liiWil

Towards Land, Work & Power is a must read for any serious
organizer attempting to formulate a strategic analysis of where and
how to begin challenging international capital and the imperial
state in the here and now on a local level. It is a critical and much
needed bridge between the workers centers movement, the non-
profit based human rights movement, and the anti-imperialist
movement. Towards Land, Work & Power is a critical and much
overdue tool needed to help fuel the resurgence of the revolutionary
movement within the belly of the beast. I hope revolutionary
organizers throughout the United States use it to help formulate
concrete strategies to help us re-seize the initiative and advance
the peoples' struggle.
- Kali Akuno
Malcolm X Grassroots Movement
I really didn't understand capitalism and socialism before reading
this book. When I finished, I had learned a lot. I realized how
the capitalist's power and wealth relies on us, the working class,
assisting them in maintaining and solidifying the system. We, the
working class are in the same situation all around the world where
work is very difficult and hard, our incomes are the lowest, we live
in places with the worst conditions. Is this the kind of life we want
to live? Our basic demand to the capitalists of just and respectful
compensation is not even considered. Towards Land, Work & Power
teaches us the important lesson that our communities of color can
rise up and fight for the justice and respect we deserve.
- Fei Vi Chen
Chinese Progressive Association
Towards Land, Work & Power is both down-to-earth and
educational, realistic and optimistic, practical and inspiring. Who
would think that in-depth analysis of the isms that plague our
lives- capitalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, heterosexism, you
name it- could be presented so clearly? The answer, I think, lies
in the fact that a number of dedicated, conscious organizers have
written a book to develop many more conscious organizers. Their
product shines with a special energy, an irresistible passion for
justice, on every page.
- Elizabeth (Betita) Martinez
Institute for Multi-Racial Justice
Iii WI
co-authored by
Jaron Browne, Marisa Franco, Jason Negr6n-Gonzales ~ Steve Williams
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR liiWIII..dS
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You don't have to read any book to know that the capitalists are on
the offensive, but reading books can help us figure out how to turn
things around. This book is a weapon for the people, preparing all
of us for the struggle to come.
-Boots Riley
The Coup
You hold in your hands one of the most important critical analyses
of neoliberalism, U.S. empire, and the impact they are having on
the urban working poor and people of color. But this compact
and readable book packs much more than a brilliant critique of
the current economic and political crises. Instead, Towards Land,
Work & Power offers a strategy-a sophisticated anti-imperialist
strategy that pays attention to race, gender, culture, community,
immigration, and international solidarity. Veterans of many years
of community and labor organizing in the San Francisco area, the
folks at POWER understand "power," and what it means to fight
back in the belly of the beast. This book ought to be mandatory
reading for anyone committed to a politics of transformation.
- Robin D. G. Kelley
author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002)
Towards Land, Work and Power is a gift and a challenge to people
building resistance from the depths of the empire. A gift because
the authors offer an incisive critique of the character and conditions
of today's U.S. imperialism in a way that is both accessible and
complex. A challenge because the book pushes all organizers
to connect our day-to-day campaigns to the struggles for self-
determination happening around the world. In the end, Towards
Land, Work, and Power is a call to action, offering hope and vision
for those of us involved in the struggles of the urban working-class
and people of color.
-Sung E Bai
CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities
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117
117
l!il
Copyright 2005 by the Amandla Project of People Organized to Win Employment
Rights (POWER)
Published by Unite to Fight Press. Unite to Fight Press does not endorse intellectual
property rights, and we encourage you to freely quote any section or sections
of this book. All that we require is that you do not modify the text and that you
cite any quotation. While we support the copying of the entire book, we ask
that you make a contribution to support POWER's work. Donations can be sent
to POWER (32 Seventh Street; San Francisco, CA 94103) or online (www.unite-to-
fight.org).
Chinese Translation: )essy Wang, Alex T. Tom, Martin Witte
Spanish Translation: luis Herrera, Monica Hernestroza, Elizabeth Medrano, Marisol
Ocampo
English Proofreaders: Alan Greig, Hillary Ronen, Mei-ying Ho, Caryl Browne, Pablo
Soto Campoamor, Alicia Schwartz
Spanish Proofreaders: Rene Poitevin, Myriam Zamora
Chinese Proofreaders: Kathy liu, Yi Hang Chen, Sai )un liang (June), Qi Wen Pan, Fei
Yi Chen, Jessie Yu, King lam Chan (King), Hong Nian luo
Designer: Steve Williams
Chinese layout: Jessy Wang
Printed by 1984 Printing in Oakland, CA
First Printing, March 2005
Second Printing, October 2005
liBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBlUCATION DATA
Browne, )aron; Franco, Marisa; Negr6n-Gonzales, jason; Williams, Steve
Towards land, work 8 power: charting a path of resistance to u.s. -led
imperialism I by Browne, Franco, Negr6n-Gonzales, Williams-1st ed.
p. em.
ISBN o-9771911-o-9 (paperback : English)
ISBN o-9771911-1-7 (paperback: Spanish)
ISBN o-9771911-2-5 (paperback: Chinese)
Unite to Fight Press
32 Seventh Street
San Francisco, CA 94103
printinga>unite-to-fight.org
www. unite-to-fight. org
Se puede comprar una version traducida de este libro en espafiol o chino.

This book is also available in Spanish 8 Chinese versions.
For your courageous example and the wisdom that you have given
to us, Towards Land, Work &. Power is dedicated to all of those
women and men in the Third World who have and who continue to
stand up for human dignity and self-determination and against
U.S. -led imperialism, colonization and aggression. We are proud
to be following in your footsteps.
We would also like to dedicate this book to all of the members of
POWER. The bravery that you show to fight for a better future is
an inspiration. Most special shout-outs go out to POWER's leaders
and fellow travelers including Cindy, Larry, Ed, Tere, Joanne, Ace,
Gloria, Don, Regina, Jordan, Donaji, Garth, Bruce, Emma, Roxanne,
Fuller, Nora and so many others. When the story of our people's
liberation is written, you will be recognized as sheroes and heroes.
We are all proud to be in this struggle with you.
One of an organizer's most important tasks is to help someone
see the root cause of the problems that they are experiencing and
to break the isolation that so many people feel. It's the task of
the organizer to help someone to see that she's not the only one
who went to the welfare office looking for assistance, only to get
disrespectfully turned away; and to help someone to see that she's
not the only one who got harassed by the police while walking
her kids to the market. Ultimately, it's the organizer's job to help
someone to see that changing the world is possible and that she
can be a key part of making that change happen, but in the midst
of major conflict, turmoil and set-backs in the United States, this
ain't easy work.
We wrote Towards Land, Work & Power to help ourselves,
and hopefully others, to make sense of what it means to be an
organizer in the United States in this period of reaction and
imperialist aggression. The four co-authors are all organizers
with a community-labor organization called People Organized to
Win Employment Rights (POWER).
Based in San Francisco, POWER is a multi -racial membership
organization of low-income tenants and workers- welfare
recipients, domestics, child care workers, shoe shiners, restaurant
workers, unemployed folks. The members are mostly working
class women and people of color who come together to fight for
greater control over the conditions in their workplaces and in
their communities. Since the organization was founded in 1997,
we have waged and won numerous campaigns for workers rights,
workplace safety, language rights, transportation justice and a
raised minimum wage. To advance this work, POWER seeks to
equip organizers with the practical and analytical tools they will
need to carry out the organization's mission, to end poverty and
oppression- once and for all.
POWER believes that the problems that we face are structural,
global and historical. The system we live under produces poverty,
1
The Coup, "Ghetto Manifesto," Party Music CD. Tommy Boy Records, 2001.
PBJSI!I
displacement and environmental destruction as mindlessly as a
car engine produces exhaust, and no one organization will be
able to win the changes that we need. A global social movement
will be required to resolve the structural, global and historical
problems of the world today.
2
While movements are always bigger
than any one organization, organizations are critical pieces to the
birth and growth of any movement. Just try to imagine the Civil
Rights Movements without the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC). Or the Anti-War Movement without the Act Now
to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition. Organizations
are the life-blood of movements, so if we want a movement then
we've got to build organizations.
Organizers are the building-blocks of organization. To build
strong organization, an organizer must have a broad array of
skills. She must be able to connect with a diverse group of people
and recruit them to get involved in the organization's work. The
good organizer must also be a skilled tactician, able to help craft
a winning strategy. A skilled organizer must be able to help
people move through a process of leadership development where
that person begins to see herself as a key part of making change
happen. A lot rides on the skill of the organizer. However, the
organizer needs more than just skills if she hopes to contribute to
the building of a larger movement. Skills alone are not enough. An
effective organizer must also have a sharp analysis of how power
operates and of how change might happen within a particular
system. We call those organizers who combine skill and analysis
'conscious organizers. '
3
Conscious organizers are those organizers who self-consciously
work to build organization and movement so that the people will
be able to strike back at the roots causes of the problems in the
2
While we do see the close relationship between organizations and movements, we do see them as two
different things. We define social movements as "sustained efforts where various groups and individuals
take collective and individual action to challenge authorities, power-holders or cultural beliefs for the
purpose of achieving a common goal." The implication of this definition is that a movement is not made
up of just one organization. By its very definition, a movement is made up of numerous organizations
and individuals.
3 We first began using the term 'conscious organizer' after a series of discussions with our comrades at the
Labor Community Strategy Center.
Pil1811f
community.
4
To fulfill her task of building organizations and a
broader movement, the conscious organizer must be guided in
her work by her answers to basic questions: What's the nature of
the system? What are the current conditions within this system?
And who are the forces that have the interest and the capability to
make change?
To answer these questions, we believe that conscious organizers
must develop as intellectuals. Throughout the Third World where
social movements flourish, working class people, who have little
formal education, study and debate theory with a prowess that
would shame most college graduates in the United States. The
challenges of this period demand that organizers develop the skills
that are so often frowned upon. As one working class intellectual
observed, "Nothing so contributes to the reproduction of class in
our society, aside from property relations, as the institutionally
enforced intellectual division of labor. It dissects knowledge into
academic ghettos and attempts to freeze working-class people
out of the intelligentsia altogether ... Those of us who lack the
credentials must be excluded from the intelligentsia because the
inclusion of our voices [] calls into question the legitimacy of
the whole system... Working-class people can and must become
intellectuals. We can and must study diligently, debate, self-
criticize, re-study, and continually sharpen our ability to play
intellectual hardball. "
5
Sadly, there are too few conscious organizers today and there
are fewer institutions which can train organizers to develop the
analytic tools which would allow them to expertly play the role of
a conscious organizer. If there is any realistic hope of charting a
path to resist and ultimately challenge U.S. -led imperialism, that
hope will depend on the ability to develop many more conscious
organizers. This process of developing more conscious organizers
has become an important part of our work at POWER.
4 When we talk about 'conscious organizers,' we are not only talking about staff organizers. Some of the
best conscious organizers are not staff of any organization but are workers, young people and community
members who do the work necessary to build the capacity of oppressed and exploited people to make
change.
5 Stan Goff, Futl Spectrum Disorder_ 2004, page. 190.
1'81215
In the summer of 2003, the organizers and leaders of POWER
realized that we couldn't answer some basic questions, such as:
What is the nature of the world's political economy? How do we
understand the events happening around the world? How do
the changes that are happening in the global political economy
impact our work for racial, economic and gender justice in San
Francisco? What will it take to build a
We believe that
change in society can
only happen when
two dynamics come
together- when the -
material conditions of
the world make change
possible and when the
capacity of the people
who have an interest in
making change is great
enough to overcome the
opposition.
broad and vibrant movement in such
despondent and challenging times?
In the fall of that year, the members of
POWER's Amandla Project decided to
answer these questions.
6
After almost
twelve months of study, reflection
and discussion, we had formulated
answers to some of the questions that
had been plaguing us. The usefulness
of this study quickly became apparent
as we felt better equipped to conduct
our local work in a way that seemed
to contribute to a global movement.
By way of sharing our reflections with
other conscious organizers, we decided
to write down these answers.
At the foundation of many of the book's
ideas is our theory about how social change happens. We believe
that change in society can only happen when two dynamics come
together- when the material conditions of the world make change
possible and when the capacity of the people who have an interest
in making change is great enough to overcome the opposition. In
other words, the window of opportunity to make change opens and
closes over time. Not all moments are like every other moment. In
6
1n 2001, POWER created the Amandla Project (formerly named the Committee for Working Class leadership
and Strategy) to provide a space for anti-imperialist leaders and organizers to support movement building
among all sectors of oppressed and exploited communities. The Amandla Project has provided a space
for members to sharpen our political analysis, engage in collective action, form alliances, raise questions,
and create an opening for dialogue with other no- and low-wage worker organizations and more broadly
within the global movement for racial and economic justice. The members of the Committee- Marisa
Franco, Jaron Browne, Jason Negr6n-Gonzales and Steve Williams- are the authors of this book. Unless it's
specified otherwise, when the book refers to 'we,' it is referring to the members of the Amandla Project.
PiiJI!I&
order to make change, we must be able to assess when the window
of opportunity is more open, and we must prepare ourselves to
jump through the window when the opportunity presents itself.
This theory recognizes that our actions can affect these two
dynamics. The people's capacity to make change is increased as
organizers work to raise consciousness and build organizations
and movements. Similarly, actions or campaigns which target the
system's points of weakness can alter the material conditions of
the world, effectively widening the window of opportunity for the
people to make change.
The two dynamics are interdependent. The system will never
collapse simply because the material conditions made it happen,
so we don't have the luxury of just sitting back and waiting for
the system's inevitable fall. The responsibility for making change
lies in the hands of the people. On the other hand, change won't
happen simply because the people are organized. If we act too
cautiously or too aggressively because we have misread the
conditions around us, our actions could serve to close the window
of opportunity for change. To forward the possibly for change,
the conscious organizer must be guided by the intention of acting
as boldly as the conditions will allow. By building the capacity
of the people and accurately assessing the material condition, we
will be prepared to take bold and decisive action at opportune
moments.
This theory also pushes us to clearly identify the interests of
different social forces in making change. For many years, some
critics within the Left have questioned why POWER has prioritized
building organization amongst no- and low-wage workers. In
their most generous moments, these critics are see our work with
immigrant and African American workers and tenants as a noble
charity. In their more skeptical moments, they question the ability
of this constituency to wield the power necessary to make real
change in the United States. As is evidenced by our continued
work, we disagree. But we also know that we have not always been
able to explain why we think that working class people of color
can and will be the leading edge of an anti-imperialist movement.
P8J817
PBIEI8
We think that a sharper understanding of the world's conditions
will allow us to more clearly identify which social forces have an
interest in and are potentially capable of making permanent and
fundamental change.
The profound changes that are happening in the world right
now are forcing many of us to ask serious questions about our
work, about our assessment of the world conditions, and about
what it will take to win. Much of the book deals with the specific
conditions that we face in San Francisco, but we believe that many
of the proposals, and certainly most of the analysis, will resonate
with organizers outside of the Bay Area who are grappling with
these same questions of strategy and analysis.
Towards Land, Work & Power is divided into five chapters. The
first chapter examines the nature of the world's political economy.
It begins by looking at the capitalist system of political economy
and how that system grew into today's system of political
economy which we call U.S. -led imperialism. The first chapter
ends by describing the challenges currently facing the system
and the international ruling class. The second chapter looks at
how U.S. -led imperialism plays out in the context of San Francisco
and the Bay Area. Framed by the history of the City, the second
chapter ends by exposing the agenda that San Francisco's ruling
class is advancing in an attempt to consolidate their power and
privilege. The next chapter presents the 'Towards Land, Work 8
Power Platform,' an alternative vision for the future of San Francisco
which was developed and adopted by POWER's membership in
2003. The fourth chapter offers three strategic opportunities that
we believe are critical to the growth of a strong, anti-imperialist
movement inside the United States. The final chapter is a call to
action, urging activists and organizers to meet the challenges and
to seize the opportunities before us.
Towards Land, Work & Power is a book by conscious organizers
for conscious organizers, which draws from a lot of historical
documents, academic texts, political theory and policy papers. It is
rooted in our shared practice as experiences building a membership
organization in San Francisco's working class neighborhoods and
represents our attempt to assess the racist, sexist, homophobic
and inherently exploitative system of imperialism. The book uses
some language that may not be familiar to a lot of organizers,
but we feel that it is important for organizers to understand this
language- especially the language that is used in the tradition of
political organizing- because our familiarity allows us to connect
with the lessons and experiences of other conscious organizers
throughout history and around the globe. By getting more
familiar with this language, the process of making assessments
will become more accessible to all of us. Even though some of
the language may be new, we believe that many of the ideas and
feelings will be very familiar to anyone who is working to uproot
injustice. We did not come up with many completely original
ideas in the writing of this book, so you will see a lot of notes on
where the ideas came from. We did this hoping that you will be
encouraged you to go back, look at those materials and eventually
to develop your own assessments.
To ensure that we are able to share our lessons with organizers
whose preferred language is not English, we are proud that Towards
Land, Work & Power has been translated into Spanish and written
Chinese. This would not have been true if it weren't for the tireless
dedication of the book's translators, Marisol Ocampo and Monica
Itzel Henestroza. Thanks also go to our allies at the Garment
Workers Center, the Chinese Progressive Association and CAAAV
who helped make the Spanish and Cantonese versions possible.
Like any other book, Towards Land, Work & Power would not have
been possible without the support, both direct and indirect, of
so many amazing family members and comrades. The members
of the Amandla Project would like to thank all of those who have
taught us and helped us become the organizers that we are today.
Specifically, we would like to acknowledge our companeras and
companeros at the Miami Workers Center, the Labor Community
Strategy Center, Direct Action for Rights and Equality, the Tenants
and Workers Support Committee, and CAAAV: Organizing Asian
Communities. It is because of the example of your inspiring
practice and principled struggle that we were able to sharpen
our ideas in the way that we have. As first-time authors whose
PIIJSIS
propensity for spelling and typographical errors seemed to have
no limit, we would like to extend our heart-felt appreciation to
our dedicated team of proof-readers which included Hillary
Ronen, Mei-ying Ho, Caryl Browne, Pablo Soto Campoamor, Alicia
Schwartz and Alan Greig.
We recognize that because of limited time and resources, this book
is limited. But we believe that we have been able to consolidate
and combine existing information, and innovate some new ideas
that have important ramifications for all of our work. In the end,
we hope that Towards Land, Work & Power will spark productive
conversation and debate that can advance our collective capacity
to produce winning strategy, conscious organizers and strong
fighting organizations. We also hope that people can give us
feedback to help us further clarify our analysis.
After our long study, we are very hopeful about the possibility
for change, and we don't think that we're alone in thinking that
the possibility for radical change is growing. Even Business Week
can see it when they remind us, "Every once in a great while,
the established order is overthrown. Within a span of decades,
technological advances, organizational innovations, and new
ways of thinking transform economies ... On the eve of the twenty-
first century, the signs of monumental change are all around
us."
7
Without any further ado, we humbly offer the conclusions of our
investigation to the movement, and in particular to those organizers
and activists across the San Francisco Bay Area who have made the
Bay Area such a good place to do this work. May this book help to
prepare movement to move all of our communities towards land,
work and power.
7 Business Week, January 1995.
PBJ82D
P8J221
That dark and vast sea of human labor in China and
India, the South Seas and all Africa; in the West Indies
and Central America and in the United States- that great
majority of [humanity] on whose bent and broken backs
rest today the founding stones of modern industry-
shares a common destiny; it is despised and rejected by
race and color; paid a wage below the level of the decent
living; driven, beaten, prisoned and enslaved in all but
pame; spawning the world's raw material and luxury-
cotton, wool, coffee, tea, cocoa, palm oil, fibers, spices,
rubber, silks, lumber, copper, gold, diamonds, leather-
how shall we end the list and where? All these are
gathered up at prices lowest of the low, manufactured,
transformed and transported at fabulous gain; and the
resultant wealth is distributed and displayed and made
the basis of world power and universal dominion and
armed arrogance in London and Paris, Berlin and Rome,
New York and Rio de Janeiro.
Here is the real modern labor problem. Here is the
kernel of the problem of Religion and Democracy, of
Humanity. Words and futile gestures avail nothing.
Out of the exploitation of the dark proletariat comes
the Surplus Value filched from human beasts which, in
cultured lands, the Machine and harnessed Power veil
and conceal. The emancipation of [humanity] is the
emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor
is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are
yellow, brown and black.
W
I
- .E.B. DuBOIS
Dr. W.E.B. Dubois' words, written in 1935, paint a powerful picture
of the world that still resonate today. Seven decades later, in our
world of "globalization," a failed "new economy" and a supposed
"war or terror," Dr. Dubois' words still cut to the core of our world
situation where extreme wealth is made possible because of the
exploitation of "that dark and vast sea of human labor" in the
Global South. We still live in a world where the people of the
Global South create the products and wealth enjoyed by the rich
nations, and we still live in a world where Middle Eastern, African,
Latin American and Asian people, wherever they live in the world
confront the "armed arrogance" of the world's imperialist super-
power.
The ruling elite of the rich nations claim that the system of
capitalism is a system of freedom and prosperity. The advances
the world has seen under capitalism are undeniable. Medicine.
Communications. Transportation. Science. Capitalism has
developed the productive capacity so that all of humanity's basic
needs could be met. You would expect that such advancements
would lift living standards for everyone so that no one should want
for basic food, shelter, medical care and education. Instead, we
are witness to unprecedented levels of poverty, unemployment,
displacement, disease and environmental degradation in a period
where the world has witnessed unprecedented advances.
The ruling elite claim that the global economy creates prosperity
and jobs. But we see a world where three billion people, or half
of the world's population, live on under two dollars a day; 1.3
billion have no access to clean water; three billion have no access
to sanitation; two billion have no access to electricity.
2
We see
more than II million children dying each year from preventable
causes.
3
1
W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America, t86o - t88o. 1935.
2
)ames Wolfenson, The Other Crisis, World Bank, October 1998, quoted from The Reality of Aid 2000,
(Earthscan Publications, 2ooo), p.10.
3
These statistics on global poverty, inequity, and death from preventable diseases are widely published
and available. Even Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the United Nations, said in a 2003 address, "I feel
angry, I feel distressed, I feel helpless- to live in a world where we have the means, we have the resources,
to be able to help[]- what is lacking is the political will."
---------------------
1'811!85
They claim that the United States is the land of opportunity. This
is a lie too. We see more than 44 million people who lack health
coverage and over 3 million women, children and men who are
homeless.
4
We see unemployment rates soaring above 6o% in
many African American communities. We see more and more
people crammed into welfare offices, decrepit schools and state-
of-the-art prisons. We see our family members pulled into an
economic draft to drop bombs on poor nations all over the Global
South.
Politicians pat themselves on the back for all of the progress
that they are making. Meanwhile, we see the gulf between rich
and poor widening everyday. Just twenty percent of the world's
population in the First World nations consume 86% of the world's
goods.
5
How do we make sense of this gross inequality?
Many times in our organizing work, we hear working class
people talk about those in power like they are just well meaning
incompetents. They'll say, "If only the people in power understood
what poor people go through, then they'd make things better."
We think that gives them credit that they don't deserve. Those
in power are well aware of the depths of misery and oppression
that the majority of humanity experience everyday. They simply
choose not to do anything about it because they have pledged
their allegiance to defending the interests of a system that makes
a small number of people rich and powerful-at the direct expense
of the planet and the people of the world. Just like a freezer can't
bake a cake, capitalism doesn't produce equality.
It doesn't have to be this way. The world's economy produces
enough food to end hunger. There is more than enough vacant
housing to provide shelter for all homeless people. Each year the
people of the United States spend three times more money on
cosmetics, jewelry and pet food than what it would cost to provide
education, clean water and medical care to everyone around the
world who needs it.
6
Humanity has the potential to successfully
4 National Coalition for the Homeless Fact Sheet.
5 1998 Human Development Report United Nations Development Programme.
6 Osvaldo Martinez, "Speech at the 2003 World Social Forum," Porto Alegre, Brazil; January 27, 2003.
Pilll!28
combat the diseases that kill millions of people each year. The
problem is not that we lack the capacity to meet the needs of the
people. The problem is that poverty, inequality and repression
are known and accepted effects of the profit driven system that
we live under. As we said in the introduction, if we want to make
change then we must build the capacity of the people to make
change and we have to understand the conditions in which we
find ourselves to know what change is strategic at this moment.
The political economy of a given society makes up the material
conditions of that society.
7
Political economy is the way a society
produces, distributes and consumes goods and services as well as
the structures and ideologies which that society uses to maintain
and reinforce this system. The political economy of today's
world is a unique and advanced form of capitalism referred to as
imperialism. In order to understand imperialism, we have to first
understand the political economy of capitalism.
adven&Uft.IS in BiiPiliiiU.Sm
Emerging out of the feudal system in Western Europe and European
colonization of Africa, Asia and the Americas in the early part
of the 15th century, the capitalist system is the foundation of
contemporary imperialism.
8
Capitalism is a system of political
economy characterized by socialized production of commodities
and private appropriation of profit. In other words, capitalist
production is set up so that everyone plays a particular role in
the production of the society's goods and services. This is what
is meant by 'socialized production.' On the other hand, 'private
appropriation' means that only a small group of individuals takes
the value produced by society's labor.
7 In saying this, we mean that the development of the political economy of a society has a foundational
role in shaping where people are and what they do. The culture, ideas and customs of a given society are
shaped by the structure of that society's political economy.
8
In the mid-,8oos a German intellectual named Karl Marx set about theorizing capitalism, which he was
witnessing expand all around him. His masterpiece, Capital, lays out an insightful assessment of the
capitalist political economy that we feel is fundamental to understanding the system. This section draws
heavily from his ideas.
P8JS27
From the theft of gold and
land from the peoples of the
Americas to the enslavement
of African people to the
invisibilizing of women's
workin the home, capitalism's
acquisition of its means of
production-land, labor and
resources- has always been
based on the exploitation
and subjugation of people of
color and women.
In order to do this socialized
production, the capitalist political
economy feeds on the fuel of
three basic ingredients: land,
labor and resources. These three
ingredients are called the 'means
of production.' Without any
of the means of production, a
society cannot produce goods and
services. This is why the capitalist
system has historically been, and
continues to be, ruthless in its quest
to steal, acquire and commandeer
the land, labor and resources that
it needs. From the theft of gold
and land from the peoples of the
Americas, to the enslavement of
African people, to the invisibilizing of women's work in the home,
capitalism's acquisition of its means of production- land, labor
and resources- has always been based on the exploitation and
subjugation of people of color and women.
Under capitalism, a small group of individuals controls the means
of production of that entire society. The result is a class-based
society in which some people work in order to live while others
live off of the labor of those working people. According to Marx's
analysis, one's class position is determined by how that person
fits into the process of capitalist production- not necessarily
by how much money someone makes, or even if that person is
currently employed.
9
Those who own the means of production
9 Here, we think that it is helpful to hear directly from Marx as he described the formation of classes. This
excerpt is taken from his essay "Wage Labour and Capital" which he wrote in 1847=
"In the process of production, human beings work not only upon nature, but also upon one
another. They produce only by working together in a specified manner and reciprocally
exchanging their activities. In order to produce, they enter into definite connections and
relations to one another, and only within these social connections and relations does their
influence upon nature operate- i.e., does production take place.
"These social relations between the producers, and the conditions under which they exchange
their activities and share in the total act of production, will naturally vary according to the
character of the means of production. "
Pill! II
are the capitalist class.
10
Those who don't own the means of
production make up the working class.
11
Because they do not own
the tools and materials to meet their own needs, each member
of the working class is forced to sell her or his 'labor power' in
exchange for wageS.
12
Capitalism doesn't give working class
people any other choice- work for wages or starve.
As capitalism began to develop in Europe in the 15
1
h century,
budding capitalists had to struggle to find workers who wanted to
come work in their factories because on the feudal estates people
had the means to subsist by working the land. To get people to
come off the land, the capitalists employed brute force to seize
land that had previously been held and worked on by peasant
farmers. Without the means to subsist on their own, peasants
were literally forced to sell their labor to the capitalists. Around
the globe whenever and wherever capitalism emerged, peasants
have resisted this process. But with brutal and bloody force,
the capitalists were able to construct a working class by forcing
peasants off the land, into the city and into their factories.
13
As
Marx concludes, "Thus were the agricultural people, first forcibly
10
In his analysis of the capitalist system, Karl Marx refers to the working class as the 'proletariat' and to
the capitalist class as the 'bourgeoisie'. We here are using the phrase "capitalist class" to highlight this
aspect of being the class that lives by its ownership of capital and the means of production.
11
Marx writes that the two most important classes in a capitalist society are the capitalist and working
classes. However, he also acknowledges that there are finer gradations in capitalist class structure. For
example, Marx identifies doctors who have their own practices as members of the petit bourgeoisie class.
The translation from the French means little bourgeoisie, and that's how Marx talked about them. They
were able to work for themselves because of the skills that they had acquired, but did not hire employees
on the scale of the bourgeoisie. In his writings, Marx points out dozens of classes, from the land-owning
class to the lumpenproletariat all of whom he says relate to society's process of production, distribution
and consumption differently.
12
'Labor power' is the term that Marx uses to describe a workers' ability to work. This is what the worker
actually sells to the capitalist; the ability to work. It is then the capitalists responsibility to get the worker
to use her labor power to produce commodities that the capitalist can sell. This is different from piece work
where employees are paid for each commodity that she produces. In traditional structures of capitalist
employment, the capitalist is paying for the worker's ability to work over a particular time so if eventually
the capitalist purchases technology which allows the worker to produce more commodities in the same
amount of time, there is no need for the capitalist to give a raise to the worker.
1
3 In Marx, this process is known as "primitive accumulation." Other writers such as David Harvey
have pointed out that this process is an ongoing part of capitalist growth and doesn't just fade away
after the transition from feudalism is complete. Harvey has called this process "accumulation through
dispossession," and has referred to the United States' war on Iraq as a classic example of this process of
accumulation by way of brute force.
PBJ82!1
expropriated from the soil, driven from their homes, turned
into vagabonds, and then whipped, branded, tortured by laws
grotesquely terrible, into the discipline necessary for the wage
system. "'
4
The fact that you have lost your ability to produce food to feed
your family doesn't mean that capitalism guarantees that there
will be a job for you. On the contrary, capitalism is not capable
of providing jobs for every member of the working class. And
that's intentional. The system creates a pool of unemployed
and under-employed workers. Marx called this pool the 'reserve
army of labor.' The reserve army of labor is necessary to allow
the capitalists to drive down wages and worsen conditions for
those members of the working class who do have jobs. If workers
demand higher wages or better working conditions, capitalists
can threaten to replace them with an unemployed worker. It is
this threat that often keeps workers going back to work for the
capitalist, based on the reality that in capitalism a small paycheck
is better than no paycheck.
The capitalist class employs workers and employs the means of
production to make commodities. Marx was the first to observe
that commodities are the building blocks of capitalism; the life-
blood of the capitalist system. A commodity is any good or service
that is produced for the purpose of being sold or exchanged for
something else. Everything is a commodity in a capitalist system.
From a loaf of bread, to a one- bedroom house, to the labor used
to clean that house, everything is treated like a commodity under
capitalism.
Once in the factories, sweatshops or whatever the workplace is
called, the worker receives a wage to produce commodities that are
then considered to be the property of the capitalist. The boss tries
to sell them for a price that is greater than the total of the wages
plus the cost of the materials that the worker used to produce the
commodity; keeping for himself the surplus above the wage he
paid the worker. This surplus value comes to the capitalist class
because the owner pays the worker less than the value of what she
produces.
1
4 Karl Marx. Capital, Vol. I, Part VIII.
... , ...
To illustrate this point, let's look at the example of Maria, one
member of the working class, who is hired to make chairs by
Mr. Blanco, a member of the capitalist class.
15
Mr. Blanco pays
Maria $8 per hour for an eight-hour day. At the end of the day,
Maria will receive $64 in wages. In that time, Maria will finish
building sixteen chairs, two each hour. If each chair sells for $rs,
Mr. Blanco will bring in $240. If the materials for the chairs cost
$2 per chair, then Mr. Blanco will clear a profit of $r44 in one day
by simply paying Maria less in wages than the market value of the
commodities that she produced.
Mr. Blanco's Daily Exploitation of Maria
Hollr z
J 4 5
6
1
8 TOTAL
Wayes 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 $64
Prod. Cost Z+Z Z+Z Z+Z 2+2 z+Z 2+2 22 2+2 $32
Sale Price 15 + 15 15 + 15 15 + 15 IS IS IS IS IS IS 15 + 15 15 + 15 $240
Net Profit 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 18 $144
This is called wage exploitation and, in capitalism, wage
exploitation is the fundamental way that profits are made. This
wage exploitation happens for every worker that the capitalists
hire. Thus, in every store and every factory of capitalist society,
bosses get rich by underpaying the workers. In our example, Mr.
Blanco appropriates $r44 every day from each worker he employs.
Mr. Blanco, the capitalist class and the capitalist system could not
survive without the wage exploitation of the working class. This is
why we say that capitalism is an inherently exploitative system.
Once the capitalist takes what the worker produced, he sells it to
whoever is willing and able to buy it. When the commodity is sold,
the profits stay with the capitalist even though it was the worker's
labor that produced it. The logic of the system is that since the
capitalist bought the materials and the labor of the worker, then
the capitalist should keep the profits and the worker should be
grateful.
It is this pursuit of profit that drives production in the capitalist
system. Things are not made just to be used. To be sold,
commodities must be useful to someone, yet that is not the
IS This illustration was originally developed by the School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL).
P8J8!11
PIIJI82
central concern of the capitalists. They do not hire the working
class to produce commodities so that those commodities can
meet some unmet need within society. Food is not grown to feed
people. Housing is not built to shelter people. Medicine is not
produced to make people healthy. Under capitalism, everything
is produced for profit. As a result, capitalism's colossal means
of production are driven to produce luxury items that society
doesn't need. The examples are all around us. While millions
of African and Asian people die of a treatable virus, U.S.-based
pharmaceutical companies spend billions trying to perfect the
formula for Viagra.
According to the logic of the capitalist system, it is better to destroy
a commodity if it cannot be sold for a profit so that workers are
unable to meet their needs without depending on selling their
labor. There are lots of examples of this happening. One of
the best known took place in the United States during the Great
Depression of the 1930s when huge stockpiles of food were burned
as millions of people went hungry.
Because profit and not need drives the system, there is no
planning what a society produces. The capitalist class produces
stuff because they think that they'll be able to sell it, whatever it
is: town houses, chocolate ice cream or Hello Kitty stickers. Marx
called this system of production the 'anarchy of the market.'
CAPITALISM'S CORE NEEDS
Under capitalism, the capitalist class is in a never-ending rat
race trying to track down the biggest profit. They are constantly
seeking bigger sources of profit because the capitalists are
competing with each other.
To grow faster and out-perform their competitors, each member
of the capitalist class is constantly looking for newer and better
ways to exploit the working class. Most often, the capitalists
look to increase their profit by reducing the cost of production.
The capitalists reduce their cost of production by three ways: by
cutting workers' wages, by re-organizing their factory to make it
more efficient, or by bringing in new tools or machinery that allow
the workers to produce more commodities in less time thereby
driving down the cost of production.
The most efficient of these three options for the capitalist is to
extract more profits from the working class by 'revolutionizing
the means of production.' Using our previous example again, if
Mr. Blanco buys a machine that allows Maria to produce twice as
many chairs over the course of a day, then he will dramatically
increase his profits (assuming he can sell the chairs) because
Maria's wages and the cost of the materials for each chair are both
remaining constant. This points to the first of capitalism's three
core needs: the need to constantly revolutionize the means of
production. Capitalism needs to develop more and more efficient
tools so that the capitalist class can extract the profits that they
need to survive.
While revolutionizing the means of production is an effective way
to extract profit, it is also problematic for Mr. Blanco because
the cost of buying a new machine will cut into whatever profits
he has accumulated. Sooner or later, Mr. Blanco will not have a
choice. He will either improve his means of production or face
going out of business because of the competition inherent in the
capitalist system. Whether or not Mr. Blanco purchases the new
machine, some other capitalist will, and in doing so will be able
to sell the chairs for less than $ro and still make the same profit. If
this happens, most people will buy the chairs that cost less, and
Mr. Blanco will be left with a bunch of chairs that he can't sell. If
this goes on too long, Mr. Blanco will either go out of business
or else his competitor will buy out Mr. Blanco's company. This
leads us to the second of capitalism's core needs: the need for
ever-expanding profits. Every capitalist needs to bring in more
and more profits so that they will be able to improve the means of
production so that he can drive down the cost of production. This
is necessary because the capitalists face constant competition
from other members of the capitalist class. Every capitalist has to
grow or else face the possibility of their own extinction.
By revolutionizing the means of production, larger capitalists
make it possible for the workers to produce more and more chairs.
But eventually they run out of people who can buy all of these
chairs that are produced. After all, being able to produce twice
,.., ...
as many chairs doesn't mean that there are twice as many people
who will buy them. The capitalist has still got to sell in order to
make a profit. This leads to the third core need of capitalism: the
need to expand to new markets. Because Mr. Blanco still has to
sell chairs to realize a profit, he looks to expand to new markets in
a different city or in a different country.
CAPITALIST PATRIARCHY
As capitalism developed and workers were driven into wage
labor for their survival, not all work was equally valued or even
deemed worthy of wages. Capitalism emerged out of a violently
patriarchal system that had existed in Europe for hundreds of
years. Under feudalism land was held by a specific class of men.
A man from this class was thought to own not only his plot of
land, but also all of the servants who worked his land, as well as
his wife and family.'
6
Women were considered the property of
their fathers until they married and then became the property of
their husbands.
This class division of human society between men and women
provided the groundwork for capitalist exploitation of women as
wage-workers who could be paid less for their work in the workplace,
and nothing at all for their work in the home. As we discussed
earlier in this chapter, the capitalist political economy relies on
workers who can be exploited as they produce commodities. But
in order to work and produce surplus value, workers must also
eat, sleep and be healthy. They must feed, clothe and educate
their children. Capitalism doesn't only need workers to produce
on a daily basis, but the system also needs workers to reproduce
for the future. This process is called the reproduction of the
working class- that is, the work of birthing, feeding, cleaning,
clothing, sheltering, nurturing, educating, nursing, etc. Through
patriarchy, reproductive labor isn't even understood as work.
Instead, it's cast as the "free" and "natural" activities that women
are supposed to do as wives, mothers and daughters because it is
an extension of their inherent way of being.
'
6
Frederick Engels, "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State," 1884.
Plf!!l'f
This gendered division of labor is critical for the capitalists because
they cannot sustain the system without the reproduction of the
working class, but at the same time they can't afford to pay for all
of this work. In order to satisfy their needs, capitalism transformed
the family.
17
The family became, and in many ways continues to
be, the social tool through which the gendered reproduction of
the working class would be carried out- to directly benefit the
capitalist class, without demanding any compensation from the
capitalist class.
The nuclear family was defined, socially and legally, as the union
of a man and a woman. Each partner had their particular role to
fill according to the gendered norms of this patriarchal system.
The working class man was to sell his labor to the capitalist class
so that he could bring home a wage to provide for himself, his
wife and their future workers, also known as children. The working
class woman was to do the work necessary for the reproduction of
her working class family. Even the work that women do outside of
the home is impacted by their position as secondary class citizens.
While working class families have long required the income of
multiple workers to generate enough wages to support a family,
women's work is generally considered supplemental income for
male family breadwinners. Entire industries that are considered
women's work, such as the textile industry, service and clerical
work, are paid less. Under capitalist patriarchy, these sectors
have been "housewifized" and occupy the lowest-waged sectors
of work.
18
This system, which is so deeply invested in the definition of a
nuclear family as a relationship of a man and a woman, was and
is extremely threatened by any behavior that falls outside of this
definition in any way. As a result, capitalism is a patriarchal
system that oppresses gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans-gendered
people as it does women. The result of the system's need to mask
and exploit women's labor is that capitalism attempts to force
1
7 Frederick Engels, "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State," 1884.
18
Maria Mies, in Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale, explained housewifization as this process
of class formation under capitalist patriarchy and the invisibilizing of women's labor. This model of
super-exploitation, intertwined with the rise of white supremacy, was foundational to colonialism and
the theft of Third World labor.
PiiI!S5
everyone- by way of socialization, coercion and violence- into a
narrow and artificial gender binary.
The unpaid labor of women- enforced through compulsory
heterosexuality and a rigid gender binary- benefits men by
elevating their class position within society and the family, and
benefits the system of capitalism as a whole by ensuring that the
reproduction of the working class continues without any expense
to the capitalist class. In this way, capitalism was built directly on
the foundation of patriarchy and has only ever been patriarchal,
and the process of making women's work invisible has been
and continues to be an inseparable part of the class structure of
capitalism.
CRISIS FOR CAPITALISM, OPPORTUNITY FOR WORKING ClASS
The capitalist system periodically suffers from slow growth, rising
costs, high unemployment, stagnant job creation and instability
for businesses. The defenders of the system argue that these are
simply aberrations of an otherwise divine system. But they are
wrong. Crisis is actually built into the genetic fiber of capitalism.
Capitalist crisis occurs when, for whatever reason, the system
fails to extract the level of profits that it needs. The irony is that
as capitalism increases its capacity to produce more and more
commodities, the system becomes less and less stable. In many
ways, the system's own success brings about crisis.
The capitalist system is vulnerable to two, inter-related forms of
crisis: the crisis of over-production and the crisis of the tendency
for the rate of profit to fall. The crisis of over-production describes
the situation when too many goods have been produced for the
system to consume. This happens because the capitalist system is
constantly advancing its ability to produce commodities without
advancing the ability of consumers to buy those commodities.
This creates a crisis for the capitalists because they are not able
to realize profit if they are not able to sell their commodities. As
a result, goods lie on the shelves, "production grinds to a halt,
people lose their jobs," and demand drops even more.
19
'9 Encyclopedia of Marxism Website, (http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/o/v.htm.)
The crisis of the tendency for the rate of profit to fall is the dynamic
that Marx observed that "the rate of profit enjoyed by capitalists
will get smaller and smaller over time. "
20
He suggested that this
would happen because as capitalists employ more and more
advanced technologies in the production process, they will use
Jess and Jess human labor-power. Because profits fundamentally
come from the exploitation of human labor in capitalism, the
capitalist's rate of profit would fall over time.
21
It's like capitalism
has a built-in Catch-22. If the capitalists don't use the latest and
greatest technologies, they will likely
be taken over by some other capitalist
but on the other hand, if they do jump
on the technology bandwagon they are
cutting down on the rate of profit that
they will be able to extract.
In a rational world, the introduction
of technology would be a good thing.
Things would be produced for the
purpose of meeting people's needs,
and it would take less time to do it. But
capitalism does not produce a rational
world and meeting people's .needs is
not the capitalists' motivation. In this
form of political economy, commodities
In a rational world, the
introduction of technology
would be a good thing.
Things would be produced
for the purpose of meeting
people's needs, and it
would take less time to do
it. But capitalism does not
produce a rational world
and meeting people's
needs is not the capitalists'
motivation.
are produced in order to reap a profit. As a result of this dynamic,
the system is constantly veering towards crisis.
22
The capitalist
class is constantly pushing and pulling on different parts of
the political economy- like interest rates, worker protections,
government spending, etc.- in a desperate attempt to steer the
system away the ever-looming crises. Nevertheless, because crisis
is an inherent part of the system, the system regularly falls into
some form of crisis despite the best efforts of the capitalist class.
20
Encyclopedia of Marxism Website, (http://www. marxists.org/glossary/frame. htm. ).
21
Encyclopedia of Marxism Website, (http://www. marxists.org/glossary/terms/o/v. htm. ).
22
Between 1834 and 1991, the political economy of the United States underwent thirty-five crises as a part
of the regular business cycles. Only two of those crises- from 1873 - 1893 and 1929 - 41- were severe
enough to be considered depressions. (Tom Bottomore, editor, A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Second
Edition), p. 160).
PBI&il7
P8J8i18
Not surprisingly, different classes are affected by capitalism's
crises differently. During these periods, it is the working class
that bears the brunt of the system's dysfunction. Working people
lose jobs and see inflation eat away the purchasing power of their
wages. Nevertheless, the crisis is in reality a crisis of the system.
Usually, capitalist crises are relatively small and do not throw
the entire system into turmoil. However, when the capitalists
are unsuccessful in finding a way to avoid a severe crisis, which
can be because of lots of different reasons, including capitalist
mismanagement or because of heightened class struggle,
the capitalist system becomes fragile and more vulnerable to
the demands of the working class for reform or radical social
transformation. It is for this reason that, even though the impacts
of crisis fall on the backs of the working class and oppressed
nationalities, we say that crisis for the capitalist system really
represents opportunity for anti -imperialist forces.
In summary, capitalism is an inherently exploitative and
patriarchal system of production, distribution and consumption.
In this system one class of people grows wealthy off of the wealth
created by another class of people. The capitalist system of
political economy has three core needs:
I) the need to constantly revolutionize the means of
production;
2) the need for ever-expanding profits; and
3) the need to expand to new markets.
If capitalism is able to meet these needs, it grows. Accumulating
more and more profit, the process of growth piles greater and
greater sums of money into the hands of the capitalist class, who
in turn gobble up their competitors as fast as possible. Small
businesses become monopolies that then become transnational
corporations. The success of the system means that capitalism
itself must be transformed. In order to survive, it eventually
transformed into something even more exploitative and global,
something called imperialism.
imPIIIjlliSm iS BIPililliSDIIU.
IILDWDUP
The political economy of the world today is best described as
imperialism. Imperialism is, at its core, an advanced stage of
capitalism which thrives off of exploitation in the same way that
capitalism does. What changes from capitalism to imperialism is
the shape and scale of the system. For example, where the basic
unit of exploitation is between the worker and the capitalist under
capitalism, under imperialism the basic unit of exploitation shifts
to nations exploiting whole peoples.
Imperialism takes many forms- cultural, economic, military,
political, etc.- which are different but inter-related. All of these
forms act in concert with one another, effectively allowing a small
group of nations.to control the resources, land, labor and markets
of the rest of the world. Imperialism has re-shaped the language,
culture and future of the majority of the people of the world; and
it continues to impact our development to this very day.
23
In the course of our study, we developed this definition of
imperialism:
Imperialism is a global system of political economy
based on the super-exploitation of whole nations and
peoples by the world's imperial powers and transnational
corporations. To sustain this unstable multi-national
system, the imperialist state serves as a manager for
global capital.
We're now going to break this definition down so that we
understand its implications:
Imperialism is a global system of political economy ...
Like all other systems of political economy, imperialism shapes
how a society produces, distributes and consumes its goods
2
3 We developed these ideas after a series of conversations with staff and members from CAAA V: Organizing
Asian Communities in New York City.
and services. The globalized imperialist political economy is
just an advanced stage of capitalism. like its predecessor, the
imperialist system divides humanity on the basis of those who
produce wealth and those who exploit the producers of wealth.
Imperialism depends on the constant revolutionizing of the
means of production. Imperialism is driven by the need for ever-
expanding profit and markets. Today's imperialism is not just a
set of policies; it is not just how the United States bullies the rest of
the world. Imperialism is a system driven by the insatiable quest
for more and more profits.
Imperialism, as a system, really took hold when capitalism began
to outgrow its national operations and became more and more
of a global system. Until the end of the 19th century, capitalism
was largely a national system of exploitation of the working class
by the capitalist class.' But capitalism had to break out of its
national borders like a snake that had outgrown its skin. With
the development of new technologies such as the steam engine
and electricity, the capitalist class was able to produce more
commodities than they could sell in just their national markets.
The system had to grow or die.
This period, from 1846 to 1898, saw major technological
breakthroughs and unprecedented imperialist expansion. The
assembly line allowed one worker to complete nine cars in the
time that it once took to build one. National railroad systems
were set up, connecting disparate parts of the United States. All
of these advances in society's productive capacity resulted in the
capitalists having more commodities that they needed to get off
their hands. The resulting economic warfare of competition went
hand-in-hand with political warfare and conquest of nations.
The capitalist class attempted to deal with these crises by seizing
numerous foreign territories.
24
During this time period, Europe
expanded its colonial control of Africa from 10% in 1870 to 90%
in 1890.
25
The United States annexed half of Mexico's territory
in 1848, and then went to war with Spain in 1898 to snatch up
2
4 The crises of the imperialist political economy are very closely related to the crises of the capitalist
system. We will examine imperialism's crises later on in this chapter.
2
5 Answers.com Website, (http:/ /www.answers.com/topic/scramble-for-africa).
,.., . .,.
colonies in Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. The expansion
of the European and U.S. empires gave the growing imperialist
powers direct control over additional markets and sources of raw
materials .
... based on the super-exploitation of whole nations
and peoples by the world's imperial powers and
transnational corporations.
As we reviewed earlier, capitalism is driven by the capitalist class'
exploitation of the working class. Imperialism too is driven by
exploitation, but imperialist exploitation takes place on a different
scale and in different forms.
Imperialist exploitation takes place on a world-scale, and
transnational corporations are one of the primary vehicles for
carrying out that exploitation. As we mentioned earlier, larger
capitalists buy out smaller capitalists. In the transition from
capitalism to imperialism, larger capitalist corporations achieve
monopolistic control over certain markets. With their expansion
to additional markets across the globe, transnational corporations
are newly able to move their production to different countries- to
get the lowest wages or to avoid environmental protections-
always with the goal of extracting more profit. In today's world,
some corporations have larger profits than entire countries. For
example, General Motors, Exxon and Wal-Mart are each larger
than the economies of Denmark, South Africa, or Indonesia.
26
In
fact, of the world's one-hundred largest economic entities, fifty-
one are corporations. Corporations play a critical role under
global imperialism. Nevertheless, despite their immense power
and influence, monopolies and transnational corporations still
rely heavily on the imperialist state.
This system is maintained by the imperialist nations' exploitation
of other nations and whole peoples. With the globalization of
the world's production and consumption, imperialist nations rely
on other nations as necessary sites to facilitate the production
and realization of profit. At different stages in history, these
2
6 Corporate Accountability Project Website, (http://www.corporations.org/system/toploo.html).
PiiJS Iff
under-developed nations were regarded as sources of cheap (or
free for the taking) resources and labor, dumping grounds for
excess commodities or as cash cows. This is not to say that the
exploitation of the working class ends. The working class of all
nations continue to be exploited under imperialism. But under
imperialism, that exploitation takes place within the context of
the super-exploitation of under-developed nations. The super-
exploitation of nations becomes the driving force of the world's
political economy.
27
Super-exploitation has taken many different forms throughout
history. Initially, the imperialist nations just stole from other
nations. This was the case with Spanish conquistadors' theft of
gold and other precious metals from the Americas. This was the
case with the British theft of Native American land. It was the case
with British, Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch theft of Africans to
be used as slave labor throughout the Americas. later, imperial
powers seized control of colonies to use as forced consumers of
the imperial powers' excess production, a guaranteed mechanism
to stave off the crisis of over-production. Today, the under-
developed nations are used as sources of wealth for the imperial
nations, sometimes as producers and almost always as cash cows,
sending billions of dollars to rich countries as debt re-payment.
Super-exploitation is possible because of the deliberate
under-development of the non-imperialist nations. Through
theft, warfare, sanctions and forced debt, imperialist nations
deliberately under-develop other nations so that those nations will
be compelled to create surplus wealth for the impe_rialist nations,
just as the working class creates surplus for the capitalist class
under capitalism. As writers including Walter Rodney, Eduardo
Galeano, Vandana Shiva and Samir Amin have all documented,
the world's imperialist powers have a long and bloody record
of undermining and sabotaging the development of strong
economies and viable systems in oppressed nations all around the
2
7 We refer to the extraction of surplus value in the imperialist system as "super-exploitation" because
the rate of exploitation is much greater and the methods are more varied when compared to capitalist
exploitation. Because the imperialist class does not feel as responsible for the reproduction of under-
developed nations, the rate of exploitation in the Global South far exceeds that which normally takes
place within capitalism. It also takes more forms than just wage exploitation as we describe.
P8JI!'f2
r liiWI'l,dlliiDd, WDII.I B PDWIII.
globe.
28
By enslaving the people of the Global South, waging war
and imposing structural adjustment through the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the imperialist nations ensure
that no viable economy can ever develop. They then tum around
and claim that their domination is necessary because the "under-
developed" nations aren't capable of governing themselves!
They have condemned the majority of the world to a life-sentence
of crippling poverty and benefit from this by extracting super-
profits from workers of the under-developed nations to support
the decadent lifestyles of people within the empires. Imperialist
nations do this because they want servants, not competitors.
By handing out small crumbs for privileged sections of society and
holding out the ever-present threat of violence, the imperialist
nations use an elaborate array of carrots and sticks to organize
the consent of whoever they can for the purpose of maintaining
this relationship. The imperial powers go to such great lengths
because the under-development of the oppressed nations is
necessary for the over-development and wealth of the imperialist
nations. This is one of the central features of the imperialist
political economy: it develops nations unevenly. Not all nations
can be wealthy. Imperialist nations enjoy tremendous wealth and
prosperity only because they suck off the wealth and resources of
the under-developed nations like a parasite. Under imperialism,
the large majority of nations are made poor so that they are forced
to serve the interests of the imperialist nations.
The imperialist world system itself did not develop in a vacuum.
Growing out of colonial pillage and patriarchal repression,
imperialism continues to have its own enabling forms of oppression.
White supremacy and the European conquest provided today's
28
All of these writers have examined the imperialist system's impact on the people outside of the empire.
Walter Rodney (1942- 1980) was a Guyanese historian and political activist who wrote the important book
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Eduardo Galeano (1940- Present) is a Uruguayan writer who exposed
the centuries of pillage in his work, Open Veins of Latin America. Dr. Vandana Shiva (1952 - Present) is
an Indian physicist, ecologist, activist, editor and author of many books including Stolen Harvest: The
Hijacking of the Global Food Supply and Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development. Samir A min
(1931- Present) is an Egyptian-born political economist who has a reputation as one of the most insightful
writers about the issues arising out of the changing nature of capitalism. His work includes Accumulation
on a World Scale and The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World.
imperialist nations with the foundation of their wealth and power.
European and white settler nations who set about conquering and
enslaving found in white supremacy the ideological justification
for the pillaging, enslavement and genocide of the peoples of
Africa, Asia and the Americas.
The historical development of imperialism alongside the history of
European conquest has produced today's imperialist system which
is always racist. The reality of imperialism is fundamentally racist,
and imperialist super-exploitation is justified and rationalized
through racism. Imperialism's inhumane brutality is heaped upon
people who are portrayed as less than human.
29
The very way in
which the system extracts wealth is racist. Look at the example of
free trade zones in Jamaica, Zimbabwe, Mexico or Panama where
thousands of women work in factories at below poverty wages. As
patriarchy does with capitalism, white supremacy has been and
continues to be a fundamental part of the imperialist system. So
when thinking about ending the imperialist political economy,
one must also fight the racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic
aspects. of the system.
Although the super-exploitation of nations fuels the imperialist
system, this doesn't mean that imperialism is only international.
The imperialist system, and the super-exploitation of whole
peoples, plays out within imperialist nations too. Let's take the
example of the United States.
The self-perpetuated myth is that the United States is a welcome
home for people from every corner of the globe. However, the
reality is that the United States is not one, unified nation.
30
The
people who live in this country do not live in similar conditions,
and we do not share the same interests. Within the borders of this
2
9 This idea is drawn from the ideas developed by Franz Fa non; see The Wretched of the Earth.
3 Even sectors of the ruling class recognize that there are different nations within the borders of this
country. Most recently, Senator John Edwards made the reality of 'two Amencas" the central platform of
his 2004 presidential campaign. However, John Edwards was far from the first member of the ruling class
to talk about two Americas. In 1896, the Supreme Court ruled that maintaining two separate nations was
acceptable as long as those nations were equal. That ruling stood for the next fifty-eight years. Then,
in 1968 after numerous uprisings within African American communities, a commission established by the
federal government warned that the United States was increasingly becoming two societies: "one black,
one white- separate and unequal."
country, there exists a Third World whose exploitation allows the
empire to function.
The United States is a white settler nation which came into being with
the mass slaughter of the indigenous
people of this land, the theft of their
land, through the enslavement and
unpaid labor of generations of Africans
and the terrorizing and lynching of
waves of Third World immigrants from
the Chinese of the late 18oos to the
current immigration of Mexicans and
Salvadorans. To this day, race defines
every aspect of life in the United
States- from the hospitals we are born
in, the schools we attend, the buses we
The historical development
of imperialism alongside
the history of European
conquest has produced
today' s imperialist system
which is always racist.
ride, the jobs we work, to our very life expectancy. If we are lucky
enough to find work, we toil at minimum wage jobs, multiple
shifts and still can't make rent. We live next to the power plants,
sewage facilities, chemical plants, smoke stacks, military bases
and brown fields required to support the livelihood enjoyed by
much of white America. Communities of color have taken the form
of internal colonies to be deliberately under-developed and used
as mechanisms to accelerate the imperial powers' accumulation
of hyper-profits. People of color within the United States have
only ever been offered "conditional citizenship" based on whether
that group is seen as being supportive of the imperialist powers.
31
Since citizenship is conditional for people of color, the ruling
class of the United States can- and history has shown that they
do- move to revoke supposedly inalienable rights when it suits
them. They did it when they interned more than 12o,ooo Japanese-
Americans in the 1940s, and they do it today by incarcerating
and disenfranchising more than 1.2 million African Americans.
The enslavement, lynching, legal and extra-legal exclusion of
Indigenous, African, latin American and Asian people from work
and wealth within the U.S. closely parallels the experience of
3
1
These ideas were drawn from the Labor Community Strategy Center's Program Demand Group, Toward
a Program of Resistance, p. 15.
,.., . .,.
imperialist domination throughout the Global South.
32
Another feature of imperialism that distinguishes it from earlier
eras of capitalism is the imperialist powers' creation of a 'labor
aristocracy. '
33
The dominant position of the imperialist nations
allows these nations to extract super-profits. The ruling elite
of imperialist nations use some of the super-profits to make
significant economic and political concessions to certain sectors of
that nation's working class. Through higher wages, greater access
to consumer goods and services and expanded social wage such
as public education and cultural institutions, the imperialist elite
are able to essentially bribe those sections of the working class.
In doing so, the imperialist elite create an "alliance between the
workers of the given nation and their capitalists against the other
countries. "
34
For a contemporary example of this, all we have to
do is look at the 2004 presidential elections. Statistics show that
working class whites in the United States voted overwhelmingly for
George W. Bush in an election that could be read as a referendum
on the empire's war on the Iraqi people.
35
An analysis that solely
focuses on class would suggest that working class whites had and
have an interest in opposing a war that, if nothing else, is costing
them billions of dollars. But clearly that ain't what happened.
Working class whites voted overwhelmingly in support of the war
on the Iraqi people. The majority of working class whites, despite
their own exploitation, tie their own interests to white supremacy
and the dominance of "America" in the world.
The privileges of empire do not extend just to white people
(although those privileges do extend further and more frequently).
At the same time that our communities are super-exploited, African
American, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Arab and Native American
3
2
Periodically, we use the term 'Third World within' when referring to people of color inside the United
States. This term was developed by activists in New York City in 2000. While the term does not capture
the real differences that exists in different communities of color inside the empire, it is helpful in making
the connection between people of color who live inside the First World and the people of the Global South.
Although not identical, it is very similar to the term 'nationally oppressed communities.'
33 Lenin first introduced this phrase in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.
34 V.I. Lenin, Lenin's Collected Works, Vol. 23, p. 114.
35 Cable News Network exit polling data, Nov. 2, 2004.
l'flfll! .,.
people inside the empire gain certain privileges by living inside
the empire. One of the most clear examples of this is the level of
violence and marginalization heaped upon oppressed nations of
the Global South. Clearly, communities of color inside the United
States are victimized by the violence of the U.S. government and
all of its repressive arms. Without minimizing that reality, it is also
true that the U.S. government is much more reluctant- which is
not to say that they haven't and won't do it again- to use the full
force of its military capacity inside its own borders. This is why
we agree with the formulation developed by organizer Eric Mann
that the U.S. practices fascism in the Global South, semi-fascism
against people of color inside the United States, and bourgeois
democracy for white people inside the empire.
36
Although the level of repression faced by people of color in the
United States is not usually as severe as that faced by the people of
the Global South, the dynamics are exactly the same. And so is the
motivation. All of this is done to allow the imperialist powers to
extract super-profits and undermine the sovereignty and rights of
oppressed peoples within the United States just as it does from the
nations of the Global South. Imperialism would collapse without
this level of international and internal super-exploitation- and
the necessary repression that comes along with it.
We opened the chapter with words from W.E.B. DuBois. Here,
DuBois suggests that the end of imperialism and the emancipation
of humanity will only come with the liberation of the working
class throughout the Third World, inside and outside the United
States. Building off of Marx's insight, he suggests that the forces
of change are not simply the working class. Quite the opposite,
DuBois shows that the nature of the system has changed, and as a
result, the social forces that have an interest in ending the system
have also changed.
3
6
In making this formulation, Mann uses the definition of fascism developed in the 1930s by the then-
General Secretary of the Communist International, Georgi Dimitrov. Dimitrov defines fascism as "the open
terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and imperialistic elements of finance
capital." Our assessment is that the policies and materials relations of George W. Bush's government
wears different masks in different arenas. While this regime is not an "open terrorist dictatorship" in
every respect, it does practice fascism towards the nations and peoples of the Global South. These ideas
were taken from Eric Mann's, The 2004 Elections: A Turning Point for the U.S. Left, 2004, p. 46.
PIIJ2'17
,.., . .,.
This analysis represents an important break from assessments
of class which suggest that class is simply based on a person's
relationship to the means of production. These dogmatic
assessments fail to closely analyze the dynamics of the political
economy of today's world. They ignore the coronation of the labor
aristocracy within the First World. They base their strategy on
assessments older than the Emancipation Proclamation. Although
DuBois' statement may be non-traditional, because it is based on
a more accurate accounting of today's political economy, this
assessment helps to accurately explain how the world functions
now and offers us clarity about what a truly successful anti-
imperialist movement would look like.
U.S. imperialism is based on white supremacy and patriarchy. The
system not only exploits workers for the purpose of securing more
and more profit, it specifically depends on the exploitation and
subjugation of Third World nations around the globe and Third
World peoples within the empire, especially women.
To sustain this unstable multi-national system ...
To try to address this dilemma and to speed up the realization
of profit, the imperialist system developed credit and finance,
also known as fictitious capital. Fictitious capital is value in the
form of credit, shares, debt, speculation and various forms of
paper money. Through stocks, bonds, loans and other forms of
fictitious capital, banks lend to businesses the money that they
are hoping to realize with the sale of the commodities produced
by the working class. Fictitious capital allows the imperialist to
launch the next round of production before he has actually sold the
commodities from the first round of production. Through credit
cards, loans and the like, businesses lend workers the money to
purchase commodities they helped produce but don't have the
money to buy. Used in these ways, fictitious capital allows the
imperialist class to temporarily alleviate the system's inherent
and ever-looming crises. Without the assistance of fictitious
capital to stimulate the process of consumption, the imperialist
system would likely stall because it would be unable to realize
the necessary level of profits. Viewed in this way, imperialism is
just as much a system of distribution and consumption as it is a
system of production.
The cheerleaders and the apologists of the imperialist system
claim that this form of political economy is great because of
the free market and unbridled competition but, in reality, it is
exactly the opposite. There is little competition. Imperialism
represents a stage of capitalist development in which virtually all
economic activity is dominated by monopolies, companies which
have exclusive control over the production or sales of a given
commodity.
Imperialism represents a stage in capitalist development
where multi-national monopolies are the dominant force in the
economy, as opposed to small manufacturers. In Capital, Marx
observes capitalism's tendency towards centralization. Capitalist
production begins with small manufacturers but, over time,
larger and more successful manufacturers take over smaller, less
successful manufacturers. According to his analysis, this would
eventually lead to the creation of monopolies. Marx finishes by
predicting that monopolies would eventually become the dominant
player in the production of society's goods and services.
In the early stages of the capitalist political economy, the formation
of monopolies was virtually impossible because of the limitations
of that system. In order for a monopoly to take exclusive control
over a particular area of economic activity, they must either buy
out or drive out of business all of their competitors. This means
that the prospective monopoly must accumulate extreme profits,
far more than what is required to simply launch another cycle
of production. That monopoly must have enough accumulated
profit to launch another cycle of production and to take over their
competitor. The capitalist must sell his commodity in order to
realize the profit; the ability to become a monopoly depends on
having the extremely high rate of sales that would be necessary
to accumulate the amount of capital needed to buy out their
competitors. In most industries under capitalism, sales simply
did not take place fast enough to guarantee the level of capital
accumulation necessary to achieve the status of a monopoly.
Monopolies became prevalent with the advent of fictitious
capital.
PIJJf! lf!l
With the revolutionizing of transportation technologies in
particular, the imperialist political economy has become
multi-national. Most imperialist monopolies have spread their
production, distribution and consumption activities to different
corners of the globe. A good example of this dynamic is illustrated
in "Are My Hands Clean?" a song by Sweet Honey in the Rock. The
song details the multi-national production and consumption of a
shirt sold at a department store in New York City. Before the shirt
makes its way to New York, its journey will begin in the "blood-
soaked fields of El Salvador" and then return to the United States
before heading back to Venezuela, Trinidad and Tobago, South
Carolina and finally Haiti where the shirt will be packaged to be
sold in New York City.
37
Globalization pushes the imperialist system to extend its relentless
quest for profit all over the globe.
Urban centers play a
particularly prominent
role in the process of
imperialist accumulation.
Capitalism and
imperialism produce cities
as much as they produce
commodities.
However, this process is not happening
uniformly all over the globe. Urban
centers play a particularly prominent
role in the process of imperialist
accumulation. Capitalism and
imperialism produce cities as much
as they produce commodities.
38
Dependent upon the context, cities
sometimes serve as production centers
(largely in the Global South) and
sometimes they are consumption
centers (as is the case of cities like New
York, London and Rio de Janeiro). But all around the world, cities
play the defining role in the development of imperialism. One
sign of the increasing importance of urban centers is that more
and more people of the world are migrating from the countryside
toward cities. In fact, 2005 will mark the first time in the history of
humanity that more of the world's population will live in an urban
rather than a rural environment.
39
This movement from the country
37 Sweet Honey in the Rock, "Are My Hands Clean?" Live at Carnegie Hall CD. 1988.
3
8
The Bay Area Study Group, "Playground of US Capitalism?: The Political Economy of the San Francisco
Bay Area in the 1980s." Fire in the Hearth: The Radical Politics of Place in America.
39 Mike Davis, "A Planet of Slums." New Left Review, March- April 2004, p. s.
f'BJI!58
to the city frequently means a move across national borders to
command posts, which are global centers of either production,
finance, consumption, or some combination of the three. Cities
like New York, London, Beijing and San Francisco have bound
their host nations to imperialism's global process of production,
distribution and consumption. As imperialism's capacity to
produce exceeds humanity's ability to purchase, these global
command posts and their local and national governments become
even more important as they provide outlets for imperialism's
excess productive capacity.
As we established earlier, the imperialist political economy is an
advanced and global stage of capitalist development and just like
the capitalist system, the imperialist system of political economy
struggles to get around the crisis of over-production and the crisis
of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall.
The move to more thoroughly connect economies at a global level
makes the imperialist system even more vulnerable to plunging
into severe crisis. During capitalism's initial stages, if a large
bank in England went bankrupt, the impact outside of England
would be rather minimal. On the other hand, because the world
economy is so fully integrated under imperialism, any disruption
in one sector of the economy in any part of the world can have
devastating impacts on the global economy. For example, it is
now common for large banks to invest millions of dollars in various
corporations and development projects all around the world. If
that same English bank were forced to declare bankruptcy under
imperialism, that action would have ripple implications on local
and national economies and could potentially throw the world
economy into recession or crash.
The imperialist system is also more fragile because its capacity
to produce commodities has far outpaced the imperialist powers'
ability to sell those commodities and realize profit. On the one
hand, the tools and machines used to produce commodities are
more advanced and efficient, which allows the imperialist class to
produce more than ever before. On the other hand, the improvement
in the means of production means that the imperialist class needs
to employ fewer workers. Today's transnational corporations have
PIJI!SI
PiiJS&i!
an incredible capacity to produce, but even with marketing to
stimulate consumption by the privileged few, they still get caught
up in the poverty they create. All of this makes the imperialist
system even more susceptible to plunging into severe crisis. This
is why we say that imperialism is an inherently fragile system. On
the one hand, the more successful the system is, the more it will
blanket the globe. But on the other hand, the more that the system
blankets the globe, the more it veers towards severe crisis.
In summary, as the imperialist system inevitably becomes more
global, it also becomes more unstable. The imperialist powers
employ fictitious capital in a desperate attempt to smooth over
the system's built-in crisis. It's stuck in a destructive cycle,
prone to crisis, stagnation, growth and inflation- all built upon
class exploitation, patriarchy and white supremacy. Under
imperialism, monopolies are the driving force of the economy,
and their development has allowed the imperialist system to
spread itself across a multi-national web of command posts that
play a central role in the imperialist realization of profit. This is
what is meant by "to sustain this increasingly unstable and multi-
national system."
To say that the imperialist political economy is multi-national is
not to say that it transcends the nation state, or that the process
in some ways transcends the reality of nations. In the imperialist
. system, states play a vital role in establishing a hospitable or
hostile environment for imperialist exploitation. Through tax and
domestic policy, trade and foreign policy, nation-states can play
a vital role in facilitating or disrupting the process of imperialist
accumulation. Whether they exert that power is not the issue.
States have a tremendous amount of power and play a central role
in helping to sustain the imperialist system.
. . . the imperialist state serves as a manager for global
capital.
Imperialism is an inherently unstable system. Markets do
not self-regulate. If it were left on its own, the market system
would eventually fall into severe crisis, leaving itself extremely
vulnerable. That's where the state comes in. Imperialism needs
the imperialist state.
40
Like the manager at a job, the imperialist
state has two roles: as the organizer and as the enforcer. In its
capacity as manager, the state takes whatever action is necessary,
nationally and internationally, to ensure that the system is able to
secure the profits it needs to survive.
Through the state, the imperialist powers manipulate their
currency's exchange rate. They ensure the privatization of
publicly owned resources. They plan military strategies and
wage war on other nations to seize control of new markets and
eliminate challenges to the system's domination. Sometimes they
crack down on other imperialists in order to defend the interests
of the system as a whole. The state's actions are always designed
to mediate the needs of the system and they change depending
on world conditions.
Even though imperialism has changed the way that power is
exercised internationally, states in general, and the United States
in particular, wield an enormous amount of power. As the leading
imperialist state in the world today, the role of the United States is
to pave the way for the global imperialist system. With less than
s% of the world's population, this nation has almost complete
monopolistic control of weapons of mass destruction, of the world's
global financial institutions and of the global communications
technologies.
41
While the United States is the world imperialist super-power,
imperialist nations still compete with one another. Frequently
the interests of states differ, and all states try to advance their
interests. As a prime example of this, France and Germany- both
imperialist powers- originally opposed the United States' war
on Iraq because the war did not advance their interests. As the
leading power, the U.S. needs to balance its national interests
with the interests of the international capitalist class. It positions
itself as the manager for global capital and is looked to represent
the interests of global capital, but at the same time it takes action
4 Jon Liss and David Staples, "New Folks on the Historic Bloc: Worker Centers and Municipal Socialism,"
2003.
4
1
Samir Am in, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization: The Management of Contemporary Society, 1997.
PiiJI!SS
against its rivals in order to stay on top. The war on Iraq is an
example of this. The war isn't necessarily being waged in the
interests of global capital, but in the interests of a section of the
imperialist class based in the United States. By waging the war,
this section of the imperialist class gains control of a main supply
of the oil used by China and the European Union that they can try
to leverage against those nations in the future.
Today it is the United States, as a nation-state, that poses the
greatest obstacle to peace and international solidarity in the world.
It is not Bechtel that locks up more than two million people. It is
not Nike that drops bombs on the people of the world. It is not
Disney that rams structural adjustment programs down the throats
of governments trying to feed and shelter their citizens. It is the
United States and its state apparatus that does these things. As
Daniel Ortega, former President of Nicaragua- a nation torn apart
by a U.S. -trained and funded civil war, said, "Without the United
States, there simply would not have been an armed uprising in
our country." Yes, the state is exceedingly powerful. If you have
doubts, just ask the people of Palestine, Afghanistan, Venezuela,
Haiti, Cuba and Iraq.
The United States was not always the top dog of the imperialist world.
Up until the 1930s, the United States was a regional imperialist
power within the Americas. Building on the foundation of stolen
land and stolen labor, the United States was able to establish an
urban-based industrial economy. Then, with the seizure of Puerto
Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, Guam and half of Mexico, the United
States had positioned itself by the early 1900s as the imperialist
super-power of the Americas, but England was still the world's
imperialist super-power. That is, until the conclusion of World
War II in 1945 ...
By the end of World War II (WWII), much of Europe and East Asia
had been leveled. like a fox busting into an unguarded hen
house, the imperialist forces of the United States moved quickly
to consolidate and strengthen their position relative to other
imperialist forces. Within months of the conclusion of WWII, the
United States had created the United Nations, the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These institutions were
created for the purpose of regulating the global political and
economic crises. Not surprisingly, not all nations had an equal
say in these institutions. Under-developed nations had no voice
whatsoever, and as the leading force, the United States gave
itself disproportionate decision-making authority in all of these
institutions.
It is popular in some circles within
the movement today to suggest that
the state is no longer important, that
states have lost their power. This idea
proposes that the real power in the world
today rests only with transnational
corporations. This view grossly distorts
the true nature of what's going on in
Today, itistheUnitedStates,
as a nation -state, that
poses the greatest obstacle
to peace and international
solidarity in the world.
the world today. When people within the United States choose to
ignore the domination of the U.S. state apparatus, it represents an
irresponsibility that is nothing short of criminal.
There is a close relationship between the state and transnational
monopolies that is not coincidental. At least nine out of the thirty
members of the Bush Administration's Defense Policy Board were
connected to companies that were awarded military contracts
for $y6 billion between 2001 and 2002. Former Secretary of State
George Shultz was chairman of the Committee for the Liberation
of Iraq, and he also happens to serve on the board of directors
of the Bechtel Group. When asked about a conflict of interest
in the case of war in Iraq Shultz said, "I don't know that Bechtel
would particularly benefit from it. But if there's work to be done,
Bechtel is the type of company that could do it. But nobody looks
at it as something you benefit from."
42
Since Shultz's comments,
the San Francisco-based corporation has received more than $2
billion to rebuild Iraq's infrastructure which the U.S. military
has spent billions to destroy. Shultz is far from being the only
person with both hands in the cookie jar. Almost half of U.S.
Senators are millionaires. As lenin said, there are thousands of
4
2
Center for Public Integrity Website, (http://www. pub I icintegrity.org/report.aspx?aid=91).
PSI& 55
threads connecting the state and the imperialist ruling class.
43
These threads are essential to corporations to help them pad their
bottom line with money funneled from public coffers. Certainly,
corporations wield tremendous power, but it is the apparatus of
the state (and during this period in particular the U.S. state) that
acts as the manager of the imperialist system.
As people living within the belly of the world's imperial power,
we have a responsibility to recognize its brutishness, not to
craft clever theories to make ourselves feel better. We have this
respc;msibility because it's only after we come to grips with how
and why the United States wields its power that we can challenge
the domination of U.S. imperialism, at home and abroad.
This, then, is the fundamental nature of the imperialist system.
It is a global system of political economy based on the super-
exploitation of whole nations and peoples by the world's imperial
powers. To sustain this increasingly unstable and multi-national
system, the state apparatus of the United States serves as the
enforcer and organizer for the global imperialist system.
As we have discussed, the system of U.S. -led imperialism is more
advanced than the system of political economy that Marx analyzed
in the 1840s. But Marx's framework is still extremely helpful to us
as we try to make sense of the world around us. As we have seen,
the imperialist system is prone to crises, creating the conditions
that seem to make it vulnerable to change. So that leaves us
with the question: What is our assessment of the current state of
imperialism? What are today's weaknesses? Where is it going?
And who are the constituencies that are positioned to mount a
serious challenge to this unsustainable system of exploitation and
subjugation?
IMPERIALISM AFTER THE WAR
The post-World War Two (WWII) period marks the defining period
in the development of U.S. -led imperialism and the terrain on
which we find ourselves today. It was during this period that the
43 V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution.
1'811!5&
li!WIIf..d! IJRd, WDil.l 8 PDWIIl.
U.S. became an imperialist superpower. During the three decades
between 1945 to 1975, the world political economy experienced
tremendous growth; but by the early 1970s, that success became
stagnant. Our struggles today are still deeply impacted by this
mid-r970s crisis in the global political economy, and the decisions
that the global ruling class made to handle it. Understanding the
nature of this current crisis, and how it developed, will allow us to
develop an effective strategy for justice and self-determination.
World War II was a devastating experience. More than sixty million
people died in the fighting. From Europe to Asia, entire nations
were leveled from massive bombing campaigns. By the end of
the fighting, economies around the world were in shambles. The
destruction of the imperialist nations ran so deep that the basic
infrastructure of the world community had to be re-assembled.
44
In the smoldering ashes of atomic bombs and concentration
camps, the United States had an opportunity to make profit and
strengthen the imperialist political economy.
45
Spurred on by this
desire to rake in profit and challenged by the Soviet Union, Third
World nations, oppressed nationality and worker struggles, the
new imperialist super-power moved to re-shape the fundamental
structures of the world's political economy. The political response
of the world's imperialist powers was shaped by the reality of the
Cold War during which the two global super-powers- the United
States and the Soviet Union- jockeyed for world domination.
This conflict and competition pushed both super-powers to make
alliances and compromises in hopes of gaining ground and
44 It should be said that most of the Global South with the exception of East Asia, the Pacific Islands,
North Africa, and the Middle East was not deeply involved in the war. For many of the people of the
Global South, the destruction and distraction of WWII gave them a moment of opportunity to try to free
themselves from their now weakened colonial occupiers.
45 But as is the case with all imperialist wars, World War II turned out to be extremely profitable for the
imperialist elites. During the war, imperialist corporations were able to produce al! sorts of war-related
commodities, knowing that warring nations would be in constant need of guns, planes, penicillin, boots,
etc. Then following the war, the imperialist powers continued to rake in huge profits in the re-building
of the world's infrastructure.
Many corporations got rich during the war and in the re-building process. One example is BMW, the
famous car manufacturer. This corporation got its start during World War II in support of Nazi Germany.
But instead of making cars, they got rich making engines for German war planes. They were the engine of
choice because their engines allowed the German war planes to reach altitudes necessary to bomb English
cities.
PillS 57
undermining the other.
CONTAINMENT LIBERALISM t: INDUSTRIALIZATION
The political strategy of U.S. -led imperialism in fighting the Cold
War came to be known as containment liberalism.
46
This strategy
meant that the United States would tolerate progressive economic
and social policy within the empire or in allied countries but only
if there was an agreement to contain the spread of Communism.
Domestically, this was the period when the labor aristocracy was
firmly established in the United States. Working class people, in
particular white working class people, received higher wages and
greater benefits in exchange for the AFL -CIO's active opposition
and persecution of leftists and Communists.
47
Internationally,
the imperialist powers of the United States permitted Third
World nations to play an active role in the industrialization of
their national economies, to carry out land reform, or set up
worker protections as long as they did not pursue Communist
models of economic development. In a show of courageous self-
determination, the Vietnamese people refused to accept these
terms, and in response, the United States launched a brutal and
illegal war to try to get them to conform.
Economically, the imperialist powers pursued a strategy of massive
industrialization. Between 1945 and 1970, three projects fueled
post-war growth within the imperialist world: I) the re-building of
Europe; 2) the development of the Keynesian welfare state within
the First World; and 3) the industrialization of the Third World.
48
r. The re-building of Europe- Before WWII, western
European nations were responsible for the majority of the
46 Walden Bello, Dark Victory: The United States and Global Poverty, 1999.
47 In addition to the continued exclusion of people of color, the AFL -CIO purged all Communists and
anarchists from staff positions in all of its member unions in the 1950s. Thereafter, staff members were
required to sign pledges indicating that they were not members of revolutionary organizations. Over the
next twenty years, the AFL -CIO played active roles sabotaging the development of leftist trade unions in
the Third World. By working closely with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the AFL -CIO had a hand
in the murder of trade unionists and in the destruction of workers' organizations throughout Africa, Asia
and Latin America. In many progressive and radical circles, the U.S. trade union federation came to be
known as the AFL -CIA.
48 Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization: The Management of Contemporary Society, 1997.
I'BJISI
world's capitalist production, but the bulk of the war took
place on European soil, and by the end of the war, most
of the continent was demolished. The imperialist system
could not survive if the advanced capitalist nations of
Europe were going to be out of the game permanently. To
jump-start western Europe's contribution to imperialist
production, the imperialist powers, led by the United
States, agreed to subsidize corporations to accelerate the
re-construction of those nations' capitalist infrastructure.
2. The development of the welfare state within the First
World- Only ten years before the Second World War
began, the global capitalist economy had been crippled
by the massive impact of the Great Depression. This global
depression threw millions of workers out of work in the
U.S. and Europe who took to the streets demanding food,
work and relief from the state. The struggles of working
people and oppressed nationalities throughout the First
World forced the ruling elites to offer certain concessions
like public works programs, unemployment insurance and
social security. It took the massive military spending of
WWII to pull the world economy out of recession, but the
First World governments continued social spending after
the war. While the social spending might not have been
the arrangement that all members of the ruling elite would
have chosen, it did serve the imperialist system well. By
increasing people's capacity to purchase commodities,
and by spending massive amounts of money on domestic
infrastructure like roads and highways, the governments
helped to spur the growth of the world economy.
3. The industrialization of the Third World- Before World
War II, large sections of Asia, Africa and latin America
were colonies of First World nations. During that period,
the imperialist nations used the Third World as a non-
industrialized exporter of raw goods and as an importer of
everything manufactured. After having been compelled
to fight for other people's freedom in the war, many Third
World nations began the struggle for their own national
liberation in the 1940s and 1950s. While some of the
PDii!S!J
national liberation movements fought for socialism and
others simply tried to expel their colonial rulers, virtually
all of the national liberation movements sought to decrease
their dependence on First World's manufacturing and
industry. Industrialization then, was a central objective
for Third World nations following the Second World War.
Although it was by no means universal or complete, many
Third World countries did industrialize to some extent in
the following twenty-five years; although often at great
cost to the environment and people of the countries.
For twenty-five years following the conclusion of World War II, this
strategy of containment liberalism and massive industrialization
was immensely successful in producing economic growth. In
particular, the United States was able to extract a continually
rising level of profit, and in doing so supported a rising standard
of living for many people living inside the empire.
49
These
political and economic strategies contributed to a world economy
that was able to radically increase its industrial capacity. From
1945 to 1970, imperialist accumulation grew tremendously.
But by 1970 things had begun to change. Growth had begun to
slow down. The European and Japanese economies were re-built
and producing. The U.S. economy continued to be strong but
the Soviet Union was at its most productive. Plus, more and more
Third World nations had developed their economies so that those
nations were able to break away from centuries of dependence
on the imperialist powers. All of this success brought crisis;
there was too much production, too much capacity and too little
con.sumption. The basis of growth for the previous twenty-five
years became of the basis for stagnation. The imperialist system's
productive capacity, which had brought mind-boggling growth,
now brought crippling recession. Areas to invest capital and
make a profit were scarce. The global system had reached the
point where it was able to produce more than it had the capacity
to consume profitably.
49 The economy of the Soviet Union and its aligned nations also experienced tremendous growth during
this period. In fact, some Soviet-bloc countries experienced rates of growth that was greater than that
experienced by the United States and other capitalist nations. In the case of the Soviet Union, this came at
the savage expense of the murder and imprisonment of millions of people under the Stalin regime.
Page sa
~ I W I W [ d ! IJDd, WDIIJ 8 PDWIII..
Increasingly, the political assertiveness of the Third World and of
oppressed nationality people within the United States threatened
to undermine U.S. supremacy. Politically, they had thrown the
boot of colonialism from their collective necks. Economically, the
industrial development of the Third
World meant that Middle Eastern,
African, Asian and Latin American
nations were no longer forced to rely
only on the First World imperialist
nations for manufactured goods. Many
Third World nations were beginning
to band together to adamantly assert
their interests, which were often
opposed to the interests of the United
The political assertiveness
of the Third World and of
oppressed nationality people
within the United States
threatened to undermine U.S.
supremacy.
States and other imperialist powers. To varying degrees, Third
World nations could choose whether it was in their interests to
produce for themselves, to trade between themselves or to trade
with the Soviet Union. This represented a significant loss of market
for the imperialist nations. In the United States, the Civil Rights
Movement, various Power Movements and the Movement against
the Vietnam War, played a similar role. For the racist elites of
U.S. imperialism, the ignominy of being challenged by the poor
yellow, brown, and black people of Dubois' quote was too much
for them to handle.
As a result, the imperialist system fell into widespread recession.
Bad turned to crisis-ridden worse for the imperialist political
economy in the early 1970s when two events took place that
ultimately forced the imperialist powers to adopt new strategies
for survival.
At the end of WWII, the imperialist nations had selected the
U.S. dollar as the standard currency for global trade when they
met at the Bretton Woods Conference in 1945. According to this
agreement, the U.S. agreed to link the value of the dollar to the
value of the gold in U.S. reserves. But after more than fifteen years
of trying to sustain a rising standard of living domestically and
simultaneously waging a multi-billion dollar war to contain the
spread of Communism, the imperialist elite of the United States
had burned through their gold reserve and had literally ran out of
P8fiE&I
money. On April15, 1971, the United States was forced to break this
long-standing agreement and de-link the dollar from the value of
its depleted gold reserve.
50
This represented a deep blow to the
stability of the imperialist system.
The second blow to the imperialist system came in 1973 when the
price of oil skyrocketed. By the early 1970s, all imperialist nations
were dependent on oil imported from Third World nations. The
United States was consuming more than 33% of the world's oil.
51
Almost all of that oil was imported from the nations of Iran,
Iraq and Saudi Arabia who had organized themselves into an
international organization called the Organization of Petroleum
Exporting Countries (OPEC). 5
2
In retaliation for the United States'
and Western Europe's support of Israel during the October War,
the Arab members of OPEC quadrupled the price of oil in 1973.
53
Because the United States and the world imperialist system were
so dependent upon imported oil, they had no choice but to pay
the increased price.
These two events- the fall of the dollar in 1971 and the oil shock
of 1973- pulled the covers back on the crisis of the imperialist
system for everyone to see. The world market was glutted with
excess productive capacity. The imperialist system had developed
5 In a further blow to the imperialist system, the imperialist elite in the United States de-valued the dollar
to avoid soaring inflation a couple of months later.
5
1
Wikipedia Website, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973-energy_crisis).
5
2
"OPEC is an international Organization of eleven developing countries which are heavily reliant on
oil revenues as their main source of income. Membership is open to any country which is a substantial
net exporter of oil and which shares the ideals of the Organization. The current Members are Algeria,
Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Venezuela.
Since oil revenues are so vital for the economic development of these nations, they aim to bring stability
and harmony to the oil market by adjusting their oil output to help ensure a balance between supply and
demand. Twice a year, or more frequently if required, the Oil and Energy Ministers of the OPEC Members
meet to decide on the Organization's output level, and consider whether any action to adjust output
is necessary in the light of recent and anticipated oil market developments. OPEC's eleven members
collectively supply about 40 per cent of the world's oil output, and possess more than three-quarters of
the world's total proven crude oil reserves." (OPEC Website, http://www.opec.org)
531n 1973, Egypt joined Syria in a war on Israel to regain the Palestinian territories lost in 1967. The two Arab
states struck unexpectedly on October 6, 1973. For more than three weeks, the Egyptian and Syrian forces
defeated the Israeli forces and re-gained the lost territories. But all of this progress came to a crashing halt
when the United States funneled massive economic and military assistance to Israel. (Palestine- Home of
History Website, http://www. palestinehistory.com/time1900.htm#1973) .
.......
the capacity to produce that exceeded its ability to realize profit.
Because profits are the fuel of the imperialist political economy,
the system was running out of fuel and the global economy was
sinking deeper and deeper into recession.
Declining profits meant that imperialism literally couldn't provide
the same wages, social benefits and independence that the Third
World, workers and oppressed nationalities had struggled for
and won. To prevent the imperialist system from a serious crash,
the imperialist powers needed a new arrangement. They needed
to develop a strategy that would allow the system to extract the
necessary profits and maintain growth.
Crisis within the system and class conflict with the Third World
forces outside and inside of the empire forced the imperialists
to abandon their old strategy of containment liberalism and
industrialization. In order to save the world economy from a severe
crash, the imperialist powers had to find a way to pump profits
into the system. By the late-r970S, new political and economic
strategies emerged to become the hope of imperialists everywhere.
These strategies are defined largely by three interrelated initiatives:
neoliberalism, a casino economy and aggressive militarism.
NEOLIBERALISM
Within the United States, neoliberalism was so universally adopted
by the imperialist political elites of both parties that it came to be
known as the Washington Consensus. 5
4
Developed in the 1970s by
a group of economists at the University of Chicago, neoliberalism
proposes that the imperialist system will be best strengthened by
empowering the state to do away with anything and everything
that might impede imperialism's ability to extract profit.
54 The Washington Consensus is a term that was first developed by ruling class economist John Williamson
to describe the similar policies being advocated by both the Democratic and Republican parties outlining
how nations should develop their economies. Williamson summarized the Washington Consensus as
a package of the following ten principles: 1) Fiscal discipline; 2) Re-direct public expenditure; 3) Tax
reform; 4) Financial liberalization; s) Adopt a single, competitive exchange rate; 6) Trade liberalization;
y) Eliminate barriers to foreign direct investment; 8) Privatize state-owned enterprises; 9) De-regulate
market entry and competition; and 10) Ensure secure property rights. See john Williamson, editor, Latin
American Adjustment: How Much has Happened, 1990.
P8J888
In practice, neoliberalism was a complete reversal of the strategy
of containment liberalism of the previous period. Though the
ten-point package of neoliberalism (listed in the footnotes) came
cloaked in seemingly harmless terms, the reality of neoliberalism
has been anything but harmless. Fiscal discipline really meant
the take back of gains made by Third World nations, women,
oppressed nationalities and workers inside and outside the U.S.
Re-directing public expenditures meant that the state would offer
up what it was taking back to private capital. The overarching
mandate of taking whatever means necessary to extract profit
furthered the super-exploitation of the working class and in
particular Third World women.
The take-back took many different forms. Neoliberal states
shredded the social wage of working and low-income people and
slashed taxes for the rich and corporations, directing huge sums
of money into the pockets of the wealthiest. The privatizatiJn of
publicly controlled and natural resources, like public education
and water, allowed corporations to commodify resources that
were once freely available. The elimination of tariffs and the
deregulation of financial systems allowed First World corporations
to swallow up their smaller rivals in the Third World. All of these
measures sought to put resources in the hands of the imperialists
and undermine the development of national industries in the Third
World. This component of the neoliberal program was vital because
these take-backs made up for the profits that the corporations
were unable to realize in a period of declining profits.
Another key expression of the take- back has been the soaring debt
re-payments from Third World nations to the imperialist powers.
Under the guise of offering humanitarian aid, First World nations
have extracted hundreds of millions of dollars to temporarily
smooth over the world financial crisis. For example, in 2004,
the IMF and World Bank offered in $78 million in development
projects; during that same year, Third World nations collectively
paid $436 million towards debt repayment, most of which went
into U.S. banks.
55
55 "The Impacts of External Debt on Economic, Social and Culture Rights of Nations," 2005 World Festival
of Youth and Students, Caracas Venezuela.
PBJI&If
However, debt is not solely a problem of finance; its impact is not
solely economic. Third World debt is an ideological, political,
ethical problem. It is an instrument of extraction of resources from
the Third World to the richest nations which greatly undermines
the sovereignty of nations. Most of the Third World is paying
off debts which were taken on by anti-democratic, corrupt
governments, such as the apartheid regime of South Africa. The
people of the Third World were never consulted about whether or
not they wanted to go into debt in the first place. Secondly, debt
re-payment responds to the needs of capital, not to the needs
of the people. More often than not, nations are forced to close
medical clinics and schools in order
to send their payments off to the rich
nations. And finally, neither the debt
nor the underdevelopment of Third
World nations would exist if not for the
history of colonization and pillage of
these very nations by the imperialist
powers. After the United States and other
imperialist nations devastated those
nation's economies through centuries of
slavery, pillaging, trade embargoes and
war, the imperial powers are now living
off of the wealth extracted from bad
loans and high interest rates like loan
sharks. The debts are illegitimate. The
true debt is historical, ecological and
social and it is owed from the North to
the South.
After the United States
and other imperialist
nations devastated those
When countries couldn't pay back the
debt, imperialist powers, operating
through the apparatus of the IMF
and the World Bank, crafted specific
nation's economies
through centuries of
slavery, pillaging, trade
embargoes and war, the
imperial powers are now
living, like loan sharks,
off of the wealth extracted
from bad loans and high
interest rates. The debts are
illegitimate. The true debt
is historical, ecological and
social and it is owed from
the North to the South.
packages of neoliberal policies, often referred to as structural
adjustment programs. Some packages prioritized the privatization
of valuable resources. Others prioritized undermining advances
in industrialization. While the rhetoric always suggested that
the neoliberal policies were designed to strengthen national
PBI!&&
economies, the imperialists frequently forced neoliberalism on the
countries. One of the earliest and most quintessential examples
of the imposition of neoliberal structural adjustment took place
in Chile. Here, a U.S. -sponsored coup ousted the democratically
elected government of Salvador Allende in 1973. Hundreds of
thousands of people were murdered and disappeared so that
a military dictatorship could pursue a course of free market
fundamentalism and privatization of publicly held assets in that
nation. Despite the heinous acts of violence that brought this
regime to power (or maybe because of them), Chile became the
poster child for future U.S. -directed IMF and World Bank programs
throughout the Third World.
For the last thirty years, the imperialist powers have forced
neoliberalism down the throats of nations like Mexico, South
Korea, Argentina, Haiti, South Africa and all throughout the
Global South. Privatization of once-publicly held resources is one
of the most common neoliberal initiatives. One example of this
occurred when the World Bank forced the Bolivian government to
sign a $2.5 billion contract to turn over control of the water in
Cochabamba, the nation's third largest city, to the San Francisco-
based Bechtel Corporation. Just weeks after taking over the water
system, officials at Bechtel tripled the rates for water. Families
earning less than $1oo per month received bills for as much as $20.
Refusing to pay for water, the residents of Cochabamba shut the
City down with a series of massive protests calling for the end of
privatization. Ultimately, these protests were successful.
56
Neoliberalism is not just an export to the Third World. Neoliberal
ideology has so thoroughly permeated our thinking that most of
us don't even think twice about relying on bottled water. Even
progressive activists have absolved the state of its responsibility
to provide clean, healthy water as a basic right; instead, many
of us pay for the commodification of this basic resource. Yes,
structural adjustment programs have made themselves at home
within the empire too, especially in cities where there are higher
concentrations of working class people of color. Privatization
5
6
Jim Shultz, "World Bank Forced Water Privatization on Cochabamba," Common Dreams News Center
Website (http://www. commondreams. org/views/071SOO-IOI. htm).
PiiJIJ&&
of public education has followed cut-backs to vital services
such as women's health programs which have preceded endless
tax subsidies to wealthy corporations. Fundamental to the
successful implementation of the neoliberal agenda was the role
of the imperialist state. Privatization, cuts to the social wage,
deregulation and all of the core components of neoliberalism
would not be possible without the transformation of the state's role.
With the strategy of the previous period of containment liberalism
eroded, the welfare state was replaced with the neoliberal state.
Whereas the welfare state regularly intervened to establish
regulations governing the process by which corporations attempted
to secure profit, the neoliberal state has systematically gone about
eliminating virtually all of the regulations that would restrict the
behavior of corporations. The aim is to make it as easy as possible
for corporations to make profits no matter the social, political or
environmental costs. Because the proponents of neoliberalism are
so fervently committed to the notion that the market will address
all social inequalities- despite the overwhelming evidence- they
are increasingly known as free market fundamentalists.
As a result of free market fundamentalism, corporations not
only enjoy fewer regulations within nations, but they also face
fewer obstacles blocking them from moving some or all of their
operations across national borders. Global trade agreements such
as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have made
it increasingly easy for corporations to pick up entire plants to
relocate to a nation with low labor costs and little regulation of
the corporations' pursuit of profit.
Free market fundamentalism has also resulted in the loss of
power by workers. Take, for example, the re-structuring of
work. Increasingly, corporations are producing commodities
by sub-contracting or by employing contingent and non-
traditional workers. Today, three in ten workers in the United
States are working in these re-structured jobs.
57
The proponents
of neoliberalism will often argue that re-structured, or flexible,
jobs are better for workers, but the reality for most workers is
57 National Alliance for Fair Employment, "Worker Center Strategies: A NAFFE Working Paper," p. 1.
P8J8&7
PIJI&8
very different. Re-structuring has made institutions that were
designed to protect the rights of the working class- such as
trade unions and the National Labor Relations Board in the United
States- impotent. Corporations are able to circumvent traditional
organizing campaigns by moving or denying responsibility.
The core neoliberal principle of driving down the cost of
production then turned the imperialists' attention squarely on
the Global South. Clearly, the exploitation of Third World nations
was happening before the 1970s; as we have previously described,
this is one of the defining characteristics of the current imperialist
political economy. But in the early 1970s, the imperialist nations
stepped it up.
In particular, this quest to lower production costs has led to the
super-exploitation of Third World women as workers at home and
abroad. The patriarchy of the imperialist system renders women's
work invisible and when it is compensated, it is considered
supplemental. Corporations have been quick to take advantage of
this, recruiting more and more women into the workforce, paying
them significantly less than their male counterparts.
The impact of neoliberalism's super-exploitation of Third World
women has been a well-documented dramatic increase in the
feminization of poverty and low-wage work. Women workers
now make up a majority of the global workforce and are an
overwhelming majority in key industries like agricultural work,
light manufacturing and the service sector.
Women in particular have borne the brunt of the elimination of
the social wage, which is the array of services such as income
support, childcare, housing aid, health care, and social security
which the welfare state provided to supplement the wages paid by
the private sector. The loss of the social wage means that workers
not only are facing lower wages at work, but fewer social wages at
home and in the community. With cuts to these public programs,
those costs have been dumped onto the family where it is women
who normally shoulder the additional burden. As a result of the
loss of the social wage, women around the globe have been forced
to enter into the informal economies, including a rising boom in
the sex trade, especially in tourist sites and military outposts in
Thailand, the Philippines and the United States.
58
CASINO ECONOMY
The neoliberal agenda advanced by imperialists couldn't
completely resolve the crisis apparent in the system. In order to
sustain itself the system must constantly expand, this means that
capital must constantly be reinvested in hopes of extracting more
profit. For capitalists, they either grow or they die. The problem
was that during this time, there were few places where capitalists
could profitably invest their capital. What they needed was some
way to invest their capital that was not tied to the ailing process
of commodity production. A solution soon followed.
The mass of floating capital in the hands of the capitalist class
desperately needed some outlet for investment, and that outlet
came in the form of expansion of the financial sector. A solution
was found in what is referred to as "casino capitalism." Developed
in the mid-I970S, this form of economy is based on the speculation
of currencies, stocks, real estate, etc. Where the capitalists could
no longer reliably extract profits by investing in production, they
invested in the stock market or speculated in the buying and
selling of currency. The deregulation of finance and the move
towards a system of floating currencies enabled that process to
happen.
The example of currency speculation demonstrates how important
the casino economy is to the survival of the imperialist system.
Currency speculation is the practice of buying, holding and
selling different national currencies to profit from the periodic
fluctuations in the values of those currencies.
59
The decision to
58 Many writers including Maria Mies have documented this phenomenon.
59 Generally regarded as the world's best currency speculator, billionaire philanthropist George Soros is a
prime example of the extreme wealth and financial crisis that currency speculation can bring about. Soros
came to fame because of his actions on one day, September 22, 1992, when he single-handedly broke the
Bank of England. "At the time, West Germany was busy swallowing up the former East Germany, creating
a pocket of growth and inflation amidst a European community otherwise marked by high unemployment.
As the Bundesbank (the German central bank) moved to raise rates, it threatened the Maastricht Treaty
by putting pressure on the European Exchange Rate Mechanism that was to be the vehicle for creating a
unified European currency. Even though other European countries needed lower rates to spur growth, they
PIIJI&B
abandon the gold standard in favor of floating exchange rates in
the mid 1970s opened the door for massive currency speculation.
When the change took effect in 1975, the ratio of the value of
international currency sales to the trade of commodities was about
two to one. In other words, twice as much money was spent on
currency speculation as was spent to purchase commodities. By
the early 1980s, that ratio of currency speculation to commodity
trade had jumped to fifteen to one. Today, the ratio is one-hundred
and twenty to one. This incredible mass of floating value which
totaled 1.3 trillion dollars a day in 1995 moves from one world city
to another through electronic transfer.
60
These developments within the expansion of finance have caused
spurts of speculation; notable examples being the Savings 8
Loans crisis of the 1980s and California's deregulation-inspired
'energy crisis' of 2000. The rise and fall of the dot.com boom and
information technology sectors in San Francisco during the late
1990s were a result of the same phenomenon.
All the talk about the "new economy" in reality involves the
capitalist class scouring the globe with their capital, hungry for
get-rich-quick schemes, investing capital in financial products
that often times have at best a tenuous relationship to production.
Nevertheless, this circulation of capital has helped to stave off a
massive crash of the global economy.
AGGRESSIVE MILITARISM
Theimperialistpowersknewthatinordertoimplementanystrategies
to address the crisis, they would need to first de-stabilize Third
World forces at home and abroad. Led by the immense apparatus
were forced to raise them, or see their currencies decline relative to the powerful German [currency, the]
mark. Sores' Quantum Fund []stepped into this crisis environment to bet against the Italian lire and then
the British pound. Indeed, the British position seemed so untenable. Soros []leveraged an enormous bet
of $10 billion. Even as the British government announced a 2% rate hike, Sores kept selling sterling. By
evening of that day, the British were forced to rescind the rate increase and withdraw the pound from the
ERM altogether. Sterling immediately plunged, [the Bank of England went bankrupt!.., and Soros walked
away with more than $1 billion in profits. (The Motley Fool Website, http:/ /www.fool.com/Features/1996/
spo719c. htm)
6o International Cooperation for Development and Solidarity Website, (http:/ /www.cidse.org/pubs/
cttenapp. htm).
1'811! 78
WDIIJ I PDWIII..
of the U.S. military industrial complex, imperialist forces moved
to violently crush any and all opposition. They waged war against
the Sandinistas and the Nicaraguan people. They assassinated and
illegally locked up freedom fighters from the African American,
Native American and Puerto Rican communities. They sponsored
coups of democratically elected leaders throughout the Third
World. Many of these military operations took place covertly,
cautious not to show the true repressive nature of the regime. In
the words of Cuban President Fidel Castro, "If there ever was in the
history of humanity an enemy who was truly universal, an enemy
whose acts and moves trouble the entire world, threaten the entire
world, attack the entire world in any way or another, that real and
really universal enemy is precisely Yankee imperialism."
Under the leadership of George W. Bush and the reactionary right,
the government of the United States has used the War on Terrorism
to assume a permanent posture of aggressive militarism. The
federal government is developing and purchasing weapons
of repression that once would have once only found home on a
science fiction movie set, and they are prepared to use them. In
2004, the U.S. government spent more than $455 billion dollars on
its military, more than the combined total of the thirty-two next
powerful nations.
61
If the meaning of his jingoistic actions were
not clear enough, Bush's proclamation of the pre-emptive strike
policy has served to put the world on notice: oppose the interests
of U.S. -led imperialism, and "we will hunt you down. "
62
This
increase in the level of aggressive militarism comes as the United
States desperately seeks to maintain control of a global situation
that is increasingly out of their control.
The impact of the violent de-stabilization of the political and
economic infrastructures of Third World nations has created a
massive migration of people from the Global South to the First World
nations. More people immigrated to the United States between
1990 and 2ooo than in any other ten-year period of the nation's
history.
63
Corporations in the First World have encouraged this
61
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 2005 Annual Yearbook.
6
2
George W. Bush, Address to the Nation, Sept. 11, 2001.
6
3 Diane Schmidley, Profile of the Foreign-Born Population in the United States: 2000. U.S. Census
PBJ871
flow of undocumented labor-power as these workers have provided
much of the hyper-exploited workforce that the corporations have
needed. Although they have made it more and more necessary for
people to leave their homelands, the neoliberal state has made it
less and less feasible to immigrate legally.
While military violence is still the most common tactic used by
the imperialist powers to de-stabilize Third World nations, the
ruling elite in the United States use a diverse set of tactics. In
the last thirty years, they have moved to administratively take
the teeth out of the trade union movement as they did in 1980
with the crushing defeat of the Air Traffic Controllers Union.
They have also funneled billions of dollars into the expansion
of prisons and police forces. In most oppressed nationality
communities, parole officers, immigration officials and police act
like occupying armies. Today, the United States has more than
three million people locked up, most of whom are low-income
and people of color. The Black community has been particularly
targeted as African American men are six times more likely to be
arrested than are white men.
64
For those people fortunate enough
to avoid jail, the United States has flooded oppressed nationality
communities with untold amounts of legal and illegal drugs to
cultivate high rates of substance abuse and alcoholism so that
our people would be unable to mount any serious challenge to
imperialist hegemony.
All this raises the question, "Has this violence and structural
adjustment succeeded in resolving U.S. imperialism's underlying
crisis?" In the end, the answer is no. None of these neoliberal
approaches have succeeded in resolving U.S. -led imperialism's
underlying crisis. U.S. -led imperialism is still a glut of production
with few opportunities for productive investment. What neoliberal
polices have done is to stabilize a system that has been in crisis for
more than thirty years. After thirty years of neoliberal intervention,
today the world economy is still struggling with the same crisis.
Bureau, Current Population Reports, Special Studies No. P23-206, December 2001 and Randolph Capps,
Fix and Passel I "The Dispersal of Immigrants in the 1990s" Brief No.2 in Immigrant Families and Workers:
Facts and Perspectives. November 2002.
6
4 In a related fact, the United States locks up more people, per capita, than any other nation in the
world.
P8f1872
Along with stabilization, neoliberalism has brought tremendous
suffering. It has exacerbated the polarization of wealth, it has
thrown millions of workers into the uncertainty of contingent work,
deepened the feminization of poverty, subjugated Latin America,
Asia and the Caribbean while banishing the entire continent
of Africa and forcing massive migrations of workers to flee the
economic devastation of their homelands. The imperialist elite
within the U.S. have attacked immigrant and African American
women, smashed and marginalized trade unions, enacted "tax
the poor and feed the rich policies" and incarcerated African
American and Latino men while funneling huge subsidies for
privileged military, computer and bio-technology elites. This
impact has been particularly vicious on working class people,
people of color, women and the world's natural environment. All
of these are being devastated by the imperialists' attempts to save
their system of exploitation and pillaging.
The ruling U.S. imperialist elite have been aided in this agenda
to re-conquer the world economically and politically by the
monopolistic control they enjoy over certain key assets. Among
these assets are technology, financial control of world markets,
access to natural resources, media and communication outlets
and weapons of mass destruction.
65
With this monopolistic
control over media outlets and communication technologies,
the imperialist powers have saturated the world with deliberate
messages that blame the victims of imperialism, in an effort to
strengthen the economic and ideological superiority of "a self-
selected few, including members of the World Economic Forum,
the un-elected leaders of the IMF, World Trade Organization and
World Bank; the current imperial president of the United States;
and a right-wing majority U.S. Supreme Court. "
66
Where they have
not been able to convince the people of the world to go along with
their exploitation, the United States has used its monopoly over
military technologies and weapons of mass destruction to put
down any resistance. These monopolies help the U.S. maintain
6
5 Samir A min, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization: The Management of Society, 1997,
p. 3-s.
66 )on Liss and David Staples, "New Folks on the Historic Bloc: Worker Centers and Municipal Socialism,"
2003.
Plf!71f
its hegemony and make it possible for the imperialist powers to
extract the level of profit needed to stabilize an ailing imperialist
system.
U.S. -led imperialism and neoliberalism have also sparked an
increased level of resistance, from both the Right and the left.
Massive social movements throughout Latin America, Asia and
Africa are contesting U.S. -led imperialism's attempts to stay
the neoliberal course. On September II, 2001 right-wing, Islamic
fundamentalist groups, opposed to U.S. imperialism, carried out
the deadliest attacks on the United States since the attack on
Pearl Harbor. The response to all of this resistance has been more
repression. More and more, the empire is resorting to war and
violence as a default mode of relating with the rest of the world.
This approach is not only costly; it has the potential of eroding
U.S. hegemony and authority.
Today, we are living in a particular period of imperialism that
has been in crisis since the early 1970s. As the manager of this
ailing system, the United States has pursued a set of actions and
policies on political and economic fronts in an effort to preserve
the imperialist system and to maintain its position of power within
that system. These actions become more and more dramatic as
the United States faces increasing challenge from the economies
of China and India. These changing conditions and the ruling
class' actions have changed the terrain on which we struggle for
economic, racial and women's justice. The new conditions are
undermining the effectiveness of old models of struggle.
hDPI FI\_IID bllPW
Understanding imperialism and the global stagnation of the past
thirty years helps us to see why the imperialists are taking such
extreme actions today- it's because they are desperately trying to
resuscitate a system which is riddled with internal crisis. However,
even though the system is facing critical challenges, imperialism's
crises will not be the downfall of the system in and of themselves.
The downfall of imperialism will come because of the courageous
resistance of those people who have been excluded and exploited.
As Egyptian, political economist Samir Amin says in Capitalism
in the Age of Globalization, "If the system adopted to manage
the crisis cannot survive in the long term, this is not due to the
absurdity of its underlying economic and monetary policies, but
to the aggravation of social and political conflicts which it cannot
"d u67
av01 .
If the fall of imperialism is to come because of "social and political
conflicts," as Am in suggests, the question remains: who will
be the leading forces of these conflicts? How someone answers
this question is framed by how they understand the nature of
imperialism. With a correct analysis, we can identify the sectors
of society which have a material interest in advancing an anti-
imperialist vision and which are positioned in such a way that
they can defeat the opposition of the
imperialist powers.
Based on our assessment we believe
that the Third World- Asia, Africa, Latin
America and the Middle East- must
be the leading force of an alliance
to defeat U.S. -led imperialism. As
the main exploited sector within the
global economy, they have a direct
and material interest in seeing the
complete abolition of imperialism.
Their struggle will be facilitated by
their greater numbers and their control
of the territories which the imperialist
nations need for cheap resources and
new markets. However, even with
Even though the system is
facing critical challenges,
imperialism's crises will
not be the downfall of
the system in and of
themselves. The downfall
of imperialism will come
because of the courageous
resistance of those people
who have been excluded
and exploited.
these factors on their side, the people of the Third World cannot
defeat the imperialist forces by themselves because of the United
States' monopolistic control over weapons of mass destruction.
From the murderous destruction of governments in Mozambique,
Nicaragua, Grenada and too many other countries to name, the
United States has demonstrated that it is prepared to unleash
monstrous violence against any people attempting to challenge
6
7 Samir A min, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization: The Management of Contemporary Society, 1997.
P8J1!75
or step outside the narrow confines of their New World Order. In
order to successfully defeat U.S.-led imperialism, the people of
the Third World must lead other forces in a broad, anti-imperialist
movement.
If the people of the Global South are to lead, this raises the question
of what is the role for those of us living and struggling inside
the imperialist super-power? What is the role of the two million
people locked in U.S. prisons? What is the role of the thirty-two
million people living below the poverty line? What is the role
Latinos, Native Americans, African Americans, Asians and Pacific
Islanders and all other oppressed people inside this racist, sexist
and homophobic nation? Simply put, our role is to build a strong
movement to address the issues that working class people of color
in the United States face that also recognizes that our fights are
against the same systems and same enemies as those of the people
of the Global South. We play the role of forcing the imperialist
states to address the conditions within their borders, as well as
around the rest of the world.
Building movement inside the United States poses certain
challenges that our comrades in the Global South don't face.
Inside the empire, the imperialist powers have saturated large
sections of U.S. society with economic concessions and white
supremacist ideology in an effort to buy their allegiance. This
effort has been successful in a way that makes the building of a
majoritarian movement in the United States unlikely. We do not
think it is possible to build an anti-imperialist movement in the
United States that involves the majority of the U.S. population and
that is aligned with the leadership of the people of the Third World.
Patriotic racism and imperial privilege are just too deeply held by
too many people. But an anti -imperialist movement that is aligned
with the interests of the Third World is possible within Third World
communities inside the empire. Within our communities, we find
enough suffering and discontent to raise a serious threat to the
agenda of imperialist militarism and corporate privatization.
To be clear, we are not saying that all of the people in our
communities see their fortunes intertwined with those of the
people in the Global South. What we are suggesting is that the
material conditions for people of color in this racist empire make
it possible to build such a movement. The conditions suffered
by the vast majority of Black, Latino, Native American, Asian and
Pacific Islander communities are more akin to those of the people
of the Global South than they are to those enjoyed by the majority
of white people in the United States. The very existence of a Third
World within the United States is one of the biggest contradictions
facing this unstable government.
Although the people of the Global South will play a leading role
within the global struggle against U.S. -led imperialism, Third
World peoples inside the United States will play an important role
too. Working class people of color within the imperialist super-
power can, and must, lead a broad anti-imperialist united front
which involves people of color from various class positions as well
as anti-racist whites. We cannot and should not simply wait for
the demands of the Global South to rise to the point of contending
for power against U.S. imperialism.
The challenge, then, for those of us inside the United States is to
take up those social and political struggles which address the
interests of strategic constituencies and which allow forces in the
Global South to advance their struggles for self-determination
and global justice. What these social and political conflicts
look like inside the belly of the beast will be determined by the
specific conditions that we are facing. Understanding this leaves
us with the question: how does imperialism's ongoing crisis affect
the conditions for us here in San Francisco? What have been the
responses of San Francisco's ruling elite? And how does all of this
shape our struggles for economic, gender and racial justice?
PIJ877
All of us are working, living and struggling within the context
of globalized capitalism. We are faced with a common exploiter
and a common enemy. But as organizers, we are also rooted in
a particular community which has its own unique history and
dynamics. It is for this reason that we must understand and
account for the conditions that emerge from this dynamic between
the local and the global. Although each local community is
closely connected to the same global political economy, each city
plays a unique role to keep the system going. Imperialism has a
geography. Different cities and regions fit together in the world
economy like pieces in a puzzle. The global political-economic
system is made up of many smaller pieces that can look very
different from one another. Ciudad Juarez looks and functions
differently than Buenos Aires. Dar es Salaam is different than
Silicon Valley.
It would be really difficult to make sense of each of these economies
taken by themselves. Capital and the state organize production,
and they bring together in different cities and towns bosses and
all kinds of workers to meet their needs. Some cities are centers
of industrial production. Others are centers of agriculture. Still
others are command posts. All of these distinct pieces come
together to form a coherent whole world system. By considering
each of the pieces in relation to the big picture, we are able to
more accurately understand the role and function of each local
piece.
Because of this inter-relationship between local conditions and
the larger global system, the changes in the global economy,
as well as the developments in a specific regional economy will
impact one another. The global system of political economy is
a dialectical relationship between the local and the global. In
other words, there is a back-and -forth between the global system
of U.S. -led imperialism and the political economies of different
communities around the world. Each one affects and influences
the development of the other.
1
Black Star, "Respiration" featuring Common, Black Star Are ... CD. Rawkus Records, 2002.
P8JI!81
For POWER and our work here in San Francisco, having an
understanding of how our city and the Bay Area relate to the global
context is an important grounding to our work. We also hope that
the example of the San Francisco Bay Area provides the movement
with a helpful case study to get a deeper understanding of how the
global situation can make itself felt in a city. U.S. -led imperialism
exists and impacts people throughout the world, but we all live
it and fight it in its specific and local embodiments. By better
understanding the context of our experience and community and
how they are impacted and shaped by imperialism, we are in a
better position to bring about change. So we have to ask ourselves
the question in our local context- how does San Francisco relate
to the big picture?
In the popular imagination the San Francisco Bay Area is often
dismissed as a nearly-socialist state- detached from the political
and economic realities of other cities in the United States like Des
Moines, Houston or Philadelphia. It is a place where queer people
and Left-wingers converge; a place that represents everything that
"the heartland of America" is against. Clearly, there are certain
qualities that set San Francisco apart. It does have a radical past
and is still a place of social progressivism. It is one of the few
relatively safe places in the nation for queer and transgender
people. It is a place that in that November 2004 election voted for
John Kerry, for withdrawing troops from Iraq, and for defending
same-sex couples the right to marry, while the majority of the
country voted for George Bush and his platform of racist, sexist,
homophobic war-mongering.
2
Even while it often stands apart politically, the Bay Area is filled
with contradictions. Even though there is little large-scale
manufacturing or production that takes place here, San Francisco
is home to some of the largest corporations in the world. While
it has been a hot-bed of radical and revolutionary organizations,
it has also given rise to notorious right-wing figures such as
Condoleezza Rice, William Rehnquist, George Shultz, Casper
Weinberger and Ed Meese. Yes, in many ways the City and the Bay
2
San Francisco voted for John Kerry (83%), voted for a local ballot initiative against the war (64%), and
marched and rallied heavily in support of gay marriage.
f'i1JI82
Area are very different than other parts of the world. But beneath
all of the hype about being different or out of touch lies a city that
is in step with and integral to the imperialists' plans to stabilize
and grow their ailing system.
If we were to summarize the most defining feature that is driving
the political economy of San Francisco at this time, we would say
that. ..
In an attempt to consolidate and expand power in a
period of global economic stagnation and rising regional
competition, San Francisco's ruling elite has developed
an agenda of economic apartheid that threatens to
eliminate all of the working class communities of color
in the City.
The same economic stagnation that is affecting the global system
of U.S. -led imperialism has put the ruling elite of San Francisco in
jeopardy. In response, they have crafted an agenda for how the
city can transform itself in order to create openings for expansion
in the midst of overall decline. That transformation has come at
tremendous expense. The people who have borne the brunt of
this massive transformation are working class African American,
Latino, Asian and Pacific Islander San Franciscans who have been
systematically cast out in the ruling elite's effort to re-invent the
City.
The systematic removal of people has been accomplished both
with targeted state actions and the removal of legal protections,
exposing people to the full brunt of market forces. This has led
to the leveling of some of the most vital communities of color in
the city and the sharp erosion of space for working class people.
It has also meant the removal of the same people whose work built
the city and continues to keep it functioning.
As working class people of color have been forced out, corporate
industries and a more acceptable (read: richer and whiter)
population have moved in. This quest to take back the City has
been the thrust of economic development in San Francisco since
WWII. It has also set the stage for social struggle in the City.
Urban development and removal have been the principal ways
PiiJI! 88
that the City has been connected to the global restructuring of the
economy since WWII, both in moments of growth and of crisis.
The transformation of San Francisco has not gone on in isolation.
It is being carried out by transnational corporations that have a
global presence. It is being carried out with money that has been
siphoned off from the rest of the world. It is being carried out with
methods that are being applied nationally and globally, and often
that have been used historically. San Francisco's transformation
is intimately connected to the transformation, growth and re-
ordering of its immediate region, the San Francisco Bay Area. To
talk about the changes in San Francisco outside of the crisis of
U.S. -led imperialism robs it of much of its context. To talk about
it outside of the context and history of the Bay Area as a region
makes no sense at all.
The San Francisco Bay Area is a huge nine-county region that
covers about 7 ,Boo square miles in Northern California.
3
It is home
to almost seven million people, making it the fourth largest urban
area in the United States. From Alameda County and the cities
of Oakland, Richmond and Livermore to the east; to San Jose and
Silicon Valley in the south; to Marin and Napa in the northern part
of the region, the Bay Area is an economic power-house. In fact,
if the Bay Area were its own country, it would be the 21
51
richest
country in the world.
4
The Bay Area is an economically diverse region, and home to a
variety of industries: shipping, railroads, petroleum refining,
wine production, international construction, government
administration, business services, tourism, restaurants, retail,
higher education, medical, ship-building, real estate speculation,
research and development.
5
Some of these sectors, such as retail,
have a lot to do with being a command post in the First World.
Other sectors, such as shipping and transportation, have to do
3 The nine counties of the Bay Area are Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo,
Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma. (Bay Area Council Website, http:/ /www.bayareafirst.org/index.html).
4 The Bay Area Study Group, "Playground of US Capitalism?: The Political Economy of the San Francisco
Bay Area in the 198os," p. 6.
5 The Bay Area Study Group, "Playground of US Capitalism?: The Political Economy of the San Francisco
Bay Area in the 1980s," 1990.
,,,, . .,
with being a large population center. Still others, such as tourism,
have developed in conjunction with their growth globally. Others,
such as wine, tourism, and shipping, have to do the distinct
natural attributes of the area. But the global importance of the
Bay Area revolves around one key industry: technology. While
we recognize the region's economic diversity, we agree with the
Bay Area Study Group in their assessment that, "The main engine
of expansion in the Bay metropolis for the last thirty years has
been the microelectronics industrial complex of Silicon Valley,
including semiconductors, computers and instruments. "
6
The Bay Area's role as a research and technology center began
during WWII in the context of an arms race with Germany.
The Bay Area was a strategic location of arms related research,
including aircraft engineering and the development of atomic
weapons. From that foundation, the region has grown into an
internationally recognized center of research and development
for computers, software, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and
nanotechnology.
7
The presence of elite research universities,
such as Stanford University and the University of California at
Berkeley, have played a key role in allowing this to happen. Bay
Area universities produce more PhD scientists and engineers than
any other area in United States.
8
Whereas the U.S. economy overall, and the industrial and
manufacturing sectors in particular, have seen jobs and wages
decline over the past 30 years, over the same period of time the
Bay Area has continued to grow in population and wealth.
9
Last
year, the largest two-hundred corporations raked in $66.25 billion,
double that of the previous year.
10
This has been possible because
6
The Bay Area Study Group, "Playground of US Capitalism?: The Political Economy of the San Francisco
Bay Area in the 1980s," 1990.
7 "The electronics and biotechnology industries are well represented throughout the Bay Area. With nearly
30% of the worldwide biotechnology labor force and 360 biotech firms, the Bay Area has appropriately
been called "Bionic Bay." InfoPiease Website (http:/ /www.infoplease.corn/ipa/Aoi08603.html).
8
San Francisco Center for Economic Development Website, (http:/ /www.sfced.org/technology.htm).
9 This phenomenon has been analyzed at length by different authors who talk about the U.S. economy
being post-industrial, or Post-Fordist, or changing into a service economy, or information economy, See
Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work.
10
Jenny Straburg, "Profit," San Francisco Chronicle, May 6, 2005. (San Francisco Chronicle Website:
www. sfga te. com/ cgi- bi n/topco/home/ 2005).
,.., ...
the Bay Area has been the hope of global capitalists who have been
struggling to overcome the imperialist crisis of excess productive
capacity and the lack of productive areas for the investment of
capital. The Bay Area has played a key role in the development of
global capital's new technologies. The scope and importance of
this role has grown and in turn, has driven the development of the
economy, the workforce, and the politics of our region.
This role of being the developer of technologies that allow
capitalist growth has been exceedingly important, especially in
the context of the global economic crisis of the past thirty years.
As mentioned previously, all capitalists look to revolutionize the
means of production to extract more profit. This search is even
more feverish in moments of stagnation or crisis such as we have
experienced since the 1970s. The United States not only needs
to successfully develop new technologies to find new areas of
economic growth, but also to maintain the hegemony that the
U.S. empire maintains both technologically and militarily across
the globe. As we mentioned earlier, the dominance that the G8
exercise today is built on their monopolization of key assets in
the global economy. The Bay Area plays an important role in
maintaining and advancing these monopolies in the key areas of
research and development and weapons of mass destruction.
11
The ruling class has funded this project of developing new
technologies in proportion to its importance. In an effort to see
success, and to speculate and get rich by investing in the next big
thing, a constant stream of funds have flowed into the Bay Area
through government funding and venture capital. In the late
1980s San Francisco's Montgomery Street- together with Silicon
Valley's Sharon Business Center- held the world's largest pool
of venture capital.
12
By the late 1990s, 30% of all venture capital
invested globally was coming into the Bay Area.
13
Clearly, San
Francisco serves as a major investment site for world capital. This
steady flow of money into the Bay Area through private investment
11
Samir Amin, Capitalism in the Age of Globalization: The Management of Contemporary Society, 1997.
12
The Bay Area Study Group, "Playground of US Capitalism?: The Political Economy of the San Francisco
Bay Area in the 198os", in Fire in the Hearth: The Radical Politics of Place in America, 1990.
1
3 Francine Cavanaugh, A. Mark Liiv, and Adams Wood, directors. Boom: The Sound of Eviction, 2002.
PiiJ88&
and government contracts has been the foundation of the regiOn s
growth. It has driven population growth and the expansion of
professional jobs and supporting economic sectors.
Today, San Francisco is a command post in the world economy.
San Francisco's importance derives largely from the significance
of the region, which has grown in importance because of its
dominance in the area of technology. Today, the Bay Area stands
tall amongst metropolitan regions around the globe.
biSiiiRU by lihl bay
BIRTH OF A COMMAND POST
For centuries, the land surrounding the San Francisco Bay was
home to the Ohlone people. With the sword and the bible, the
Spanish conquistadores virtually wiped out the Ohlone people
in the 1770s, claiming California in their expansion of colonial
Mexico. California remained a part of Mexico until 1848 when
the United States decided to seize the territory as a part of its
Manifest Destiny plan to complete its own expansion from sea to
shining sea.'
4
With U.S. victory in the Mexican-American War, San
Francisco officially became a part of the United States.
The United States knew from jump just how important San Francisco
would be to its rise as a world power. In his State of the Union
address in 1848, then-President James Polk commented,
From its position [California] must command the rich commerce
of China, of Asia., of the islands of the Pacific, of western Mexico,
of Central America, the South American States, and of the Russian
possessions bordering on that ocean. A great emporium will
doubtless speedily arise on the Californian coast... The depot of
the vast commerce which must exist on the Pacific will probably
be at some point on the Bay of San Francisco... The powers of
Europe, far removed from the west coast of America ... can never
'4 Manifest Destiny was the political and religious ideology that the United States used to justify and
mobilize support for its conquest and expansion across North America. This ideology suggested that the
white race of the United States had a divine mission to expand the country's territory, and God wanted
them to do this, no matter what it took.
P&fl!87
successfully compete with the United States in the rich and
extensive commerce which is opened to us at so much Jess cost
by the acquisition of California.'
5
Situated on the Pacific Ocean and close to immense forests, San
Francisco promised to be a valuable asset in the future. Just one
year after Polk's address, San Francisco's value jumped, throwing
it into the spotlight and setting the course for its contemporary
role.
The discovery of gold in 1848 at nearby Sutter's Mill quickly
established San Francisco as the urban center of banking, trading,
entertainment and supplies for the entire West Coast. In less than
two years, this new city literally exploded, growing from a small
farming community of just six hundred to a city with a population
of 40,ooo.'
6
Even with the gold rush flood of mostly young men,
the new ruling class of the West Coast needed more workers to do
the heavy labor of building the railroads and other infrastructure
that would integrate the West Coast into the rest of the country.
They also needed workers to extract the gold that they hoped
was "in them hills. "'
7
In particular, Mexicans and Chileans were
brought in to help in the extraction of gold and silver based on
the expertise that they had developed during Spanish colonization
of the Americas. Chinese workers were brought in to build the
railroad system connecting West Coast to the East. The skill and
sweat of these immigrant workers created enormous wealth.
Third World workers may have created that wealth, but the white
ruling class of San Francisco was going to make sure that they were
the only ones that profited. To ensure that the wealth stayed in
white hands, Latino and Chinese workers were routinely subjected
to deportation, having their land or businesses taken from them,
or being attacked by state-sanctioned white supremacist groups.
Things got so bad that in 1849 the Chilean government sent a
1
5 james Polk, "1848 State of the Union Address."
16
Links to the Past: National Park Service Website, (http://www.cr.nps.gov/seac/earlyday.htm).
'7 Early on, San Francisco's population was 92% male. Most of these were young people who had come
West in search of a fortune. More than 2oo,ooo gold-seekers and farmers followed this route to the gold
fields and farmlands of California during the 1840s and 18sos. (National Landscape Conservation System
Website, http: I lwww. discovemlcs. org/TheNLCS/Trails/index. cfm).
PIIJS88
war ship to San Francisco to evacuate its citizens who were being
attacked.
Only twenty years after being taken into the United States, San
Francisco had become the tenth largest city in the nation. By 1870,
with the railroad completed and the hills stripped of gold and
silver, the City's white workers felt threatened by competition
with the immigrant workers. Immigrant workers in the City and
particularly the Chinese community had already been ghettoized
and confined to living and doing business in their own community.
With most of the hard labor outside the City finished, San Francisco's
ruling elite got worried about the non-white competition and set
out to white-wash the City, deporting, harassing and terrorizing
all people of color. As San Francisco's largest community of color,
the Chinese community bore the largest brunt of this attack. Mob
violence against the Chinese community in 1877 paved the way
for the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which barred all Chinese
immigration into the United States.
18
For the next thirty years, San Francisco solidified its position
as command post of the West Coast. It became the financial
hub of the region. It was the center of whaling, fishing and
shipping, especially with Asia. The region established itself as an
educational hub with the founding of the University of California
at Berkeley in 1873 and Stanford University in 1891. By the end of
the 18oos the economic, cultural and political life of San Francisco
was booming. It seemed like there was no limit to how much San
Francisco could grow- that is, until1906.
On April 18th, 1906 an earthquake struck. The 1906 earthquake,
and the subsequent fire that burned for three days, leveled San
Francisco. Approximately 28,ooo buildings were destroyed. More
than 6oo people were killed. More than 225,000 people were left
homeless.
19
The 1906 earthquake was the most destructive natural
disaster to ever hit the U.S., and it took the City almost a decade
to pick up the pieces. The process of re-building the City served
1
8 This piece of legislation stayed on the books unti11943. During these sixty years, Chinese immigrants
caught coming to the United States were imprisoned on Treasure Island.
1
9 SFGov Website, (http://www.sfgov.org/site/visitor_index.asp ?id=8o87 ).
P8f&88
.......
to tighten the hold of San Francisco's richest citizens on the City's
industry and local government. They were the ones who were most
able to ride out the destruction and the ones with the resources to
rebuild and expand.
The ruling class of San Francisco did everything that they could
over the next forty years to re-build their shining city on a hill,
dealing with the Great Depression and a general strike in the
1930s. Their primary success came in establishing San Francisco
as a financial center. In this period, prior to WWII, San Francisco
became home to the Pacific Stock Exchange and the West Coast
Federal Reserve Bank. In addition many large banks, including
Bank of America and Wells Fargo, grew up and were headquartered
here. Nevertheless, San Francisco still operated in isolation of the
rest of the region.
Up until WWII, the individual cities surrounding the Bay like
Oakland or Richmond had developed in a more or less independent
manner. This created certain problems for the owning class. The
haphazardness of this spontaneous organization of business and
industry was cutting into profits and into the Bay Area's ability
to play its new wartime role efficiently. The completion of the
Bay Bridge in 1936 and the Golden Gate Bridge in 1937 had set the
stage for the integration of the Bay Area into a regional unit, but
the owning class needed an opportunity to re-shape the political
economy of the Bay Area. That opportunity presented itself as
WWII.
But it wasn't until World War II that San Francisco was pushed
towards its current role in the imperialist system. San Francisco's
prominence increased dramatically as it became the center of a
highly coordinated regional economy, because of the calculated
actions of the Bay Area's owning class over the next five years.
METROPOUS OF THE WEST
WWII was a defining period for the San Francisco Bay Area- just as
it was for the United States as a whole. San Francisco became the
primary West Coast launching point because much of the war was
taking place in the Pacific. Between 1941 and 1945, more than 1.6
million service-men and -women were shipped out to fight from
San Francisco.
20
Seeing an opportunity for patriotic profiteering, several of the
Bay Area's largest corporations joined with local politicians and
military leaders to form the Metropolitan Defense Committee
(MDC). During the war, the MDC took up the coordination of
wartime industry and planned defense and emergency services for
the region. They eliminated overlap and drafted a clear division
of labor for every city throughout the Bay Area. Munitions plants
were built in Concord. Research labs were built in Palo Alto and
Livermore. And a naval shipyard was built in the Hunters Point
neighborhood of San Francisco. By the middle of the war, the
MDC had successfully harnessed the entire region into a well-oiled
machine designed to support the U.S. war-effort.
All of this activity radically changed the demographics of San
Francisco. When WWII erupted, there was a sizable Japanese-
American population living in San Francisco's Fillmore district.
Based on racist paranoia and without an accusation of guilt,
the U.S. government rounded up more than 12o,ooo Japanese-
American citizens and jailed them in concentration camps,
claiming that they might be spies or that they might fight on
behalf of Japan in the war.
21
When Japanese-Americans were taken
away, landlords in the Fillmore district began renting to African
Americans who began migrating to San Francisco. During the war,
African Americans, who had been largely employed as agricultural
workers in the South and had been barred from manufacturing
jobs, were recruited to work in war-related industries like ship-
building and munitions work. Between 1940 and 1950, the African
American population in San Francisco grew ten-fold.
The City also became central location for the gay community during
this time, courtesy of the U.S. military. During the war, if a soldier
was dishonorably discharged for homosexuality, the military
would dump that person off in San Francisco. Instead of returning
20
Economist Magazine Website, (http://economist.com/cities/findStory.cfm?city_id=SFf.folder=Facts-
History).
21
This action was taken by Executive Order 9066, issued by Franklin Roosevelt in 1942. In San Francisco,
more than 8,ooo Japanese-Americans were forcibly removed.
PBJBSI
to their hometowns, thousands chose to stay and build community
in San Francisco. From that point forward, San Francisco's Gay,
The ruling class was able
to transform San Francisco
into a global command post
and the center of a regional
powerhouse. But to make
that happen, San Francisco's
ruling elite had to wage a
series of premeditated attacks
on oppressed communities.
Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender
community was forged much more out
of struggle than circumstance. The first
gay rights organization in the U.S., the
Mattachine Society, was founded in Los
Angeles in 1951, but soon moved their
headquarters to San Francisco. In 1955,
the first Lesbian Rights organization
in the U.S., the Daughters of Bilitus,
was founded here.
22
The political
movement for gay and lesbian rights
served as an anchor for the community
over time, and San Francisco became popularly thought of as
the queer capital of the world. There is a story that is told of a
homophobe harassing a gay man in San Francisco saying, "They
should round up all you people and put you on an island." The
gay man responds, "They have, honey, and you're on it."
The experience of regional cooperation had been lucrative for
the Bay Area's ruling elite. Just because the war was over did
not mean that they should stop colluding with each other to
advance the prominence of the Bay Area as a region. When the
war ended, the ruling class kept right on with what they had
been doing. First, they moved to re-make the MDC as the Bay
Area Council (BAC), a peace-time group charged with integrating
the region into a unified political economy. In the BAC's plans
for a planned regional economy, each city would play its own
particular role. According to the plans, Oakland and the East
Bay would be transformed into the hub for heavier industry,
chemicals, petroleum refining, shipping and transportation. San
Jose and the South Bay would be designated as areas for light
manufacturing, electronics and aerospace industry. Contra Costa
and San Mateo counties provide auxiliary office space. Because of
22
The legacy of queer rights activism grew tremendously after this period, including the transgender
women and queer youth who led the Compton Cafeteria Riot of 1966, the movement to elect Harvey Milk
as Supervisor in the 1970s, the strong presence of Act Up (the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) and the
Lesbian Avengers in San Francisco through the 1980s, and many smaller more recent organizations such
as TransAction and Gay Shame.
PIIJ882
its history, existing infrastructure and geographic centrality, San
Francisco was chosen to be the "center of administration, finance,
consulting and entertainment. "
23
Connecting it all was the Bay
Area Rapid Transit (BART) train system and an elaborate network of
highways to link all the sectors of this regional economic system.
With plan for regional coordination, the BAC began making their
vision a reality.
This would not be a simple task. Even after the war, the region
had yet to be integrated into a regional identity. Each city had
to be outfitted to play its specific role. Oakland's port needed
to be modernized. The South Bay's infrastructure for light
manufacturing needed to be expanded. In 1945, San Francisco was
not well-suited to play its appointed role at the administrative,
financial, consulting and entertainment center of the region. The
local economy did not fit perfectly into this vision. Its workforce
did not have the skills that would be required. And San Francisco's
neighborhoods were not laid out in the way that they would have
to be. One thing was very clear; if the BAC's plans were to become
a reality, then the ruling elite of the Bay Area would have to
transform all of the cities of the Bay Area, especially San Francisco.
And that's what they did. After about thirty years, the ruling class
was able to transform San Francisco into a global command post
and the center of a regional powerhouse. But to make that happen,
San Francisco's ruling elite had to wage a series of premeditated
attacks on oppressed communities: Rich versus Poor; Developers
versus Tenants; White people versus African American, Latino,
Asian and Pacific Islander people. Instead of carrying on with
the narrative history of San Francisco and the Bay Area, the next
section will highlight three case studies, which illustrate the ruling
class' relentless attacks throughout this period.
DOWNTOWN V. DOCKWORKERS
Throughout San Francisco's history, Market Street has been the
metaphorical- and often geographical- dividing line between
rich and poor. At the conclusion of WWII, North of Market was home
to the Financial District, Nob Hill and Pacific Heights while South
2
3 Chester Hartman, City for Sale: The Transformation of San Francisco, 2002.
rage sa
PiiJSB'f
of Market, also known as SOMA, was home for retired dockworkers,
sailors, some sections of the Chinese community and the center of
San Francisco's Filipino community.
By the 1950s, the capitalist class of San Francisco was in a bind.
Business was booming as more and more businesses set up shop
in the administrative, financial and entertainment center of the
region; so much so that downtown and the Financial District were
becoming overcrowded. If San Francisco was going to play its
role as the Bay Area's hub, the ruling class had to provide more
office space for corporations and businesses.
In many cities, the proposal to expand downtown might not have
posed much of a challenge, however the geography of San Francisco
presented the ruling class with a particular set of challenges.
San Francisco sits on a small plot of land that is surrounded on
all sides by either industrialized towns (namely Daly City) or by
water (namely the San Francisco Bay and the Pacific Ocean). Every
square block of the City is built up in some way, so building out
was not an option. And because of the threat of earthquakes, the
ruling class was cautious to built up. This means that in order for
San Francisco's ruling class to expand the Financial District in the
1950s, they had to tear something else down. This dynamic of the
ruling class tearing something down to build something new is a
recurring theme in San Francisco politics and the history of social
struggle here.
In this case, the ruling class sacrificed the SOMA neighborhood
for the sake of the progress of San Francisco's standing in the
imperialist economy. The BAC's plans required tearing down
blocks of existing housing where people had been living for
decades. Tenement hotels and neighborhood centers would be
replaced by luxury housing, high-rise office buildings and a
convention center. All in the heart of the old South of Market.
San Francisco politicians created the San Francisco Redevelopment
Agency (SFRA) to marshal public resources towards the capitalists'
development projects. The stated goal of the SFRA was to improve
"the environment of the City and [create] better urban living
conditions through the removal of blight. "
24
Together with the
Mayor's Office of Economic Development, the regional office of
the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and
large corporations, the SFRA spearheaded the effort to expand the
Financial District and destroy the existing community in SOMA.
In the campaign to gentrify SOMA, the ruling elite applied a
four step model to displace residents and uproot community
institutions and local businesses which included:
1. Proposing massive redevelopment projects that expand
the influence of the local capitalist class and begin the
gentrification of working class communities of color.
2. Declaring that a targeted community was blighted.
3. Using public funds to demolish existing buildings and
build new ones for the new corporate residents.
4. Taking the area by any means necessary, including the
use of eminent domain, re-zoning, tax breaks, etc.
25
Working in tandem with the City's daily newspapers, the SFRA so
vilified SOMA and its residents that many people saw the Financial
District's expansion as a public service. The campaign was so
successful for the ruling class that it paved the way for the Financial
District continuing to encroach into SOMA over the next twenty
years with the development of the Verba Buena Convention Center
and numerous redevelopment projects. Today, you'd be hard
pressed to find much evidence that the neighborhood was once
the home to San Francisco's Filipino community and the workers
who led the 1934 General Strike. The Financial District- its offices
and its identity- flows seamlessly across Market Street deep into
the heart of SOMA, washing away much of the neighborhood's
rich history.
The destruction of SOMA was the ruling elite's first effort to use
redevelopment as a tool of displacing people and re-shaping the
City's economic terrain. It was the first, but it would be far from
the last.
2
4 San Francisco Redevelopment Agency Website, (http:/ /www.sfgov.org/site/sfra_index.asp).
2
5 Eminent domain is the power of the government to seize privately owned property if it is for the 'good
of the community.' Under eminent domain, a government can force a homeowner to sell her or his
home.
Pilfi!SS
PBJI! S&
JUSTIN HERMAN V. HARLEM OF THE WEST
African Americans began migrating en masse to San Francisco
during 1940s. While there were African Americans in San Francisco
long before, WWII brought a massive migration of African
Americans from the South looking for work in the war-related
industries. Racist renting practices and lending policies channeled
African Americans into two neighborhoods: Hunters Point and the
Fillmore. Their wages and work built up these communities. In
particular, the Fillmore became recognized as the heart of the
African American community on the west coast. Musicians like
John Coltrane, Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker were regulars in
a neighborhood that quickly became known as the Harlem of the
West.
The end of the war saw large numbers of African American workers
fired from the jobs that they had been recruited into as white
soldiers returned home looking for work. Getting no help from
racist bosses who refused to hire them and racist unions which
refused to admit them, African Americans in San Francisco would
spend the next twenty years struggling for an end to discriminatory
hiring practices.
By the early 196os, San Francisco's ruling elite had become
proficient at clearing the way for capitalist redevelopment which
they now referred to as 'urban renewal.' The new, catchy name
was not all that they had on their side. They also had a urban
renewal zealot as the head of the Redevelopment Agency. The
new head of SFRA was Justin Herman who had previously been the
director of the western regional offices of the Housing and Home
Finance Agency (the equivalent of today's Housing and Urban
Development Department). He began his twelve-year tenure as
the head of the SFRA in 1959. His first major project after assuming
the post of SFRA director was to put a dagger through the heart of
the Fillmore neighborhood.
Quickly, San Francisco's two daily newspapers began running
stories on how decrepit and dangerous the Fillmore was. Herman
jumped into proclaiming himself the savior of the blighted
area. He promised to renew the neighborhood. Herman and the
I I W ~ E t d ! @Od, WDIIJ I PDWIII..
Redevelopment Agency came up with a development project which
called for the creation of a six-lane highway cutting right through
the heart of neighborhood.
26
Because many of the Black home
owners refused to sell their property, Herman began using eminent
domain to force owners to sell their homes and buildings. The
Federlein family was one such family. Through eminent domain,
they were forced to sell the home that had been in their family for
more than ninety years. Once the house was demolished, the SFRA
built a parking lot on the property.
27
Fillmore residents were quick to call things what they were. They
saw through all the fancy promises. They said urban renewal
was nothing more than Negro removal; and they tagged Justin
Herman, "the White Devil." But they didn't just call names, the
community organized to protect the neighborhood and defend
their land against the Redevelopment Agency's plans. Herman
was met with stiff resistance by community organizers like Mary
Rogers and Hannibal Williams who were able to stall the project
for years. But eventually Herman was able to get the project
through. The mini-highway project displaced 6,ooo of the 35,000
people living in the Fillmore. But Herman was not finished. In
1966, Herman launched the second phase of urban removal which
ultimately displaced another 12,ooo people.
When Herman and San Francisco's ruling elite were done with
their development projects in the Fillmore, the once vibrant
African American community was left in shambles. Not only had
thousands of people been displaced but anchor institutions in the
community such as barber shops, clubs, churches, grocery stores,
etc. had all been put out of business. The community never fully
recovered.
TOURISM INDUSTRIES V. THE HOMELESS COMMUNITY
San Franciscans regularly name homelessness as the City's biggest
problem. The thing is that people often forget that homelessness
in San Francisco was unknown in the 1960s and 1970s. There was
poverty in those days, but people sleeping in the streets for lack
2
6 This six-lane highway is the Fillmore section of Geary Street today.
2
7 KQED Television Website, (http:/ /www.pbs.org/kqed/fillmore/learning/time.html#nsv).
Pilfi!S7
of housing was something that you didn't see.
Homelessness emerged as an issue in San Francisco in the late
1970s with the ascendancy of neoliberalism, as the ruling class
gutted state-sponsored public benefits, housing and mental
health services at the state and federal levels. These cuts caused
a sharp increase in poverty and the growth of homelessness
nationally. Working class San Franciscans- African Americans,
Latinos, and Asians, in particular- found themselves caught in
a spiral of rising housing prices, loss of benefits and exclusion
from all but the lowest paying jobs. The City of San Francisco
opened its first homeless shelters in the early 1980s. By the late
1990s San Francisco had the highest housing prices, the highest
eviction rates and the highest per-capita homeless population in
the country.
There are now between 7 ,ooo and Is,ooo homeless people in the
City.
28
Estimates are that approximately 6o% of these people
were once residents of Bayview.
29
Economic refugees of a system
of development that produces a lack of affordable housing and
social spending, San Francisco's homeless population is the living
and breathing embodiment of the failure of a development model
that prioritizes profit over human need.
Homelessness is a major political issue in San Francisco. More than
one San Francisco mayor has lost a re-election bid because of his
failure to reduce the number of homeless people. This is not only
because many rich and middle income people hate poor people
(although this fact should not be discounted). Homelessness is a
political issue in San Francisco because the City's economy is so
dependent on the entertainment and tourism industries.
On the issue of homelessness, it is the entertainment and tourism
industries that act as the most reactionary force. They want
homelessness and poverty to be erased from the sight of tourists
and wealthy professionals to whom they cater their businesses.
They don't care if poverty and homelessness are eradicated;
they just want it out of sight because their profits depend on the
2
8 San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, "Facts about Homelessness," p. 1.
2
9 San Francisco Department of Human Services grant application, November 2004.
,.., ...
commodification of the City. According to them, it's simply a
question of profits, and homeless people are bad for business.
San Francisco's most activist reactionary forces on the issue of
homelessness have been the Golden Gate Restaurant Association
and the Hotel Council for the last ten years. Led by these two trade
associations, the entertainment and tourism industries have spent
the past ten years picking fights over "quality of life" issues, such
as eliminating social services or making those services so punitive
that no one will access them.
30
In 2002, the Golden Gate Restaurant
Association, in partnership with then-mayoral candidate Gavin
Newsom, sponsored a ballot proposition to cut public benefits to
homeless people. It was the third attempt to slash welfare benefits
in five years. Pouring almost a million dollars into the campaign,
the entertainment and tourism industries' Care Not Cash initiative
served as a rallying point for people frustrated with the City's
failed homeless policies.
MANHATTAN OF THE BAY
As each of the three case studies illustrated, San Francisco's ruling
elite have been advancing a plan that they crafted fifty years
ago. A central part of that plan was transforming all of the Bay
Area into the major metropolitan region of the West Coast. They
wanted the Bay Area to be the New York of the West. They wanted
to coordinate the region's political economy into a coherent and
powerful entity that vaulted their position in the global pecking
order. Like each of New York's five boroughs plays a different role
in the City's political economy, the ruling class of the Bay Area
assigned different cities different roles.
It was always clear that San Francisco would have to be the center
of this constructed regional economy. As the former President
of BART's Board of Directors said in 1968, "It's not a question of
whether it's desirable. It's the only practical way. Certain finance,
banking industries, want to be centralized, want to have everyone
near each other ... There's also a cultural aspect. You can't have the
3 "Quality of life" is a term used by forces in San Francisco who support the removal of poor or homeless
San Franciscans, the cutting of social services, and in particular more police intervention to get poor
people out of public spaces. The quality of life they are talking about is that of yuppies who don't want
contact with poor people.
PiiJS SS
symphony, the opera, the ballpark in every community." Reading
the words of another BART official, Roger Lapham, Jr., it is also
clear that San Francisco was always going to be the center: "The
end result is that San Francisco will be just like Manhattan. "
3
'
Comparing both cities makes it obvious just how successful the
ruling class has been .. Compared to the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens
and Staten Island, Manhattan is the main center of luxury housing,
retail consumption, restaurants, tourism, finance and business,
culture and entertainment. Manhattan is home to the famous New
York skyline, Central Park, Grand Central Station, Radio City Music
Hall, Broadway, Soho, Chelsea, Mid-town, the Upper-West Side,
the Museum of Natural History. It's where New York University and
Columbia University are. The Macy's Day Parade. The Oak Room
at the Plaza Hotel. It's the place that gives the word cosmopolitan
its meaning. Manhattan is urban; wealthy, and cultured.
In the Bay Area, San Francisco is where transnational corporations
base their headquarters, right next to hot-shot law firms, brokerage
houses and marketing firms. San Francisco is home to the Pacific
Stock Exchange, the regional branch of the Federal Reserve Bank,
Charles Schwab and Bechtel. It is where you find the Chinese New
Year Parade and LGBT Pride, four major art museums, the Opera,
and several smaller theaters and galleries. It is the center of
government administration for the region, the place with state
and federal offices and international embassies. It is also the site
of luxury housing, fancy restaurants, five-star hotels and world-
class shopping- the city of cable cars, Union Square, lombard
Street, Fisherman's Wharf, the Presidio, Candlestick Park, and the
Tonga Room of the Fairmont Hotel. San Francisco is the enclave for
the young, professional, fashionable, and wealthy to have trendy,
artsy, big city living.
None of this wealth has come without consequences. All of this
so-called progress has come at the direct expense of working class
communities of color, but as the elites of the world would say,
"You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs." To get
3' San Francisco Bay Guardian News, October 18, 2000. San Francisco Bay Guardian Website, (http:/ 1
www.sfbg.com/News/3s/o3/03chron.html).
,.., ....
from "Gangs of New York" to "Breakfast at Tiffany's" you have
to make some significant changes. Manhattan is increasingly
where Chinese, African Americans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans,
Haitians and Africans are not. Neighborhoods whose names have,
for decades, been synonymous with communities of color are
being gentrified and whitened. Manhattan is less and less where
you find a Puerto Rican Lower East
Side or Barrio, a Chinese Chinatown, a
Dominican Washington Heights or an
African American Harlem. Increasingly,
it's the borough within the city of New
York where business people, the white
and the wealthy come together to live,
work and play while they are served
by working class people of color who
must leave on the train once their shift
is over.
The same has been true in San Francisco.
In the last thirty years, San Francisco
is less and less home to a transgender
Tenderloin, an African American
Fillmore, a Filipino Manilatown,
The imperialist elite turned
San Francisco into the
Madonna of the global
command posts. Madonna's
role within the music industry
and pop culture is to be on the
cutting edge, always one step
ahead. From "Lucky Star" to
her current fascination with
techno, the Material Cirl has
made a career of re-inventing
herself. That, too, is San
Francisco's role.
a Latino Mission, a African American Bayview or a Chinese
Chinatown. Drunk with their class' success, real estate developers
and brokers have gone so far as to trash the old and blighted
names of the communities. Manilatown has all but disappeared.
The Tenderloin has been re-discovered as Lower Nob Hill, and
Bayview Hunters Points is being called Bayview Heights. Although
African American, Latino and Asian communities do remain in
San Francisco, the ruling class is waging a vicious displacement
campaign so that they can further expand their privileged position
as a command post of U.S.-led imperialism.
madonna in &he l!saa
As you approach the mayor's office in San Francisco's City Hall,
after you've made it past the metal detectors and armed guards,
PiiJI! 181
you see the busts of two former mayors. One is of Diane Feinstein.
32
The other is of George Moscone.
33
Underneath Moscone's bust
there's a quotation that reads:
San Francisco is an extraordinary city because its people
have learned how to live together with one another, to
respect each other and to work with each other for the future
of their community. That's the strength and the beauty of
this city- and it's the reason why the citizens who live here
are the luckiest people in the world.
Moscone's words capture the beatific image that many of San
Francisco's ruling elite have of their shining city on a hill- tolerant,
caring, respectful of difference and community-minded. But this
idyllic image is the exact opposite of the lived experiences of
working class people of color who have been cast out of the city
so that San Francisco's ruling elite could consolidate and expand
their privilege.
At untold costs, the ruling class has solidly established San
Francisco as the hub of the Bay Area's regional economy. This
did not come about naturally. Over the last fifty years, the ruling
class has conspired to mold San Francisco's political economy so
that it would best serve their interests and the interests of global
capital. Their deliberate policies and actions have affected San
Francisco in a myriad of ways. The City's economy is organized
and managed to be able to fill that role. New development
projects are evaluated on the basis of whether they will help the
City play its role. All of this has had, and continues to have, a
profound impact on the social and economic landscape of the
City. It shapes what industries are now located here, who works
here and who lives here.
3
2
Diane Feinstein was a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in the 1970s. After the
assassination of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, Feinstein was appointed as Mayor,
and went on to hold the office for the next 10 years. She is married to Richard Blum, a powerful investment
banker. Many people mark her time as mayor as a shift toward a more business-centered politic in San
Francisco city government. She has gone on to hold several terms on the U.S. Senate.
33 George Moscone was one of the most progressive mayors in San Francisco's history. His life was cut
short in a homophobic anti-civil rights backlash, when conservative supervisor Dan White broke into his
office and assassinated Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the
U.S. and a crusader for queer rights and civil rights.
Pilfi!ID2
San Francisco is often referred to as the quintessential post-Fordist
city because it is a city that for years has grown more and more
wealthy despite the fact that there is no traditional manufacturing
industry that takes place here. Whereas Sao Paulo builds cars,
Beijing sews clothing and Silicon Valley assembles computers,
that is not the role that San Francisco's designed to play. San
Francisco's role was, and continues to be to revolutionize the
means of production for the world system of production.
In essence, the imperialist elite turned San Francisco into the
Madonna of the global command posts. Madonna's role within
the music industry and pop culture is to be on the cutting
edge, always one step ahead. From ''Lucky Star" to her current
fascination with techno, the Material Girl has made a career of
re-inventing herself. That, too, is San Francisco's role. Whether it
is the development of personal computers, the commercial utility
of the internet, or advances in biotechnology, the imperialists
rely on San Francisco to help fulfill one of capitalism's most basic
needs. Other cities can build stuff, sew stuff and assemble stuff.
Within the global political economy, San Francisco is responsible
for coming up with- or at least funding Silicon Valley to come up
with- the next big thing.
San Francisco's local economy revolves around four key industries:
finance, technology, real estate and entertainment/tourism. These
Big Four Industries are not only central figures in San Francisco's
economy, they also represent some of the most influential movers-
and-shakers in local politics.
34
Linked to the Big Four Industries is the service sector. The service
sector is a multi-tiered sector of the economy; some aspects,
such as law firms and marketing firms, are high-wage and high-
profile, but the overwhelming majority of San Francisco's service
sector is classified as low-wage work. Although the bulk of service
work is low-waged and under-appreciated, that is not to say
34 San Francisco ruling class politics today are run by the Big Four: real estate speculators (like Shorenstein,
the Residential Builders Associations), the tourism industry (like the Hotel Council, the Golden Gate
Restaurant Association, Union Square Business Improvement District), technology (UCSF, dot-com start-
ups) and the downtown business elites (the Committee on Jobs, SF Chamber of Commerce)
6
These are
the business groups that represent the dominant economic sectors of the city, and shape many of the
economic development policies of the city.
---------------------
Pi1J8188
that it is superfluous. San Francisco's service sector ensures the
reproduction of the Big Four, in the same way women's work in the
household reproduces the working class. Workers at Kinko's allows
law firms to distribute legal briefs to those who need them. Bicycle
messengers quickly deliver architects drawings. And nannies and
coffee vendors make it possible for stock brokers to work twelve-
hour days. Without industries that catered to the specific needs of
the industries and their employees, the Big Four would drown in a
pool of inefficiency. In a general sense, San Francisco's economy
resembles an hour-glass. There are a lot of jobs on the top and the
bottom which are connected to one another by a skinny middle
strata.
This over-emphasis on professional and technocratic jobs has
helped to cultivate a wealthy and educated populace. In 2000,
San Francisco had the third highest average household income in
the country (behind San Jose and Anchorage).
35
Today, more than
so% of San Franciscans have a college degree which makes the
City the fourth most educated city in the country.
36
Over the last
decade, the percentage of San Francisco residents with at least a
bachelor's degree increased by 47% while the percentage with
less than a high school degree fell by 23%. But one quick look at
the following statistics shows us that although San Francisco on
the whole is wealthy, the rising tide of capitalist progress has not
lifted all boats equally.
37
Number of Residents ~ o f SF Population Per capita Income
White 385.728 49% S48,393 a year
Asian 239.56s 31% szz.m a year
Latino 109,504 14% S18.s84 a year
African American 60,SIS 8% S19,275 a year
In a not-so shocking turn of events, San Francisco's workforce is
highly racialized. Over the past decade per capita income in the
35 U.S. Census Bureau, 2003 American Community Survey: Ranking Table 2003, Median Household
Income.
3
6
Cities were ranked by the percent of the population aged 25 years and over with a college or professional
degree .. CensusScope Website, (http://www.censusscope.org).
37 For population statistics, refer to SFGov Website, http://www.sfgov.org/site/bdsupvrs_page.
asp?id=4783). For per-capita income statistics, see the American Fact Finder: US Census Bureau.
PSJf!IBif
city increased 30% and household income increased 40%.
38
Of
course, it is not that everyone is getting richer; it's that low-wage
workers, particularly African American, Latino and Asian workers,
are being forced out of the City.
But even as they are forced to leave, working class people of
color still come back into the City to work, largely in the low-
wage end of the service sector. Today's new service sector workers
who are predominantly Latin American and Asian immigrants,
face low pay, little or no benefits, under-employment, unstable
work and often hazardous conditions. Many of these immigrants
working in the low-wage service sector are forced to triple up in
apartments so that they can afford the sky-rocketing rents or else
they pay the costs of commuting. Although these workers play
a vital role sustaining San Francisco's economy, the state has
subjected immigrant workers to incredible abuse. For example,
since late 2001 immigrant workers have been subject to increased
anti-immigrant attacks, and the City has largely stood by as the
Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) has stepped up its
raids of the Asian and Latino communities. All in keeping with
San Francisco's long track-record of racist abuse of working class
people of color.
Not only is San Francisco's service sector highly racialized, it is also
highly gendered. Women workers play a central role in several
key industries in the service sector. As janitors, waitresses, hotel
workers, laundry cleaners, domestics, child care workers, home-
care workers and sex workers- all jobs that are highly gendered,
women workers provide critical service to the functioning of San
Francisco's Big Four Industries.
Since the closure of the Navy's shipyard in 197 4 and the neoliberal
cut-back of the public sector, San Francisco's ruling elite have
systematically relegated the African American community to
the reserve army of labor. The official rate of unemployment
in San Francisco is 4.5%.
39
In the Black community, the
official unemployment rate is 11.4% but estimates are that the
3
8
SFGov Website, (http://www.sfgov.org/site/bdsupvrs_page.asp?id=4783).
39 California Employment Development Department, "Monthly labor Force Data for Counties," December
2004.
Pilfi!IDS
unemployment is really much closer to so%. This exclusion from
jobs and the soaring costs of living have forced thousands of
African Americans to flee the City. Over the past ten years, the
African American population has dropped by more than 23%.
40
But it's not just individuals who are leaving. Anchor institutions
such as Black-owned businesses and churches, unable to secure
loans because of banks' red-lining practices, have been victims
of gentrification as well. Those African Americans who have
remained in the City have borne the brunt of police brutality and
have been targeted to fill the ever-expanding prison industrial
complex.
San Francisco has the highest percentage of gay men in the United
States, and the Castro continues to be the center of much of San
Francisco's gay community. However, in recent years, the Castro
has become more and more white and more and more affluent.
In line with this transformation, the image of queer people in
the City is portrayed as a young, professional, white, gay man.
However, in reality, there are multiple queer communities in
the City by the Bay. San Francisco's lesbian, gay, bisexual, and
transgender communities are much more multi-class and multi-
racial than the popular image would acknowledge. low-income
African American, Latino, Asian, and Pacific Islander queer San
Franciscans, especially women, are increasingly being pushed into
the poorer, more multiracial and transgender Tenderloin, or out of
the City altogether. As a result of this outward migration, Oakland
recently surpassed San Francisco with the highest population of
queer women in the country.
Yes, the ruling elite have left their mark. Under their careful and
relentless management, San Francisco has become the Madonna
of the global command posts, outfitted with a matching economy,
workforce and population. In the process, the ruling elite had to
make San Francisco less working class, less queer, and much less
African American, Latino, Asian and Pacific Islander than it was
fifty years ago. All the while, San Francisco's largest corporations
continue to gorge themselves on profits, extracted from the
exploitation of a workforce that is overwhelmingly low-income,
4 SFGov Website, (http:/ /www.sfgov.org/site/bdsupvrs_page.asp?id=4783).
P8f81D&
female, immigrant, of color.
Many people might argue that these communities have been so
ravaged by the last fifty years of displacement and gentrification
that the future of San Francisco is a foregone conclusion. That it is
only a matter of time before the ruling class completes their project
of making all of San Francisco an exclusive playground for wealthy
and white professionals and technocrats. We don't think that the
fight is over just yet, but the struggle for self-determination in
San Francisco's working class communities of color is at a tipping
point. If the ruling class is allowed to advance their agenda in
the next few years, African American, Latino, Asian and Pacific
Islander communities will not have the strength or positioning
to mount a successful counter-offensive. The time is now for a
campaign to protect vibrant working class communities in San
Francisco, but any successful campaign will need to be rooted
in a sharp understanding of the ruling elite's agenda and their
tactical plan.
THEIR SCHEMES, OUR LIVES
Despite ail of their success over the past fifty years, San Francisco's
ruling elite is not content because they are staring at a series
of grave challenges. These challenges are putting the ruling
elite's privileged status within the imperialist order in jeopardy.
Desperate not only to consolidate but also expand their privilege,
the pro-imperialist politicians and leaders of San Francisco's
largest corporations have developed a clear agenda for the future
development of the City. The implementation of this tactical plan
would spell the demise of all working class communities of color
in San Francisco.
The challenges are coming from both the global and regional
levels. As we discussed in chapter one, the global imperialist
system is currently tangled up in its own crisis. The imperialist
system has developed an excess of productive capacity. The
result is that the imperialists are capable of producing more
commodities than society can profitably consume. If the system
is run at full-speed, a crisis of over-production will ensue. But
l'i1J1!187
P8f8188
holding back from running the system at its peak capacity means
that there are fewer places where the imperialists can profitably
invest their capital. Especially since the collapse of the dot.com
bubble in the 1990s, the imperialists have chosen to hold back and
investors have been reluctant to float capital. As one of the global
command posts charged with managing the flow of financial
capital, San Francisco has been deeply impacted by this crisis of
the imperialist system.
The other challenge is coming from other cities and regions, each
jockeying to take over San Francisco's role. San Francisco is in
constant competition within the Bay Area, the nation and the
world to maintain and expand its position. As one example, there
is an on-going rivalry between San Jose, the technology center,
and San Francisco, the business and finance center. Each city is
constantly vying to snatch parts of the other's economic base.
San Francisco has repeatedly tried in past decades to attract some
of the Bay Area's research and technology work, as was the case
with the dot. com businesses and the current plans to develop
a biotech industrial complex. The challenges are not just from
other Bay Area cities. The city of Los Angeles, and its broader
metropolitan region which includes San Diego, poses a serious
threat to the ruling elite of San Francisco, and the Bay Area, in
both the financial and technology industries.
So despite all of their success, San Francisco's ruling elite is
not comfortable. In response to the looming challenges, San
Francisco's Big Four have developed an agenda of the changes
they want to see happen so t ~ a t they can strengthen their ability
to extract wealth. Simply put, they want San Francisco's public
and private sectors to support development projects which will
create three things: I) market-rate housing, 2) white-collar jobs
and 3) low-wage service sector jobs. This agenda they believe will
solidify San Francisco's role within the imperialist order, at least
for the time being.
To advance their agenda, the Big Four has a tactical plan that
borrows heavily from the four-step process applied by the
Redevelopment Agency. In order to carry out their agenda, the
Big Four had to establish support within city government. City
government is critical to the Big Four's plans because, the corporate
elites don't want to have to foot the bill, especially during a period
of potential recession. In keeping with the neoliberal model, the
ruling elite want to use public resources to pay for their privately
controlled ventures. Additionally, the Big Four will look to their
governmental partners to relax regulations which could slow the
development of these projects.
It doesn't take much to see how successfully the Big Four have
organized support for their agenda within the highest levels of San
Francisco's city government. In his campaign materials from 2002,
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom called on local government
to "place priority on development projects" and "to streamline
regulations and meet accelerated schedules for approving worthy
new public and private projects. "
4
' In other words, Newsom sees
the role of government as making San Francisco safe for capitalism.
The thousands of strings connecting the capitalist class to City Hall
are so strong that not only are their interests the same but so is
their language. Mayor Newsom describes himself as the CEO of San
Francisco and says "the City is my Client." With all of their pieces
in place, San Francisco's ruling elite have already begun rolling
out the same four-step process used by the City's Redevelopment
Agency during the urban removal projects of the 1950s and 196os
(for a description of the four-step process, refer to the "Downtown
v. Dockworkers" section on page 91).
The first step of this plan, then and now, is to propose massive
redevelopment projects that would expand the influence of the
local capitalist class and begin the gentrification of working class
communities of color. San Francisco's Redevelopment Agency
and Planning Department are looking to move more than thirty
different development projects forward.
42
The center piece of the
ruling elite's development plans is Mission Bay. The Mission Bay
4' Mayor Gavin Newsom Website, (http://www.gavinnewsom.com/index.php?id=z?).
4
2
See the "Pressures Map" from There Goes The Neighborhood, POWER's demographic survey of the
Eastern neighborhoods. There are also a variety of documents available currently on the internet on the
websites of the chamber of commerce, and other groups that lay out their goals and plans. For more
examples, see http:/ /www.sfchamber.com/sLplans_zozo.htm, http:/ /www.sfchamber.com/, http:/ I
www.sfced.org/, http://www.ggra.org/html/hot_issues.cfm.
P81J8188
Project seeks to develop a "new neighborhood" by constructing,
in partnership with the University of California-San Francisco, a
gigantic biotech research and development complex. This is the
only proposal of the thirty that would bring new production in
the City. However, the jobs created by the Mission Bay project
would, almost exclusively, be for highly-educated, highly trained
professionals. The hand full of entry-level jobs that this project
would create are likely to be janitorial or very low-wage work in
the production side of biotechnology, offering no real opportunity
for advancement.
Taken together, these thirty development projects would create
a windfall of market-rate housing development. The twelve
development projects highlighted in the Mayor's proposals
alone would create 15,690 units of market-rate housing and only
approximately 1,200 units of low-income housing.
43
Eighteen of
the new development projects create retail or commercial space.
In short, these projects focus on consolidating and expanding
San Francisco's current role as a center of tourism, entertainment,
luxury consumption, upscale housing, financial and business
services, and the new growth sector of biotechnology. On the
other hand, these projects would do little to meet low-income San
Franciscans' need for stable community, affordable housing and
accessible jobs that pay a livable wage.
44
Having crafted proposals for massive development projects, San
Francisco's ruling elite are now actively engaged in trying to carry
out the second and third steps. The second step is to declare a
community full of blight. In the 1950s, the City's newspapers,
43 Zoning requirements mandate a certain percentage of new housing developments must be designated
for low-income tenants. New developments on the city's polluted brownfield sites are slated to have
a higher concentration of low-income housing ("almost one third" of 16oo in Hunters Point Shipyard,
and 30-50% of 750 at Shlage Lock development in Visitation Valley). Waterfront, city-subsidized
private developments such as Rincon Hill and the Transbay Terminal tend to only meet the minimal
requirements of affordable housing, or even attempt to locate the low-income housing "off-site" in a
different neighborhood all together.
44 Beyond that, there are projects of transportation or land reclamation (in particular environmentally).
The projects detailed in "Building a Strong Local Economy" are not the entirety of the projects that are on
tap. In addition there are other urban renewal projects such as: Halliday Plaza, the Mint Building, a 30th
Street BART station, a 16
1
h Street Lightrail, the Third Street Corridor and Central Subway, the destruction of
the Hunters Point housing projects in Middle-Point, Harbor Road, and Double Rock, and several proposed
Redevelopment zones throughout the Eastern Neighborhoods.
Pii1J8118
business leaders and politicians all began singing the chorus
about the need to 'clean up' the blight of the Fillmore. Today,
the City's one daily newspaper, business leaders and politicians
have begun calling for the City to be cleaned up. The most
notable instance has been with Bayview/Hunter's Point. The City
is targeting the last strong African American neighborhood left
in San Francisco for redevelopment and urban removal. After
decades of economic isolation, toxic contamination and some of
the highest cancer and asthma rates in the country, the City is not
stepping in to address any of the real demands the community
has been fighting for over the last thirty years. Instead, the City is
trying to take advantage of the conditions that our communities
have endured, claiming the need to tear down the neighborhood
in order to save it. Alongside plans for condo-conversion and
mini-malls, the City is suddenly interested in cleaning up the
environmental catastrophe created by the Navy and Pacific Gas
and Electric (PG8E) so many decades ago.
The third step in the four-step process is to secure public funds
to demolish existing buildings and build new ones for the
new corporate residents. Although the ruling elite have yet to
launch their full-blown campaign to grab as much public funds
as possible, local politicians have started the corporate welfare
programs. In 2004, San Francisco's Board of Supervisors approved
a ten-year exemption to the City's 1.5% pay-roll tax for all biotech
companies that located in San Francisco. The Redevelopment
Agency has also served as a tool for the elite for siphoning
public money to subsidize private corporations. In the last few
years alone, the Redevelopment Agency gave $27 million to
Bloomingdale's to build their new department store downtown,
$71 million to subsidize the construction of the new Mission Bay
biotechnology complex and subsidized several other private
development projects.
45
In addition to the tax breaks and public subsidies, the ruling elite
will be looking to circumvent as many City regulations as possible.
In recent years, state policies and protections around rent control,
housing construction and condo conversion have been key arenas
45The Building and Construction Trades Council of San FranciscoWebsite, (http:/ /www.sfbctc.org/82S03-
construction. htm).
P8J8111
of struggle for working class people of color in San Francisco.
Attempts to streamline parts of the Planning Commission process
and to limit or remove rent control have met broad-based
opposition. The City's real estate developers and speculators want
a free hand to build and sell whatever the market will support. They
want to abolish the planning processes, construction regulations,
tenant and community protections because of the impact that this
type of legislation has on the market's ability to extract profit.
This is neoliberalism, pure and simple, and judging from his
campaign materials, it seems that the Mayor will be extremely
supportive of any attempt to streamline regulations.
The final step is to take the area by any means necessary. This
stage of the present struggle has yet to fully develop, but it is only
a matter of time. Today, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency
has development plans for the next thirty years which cover most
areas of the City. For example, the City's is projecting that with
the adoption of their plans one out of every four new arrivals to
San Francisco in the next twenty-five years will move into Bayview
Hunters Point.
46
The fact of the matter is that the housing does
not exist to accommodate this influx. To make way, the ruling
elite will have to displace the current residents in Bayview, and
they won't stop there. The City's ruling elites are desperate to
snatch up many of the working class communities so that they
can attract new industries and make up for the disintegration of
the dot.com industry. To this, they have targeted eight working
class communities which they have now labeled the "Eastern
Neighborhoods"- Chinatown, the Tenderloin, South of Market,
the Mission, Excelsior, Potrero Hill, Bayview Hunter's Point, and
Visitation Valley- the neighborhoods which have historically
been home to San Francisco's largest communities of color.
47
4
6
Draft Environment Impact Report for "Bayview Hunters Point Redevelopment and Zoning" prepared
by the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency and San Francisco Planning Department, October 19, 2004,
page S-8. The Environmental Impact Report states that the project area plan anticipates a population
growth of 20,896 by 2025, and "would account for nearly one-quarter (24 percent) of the citywide
population growth (8o,IOO residents) anticipated in San Francisco during this same 25-year period."
Without the adoption of the Redevelopment Plan, the anticipated population growth in Bayview is only
2,815 new residents by 2025.
47 For more information on the neighborhoods comprising San Francisco's Eastern neighborhoods, see
There Goes the Neighborhood: a Demographic Survey of San Francisco's Eastern Neighborhoods, published
collaboratively by POWER and Urban Solutions, 2004.
Pilff!ll2
In the face of this agenda, working class African American, Latino,
Asian and Pacific Islander communities are facing the prospect
of complete displacement from a City that has been built on the
land and labor of people of color. The cycle of displacement
and growing inequity amidst tremendous wealth that we are
experiencing is the continuation of a process that has been on-
going for the last fifty years. It is not simply the result of one
policy enacted by misinformed bureaucrats or greedy politicians.
It is the result of local elite's need to compete within a global
economy that is based on snatching the wealth created from the
labor of Third World people, particularly women, throughout the
Bay Area.
hDPI FDII..Iihl Bilil by lihl bay
Although San Francisco's ruling elite has their agenda laid out
and although they are closely aligned with other sections of the
global imperialist class, they are by no means invincible. There
is still hope for an economically, gender and racially just San
Francisco. The success of the ruling elite's plan still depends on
whether or not they can seize and control certain blocks of land
and labor- two of capitalism's key ingredients.
The struggle over land in San Francisco shows no signs of cooling
down. San Francisco's ruling elite need more space than they've
got now in order to carry out their plans of regional and global
expansion. Because of San Francisco's small size and high
density, they will have to displace deeply entrenched, working
class Chinese, Latino and African American communities. They
need to expand the amount of commercial space available in the
Financial District. To do that, the ruling elite will have to seize
much of Chinatown. In order to expand retail space, they need
to take control of the Mission and displace the Latino community.
Both of these neighborhoods have been targets of gentrification
in the past decade, and both communities have waged important
struggles to stem the incursion of developers' capital. Today,
both of these neighborhoods are in developers' cross-hairs, but it
is Bayview Hunters Point which will be the primary site of struggle
,.,,,,.
P8JSIIIf
in the ruling elites' attempts to seize more land. This, the last
remaining African American neighborhood in San Francisco,
plays a central role in the ruling elites' plans to transform the
City's political economy. From the construction of the Third Street
light rail to the recent decision to give the old shipyard to private
developers to the plans to raze the housing projects on the some
of the City's most scenic property, the ruling elite are scheming
to grab Bayview so that they can transform it into the bedroom
community for the biotech engineers working in the Mission Bay
industrial park.
San Francisco's labor struggles will likely take place in the
trenches of the City's low-wage service sector. As the City rolls
out the welcome mat to the expected flood of bio-tech engineers,
low-wage service workers, most of whom are immigrants, will be
shuffled through the back-door. Despite the ruling classes' efforts
to shape the character of the local political economy and the face
of San Francisco, they will require more low-wage workers to clean
houses, raise children, shine shoes, guard important buildings,
make food and prepare double lattes. The conditions that workers
face in low-wage service work- hard work with little to no rights,
respect or fair compensation- only look to worsen with local and
state government's crack down on immigrant communities amidst
rising racist, anti-immigrant hysteria.
If the sites of these impending struggles will center around land-
i.e., San Francisco's Eastern Neighborhoods- and labor- i.e., low-
wage service work- this means that the leading forces against
the ruling class' agenda in San Francisco will be the African
American, Latino, Asian and Pacific Islander communities. While
all of these communities are similarly targeted, the way that these
attacks are manifested is very different in each community. For
example, one of the central challenges in the Latino and Asian
Pacific Islander communities is over-work and low-wages. In
California, the issues of under-employment and the informal
workforce are intertwined with issues of immigration. Meanwhile,
in the Black community, problems center around the lack of jobs
and high rates of unemployment and the record-setting rates of
the state's incarceration of African American men and women.
While many African Americans in Bayview own their homes, most
Latino immigrants are renters. The situations often look different
but they are all connected to the ruling elite's deliberate under-
development and super-exploitation of working class people of
color, a core feature of the imperialist political economy. That
different communities face different aspects of the imperialists
attacks frequently gives rise to hostility between the communities
of color and represents a serious challenge to conscious organizers
attempting to unite these communities which share so much in
common.
For better or for worse, none of these communities is strong
enough to withstand the attacks that the ruling elites will surely
unleash. These communities can
only be saved if a strong alliance led
by the City's working class African
American, Latino, Asian and Pacific
Islander communities can be forged
because together they are strategically
located in sites where the ruling
elite is most vulnerable and together
these communities have the numbers
required to exert the necessary level
of power. If properly organized and
united, workers and tenants from key
working class communities of color are
positioned to resist the ruling elite's
brand of U.S. -led imperialism. It will
require this type of alliance to wield
the power necessary to ensure that San
Francisco is a place where low-income
If properly organized and
united, workers and tenants
from key working class
communities of color are
positioned to resist the ruling
elite's brand of U.S.-led
imperialism. It will require
this type of alliance to wield
the power necessary to ensure
that San Francisco is a place
where low-income people
can work, raise their families
and live in dignity and self-
determination.
people can work, raise their families and live in dignity and self-
determination. Undoubtedly, the ruling elite will try to dismantle
any attempt to build such an alliance. They will pit communities
against one another, playing off of the real differences that exist
between them, and while uniting these communities promises to
be a difficult task, it is absolutely necessary if the ruling elites'
plans are to be stopped.
1'118115
P81J811&
Although building this alliance will be difficult, understanding
the nature of the political economy provides conscious organizers
with the tools necessary to forge real and lasting alliances. Along
with this understanding of the fundamental inequity of the existing
system, we must also be able to articulate our communities'
visions for a San Francisco that promotes the self-determination
of all working class communities and communities of color.
1
1
PBJII!II7
Underthepolitical economy ofU .S. -led imperialism, San Francisco's
dilemma never ends. The Madonna of world cities must always
strive to remain "in vogue" to maintain her position within the
global and regional imperialist economy. Local politicians and
the private sector work hand-in-hand to shape San Francisco's
future. Most of the time, the plans of the ruling elite don't benefit
the majority of San Franciscans. In fact, they're not designed
to. They are created simply for the purpose of preserving their
privileged status. In carrying out their plans, the elites of San
Francisco threaten the very fabric of the city and the people who
live within its borders.
Although San Francisco's history and its cast of characters may be
unique, the process of gentrification, displacement and extreme
profiteering that we are experiencing is not something particular
to San Francisco alone. This dynamic of destroying the fabric
of communities in order to benefit a small number of people is
common practice of the imperialist class everywhere, which raises
the question: How do they get away with it? How does the ruling
class manage to advance an agenda in which whole sections
of society stand to lose as a result? Amilcar Cabral, the great
revolutionary leader of Guinea-Bissau, answered this question
by saying' "History teaches us that certain circumstances make it
very easy for foreign people to impose their dominion. But history
also teaches us that no matter what the material aspects of that
domination, it can only be preserved by a permanent and organized
control of the dominated people's cultural life; otherwise it cannot
be definitively implanted without killing a significant part of the
1
We heard excerpts of this manifesto, read by Subcomandate Insurgente Marcos, on Mano Chao's albums
"Radio Bemba" and "Clandestine: Esperando la Ultima Ola .... " The slogan, Para Todos Todo, inspired
us in the development of our platform, using it as a closing slogan for one of the points within the
Towards land, Work and Power Platform. Translation of the quote is as follows: "We were born in the
night, we live there, we will die there. But the light, shall tomorrow be for the rest, for all those who
now weep in the darkness, for those who have been denied the light of day. For everyone, light. For
everyone, everything. Our struggle is for life, and the bad government offers death as a future. Our
struggle is for justice, and the bad government fills itself with criminals and murderers. Our struggle
is for peace, and the bad government announces war and destruction. Our struggle is for the respect
to our right to govern and govern ourselves, and the bad government imposes the law of the few on the
many. Housing, land, Work, Bread, Health, Education, Independence, Democracy, liberty. These were
our demands in the long night of the last soo years. Today, these are our exigencies."
P8fl!l21
population. "
2
Our study and our experience leads us to agree.
An economically dominant class rules through the process of
hegemony. Hegemony is the ongoing process in which a dominant
class exercises cultural, political and ideological leadership over
allied and subordinate groups, utilizing the combination of force,
concessions and winning people over to manufacture consent.
3
The imperialist ruling class invests an enormous amount of time
and resources to get the majority of the population to consent to
and to carry out their agenda. This happens globally, nationally
and locally in obvious and subtle ways. To better understand
how they do it, let's take the example of the local elites of San
Francisco.
manuFaaaumng aansena
Despite the City's reputation as a progressive mecca, the ruling
elites of San Francisco do not shy from employing the means of
force to rule- from bringing in the National Guard with orders to
'shoot to kill' during the 1966 uprisings in Hunter's Point, to using
the San Francisco Police Department to systematically harass
homeless people. When push comes to shove, San Francisco's
ruling class is willing and able to show working people who's
boss.
4
While the ruling class is willing to unleash savage violence
when they have no other option, state-sanctioned force isn't a
sustainable way to rule if that regime wants to present itself as a
democracy. When they have the option, the ruling elite prefer to
2
Amilcar Cabral, "National Liberation and Culture." Address at University of Syracuse, February 20,
1970.
3 Special thanks to the Gramsci Study Group and in particular Genevieve Negr6n-Gonzales for her
leadership in the process, which deepened our understanding of hegemony. David Forgacs, The Antonio
Gramsci Reader. Selected Writings 1916- 1935, p. 423 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, Oxford
University Press, New York. p. 1o8-114.
4 The 1966 uprisings erupted in response to the death of a 16 year-old boy who was shot in the back by
San Francisco police. An example of the institutionalized harassment of homeless people is the MATRIX
program. Instituted by Mayor Frank Jordan from 1993 - 1996, the program involved escalated police
harassment of homeless people issuing citations, confiscating and destroying people's belongings.
Jordan reached the point to where he was pushing to even make sitting on the sidewalk illegal. For
more information on the history of police harassment of homeless and poor people, visit the Coalition on
Homelessness website, ( www. sf- homeless-coalition.org/civilrights.html).
PIJI!I22
IIWCMfld!i IJDd, WDII..I 8 PDWBII..
win over allies and quell class struggle by offering compromises.
Generally, these compromises come in the form of concessions
like wage increases, tax breaks, workplace protections, etc. They
are not limited to being, hut they tend to he economic in nature.
Although they can dramatically improve the lives of working class
people who are struggling to stay out of poverty, these concessions
are never enough to make a serious dent in the imperialists'
profit. In San Francisco, some examples of concessions are the
cost of living increases for the welfare programs, the legalization
of gay marriage or sanctuary city status for immigrants and
refugees. The ruling class never gives up these concessions out of
altruism; concessions are produced when oppressed groups raise
the level of struggle. The ruling class doesn't just grant them
out of kindheartedness. Like Abolitionist Frederick Douglass said,
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. "
5
On the day to day, they simply try to convince us that what's in their
best interests is in the best interests of all of us. The ruling elite
seems to be following the Vladimir lenin's observation that "A lie
told often enough becomes the truth. "
6
Everyday, the ruling class
takes full advantage of their monopolistic control on the means
of communication. Billboards, television, radio, newspapers- we
are inundated with ideas that promote the interests of the ruling
class as the interests of all. They propose their explanation of
what's happening in society and how they think things can get
better. Their policies are situated within a broader vision, to make
their agenda seem like 'common sense.' Our constant task is to
unmask the f a ~ a d e of mutual interest and expose as class biased
the concepts of the ruling class that threaten our survival.
This is easier said than done. The complex configuration of
hegemony is not exclusive or static. Hegemonic ideas, values
and norms constantly change. They are re-created, and renewed;
alternative culture and politics are permitted as long as ruling
class hegemony is dominant. Class domination then, doesn't
just take the overt form of a dictatorship; the ruling class also
5 Frederick Douglass, Address on West India Emancipation, August 4, 1857.
6
The Quotations Page Website, (http:/ /www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/v/vladimirlei3203I.
html).
PBJ212SJ
negotiates concessions in order to mask irreconcilable class
antagonisms.
7
Underneath that compromise however, ruling elite
hegemony conveys the message that resistance is futile and that
their domination of the world is natural.
In our struggle to change the world, ideas are a part of the
equation. Everyday, in our community there is a battle of ideas
going on, and everyone takes sides. However, most of the time,
we fail to articulate our ideas in the form of a coherent vision.
This is an error on our part. It is critical that communities of color
join the battle. Though the members of POWER's Amandla Project
understood the root of the problems to be U.S. -led imperialism,
we were unable to articulate our vision in proactive terms.
lacking this, we were consistently in a position where we took
swings against our opposition, only able to hope that our work
was indeed moving us forward. To make our hope more concrete,
the members of POWER took on the challenge of developing a
vision of racial, gender and economic justice. POWER decided to
develop a platform that would communicate an alternative vision
for the development of San Francisco and help us speak about the
values of our organization to people in our communities.
Our process began in the community where we surveyed about
Boo no and low-wage workers from across the city- single
mothers, elderly people, day laborers, domestics, immigrants,
General Assistance recipients, CalWORKS recipients. We did oral
histories with San Francisco elders. Then we hit the books. We
studied history, theory and statistics. Upon completing a draft
of our platform, we took it back out and solicited feedback from
people. The Platform was finally ratified by POWER members and
community allies at POWER's Poor People's Congress which was
held in April of 2004. The following is a copy of the Platform:
8
7 Michael Buroway, For A Sociofogica{ Marxism, p.224-225.
8
We studied the South African anti-apartheid movement and were inspired by the "Freedom Charter."
This document was adopted on June 26, 1955 by thousands of delegates from hundreds of organizations
who came together throughout South Africa in the face of extreme repression from the white minority
government, which used its control over the economy and the police to crack down on those struggling
for the end of the racist system of apartheid. The "Freedom Charter" helped unite the movement and
provided a vision for the movement over the next 40 years. You can find a copy of the original "Freedom
Charter" on-line (http://www.anc.org.za/).
f'81JI!I21f
IMIWifld!i @Ad, WDII..I I PDWIII..
liDWIII..dS IJRd, WDILII PDWIIL
We, low-income tenants, unemployed and low-wage workers,
declare for our neighborhoods, for San Francisco and for all the
world to know:
that a dangerous polarization is underway in San
Francisco, just as it is across the globe. There is an
increasing polarization of wealth, control and prosperity
of a privileged few while the vast majority of us struggle
with crushing poverty, despair and death;
that we, the tenants, unemployed and low-wage workers
of San Francisco, are overwhelmingly women and people
of color- not because of any accident, but- because of
the deep and historic integration of racism and sexism
with economic exploitation;
we adopt the following platform, Towards Land, Work
and Power;
that we pledge to struggle together, with pride and
courage, until this platform has been made real.
THERE SHALL BE AN ECONOMY FOR THE PEOPLE
San Francisco is one of the wealthiest cities in the world, yet
thousands of us struggle to make ends meet, unable to find
meaningful work or laboring in jobs that work us hard but pay
us little. This is especially true for women, as we do the work to
raise our families as well as cook, clean, coddle and clothe the
families of others and in return get only a few pennies and a lot
of disrespect.
On the other end of the spectrum, corporations in the City rake
in billions in profits, tax breaks and government contracts. Even
though these corporations take advantage of public resources
that belong to us, even though we do the work to make these
corporations rich- we don't get our fair share or a say in how the
wealth is distributed.
PSJI!Ii!S
P211!12&
We demand the right to participate in shaping the economy. We
demand meaningful work or income support for all. We oppose the
continued polarization of wealth and power in the city that leads
to our displacement. It is time that the economy of San Francisco
put people before profits. All of the people of San Francisco shall
have a share in the wealth of the city. Livable jobs or livable
income, now!
THE PEOPLE SHALL HAVE HEALTHY NEIGHBORHOODS WORKPLACES
For too long the elites of San Francisco have taken valuable resources
out of our communities and replaced them with dangerous
elements. Our communities are filled with poisoned air, land and
water. Our streets are flooded with illegal and legal drugs. And
when we go to work, we are forced to do the most dangerous and
dirty work that makes the City function- without adequate health
or safety protections. At retirement we are left with littie to no
support. That's why we see so many seniors living in homeless
shelters or living in deplorable conditions in SRO hotels. To make
matters worse, the elites have slashed funding to the resources
that would allow us to make things better, like quality schools,
day care centers, comprehensive welfare and health care coverage
as well as other community services.
By stealing these resources, the elites have taken from us what
we deserve. The people deserve healthy neighborhoods and
healthy workplaces where we have all of the institutions, services
and resources that meet the needs and hopes of all our people
regardless of race, gender, national origin, language spoken or
sexual orientation. We all deserve the right to determine our own
futures. iPara Todos Todo!
THERE SHALL BE LAND, HOUSING E COMMUNilY FOR ALL
Housing is a right. For too long, San Francisco has offered housing
only to the highest bidder- those who fall short have been thrown
onto the streets and out of the City. Now gentrification threatens
to destroy San Francisco. The ravages of gentrification have
destroyed countless communities of working class people of color.
Affluent, mostly white communities remain untouched, enjoying
the fruits of racist disproportionate allocation of resources. These
resources and over-development are made possible because of
the deliberate under-development of working class oppressed
nationality communities.
The people have a right to live where we choose. Housing should
always be made available to low-income people - especially
people of color - regardless of our income. We have the right to
maintain our culture, customs and community. After all, it was
the labor of our people that built this city, and it is our labor that
makes the city rich today. There must be a guarantee that any
project for development will bring progress for the people. Our
communities should be protected, not preyed upon. We Shall
not be Moved.
THERE SHALL BE FREEDOM FROM RACIST POLICE INS REPRESSION
A dangerous combination of reactionary patriotism and paranoia
within the United States has permitted the escalating erosion of
civil liberties and democratic rights of people, especially people
of color, LGBTQ people and immigrants. These expanded powers
give the state the right to spy on, arrest, detain and even torture
"dissidents." With the creation of the Department of Homeland
Security, the near merging of the FBI and CIA and the Patriot Act,
'big brother' is always watching. Whether we are born inside or
outside of the U.S. Empire- Arab, Asian, Pacific Islander, Latino,
African American and indigenous peoples- we are assumed to be
and treated like criminals, terrorists and aliens. We are never truly
citizens of this country. In our communities, the INS systematically
terrorizes and deports people who have immigrated to this
country. As a result, our communities look more like occupied
territories than "the land of the free." All the while, the prison
industry expands, willing and able to lock more of us up. It's
time that more resourct?S go towards LIFTING our people up
rather than LOCKING our people up.
THERE SHALL BE MULTI-RACIAL AND INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARilY
San Francisco is not an island; we live in a global community.
While we demand justice in San Francisco, we recognize that
Pilfl!l27
1'211!128
this can only come to be if there is justice throughout the world.
Remember that many of the workers and low-income tenants
who make up San Francisco were forced to flee their homelands
in African, Asia and Latin America because the U.S. government
destroyed their homes through war, exploitation and poisoning.
San Francisco must stand in solidarity with the people of the
world and uphold the sovereignty of these nations, just as it must
protect the culture and language of the people who now make
our homes in this city. We demand the right to determine for
ourselves the future of our communities. We come from different
lands, speak different languages but our strength comes from our
unity. Solidarity Forever!
THE CORPORATIONS SHALL PAY REPARATIONS
For decades, the corporations have taken more than they've
given. The wonderful buildings of the Financial District are all
monuments to the immeasurable sweat and toil of workers -
from the Ohlone people to the Chinese rail workers to the African
American dockworkers to Central American cooks. Even though
they have been fattened by our labor, these corporations are not
grateful. They demand more tax breaks. More wage cuts. More
public subsidies. More and more and more. Those days are over.
Corporations must pay reparations to our communities for years of
slavery, exploitation and pillage. No longer will anyone profit
from our poverty.
THE PEOPLE SHALL GOVERN GOVERNMENT SHALL SERVE THE PEOPLE
Today, the government is controlled by a machine of elites who
are not accountable to the vast majority of the City. The result has
been the best government that money can buy. Under the rule of
the elites, the tools of government are used to assist corporations in
their non-stop quest to seize more and more profits and resources.
The true point of government should be to serve the interests of
the people. The government should work to actively guarantee
that the needs of the people are being met, and where they are
not, it is the responsibility of government to fill those needs. To
ensure that this happens, popular participation in the policies and
structures of government is crucial. The people should have the
opportunity to make decisions that affect our lives, our families
and our communities and to hold the government accountable
for its actions. It is time for government to stop serving the elites
and the corporations. It is time for government to serve the
people.
!liiWIII.dS IJIId, Wll(.ll PIWIII:
iiS DDUDiiiR_:llegemang
As we have already discussed, the local ruling class is looking
to advance San Francisco's agenda that fattens their pockets
while remaining faithful to the designated role within the global
capitalist system. In response to these plans and seeing the need to
articulate some alternatives, we have intentionally developed our
platform as a vision that is counter-hegemonic to this imperialist
agenda.
In order to do that, one of our tasks in addition to mass organizing
is to organize consensus for our alternative vision and advance
that vision, "to make possible for tomorrow what seems impossible
today. "
9
We want to plant a seed in people's minds that resistance
isn't futile and that change is possible through struggle. POWER
organizes our own consensus and advances counter-hegemonic
ideas in the way we wage campaigns and how we build our
organization. In the following section, we outline the principal
ways in which we see the 'Towards Land, Work 8 Power' Platform
as counter-hegemonic to the vision of San Francisco ruling class
elites:
UNDERMINES E DE-LEGITIMIZES NEOLIBERAL VISION
Globally and locally, the ruling elites have hitched their hopes
to the political and economic strategy of neoliberalism.
Professing neoliberal doctrine like religious zealots, they insist
that privatization will solve our problems, that the market is
9 Marta Harnecker, "The Situation of the Left," 1999.
1'111!128
PBJI!ISD
self-regulating and efficient and that the unrestricted mobility
of capital will lead to 'development.' When the imperialist class
speaks of development, they don't mean the development of
people, instead they mean the expansion of capital and increase
of profit. Meanwhile, the state has taken on its new role with
refreshed vigor, dismantling long-standing concessions and
handing over public resources to the private sector.
In this country, it's assumed that if you have something, you've
worked hard and deserve it. If you don't, it's assumed that you
were lazy and aren't deserving. People are pitted against each
other, groups are played off against each other- all fighting each
other for the crumbs. The 'Towards land, Work and Power' Platform
is rooted in the understanding that there are enough of the things
we need and deserve for everyone to live decently. It is the logic
of the current system that prevents equal distribution of resources
to all and ensures that the poor are forced to compete against
each other. We want to create opportunities for all- not only for
a privileged few. We seek to build authentic solidarity and unity
amongst people through struggling together and linking where
there are common interests.
Our approach to development prioritizes meeting people's
needs, and this is articulated by the way we talk about the role of
government in the platform. POWER asserts that housing is a right,
and we demand accountability from corporations for past and
present injustices, and that this takes precedence over a profit-
driven, market- based approach. The organization advocates for
authentic development, such as employment growth, decrease
in poverty and the building of the capacity of communities and
people so they may determine their future and achieve their
potential. We reject the notion that what is 'public' is inefficient.
Collective organization of society, as well as working together to
meet our own needs, creates the conditions to develop community,
culture and ourselves as individuals.
The ruling class strategy of neoliberalism has wreaked havoc on
people all over the globe. The most basic rights- food, education,
health care, welfare and housing- have been whittled away from
I I W I E t d ~ l!IDd, WDIIJ 8 PDWifl.
those most in need in a time of growing unemployment and
stagnant wages. In the name of 'adjustment' and 'development,'
they have globalized starvation, poverty and death. In response,
neoliberalism has become an international rallying point of
resistance all around the world. As we continue our struggles,
we must be guided by a vision of globalizing peace, equality and
justice. As Cuban President Fidel Castro said, "Globalization is
inevitable and historical. But we must fight for a globalization
of fraternity and cooperation among peoples, of sustainable
development, of just distribution and rational use of the plentiful
and material and spiritual wealth that men and women are capable
of creating with their hands and intelligence. "
10
The struggle
to defeat neoliberalism and globalize international solidarity is
a core component of the counter-hegemonic, anti-imperialist
vision we seek to advance.
RACE E GENDER- FRONT E CENTER
Many times people say that talking about race or gender in our
organizing efforts is divisive, that it overly complicates things.
They counsel that we should just 'concentrate on the issue' or
explain that 'its about class.' Imagine a patient coming in to see
a doctor. An incorrect diagnosis can spell disaster for the patient.
Any competent doctor doesn't make an assessment based on just
one symptom. She would examine all of the symptoms the patient
is having, and then make her diagnosis. If a doctor has to look at
the whole of a patient's condition, why then, would we as conscious
organizers make half assessments of society's ailments?
11
Beyond just making correct diagnosis, it's a doctor's responsibility
to tell the patient what the problem is. We incorporate and
highlight race, gender and all forms of oppression in our work,
because doing so explains what's happening in the communities
in which we organize. Concretely, this means that we intentionally
highlight this within each point of the platform and in our
campaign work. As stated earlier, class analysis alone does not
explain the totality of the social ills produced by the system. White
1
Fidel Castro, Speech at the CARIFORUM in Santo Domingo on 21'
1
of August, 1998.
11
POWER University 200 series, Session 2: Making Assessments.
,.,,. 1!11
supremacy and patriarchy have served as the foundation for the
development of U.S. -led imperialism and continue to serve that
function today. Could U.S. imperialism survive the due payment
Could U.S. imperialism
survive the due payment
of reparations to African
Americans for generations
of slavery? Would the fair
valuation and compensation
of women's work ... paralyze
the system of global capital?
The fact is that we are living
in a white settler nation and
the history of this racist,
sexist, homophobic nation
further escalates the need to
lead our fights with a strong
emphasis on race and gender
oppression.
of reparations to African Americans
for generations of slavery? Would the
fair valuation and compensation of
women's work, now deemed invisible,
paralyze the system of global capital?
The fact is that we are living in a white
settler nation and the history of this
racist, sexist, homophobic nation
further escalates the need to lead our
fights with a strong emphasis on race
and gender oppression.
Putting race and gender front-and-
center in our vision provides space
for us to explore and respond to the
very different conditions that exist
in different oppressed nationality
communities. As the ruling class
continues to mask and invisiblize the
exploitation of women, lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ)
Pi1J1!182
people and people of color we must see exploitation for what it is,
and then must agitate and struggle against it. The 'Towards land,
Work 8 Power' Platform provides a framework which facilitates the
development of campaigns and demands which directly confront
the inherently oppressive nature of neoliberal imperialism.
CONNEOS THE STRUGGLES OF THE OPPRESSED E EXPLOITED
Imperialist hegemony promotes isolation and fragmentation.
This serves the interests of the imperialist class by helping to keep
potential anti -imperialist forces separated from one another. While
recognizing the different histories and experiences of oppressed
and exploited peoples, any counter-hegemonic initiative must
look to connect struggles across their differences. While the
conditions plaguing the Salvadoran immigrant community may
look different than the conditions plaguing the African American
~ I W I 5 t d ~ I!IDd, WDII..I I PDWIII..
community, our analysis of U.S.-led imperialism shows us that
the underlying cause of those conditions are the same. All
organizers inevitably face the danger of becoming too myopic in
our organizing. There is always too much for too few people to
do. This danger is especially prevalent in a social, political and
cultural context like the United States where so much is done to pit
communities of color against one another. However, if we hope
to build a vibrant movement against imperialist destruction, then
we must find a way out.
Because of the history of racism in the United States, communities
of color need to build with one another, and that happens best
through common struggle. The 'Towards Land, Work 8 Power'
Platform gives a basis around which different oppressed nationality
communities can come together and link their struggles. At
POWER, the Platform has allowed us to build solidarity between
immigrant Latinas working as domestic workers and low-income
African American residents fighting against displacement.
Because members of each organizing project see their struggles
reflected in the broader vision of the Platform, they develop a
connection to other people's struggles which are connected to the
Platform's vision.
Still, the work of connecting the struggles of oppressed and
exploited peoples must go beyond connecting communities inside
the empire. Because forces in the Global South will play a leading
role in the anti-imperialist movement, we need to connect our
struggles to those of the people in the Third World. The Platform
pushes us to do this. For example, the call for reparations is not
one that's limited to the reparations owed to African descended
peoples; it's a call that is equally relevant to the conditions in
the Third World. The fact that Haiti is the poorest nation in the
Western Hemisphere is frequently recited. What is not mentioned
is that Haiti was made poor because France and the United States
forced Haiti to pay so-called compensation to its former colonial
master.'
2
The call for reparations inside the United States must be
connected to the call for the reparations that the First World owes
12
laura Flynn and Robert Roth for the Haiti Action Committee, "We Will Not Forget: The Achievements of
Lavalas in Haiti." February, 2005.
Pllf!lilil
to the Global South. The "Towards Land, Work 8 Power" Platform
provides conscious organizers with the opportunity to connect
struggles and break from the hegemonic norm of isolation.
PROMOTES SELF-DETERMINATION AND AUTONOMY
As conscious organizers, our work is to build mass organizations
and working class leadership by engaging in concrete struggles
that change material conditions while raising class consciousness.
Because of the structural, global and historical nature of the
problems that we face, the consciousness we are trying to build
is not only about the survival of one individual, but is about the
survival of our communities as a whole.
The under-development of nations and peoples is a central feature
of imperialism. Today's constant conquest of land, labor and
resources has resulted in the near re-colonization of nations and
nationally oppressed peoples. This ensures less competition in
the market and more profits to be made by those sitting atop the
economy. The ruling class is moving to erase the idea that people
should control their own lives and their own community; we see
this as a danger that we need to respond to.
In San Francisco, the idea that African Americans, Native
Americans, Asians, Arabs, Pacific Islanders and Latinos have a
right to community has been further eroded as local and federal
government increasingly turns a deaf ear to people's wants and
needs. Culture is preserved only when deemed profitable for the
right people. When communities demonstrate a level of self-
sufficiency, they are targeted with the racist tag of 'blighted' and
are subsequently 'developed.' The Fillmore is a prime example
of this dynamic. But the state hasn't only leveled communities
to stop self-sufficiency; any expression of self-determination has
evoked a murderous reaction. This is evident in the murderous
ways that the U.S. government dealt with organizations such as
the American Indian Movement, the Black Panthers and the Young
Lords during its counterintelligence program (COINTHPRO) of the
1960s and 1970s.
13
In our platform we emphasize the need to cultivate the appetite
1
3 Brian Glick, The War at Home.
PBJI!IIIf
and capacity of people to govern themselves. Whether talking
about the role and actions of the economy or of the state, people
should have the power to make the decisions that affect their
lives. We look to examples like the participatory budget process
developed by the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers' Party) of
Brazil; an innovative example of how this can be done. Originating
in the city of Porto Alegre, where in 1990 1,000 people participated,
the process of participatory budgeting has continued to gain
strength. In 1999 officials estimated 40,000 residents (mostly
working class) participated in the process of creating a budget for
the city.'
4
It's now conducted in over one-hundred cities in Brazil.
To fight solely to improve material conditions without addressing
the fundamental relationship, role and process between people
and the state is insufficient. We must promote the values of
democratic struggle and self-determination and weave them into
campaign demands.
Especially for those of us living and struggling in the cradle of MTV
Cribs and Fox News, this will not come easy. The challenge of raising
class consciousness is like that of a fish swimming upstream. It's
not easy to forge the consciousness of the exploitation that is so
central to the system when that same system_ is steadily pumping
out ideas of consumerism and pull-yourself-up-by-your-
bootstrapsisms. Nevertheless, the success of any anti-imperialist
movement will help people to see themselves as a part of a class or
community rather than solely an individual. How we conceive of
what's possible in the world and our role in that process is shaped
and re-shaped continually in the lived process of hegemony.
'4 Micah Maidenberg "What If Citizens Got To Decide the City Budget? Brazil's Workers Party Tries
"Participatory Budgeting," laborNotes Website, (http:/ /www.labornotes.org/archivesf2ooz/IO/d.html).
A World Bank study found substantial quality-of-life improvements in Porto Alegre after the
implementation of the Participatory Budgeting Process, including:
Between 1989 and 1996, the percentage of the population with access to water services rose
from 8o% to 98%.
Those served by the municipal sewage system increased from 46% to 8 5%.
The number of children enrolled in public schools doubled.
In poorer neighborhoods, 30 kilometers of roads were paved annually.
Tax revenue increased by nearly so percent, a fact the World Bank attributes to "transparency
affecting motivation to pay taxes."
PDJ81!15
PiiJI!IIJ&
Coming to recognize our interests and our role in making change
happen are central steps in coming to understand that another
world is possible. We believe the 'Towards Land, Work 8 Power
Platform' is an important tool to help working class people of color
to see themselves in new ways and to fight in their own interests.
P8fl!lil7
All too often organizers are pulled away from developing sharp
assessments. There always seems to be another action to plan
for, another house visit to do, another meeting to attend. With so
much to do, organizers have little option but to drop something.
If assessment is one of those things that is dropped, as it often is,
then we find ourselves unprepared to develop a strategic plan of
action that is grounded in the reality of the current conditions.
Malcolm X once said that "the future belongs to those who prepare
for it today. "
2
We think that devoting time and resources to making
sharp assessments today will allow us to position ourselves for the
struggles that will come up in the future.
Having a counter-hegemonic vision of the future, such as the
'Towards land, Work . Power Platform,' will be critical to the
success of an anti-imperialist movement. It can help guide us,
give us hope in the darkest moments and keep us on task. However,
having a vision is not enough. It will take more than an inspiring
vision of another world to bring that world into reality. Although
Towards Land, Work & Power is not intended to be a strategy
document, we will turn our attention towards the question of what
is to be done now.
Towards Land, Work & Power is our attempt to develop such an
assessment. Less than trying to develop a sweeping assessment
for all of the movement, we wanted to demonstrate how a group
of conscious organizers might answer three basic questions of
an assessment which, once again, are: What's the nature of the
system? What are the current conditions within that system? And
who are the forces that have an interest and that will be capable
of making change?
Although the imperialist system and the imperialist class sometimes
seem invincible, the current conditions within the global political
economy are opening the possibility for fundamental change. In
response to the system's inability to secure the necessary levels of
profit, the system is in crisis and the imperialists are in jeopardy
1
Arundhati Roy, Speech at 2003 World Social Forum. Porto Alegre, Brazil.
2
Wikimedia Website, (http:/ /en. wikiquote.org/wiki/Future).
PBJI!IIfl
of losing control. It is this jeopardy that is the basis of the savage
attacks that the United States has launched around the globe. As
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez Frias recently noted, "When
imperialism feels weak, it resorts to brute force. The attacks
on Venezuela are a sign of weakness," and as the United States
attacks more and more nations, opportunities for anti-imperialist
struggle are opening up.
3
As we write this, forces throughout the Global South are seizing
upon the opportunities that have been created by the current crisis
of the imperialist system. Social movements in Mexico, Brazil,
Kenya, India, Turkey and other parts of the world have all stepped
up their respective struggles. The governments of nations such
as Cuba and Venezuela have not only advanced their own models
of alternatives to imperialism, they have also banded together
to form an alliance which poses a direct challenge to neoliberal
trade agreements like the Central American Free Trade Agreement
(CAFTA) and the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA).
The forces which are rising up today to challenge the imperialist
domination are those of the Global South. As inspiring as these
movements are, they cannot defeat U.S. -led imperialism on their
own. The might of the U.S. military is too much to bear by one
nation by itself. They still need a vibrant movement inside the
borders of this country that demands the attention of the U.S.
government. The problem is that where the movements of the
Global South are strong and growing, the movement in the United
States is weak and fragmented. If there is to be a concerted
struggle to stop the exploitation and subjugation that is inherent
to the imperialist system, the central task must be to grow an
internationalist movement within the belly of the beast.
Although we did not write this book to provide a thirty year
plan to the movement in this country, we do see three important
imperatives that, based on our assessment, must be addressed
to build a strong anti-imperialist movement within the borders
United States: I) build independent, fighting organizations
amongst Third World people; 2) smash the state-corporate
partnership; and 3) combat racist patriotism.
3 Hugo Chavez Frias, Speech at 2005 World Social Forum. Porto Alegre, Brazil.
BUILD INDEPENDENT, MOVEMENT ORGANIZATIONS ROOTED IN THIRD
WORLD COMMUNITIES
First things first. You can't have a movement without organizations.
If our objective is to build organization towards a movement that
focuses its fights upon U.S. empire, then we must root ourselves in
constituencies who are strategic toward that objective.
Organization amongst who? The answer to this basic question
depends on who within the United States we see as potentially
willing and capable of making demands on U.S. -led imperialism.
While the section of the anti-imperialist movement based in the
United States will ultimately include a wide array of social sectors
within the country, we think that there needs to be leadership
from people with the greatest interest to drive such a movement
forward.
Within the United States, as in the global situation, the brunt
of exploitation falls upon people of color, in particular women.
Informal, invisible and slave labor continues to provide the basis
for the expansion of capital and profit, inside and outside the
United States. We cannot ignore the role of racism and women's
oppression within the framework of empire. With this assessment,
we see the leading force within the united front against U.S. -led
imperialism to be the intersection of the multi-national working
class and oppressed nationality people.
4
Cities play a critical role within the imperialist process of
accumulation, functioning as centers of production, consumption
and distribution and serving as home to high concentrations of
working class and people of color. This is why we believe that
within the belly of the beast urban centers will be the pillars of
where we need to build up the resistance. If we are able to disrupt
this process of accumulation, we will be able to heighten the
imperialists' crisis and make the conditions more ripe for change.
5
This emphasis on building organization in urban centers is not
4 Labor Community Strategy Center (LCSC), Program Demand Group, "Toward a Program of Resistance."
5 This was demonstrated recently in Argentina, where thousands of unemployed and laid off workers
forced their government to reject the structural adjustment plans of the lMF and the World Bank by
laying siege to Buenos Aires and blocking transportation and commerce in and out of the city for
weeks.
f'III!I'IS
Pil1811f.
to suggest that important organizing will only happen in cities.
Some of the fiercest counter-hegemonic struggles in the United
States have emerged from the rural parts of the country- for
example, the struggles of indigenous nations as well as those of
the peoples in the Black Belt South and the Brown Belt Southwest,
in the face of the nation's most racist forces. All of those forces
have fought important struggles against environmental racism
and the continued theft of land and resources by the United
States government and some of the nation's most racist vigilante
forces.
After Bush's victory in the 2004 elections, Democrats were left
wondering-what do we do now? Some are now advocating to "go
back to the heartland" to reconnect with Middle America. Others say
progressive forces must incorporate faith into their politics. Based
on how we see it, cities will be the central site of anti -imperialist
struggle in the United States. There's a long-standing debate
whether or not we can actually create a majoritarian movement
in the United States. We don't feel hopeful. This is demonstrated
in the election results of 2004. Those oppressed communities
which decided to participate in the 2004 elections- and were not
barred from doing so- came out resoundingly against George W.
Bush. People of color understood and soundly rejected the Bush's
agenda. Even if it were possible, even if we thought we could get
white, middle class folks to sign on to an anti-imperialist, anti-
racist, anti-sexist agenda, we don't believe that's the priority
right now. The central task at this time is organizing those with
the most material interest in advancing that agenda. As this
movement grows, at some point all so-called Americans will have
to decide if they stand with empire or if they stand for justice. In
the end, the united front in the United States will need to have a
broad array of forces. But first things first, rooting ourselves in
strategic constituencies is the primary objective.
What type of organization? As conscious organizers, we must
adapt the organizational forms and structures as conditions
change so that they truly speak to and ultimately attract people.
That's why the priority must be building independent, fighting,
base-building organizations. By independent we mean that
organizations operate independently of the Democratic Party
and the American Federation of Labor - Congress of Industrial
Organizations (AH -CIO), the more traditional institutions seen as
organizing or representing the working class. This is both to break
from traditional structures in these institutions and the political
leadership guiding these institutions. There's not much to say
about the Democratic Party. As Talib Kweli says, "The mother-
Democrats is actin' like Republicans."
6
They've demonstrated
repeatedly that they don't fight in our interests. Their interests are
with imperialism. Their perpetual position of retreat from public
debate and our communities reaffirms that we cannot depend on
them to represent us, much less solve our problems.
The state of the AH -CIO is complicated and in flux. It has seen
its membership plummet over the past twenty years, reeling from
attacks from the state and economic changes. Recently, several of
the largest member unions broke away from the AH -CIO, bringing
even more instability to that section of the U.S. workers movement.
But even in the debate about the trade union movement within
the United States, the issue of global justice was never at issue.
It's as if the AH -CIO didn't have a long and bloodied history of
supporting U.S. -imposed dictatorships throughout the Global
South, including the Pinochet regime in Chile and the Somoza
regime in Nicaragua. Then, given the increasing evidence that
the AFL -CIO was involved in the failed coup attempt against
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2002, the silence of labor
leaders in the United States is conspicuous.
New forms of independent organization in the United States
have emerged in the last period, out of necessity given the rise of
neoliberalism and the widespread attacks from the Right. Trade
unions focus on worksite issues, engaging in conflict almost
entirely with specific employers, rarely engaging with the state
on issues outside of contract negotiation. However, such a focus
on organizing members around contract negotiations leaves out
a myriad of issues around which people were willing to fight.
Worker centers, youth organizations, activist formations- there
6
Talib Kweli, "Beautiful Struggle." Beautiful Struggle CD, Rawkus Records, 2003.
PBJ&I'fS
Pillllllf&
are multiple forms of organization that have stepped into this
void and created new models that can respond to and repel the
neoliberal agenda. Despite being smaller and less resourced,
these new kids on the block have shown they can pack a punch. In
New York City, the Taxi Worker's Alliance successfully organized
a strike of taxi drivers, effectively stopping all taxi -cab service
in all of New York City. Enlace, an international network of
labor organizations, has successfully contributed to Mexican
maquiladora workers gaining recognition for independent
labor unions they've formed. The Tenant and Workers Support
Committee in Alexandria, Virginia formed a $15,ooo,ooo housing
cooperative- the Arlandria-Chirilagua Housing Cooperative-
benefiting 1,ooo low-income residents of Arlandria through long-
term affordable housing creation and community ownership and
control. And recently in San Francisco a coalition, including the
Chinese Progressive Association, the Day Laborers Program and
POWER successfully raised the minimum wage from $6.75 to $8.50
for more than 50,000 workers in the City.
What is the organizations' outlook? As we build organizations,
conscious organizers must avoid the trap of becoming narrow and
provincial in our orientation. We are not building organizations
to simply have more organizations. We are building organization
.to build a movement, therefore conscious organizers must bring
a movement-building orientation to our work. We must look for
ways to support the building of a strong anti-imperialist movement
rooted in Third World communities inside the borders of this
country that sees itself connected to the struggles of Third World
people around the globe. This is especially true within the empire,
where our true class interests are aligned with those of the Third
World even when it cuts against our more immediate privileges.
Sometimes this will mean that we should invest more resources
supporting other organizations and the broader movement, while
other times this will mean that we should concentrate our energies
on building our respective organizations but never should this
work undermine the building of the larger movement.
Cultivating a movement-building orientation is particularly
important in the United States because the current conditions
entice us to act in a sectarian manner and fgnore opportunities
to grow the movement. This movement-building orientation is
especially important for conscious organizers in the United States
who work within what is commonly referred to as the nonprofit
industrial complex. Because nonprofit
organizations in the United States
depend on sanctioning from the
Internal Revenue Service as well as
financial support from the capitalist
class, it is easy for committed organizers
within this sector to become obsessed
with promoting and sustaining their
own organization- to the detriment
of their relationships with would-
be allies. There have recently been
numerous debates on the limitations
of organizations within the nonprofit
industrial complex, but nonprofit
tax status is a tactic which can be
used badly or which can be used with
subtle expertise. Given the nature of
imperialism in the United States and
the under-developed state of the anti-
imperialist movement, it is a strategic
imperative that the movement place
a strategic priority on the building
and supporting of independent,
Civen the nature of
imperialism in the United
States and the under-
developed state of the anti-
imperialist movement, it is a
strategic imperative that the
movement place a strategic
priority on the building and
supporting of independent,
movement organizations
rooted in Third World
communities. The important
thing is that organizations
build themselves and their
memberships so that they
uncompromisingly see
themselves as a part of global
movement for liberation.
movement organizations rooted in Third World communities. The
important thing is that organizations build themselves and their
memberships so that they uncompromisingly see themselves as a
part of global movement for liberation.
A part of cultivating a movement-building orientation is making
sure that organizations fight on the full range of working class
struggles, against all forms of exploitation and oppression. While
the power dynamics within the United States are rooted in the
relationships of production, we understand that t ~ e oppression we
face takes place throughout all of society's structures. At various
P8f&llf7
times throughout history, the Left in the United States has focused
so exclusively on the struggle of workers against bosses that it
has marginalized working class struggles for national liberation,
women's liberation and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender
(LGBT) rights.
For example, there is a tragic legacy of Left movements actually
promoting homophobia and repressing LGBT activists. In the last
ten years, there have been very promising developments in the
Third World with the emergence of mass- based working class,
LGBT organizations that are consciously aligned within national
liberation struggles. The organizations Pro-Gay (Progressive
Organization of Gays in the Philippines) and LesBond (Lesbians for
National Democracy) are key examples of this new politics of class
struggle, within the Philippines National Democratic Movement.
These organizations wage struggles that address the material
needs of working class, LGBT communities as part of the broader
class struggle in Philippine society. Both Pro-Gay and lesBond
challenge homophobia with Left, progressive and feminist forces
all united as part of the broader movement for national democracy.
In their website they explain, "ProGay-Philippines believes
that gay liberation involves not just gay men but also all other
people of different sexual orientations. like other oppressed and
exploited people, we struggle for social equality. We define the
struggle for gay liberation as a part of the struggle of the Filipino
people for national freedom, and at the same time, this has a
distinct concern for the concrete demands of Filipino gay men.
We advocate the full recognition of economic, social and political
rights of all sexual minorities to freedom from all forms of sexual
discrimination in family, the community, the government, church
and mass media."
7
Within the United States, we have to ask: what is driving the
rise of anti-gay attacks by the reactionary right-wing in recent
years? What makes LGBT communities such a threat to those
in power? Each advance that LGBT communities have won over
the last thirty years has been met with severe state-sanctioned
violence and homophobic backlash initiatives. As we explained
7 Pro-Gay Philippines Website, (http://members. tripod.com/progay _philippines/intro.htmD.
Pi1JI!IIf8
in the first chapter, capitalism is built on the foundation of
patriarchy and depends on the invisible, unpaid labor of women.
This stolen labor is so critical to the survival of the system that
imperialism cannot tolerate any challenge to the construction of
the heterosexual family. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender
people are a massive threat to imperialism, because our very
existence alone undermines the core assumptions that underlie
patriarchy and the nature of the family. Hatred, violence, and
the repression of queers functions to support the exploitation of
women, by drawing the boundaries around society's definition
of what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman.
The movement-building orientation that we are cultivating is
one that understands that the struggle for national liberation,
women's liberation, gay rights, disability rights, language rights,
indigenous right, environmental protections and transgender
liberation are all key parts of the working class struggle.
8
SMASH THE STATE-CORPORATE PARTNERSHIP
Since the early 1970S, the way in which the imperialist class
extracts profit has been transformed in ways that have a direct
impact on the strategic targets and sites of struggle. In the last
thirty years, the neoliberal state has become a basic tool to funnel
wealth from the public sector into the control of the imperialists.
This has allowed the ruling class to make up for the profits that
they are unable to extract in light of imperialism's ongoing crisis.
As a result, most working class communities and communities of
color in the United States are literally being strangled to death,
and those people within the United States who are best positioned
to challenge imperialism do not have the resources to raise this
challenge.
If the anti-imperialist movement's objective is to weaken the
imperialist system while strengthening anti-imperialist forces,
then anti-imperialists should focus a great deal of attention
8
In addition to the organizations in the Third World, there are also key organizations developing
within LGBT communities of color within the U.S., such as Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for
Community Empowerment (FIERCE) and the Audre Lorde Project in New York, and Transgender in Prison
in San Francisco.
Pilf211fll
towards those areas where the ruling class is using the neoliberal
state to stabilize a crisis-ridden system. This objective is
particularly important for activists and organizers inside the
belly of the beast, given the U.S. government's leading role in the
global economy.
Anti-imperialist struggle
In previous periods of the development
of imperialism, capital accumulation
does not only take place in
the workplace- it takes place
in prisons, in indigenous
communities fighting against
environmental racism. It's
welfare mothers fighting
for training and education,
seniors fighting for adequate
health care, families fighting
for better schools.
largely took place through
transnational corporations. While
these global monopolies still play a
driving role in the world's economy,
the degree to which nation-states act
as extractors of capital is particularly
acute at this point in history. The state's
expansion of the prison industrial
complex is an intentional mechanism
to maintain and control the reserve
army of labor. Corporate subsidies
for the development of market-rate
PBIM!ISD
housing are little more than direct transfer of collective wealth
into private pockets. Debt repayment by nations of the Global
South is a globalized form of exploitation. And imperialist war is
an important tool of controlling resources and expanding to new
markets.
In response to this, new fronts of gender, race, and class struggle
have opened up to limit the state's ability to act on behalf of global
capital. The movement has responded to the neoliberal state
by fighting the class struggle not only in the workplace. Anti-
imperialist struggle does not only take place in the workplace- it
takes place in prisons, in indigenous communities fighting against
environmental racism. It's welfare mothers fighting for training
and education, seniors fighting for adequate health care, families
fighting for better schools. It's undocumented immigrants
fighting for the right to drivers' licenses. It's low-income tenants
fighting against the privatization of public housing. All of these
battle-fronts are potentially important sites of anti-imperialist
struggle where the people have the capacity to push the imperialist
system towards crisis because all of these fights attempt to break
the state's partnership with corporations at the same time that
they look to improve conditions in low-income communities. In
order to seize this opportunity, the people need to wage strategic
campaigns which are informed by an understanding of the
imperialist system.
We also recognize that orgamzmg victories which raise the
standard of living in the U.S. may result in greater levels of
exploitation and oppression for those in the Global South. In
our work locally then, we seek to develop this consciousness in
making connections between the experiences of different groups
and carrying the orientation to create global equity rather than to
heighten imperial privilege.
COMBAT RACIST PATRIOTISM
In the months leading up to the U.S. War on Iraq, as the war-
mongers of Washington circled the globe condemning that
country, the world community weighed in on the issue. Millions
marched demanding 'No War! U.S. hands off Iraq!' Polls showed
overwhelming opposition to another launch of attacks. Several
nations took brave and unprecedented actions, openly opposing
the United States at the United Nations. How did the world's super-
power respond? President George W. Bush scoffed, dismissing 10
million people as a 'focus group' and saying that America needs
no 'permission slip' to 'defend the security of our country. '
9
Bush's dismissal of world opinion and subsequent waging of
an illegal war on a sovereign nation that had not attacked the
U.S. demonstrated the arrogance and chauvinism that pervades
U.S. society. Imagine the concept: the United States, waging
war as the self-appointed police of the world, above all laws and
accountable to no one. Instead of reacting with disgust to the
situation, the people of the United States increased their support
for the president's illegal and immoral actions.
Through its machine of propaganda and hegemony, the United
9 Richard W. Stevenson, The New York Times, "Antiwar Protests Fail to Sway Bush on Plans for Iraq,"
February 19, 2003; and San Francisco Chronicle, "Fired up Bush takes offensive President claims success
on Iraq and tax cuts," january 21, 2004.
P81151
States promotes itself as the chosen one, destined to carry out its
manifest destiny no matter what the cost to the rest of the world.
The result is that many people in our Third World communities
identify more with the imperialists of this nation, rather than with
the people of the world. As Ho Chi Minh observed,
In his theses on the colonial question, Lenin clearly stated that
"the workers of colonizing countries are bound to give the
most active assistance to the liberation movements in subject
countries. " To this end, the workers of the mother country must
know what a colony really is, they must be acquainted with
what is going on there, and with the suffering- a thousand
times more acute than theirs- endured by their brothers, the
proletarians in the colonies. In a word, they must take an
interest in this question.
Unfortunately, there are many militants who still think that a
colony is nothing but a country with plenty of sand underfoot
and of sun overhead; a few green coconut palms and coloured
folk, that is all. And they take not the slightest interest in the
matter.
10
The success of the imperialists in promoting their own brand
of racist patriotism produces two real challenges for conscious
organizers working within First World nations. First, we must
be careful not to contribute to the U.S. exceptionalism that tells
us that the United States is somehow special and deserving of
preferential treatment. Second, we must take care not to take
a U.S. -centric orientation to fighting class, race, and gender
struggles. It is easy for us to fall into advocating improving
the lives of poor and working class people of color and women
in the First World at the expense of the rest of the people of the
world and of the planet's ecology. We must link our struggles
for justice here with the struggles of people throughout the Third
World. This is particularly important in the United States where the
corporate media and hegemony machines have fostered a deadly
combination of global ignorance and patriotic arrogance.
We can undermine racist patriotism by understanding our
fights in a global justice framework. By framing our campaign
10
Ho Chi Minh, "The Path Which Led Me to Leninism," Selected Works of Ho Chi Minh, Vol. 4. 1960.
P88152
and leadership development work within the context of an
internationalist movement for justice, we can help Third World
people inside the United States understand that our lives and
struggles are inextricably connected with the struggles emerging
out of the Global South.
The building of an anti-imperialist front within the United States
is the central task of conscious organizers in the belly of the beast.
To carry this work out, movement organizations must address
these three areas. The form and character of what the work will
look like within each of these areas will be different depending on
the local conditions and the specific constituency with which an
organization is building.
It is imperative that organizers and activists in the United States
roll up our sleeves and get to work, building the movement that
the world is waiting for. The conditions in the world situation are
rapidly shifting to open the possibility for fundamental change
to take place. If we drop the ball, the prospect for success is dim.
But if we manage to build a movement led by conscious forces in
Third World communities, we stand a chance to allow humanity to
free itself from under the boot of imperialism. The choice is ours,
and the whole world is counting on us.
PSJI!I58
Although the sentiments that President Chavez speaks to in this
chapter's opening quotation have been voiced by other thinkers-
including Karl Marx and Rosa luxemburg- they have never
been more accurate than they are now. The current situation for
imperialists and the growing discontent by all those affected has
the oppressed and their oppressors on a collision course.
It is very likely that within the next fifty years, the future of
humanity and of the planet will be decided. The imperialists are
on the offensive, which means that for us there is no time to waste.
Social movements in the Global South have gained strength from
decades of struggle and rising discontent against neoliberal policy
from Washington. The strength and potential of these movements
have been demonstrated by their success at advancing demands
and winning real changes, frequently targeting institutions such
as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. From
Venezuela to India, from Brazil to South Africa, from China to
Bali, social movements and growing economies throughout the
Third World are mounting a serious challenge to U.S. imperialist
hegemony.
It is time that those of us living and struggling inside the belly of
the beast engage in our work with a renewed sense of urgency.
In the immortal words of De La Soul, "The stakes is high. "
2
Our
successes or failures will directly impact the outcome of this
historic conflict. Although we do not have the movement that
we need, we do see reason for hope. Periodically, POWER gets
invited to attend gatherings and conferences which bring together
community-based organizations from across the United States.
From these experiences and many others, it has become clear to
us that many organizers and organizations are grappling with
the same questions and challenges that prompted us to write this
book. Essentially, we are all trying to wrap our heads around a
situation that is worsening before our eyes so that we can figure
out how we can intervene and make change.
1
Hugo Chavez Frias, Speech at 2005 World Youth Festival, Caracas, Venezuela.
2
De La Soul, "Stakes is High." Stakes is High CD, Tommy Boy Records, 1996.
PliSI57
The process of writing this book and clarifying our vision has been
positive and has strengthened our organization and has made us
better organizers. It has built up our unity with one another and
has deepened our understanding of the difficult tasks ahead.
All four of us are convinced that we are on the right path. In
the coming months and years, we are committed to continuing
to tackle these questions so that we might improve the theory
and practice of our work. We hope this book sparks discussion
that will lead to further development of our theory and practice
as conscious organizers and towards a long-term strategy. The
movement's success will be tied to our ability to both touch upon
the issues that move communities in order to build mass base and
to understand the local and global terrain in which we struggle;
making our adversary weaker as we grow stronger. We have our
work cut out for us.
We must defy convention and continue to dream, as expressed by
former-Sandinista militant Gioconda Belli, "I dare say, after the life
I have lived, that there is nothing quixotic or romantic in wanting
to change the world. It is possible. It is the age old vocation of
all of humanity. I can't think of a better life than one dedicated
to passion, to dreams, to the stubbornness that defies chaos and
disillusionment. Our world, filled with possibilities, is and will be
the result of the efforts offered by us, its inhabitants. "
3
In the constellation of movements, we look towards the direction
of our comrades in the Global South, whose inspirational struggles
light our path here in the belly of the beast. Here, inside the
empire we have a task at hand. We must not fail. We owe it to
ourselves, to the world and to future generations to chart our
own path of resistance and do the necessary work so that we can
become a beacon of hope, showing the empire and the entire
world that within the belly of the beast, the fire of rebellion has
been sparked.
3 Gioconda Belli, The Country Under My Skin.
P8JI!I58