A somewhat randomly generated 'pirate' crew

The little references I started with - 2-3 random traits, a random quirk, and a song from my shuffled spotify likes and age... I'm not dead set on these since some don't really go together well but its a starting point!

The contradiction of airplanes in the sky

Whenever I’m in an airplane, I think of the contradiction that experience it embodies, and how it seems to be a metaphor for modern life. There’s so much wonder in flying thousands of miles into the sky, and yet we do it in a cramped, claustrophobic quarters that dilute or negate the magic. That’s what living today is like, is it not?

But of course, despite myself, being in an airplane always makes me feel wine-drunk with awe. When I flew back to Kansas last winter of 2021, I watched the sunset from the JFK airport and thought about the cycles of disappointment in love that I’d gone through that year, and thought about who I used to be, with my naive optimism and defensive arrogance protecting a shaky self image. At that time, I cringed to remember my past self.

But looking back now, I think of how I was just 22 and trying to figure it out. How much I love the boundless naive optimism that I carried with me throughout all the different selves I became, and how natural it seems that I would end up in Anakbayan – and how much that experience changed me. It affirmed my stance of joy as defiance.

There’s a word in tagalog that we use to refer to each other in the movement – “kasama”. It loosely translates to ‘together’, and ‘with you.’ What binds us in the movement is a current that’s deeper than political affinity – it’s shared vision, a shared history of “filipino and not-filipino.” The variable we share in common is that we’re all taking a gamble, staking our lives to a future that remains dark.

When I joined the movement, I was shocked to see people my age quoting Mao, identifying as radical anti-imperialists, and re-enacting guerilla theater of rebels. Up until then, I thought that organized resistance was a dead pipe dream of the 60s. To discover that it was real, even if only in the margins, shifted everything that I thought was possible.

I gained a specific kind of optimism that comes from seeing what revolution looks like in practice. It’s a feeling I haven’t found a language to quite articulate or describe or understand yet, though I think it has to do with resisting the state of psychological domination our culture is paralyzed by.

Of course, this spirit of optimism isn’t a constant. There are times I often look around and think, we really are just a small group of ragtag organizers. When I first joined, there would be times I would question the worth of our work in the larger scheme. It was easier to be a cynic than to dare to hope. Years after joining, I told my kasamas that this felt like the only sane space to me, and they all exchanged incredulous looks. And I understand, because actually, it does seem to feel that you have to be a bit insane to pursue the unrealistic and improbable.

To be radical is to change the parameters of what we can fight for. That was the most critical question in college, that I’ll always carry with me in my heart. What does it mean to be radical? Years later, as I’m writing this, I have an answer. To decide to eliminate the chair itself.

This work – the work of revolutionaries – goes against the dominant culture, which is why it’s so fucking difficult to do in isolation. It isn’t praised, or popular, or funded, or accepted in the mainstream, which makes it easy to question ourselves every step of the way – which can make us doubt ourselves – if we lose an inch of conviction. I admire my kasamas deeply for the courage it takes to ask for more than what’s realistic.

I think part of our optimism comes from – and is part of – the way we feel part of history. We share the understanding that the work we do in our lives goes beyond the brevity of our lifespan. There’s comfort knowing that even if change doesn’t happen in my lifetime, we’re building on the groundwork that generations before us have set, and generations after us will continue to build on, and whatever we accomplish, no matter how small, it won’t have been for nothing.

There are some who compare this kind of faith to the kind you find in organized religion, and that brings with it warnings of the dangers of idealizing any kind of ideology. The fear of being absorbed into an ideology is what made me initially hesitant to join a movement. But I’ve been part of a church before, and to me, there’s a clear distinction between political work and being a christian, even though they’re also familiar. It’s about committing to a value system and world view. The difference is that while I think political ideology offers a way to transform my values into action, by no means do I turn to it for either a blueprint or final answers.

There was a deep, fundamental change in my life finding the movement. I think my stance of optimism has somehow come from the gradual radicalization of my politics, and how that led me to recover hope and the spirit to fight. I found a home for my values, and an alternative to aspirations for material success and personal ambition that wasn’t just protecting my own individual happiness for the time I’m alive.

I think I write about this because I wonder what leads people to a movement. What radicalizes someone. Because I’m interested in what kind of spirit counters the fatalism of capitalist realism. A word for the opposite of loneliness. Because the words kasama and political home didn’t exist in my language a few years ago. For all the ways I’ve changed since accepting ‘revolutionary’. My shifting perceptions of the words “radical” and “revolution”. Paradigms upended. Wondering about the common variable behind the emotions of joy, agency, self-determination, the willingness to struggle, optimism, hope, faith, these supercharged euphorias. Courage and strength, all entertwined with love and rage and compassion and kindness. The seedling of an understanding that if we want a revolution, we have to understand how these emotions all can be transformed and channeled into revolution. Into people power. There’s an answer, somewhere, in the optimism that comes from seeing other people care and believe, just as much, in what used to seem to be an untenable fantasy: revolution. Genuine change within our lifetime. That what we dream of is not to much to ask for. But we have to start with naming what we are fighting against, and what we are dreaming of. James and I joke, without really saying it, that the answer is revolution. What is to be done with this world? Where are we going?

I’ve been thinking about the premise of my conclusion in college – how the word utopia is an ancient Greek pun on “ou-topis”, meaning “no place”, and “eu-topos”, meaning “good place”. It was originally coined by Thomas More, and implies that a perfect political state cannot actually exist. I have no masterplan for saving the world. I don’t have the details of what an ideal world would look like. But we always ask each other, what do you want for your community? What are you fighting for? As if these questions are worth asking, are serious questions to consider, and not frivolous at all. I do think we are entirely capable of asking for a different present, of dreaming for the way that we can live right now.

Hannah Arendt believed, above all, that if we could say, I don’t want to live this way–and that if we projected these longings into the world–we could work to address the lonelinesses we inflict on others; the isolation that drives us to destruction and our desire to dominate. In her biography of Lessing, you can find Lessing’s notion of love threading throughout her work; the kind of love that simply says “I want you to be”. She believed that in order to rebuild cultures from the politics of exclusion and division, ones that make truth and justice meaningful in the world, communication and changes in modes of thought had to happen between two people. She believed we could imagine only by understanding, by living and knowing together.

___________

Somewhere outside the invisible net cradling earth, satellites are spinning in the yawning empty black and the pulse of cities is so far away. People are dying from a pandemic, in the antiseptic halls of hospitals. In future dystopias, a love song waltzes from an underground bunker.

It’s spring now, and I find myself caught in the still warmth of an evening where I have absolutely nowhere to go. The busyness of the day fading to twilight, bright shadows thrown up against the skyscrapers of Manhattan. It’s an alien feeling, the relief to realize I have no obligations. I stand for a moment in Brooklyn as bodies rush past me, looking at the sky, looking at people, a still point in a crowded intersection, feeling for the first time in a long time that I longer have to be anywhere. A breeze on the back of my neck, the air tasting like lemon and sticky asphalt, and no one knows who I am.

On my way to Coney Island, I accidentally dislocate the chain from the gears with my shoulder, and so I stop in the middle of the sidewalk to lock it back in place, wipe the grease from my fingers onto my backpack. Beyond the language of nuclear radiation and retreating shorelines, there’s a place where we go on and survive.

despite how difficult it is, how widespread futility and cynicism are, we are all suffering together and finding joy somehow, and there’s comfort in that.

Animation Night 94: ‘The New Anime Century’

Apologies for the very late start today. I’ve not been at all functional. I understand that most eyes are on Ukraine right now. Nevertheless, it is important to me to keep up the streak of Animation Nights, so an Animation Night there shall be.

Since it’s so late, and I’m not in the best sorts, I’m going to lean on a previous writeup; we’ll be looking back at the misty origins of the vast Gundam franchise, and a curious set of historical events.

Today is 24th of February, two days off from February 22. Back in 1981, February 22 was the premiere of the film adaptation of Mobile Suit Gundam; at first an unsuccessful television show that tried to inject elements of ‘realist’ sci-fi war drama, which became a cultural phenomenon on the back of ‘gunpla’ model kits, and then, a symbol of the changing audience of animation in Japan - something which Tomino would claim as a ‘New Anime Century’ (anime shinseiki sengen) at the occasion of the film’s premiere.

Normally I would launch right into the history, but I feel like the context means I ought to say at least something about how this all connects to our time. Because a war has just considerably escalated in Ukraine, joining the ongoing wars in e.g. Syria and Yemen, as various imperialisms vie for dominance and various groups of people of myriad ideologies cast in with this or that faction that might protect them, or get caught in the fighting of others, like the Saudi naval blockade and resulting famine. “What the hell you even do” is a question we continually face, especially when we are so powerless - something acutely experienced by e.g. the Ukrainian anarchists interviewed here, for whom the choices not ‘what to tweet’ but whether to pick up weapons, and if so, how to avoid their tiny movement getting subsumed into a nationalist project.

Understanding a war at the time it’s taking place is very difficult; in the years following, it falls to artists of various kinds to end up defining the social meaning of that war, and the whole sorry spectacle of war in general. Is that a good thing? Who the fuck knows. But it happens, regardless.

So, for example, thanks to novels and memoirs like All Quiet on the Western Front and Poilu, famous poems, and various histories (an art form itself) constructed by sifting through the records and propaganda, the gigantic act of human sacrifice that broke the old imperialist system and opened the ‘bloody twentieth century’ can be turned into a story that we can at least pretend we comprehend in some way as ‘World War I’. (For good or ill! The Italian futurists and, later, Nazi propagandists turned their artistic efforts towards telling a story to further or repeating that war. And of course, during the war itself, all sides called on their artists and reporters to tell stories that would maintain the supply of bodies and shells to combine alchemically into ‘political power’ and corpses.)

In the decades after whatever temporary peace is found, the art ends up talking not about our direct experience of living through a war (an experience that is traumatic even far from the actual fighting), but the images of it we receive in art. The Nazis, for example go from actual people who you or your audience may have physically fought or lived under or fled, whose genocides were only recently exposed, to cartoon villains or even edgy sex symbols. The survivors gradually die and romantic narratives take over from people to whom that war was a story. And yet, the experience of these later generations living in the shadow of all the millions of empty deaths is still something that will - inevitably! - be expressed in art.

(this is from 08th MS Team so the animation is a bit more modern than what we’ll see today - I don’t really have time to scour the gif searcher for OG gundam clips!)

So, Gundam. Famously, Tomino is an ‘anti-war’ director. But whether an ‘anti-war’ film is even possible has often been called into question. Certainly, you can present images of senseless death and suffering - but the cult of the soldier loves the struggles borne by its ‘heroes’ for the sake of the nation. (The logic of sacrifice transfers the value of the thing sacrificed; kill a prize cow for a god, and you are declaring that to you, such food and wealth is less important than the god. Kill a million soldiers in ‘service’ of a nation, and the psychic power of the nation is strengthened, not weakened, by the value of a million human lives.)

It is easy to say “war may be an awful thing, but this time, we must fight” - and to recognise the logic of violent domination and coercion that doesn’t care for principle. And so, those who wish to start or sustain a war have long, long ago learned that they need to make a plausible-enough case that it is ‘justified’ to maintain their supply of bodies, and have developed very sophisticated ways of telling that story.

Mecha anime, and Gundam in particular, inherits a curious relation to war in general and Japanese history in particular (their failed imperial ambitions and the aftermath of near complete destruction by war, their relationship to the USA in the Cold War, and the question of the restrictions placed on the JSDF, much to the resentment of far-right nationalists).

It depends, fundamentally, on lavishly elaborate depictions of military equipment - before it narrowed to ‘giant humanoid robots’, the term ‘mecha’ simply meant machinery in general, and the visual language of giant robots (especially in Gundam’s ‘real robot’ subgenre) takes a lot of cues from jets and tanks and other such machines. (Last time around, we talked about how the first ‘super robot’ manga, Tetsujin 28-go, imagines a secret WWII weapon in the hands of a child.) Mecha have many meanings, but an inarguably important one is that we are captivated by the image of precisely engineered killing machines; for much the same reason, people adore guns even if they have no intention of killing anybody with them. I don’t think this enables war, inherently - it is a reality of our experience of a violent world that is being reflected truthfully in our art.

And yet, for all that, Tomino wished to tell specifically a tragic story about war; calling attention to the humanity of the enemies, and filling his story with senseless death and grief proper to the subject matter, which was a significant break. How strongly and coherently this theme has been expressed and developed varied through the franchise, which was primarily an instrument to move gunpla models and faced many constraints, but it’s a stance he held fast to pretty much throughout. This productive contradiction has fuelled several subsequent decades of robot anime; in the 90s, Anno’s ‘New Gospel’ of Evangelion would take mecha into a much more psychological direction, but it’s always been in part about war.

And how animation should treat the matter of war (as a subset of film in general) was at the time becoming a significant subject of contention. A year after Gundam‘s film premiere would follow the conflict over the film Future War 198X in which anti-war, Soviet-sympathetic trade unionists vehemently protested what they saw as a warmongering film.

To say more is really more than I have time to talk about tonight; let’s press on to the event in question that frames tonight’s screening: the 1981 release of the Gundam theatrical trilogy and the ‘New Anime Century’. (I talked about Tomino’s career leading up to Gundam last time so go back there for that!)

As this page recounts, the original Gundam TV anime was cancelled, but the series became increasingly popular off the strength of gunpla kits, eventually resulting in a recut of the series into three theatrical films with a great deal of ceremony. The turnout on the day was unexpectedly huge (in part due to the temptation of 10,000 free Gundam posters), and Tomino became afraid that a riot might break out:

By the morning of the 22nd February, there were 2,000 fans at the east exit to Shinjuku station. Tomino wryly observed that a TV director’s life was often lived hand-to-mouth, worrying about little more than the next meal, but here, outside a cinema for one of anime’s first big grown-up movie events, we were seeing the true power of television – its ability to attract an exponentially larger number of viewers. TV people had always been excluded from the movie world – now, suddenly, he saw that they had taken it over.

The posters were gone by 10am. By midday, Tomino estimated the numbers were pushing 15,000, which threatened to turn the event into a riot. Ever since the Anpo Protests over the controversial US-Japan Security Treaty (an event later referenced in the opening unrest of Akira), “public demonstrations” had been illegal around Shinjuku station. Enough Gundam fans had now gathered to risk attracting police attention, and Tomino fretted that an injury in the crowd could attract exactly the wrong kind of media attention. His “new anime century” risked dying before it could even begin, with future events shut down as too dangerous.

So, Tomino made an address to the crowd, like a politician speaking at a rally, with little preparation. His statement was... a curious and still rather boastful one:

“Sorry, but you are dummies,” he shouted, presumably in reference to the number of bodies needed to create a noticeable crowd. But then again, you never knew with Tomino. “We gathered you here to make a statement, to make all the grown-ups wonder what so many young people want to say. And in fact, the statement we really want to make is not about Gundam at all! But Gundam is the name that has gathered you youngsters here today. We need the grown-ups to wonder what this Gundam is all about. We need them to understand what young, modern people, teenagers, are seriously thinking about, and grasp that by seeing Gundam for themselves, even once.”

His awkward address, and official declaration of the ‘New Century’, would be repeated by two younger anime workers:

Tomino spoke from the stage, but doubted anyone heard him. At 40 years of age, he already belonged to a different generation. Ultimately, the proclamation’s official delivery was read out by “the kids” themselves, two young students, who were both already intimately involved in Tomino’s new era of anime: Mamoru Nagano, the future creator of Five Star Stories, and Maria Kawamura, already a voice actress in several Tomino productions, fated to become the iconic Jung Freud of Gunbuster.

Both in cosplay at the time, the two would eventually marry.

Much later, this event would be narrativised as ‘the day anime changed’ - though this seems like far too neat a narrative and many of the elements popularised by Gundam had been in the works throughout the 70s. Still, it did correspond to a turning point: the 80s soon saw the rise of the OVA market and rapid transformation of animation from purely a children’s medium to one capable of attempting more challenging stories - or serving the very specific tastes of adult otaku. Anime directly addressing war would become increasingly emotionally sophisticated - subsequently we would see films like Barefoot Gen (Animation Night 26), Grave of the Fireflies and In This Corner of the World as the realist movement developed. It would be absurd to ascribe all this to the influence of Gundam (as much as it would surely flatter Tomino) but the three Gundam films do stand at a pretty important point in that big historical flow.

I won’t say anymore, because it’s 11pm and I would like to start Animation Night on Thursday, even if we’ll probably have to watch the last film tomorrow. We’ll be starting the screening very shortly, but if you feel like dropping in at any point, I’ll happily catch you up. So please, head over to https://www.twitch.tv/canmom!

Ilvermorny

Given with how sometimes being a wizard is not a hereditary thing, I find it very hard to believe that you can just go without racism. It is something so ingrained into our society. Even if pureblood wizards never discriminated based on race, not all wizards going to Ilvermorny would be a part of that kind of culture. I’m pretty sure most would be racist. Besides that I think, realistically, all the white wizards would be the first to come together. And the Indigenous wizards would definitely practice magic differently from the white wizards, creating another barrier between the two groups. While it is likely for two very different groups of people to coexist, history has shown that it is more likely for the colonizing group to try and overtake the other. And while the founder of Ilvermorny was not racist and actually welcomed Indigenous people into her school I think the opposite would be more popular. I read somewhere how there’s a theory that there were a small group of settlers who ended up integrating and coexisting with the tribe that was already living there. And that is literally just a theory, but we have our whole history showing how discriminatory white people were and still are to Indigenous people. I honestly hate that Ilvermorny is the first wizarding school in America, as if the Indigenous people of the area didn’t already have a way of life or as if they needed to be colonized or as if things didn’t really start till the white heros came in. 

Anyways, having Ilvermorny’s history and school be different to hogwarts allows you to explore many different things. Something which the fantastic beast movies don’t really allow for. The first movie takes place in the 1920s and yet the person in charge in the American wizarding world is a black woman, which let’s be honest she’d definitely be discriminated against. The wizarding world in the US is probably more integrated with the no-maj world. And like with the Indigenous people, the African people forced over here most definitely saw/practiced magic in a very different way, and I don’t think the European wizards would be too fond of it. So what I am saying is that you probably have three (or more because each Native American tribe would have definitely practised magic differently) very different ways of practicing magic that can over time slowly come together. This allows you to explore many different stories, which could be driven by black and Indigenous people. Even though this is a made up story I still think it is problematic to whitewash it, because it is something white people have been doing for many years and still continue to do. You see how this is done with MLK jr’s image. During his time he didn’t just advocate for a peaceful movement, but was anti-imperialist and a dedicated democratic socialists. He was such a radical figure, who would definitely be considered radical for today’s standards and yet he was whitewashed to the point where liberal and moderate democrats and even republicans can say that they agree with him. And republicans even use his quotes and image to shut up blm supporters. But we know damn well they wouldn’t agree with him if he were alive today. After his death he was not popular with 2/3 OF THE COUNTRY!! We only really hear about him speaking of peace, but he was a radical brilliant man was outspoken about economic inequality. So, back to what I was saying before, if we accept this whitewashed version of Ilvermorny and just magic in the US in general, then you leave out many other stories. 

If you got through all this, thank you. 

This was just a critique of wizarding world? in the US. 

Remembering the Lesbians in Lesbian/Gay Liberation

Remembering the Lesbians in Lesbian/Gay Liberation By Ann Menasche  Under patriarchy, lesbians are not supposed to exist. Women - "normal" women at least - are supposed to need men to be complete, for love, for sex, for economic survival, for family, for legitimacy. In such a world, there is no place for lesbians; if a few manage to exist, they are seen as freaks or pariahs. Not surprising that we rarely appear in history or when we are named at all, we are portrayed as lonely spinsters pining after some man. (Remember the lies told about 19th century poet Emily Dickenson, who had a lifelong passionate relationship with her sister-in-law.) In the mid-to-late 20th century, ideas of traditional womanhood began to be challenged as women as a sex gained increased independence. By the height of the Second Wave of feminism in the late 60s and 70s, lesbians had begun to emerge from the shadows and establish themselves among the leadership of the newly emerged Feminist and Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movements. And as the synergy of Lesbian/Gay Liberation and Radical Feminism freed more women to be able to pursue a lesbian life, a vibrant culture of Lesbian Feminism emerged.  That culture produced socially conscious music, poetry, books, publishing houses, newspapers, feminist theatre, coffee houses, and festivals run by and for women that inspired and sustained us and helped fuel the political activism of the time. And in this environment we began to rediscover the lesbians that came before us. We no longer felt so alone. But times have changed again and lesbians are being rendered invisible once more. Even the contributions lesbians made to the Movement for Lesbian and Gay Liberation are being forgotten. Many factors have contributed to this disappearing of lesbians from history, from our public consciousness, and often from ourselves and each other. While lesbians have won some mainstream acceptance through marriage equality, the accumulated losses have begun to be greater than the gains. Hard economic times, a conservative political climate, the growth and increased power of the Christian fundamentalist Right and a growing backlash against feminism have conspired to make lesbian existence harder once more. Independent lesbian culture has been destroyed. Even the lesbian bars that, despite their flaws, provided a place to meet and find community with other lesbians are now gone. In their place is a sense of utter isolation and despair among many lesbians. And there is often no place to turn for support except perhaps online forums. Moreover, though the illusion that we've already won our rights is widespread, the reality is quite different. Lesbians in the United States can still lose their jobs, be disowned by their parents, lose custody of their children, and be raped or murdered for loving other women. Anti-lesbian prejudice is everywhere. One of the most destructive influences on lesbians, which is erasing us from history and undermining the possibility of lesbian existence in the present, is gender identity ideology. As this ideology has become increasingly predominant, overwhelming our lesbian/gay communities and incorporating itself into law and culture, lesbians have felt ourselves surrounded on all sides. We are being pressured and guilt-tripped on the one hand to accept men calling themselves women into our communities and our bedrooms. At the same time, rebellious young girls with same-sex feelings, and lesbian adults are being convinced in growing numbers they are really "men" and are being coerced or swayed into "transitioning."  As women’s liberation no longer appears to be a realistic goal, some of this vulnerability to the forces of transgenderism and extreme body modification may be summed up by the phrase “if you can’t beat them, join them.”  How else escape the violent heavy hand of misogyny on our bodies and lives but to pass as male? Without question, Lesbians have become extremely marginalized within the modern LGBTQ+ "alphabet soup" - the corporatized stepchild of the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movement. LGBT centers in the name of trans-inclusion, refuse to provide space for lesbians to even meet together outside of the presence of males. We are not welcome at Pride and even the Dyke March has been taken from us by “lesbians” with male genitalia and their supporters. And as lesbians have been virtually disappeared, so has the role we played in the struggles that came before us been disappeared as well. Our lesbian foremothers are once again gone from the history books, or are posthumously "transitioned," described as "queer," or treated merely as a footnote. But lesbians fueled the Lesbian and Gay Liberation Movement from its start.  It would not have happened without us. And it is time to give credit where credit is due. The Stonewall Rebellion on June 28, 1969 was not led by individuals identifying as transgender. Transgenderism barely existed at that time even as a concept. What existed was large numbers of lesbians and gay men, some of whom cross dressed or dressed in drag, but did not thereby deny either their sex or their homosexuality. Drag queens and butch lesbians were among those who found community at the Stonewall Inn in New York, a bar owned and operated by the mafia but one of the few places that same sex couples could dance together. Police raids were commonplace but that historic night as police dragged patrons out of the bar and beat them, one butch lesbian, Storme DeLaverie, decided she had had enough. When a police officer shoved her and called her a "faggot", she punched him in the face. Four officers assaulted her and one hit her on the head with a billy club.  Bleeding from the head, and dragged toward the police van, she yelled "Why don't you guys do something?"  The rebellion was on and lasted six nights. Lesbian and Gay Liberation was born. Martha Shelley, a lesbian with strong left-wing politics, had passed by the Stonewall on the fateful night but thought she was seeing an anti-war protest. She had no idea that the people throwing rocks at the cops were gay. When she realized what she had missed, she contacted the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattichine Society and made a proposal for them to jointly sponsor a protest march. On July 27, 1969, 200 lesbians and gays marched in Greenwich Village, in what was to become the world’s first Gay Pride Parade.  The organizing committee formed itself into the Gay Liberation Front, a revolutionary group that demanded not assimilation but a complete overhaul of the patriarchal, racist, imperialist system. A new movement was launched, initiated by a lesbian. Almost a decade later in 1978 in San Francisco another lesbian was the central leader in the successful movement to defend Lesbian and Gay Rights then under attack. This was the struggle against the attempt by Christian fundamentalists to pass the Briggs Initiative, a proposition that would have banned gay teachers and all supporters of Lesbian/Gay Rights in the schools. Though everyone knows about Harvey Milk, many giving him credit for the defeat of the Briggs Initiative, it was actually Nancy Elnor, a lesbian-feminist and socialist, someone virtually no one has heard of, who was far more responsible for that victory. I knew Nancy personally and worked together with her in the Bay Area Coalition against the Briggs Initiative.  We were on and off again lovers, our personal interaction often stormy, but my admiration for her never waned. Nancy worked long hours, doing amazing grassroots organizing work always accompanied by her German Shepherd "Bianca" and put together a mass movement that brought out tens of thousands into the streets against Briggs. She brought in organized labor and every progressive organization in San Francisco to join the cause, and chaired packed meetings of activists.  The Coalition under her leadership, organized a televised debate between Milk and Sally Gearhart on the one side and Briggs and one of his cohorts on the other.  A thousand people watched the debate on a big screen in a local high school auditorium. Nancy's in-the-streets movement building done through distributing thousands of flyers, making hundreds of phone calls, and attending dozens of meetings (there was no Internet) set an example for the whole state, helped change the political climate, and put us on the path to victory. Nancy died young but I'll never forget her. As many lesbians celebrate Pride with varying degrees of ambivalence or else consciously ignore the festivities as no longer speaking to us, it is important to remember and celebrate the heroic leadership of our lesbian foremothers who changed history. If we did it once, we can do it again. Read the full article

1919: When the Bolsheviks Turned on the Workers—Looking Back on the Putilov and Astrakhan Strikes, One Hundred Years Later

One hundred years ago in Russia, thousands of workers were on strike in the city of Astrakhan and at the Putilov factory in Petrograd, the capital of the revolution. Strikes at the Putilov factory had been one of the principal sparks that set off the February Revolution in 1917, ending the tsarist regime. Now, the bosses were party bureaucrats, and the workers were striking against a socialist government. How would [the dictatorship of the proletariat respond?

Following up on our book about the Bolshevik seizure of power, The Russian Counterrevolution, we look back a hundred years to observe the anniversary of the Bolshevik slaughter of the Putilov factory workers who had helped to bring them to power. Today, when many people who did not live through actually existing socialism are propagating a sanitized version of events, it is essential to understand that the Bolsheviks meted out some of their bloodiest repression not to capitalist counterrevolutionaries, but to striking workers, anarchists, and fellow socialists. Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

If you find any of this difficult to believe, please, by all means, check our citations, consult the bibliography at the end, and investigate for yourself.

A note on the artwork: the artist, Ivan Vladimirov, was a realist painter who participated in the Russian Revolution, joining the Petrograd militia after the toppling of Tsar Nicholas II. He used a style of documentary realism to portray scenes from the Revolution and Civil War. Afterwards, he continued to work as an artist in good standing with the Soviet Union—such good standing that he lived into the 1940s and died of natural causes!—although he was compelled to shift to making fluff pieces lauding Soviet military triumphs and social harmony.

Bolshevik Realism

In March 1919, the Bolsheviks had uncontested power over the Russian state, but the revolution was slipping from their grasp. As self-styled pragmatists and realists, they believed that revolution had to be dictated from above by experts. Who can better understand the needs of the peasants and the proper means for communalizing the land and sharing the harvest than a revolutionary bureaucrat in an office in the city? And who knows more about the plight of the factory workers than a party official who worked in a factory once and now spends all his time going to committee meetings and interpreting the dictates of the Fathers of the Proletariat, men like Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Sokolnikov, and Zinoviev who never worked in a factory or toiled in the fields in their lives?1 And who better to protect the interests of the soldiers than the political commissar who stands at the back of the line during an offensive, pistol in hand, ready to shoot anyone who does not charge into enemy fire?2

Bolshevik realism made it clear that the only way to execute a real revolution was to take over the state, make it even stronger, and use it to stamp out all their enemies—who were, by definition, counterrevolutionaries. But the counterrevolutionaries must have had secret schools in every town and village, because by 1919 more and more people were joining their ranks, especially peasants, workers, and soldiers.

The “dictatorship of the proletariat” would have to kill a whole lot of proletarians. Not everyone could make it to the Promised Land.

1919: Russians searching for food in the garbage during the lean times of the Civil War.

Enemies, Enemies Everywhere

The dastardly anarchists had corrupted the age-old revolutionary slogan, the liberation of the workers is the task of the political commissars—get back to work, it’s under control. They had replaced it with a dangerous revisionist lie—“the liberation of the workers is the task of the workers themselves”—and more and more people had come to believe this lie. In April 1918, the Bolsheviks unleashed a terror against the anarchists, who were becoming especially strong in Moscow. In September, they instituted a general Red Terror against all their former allies, killing over 10,000 in the first two months and implementing the gulag system.

They also had to turn their guns against the peasants, who were in open rebellion against the policy of “war communism” by which the Red Army and party bureaucrats could steal whatever food, livestock, and supplies from the peasants they saw fit.3 Evidently, the uneducated peasants didn’t have the vocabulary to understand that this theft was a “requisitioning,” that their starvation was a form of “communism,” and that it was being supervised by incorruptible men who had their best interests at heart. In August 1918, Lenin directed the Cheka and the Red Army to carry out mass executions in Penza and Nizhniy Novgorod to put an end to the protests. But dissent only spread, and the peasants gave up on protesting in order to arm themselves and fight back. Many formed “Green Armies,” localized peasant detachments that often fought against both the White and the Red Armies.

There was also a shortage of realism in the Red Army. Arguably, the most effective fighting units in the war against the tsarists and the capitalists of the White Army were the localized, volunteer detachments that elected and recalled their own officers; granted no special privileges to officers; defined their goals, general strategies, and organizational principles in assemblies; relied on the goodwill of local soviets to supply them; and were intimately familiar with the terrain they operated on. Such detachments included Marusya’s Free Combat Druzhina, the Revolutionary Insurgent Army, the Dvinsk Regiment, and the Anarchist Federation of the Altai. Few other detachments were able to inflict critical defeats on tsarist forces even when they were overwhelmingly outnumbered and outgunned.4 The fact that the combatants fought for a cause they believed in, were led by strategists elected on account of their abilities, and were wholeheartedly supported by the local peasants and workers enabled them to use the terrain to their advantage, fight more bravely than their opponents, innovate creative and intelligent strategies in response to developing circumstances, and transition between guerrilla and conventional warfare in a way that confounded the enemy. Such groups were instrumental in defeating General Denikin, Admiral Kolchak, and Baron Wrangel, ending the three major White offensives—not to mention capturing Moscow at the beginning of the October Revolution.

But all of these groups suffered a fatal defect. These fighters often prioritized listening to local peasants and workers and their own common soldiers over the wise dictates of the Fathers of the Proletariat emanating from the capital. Even worse, sometimes they did hear those dictates, yet still disobeyed them. And when the Party leaders, in their infinite wisdom, decided that it was necessary to massacre peasants or workers for the sake of the revolution, the detachments led by those very peasants and workers simply weren’t up to the task.

1917: Eating a dead horse.

In order to increase the efficiency of the Red Army, the wise masters of the Bolshevik Party decided to take lessons from the great militarists of history, starting with the Tsarist army. By June 1918, they had abolished all the anti-realist policies that revolutionaries had wrongheadedly introduced into the Red Army: they discontinued the election of officers by the soldiers who would serve under them, reinstituted aristocratic privileges and pay grades for officers, recruited former Tsarist officers accustomed to those privileges, and brought in political commissars to spy on the soldiers and root out any incorrect thinking. After all, rebellious idealist soldiers had toppled one regime in 1917—and without a sufficient dose of realism, they might well topple another.

The Bolsheviks had also learned from imperialist armies throughout history that sent soldiers from one end of the empire to fight rebels at the other end of the empire. This was a sentimental kindness on the part of the Bolsheviks. Psychologically, it was much easier for Korean-speaking soldiers to avoid fraternizing with Ukrainian peasants and workers near Kharkiv—and on occasion to massacre them—and for Ukrainian-speaking soldiers to avoid fraternizing with Korean peasants and workers near Vladivostok (and occasionally to massacre them, too). This strategic practice also helped keep soldiers from getting lost. A Red Army soldier from Ukraine, fighting counterrevolutionaries in Irkutsk, would be hard-pressed to obtain support from locals or find his way home without leave. That ensured that he would know to stay with his regiment rather than deserting in a fit of anti-realism. And if he did get lost, a blond, round-eyed Ukrainian would be easy to find among the locals, who could return him to the proper authorities. Good organization: this is how a successful revolution is waged!

Yet the soldiers of the Red Army weren’t educated enough to understand. A million desertions took place in a single year. Many Red Army detachments took their weapons and joined the peasants who were forming independent Green Armies. Later, huge groups would join Makhno, who was naïvely defeating the Whites without installing a dictatorship of his own. So the Bolsheviks had to be cleverer than their tsarist and imperialist mentors. They shot tens of thousands of deserters, but this age-old tactic wasn’t enough. In a burst of inspired realism, they improvised a new tactic: taking the family members of soldiers hostage, and executing the family members if deserters did not turn themselves in to be shot.5

Propaganda poster: “Deserter, I extend my hand to you. You are as much a destroyer of the Worker-Peasant State as I, a Capitalist!”

While so many of the Red Army’s bullets were ending up in the bodies of Red Army soldiers or in the uneducated brains of anti-realist peasants, too few were being fired at the White Army—and the White Army was growing, threatening the revolution on every side. The Red Army was slowly pushing back the Northern Russian Expedition of British and US troops on the Northern Dvina front, but intense fighting over the winter had failed to dislodge General Denikin from the Donbass area of eastern Ukraine. Meanwhile, a French expeditionary force had landed in Odessa, the White Army had cemented its hold on the Caucasus, and at the beginning of March, Admiral Kolchak had begun a general offensive on the eastern front, quickly capturing Ufa and continuing to gain ground.

The anarchist Black Army held the line in southern Ukraine, but their clever Bolshevik allies were starving them of weapons and ammunition, hoping the White Army would finish them off. This was an effective economization of resources on the part of the Fathers of the Proletariat. They would not have to spend time debating anarchists or making propaganda against them if the anarchists were all dead, and it was much easier to present themselves as the alternative to the confused tsarists and liberals of the White Army than it was to debate the anarchists, with their insidious lies about people being capable of liberating themselves.

The stratagem of denying resources to the Black Army was to backfire in summer 1919. After Denikin broke through the lines, he advanced so far against a helpless Trotsky that he threatened Moscow, and only a resounding success by anarchists at the Battle of Peregenovka in September 1919 cut off White supply lines, ultimately forcing Denikin to retreat. But after all, that was why the Bolsheviks had allies: it was easier not to put all the people they wanted to kill on their “enemies” list all at once, in hopes that they would first kill each other in ways that would be advantageous to the Bolsheviks.

1920: Bolshevik propaganda in the village.

Worker Resistance to the Soviet State

Let’s rewind to early 1919, when, facing so much resistance, the Bolsheviks needed more allies. They had legalized the Mensheviks after a few months of the Terror, and gotten the various anarchist detachments to focus their energies on fighting the Whites, but they still needed more support. After half a year of killing and imprisoning members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party (SRs), the Bolsheviks legalized the SRs; to be fair, the previous year, the SRs had tried killing and imprisoning the Bolsheviks, after the Bolsheviks had tried to monopolize all the instruments that would allow them to kill and imprison people. The Bolsheviks had won those monopolies now, but a revolution can’t defend itself if too many of the participants are dead or in prison. They still needed help getting the common people in line working for and fighting for the Bolsheviks. The SRs had been good propagandists and considerably more popular than the Bolsheviks. Besides, it was easier to keep the SRs under their thumb when they were out in the open, with public offices in Moscow, than when they were operating underground.

The SRs decided to trust the Bolsheviks, hoping that they could regain control of the soviets or win over other revolutionary forces. But once they came out of hiding, the Cheka began periodically arresting the SR leadership, accusing them of conspiracy, and hustling them off to the gulags. The organization never regained the strength to oppose the Bolsheviks. Meanwhile, the legalization of the SRs and Mensheviks had reduced the number of enemies the Communists had to fight, and set more forces to work putting out propaganda in favor of the revolution.

The Bolsheviks still had plenty of problems. If it wasn’t bad enough that so many peasants and soldiers were rebelling, the factory workers also began to rebel. In the city of Astrakhan, the workers went on strike. Even worse, many Red Army soldiers joined them, and similar strikes began to spread in the cities of Orel, Tver, Tula, and Ivanovo. Then strikes broke out at the giant Putilov factory in Petrograd, the capital of the revolution.

The Putilov factory had built rolling stock and other products for the railways, before branching out into artillery and armaments for the military. Later, they would also manufacture the tractors that would become essential to the industrialization of Russian agriculture, after Lenin ordained the transition from war communism to the “state capitalism” of the New Economic Policy. A strike at this factory was especially embarrassing for the Bolsheviks, because the Putilov factory had been one of the origin points of the revolution. The revolution of February 1917 had sprung from four groups: rebellious military units at the front, women protesting government food rationing, sailors stationed at Kronstadt and Petrograd, and striking workers at the Putilov factory. Strikes at the Putilov factory had also been one of the sparks that caused the 1905 Revolution.

The Bolsheviks had already dealt with the Dvinsk Regiment—heroes of the revolution and a symbol of the refusal of soldiers to fight in an imperialist war—by assassinating their commander, Grachov, and disbanding the regiment. They had managed to do this quietly and out of the public eye. Later, in 1921, they would explain that in the course of the revolution, the Kronstadt sailors had somehow gone from being the staunchest defenders of revolution to become petty bourgeois individualists infiltrated by White agents. No one really believed Trotsky when he said this, but it didn’t matter.6 What was really at stake was not truth, but power; the Bolsheviks had already crushed all their other enemies, and they resolved questions about the politics of the Kronstadt sailors not by presenting facts, but by slaughtering them, as well.

But the crushing of Kronstadt was still two years in the future. In March 1919, the Bolsheviks still had plenty of enemies, and everyone was watching. The Putilov workers had some simple demands: increased food rations, as they were starving to death; freedom of the press; an end to the Red Terror; and the elimination of privileges for Communist Party members.7 What would the Bolsheviks do? Was it possible to have a revolution without starving the workers, shutting down critical newspapers, disappearing revolutionaries of other tendencies, and elevating Party members as a new aristocracy?

1920: Seeking an escaped kulak.

The Bolshevik Response

What a silly question! The Bolsheviks were realists, and their strategy relied on making the revolution by gaining control of the State. The State was the Revolution, as long as it was a Bolshevik State. They couldn’t make the State stronger without eliminating their rivals, squeezing the workers and peasants for every last drop of sweat and blood, and divvying up the wealth among themselves. Who in their right mind would become a Bolshevik unless that meant obtaining a bigger paycheck, guaranteed food rations, and a chance to move up in the world? The Communist Party needed realists. The idealists would starve. Those who were willing to say that the State was Revolution and obedience was freedom earned a chance to contribute their talents to building the new apparatus.

As for the suckers who remained workers rather than becoming Party officials, the Bolsheviks knew that the role of workers was to work. Workers who did not work were like broken machines. As any realist can tell you, when a machine breaks the only thing to do is take it out back and put a bullet in its brain.

Between March 12 and March 14, the Cheka cracked down in Astrakhan. They executed between 2000 and 4000 striking workers and Red Army deserters. Some they killed by firing squad, others by drowning them—tying stones around their necks and throwing them in the river. They had learned the latter technique from Lenin’s heroes, the Jacobins—enlightened bourgeois revolutionaries who massacred tens of thousands of peasants who weren’t educated enough to know that the commons were a thing of the past and land privatization was the way of the future.8

The Bolsheviks also killed a smaller number of members of the bourgeoisie, between 600 and 1000. The smartest of the bourgeoisie had already joined the Communist Party, recognizing it as the best way to profit in the new situation. But the stuffier bourgeois conservatives were staunchly opposed to the Bolsheviks, the anarchists, and the aristocrats, as well, though they weren’t against allying with the aristocrats. Any political system in which they could not do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted, they called “tyranny.”

The bourgeois conservatives would also have crushed the striking workers, perhaps with hunger instead of bullets, if they had been in charge. Despite this, the Bolsheviks claimed that the striking workers had to be agents of the bourgeois order. Curiously, when anarchists had expropriated the bourgeoisie in Moscow in April, 1918, the Bolsheviks had called the anarchists “bandits” and returned the property to the bourgeois. Now, they killed bourgeois dissidents as well as striking workers—but they reserved the vast majority of the bullets for the workers.

Two days later, on March 16, the Cheka stormed the Putilov factory. They arrested 900 workers and executed 200 of them without a trial. These were pedagogical killings meant to “teach them a lesson,” educating the workers by executing their peers. The workers did not understand yet, but they would have to learn: workers were meant to work. If they had to starve, it was for the good of the proletariat.

The workers did not learn this lesson right away. At first, state repression only intensified worker opposition. According to intercepted Bolshevik cables, 60,000 workers were on strike in Petrograd alone in June 1919, three months after all the executions at the Putilov factory.9 The poor Bolsheviks had no choice but to kill even more workers and expand their gulag system to the point that it could reeducate not just thousands, but millions.

Many later Marxists unfairly blamed Josef Stalin for the USSR turning into a massive machinery of murder, but we can see the origins of that macabre evolution right here in the need of the Bolshevik authorities to kill workers in the name of workers. The entirety of the Party apparatus, from Lenin all the way down, dedicated itself to liquidating all opposition; and the entirety of this monstrous venture was ordained from the moment that the Communists decided that they were the conscious vanguard of the proletariat, that economic egalitarianism could be achieved through political elitism, and that liberatory ends justified authoritarian means.

1921: Requisitioning.

The Economic Policy of the Communist Party

Other revolutionary currents had conflicting ideas regarding the demands of workers and their instruments of self-organization. Some favored the factory councils that spontaneously arose around the February Revolution. Others favored the workers’ unions that had grown immensely in the course of 1917. Only the Bolsheviks had a realist position, changing their relationship with these structures according to which way the wind blew. As documented by Carlos Taibo,10 the Bolsheviks alternated between promoting the soviets and unions, attempting to capture them within larger bureaucratic structures controlled by the Party, eroding their powers, and suppressing them outright. Their approach varied wildly according to whether they believed that they could use these organizations to prop up their own power or feared, instead, that these organizations threatened Bolshevik supremacy. All power to the Party was their only consistent principle.

Throughout 1917, the Bolsheviks gained immense popularity by making all the right propaganda. They promised to redistribute the land directly to the peasants, to end the war without allowing imperialist Germany to annex territory, and to give the workers control of their workplaces. We have already seen how they broke the first two promises. As for their promise to the workers, they pitted different workers’ organizations against each another as they steadily strengthened their bureaucratic control.

In 1917, factory councils had sprung up in hundreds of factories throughout Russia, while membership in trade unions grew from tens of thousands to 1.5 million. At first, the Mensheviks dominated the unions and used their influence to get the unions to support the pre-October Kerensky government. According to a Trotskyist account, “As they were preparing for the seizure of power, Lenin and his followers tried to approach the trade unions from a new angle and to define their role in the Soviet system.” Promising them greater power, the Bolsheviks hoped to win union support for their project of seizing control of the State—or at least acquiescence to it.

According to two other pro-Leninist scholars, Lenin “essentially abandoned the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’” when he “convinced the party that the time was right to seize state power.”11 This is a fairly literal admission of fact. If the soviets were to have all the power, the Party could have none.

In November 1917, immediately after taking power, the Bolsheviks decreed that the factory committees must not participate in the direction of the companies, nor take on any responsibility in their functioning; instead, each committee was subordinated to a “Regional Council of Workers’ Control” which answered to the “All-Russian Council of Workers’ Control. The composition of these higher bodies was decided by the Party, with the trade unions receiving the majority of the seats.12

“The Revolution has been victorious. All power has passed to the Soviets… Strikes and demonstrations are harmful in Petrograd. We ask you to put an end to all strikes on economic and political issues, to resume work and to carry it out in a perfectly ordinary manner… Every man in his place. The best way to support the Soviet Government these days is to carry on with one’s job.”

-Bolshevik spokesmen at the second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, October 26 [Old Style calendar], 1917 (quoted in Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control 1917-1921)

“It is absolutely essential that all the authority in the factories should be concentrated in the hands of management… Under these circumstances any direct intervention by the trade unions in the management of enterprises must be regarded as positively harmful and impermissible.”

-Lenin speaking at the Eleventh Congress in 1922

Referring again to the Trotskyist account, “The Bolsheviks now called upon the trade unions to render a special service to the nascent Soviet state and to discipline the factory committees. The unions came out firmly against the attempt of the factory committees to form a national organization of their own. They prevented the convocation of a planned all-Russian congress of factory committees and demanded total subordination on the part of the committees.” At the end of 1917, the Bolsheviks forced the factory committees to incorporate themselves within the trade unions, in an attempt to curtail their autonomy.

1918: A shooting.

From the moment they were in power, the Bolsheviks treated workers’ councils as a threat. Why? Many Leninists, as well as the aforementioned Trotskyist, claimed that the councils were only conscious of their interests at the level of individual factories; they could not take into account the interests of the entire economy or the entire working class. This is contradicted, though, by the many examples of solidarity between soviets and workers’ councils across the country beginning already in 1917, and the fact of material support by peasants and urban workers for the anarchist detachments fighting against the White Army in the anarchist zones of Ukraine and Siberia, where idealist revolutionaries allowed workers and peasants to organize themselves. The simple fact that the factory councils were trying to coordinate at a countrywide level at the end of 1917 shows that they were in the process of developing what one might reasonably call a universal, proletarian, revolutionary consciousness; it was the Bolsheviks themselves who cut that process short.

From the Bolshevik perspective, what was most dangerous about factory council consciousness was that it might not lead to the particular kind of working-class consciousness that the Bolsheviks desperately needed to stay in power. Self-organized factories would support revolutionary armies of workers and peasants, but they probably would not support the Red Army in suppressing workers and peasants, nor would they support Lenin’s highly unpopular cession of Ukraine, Poland, and the Baltics to imperial Germany.

The councils were dangerous for another reason as well. Not only were they an organ of workers’ autonomy and self-organization that rendered any political party obsolete, they also tended to erode party discipline. Workers within the councils who were affiliated to the Mensheviks, the Bolsheviks, or any other party tended to act in accord with their common interests as factory workers rather than maintaining party interests.13

As Paul Avrich pointed out,14 the Bolsheviks made use of a nuanced distinction between two very different versions of workers’ control. Upravleniye meant direct control and self-organization by the workers themselves, but the Communist authorities refused to grant this demand. Their preferred slogan, rabochi control, did not denote anything beyond a nominal supervision of factory organization by workers. Under the system implemented by the Bolsheviks, workers participated in workplace decision-making together with the bosses, who could be the pre-Revolution capitalist owners or agents of the Party and the State, depending on Soviet policy at the moment.

All final decisions were made by the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy (the Vesenkha), an unelected, bureaucratic body established in December 1917 by decree of the Sovnarkom and the All-Russian Central Executive Committee. All of these bureaucratic bodies were controlled at all times by the Bolsheviks, meaning that no worker could have a final say in workplace decisions without becoming a full-time party operative and climbing to the very highest ranks of the bureaucracy.

Already in March 1918, an assembly of factory councils in Petrograd denounced the autocratic nature of Bolshevik rule and the Bolshevik attempt to dissolve those factory councils not under Party control.15 Such autocracy only increased when the Bolsheviks finally went ahead with the nationalization of the economy in the summer of 1918, increasing Party control and running the factories with the help of “experts” recruited from the old regime.

Though there was initially an ambiguous continuum between the economically oriented factory councils and the politically oriented town or village councils, the Communist Party quickly homogenized and bureaucratized the territorial soviets, starting with codes governing elections to the soviets in March 1918 and finishing by the time of the Soviet Constitution of 1922. Even more quickly, they got rid of the councils comprising all workers in a factory or other workplace, replacing them with symbolic worker representatives completely subordinate to a director appointed by the Party.

The Communists did all of this while paying lip service to their slogan and key campaign promise of 1917, “All Power to the Soviets.” They eventually got around the contradiction of simultaneously promoting and suppressing the soviets by declaring that councils of representatives of representatives, and even those of representatives of representatives of representatives, were also “soviets.” In fact, the committee furthest removed from any actual soviet of real-life peasants, workers, and soldiers was the “Supreme Soviet.” Since the Bolsheviks tightly controlled all these higher, more bureaucratic organs of government, which they had decided should also be called “soviets,” they could say “All Power to the Soviets” with a straight face—because now all they were saying was, “All Power to Us!”

This ingenious trick was very similar to the one used by the Founding Fathers of the United States, when an assortment of wealthy merchants and slave-owners established a government “of the People, by the People, and for the People.” Slave-owners qualified as people; slaves did not.

The Bolsheviks crushed the factory councils first, though they did not wait long to sink their teeth into the unions and drain them of their independence. It is noteworthy that they moved against the unions preemptively, preventing a possible threat to totalitarian rule even before the unions had offered any sign of resistance. At the First All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions in January 1918, the Bolsheviks successfully defended their position that the trade unions should be subordinated to the Soviet government, in the face of opposition by Mensheviks and anarchists, who argued that the unions should remain independent.

The Bolsheviks were able to dominate the unions using the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. By 1919, under the pretext of the extraordinary measures required by the Civil War, the Central Council had been fully incorporated into the bureaucracy that was now completely controlled by Party leadership.

Of course, as we have already shown, the Communist Party’s “extraordinary measures” preceded the Russian Civil War; they may have been the primary cause of the opposition and outrage that fueled the multiple and conflicting factions that fought in the Civil War.

In 1921, with the Civil War all but over and Bolshevik dominance indisputable, Lenin and his followers could do away with “war communism.” There followed more excuses about exceptional circumstances, delaying yet again the repartition of the pie in the sky that supposedly awaited the workers in paradise. The result was the New Economic Policy (NEP), which Lenin himself described as “a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control” together with state enterprises operating “on a profit basis.”16 Anarchists may have been among the first to level the accusation of “state capitalism,” but Lenin accepted the label as an objective fact.

In conclusion, the Bolsheviks seesawed from November 1917 to the NEP in 1921, changing their economic policy multiple times. Throughout these changes, they entrusted control over the workplace to capitalist bosses with symbolic worker oversight, to Party lackeys, to bureaucratic supreme committees, and to nepmen, the economic opportunists of the NEP era. It seems the only people the Bolsheviks were not willing to trust were the workers themselves.

Anti-colonial Marxist Walter Rodney, who was sympathetic to Stalin and wholly supportive of Lenin, nonetheless acknowledged that “The state, not the workers, effectively controlled the means of production.”17 He also showed how the Soviet Union inherited and furthered the Russian imperialism of the earlier tsarist regime—though that’s a topic for a future essay.

A realist knows that the best counterargument to all these sentimental complaints is the indisputable fact that, in the end, the Bolshevik strategy triumphed. They eliminated all their enemies. The idealists were dead—and therefore wrong. What better positive evidence can we find for the correctness of the Bolshevik position?

1919: in the basements of the Cheka.

The End of Resistance to Bolshevik Realism

Things immediately got better. The workers no longer had to toil for the enrichment of the capitalist class. Now they reaped the fruit of their own labors. (Except, of course, for all the workers in the free-market enterprises permitted under the NEP, and the millions of peasants who quite literally had to give away the fruits and the grains they grew.) To make things simpler, all the social wealth they reaped was kept in a trust managed by the intellectual workers. The intellectual workers worked a lot harder and required more compensation, better food, and bigger houses—but they also made sure that most of that wealth went to fielding an army of 11 million (shy by just a million of being the largest army in world history). And a damn fine opera. And one of the most extensive secret police apparatuses ever seen, too, to make sure the people stayed safe.

During Stalin’s Five Year Plans, the Soviet economy grew faster than the contemporary democratic economies and steered clear of the Depression that was ravishing much of the rest of the world. Idealistic anarchist critiques of “state capitalism” have long pointed out that the Communists were able to bring capitalism to the countries where the capitalist class had largely failed—they did capitalism better than the capitalists. But this naïve complaint misses out on the fact that a strong State, and thus a strong Revolution, requires a robust economy producing huge amounts of surplus value that can be reinvested as the Fathers of the Proletariat see fit.

Alongside all these exciting developments, the workers eventually got housing and healthcare, if they worked hard and kept their mouths shut. Provided, of course, that they weren’t among the millions of victims of the systematic famines designed to break the peasantry.

And that’s why these are such important days to remember.

On this, the one-hundred-year anniversary of the massacres of striking workers in Astrakhan and Petrograd, workers would do well to remember who has their best interests at heart, and keep in mind that obedience is freedom. To celebrate the triumph of the Bolshevik Revolution, which continues to shine as a beacon to oppressed people everywhere, workers should obey their elected union representatives, prisoners should heed their guards, soldiers should obey the command to fire, and the people should await the directives of the government. Anything else would be anarchy.

1922: A lesson on communism for the Russian peasants.

Bibliography

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Additional Reading

1921-1953: A Chronology of Russian Anarchism

Ilyich Moves to Moscow, His First Months of Work in Moscow, from Krupskaya’s “Reminiscences of Lenin”

Bolshevik repression against anarchists in Vologda

April 2018: One Hundred Year Anniversary of the Beginning of Bolshevik Terror

Lenin Orders the Massacre of Sex Workers, 1918

A Century since the Bolshevik Crackdown of August 1918

Manual for Revolutionary Leaders, Michael Velli

Of the seven members of the first Politburo—Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Kamenev, Sokolnikov, Zinoviev, and Bubnov—all but Zinoviev had received elite educations and become professional activists immediately after their education. Stalin was the only one of the seven who came from a less-than-middle class background. His father was a well-to-do shoemaker who owned his own workshop, though he lost his fortunes and became an abusive alcoholic. Young Stalin was able to receive an elite religious education thanks to his mother’s social connections. His first job was as a meteorologist; he later worked briefly at a storehouse in order to organize strike actions there.

Lenin and Sokolnikov were from families of professional white-collar workers; Bubnov was from a mercantile family; Kamenev was the son of a relatively well-paid worker in the railroad industry. Trotsky and Zinoviev were the children of landowning peasants, or kulaks—the very people they identified as the class enemy in the countryside in order to justify the murder of millions, both actual kulaks and poor peasants who opposed Bolshevik policies.

Most anarchists do not believe that a person’s class background determines their beliefs and attitudes, nor that it grants or denies them legitimacy as a human being. We recognize that how we grow up affects our perspective, but we tend to place more importance on how someone chooses to live their life. A few anarchists, like Kropotkin, came from elite backgrounds, whereas many more, such as Emma Goldman and Nestor Makhno, came from working-class or peasant backgrounds.

It is nonetheless significant that practically every single anarchist who was influential in the course of the Russian Revolution or who was chosen to lead a major detachment in the Civil War was a worker or a peasant. This exemplifies the slogan of the First International, “the liberation of the workers is the task of the workers themselves.” (The only exception was Volin, who came from a white-collar background.) It is also significant that, while the Bolsheviks recruited heavily among industrial workers, their entire Politburo was 0% working class.

Given both Marx and Lenin’s systematic use of their adversaries’ class identity—real or perceived—to delegitimize them or even justify murdering them, the fact that neither Marx nor Lenin nor the rest of the Communist leadership were working class is hypocritical to say the least. ↩

On the “blocking units” that did this, see Volkogonov, Dmitri (1996), Shukman, Harold, ed., Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary, London: HarperCollins, p.180. ↩

Brovkin, Vladimir (Autumn 1990), “Workers’ Unrest and the Bolsheviks’ Response in 1919”, Slavic Review, 49 (3): 350–73 ↩

Alexandre Skirda, trans. Paul Sharkey, Nestor Makhno: Anarchy’s Cossack. Oakland: AK Press, 2003 ↩

Beryl Williams, The Russian Revolution 1917–1921. Boston: Wiley-Blackwell, 1987. ↩

Even before Stalin, the Bolsheviks spread lies not so much to convince people of them as to force them to repeat the lies. This was an effective loyalty test: anyone who insisted on speaking the truth was clearly a dangerous counterrevolutionary, whereas those who called starving peasants “kulaks” or denounced principled revolutionary sailors as “White agents” had accepted Communist realism. ↩

“We, the workmen of the Putilov works and the wharf, declare before the laboring classes of Russia and the world, that the Bolshevik government has betrayed the high ideals of the October revolution, and thus betrayed and deceived the workmen and peasants of Russia; that the Bolshevik government, acting in our name, is not the authority of the proletariat and peasantry, but the authority of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, self-governing with the aid of the Extraordinary Commissions [Chekas], Communists, and police.

“We protest against the compulsion of workmen to remain at factories and works, and attempts to deprive them of all elementary rights: freedom of the press, speech, meetings, and inviolability of person.

“We demand:

Immediate transfer of authority to freely elected Workers’ and Peasants’ soviets. Immediate re-establishment of freedom of elections at factories and plants, barracks, ships, railways, everywhere.

Transfer of entire management to the released workers of the trade unions.

Transfer of food supply to workers’ and peasants’ cooperative societies.

General arming of workers and peasants.

Immediate release of members of the original revolutionary peasants’ party of Left Socialist Revolutionaries.

Immediate release of Maria Spiridonova [a Left SR leader].”

↩

Piotr Kropotkin, The Great French Revolution. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1989. p.454-458 ↩

Document no. 54, “Summary of a Report on the Internal Situation in Russia,” in A Collection of Reports on Bolshevism in Russia, abridged ed. Parliamentary Paper: Russia no. 1 [London: HMSO, 1919], p.60 ↩

Carlos Taibo, Soviets, Consejos de Fábrica, Comunas Rurales. Calumnia: Mallorca, 2017 ↩

Robin D.G. Kelley and Jesse Benjamin, “Introduction,” in Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World. London: Verso, 2018. ↩

Maurice Brinton, The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control 1917-1921. 1970. p.65

“Once power had passed into the hands of the proletariat, the practice of the Factory Committees of acting as if they owned the factories became anti-proletarian.” -A.M. Pankratova, Fabzavkomy Rossil v borbe za sotsialisticheskuyu fabriku (Russian Factory Committees in the struggle for the socialist factory). Moscow, 1923 ↩

Mário Machaquiero, A revolução soviética, hoje. Ensaio de releitura da revolução de 1917. Oporto: Afrontamento, 2008. p.144. ↩

Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists. Oakland: AK Press, 2006. p.147 ↩

Carlos Taibo, Soviets, Consejos de Fábrica, Comunas Rurales. Calumnia: Mallorca, 2017. p.58 ↩

V.I. Lenin, “The Role and Functions of the Trade Unions under the New Economic Policy”, LCW, 33, p. 184., Decision Of The C.C., R.C.P.(B.), January 12, 1922. Published in Pravda No. 12, January 17, 1922. Lenin’s Collected Works, 2nd English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1973, first printed 1965, Volume 33, pp.186–196. ↩

Robin D.G. Kelley and Jesse Benjamin, “Introduction,” in Walter Rodney, The Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World. London: Verso, 2018. p.lvi ↩

Disillusioned By Two Decades of Dreams, Discerning ‘10 Illusions’ of the US From the ‘Kabul Moment’

— Shao Xia | September 26, 2021 | Global Times

Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

In 2001, the US entered Kabul, and it was the Taliban who confronted the US. In 2021, the US fled Kabul in chaos, and it was still the Taliban who "sent off" the US. What's different, however, is that the Taliban updated their weapons with captured high-tech American armaments, and has learned from their opposition during the 20 years of US occupation.

This Kabul moment is far more dramatic than the Saigon moment of 1975. When the US started the war in Afghanistan two decades ago, its national strength was almost at its peak. But now the US became another superpower lost in the Graveyard of Empires, just like the Soviet Union and Great Britain. As Russian President Vladimir Putin noted, the US is now walking the Soviet Union's path.

Perhaps what the US is most worried about today is that the Kabul moment might just be the first domino to fall down and the first hole of the Broken Windows theory. History never ends. History is proceeding.

The world is undergoing a great change unseen in a century, and the momentum of change is accumulating fast. However, imperialists and hegemonists will never willingly admit their defeat, and will never honestly admit the end of "American mythology". They did their utmost to project the aura of the peak era into the shadow of today's America, and created "10 illusions" for those who yearn for America and fear America. These illusions should be considered in detail.

Illusion 1: America is invincible

Relying on advanced weapons and equipment, the US military killed numerous lives, including those of Afghan civilians, as if the operators of high-tech weapons were "playing video games."

However, in the long term, "weapons are an important factor in war, but not the decisive factor. It is the people, not things, that are decisive." Calculating the strength of the two sides is not a simple mathematical question of comparing GDP, but an analytical problem of political economy.

An economic "star" may indeed be a "black hole" in politics. For example the Wall Street titans may earn a lot, but they are also powder kegs that cause polarization between the rich and the poor, creating national turmoil. America's strength is glamorous, but it is by no means invulnerable, let alone invincible, as the Taliban has confirmed.

Illusion 2: The US could play with the concepts of grand geopolitical strategy at will

The US always boasts of its military supremacy-based strategies, while completely ignores the gap between its capabilities and aspirations.

John Gaddis, an American scholar, pointed out in his book On Grand Strategy that to succeed in geostrategy, you must recognize what kind of restrictions and constraints exist. There is a saying in Sun Tzu's Art of War, "plan before moving, gain something by stopping." Napoleon, who rushed into Russia and eventually lost the war, and Perikles, who blindly pursued hegemony and eventually lost Athens to Sparta, were unwilling to be bound by realistic conditions and stubbornly pursued their overambitious goals, thereby doomed to failure.

Today, the American hegemony is falling apart, as the Economist bluntly points out that the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan had demonstrated Biden's "Great Defeat." Under such circumstances, the US is still addicted to playing with a grand geostrategy out of its control, making excuses for the Kabul moment, arguing that withdrawing troops from Afghanistan is a great turn to the grand strategy of the Indo-Pacific, as laid out by former president Barack Obama.

Even if the US does pivot to the Indo-Pacific, regional countries might have to ponder: Will the US run away again as it did in Afghanistan?

Illusion 3: American democracy could heal itself

American democracy has died in Afghanistan, and has been admitted to an intensive care unit in the US. The withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan is not the end of disasters in the past 20 years, but the beginning of an American political civil war in the next 20 years. We saw its origins in the forced storming of Capitol building earlier this year.

Francis Fukuyama said recently that the Afghan crisis marks the end of American hegemony, while the real crisis in the US lies in internal polarization, which will result in almost no consensus on all issues. There is no sign of American democracy healing itself. On the contrary, American democracy has become an accelerator of political division and social confrontation.

Biden came to power in the general election controversy and congressional riots, talking endlessly about vaccination and infrastructure plans, rather than taking care of the American people in their time of great need. Afghanistan issues have hit Biden's approval rate hard, leading the US into a fierce political battle before the mid-term elections. No matter what happens on the US domestic political scene, the current political division in the US will not be the worst seen, it will become worse.

Illusion 4: The US could still do whatever it wants by virtue of its position of strength

People with real strength never talk about strength all the time, but recently the "position of strength" has become the mantra of American diplomacy.

The US made use of its so-called position of strength to engage in unilateral sanctions and "exerting maximum pressure," but all its expected goals have failed. Where there is oppression, there is resistance. Anti-sanction, anti-pressure, anti-bullying. More countries and people are on the way to an era of awakening.

Americans often say, don't "bet on America to lose." This makes America look like an anxious gambler, who wants to win too much but only loses more. The international community is not a casino, and no country would like to place its future and destiny on the roulette wheel.

More peace-loving countries now stand up and say no to the US, and safeguard the morality, conscience and justice of the international community.

Illusion 5: America is 'back'

Biden made a high-profile announcement, "America is back" at the Munich Security Conference in early 2021, trying to create the impression that America is returning to the world stage and intends to expand again. However, the Kabul moment has shown that this was not the case. "America is back" has changed to "America is home." The Republican Party has sarcastically stated: "The Taliban is back, not the United States."

Whether it is the crazy withdrawal from international treaties in the Trump era, or the failure to fight the epidemic, or the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, it all confirmed what Czech President Zeman noted, Americans have lost "the prestige of a global leader."

The expansionist America needs to go home, have a physical check-up, and seek remedies while reflecting on its past. On the other hand, the US should engage in true multilateralism, learn to listen and discuss, resort to problem-solving through political dialogue instead of the wanton and futile use of aircraft and artillery.

Illusion 6: The American alliance system has been 'repaired'

The Biden administration expects to create a "Grand West" through its European allies, the Group of Seven (G7), the QUAD mechanism, the "Indo-Pacific Strategy" and the "Summit for Democracy". However, the US did not consult or even inform its allies about before deciding on the hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan. Many Europeans lament that the United States merely treats its allies as a tool.

It is not difficult to tell whether it is "America first" or putting allies interest first. It is the US that forced its allies to revise bilateral free trade agreements on the grounds of trade deficit. It is again the US that hoarded scarce anti-epidemic materials such as vaccines, regardless of the demands of its allies. The fate of its interest-based alliance system is doomed as it will break up upon the exhaustion of interests.

Britain, the devoted supporter of the US in the group, has repeatedly vented its dissatisfaction with the US recently. The British defense secretary expressed the idea that the US was no longer a superpower. Britons may still remember that the US betrayed Britain and dealt the last blow to "the empire on which the sun never sets" during the Suez Canal crisis in 1956. Will history repeat itself? Let's wait and see.

The Anglo-Saxons believe strongly in self-interest. "Every man for himself and the Devil take the hindmost." A man may be stabbed with a knife in the back as soon as it is deemed expedient to do so.

Illusion 7: Universal values are the soft power of the US

"When poor, you get no friends. When rich, you get more friends than you know." The soft power depends on the hard power. When the hard power of the US declined sharply, e.g. at the Saigon moment in the 1970s, it kept a low profile and turned from ideological diplomacy to realistic diplomacy, with Kissinger as the representative.

However, it is different this time. The Biden administration propagated "universal values" vigorously and even arranged the "Summit for Democracy" after the "Kabul moment".

"Universal values" are "luxuries" given to the "third world" by the US. At the moment of severe lack of national strength, the US, unable to fulfill its promise to the followers, has only brought disgrace on itself in Afghanistan.

The Afghans who believed in the commitment of the US for democracy were either abandoned without mercy, fell from airplanes they cling to and died, or became miserable refugees. I'm afraid it will be difficult to reproduce the highlight of "universal values" at the "Summit for Democracy" in December as we still remember the Afghan children murdered in drone strikes.

Illusion 8: The economies will continue to rely unilaterally on the US

The supremacy of the US dollar has created economic dependence on the US. The US frequently abuse other economies by using tools such as tariffs, sanctions or even decoupling when necessary.

However, the epidemic has hit the US economy continuously, and the crazy financial capital injection used as a "cure" has caused the skyrocketing of prices and inflation. The trade war with China revealed the long-standing industrial and financial problems of the United States. The US's deficit with China even rose rather than fell.

More and more countries have begun to enhance their autonomy in economy and finance. A "de-dollarization" movement has begun. Countries have started to reduce their US debts substantially, give up anchoring US dollars, and increase commodity trading in currencies other than US dollars and non-US dollar currency or gold reserves.

The dominance of the US dollar is not guaranteed by sufficient real economy and a gold standard; instead, it is endorsed by national credit. A mudslide of the dollar collapse is not far away when the US Congress continually abuses its credit without any restraint every year.

Illusion 9: America would have the last laugh on epidemic prevention and control

COVID-19 has infected tens of millions of Americans and caused more deaths than the sum of those lost in World Wars I and II, accompanied by more severe social conflicts and crisis.

In the past few days, the daily average number of confirmed cases has exceeded 150,000 consecutively. There have been over 1,000 new fatalities each day, drawing sharp criticism even from its own allies. The European Council decided to take America off the "EU safe travel list" and suggested its member countries take epidemic prevention restrictions against American travelers. Despite "natural disaster" factors at the beginning of the epidemic, America's current situation where a large number of hoarded COVID-19 vaccines still cannot reverse the tide of considerable deaths of its people can only be called a "man-made disaster".

However, America attempts to shirk its responsibility and hide its incompetence by blaming China. It declared that "China's so-called anti-pandemic achievement is the result when authoritarianism defeated "human rights" and China's "Zero-Covid" policy would lead to huge economic costs and would only make itself into an "island isolated from the world".

In fact, the countries imitating American anti-pandemic measures have had to swallow bitter pills. Europe once interrupted their lockdowns against the epidemic and is now suffering from a variant of the virus that is bouncing back. India, passively taking measures for epidemic prevention and control, has been completely trapped in uncontrollable consequences. Vietnam, a country that relaxed its vigilance during the fight against the epidemic, has been faced with tough results.

America may have false hopes that vaccines will save its people from misery, the economy would reinvigorate itself, and it would successfully shirk its responsibility for its repeated mistakes in the fight against the epidemic. Please wake up. The result can only be that, American measures against the epidemic will meet the final failure, American people will be the victims, and the whole world will have to face the resulting consequences.

Illusion 10: America could determine the development of history

30 years ago, the dissolution of the Soviet Union once gave America a reason to cheer. The "end of history" has made America unreasonably believe that it could determine the development of history.

Today, history does not advance straight along the designed route of "end of history", instead it shifts to other paths. Today, America stands against global trends of history, and heads towards a mirage of ideology built on hegemonism and neoliberalism. The "American myth" has been stricken by a financial crisis, Donald Trump's failed administration, failure in the anti-epidemic fight, riots on Capitol Hill, defeat in Afghanistan, and America has arrived on the brink of an edifice falling apart under the weight of its own dreams.

It should be remembered, America's historical view was built on its short story of 250 years, and thus it has no concept of "sunset", only "sunrise". There has never been any era of America solely. America was, is and will be only a country in the era.

— The author is an observer on current affairs. [email protected]

if you really think you can disprove redmensch, refute each of the books and points he referenced with annotated sources, bc you aren't explaining your point of view with anything substantial

I guess this is as good of a time as any to post a huge excerpt on the Jews of the USSR from Human Rights in the Soviet Union:

***The Jewish People in the USSR***

During the Czarist period the Jewish people, largely confined by imperialist edict to the western part of the Russian Empire (i.e. 'the Pale) (Poland, the Baltic states, the Ukraine and Belorussia) suffered vicious anti-Semitism. Beginning in the last decades of the 19th Century, the Czarist government sponsored violent pogroms against the Jewish people during times of crisis, making them the scapegoat for economic and political problems, and thereby deflecting criticism from itself. Jews were systematically excluded from privileged positions, and many were driven out of the country by discrimination and pogroms in the generation before the 1917 Revolution, large numbers of whom settled in the USA.

Immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution expressions of anti-Semitism became a crime. In July 1918, the Council of People's Commissars called for the destruction of 'the anti-Semitic movement at its roots' by forbidding 'pogromists and persons inciting to pogroms'. In 1922, the Russian Criminal Code forbade 'agitation and propaganda arousing national enmities and dissensions' and specified a minimum sentence of one year's solitary confinement (and 'death in time of war') as punishment. In 1927, the Russian Republic passed legislation outlawing the dissemination, manufacture or possession of literature calculated to stir national and religious hostility.

Article 74 of the Russian Criminal Code, which came into effect in 1961, reads, 'Propaganda or agitation aimed at inciting racial or national enmity or discord ... is punishable by loss of personal freedom for a period of six months to three years, or exile from two to five years.'

During the Civil War and throughout the 1920s there was an active official government campaign against anti-Semitism, incidents involving, and actions taken against, were frequently reported in the Soviet press. In this period the Party published over 100 books and brochures opposing anti-Semitism.

Jewish intellectuals and workers were disproportionately active in the revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire. In 1922, Jews represented 5.2% of Communist Party membership (about five times their percentage of the population). From the late 1920s through to World War II the proportion of Jews in the Party was about 4.3%. 56 During the Civil War large numbers of non-Marxist Jews rallied to the Bolsheviks, the only major non anti-Semitic organized force.

The White Armies and their allies systematically promoted pogroms and other forms of anti-Semitism as part of their campaign to defeat the revolution. Many of the top Party leaders were Jews e.g. Kamenev, Trotsky and Zinoviev, Kaganovich and Litvinov.

After the Soviet regime had removed all the traditional Czarist restrictions on Jews, they eagerly took advantage of the new educational, economic and social activities opened to them. As a result both of the elimination of traditional barriers and the general leftist mobilisation in which most Jews participated, large numbers gave up their traditional ways, and became part of the mainstream of the newly emerging Soviet society.

The majority of the young generation of Jews became alienated from both the religion and the cultural practices of their parents. As a measure of the rapid integration of Jews into Soviet society, intermarriage, which was extremely rare before the Revolution, became quite common. In the 25 years after the revolution, traditional Jewish life was revolutionized as the Communist Party organized new organizations to impart a socialist content to Jewish culture.

Special 'Jewish national districts' for Jewish settlement were set aside in the south of Russia, the Ukraine and Crimea. 58 In 1928, an autonomous Jewish Republic was established within the Russian Republic of Birobidzhan, on the border of Manchuria. This was meant not only as a 'Jewish homeland', but as a means of encouraging development of an undeveloped area of the East. Birobidzhan was officially proclaimed an autonomous region in 1934, and although it has attracted relatively few Jewish settlers, it continues to exist as a Jewish Autonomous Republic.

Jewish culture, within a socialist rather than a religious or Zionist context, thrived in the 1920s and 1930s. Both the Ukrainian and Belorussian Academy of Sciences included Jewish sections which were described as 'a laboratory of scientific thought in the field of Jewish culture'. These institutions focused on the history of the revolutionary movement among Jews and the social and economic condition of their people. In 1919, a Jewish State Theatre was established in Moscow, and by 1934 a further 18 had been established in other cities. Jewish theatre, as well as other expressions of Jewish culture, was strongly supported by the Soviet state. In 1932, 653 Yiddish books were published with a total circulation of more than 2.5 million (an average run of about 4,000 copies). In 1935, there were Yiddish dailies in Moscow, Kharkov, Minsk and Birobidzhan; in the Ukraine alone ten Jewish dailies were in circulation. During the mass hysteria of theGreat Purge Trials (1936-38), essentially caused by the paranoid fear of Japanese and German invasion, many Yiddish cultural institutions, along with many other institutions in Soviet society, were temporarily closed down, to be largely revived during World War II.

During World War II a Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was set up in the Soviet Union, to help mobilize both Soviet and non-Soviet Jews against Fascism, and to encourage the development of a socialist oriented Jewish culture. Jews were given priority in evacuation from areas about to be overrun by the Nazi invaders. Virtually all Polish Jews who survived the holocaust (250,000) survived by fleeing to the Soviet Union and being evacuated East.

In the immediate post- World War II period, Yiddish culture thrived in the USSR. The Jewish State Theatre continued to prosper in Moscow; a tri-weekly paper, Aynikayt, was published, also in Moscow; between 1946 and 1948 110 books were published in Yiddish. The Soviet Union was the first country to accord diplomatic recognition to Israel.

In 1948, with the onset of the Cold War, the paranoid atmosphere characteristic of the late 1930s returned to the USSR. There were a number of official accusations that some politically prominent, professional Soviet Jews were involved in 'cosmopolitan', pro-Western or Zionist (anti-Socialist nationalist) plotting against the Soviet state.

The hysterical atmosphere of the 1948-53 period was induced by fear of another attack, this time by the US and its NATO allies.* There was a tendency to identify most manifestations of Jewish nationalism with 'cosmopolitanism", 'Zionism' and pro-imperialism during these years, in good part owing to the new state of Israel's increasing identification with the West. The Jewish Anti- Fascist Committee was dissolved; the Jewish State Theatre in Moscow was closed. Shlomo Mikhoels, a prominent actor and head of the Jewish Anti- Fascist Committee, was assassinated (by the KGB according to Zionists) and various Yiddish publishing houses and periodicals closed. Hundreds of prominent Jewish literary figures and political activists were arrested and charged with under-mining the Soviet state by working with Western bourgeois or Zionist forces. The height of the anti-Zionism campaign was manifested in an announcement in January 1953, that a group, mostly of Jewish doctors, were plotting to kill prominent Soviet leaders (apparently including Stalin). These doctors were accused of working on behalf of the Zionist 'international Jewish bourgeois national organisation' - the Joint Distribution Committee. In February 1953, a month after the announcement of the discovery of 'the doctor's plot' the Soviet Union broke off diplomatic relations with Israel, and shortly thereafter began to support the Arabs in their confrontation with the Zionist state. The Soviet reversal on the Arab-Israeli question was largely motivated by Israel's increasing integration with US imperialism.

After Stalin's death in March 1953, the campaign against 'the doctor's plot' was quietly dropped. But it had provoked suspicions against many Jews working in medical facilities on the grounds of their alleged Zionist sympathies (and thus anti-Soviet potential). Thousands of Jewish medical specialists were dismissed from laboratories, hospitals, medical institutes and faculties during this campaign.

Many anti-Soviets in the West, especially Zionists, have argued that the 1948-53 campaign against 'cosmopolitanism' and 'Zionism' was really a manifestation of anti-Semitism (analogous to that of Hitler's) but a realistic assessment demonstrates that this argument functioned to serve the interests of Western and Israeli Zionists in their long-term battle with Jewish Marxists for hegemony in the Jewish community, as well as to strengthen Western imperialist support for Israel. Nevertheless, in common with the far more vicious events of 1936-38 the hysteria and the purges of 1948-53 seem to have been the outcome of a considerable over-estimation of the danger from pro-Western Jewish and Zionist forces in the Soviet Union.

Many innocent Jews appeared to have suffered, although little permanent harm seems to have resulted either to individuals or to their careers. The Soviets were slow, however, in restoring the various Yiddish cultural institutions that were closed in the 1948-53 campaign, and, combined with the rapid undermining of Yiddish and Yiddish culture through urbanization, education and professionalization, this has meant that distinctive Jewish cultural life never regained the level of the pre- 1948 period.

***The Economic Position of Soviet Jews***

Professionally and economically the Jewish people have fared extremely well in the period of Soviet power. They are, for example, far more highly educated than any other nationality in the Soviet Union, and in 1970-71 the ratio of higher education students per 1,000 population was 49.2. This is almost twice as high as the next highest group, the Georgians, who had a ratio of 27.1 per 1,000. (Russians rank fourth on this indicator with a ratio of 21.1 per 1,000) In the Russian Republic in the early 1970s, of every 1,000 Jews of ten years old and above 344 completed some form of higher education, compared with only 43 out of 1 ,000 Russians; an 8 : 1 ratio in favour of the Jews. Comparable ratios in the Ukraine were 6.5 : 1. in Belorussia 7:1. and in Latvia 5.5 : I.

In the early 1970s approximately 1 10,000 Jewish students were in institutions of higher education; this represents 2.55% of the total — an over-representation factor of almost three. In 1960 77,000 Jewish students had been in such institutions.

In 1971, 6.7% of all scientific workers in the Soviet Union were Jews. In that year .9% of all Soviets were Jews, therefore, in this field Jews were over-represented by a factor of 7.5. Armenians, with an over-representation factor of 1 .5 in the same year came next, and Russians, with an over-representation factor of 1 .2 were fourth in this respect.

Around 1970 about 68% of all Jews employed in the Russian Republic were specialists with either a higher or secondary special education; this compares with 19% of Russians. In the mid-1960s, 15% of all Soviet doctors, 9% of all writers and journalists. 10% of all judges and lawyers and 8% of all actors, musicians and artists were Jewish. The percentage of Jews in the various professions has been declining, even though their absolute numbers have been rising. In 1972, there were 68.000 Jewish scientific workers, approximately double the number of those so employed in 1960; but in that year 9.5% of all scientific workers were Jews compared to 6.1% in 1973. Given the considerable advances of the traditionally backward nationalities, especially the Asians, this is to be expected.

***The Jewish Religion***

The practice of Judaism as a religion has received more or less the same treatment as has the practice of other religions, such as Russian Orthodoxy, Islam, Catholicism and Lutheranism. Official policy and practice is to permit religion to be practised, but to discourage its propagation by forbidding organized religious instruction, active conversion and other forms of religious propaganda, while at the same time officially propagating anti-religious and atheistic precepts ; The Party considers all religions to be superstitions which will gradually die out, as the oppressive conditions which gave birth to them are eliminated, and the old people brought up in the old religious environments die. When applied to Judaism, the offical anti-religious policies in operation for all religions are often singled out by the Western media or by Zionist interests in the West to substantiate the claim that the USSR discriminates against Judaism (in a manner analogous to Hitler), thereby attempting to mobilize world Jewish and public opinion against the Soviet Union.

Ninety-eight percent of Jews in the USSR live in urban areas, mostly concentrated in the larger cities. This fact, together with the remarkable educational and professional progress of Soviet Jews, manifests their central integration into Soviet society, with the corollary of rapid deterioration of traditional Jewish ways. Most Jews, especially the younger, have adopted the secular atheism of Soviet society, few any longer subscribe to Judaism. It is mostly the old, together with nationalist dissidents, who attend religious services or otherwise practise Judaic rites. 68 As a result the number of active synagogues have been declining.

In the early 1970s there were about 100 active synagogues in the Soviet Union, although the figure given for 1972 by anti-Soviet Jewish organizations in the West was 58. A small yeshivah operates in Moscow to train rabbis, and limited editions of prayer books are published: 3,000 in 1957, and another edition of 5,000 in 1968. Two Judaic religious rites have been subjected to pressure from the state: Passover and circumcision. Circumcision, which is also traditionally practised by the Islamic peoples, is regarded by the Soviets as a barbaric custom comparable to subincision or clitoridectomy. The Soviets have attempted to suppress this practice since the Revolution ; more stringently in the Asian republics than among the Jews.

The celebration of Passover is regarded as primarily a Zionist rather than a pious manifestation. Passover commemorates the deliverance of the Jewish people from Egyptian bondage and is marked by the recitation of the words 'Next Year in Jerusalem'. That Zionists both inside and outside the Soviet Union, many of whom are atheists, have, in fact, given the celebration of Passover a Zionist and anti- Soviet character (asserting that the modern day Egyptian captor is the Soviet state) has not gone unnoticed by the Soviets.

There have been Jewish complaints both inside and outside the USSR that the Soviet state often puts obstacles in the way of securing matzo (unleavened bread) which is used as part of the Passover celebration. Such mild harassment of what is officially considered to be anti-Soviet or reactionary aspects of a religion is by no means unique to the treatment of Judaism. For example, the traditional pilgrimage to Mecca, required of devout Islamic men, has been largely suppressed, as has the wearing of the veil for women.

Soviet anti-religious propaganda in general attacks all religions, and in particular, those aspects that are regarded as specifically harmful within each religion. An analysis of anti-religious propaganda directed at Jews in the 1960s finds such specific themes as: (1) The Jewish religion promotes allegiance to another state, Israel, and to a reactionary, pro-imperialist movement, Zionism; (2) the Jewish religion promotes the notion that the Jewish people are superior to others, 'the chosen people', and thus breeds hatred of other peoples; (3) the Jewish religion elevates the pursuit of material wealth, a pursuit incompatible with the Communist ideal of Soviet society; and (4) the Jewish religion calls for genocide and enslavement of other peoples by the Jews (a reference to the effect of Zionism on the Arabs).

***Jewish Culture***

Traditional Jewish languages, especially Yiddish, are dying out in the USSR. In 1970, only 17.7% of Jews reported that they spoke a Jewish language as their native tongue; a further 7.7% reported they were able to speak such a language, but that it was not their mother tongue. Those who continue to speak Yiddish, or one of the Oriental Jewish languages, are either old people or those largely concentrated in the peripheral regions that were incorporated into the USSR in 1939-41, or both. Very few younger Russian, Belorussian or Ukrainian Jews now speak or understand Yiddish. This contrasts sharply with the situation before the Revolution, when 97% of all Jews in Russia (including Russian Poland) regarded Yiddish as their mother tongue; by 1926, this figure stood at 70%. 72 In 1970, 60% of Jews in Lithuania specified Yiddish as their native tongue, 40% in Latvia and approximately 50% in Moldavia.

The rapid decline of Yiddish reflects the general decline of distinctively Jewish culture among a highly urbanized, educated and professionalized population that has become fully integrated into Soviet society. That the responsibility for this decline does not rest upon any Russification policies of the Soviet state is demonstrated by the situation of the various European and Asian minority nationalities that are geographically concentrated. In these areas, rapid economic progress has not undermined traditional languages and cultures. Nevertheless, it should be noted that there have been no Yiddish language schools in the USSR since 1948.

A small Yiddish cultural establishment still exists in the USSR, although on a much smaller scale than in the pre-1948 period. Yiddish papers, publishing houses and theatres were restored after 1956, following their suppression as part of the 1948-53 'anti-cosmopolitan', anti-Zionist campaign. In the mid-1970s there were two Yiddish periodicals circulated in the USSR: Sovetish Heimland, a literary monthly with a circulation of 25,000, and the thrice weekly newspaper the Birobidzhaner Shtern with a circulation of 12,000, largely outside the Jewish Autonomous Republic of Birobidzhan where it is published, Yiddish speakers also have access to Yiddish language publications and periodicals published by Jewish Marxists overseas.

A few books continue to be published in Yiddish. Between 1948 and 1 970, 32 Yiddish language books were published in the USSR. 76 More important than Yiddish language publications, which can be read by only about one of eight Soviet Jews, are works translated into Russian which originally were published in Yiddish. In recent years there have been a considerable number of these, many of which are issued in quite long press runs. For example, in 1973 50,000 copies of I. Rabin's On the Nieman. originally written in Yiddish, were printed in Russian. Many Russian translations from the Yiddish are of poetic works.

The most co nspicuous expression of Jewish culture in the USSR, and that receiving the widest participation, is the Jewish theatre. There are several Jewish song, music and drama companies, the oldest being the Vilnius Jewish People's Theatre, which was established in 1957. Since 1962, the Moscow Dramatic Ensemble, a Jewish theatrical group, many of whose actors were part of the old Jewish State Theatre, has been performing regularly in Moscow; there are also a number of other itinerant Jewish theatre groups, including the Birobidzhan Yiddish People's Theatre and the Kishinev Jewish

***Political Positions***

Jews have the highest representation in the Communist Party of any other Soviet nationality. In 1965, 80 out of every 1,000 Jews belonged to the Party, compared to the Soviet average of 51 per 1,000. In 1969, Jews made up 1.5% of the Party (an over-representation factor of 1.67). As other nationalities, especially Asians, are increasingly brought into the Party, and as the Party's recruitment policies increasingly favour the working class, the percentage of Jews in the Party has been declining, even while their absolute number has been increasing. Between 1920 and 1940 the percentage of Jews in the Party fluctuated around 4.5% to 5.0%. The percentage of Jews in the principal leading body of the Party, the Central Committee, is proportional to the number of Jews in the population.

In 1976, three Jews were elected to the 330 person Central Committee. In the 1920s, 25% of the Central Committee was Jewish, 10% in the late 1930s, 2-3% in the 1950s, and .3% in the 1960s. Given the strong representation of members from working class and peasant backgrounds on the Central Committee, and the increasing political mobilization of the more backward nationalities, that the proportion of Jews now accords with their percentage of the population should be considered neither extraordinary nor exemplifying discrimination.

The number of Jews elected to all local Soviets between 1959 and 1973 has averaged about 7,000 per election, or about .4% of all Soviet delegates (an under-representation factor of about .50). In 1970 and 1974 six Jews were elected to the Supreme Soviet: roughly proportionate to their share of the population.

Very few Jews now occupy prominent positions in the Party or government apparatus, in contrast to the pre- 1948 situation when Jews were prominent in all major aspects of government and Party activities. In the early 1970s the highest ranking Jewish person was the Deputy Minister for Supplies, V. Dymshits, who was also the highest ranking Jewish person on the Party's Central Committee; another was Alexander Chakovsky, the editor of the influential Literary Gazette. Lev Shapiro, the first secretary of the Birobidzhan Party organization and also a member of the Central Committee, became increasingly influential during the 1970s.

The evidence seems to point to a certain distrust of Jews in sensitive top leadership positions, initially aroused during the 1948-53 ' anti-cosmopolitan' /anti-Zionist campaign, and reborn after the 1967 Israeli-Arab Six Day War, when many Soviet Jews adopted pro-Israeli sympathies - thus manifesting opposition to Soviet policies. While there seems to be no substantial evidence for discrimination against Jews as Party members or in middle level Party and government positions, the evidence is compatible with some political discrimination against them for the top leadership roles as heads of ministries, Politburo members and first secretaries of leading Party organisations.

Given the long history of Jews having filled leading roles in the Party, which continued throughout the Stalin period, this seems to reflect Soviet doubts about historically specific Jewish loyalties on the question of Israel/Zionism, rather than classical anti-Semitic attitudes.

***Anti-Semitism in the USSR***

Not surprisingly, the virulent anti-Semitism of all classes in the pre-1917 Russian Empire has left remnants of anti-Semitic attitudes, especially among older, less educated and more rural populations, even after two generations of Soviet education. To the extent that such attitudes linger on, in spite of official Party policies designed to eradicate them, must be distinguished from the economic and political policies and educational campaigns of the Party.

Evidence concerning whether or not Jews in the Soviet Union experienced a significant amount of interpersonal anti-Semitism is mixed. Studies of recent Soviet emigree's anti-Semitic experiences casts considerable doubt on the theory that interpersonal anti-Semitism is a major factor in the country, A 1973 survey of 2,527 emigrants from the USSR in Israel found that 25% of those who had been nationalist activists in the USSR claimed never personally to have experienced an incident of anti-Semitism. In another survey of emigrants bound for Israel only 39% claimed that anti-Semitism in the USSR was a primary reason for their emigration. It is of interest to note that many more emigrants, bound for the US rather than for Israel, claimed both to have experienced anti-Semitism and that such experiences were the primary reason for their emigration. Anti-Soviet pro-Jewish emigrant observers, such as Gitelman, draw the reasonable conclusion that a language of motives focusing on anti-Semitism has been formulated that maximizes the probability of being accepted into the US, that is, affirms the claim to legitimate refugee status. Asserting the desire to make more money or to advance one's career as the reason for emigration to the US would not be effective.

***Zionism and anti-Semitism***

From the beginning of the Soviet state in 1917, the Soviets, with various degrees of intensity, have systematically attacked Zionism as reactionary, pro- imperialist, racist and, since World War II, essentially Fascist. They share their analysis with most of the rest of the world's Marxists, including many Jewish Marxists, as well as with most progressive movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America; especially those in the Islamic world. Anti-Soviets, especially those sympathetic to Zionism and the Israeli state, often fallaciously accuse the Soviet Union of anti-Semitism because of Soviet attacks on Zionism. But the two are quite different. Anti-Semitism, the ideology that Jews are a race to be despised and that to discriminate against them is justified, is against the law in the Soviet Union and, as far as I can ascertain, totally absent from all official Party and government written matter. Anti-Zionism, the notion that Jews should not seek or support a separate state in which all Jews maintain solidarity solely amongst themselves - rather than with individuals of other ethnic groups - is official state and Party policy.

Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda includes such themes as the following:

(1) that most international Jewish organizations in the West are controlled by Jewish capitalists and, therefore, operate against the interest of workers; (2) that Israel endeavours to establish an inherently anti- Communist 'fifth column' inside the Socialist countries; (3) that Zionism and Israel are 'implacable enemies of the socialist camp'; 4) that Israel is intent on building a 'Greater Israel' from the Nile to the Euphrates, where the Israelis would be a kind of master race comparable to that expounded in Nazi ideology for the Aryans; (5) that the Israeli state's ruling class jeopardizes the very existence of Israel as a state by the expansionist and militarist policies they follow; and: (6) that Zionism, as practised by the Israeli state in relation to the Arabs, is closely paralleled by the treatment of Jews by German Fascists.

Claims that the Soviet Union engages in anti-Semitic propaganda can invariably be reduced to statements such as these about Zionism, or to examples of anti-religious propaganda which, as applied to Judaism, do not differ qualitatively from that applied to Islam or Christianity. It is difficult to see how anti- Zionism and propaganda against the religious aspect of Judaism can justify the claim that, similar to Fascist anti-Semitic propaganda, the USSR considers Jews to be racially inferior. Such, however, is the implication of most statements that employ examples of anti-Zionism to support the contention of Soviet anti-Semitism.

Indicative of Zionist allegations of official Soviet anti-Semitism was the response of some Jewish dissidents, in November 1980, to an article in the Young Pioneer's Newspaper which attacked Zionism as 'modern day Fascism' calling it 'the main enemy of peace on Earth'. This article went on to argue that Zionists who control 'the major portion' of the US mass media have 'orchestrated anti-Soviet campaigns and opposed the strategic arms limitation treaty', and that 'Jewish bankers and billionaires' established the Jewish Defence League which 'terrorizes' Soviet diplomats in New York, and that Jewish bankers acted to 'defend their own class interests'. In commenting on this article, Jewish dissidents in the Soviet Union said that:

"We regard it as one of the worst examples of anti-Semitic writings to have appeared in Soviet publications in recent years. , . . Even more unfortunately, it is the first time in recent memory that anything so blatant has appeared in material intended for children."

If such statements are indeed the most blatant examples of official anti- Semitism that Zionist critics of the Soviet system can find, one can be assured that there is no official anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union.

The Six Day War between Israel and the Arab states, which was won decisively by Israel, generated much sympathy for the Israelis among many Soviet Jews. Given the Soviet's active support for Egypt and Syria in this war, and their strong commitment to opposing Israeli expansionism, and to the creation of a Palestinian state (it should be noted that the Soviets have never advocated the elimination of the state of Israel), such sympathy for its enemies aroused concern. Beginning in 1967 a Zionist dissident movement began to gain credibility within the Soviet Union; it manifested itself in such activities as large numbers of non-religious Jewish youths gathering around synagogues to demonstrate their support for Zionist ideas and Israel's cause, as well as the promotion of emigration to Israel. Jewish dissidents came to participate in the full range of dissident activities which focused on attacking Soviet policies and institutions in interviews with Western reporters, and in documents smuggled out of the Soviet Union.

The Soviet government's response was to step up its anti-Zionist propaganda campaign to a considerable extent, emphasizing the six themes itemized above. In 1966 only ten articles attacking Zionism were reported in the Soviet press, in 1969 there were 42, and at the peak of the anti-Zionist campaign in 1970, there were 204. 90 The post-1967 campaign was largely directed towards persuading Soviet Jews not to leave the USSR for Israel.

***The Post- 1967 Jewish Emigration from the USSR***

Throughout the 1960s about 1,000 Jews a year emigrated from the USSR to Israel; mostly on the grounds of reunification with their families. After the 1967 War, significant numbers of Jews began to apply to leave the USSR for Israel. In 1971, the government, apparently recognizing that its campaign to persuade Zionist Jews to stay was ineffective, began to issue numerous emigration visas for Israel. In 1971, approximately 13,000 Jews emigrated to Israel; approximately equal to the total number of those who had left for Israel in the previous 12 years. 92 From 1972 to 1977 approximately 30,000 Jews left for Israel each year, and in 1978 and 1979, when emigration became easier, roughly 50,000 left each year. Virtually any Jews wishing to leave were granted emigration visas during these latter years. Emigration declined after 1979, indicating that most of those who wished to leave had already done so, as well as a stricter emigration policy coincident with the revived Cold War.

Between 1968 and 1976, 133,000 Jews left the USSR, approximately 6,2% of all Soviet Jews; by the beginning of 1980 the percentage had risen to roughly 12%, a total of approximately 250,000. In the early 1970s, Roy Medvedev, usually an accurate source of information about the dissident community in the USSR, estimated that between 200,000 and 300,000 Jews would apply to leave. Maximum estimates from anti-Soviet sources speculated that the figure would reach 500,000, that is 25% of all Soviet Jews. 94 The decline in emigration in 1980 and 1981 indicated that the Medvedev estimate was probably correct - that is, almost all who had wanted to leave had left.

Those who left the USSR had been heavily concentrated in certain areas of the country. Over 50% who applied for exit visas between 1968 and 1976 were from the five Republics of Georgia, Uzbekistan, Latvia, Lithuania and Moldavia. Generally, Jews who emigrated, during that period at least, were either from areas newly amalgamated with the USSR (Latvia, Lithuania, Moldavia or the Western Ukraine) where they had not yet fully integrated themselves into Soviet life, or from Soviet Georgia where, although conditions were exceptionally good for Jews, their brand of Judaism virtually mandated their emigration to the 'Holy Land". Over 50% of all Georgian Jews migrated - mostly to Israel - as did 22% of Latvian, 41% of Lithuanian, 13% of Moldavian and 8% of Uzbek Jews between 1968 and 1976.

This contrasted sharply with the picture for the Soviet heartland of the Russian Republic, the Ukraine and Belorussia, where, according to the 1970 census, 80% of Soviet Jews live. In the same period only 1 .9% of Russian Jews left the country, as did 1 .6% of Belorussian Jews and 5.5% of Ukrainian Jews, most of whom were from the western third of the Republic — formerly part of Poland. Less than 12% (about 16.000) of the total Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union between 1968 and 1976 was from Russia proper.

These figures indicate that until the mid-1970s the motives for emigration were overwhelmingly religious and cultural, and neither as a result of anti-Semitism nor general dissatisfaction with Soviet life. Seemingly, the vast majority of Jews who had been part of the USSR since the Revolution were quite content to live in the Soviet Union. The emergence of a different motive in the mid-1970s is indicated by a radical change in the destination of Jewish emigrants. In 1974, 18.8% chose to go to the US and the other Western capitalist countries rather than to Israel, as did 37.2% in 1975, and 49.1% in 1976, while only 4.2% chose such destinations in 1973. In 1979 and 1980 only about one-third of Soviet Jewish emigres went to Israel, in 1981 20%, rnost now preferring the higher incomes and professional advancement possible in the US. Many Jews who originally migrated to Israel re-emigrated and settled in the US. This suggests that the desire to maintain Jewish culture or help build the Zionist state, has been superseded by the desire for financial gain and to advance one's career, An increased proportion of Russian, Ukrainian and Belorussian secular Jewish emigres are another manifestation of this change of motive.

Perhaps the most significant observation to be made about Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union after 1970 is the relatively small percentage (3% to 4%) who availed themselves of the opportunity to leave the Soviet heartland. Presented with the opportunity either to live in a predominantly Jewish culture in Israel, or obtain a significantly higher standard of living in the USA, 95%-97% chose to remain in the Soviet Union. It should be noted that, over the period 1970-79, only 5.1% of Moscow Jews emigrated, even though in the latter part of this decade it was very easy for Jews to do so. Emigres were mainly those Jews on the margin of the mainstream of Soviet life together with a relatively small number of professionals throughout the country.

Western attempts to present the Soviet Union as a virulently anti-Semitic society cannot be substantiated. Historically, the Jewish people in the USSR have fared, and continue to fare, very well in almost all respects. Jews are over-represented in the highest paying occupations, in the skilled professions, in the institutions of higher education and in all except the top levels in the Communist Party; but, as was noted previously, Jews are no longer over-represented in state legislative and top administrative positions. There is no evidence of official or Party approved anti-Semitism, and little evidence of interpersonal anti-Semitic expressions. The majority of Jews are fully integrated into Soviet life and demonstrate their support for Soviet institutions.

Conclusion

As is the case for the Soviet Asian Republics, there is no evidence of exploitation or economic discrimination by the Soviet government in the European Republics ; with rapid industrialization their economies have all prospered. Additionally, education, books, newspapers, theatre and so on in the various native languages have been actively promoted. Although, as a result of the integration of Jewish people into modern Soviet society, traditional Jewish culture is dying out, the Jewish people, too, have thrived. In short, the success of Soviet policy towards the European and Asian Republics in the USSR is one of the principal accomplishments of the Soviet system.

Albert Szymanski, Human Rights in the Soviet Union (1984)

Before Chizuru and the demons, basically when the Shinsengumi being Kyoto's police force, how would Heisuke respond to a village girl taking an interest in him? Like when he comes back from partrols or missions there are little gifts waiting for him, and he's being timidly courted

You’ll have to keep in mind that I am a diehard HeiChi shipper, so my knee-jerk reaction is NOPE. That said, I’m backing up that response based on historical context and characterization, so I hope it’s objective enough to be realistic:

First of all, keep the time and place in mind (which I’m excited about mentioning, because I’m supposed to be writing an essay about it). The Shinsengumi are an immensely hated and feared group of warriors, assigned by the shogunate to ‘keep order’ in Kyoto. That’s code for suppressing the ronin and other anti-shogunate forces and, by doing so, striking fear in the hearts of all who are overtly biased toward the imperial court. Because Kyoto was home to the Imperial Palace and consequently most of its citizens were decidedly imperialist, the Shinsengumi were not popular—and that’s not even getting into the classist aspect, e.g. “why are these peasants wearing swords and claiming to defend us when really they’re oppressing our views”. There’s a reason they obtained the title of ‘Wolves of Mibu’.

Basically, the Shinsengumi had very little overt support in Kyoto; at best, people were indifferent, and at worst, they were hostile. The average seemed to be a vague distrust and fear, so it strikes me as highly unlikely that this hypothetical girl’s family would encourage such a match, and even more so—especially if she was timid to begin with—that she would take matters into her own hands like that, and make the advances on one of the officers herself. Historically speaking, most of the men of the Shinsengumi only married in later years and/or married women from less politically unfavorable areas (I’m not counting geisha since they were sought after by men from both sides), once their circumstances were rendered more stable and less undesirable. Even subtracting all this historical context, their unpopularity is not watered down much in canon, so the situation you’re talking about is still highly unlikely.

But, all that aside, to get into characterization—Heisuke would undeniably be flattered at anyone’s attention and could even become infatuated because of it, but ultimately, his temperament doesn’t allow for much more than that. Even though Heisuke isn’t half as ‘duty-oriented’ as people like Saito or Yamazaki, more than anything else, he needs to feel stable and sure of himself before he can accept any variables like love interests. This tendency is actually very similar to Harada, who is clearly and actively invested in the idea of having a family someday, yet can’t bring himself to give up what he already has. Heisuke hasn’t even gotten that far in his ‘life plan’ yet and is still feeling things out, which always takes top priority for him, plus he isn’t ready to settle down.

Essentially, Heisuke loves his life and his friends too much to trade them for anything else, even a love interest… especially while things are still so turbulent for the Shinsengumi in Kyoto. In other words, Heisuke made the choice to move with his comrades and do his job, so the last thing he’d want is to undermine his own decision by changing his mind and altering his entire life. Basically, settling down with anyone is a huge step, and Heisuke strikes me as self-aware enough that he understands that his maturity level doesn’t allow for that.

To conclude, taking into account his selflessness, Heisuke would eventually decide that a.) he doesn’t want to settle down so soon, and b.) he doesn’t want to lead the girl on, regardless of whether he returns her feelings or not. Either way, it would result in rejection, probably of the gentlest and most awkward “it’s not you, it’s me” kind. At best, it would include a promise that he’d get back to her when he has his life together; at worst, it would result in conflict-avoidant Heisuke trying not to interact with her again.

It’s worth noting that because Heisuke clearly has a thing for Chizuru from close to the beginning but doesn’t say anything about it for years, it can be inferred that he just isn’t the type to act on feelings like that until they have a workable context (regardless of whether they are for Chizuru or for anyone else). Heisuke is stubborn and strong of will, and he stands by and takes pride in making his own decisions even if they turn out to hurt him in the end. Judging by his existing characterization, I personally have no doubt that he would stand by his earlier choices and turn down a romance, even before Chizuru came along.

Comrade Malik on Juneteenth

WHY I AM CALLING FOR AN INTERNATIONAL DAY OF ACTION ON JUNETEENTH!

Keith ‘Malik’ Washington

“The plantation system in the American South no longer exists in its earlier historical form. The wage system of the North clearly established its hegemonic position over its competitor after the Civil War. However, the fundamental issue the abolitionists raised—the matter of slavery and slave society—was not only never resolved, but has been normalized, legalized, and expanded. We see that the most egregious institutions of the 18th century are replicated in the 21st century in remarkably similar forms with similar effects.”

--excerpt from the Black Struggle on page 6 of the booklet: Burn Down the American Plantation, published by the: Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement

 Peace and blessings sisters and brothers! I read a quote the other day by an anonymous author and I’d like to share it with you: “Not everyone will understand your journey. That’s okay. You’re here to live your life, not to make everyone understand.” Nevertheless, as we organize for our Juneteenth rallies, protests, celebrations, and direct actions I want to make all of you understand “Why” I have made this “call to action”.

In Texas, at he very end of the MAAFA (Black Holocaust) slave owners didn’t want to release their slaves! It was to profitable. In fact, many slave owners had erected elaborate obstacles which kept the news of “emancipation” from reaching the ears of slaves in Texas. Many of our ancestors just kept toiling away in the fields because “Massa” wouldn’t tell them they were free!

I see the similarities between what happened then as compared to what is happening now! Not just in Texas but all over the world, humyn beings are being exploited and abused by capitalist and imperialist systems of government. Since I am trapped in Texas prisons, I am most familiar with their sophisticated form of exploitation.

Texas government created a “shell company” known as T.C.I, also known as Texas Correctional Industries. The business model is successful and grosses approximately $89 million a year! Its labor force is made up of prisoners who work in numerous factories throughout the state in prisons that are operated and supervised by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (sic!). Prisoners are paid nothing!

The Texas government has assembled a Board to supervise the day to day operations of the prison agency (T.D.C.J.) and the lucrative business model (T.C.I.). The Board is hand-picked by the Governor. The current Chairman of the Board is a black man and a highly accomplished Uncle Tom boot licker named Dale Wainwright. The rest of the Board is made up of individuals who all have close ties to capitalist businesses. What I want you to know is that the Texas Board of Criminal Justice has the power and authority to create rules and policies that would open the door to wages being paid to prisoners who toil in these factories. But why do that? Slavery is good! REMEMBER SISTERS AND BROTHER’S “POWER CONCEDES NOTHING WITHOUT A DEMAND!”.

So, I will tell you that one of the reasons I am calling for an international day of protest is to address the reality of slave labor. Slave labor is not something unique to Texas, although many of us feel as if Texas has perfected the “slave model”. We see similar programs of oppression in Alabama, Florida, and even California, as we watch prisoners fight wild fires for next to nothing. They are risking their lives to save lives and property of people who don’t care enough about them to pay them a reasonable wage for their work and sacrifice!!! STOP FIGHTING FIRES FOR PENNIES!! YOUR LIFE MATTERS!!!!

However, the call for Juneteenth Protests, Rallies, and Direct Actions is much bigger than just the prison abolition issue. And don’t you dare to speak out against the establishment “boy” or “girlie” or we will criminalize you, silence your voice, and if need be, assassinate you!” For those in the “movement” they know I am not lying—case in point, Colin Kaepernick!

Colin silently made a stand for Black Lives, by taking a knee, and then a group of white supremacists led by the President of the United States decided it would conspire to “black-ball” Colin and keep him from earning a living! I ask that you don’t try to divorce the motivating factor of anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism from our Juneteenth message. A bigoted group of NFL owners has formed a billionaire’s good old boys club in order to intimidate black NFL players and to send a not so silent message: “Keep your mouth shut ‘boy’ sand just do what I’m paying you to do, you filthy ‘sons of bitches’. You want to know why I’m calling for Juneteenth protests? Well, I’m going to tell you! Although, some may not like what they hear.

I’m calling for Juneteenth protests, in order, to address the absolute failure of the U.S. government to address the plight of the “dreamers”. How can we not create a realistic pathway to citizenship for these humyn beings? But, then I take a hard look at Donald Trump and his U.S. Attorney General Jeff Beauregard Sessions and I see the cloak of the Ku Klux Klan and the burning cross on our lawn! Yes! I will tell you why I’m calling for Juneteenth protests! I’m standing in solidarity with every Latina and Latino who is having their families torn apart by this racist and discriminatory immigration policy!

There is implicit bias and prejudice in the court system and it is not just here in Amerika. Courts and judges as well as the police and prisoners all over the world have engaged in a conspiracy to TARGET people of color! I’ve specifically looked at the Ministry of Prisons, in the United Kingdom. These prisons are beginning to overflow with Pakistanis, Africans, and poor English and Irish beings!!

In Amerika, we are all too familiar with the track records of the police. And then in Parkland, Florida we see something which bolsters the argument that the police are only interested in protecting the lives and property of the rich or capitalist elite. But when the lives of ‘common folk’ are at risk they stand idly by like cowards while children are slaughtered like sheep! So, the question presents itself: “Who do the police really ‘protect and serve’??

So, yes!! Juneteenth protests are about shedding a discerning light on the corrupt and racist courts and police agencies in Ameika and beyond!

And what of the environment? Our planet? Clean air? Clean water? If free citizens fight for clean and safe drinking water supplies and still don’t receive it! How do you think prisoners fair when facing a system, which refuses to even acknowledge them? If it wasn’t for the campaign, which seeks to Fight Toxic Prisons, I don’t think the Environmental Protection Agency would have even considered its new implementation of the EJ Screen as a tool to examine the impact that environmental hazards have on imprisoned populations.

Things are absolutely crazy in Texas. In 2015, Professor Victor Wallis and I collaborated, in order to craft an Ombudsman Complaint. This complaint addresses the presence of high levels of arsenic in the water supply, at the Pack I Unit located in Navasota, Texas. I can tell you that the prison agency T.D.C.J. along with maintenance personnel on the Unit, with employees from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) all conspired to lie and say that “there are no traces of arsenic in the Pack I water supply.”  In June 2016 a federal judge named Keith P. Ellison issued a finding that the water at the Pack I Unit contained 2- 41/2 times the allowed amount of Arsenic! And now I release to the public the actual response from the TDCJ Ombudsman office, where you can clearly see a conspiracy exists to violate the Humyn and Civil Rights of Texas prisoners by fabricating lies about conditions inside slave kamps and gulags!

You want to know why I’m calling for Juneteenth protests? I’ll tell you why! It is to recognize the struggles of my sisters and brothers at Standing Rock and to highlight the inadequacy of a government, which has still not fixed the problem in Flint, Michigan and to protest the impotent and lack-luster response to the humyn beings in Texas, who lost everything during Hurricane Harvey!

(FEMA) is a corrupt and failed agency, who was more interested in hunting down undocumented workers than meetings the needs of the communities who really needed help and who still need help to recover from unprecedented natural disaster!

There will be no utopian anarchist or socialist society without a planet to live on! Juneteenth is about saving our planet! Don’t say I didn’t articulate my point!

And what about the abuse of wimmin? What about the demonization of the LGBTQ community? I’m not shutting up!  Wimmin don’t need a man to protect them! That is not why I’m speaking out! But what happens when the system of checks and balances is so broken that when a womyn does scream “No!” or cries “Foul!” that the courts, the police, the media, which have a strong undercurrent of patriarchy and misogynistic tendencies ignores their voice of protest?

And what happens when the President of the United States is the leader of a movement, which seeks to silence our voices? His mantra: “Profits by any means and shut all dissenting voices down!” Mr. President you think we all stupid, don’t you? Hope Hicks goes in front of the Russia Probe Committee and tells the truth that she has lied to protect you! And then you conveniently force her out and have your press officer say her leaving had nothing to do with her testimony! We aren’t as stupid as you think!

You want to know why I’m calling for Juneteenth protests? It is a beginning of our organizing and actions to finally confront this filthy, rotting carcass of a system you call capitalism! I don’t have the influence to get everyone to get on board and act on Juneteenth, but don’t say I didn’t tell the world what this is about. Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, the genocide of the Palestinian people and the humyn rights disaster of the Rohingya Muslims who suffer in refugee camps in Bangladesh. This is a call to action to all socialists, communists, anarchists, freedom fighters to include Antifa, blac bloc, and all progressive and revolutionary New Afrikans! United we stand divided we fall! Fascists must be defeated!

Dare to struggle, dare to win, all power to the people!

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Psychology of Racism Research Paper

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Abstract

Racism has been a core topic in social psychology since the 1930s. Central to most definitions of racism is the belief in a biological hierarchy between different social groups based on perceived racial differences. As a complex social issue multiple social psychological perspectives have been advanced to understand and theorize beliefs, behavior, and social practices that sustain racial inequality ranging from the individual to the social level of explanation. These include personality theories; social cognition models; realistic group conflict; social identity theory; critical discursive approaches, studies of White privilege; and embodied racism. Although these perspectives are frequently argued to be inconsistent with each other, recent attempts at integration are providing richer accounts of this phenomenon.

Outline

Defining Racism

Prejudice versus Racism

New Racism

Theories of Racism

Personality Theories

Social Cognitive Theories

Realistic Group Conflict and Social Identity Theory

Critical Discursive Research

Embodied Racism

Racism as White Privilege

Integrating Multiple Perspectives

Bibliography

Defining Racism

Although many definitions of racism have been proposed, an all-inclusive definition has yet to be agreed upon, particularly as researchers have identified a variety of ‘racisms’ (Miles and Brown, 2003; Richards, 1997). Central to most definitions of racism is the belief in a biological hierarchy between different social groups based on race, and the associated practices that maintain and reproduce social inequalities between groups based on such beliefs. The belief that different racial groups reflect a natural evolutionary hierarchy, at the top of which are European (White) people was central to scientific racism which was widely promoted as an ideology between 1850 and 1910. During this period, European imperialist expansion and colonial rule over Indigenous peoples created the ideal conditions for the proliferation of such Social Darwinist beliefs (Richards, 1997).

The concept of race is entrenched in both popular usage and scientific discourse as a taken-for-granted, essentialist category that categorizes people into groups based on assumptions that surface phenotypic characteristics such as skin color reflect deeper genotypic features. Despite its ubiquitous taken-for-granted usage, geneticists and biologists discredited the validity of race as a scientific category as long ago as the 1930s (Richards, 1997), and more recently via the mapping of the human genome (McCann-Mortimer et al., 2004). Nonetheless the concept of race continues to be used uncritically both in the scientific community and in everyday discourse as a ‘natural’ kind variable in ways that reinforce the commonplace view that it is a biological and genetic reality that reflects real differences between groups.

Although the notion of a biological hierarchy between groups is generally eschewed today and indeed is associated with blatant forms of racism, it has been replaced with beliefs in a cultural hierarchy between groups where the dominant group’s social values, norms, and practices are represented as superior to those of less dominant groups. As we will discuss further below, this has come to be known as the ‘new racism.’ Group differences therefore, whether biological or cultural, continue to operate as socially meaningful cues by which to categorize and differentiate people. That is, ‘race’ has become a reified and objectified social representation through which group differences come to be understood and explained (Moscovici, 1988).

Prejudice versus Racism

There has been a tendency within psychology to use the terms prejudice and racism interchangeably. Jones (1997), among others, argues that racism is distinct from prejudice. Prejudice has commonly been defined as negative attitudes and behavior toward a social group and its members. Prejudice is typically regarded as an individual phenomenon, whereas racism is a broader construct that links such individual beliefs and behavior to broader social and institutional norms and practices that systematically disadvantage particular groups. The second important difference between prejudice and racism relates to the role of power. At an individual level, a person can display prejudice, but this in itself does not necessarily constitute racism. Central to racism is the ability of dominant groups to systematically exercise power over outgroups. If we define racism without reference to power differentials between groups, it is clear that anyone can engage in ingroup preference and outgroup bias. ‘Everybody is racist’ is a claim that is often used to counter accusations of racism (Hage, 1998). Importantly, the power one group has over another transforms prejudice into racism and links individual prejudice with broader social practices (Jones, 1997).

Racism, practiced at a structural and cultural level, maintains and reproduces the power differentials between groups in the social system. Racism practiced at this broad societal level has been referred to as institutional and cultural racism (Jones, 1997). Institutional racism refers to the institutional policies and practices that are put in place to protect and legitimate the advantages and power one group has over another. Institutional racism can be overt or covert, intentional or unintentional, but the consequences are that racist outcomes are achieved and reproduced. Cultural racism occurs when the dominant group defines the norms, values, and standards in a particular culture. These mainstream ideals permeate all aspects of the social system and are often fundamentally antagonistic with those embraced by particular minority groups. To participate in society, minority groups often have to surrender their own cultural heritage and adopt those of the dominant group (e.g., the White majority).

Although prejudice has been condemned within psychology as negative and pernicious, it has also been criticized for depoliticizing the issue of racial inequality. Because the concept of prejudice is primarily seen as located within the psychology of the individual, it fails to recognize the wider historical, social, and institutional structures that support racial inequality. Because of this narrowness, the concept of prejudice is often challenged as actually part of the problem of racial inequality – by making it an individual pathology rather than a political and social reality. As many social theorists have argued, this has had the net effect of obscuring the political and ideological dimensions of prejudice. Racism can persist in institutional structures and policies in the absence of prejudice at the individual level (Henriques, 1984).

New Racism

Over the past 50 years, social psychologists and social scientists more broadly have argued that contemporary racism has become less about beliefs in a biological hierarchy between groups, and increasingly about beliefs in the cultural superiority of a dominant group’s values, norms, and practices (Barker, 1981). Survey studies consistently demonstrate that blunt, hostile, segregationist, and White supremacist beliefs are less openly acceptable to White majority group members in Western liberal democracies. However, racial inequality continues to exist. To explain this, a distinction is therefore commonly made between ‘old-fashioned racism’ and ‘modern’ (McConahay, 1986) or ‘symbolic racism’ (Kinder and Sears, 1981), which in contrast, is subtle, covert, and paradoxically, endorses egalitarianism. Modern racism rejects racial segregation and notions of biological supremacy, and is instead, based on feelings that certain social groups transgress important social values such as the work ethic, individualism, self-reliance, and self-discipline: values that are embodied in the Protestant ethic. Symbolic or modern racism justifies and legitimates social inequities based on moral feelings that certain groups violate such traditional values.

Gaertner and Dovidio (1986) have also proposed models of racism that address the changing and complex nature of contemporary beliefs about race. Their ‘ambivalent racism’ and ‘aversive racism’ models both posit that contemporary racial attitudes have become complex, contradictory, and multidimensional. In the ambivalent racism model, pro-Black and anti-Black sentiments are seen to coexist within the person and to reflect different value structures held by the individual. Pro-Black attitudes reflect humanitarian and egalitarian values that emphasize equality and social justice, whereas anti-Black attitudes reflect individualism, the Protestant ethic, hard work, individual achievement, and self-reliance. Similarly, the aversive racism model emphasizes the coexistence of a contradictory complex of attitudes: on the one hand, liberal egalitarian principles of justice and equality; and on the other, a residue set of negative feelings and beliefs about particular groups that are learned early in life, and which are difficult to completely eradicate. Gaertner and Dovidio (1986: p. 63) describe these negative feelings as “discomfort, uneasiness, disgust, and sometimes fear, which tend to motivate avoidance rather than intentionally destructive behaviors.” In both of these accounts, individuals strive to maintain a nonprejudiced image, both to themselves and to others, and struggle unconsciously to resolve the internal psychological ambivalence that is produced by maintaining a contradictory set of attitudes and beliefs. By justifying and legitimating social inequalities between groups on the basis of factors other than race, members of dominant groups can avoid attributions of racism and thus maintain and protect a nonprejudiced self-image. Indeed the psychological and social motivation to dodge a prejudiced identity is a common thread in contemporary theorizing on racism.

Contemporary racism, therefore, is seen as more insidious and difficult to identify because of its subtle and covert nature. This has led to the proliferation of implicit measures to identify and measure this more subtle racial bias (Greenwald et al., 2003). For example, the Implicit Association Test is a response latency measure using subliminal primes to test the strength of association between social categories (e.g., ‘Black’ or ‘White’) and positive and negative trait characteristics. Slower responses to stereotype inconsistent associations (Black þ positive traits and White þ negative traits) than to stereotype consistent associations (Black þ negative traits and White þ positive traits) is treated as evidence for an implicit bias or prejudice toward Blacks. Indeed the distinction between implicit and explicit racial bias is now so ubiquitous in social psychology that it is sometimes (erroneously) assumed that implicit measures reflect people’s true or real attitudes whereas explicit measures merely reflect social desirability norms. It has been argued, however, that implicit measures do not tap racial attitudes or beliefs per se but deeply ingrained stereotypes strongly associated with particular groups. Devine’s (1989) dissociation model of prejudice is consistent with this view and posits that stereotypes are more primitive cognitive structures learned early in life that can be automatically activated, whereas racial attitudes (prejudice) are learned later in life and can be either inconsistent or consistent with these stereotypes. The fact that negative stereotypes can be unconsciously activated even among people with low levels of explicit prejudice should not be taken as evidence that prejudice is an inevitable and natural cognitive tendency in everyone. As we will discuss below, the inevitability of prejudice perspective is associated with cognitive models of prejudice.

Theories of Racism

A variety of explanations for prejudice and racism have been advanced by social psychologists throughout the twentieth century. The prevalence of particular kinds of explanations has shifted during this time depending on wider historical and social factors and the dominance of specific paradigmatic frameworks within social psychology itself. Here we provide an overview of six current approaches to racism ranging from the individual to the social level of explanation: personality theories; social cognition models; realistic group conflict and social identity theory; critical discursive approaches, studies of White privilege; and embodied racism.

Personality Theories

Freudian psychodynamic accounts of prejudice were prevalent between 1930 and 1960. Prejudice was largely understood as a product of intrapsychic unconscious impulses primarily related to sexual and aggressive desires within the person. To reduce tension, negative emotions such as fear, anger, and disgust generated by these internal psychological conflicts are projected outward onto outgroups.

The most well known of these psychodynamic approaches is The Authoritarian Personality by Adorno et al. (1950). Published soon after the end of the Second World War, Adorno et al. were interested in explicating a theory that accounted for the widespread support for fascism as was seen in Nazi Germany. Adorno et al. (1950) argued that parent–child relationships with severe and punitive parental discipline produce children with an authoritarian personality characterized by a rigid adherence to conventional social values and mores, an unquestioning subservience to one’s moral and social superiors, and a vigilance for, and hostile rejection of, those who violate conventional social values and mores. The F Scale was developed to measure levels of authoritarianism and was widely used as a personality measure. High levels of authoritarianism were found to be associated with all types of prejudice (racism, sexism, homophobia). Despite the widespread use of the F Scale, by the 1960s, the theory of the authoritarian personality was strongly criticized for its emphasis on internal psychological predispositions at the expense of social and cultural norms that tolerated prejudice and sanctioned institutionalized racism, for example, racial segregation in the United States and apartheid in South Africa (Pettigrew, 1958).

Interest in authoritarianism was revived in 1981 with Altemeyer’s theory of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA). RWA is described as a rigid adherence to social conventions, submission to established authorities, and a strong rejection of outgroups who are perceived to be culturally and ethnically different. Unlike Adorno et al. whose work was heavily influenced by psychodynamic theory, Altemeyer theorized RWA as an individual personality characteristic that was predominantly shaped by social learning experiences. RWA has been found to be a good predictor of racial and ethnic prejudice in a variety of different settings, more so than the early authoritarianism scales.

The most recent personality approach to prejudice is that of ‘social dominance orientation’ or SDO (Sidanius and Pratto, 2001). SDO is purported to be a stable individual difference that refers to a person’s level of support for group-based hierarchies in society such as racial/ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic hierarchies. Like RWA, SDO is strongly correlated with prejudice. SDO scores vary with gender (males score higher), personality and temperament, education, religion, and whether one is a member of a dominant or subordinate group. Although the concept of SDO is embedded within a wider social theory, it too has been criticized for reducing prejudice to a psychological trait rather than a social phenomenon that requires a social/structural explanation. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of SDO is the claim that group-based hierarchies and the legitimating beliefs that support them have an evolutionary basis.

Significant limitations have been identified with personality accounts of prejudice. Most notably is the issue of why certain groups rather than others become the targets for prejudice by authoritarians, those high on RWA and/or SDO. In addition, although such theories recognize that economic, historical, and social factors contribute to these predispositions, the potential interplay between individual psychology and social structural factors is rarely dealt with explicitly or integrated thoroughly into these models.

Social Cognitive Theories

Gordon Allport’s seminal work, The Nature of Prejudice (1954), provides the foundational basis for social cognitive models of prejudice which have become dominant and influential in social psychology since the 1980s. Allport’s definition of prejudice as “an antipathy based upon a faulty and inflexible generalization” (1954: p. 9), about a social group and its members emphasizes the prominent role that social categorization and stereotyping as perceptual–cognitive processes are given in social cognition models. According to these models, categorizing people into their respective group memberships (such as race, gender, age) is driven by our cognitive need to simplify the overwhelming amount of stimulus information we receive from our environment. This group-based or category-based perception is seen as distorting reality because people are not viewed as individuals in their own right but rather as prototypical group members. In turn, this leads to stereotyping, which recent social cognition research suggests can occur automatically and outside conscious awareness (Nosek et al., 2011). Stereotyping of course is just one step away from prejudice – literally prejudging someone based solely on their group membership. This inextricable relationship between categorization, stereotyping, and prejudice is central to social cognition models of prejudice and notwithstanding some of the qualifications that recent research has placed on this directional, and by implication, causative link between these three processes (e.g., Devine, 1989, see above), it is nonetheless the case that categorization in and of itself is seen as the cognitive basis for prejudice, driven primarily by our limited processing capacities.

Social cognition models have been criticized for normalizing prejudice and racism as inevitable products of our cognitive hard-wiring. Critics have also argued that by treating racial categories and racial categorization as natural rather than social and ideological constructs, social cognition models themselves reproduce racism in psychology (Hopkins et al., 1997).

Realistic Group Conflict and Social Identity Theory

Realistic group conflict theory and social identity theory are intergroup approaches to racism in social psychology that emphasize the role that relations of power and dominance between different social groups play in determining patterns of intergroup hostility. As the name suggests, realistic group conflict views intergroup hostility as arising from competition between social groups for economic, social, and cultural resources. Unlike personality theories that see racism and prejudice as outcomes of internal psychological drives or differences in personality, in this approach conflict is viewed as emerging from ‘real’ group-based interests. The famous boys’ camp field studies by Sherif et al. (1961) demonstrated how the creation of two competing groups was able to produce ingroup favoring and outgroup derogating attitudes and behavior between the two groups. When the social conditions were changed, however, and the two groups were required to cooperate to obtain resources or to complete valued tasks, intergroup hostility began to diminish.

Another series of famous studies, the minimal group experiments by Henri Tajfel and his colleagues formed the foundations upon which social Identity theory (SIT) was built (Tajfel and Turner, 1986). Many social psychologists have concluded erroneously from the minimal group experiments that the mere categorization of people into ingroups and outgroups is sufficient to trigger intergroup discrimination and prejudice. Although SIT stresses the psychological importance for groups to differentiate themselves positively from other groups this does not necessarily go hand-in-hand with ingroup enhancement and outgroup derogation though regrettably these are all too frequent occurrences. Groups can maintain a positive social identity without threatening the social identity of others. SIT posits that groups and their members strive to achieve some sort of differentiation from other groups, in ways that are shaped by the nature of the intergroup context and on dimensions of importance to them. Sometimes those dimensions of importance emphasize tolerance, generosity, and beneficence, but again all too often these dimensions emphasize superiority, dominance, and preserving ingroup privilege (Ellemers and Haslam, 2012).

Critical Discursive Research

Critical discursive research views racism as interactive and communicative and as located within the language practices and discourses of a society. This body of work emphasizes the ambivalent and contradictory nature of contemporary racism, but explicitly avoids making claims about the psychology of individual perceivers. Discursive studies analyze how people talk, discuss, and debate matters to do with ‘race’ and intergroup relations in both formal and informal settings (van den Berg et al., 2003).

It is through everyday language practices, both in formal and informal talk that relations of power, dominance, and exploitation become reproduced and legitimated. The analytic site for discursive research is how discursive resources and rhetorical arguments are put together to construct different social and ‘racial’ identities, and to provide accounts that legitimate these differences and identities as ‘real’ and ‘natural.’ Discursive studies locate these language practices or ‘ways of talking’ at a societal level, as products of a racist society rather than as individual psychological and/or cognitive products. The analytic site therefore is not the prejudiced or racist individual, but the discursive and linguistic resources that are available within an inequitable society (Wetherell and Potter, 1992). This approach has been able to identify how linguistic resources are combined in flexible and contradictory ways to reproduce and justify racist outcomes in modern liberal democracies. In some instances, existing relations of power, dominance, and privilege are maintained through overt racial ideology, but given the increasing opprobrium against the expression of such views, social inequalities are more commonly legitimated through the flexible and contradictory use of liberal egalitarian arguments that draw on principles such as freedom, individual rights, and equality. Discursive studies in several Western countries including Australia, Britain, Belgium, the Netherlands, New Zealand, and the United States have demonstrated how majority group members express negative and even hostile views of minorities by the use of self-sufficient rhetorical arguments premised on liberal and egalitarian values such as treating everybody equally.

Critical discursive research has demonstrated the varied ways the category of racism is itself highly contested in everyday life: that is, defining what is and what is not racist is far from being a value-free, neutral assessment. Rather, the category of racism itself is constructed flexibly and variably, and can be used to manage the moral accountability and identity of an individual or group. van Dijk (1992) documents the ubiquitous nature of denials of racism through the use of disclaimers such as “I’m not racist but . .” Contemporary race talk therefore, is strategically organized to deny prejudice and racism. By redrawing the boundaries of what may be legitimately defined as ‘racist,’ the category of racism may be used to position a person or group as ‘not racist’ by placing their own behavior and views outside of these boundaries.

These language practices are forms of power that are products of particular historical, hierarchical relationships between groups of people, in which some people have unjustly and unfoundedly claimed dominance over others. Understood as power relationships, racism shapes the lives of everyone within these hierarchies, both the oppressed and the oppressors. In this sense, ‘race’ is a form of categorization that reflects particular forms of power relations between groups of people, rather than reflecting the actual attributes (whether they be physical or behavioral) of any particular group of people.

Embodied Racism

While critical discursive research has been invaluable for elucidating the perpetuation and legitimation of racism, it has also been criticized for its privileging of discourse; for ignoring the materiality of oppression. Discursive work has tended to become heavily involved in identifying the rhetorical aspects of racism and oppression, but has been less concerned with the nexus between discourse, space, and place. Such a research focus has been taken up by Durrheim and Dixon (2005) in South Africa.

Durrheim and Dixon (2005) combine discourse analysis with ethnographic mapping to identify the ways in which discourses are embodied in people’s use of public places such as beaches. They demonstrate that, even in post-Apartheid South Africa, there remains significant physical segregation on South Africa’s beaches – Whites and Blacks use different areas of the beach, and use the beach at different times. These spatial practices are legitimated through discourses about ‘appropriate beach behavior’ with White beach-goers explaining that they leave the beach because Black beach-goers are too loud, create mess, and do not respect personal space. Their research demonstrates the interdependence of discourse and embodied practices and how “‘race relations’ are constructed both in language and in located bodily practices, emphasising how people describe and account for the racialised features of social life that they participate in” (Durrheim and Dixon, 2005: p. 459). They argue that without such a combined approach, research on racism cannot capture the lived experience of racism, or of anti-racism. Their observations and interviews capture the ongoing nature of racism in everyday life, even where overt official structures maintaining inequality are dismantled.

Racism as White Privilege

While traditional research on racism focuses on attitudes and practices toward minorities, recent research on White privilege turns the gaze from minorities to the majority group. Thus there is a shift in focus – the gaze moves away from those who bear the brunt of racism, and toward the discourses and institutional practices of those who benefit from racism (Aveling, 2004). This body of work focuses on White identity construction (e.g., Carter, 1997). It also examines the ways in which whiteness is produced and reproduced in different social and cultural sites; and the implications of these constructions for intergroup relations and anti-racism (e.g., Hage, 1998). Whiteness studies is primarily concerned with how White people’s identities are shaped by broader institutionalized forms of racism and brings to the fore both the benefits that White people accrue because of their privileged position in society and the responsibilities they have for addressing racism (Giroux, 1997).

Clearly the category ‘White’ or ‘White people’ is problematic as a way of referencing the dominant majority in Western liberal democracies as it fails to adequately reflect the ethnic and cultural heterogeneity of group members that may identify as ‛White.’ Nonetheless by marking ‘whiteness’ (not only as a category of skin color, but of cultural capital (Hage, 1998)), there is an attempt to make visible the unearned power and privilege that accrues to the dominant majority, especially those that have access to the highest cultural and social capital – in terms of appearance, ancestry, religion, socioeconomic status, education, and employment (Hage, 1998).

Broadly speaking, whiteness is “. the production and reproduction of dominance rather than subordination, normativity rather than marginality, and privilege rather than disadvantage.” In this definition, whiteness is something that places White people in normative positions and grants White people unfair privileges. These positions and privileges are often invisible to White people, because of this normativity. Indeed, it is this normativity that gives whiteness its power (Frankenberg, 1993: p. 236).

Integrating Multiple Perspectives

This overview of social psychological approaches to racism always raises the difficult question of whether it is possible to integrate these different theories. This question has always been a bone of contention within psychology, as analytic frameworks differ significantly in their epistemological assumptions and orientations. It also raises the question of whether integration is desirable.

Duckitt (1992) argues that these multiple social psychological perspectives are not necessarily competing paradigms, but rather each is a valid response to different aspects of this social phenomenon: unconscious processes, personality, cognitions, social norms and linguistic practices, power, social structure, and intergroup relations.

Duckitt (1992) has proposed an integrative framework that identifies four primary causal processes of prejudice: internal psychological processes; social and intergroup dynamics; social transmission; and individual differences. He argues that each of these causal processes provides a partial but essential contribution to the explanation of prejudice: psychological processes build a human propensity for prejudice; social and intergroup dynamics elaborate this propensity into socially shared patterns of interaction; these patterns are socially transmitted throughout social groups; and individual differences in susceptibility to prejudice modify these social norms. Each theory is limited on its own as it focuses on and seeks to elaborate just one of these causal processes.

While Duckitt’s integrative framework has considerable appeal more recent critical approaches that focus on racial discourse, power, whiteness, and embodiment are largely ignored in this model. Bringing all of these together we conclude that social psychology has conceptualized racism to be a normative, often invisible system of social practices, cognitions, emotions, and discourses that are perpetuated through all levels (individual, interpersonal, intergroup, institutional) that privilege one social group and disadvantage and marginalize other social groups. These practices can be overt assertions of biological difference, but in today’s social and political climate, are more likely to be covert and implicit.

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See also:

Sociology Research Paper Topics

Sociology Research Paper

Racism Research Paper