Photo by Josh Sanseri
I always appreciate Boots Riley’s artistic and political interventions. Despite his creative capacity and credibility he has developed over nearly two decades of his career as a politically engaged hip-hop artist, he remains down to earth and accessible. He constantly interacts with his fans on social media and engages in discussions. He is not afraid to use his fame (for the lack of better word) to popularize radical politics and serve the popular struggles. But I’m not writing this to put Boots in the pedestal. Like any of us, he is imperfect and not without contradictions. His recent op-ed piece on the Guardian, later republished by Creative Time Reports, contained some errors that I would like to point out in this blog entry.
In this article, Boots criticizes the mainstream labour movement for prioritizing lobbying and not teaching the workers to fight. He argues that workers should stop relying on union bureaucrats and asking politicians to raise the minimum wage for them. This would only lead to compromise and defeat. Instead, workers should directly engage in militant strikes, work stoppages, and occupations that could disrupt the business-as-usual at the points of production and physically prevent the scabs (“replacement workers” in the bourgeois language) from taking the place of the strikers.
What is needed, he claims, is a militant union that is grounded on revolutionary ideology, willing to struggle and ultimately win, not only immediate struggles but also a broader political and social change. Like his previous writings, this article is a much needed intervention in the present period when the workers’ movement in North America is in the perpetual state of defeat. Even as a mainstream news article, it’s 100 times better than Paul Mason’s piece on the so-called “End of Capitalism” that the Guardian also recently published.
Despite the strength and clarity of Boots’ argument, it is when he delves into historical analysis that it becomes less convincing. He traces the historical origin of the retreat of class struggle in the U.S first to the 1940s. This was when the Communist Party of the U.S.A (CPUSA) adapted the Comintern’s Popular Front strategy against fascism and halted their public criticism of the U.S government. Revolutionaries no longer made their politics public and organized in a clandestine fashion. In Boots’ view, this made them more vulnerable to the state repression during the red scare that followed this period.
This assessment is interesting and something we can learn from in the face of the heightened repression and anti-terrorism legislation that are currently being passed by governments everywhere (i.e Bill C-51 in Canada). However, he also traces the present weakness of the workers’ movement to the rise of the New Left in the 1960s when the left supposedly, in Boots’ words, “moved away from class struggle.”
The New Left did things differently: no more showing people that they could stop the machinery of industry, forcing the bosses to meet demands or lose profit. Instead, their goal was to cause enough of a scene on the street that the media would cover it and embarrass administrators or politicians into meeting demands. This approach may have had some success at the time, but it’s not the model that today’s workers should use.
Our power lies not in the streets but at the pivot point of capitalism : the workplace.
This emphasis on wage labour and capital as the primary contradiction in capitalist society and the subsequent need to build militant labour movement have been the focus of his political line for some time. He has applied this framework to analyze specific issues like gentrification and events like the rebellions in Ferguson and Baltimore. While I agree with Boots’ overall analysis that workplace organizing has declined, his equation of the New Left with the weakening of class struggle is somewhat misleading.
For one, Boots’ view of class struggle is tactically focused. Radicalness of a movement is judged by its (un)willingness to engage in militant actions, rather than theoretical orientation informed by concrete analysis of concrete situation. He also seems to frame this reformist turn in the labour movement as purely subjective, as a strategic choice made by activists and organizers at the time. He doesn’t consider objective conditions that made workplace organizing difficult i.e high unemployment and poor living conditions among the racialized working-class peoples. He also doesn’t mention the fact that this was a period in which anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism came to the forefront of radical politics, and many movements shifted their focus from civil rights to self-determination (i.e Black/Brown/Red Power) in response to the grinding poverty, lack of essential services, and increased police repression in their communities. For these reasons, organizations formed during this period were mostly community-based and used tactics that were less oriented towards economic disruption i.e armed self-defence and service to the people programs.
Boots’ reference to the media stunt and shaming of public officials seems to refer to the Black Panthers Party, which engaged in public confrontations with the state, often by mobilizing their social base and appealing to the media. Of course, when they were not doing these things, they were organizing other community institutions mentioned above and resisting capitalism at the points of reproduction rather than production.
Boots’ comment on the New Left should not be seen as trivial. It is representative of a broader current within Marxist thought that prioritizes production over reproduction as the primary site of class struggle. It points to the age-old disagreement as to which section of the working-class is the leading force of revolution and subsequently where revolutionaries should focus their organizing effort in. For Boots, the answers are wage labourers and the workplace.
In comparison, many anti-colonial theorists of New Left like Huey P. Newton and Franz Fanon saw the “lumpenproletariat” as the revolutionary class, though the precise definition of the term is highly contested. Long before the New Left, Marxist feminists had pointed out the tendency in Marxsim to discount reproductive labour performed by women as the basis of the capitalist mode of production. Proletarian feminists later updated this theory to contextualize capitalist patriarchy in the age of imperialism as super-exploitation; exploitation of women’s labour both at the points of production and reproduction. Its effect is most harshly experienced by poor women of colour in the periphery of the world system, and within the internal colonies of settler societies. Unfortunately, Boots does not consider any of these factors.
By valorizing the points of production as the primary site of class struggle, Boots seems to suggest that robust national-liberation movements and struggles during the so called New Left period in the 1960s and 70s, led by organizations like Black Panthers, Young Lords, and American Indian Movement cannot be considered as authentic class struggle. True, many of these groups defined their politics along race and national lines, rather than a strictly class-based line. Still, Boots’ view only reinforces the idea that class struggle only happens in workplace, not in the communities.
What is missing from Boots’ analysis is more nuanced understanding of class and class struggle. What is needed is a broadening of class struggle as not only between capital and labour but also between the oppressors and the oppressed, the exploiters and the exploited, and the colonizers and the colonized.
Bryan Palmer provides a useful framework for this re-conceptualization in his article Uniting the Dispossessed. Palmer problematizes how defining class solely in terms of extraction of surplus value and the wage relation limits the entirety of the meaning of class and class struggle to workplace. He argues that we need to consider not only the process of production and relations of exploitation that characterize it. We also need to look at how dispossession makes the survival of such system possible.
For Palmer and many other Marxists, reproduction is part of the dialectical whole that constitutes the capitalist mode of production. In particular, by referring to Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation, Palmer points to the expansive nature of capitalist reproduction in which self-sufficient peasants and land-based peoples are forcibly separated from their lands and means of production, and subsequently become dependent on wage for survival. However, unlike Marx’s definition of primitive or original accumulation, Glen Coulthard applies this to the Canadian context and argues that dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their land is not an one-time event, but ongoing process and the foundational mechanism of settler-colonial capitalism in Canada.
Palmer also points out that, in order for capitalism’s to survive, it deliberately dispossess and pauperizes a section of workers as a “redundant population” and a reserve army of the unemployed. Similarly, like during the 60s and 70s, austerity programs continue to deprive many working-class peoples of essential services like housing, healthcare, and education. He argues that dispossession is part of the capitalist system which differentiates one section of the working-class form another, and the solution is not to posit this or that section as being more revolutionary than others, but to have e broader understanding of class that includes both waged and non-waged.
When we consider these factors, Boots’ analysis becomes inadequate. In North America, radical transformation of society requires understanding of settler-colonialism as its primary contradiction, and that the very existence of capitalism is made possible through the continuous dispossession of Indigenous peoples. It is neither desirable nor possible to build a revolutionary mass movement in Canada without the active participation of Indigenous peoples.
Boots’ call to “fight the scabs” also makes re-conceptualization of capitalism as dispossession and unemployment as part of its mechanism necessary. Practical corollary of this conceptual shift is of course organization of the unemployed and other dispossessed sections of workers to ensure that they don’t become scabs in the first place. The Workers Unity League (WUL), a Canadian counterpart to the pre-Popular Front radical unions Boots mentions, did exactly this during the 1930s.
Organization of the dispossessed workers is something that the contemporary labour movement has failed to do, while groups like Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP) fill this vacuum, often by engaging in militant actions. This was most clearly demonstrated in defensive, if not overly chauvinistic, positions taken by the mainstream unions in response to the Temporary Foreign Workers Program. Without organizing the unorganized and proactively calling for broader immigration reforms in collaboration with other grassroots organizations like No One Is Illegal, many of them simply called for abolition of the program altogether. This has only reinforced the regressive immigration policies, led to mass deportations, and continued super-exploitation of migrant labour in Canada, while the majority of Canadian workers remain non-unionized and precarious.
Again, all of the flaws I have identified in Boots’ article are nothing new and something that Marxists have been debating for decades. But his popularity and the force of his argument make it all more necessary for us to revisit them now than later. I’m also not saying that it’s either production or reproduction that we need to focus on. We need to have a well-rounded analysis of both as dialectically interrelated and mutually constitutive, as part of the same whole, however contradictory they may be. We need both strong workers’ movement and mass organizing in neighborhoods, communities, and campuses to push the struggle forward.
