Stan Goff interviews Meleiza Figueroa

Meleiza Figueroa

I met Meleiza during an anti-war event in Los Angeles back in 2004. She was already an activist understudying Lisa Lubow as well as a student. Since then, we corresponded occasionally, but when the Sandercrat challenge shook up the Democratic Party — while Meleiza was doing field work in Brazil — we resumed correspondence to commiserate with one another about the dangers to this emergent movement as well as its historic potential.



MELEIZA FIGUEROA is a Berkeley PhD Candidate in Geography. She’s a Fellow with the Liberty Tree Foundation for the Democratic Revolution. She was the National Press Director for the 2016 Stein/Baraka Green Party presidential campaign. She is also a political journalist, a teacher, and organizer. She co-facilitates the Movement School for Revolutionaries. She’s on the steering committee of the Campus Antifascist Network.

Her experience in leftist media includes more than a decade as a staff producer for Pacifica Radio; lead researcher for the 2005 documentary “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price”; and Executive Producer of the Green News Network. She currently serves as an on-air correspondent for Free Speech TV’s “Rising Up With Sonali,” and has written for The Nation, Truthdig.com, Against the Current, and New Politics.

Her academic and practical political work revolves around agroecology, food sovereignty, and urban food justice, her research exploring the socio-ecological aspects of food systems and responses to climate change in distressed urban communities in the US and Latin America. She also specializes in “economic history, political economy and globalization, urban studies, critical and postcolonial theory, the African Diaspora in the New World, and the dynamics of global crisis and popular revolt in the post-2008 period.”

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STAN GOFF: If I call you comrade, will you call me brother?

MELEIZA FIGUEROA: Absolutely! Contrary to popular belief, the two are not irreconcilable, because historically, radical currents of each have come together and worked together quite closely, often among and against the authoritarian tendencies of both traditions. Currents of radical Christianity have struggled among and against the Puritans and pedophile priests, just as libertarian currents of Marxism struggled against Stalinist tanks in Prague and against party leaders in today’s China. Latin American Marxism would not have been as strong as it was were it not for liberation theology, and the wisdom and heroism of figures like Monsignor Oscar Romero and Bishop Leonardo Boff as well as the comunidades de base that formed around churches. I grew up Catholic, and you were in Marxist circles for quite some time, so you and I have shared languages when it comes to moral and material imperatives to struggle for social equality. As many Marxists assert, Jesus was a communist. He trashed the moneychangers in the temple, after all.

SG: The priest Ivan Illich said that Jesus was an anarchist, but I’ll let you two hash that one out. (-:

Yes, we have some fluency in two languages. I think I remember you calling yourself a lapsed Catholic. I supposed I am in some ways a lapsed Marxist. We’re in a borderland, doing mestizo criticism. Reminds me of that disaster-creolism you and I have talked about.

Not many metropolitan leftists I’ve run across have worked extensively, as you have, in communities of so-called “syncretic” Christians, like the Candomble of Brazil. For myself, it was my exposure to “syncretic” faith in Haiti through Voudon, where Catholicism was creolized the same way as in Brazil and other former slave states, Catholicism with the incorporation of West African and First Nations practices, or African and Native practices incorporating Catholicism.

I think we both approve of these creole traditions for roughly the same reasons — reasons that are compatible with aspects of the Marxist tradition and the “way” narrated in the Gospels. The continuity of both traditions is in what my father called “rooting for the underdog.” Do these syncretic traditions, like in Brazil and Haiti, in and of themselves as vernacular cultures that are in some ways opaque to the modern western eye, constitute a form of resistance, the refusal to be enclosed?

MELEIZA: I like the way you put that last point, “the refusal to be enclosed,” because enclosure precisely names the enemy; the coercive mechanism behind the whole historical process of capitalism that binds the colonized, the enslaved, and the dispossessed alike into dependence on a fundamentally exploitative, unequal, and unjust system of social relations based on private property and the accumulation of profit.

The twin aims of enclosure, or “primitive accumulation” as Marxists put it, is described by Michael Perelman as a kind of scissors: the first “blade” was to separate human beings from their land, as the basis of subsistence and ‘means of production,’ in order to make that land into a financial asset, or capital; and the other was to create a labor force by eliminating all forms of self-provision, self-reliance and self-determination — in other words, culture — that could give people an alternative means to survive without subordinating oneself to the system through labor (whether wage labor or enslavement).

Syncretic traditions allowed enslaved and oppressed peoples to hold on to that alternative — retain their traditional culture and lifeways — in a system that otherwise banned those practices. Catholicism in particular, with its tradition of saints, provided perfect cover for animist and polytheistic faiths such as the Yoruba worship of Orixas to continue operating while basically hiding in plain sight. In the process, it also created a new and unifying tradition where Africans that had been uprooted from multiple homelands, as well as indigenous peoples and renegade Europeans, could find kinship, comfort, and material solidarity.

Clandestine houses and circles of worship were essential parts of an underground railroad that connected the world of the enslaved to the world of the quilombos, the maroon communities of self-liberated Africans that carved out free lives for themselves in the mountains and hinterlands; it facilitated trade between these two worlds, and a cultural connection that gave people hope of a “way out”; the means to persist, resist, and even thrive within, without, and throughout the system that enslaved them.

My own connection with these traditions comes from living and studying in Bahia, Brazil, one of the major historical centers of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, where I was interested in ethnobotany and the use of ritual plants in Candomble (the version of Afro-syncretic faith in Brazil). There is an Afro-Catholic church in the heart of Salvador, the capital city, which has a remarkable history. It was built, so the story goes, by two slave women who had learned to read and write, and wrote a letter to the King of Portugal posing as white colonists seeking funds for a cathedral. In Portugal, where it was difficult and/or cumbersome to verify these claims (and where people assumed Africans were illiterate), the funds were granted, and these women used it to create an amazing institution of black power and influence smack in the middle of one of the largest slave markets in the New World.

I hadn’t set foot in a church for well over a decade, and while I was in Brazil I got news that my mother had suffered a stroke. Not knowing what to do from several thousand miles away, I decided to go to that church and attend a service in honor of my mother. It was the most incredible church service I have ever been to; drums accompanied the liturgy, among hymns of liberation. It was a transformative experience that brought me, in some ways, into a kind of reconciliation with a faith I had long abandoned through a different prism that fit far better with the changing set of values I was developing around decolonization, social justice, and uplift of the marginalized and forgotten.

I also spent time in more informal/traditional Candomble houses of worship (often in community members’ living rooms) and deeply explored these ritual practices that were, by their very nature and cosmology, practices of community. It was a kind of “code” that, once understood, lets you in to a whole parallel universe of social experience that exists alongside the dominant culture but just enough out of sync, creating these pockets of space where one could, even for just a few hours, feel what it was like to live free.

SG: Two topics jump out here. First, Brazil, and the coup followed by the election of Bolsnaro; and second, your heterodox (I would call it advanced) views about the centrality of subalterns, the importance of agroecology, both as resistance (surviving outside capital circuits) and as prefigurative of a genuinely sustainable “socialism.” And how does your own “diasporic” status, so to speak, inform your thought and work in ways that differ from, say, your whiter, wealthier colleagues from Berkeley?

MELIEIZA FIGUEROA: ‘Subaltern’ generally refers to peoples who are oppressed and marginalized in the current order, i.e. colonized peoples, Dalits, Black folks, the urban poor, etc. I also like the term because it has also been used to describe the condition of indigenous peoples whose autonomy and sovereign cultures have been dis-empowered by colonialism — who have been subsumed, so to speak, by capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy. After all, what is power, in its most elemental form? It is the ability and capacity to shape the world in one’s own image.

As a woman of color from an immigrant family, having grown up embarrassed by my culture, feeling invisible and inadequate in this society because there was no representation for people like me, this term rings pretty true to my experience, as well as my commitment to change that condition by learning about it and speaking out against the multiple layers of injustice in society that conspires to keep us ‘down below’ and subjugated. The postcolonial scholar Gayatri Spivak wrote a famous paper called “Can the Subaltern Speak?” I want to be the one over here responding “Yes, I am!”

‘Diaspora’ simply refers to my immigrant heritage from the Philippines. It is a term that has Biblical origins, referring to the scattering of the Jewish people after leaving slavery in Egypt. People may have heard of the African Diaspora, the scattering of Africans around the world due to slavery and forced migration. In the Philippines, our largest export is people — migrant workers who go around the world, doing domestic work and nursing and construction and all kinds of jobs to earn money to send back home to their families. I like it also because it invokes a kind of global identity — not quite fully in one culture or another, but in a kind of mashed-up, cosmopolitan third space and a space of encounter with a diversity of people and worldviews.

So, Brazil! Bolsonaro is an unmitigated disaster for Brazil and the world, full stop. I remember coming home to the US from Brazil in the midst of the 2016 electoral mess and saying “if you think Trump is bad, wait till you see this guy.” He is in many ways a bona fide fascist, but also needs to be understood in his own context, that is the Brazilian context.

First, as I understand it, this is the culmination of the historical revenge of Brazil’s elite classes — the colonial, large landowner (latifundio) class, and agribusiness — against the relatively mild and modest reforms of a decade and a half of Workers Party government, at a time when economic recession and austerity exposed the compromises of the PT government and had made it vulnerable to opposition pressure.

It’s also a story of the rise of evangelicalism, where paternalism and the prosperity gospel have enthralled a large proportion of the lower middle class and the poor; and of historical-geographical divides, that pit a richer, whiter urban south against the poorer, Black, miscegenated rural North and Northeast, a dimension that I often find lacking in many English-language commentators who only visit Rio and Sao Paulo.

I was on a boat in the Amazon River when the 2015 parliamentary coup against Dilma Rousseff took place. The PT is not very strong in the Amazon, except among indigenous peoples and small-scale extractivists who are reliant on federal protection; there was a fair amount of apathy in the region at that time, but then Para state became a prominent bulwark against Bolsonaro in the most recent election.

Brazil is a land filled with contradictions, but Para’s performance in these rounds show me a populace that understands their condition: both dissatisfaction with a compromised PT that conceded too much to the multinationals in the soy industry, and the existential stakes of having a president who has advocated for genocide of indigenous peoples, and openly declared his intent to eliminate land protections enshrined in the 1988 constitution.

In the Northeast, the largest concentration of rural poverty in Latin America, where the PT is strongest (Lula is a Nordestino), the PT’s social policies are a vital defense against the devastating effects of periodic El Nino-induced droughts, and like in Amazonia this will exacerbate the humanitarian crises driven by both climatic and economic volatility.

I feel so much anger, despair, and defiance all at the same time when I think about Brazil, and the friends I have there who are struggling to make sense of this moment. I grieve most for the loss of democratic agency of historically marginalized peoples that, for what it’s worth, had some degree of support and political space under the PT and its expansive social-institutional base.

I had the incredible opportunity to attend one of the annual gatherings of the rubber tappers’ union in the Amazon, and witnessed firsthand how communities, academics, and government agencies sat down together in a process of “bottom-up” state formation: communities engaged in “social mapping” to illustrate their customary land uses, working with the academics and agencies to figure out ways to make them legible in state policy. It was a remarkable process, the product of long struggles that at one point achieved net-zero deforestation in the Amazon, that will be gone under Bolsonaro; replaced by a return to the colonial, incredibly violent politics of the landowners, loggers, ranchers and soy farmers.

Where I have hope is in the remarkable strength of the social movements, who have benefitted from the space to organize and cohere under the PT; it will be a protracted struggle that will face a terrifying amount of violence, but I hold out hope that they will prevail.

SG: That’s one of the most depressing accounts of hope I can imagine. But this is not a particularly Pollyanna period in history. The only optimisms that seem to match reality are faith and will. Looking at the material calculations, I don’t see any socio-political or biospheric happy endings at all, and it makes me grieve, really.

“Terrifying” is exactly the right word. I think we might agree that one cluster of these rare rays of hope, though, is not manifest as a great deux ex machina that solves the problem from above, swooping in like Gandalf’s eagles; it’s more granular, like yeast, and those are “frontier” struggles. By that, I mean, referencing Jason Moore here, those edges of primitive accumulation where capital is most violently appropriating nature/humanity as a single unified whole. Frontiers are water struggles, food sovereignty, alternative grids, land reform, agro-ecology, squatting, something materially necessary for that maroon organizing you named. It is what Cooperation Jackson is trying in an urban setting the US — engagement with politics, but with skin in the game. Land, food, digging in and defending actual grid coordinates. It seems slower, but it looks more durable. I think you have some Brazilian experience with that, too, and I’d be keen to hear whatever else comes to mind.

MELEIZA FIGUEROA: I think there is a gulf of experience that distinguishes more voluntarist forms of activism — intellectual debate, social media wars, symbolic struggles, and the like — from acts that more immediately impact everyday life struggles. Obviously they are not separate, but can often be complementary, because we need both types of struggle on all fronts. But there is something quite different about being able to sit in one’s comfortable home, having meetings and publishing journal articles and firing off strongly worded missives to one’s Congressperson, than doing things like rent strikes, guerilla homeless shelters, communities blockading their neighborhoods after a police murder, or reclaiming land, envisioning and enacting different kinds of community altogether. And these are often frontier struggles — whether it’s a frontier of gentrification in central cities, or a rural frontier where fights over water, natural resources, or just the right not to be poisoned by pipelines and fracking are more prominent.

Frontiers are zones of extraction — not just where capital is most violent, but also (and because) it is where capital is more desperately seeking new zones for profit-making, whether it’s ripping resources out of the ground, land under people’s feet, or extracting new forms of labor from desperate people who are unable to live otherwise in a cash-based society. Enclosure and primitive accumulation is an ongoing process and will consume the planet and all our lives if we don’t find another way to live without the profit motive or holding ourselves in thrall to corporations.

We as a society have been both coerced and conditioned into living in a cash-based and increasingly finance-based economy, in which even thinking about, much less proposing, ideas that don’t involve wage labor or investors or profits or cost-benefit analyses are shut down or repressed pretty much from the jump.

It’s crazy that the very notions of self-sufficiency, resilience, or community-based social organization that sustained our species for 99% of human history are thought of as “unrealistic” or even “dangerous” today. But we are approaching a point in which recovering and remixing those lifeways that have long been outmoded, dismissed, or repressed is a priority for our species, because our own way of life, late-stage capitalism to be exact, is itself outmoded, and must be transformed if we are to save ourselves and the planet.

It feels okay to talk about this in the abstract as an ideology or intellectual exercise if you’re still a beneficiary of the system; with all the stress that bills, and rent, and insurance, and all our financial woes give us, there are still a lot of people that can’t or won’t take that leap of imagination, because the risk of failure is still greater than the possibility of walking away. But there are so many others, many more every day, who simply don’t have a choice anymore. They are our unhoused, uninsured, jobless, underemployed, our younger generations for whom the never-ending quest for value added is an existential crisis in the face of precarious labor, mental stress, and climate change.

The silver lining in all of this is that there are so many possibilities to do something different, so much accumulated knowledge and practical wisdom handed down from multiple cultures through many generations — if we can undo a couple centuries of internalized capitalist white supremacy and recognize the value in those ideas and people. A big majority of the poor folks on this planet still live by that knowledge or wisdom, or at least draw upon it, as a way of surviving and resisting the global pressures being imposed on them.

In living and working with some of those peoples in Brazil, I was astounded how much I learned, or re-learned, about myself and the people I came from; to find value and strength in an immigrant heritage I’d largely disowned in order to assimilate into this society. I suspect there are many more of us out there, maybe enough of us, that can forge a better and more sustainable path out of this mess, if we can recognize and tap into the distinctive strengths we carry with us, and realize our power to do so.

This is where the agroecology part comes in.

Agroecology, as described by Peter Rosset and other agroecology scholars, is knowledge, practice, and politics. It’s not a matter of going back to some idyllic “traditional” past; one sort of bright point about this rapacious system of global capitalism is that it has brought about the means for people to come together and talk together, and that is exactly what is happening in agroecology movements around the world.

Farmers and stewards of the earth are standing together, exchanging knowledge, and partnering with scientists to enhance that knowledge and construct new systems and values that deliver the greatest benefits to people and planet; discovering when and where to engage in political struggle as a means of supporting the larger effort and overcoming obstacles.

It’s not an ideological exercise to these communities; these are imperatives in order to ensure their continued survival. We too have imperatives to ensure our own survival, to house and clothe and feed ourselves, and keep ourselves healthy — and there are many ways to fulfill those needs that don’t involve imploring some comfortable, rich and powerful people that have no idea what we are talking about to throw us a bone.

Political struggle, in the sense of bourgeois democracy, is thus turned on its head. It’s no longer about which detached talking mummy we choose to talk to other detached mummies in a Capitol thousands of miles away, but about demanding the space and agency to explore new possibilities and pursue our own needs on our own terms; in other words, self-determination, and a re-opening of that which has been enclosed.

We have so much accumulated potential in the diversity of amazing human beings on this planet, and yet so limited politically and economically in how we can realize it. At this point, even being allowed to try is an incredible political, social, and even cognitive struggle.

SG: Looking at this situation with Venezuela, and we’ve been watching Venezuela since the Bolivarian movement started, we have this confounding complexity. Maduro has make all kinds of jackass mistakes, but much of the destabilization has been kept on boil by the US ever since Chavez won his first election. And the economic sabotage has been ongoing. So everyone with an agenda wants to tease out the convenient parts, but Maduro and the US have been in this invisible and unequal war for years, so they are joined dialectically, if you will.

We know the screenplay already, the coup template from Honduras most recently, Haiti before that, attempted coup in Venezuela, the first Haiti coup . . . the mechanics of it are always the same: strangle the economy, turn that into a social crisis, culminate with a security crisis. But Americans overwhelmingly have no clue about these things. It’s too far away. Which is why the American ruling class media can control the narrative — Venezuela equals socialist equals bad.

How might a principled left effectively overcome these simplified narratives that are being streamed into the heads of overwhelmed people? In the case of Venezuela, what might a hypothetical agronomic-socialist approach have changed the outcomes they’re experiencing today? I mean, petro-socialism was always on a timeline. And it was very effective, for a while, as a triage stage wherein redistribution could relieve misery; but they never followed through. Then oil prices tanked. I just wonder if we put agronomists in the front rank instead of technocratic intellectuals hunting cash, if it might not have consolidated slower initial gains that translated into more durable systems. In particular, I wonder if the best prophylaxis against finance capital isn’t reducing general dependency on money — which makes everything a food sovereignty issue.

Sorry, go ahead.

MELEIZA FIGEUROA: Absolutely — in my view, everything comes down to a food sovereignty issue.

There are real, material reasons for that: economics, after all, comes from the Greek root word oikos, which initially meant “managing the household.” It boils down to the simple fact that change, any real change, cannot thrive without the ability to feed its people, and by extension, to present a way of life that is more attractive and beneficial to what came before. Food sovereignty, in the ways it is articulated today, mostly in the Global South but now increasingly in poor communities of color in the Global North, is also about culture, and about land — which, especially in Latin America and countries like Venezuela, is a primary vector of wealth inequality and dispossession.

Venezuela’s oligarchy, just like Brazil’s, is rooted historically in the latifundio system, the descendants of colonists with massive land grants from the Spanish crown, who subsequently secured rights to the extraction of resources from those lands, as well as the extraction of labor from massive numbers of enslaved indigenous and African people. It is absolutely foundational to the class and racial divides that are present in the country today, forming the oppositional forces on either side of the Bolivarian Revolution. A few of my colleagues in the food sovereignty scholarship community have written a fantastic, in-depth piece about the politics of food in Venezuela and its relevance to the current situation there, like this Monthly Review article.

One of the most frustrating things about watching the current situation in Venezuela now is the absolute lack of a historically informed view of the Bolivarian process, with all its warts, and the acceptance, even amongst the current “progressive” champions in government, of a superficial view of the situation; looking at a Latin American situation through United States eyes, in a way.

Even among those who understand how corrupt and unfair our own systems of “democracy” are, people still assume that US government and US-affiliated institutions are the gold standard by which to judge other systems. It’s tough to explain to people who were not paying attention in 2002 how this is directly connected to that coup attempt, and to those who have taken the “dictatorship” narrative for granted.

Several international institutions, including the Carter Center and the UN, have consistently rated Venezuela’s election integrity as among the highest in the world, and several degrees more free and fair than our own elections. But it’s precisely because of those difficulties that it is ever more important to educate as much as possible about the historical basis of the struggles taking place in Venezuela, and Haiti, and Latin America; not only about the history of violent US intervention but also as a way of getting people to see the situation through Latin American, Afro-Latino, and indigenous eyes. It’s ever more important because much of what has been going on there is increasingly relevant and informing to our struggles here, as Global South levels of inequality, autocracy, and poverty are coming ‘home’ to the core.

People really need to watch the documentary “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” about the 2002 attempted coup in Venezuela, especially those who are now concerned with election fraud and fake news, so they can understand the context of the current situation in Venezuela and connect it to the concerns many progressives are encountering right here at home. I think it will be ever more relevant to have conversations about Venezuela’s struggles with capital strikes, hoarding, and other tactics by which the oligarchy within that country have attempted to strangle the bottom-up process of democratizing that nation.

It’s also worth having a conversation about twentieth-century state socialism, ‘petro-socialism’ as you called it, and how old models of centralism combined with a “bunker mentality” conditioned by external threats have not perfectly served the aims of a bottom-up revolution, while also acknowledging that US intervention is not the answer.



Ultimately, the questions around support for Venezuela and the Bolivarian process means a conversation that gets real about the difficulties of creating an authentic social transformation in an era where media narratives, and all “grand narratives” focusing on the institutions of government, acknowledge the role of the people involved in that process hardly at all. You and I have known people intimately involved in that process, over the nearly two decades of activism supporting it, and have friends who have done research and solidarity work in the poorest neighborhoods that are the bedrock of the revolution.

I’ve had the privilege of recently meeting comrades who’ve been involved in forming cooperatives in Venezuela, who have described the painstaking process of creating new cultures of community, trust, and collaboration in their communities, outside the governmental structure but at the very least enabled by the spaces the Bolivarian paradigm has created.

It’s difficult, and admittedly unrealistic, to change the hearts and minds of people embedded in a corporate media culture overnight, and I’m not too sure social media call-out culture is the best forum and means to affect this level of change; but poco a poco, as my new friends from Venezuela put it, little by little, our efforts at speaking out and educating will help cultivate spaces for people to see the possibility, and the necessity, of changing the frame when looking at struggles abroad, and hopefully find the courage to let it change ourselves, here in the belly of the beast.

SG: In a Town Hall some months ago with Bernie Sanders, he repeated the talking points about Maduro as authoritarian (as did Rep. Ocasio-Cortez), but he did break with the Beltway consensus by categorically rejecting US intervention in Venezuela, and his position of support for the Israeli state has weakened considerably over the last few years. On domestic issues, he is already left of the whole field, but on these, too, he is left of the field . . . if only because the Beltway consensus is so far to the right. This points to a contradictory situation in which the standing “ideological” left full of old-timers like me and the social democratic rebellion that is the wind under Sanders’ wings can be at odds. I don’t mean to tar everyone with the same brush, but one tendency on that more long standing but far smaller “hard” left has been to approach the Sanders candidacies with ideological purity codes.

If Sanders is wrong on Venezuela or Palestine (even if he is left of the Beltway consensus), then he is contaminated, and anyone who votes for him or supports his candidacy is a class traitor, the political equivalent of a leper. I’m never sure whether to call this tendency inquisitorial or a contagion narrative. It seems like the focus in on the pure candidate, as opposed to the movement for which he provides an electoral focal point. How should the left relate to this nascent but growing social democratic impulse and the mass movement it portends? Is it not an incubator for a stronger left? And what is the responsibility of the left in terms of changing the popular narratives to make it easier for “our own” politicians to say and do the right thing?

MELEIZA FIGUEROA: This has been weighing on my mind a lot, especially as we go into a particularly contentious — and important — election cycle. I think part of the issue is that the left, or at the very least, a left/social-democratic alliance, is now in a position where taking power within the institutions is actually possible, which is a situation we haven’t really seen in this country for a few generations now.

In critical theory, we talk about the period after 1968 — the defeat of the last major leftist revolutionary upsurge in the world, and especially after 1980, with the ascendancy of Thatcher and Reagan which basically locked in a neoliberal trajectory — as the “semiotic turn,” the point at which signs and signifiers, and of the politics of representation, took prominence at a time where the material and political struggles of the Left were in a period of retreat.

It’s important to situate this historically. In a period of retreat, when the routes to power had been closed off to the left, in many cases violently, it made a lot of sense to enter a mode of reflection, to refine one’s analysis and position vis-a-vis the evolving situation.

Gramsci called this the “war of position,” as opposed to a “war of maneuver,” when political forces are actively engaged in a struggle for power. In a period of retreat, just about all one could do was “speak truth to power” while remaining in a relatively marginalized position in relation to state power and social hegemony.

Now, by which I mean the period since 2016, the situation has dramatically changed, and our framework of politics needs to change accordingly; we are in a war of maneuver now, where it’s no longer enough to navigate the terrain by signs and symbols, but now the question of physically retaking the reins of power to remake our world is once again before us.

This is complicated, however, not only by the force of habit on the part of the left, but also because neoliberalism itself has remade American politics into a market-based model — what some folks have called “retail politics.” We treat our candidates now not in the literal terms of republican democracy — in terms of our representatives’ degree of agency in advancing our goals — but as products, in terms of their features and amenities and political posturings, rather than as an extension of our own civic engagement in the transformation of our everyday lives.

It’s a subtle difference, but significant in that it warps our understanding of what elections mean, and what our representatives are supposed to do for us.

Getting someone who looks like us, talks like us, and that we may want to have a beer with into the seat becomes more important than what they do in that position; and elections become like horse races, the moment of triumph coming at the very beginning of the struggle rather than at the happy ending, because for the most part we’ve given up the very idea of a happy ending.

We want a perfect product, a perfect horse to back, as opposed to a progressive outcome informed by a dialectical view of history. Just as we so intensely want our candidates to reflect our yearnings, so too the search for the “perfect” representative reflects our sense of despair and powerlessness at any kind of result.

As Lauren Berlant, who theorized the ‘politics of affect,’ puts it: “having adopted a mode that might be called detachment, may not really be detached at all, but navigating an ongoing and sustaining relationship to the scene and circuit of optimism and disappointment.”

I don’t know precisely what the antidote is, but I think it will definitely have something to do with a return to engagement on a material level; going beyond affect and representation, and back into civic and community engagement, beyond protesting and into building alternatives, and a redefining of politics as an extension of that engagement.

To put it in soundbyte terms, it’s about keeping our eyes on the prize, and building the ground-level infrastructure to just do it, and in that sense forcing our politicians after their election cycles to follow us and be defined by that, rather than the other way round. It’s already happening, in a myriad of ways; in the marijuana decriminalization movement, and the demands growing out of the everyday structures of mutual aid and protection for trans people, and to a degree, in the #MeToo and reparations movements.

I also think there’s something very practical to be attended to in terms of training those we want to represent us in the ways we would like to be governed; and that puts a particular responsibility on the part of movements to learn and innovate in the arts of governing. When elections are the focus of governing, we focus on political posturing; in which a candidate may be very good, but actually governing is also a very particular job and task that we tend to forget about.

We can elect the best candidate with the best positions to office, but on day 1, and day 100, and forwards, the people who are training that candidate are the technocrats and bureaucrats and the good ole boys. On day 1, they learn the “rules” that have already been institutionally established; and in the absence of alternatives, are automatically resigned to accepting them as constraints on what’s possible.

In the act of engaging with communities on a material level, we need to learn how things like city and state budgets work, how water systems work, how sanitation and housing and education is actually administered on an everyday level; if only to figure out how to disrupt that bureaucratic inertia and build viable alternatives that our elected officials can use and fight for. And the best way that’s learned, and done, is on the local level.

Cities, and local state formations led the way for the neoliberalization of politics on a national level; it’s also the scale at which we can undo that damage, not only because it’s easier to organize but also because it provides a proof of concept of what can be done on larger scales. Progressive and radical engagement on the local level have pushed national policy in tons of ways throughout our history; cities across the country are doing it now, in enacting living wages and alternative housing and decriminalization and renaming Columbus Day. In a weird way, the very systems of home rule that were fought for and used by conservatives in a progressive era are now our tools for undoing the damage they perpetuated and institutionalized in our political life.

In this age, the left can take the lead on new mechanisms of state-making: popular and participatory processes of managing our lives based on the needs of the people, envisioned by the people that already practically make that happen on a daily basis. We need to use all the practical and theoretical skills at our disposal. If we don’t know how, we could connect and organize with those who do. There’s a reason — not just theoretical, but eminently practical — why the working class is the revolutionary class: because this is the class that makes daily life happen.

SG: I might amend that, a la Federici. Peasants on thirty percent of the world’s remaining arable land are feeding seventy percent of the world. And then there’s her theses on “reproduction,” so . . . women, working class, okay, but doing far more necessary and unpaid labor than just adding value at waged points of production.

And I wonder if the US hasn’t become a kind of global ATM, where we are just the consumers of last instance for a good deal of global production, running on capital’s treadmill to keep up, as well as a debt investment . . . a permanent bloc of debtors to keep cycling and expanding fictional value. Meanwhile, the view from a higher altitude shows how, as capital retrenches in the face of what appears to be a long-wave profitability crisis — itself exploited in every fissure for more returns-on-investment — it contracts in a kind of organized retreat, leaving masses of “redundant” human beings, what capital must see as “useless eaters.”

I love your description of the electoral situation, and your inhering critique of the old left — admittedly, I used to say things like they do — and its pathological aversion to any participation in elections with Democrats. This approach is leftist self-marginalization, I think, for exactly the reasons you state.

On a more tactical and immediate note with regard to elections — and I invite you to challenge me on this — what I see right now is a solid bloc on the proto-fascist right that is holding at close to forty percent. The emergent social democratic bloc, comprised of social democrats and more thoroughgoing socialists, cannot yet command a majority of Democrats and leftish independents, but it is making gains.

The primaries and the general elections have to be seen separately, as two distinct tactical phases. As long as we are caught in the two-party system, and we are still caught in that, the modest but extremely important electoral gains we are making would not be possible right now without a critical fusion strategy.

There is a far larger bloc of voters who will vote whatever Democrat opposes whatever Republican, after the primaries, even if they are not supporters of the left incursions, than there is of people who would step out on that limb and vote a third party. The left incursion requires that at this stage. Stepping out on our own, with the proto-fascist threat as high as it is right now, is perverse. The arithmetic on this is pretty clear. If we have 45 percent in the total anti-Republican column, and forty percent in the Republican column; and if the social democrats — within that anti-Republican column — are, let’s say, half of the total, which might be a bit optimistic, then we can command 20–25 percent, max, on our own. (I saw some slightly more optimistic figures recently.)

The struggle during primary seasons is already sharpening, and will continue to do so as more people enter the social democratic/socialist column. Obviously, this is more complicated by location and distribution, but if there is to be an alternative to the Democratic Party, then we have to build to the point where we can successfully challenge during both phases, primary and general, before we can electively calve off into a different party, or whatever.

The social democratic bloc has to be as strong as the proto-fascist bloc before it goes out on its own, so to speak, so we’re stuck with the Democratic hostage crisis for a bit longer, though we are plotting our escape. But we can’t do that by fiat, or based on some ideological template. Admitting one’s own weaknesses is essential for any good tactician. We are gaining strength, but we need to gain a bit more . . . and, I might add, as you pointed out, the most durable form of organizing here is tangible, multi-focused, and local. Better to accrue durable power slowly than fragile power opportunistically.

MELEIZA FIGUEROA: Yes, I agree with you — but this is also a conjuncture, and things go haywire in a conjuncture.

It’s an interesting challenge for the Left, because the unexpected twists and turns, the suddenly appearing phenomena, the multiple battlefields that open up in the conflict, require us to become tacticians, in the moment, to pay close attention and throw away some of the old wisdoms and ideological analyses.

As Stuart Hall said, “When a conjuncture unrolls, there is no ‘going back’. History shifts gears. The terrain changes. You are in a new moment. You have to attend, ‘violently’, with all the ‘pessimism of the intellect’ at your command, to the ‘discipline of the conjuncture’.” Ultimately yes, there are no shortcuts, and we must patiently accrue power, but in the volatility of the conjuncture there are leaps too, and as good tacticians we must pay attention to that too, and take our shots when we can.

That’s basically how I saw it when I took the opportunity to work as press director for Jill Stein’s campaign, and I have zero regrets about it. I saw Bernie Sanders activate a whole generation, and cohere a progressive vision and narrative that counterposed both the reigning narrative and the narrative of the right. So when he was defeated, the Gramscian in me looked at me and thought, “that can’t be the end of this narrative. If all we have in the presidential election — the stage that to many Americans is politics — is Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, then we truly are fucked.”

I saw an opportunity and a responsibility at that time to take up the position on the outside and keep the left narrative going, pick up the baton and continue the work that the first Sanders campaign started. That was the battlefield then, and I ran with it as far as I could.

Now is different, for sure — the internal relations of the Democratic Party is the primary battlefield now, and it is interesting to watch that internal resistance unfold in tandem with the radicalization of so many especially young people. I’m still a Green, and active on the national committee. But that’s not to say I’m not watching what’s going on with keen interest and a bit of investment, because what does happen will be incredibly consequential not just for the party but for the very conception of politics among the people. Now, even the pussy-hat wearers are going out to block ICE vans. Socialism and even guillotines-memes are cool again.

There’s another leap in the general consciousness coming, if it’s not happening already. And it will be contradictory as hell, and as you said, many an ideological template will have to go into the bin. But there’s a lot we can do to be organized, prepared, and conscious enough to analyze the changing situation and move decisively. A lot is happening on the local level, where elections are by and large non-partisan, and local people have a keen knowledge of their particular situation, not getting their talking points from a distant national media. This is the place where, as I think you are saying, we can really connect with a base and build lasting power — not just electorally, but to have de facto power over our own lives, to build dual power. And we need everyone for that, of whatever stripe. The only way we are going to get out of this, much less survive on this dying planet, is together.

SG: Speaking of tactics and connecting with bases, I’ve been watching the Sanders campaign — Act II, and I’ll be very curious to see how this plays out. It’s like they’re laying back — though I receive frequent missives as a “volunteer” on various lists — and just coasting on what appears to be a very firm footing in the top tier of the Democratic Presidential field. At least, on MSNBC.

But if you look through the news online, both Sanders and his campaign show up in dozens of local news outlets, where they are putting the resources of the campaign at the service of active struggles. He’s rallying McDonald’s workers, or attending strikes, or amplifying fights against hospital closures, and so on. And he shows up on non-cable programs like Black Coffee. It’s almost like this is eighty percent ground game and twenty percent publicity. This strikes me as a pretty smart risk, but I obviously don’t have any way of knowing all the variables. All he has to do is stay in the top three for now, and while Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg and the rest run from their own pasts with platitudes, that ground game is advancing, advancing, advancing. I have this sense that when the campaign swings into high gear, these contestants are going to be really surprised by how strong this movement has grown.

There is a real chance, a tight one, that he could win, which puts the Left in the toughest position of all, not that we have a choice. There will be expectations that he is a new King who can put things right, and what will happen is the whole apparatus will go into high-friction mode to frustrate our agenda. Am I reading this too optimistically, or too pessimistically?

map of contributions to DP POTUS campaigns, 2019

MELEIZA FIGUEROA: Can we say both?

On the media/publicity side, proportionate to ground game, he may not have a lot of control over that aspect. Corporate media consolidation has gotten about as monopolistic as it can get, and now they are not even trying to hide the fact of their partisanship (and intra-partisanship especially when it comes to the Democratic Party). When they want to shut someone out of the mainstream media sphere, they will shut it down, and I think that kind of lockdown is something like what he is fighting against right now.

I think there were two big reasons why Sanders had a big break in 2016 in terms of media: first, it was the novelty of his campaign and the conjunctural conditions that let it catch on so quickly and turn into a movement beyond anyone’s expectations.

When Sanders announced his run in 2015, I think pretty much everyone, myself included, assumed he’d be another Kucinich, or Gravel; he’d say his piece, get a couple of percentage points, and go start a nonprofit or whatever. And perhaps, if it were any other year but 2016, he would have ended up that way. So the historical contingency of his campaign and the necessity/popularity of the message he presented really caught everyone by surprise, which allowed him to exploit that break in the continuity of corporate media control.

Secondly — and this is a controversial point on the Left — he focused a lot of his early media engagements on Fox News and a few other conservative media outlets. A lot of leftists wouldn’t go near Fox with a ten-foot pole, but I think he was very smart to do it, and it was a tactic I pursued with Jill’s campaign as well. Remember that Fox News, as a news/propaganda outlet, was really constructed with the Bush/neocon type Republican bloc as its driving force. That bloc collapsed in 2016 with Trump’s ascendancy, and there was a moment of disorientation in terms of the political alignment of the network in the ensuing months of that election cycle. The other thing you need to know is that Fox, unlike the other outlets, does not have a central booking department. The shows are generally autonomous, pitted against each other in the quest for ratings. And not all Fox hosts were Trump-aligned; many are more libertarian-leaning, others more in the traditional conservative vein, such as Charles Krauthammer, Bret Baier and the like.

This is a little bit of election-media inside baseball that I was privy to: there was a very small, but very profound moment, after it became clear that Trump would win the nomination, where traditional conservative media hosts honestly didn’t know who to support in the election. They certainly weren’t going to support Hillary, and so for a short period of time they were genuinely open to entertaining alternative candidates, like Sanders and later, Jill Stein.

Sanders’ message also proved to be rather popular among their base, who wrote into several shows requesting to hear more from him and other candidates. It was an opening that even a leftist candidate could exploit to, as I called it, “drop an earworm” into the consciousness of millions of “regular” Americans, the grandmothers in Iowa and working class kids in Texas and people casually watching at airports or the doctor’s office. You get an average of 5–7 minutes on a typical cable news interview, but in circumstances like that it was a precious bit of time where you could amplify your message far beyond traditional politically active circles.

Exploiting those two historically contingent factors in very smart ways, I think, are what got Sanders his big break in 2016.

But because they were historically contingent, they can only work for a time, in the lag time before the mainstream media reorients and re-asserts their control over the political dialogue. In Jill’s campaign, that break lasted and worked for us for perhaps a couple of months at best, getting us incredible coverage and publicity, town halls on the major networks, and getting up to 27 million unique Twitter/Periscope engagements for our livestreamed response to the first debate — until literally the day before the second debate, where we experienced a remarkable near-total media shutdown. It really was that dramatic — one day I was getting more media requests than I could handle, and the next day crickets.

Obviously Sanders had already gotten far more coverage and attention than Jill, so I doubt they are able to shut him down quite in the same way they did us. But believe me when I say they are absolutely pulling out all the tricks to ensure that he gets as little coverage as possible, as well as spread negative coverage when he must be mentioned. Fox’s realignment behind Trump has completed and is as rock-solid as his wall; and the liberal media will do what they do, ignoring when they can and manufacturing scandal and reaction when they can’t.

That’s probably the biggest reason Sanders has now reoriented the campaign so heavily towards movement-building; I’m guessing that would be the case with him, because it was exactly what we did when they put the drop on Jill; as well as leverage the relatively powerful and hitherto unregulated sphere of social media (although that is also changing very quickly now, towards a greater degree of control over the algorithms).

Livestreaming was a relatively novel technology at the time, but we used the hell out of that to engage with movements and highlight their struggles, from Louisiana to Baltimore to Standing Rock. Our social media and grassroots game quickly became the lifeblood of the campaign, and I suspect it will be to a much greater scale this time around with Sanders.

I think he is engaging constituencies that aren’t reflected in mainstream polling, the under-the-radar folks who generally don’t turn out, but might do it this time. And I think — hope — that this will bear itself out when the actual primary results come in. Remember that AOC didn’t win by going the normal route either — she expanded the electorate, almost all in her direction, which gave her the win. I’m hoping that kind of mismatch between reality and media narrative works again this primary, in Sanders’ favor; but the corporate media will always have some kind of ace up their sleeve.

This time what I am seeing much more frequently in liberal media is the classic Goebbelsian tactic of literally just making up narratives and repeating it so often that it becomes effective reality — the ‘Bernie bro’ fallacy being one of the most pernicious. It’s also more confusing (and gaslighting) when it comes from the liberal media, because they’re supposed to be the “good guys.” But they use all the same tactics that Fox News employs on a regular basis — and David Brock is the evil granddaddy of them all. There really is a special place in hell for that guy.

I guess, when it comes down to it, that it will be the ground game that will ultimately decide what happens in the primary, and to what extent the grassroots forces are able to supersede the mainstream narratives. It’s an incredibly, almost impossibly difficult row to hoe. But he has also had four years to build up a massive apparatus for just that.

Livestreaming and social media are absolutely key — I’m very impressed he now has a Twitch channel, for example, because gamers are all but nonexistent to the political strategists. Joining hands with and lifting up social movements is not only the right thing to do, but incredibly effective; it doesn’t just boost numbers but it also makes these movements aware of each other and lets them experience the sense of being interlinked, even if it’s through an electoral candidate.

I’d say that arguably more than social media, strengthening and affiliating with movements on the ground is his most important “trump” card (pun intended, sorry not sorry) against a hostile and pretty monolithic mainstream media apparatus this time around. The primary will be the acid test.

SG: Maybe we can talk about movements and contingency for a minute. At least get some definitions straight and maybe see how movements and contingencies are not necessarily opposed to each other, but how each draws on resources and time, which are finite. By contingencies, I mean stuff that comes up. Hahnemann University Hospital closing, local teachers’ strikes, Flint’s poisoned water, DAPL, etc. Places where we lock horns, but there is a beginning and (hopefully) and end. I’ve been reading Toril Moi, and her playbook includes De Beauvoir. Moi uses De Beauvoir’s analogy, taken from more recent and accurate translations of De Beauvoir, of topography, like a 3-D map that shows elevation and relief.

In Beauvoir’s account of being a woman, she echoes Fanon and Du Bois on the issue of double-consciousness, but she describes the particular (her living in a sexed body that is “taken to be” Woman) as hilltops or ridges that arise from the base or surrounding and contextualizing terrain of the more universal historical process unfolding.

This prioritizes neither the particular nor the universal, not opposing them, but reaching out to synthesize them. So, in a sense, when we see DAPL or a strike, this particularity is a feature on the larger terrain, which connects these particular features. Forgive me, I’m wrestling with this still, but a movement, it seems, has to establish pathways across that surrounding terrain.

This fuzzy intuition corresponds to my discomfort when I hear people talking about “building” movements, which — as you know — I am extremely skeptical of. Social movements are not buildings, and they are not “constructed” using blueprints and materials lists. Based on this admittedly underdeveloped idea, maybe we need to think about creating pathways between these terrain features, so to speak, and establishing the kinds of sustenance and support that helps contingent struggles flourish, and eventually, however that comes to be understood, win.

MELEIZA FIGUEROA: Yes! I think you’re going in the right direction, and topography really is a great heuristic for thinking through how to connect global processes and local struggles in ways that help folks understand the interconnectedness of our struggles and act accordingly.

In geography, Cindi Katz is the key scholar who’s used topography to this end — tracing the process of globalization as it has “provoked, undermined, and reworked” the relations, practices, and sedimented material histories of places as far apart as Harlem and the Sudan; and suggests how, analytically, we can construct “counter-topographies” by which social movements can connect and build ties of solidarity between seemingly disparate struggles around the globe.

The project of neoliberal globalization was concentrated on achieving a singular objective: the imposition of a set of neoliberal policies on sovereign states, in order to facilitate the unfettered movement of capital across the world. And as we all know, the implementation of this new order has had devastating effects on societies the world over.

But it’s not adequate to simply talk about the terrible “impacts” of globalization, as if it were a meteor shower leaving identical craters all over the place that one could easily identify, compare, and aggregate across space. If that were the case, it would be easy for anti-globalization activists around the world to simply compare notes, unify their slogans, and win the day with a unified model of struggle.

Unfortunately, it’s not so easy to transpose a particular mode of politics across the diverse, complex, and politically messy mosaic of real-world societies. What critical geographers like Katz and fellow travelers recognize is that actually teasing out and working through how difference is produced across local contexts is every bit as important to the work of building solidarity between them.

It kind of goes like this: agents of neoliberal globalization move around the world, marching orders in hand from Washington or the IMF — but then they come into contact with actually existing societies, and the unique histories, cultures, and environments that comprise a particular identity of place. They can’t simply overwrite all those deeply embedded relations. Global capital is forced to work with what is already there, to reckon with the local “frictions” that push back against it; to recombine and reshape the underlying relations to get what they need out of that particular place, the labor or resource pool. Thus, local struggles may be expressed in very different ways, even as they are really pushing back against the same thing.

Katz uses the cartographic technique of the “contour line” to tease out the underlying relational connections amongst seemingly disparate local struggles. Contour lines are used in topography to indicate where disconnected points within a mountain range stand at the same specific elevation; so too, we can use “contour lines” to trace specific changes induced by neoliberal development — deskilling, for example, or the introduction of patented seeds — and compare how they play out across particular spaces and cultures. For example, resistance to management abuses in a factory may, in a place like West Virginia with a strong memory of unionism, manifest as an organized slowdown or strike; but in Cambodia, where traditional animist beliefs shape the relationship to land, workers’ reaction to the same stressor is expressed as a mass episode of spirit possession. What interlinked social movements can do is engage in cross-cultural education and dialogue to map those contour lines and understand how responses to particular global pressures work through each local context.

That also speaks to your concerns around the metaphor of “building” movements, as if one homogeneous or overarching “structure” can possibly capture or manage these kinds of nuances across places or cultures in a unified framework. At the same time, you make the point that we can’t leave it to contingency, and keep chasing the dragon of spontaneity hoping that this time will be the magic moment of “proletarian salvation.” While spontaneous upsurges can be very powerful in a particular moment, perhaps because of the contingent factors that combine in the right time and place, they tend to fade quickly unless some of that energy can be rooted in more deliberate, resilient forms for the long haul — if we are intent on actually winning this protracted, asymmetric war against the formidable, resilient, totalizing foe that global capitalism represents.

Forgive me now as I am about to crudely (and perhaps badly) invoke references to war theory, but I must say, there is something to be said about the deeply rooted community networks that develop, sometimes spontaneously, to support guerrilla resistance movements during asymmetric anti-colonial struggles. These networks tend to be incredibly agile, geographically expansive and dynamic (in order to help forces evade capture), and importantly, are embedded in particular cultural languages that allow broad participation from the populace.

I grew up with my father’s stories of WWII and the Japanese occupation of the Philippines, which he experienced as a young child, and his older brothers who became guerrilla fighters in the resistance; I find myself remembering these now, especially fascinated with his stories of how communities improvised support structures as they fled through the jungle, and old women who lived deep in the forests, cultivating food on the hillsides to support refugees on their journey.

Perhaps instead of a static movement “structure,” we could be guided by a guerilla concept of “infrastructure” along these lines, as a way to think about dynamic linkages that can support and aggregate the strengths of international, cross-cultural movements without the impulse to homogenize them. We can’t anticipate the specific course of events by which people make history, but we can try to set some of the conditions in our favor by laying down networks that could both support active movements and prepare our communities for a protracted struggle: lines of communication and supply, metaphorical rope bridges and highways to facilitate mutual aid and support between movements that understand enough about how they are interrelated to coordinate their efforts, yet are able to pursue their individual objectives in locally specific and appropriate ways.

SG: War metaphors are hard to evade in a country that has been highly militaristic from its origins, where war nationalism is the civic religion, and where even the political system is a form of somewhat sublimated war.

My own nonviolent commitment has not prevented me from using war metaphors, because we sometimes have no other frame of reference, but also because we are — as is becoming clearer with the Trump cult of violent white masculinism — at war, whether we like it or not, and whether we choose to respond to violence with violence or not.

People who smuggled Jews out of Nazi Germany were not combatants, necessarily, but they were pretty clear that they were immersed in a war. Jesus argued, I think, for a kind of pacifism combined with tactical agility among his first followers, telling them, “be gentle as doves and wise as serpents.”

But at the end of the day, however we theorize the ethics of violence, what motivated me as a communist before and what motivates me as a Christian now is opposition to those social forms that are reproduced through violence, that reproduce injustice using violence.

Capitalism is an insidious and extremely violent social form that has learned how to cloak or justify that violence. I think this is very solid ground for Marxists and Christians — not that dispensationalist heresy that fuels the right wing — have a good deal of common ground, especially as these contradictions in the system engender the kind of reaction we see today.

You and I are mutual fans of David Harvey’s work, and we’ve waved at his umbrella term “accumulation by dispossession” a couple of times already. I’ll give you the last word here, since we’re over ten thousand words already; but can you outline the relation between fictional value, financialization, and what Harvey calls “dispossession.”? And what that implies about how we do politics.

MELEIZA FIGUEROA: Well! A very simple topic to round out our discussion, LOL.

So, to understand Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession, we have to start with his understanding of neoliberalism as a class-based political project of the capitalist class and the wealthy. In the years following the Great Depression, a bargain had been negotiated between these classes and a newly configured “welfare state” that levied deep taxes on wealthy households and large industries in order to strengthen the hand of the federal government in regulating capitalism; to reduce inequality and create a society with broadly shared prosperity, buttressed by strong federal programs and agencies, and a social safety net. By the 1970s, this economic order began to decline, partly due to the oil shocks of the early 70s but more fundamentally because, as Europe and Japan came back online as manufacturing powers, production in the world market reached a saturation point and the overall rate of profit from manufacturing began to slow down. The ensuing stagflation crisis presented an opportunity for the 1% — the capitalists, financiers, and wealthy — to strike back.



Neoliberalism was their strategy to recuperate the accumulated wealth they had conceded to the rest of society during the welfare state era, to restore laissez-faire capitalism and unfettered growth: trade liberalization across borders, deregulation, privatization of public goods, and a return to the highly individualistic ideology of entrepreneurship in, well, just about all areas of society.

With new technologies coming online providing an electronic infrastructure for moving money at lightning speeds around the globe, neoliberalism is also characterized by the dominance of finance, and the dynamic global movement of financial investment capital to whatever place can deliver the highest value for the lowest cost.

And of course, as we have seen over the past 40 years, this model has been forced upon just about all the countries of the world, many times at the point of a gun; and in the 21st century, capitalism is, for the first time, truly able to encompass the entire world; clearing the way for profit-making and accumulation to proceed on a bona fide planetary scale. Most importantly, especially for Harvey, despite everything the free-market fundamentalists say about getting government out of business, the aims of this round of class warfare were explicitly political: to regain control over the terms of accumulation, the prevailing conditions to maximize profit within the capitalist economic order.



And it worked, for a while; rich folks made hand over fist, workers’ power was broken in key countries and industries, and the world was integrated into a massive, interlinked, highly efficient system of moving goods and services around the globe, dictated by financial markets and facilitated by the incredibly agile movements of global capital investment. BUT — this is where it encounters a problem.

The problem writ broadly is that neoliberalism had never resolved the problem of the falling rate of profit in manufacturing; the fact of overproduction and overaccumulation of productive capacity that led to the 1970s crisis in the first place. But the unique essence of capital, what distinguishes it from simple money as currency, is in its core function as a means of investment. In fact, capital that comes back to a capitalist as profit must be re-invested or revalorized to retain its status as capital; it’s actually not worth very much if it’s just hoarded and not thrown back into the cycle of capitalist production.

Neoliberal restructuring kind of just covered up this underlying problem by throwing everything into financialization: finance operating at a high level of abstraction, constantly trying to “free” itself from the millstone that has been the real economy and the law of declining returns. And of course, the financial sector has since blown up to titanic proportions, and tries to stay afloat by inflating a series of speculative “bubbles” that work for a time, and then “burst” in spectacular fashion; a market correction that plunges affected economies into recession.



There’s just one little problem: capital valorizes itself through production — by which I mean making an actual thing, a commodity with an exchange value based on labor time to produce it, that goes onto the market and gets bought by someone else. Anything at levels of abstraction above that — derivatives, stocks, etc. — is just that, an abstraction; what Harvey calls fictitious capital.

It is “fictitious” because what gives that capital value is not production, but debt. Debt itself thus becomes a commodity that is bought and sold, and then securities on debt are created to be bought and sold, and so on. But there is no actual use-value in debt; it’s not like a chair or table or something anyone actually needs on the daily. A debt-based financial system, therefore, turns into a literal Ponzi scheme, kicking the problems down the road farther and farther into the future. But that debt, no matter how large or small, still needs to be realized through the real economy from future production, earnings, or real property/assets at some point in the future.

If people just decided to stop paying debt, or simply couldn’t anymore, all the money securitized by that debt literally just vanishes. This is what happened in 2008, when the sheer scale of mortgage defaults — a reality check to market assumptions of a self-perpetuating system, that the money for the underlying asset will never actually materialize — popped the hyper-inflated real estate bubble and vaporized trillions of dollars in value, and of all the derivatives based on them.

At the core of Harvey’s theory of accumulation by dispossession is this problem of surplus capital.

Again, capital must be re-valorized in order to have value as capital. But what if you have accumulated a ton of capital, but cannot or don’t want to invest it in production, since that sector is saturated and long suffering from declining returns?

The longer you hold on to your surplus capital, the less value it will have in the long run. There’s finance, of course, but the real powers that be know about market volatility and diversify their investments to keep at least a good portion of their cash invested in something real. It’s like a digital Gold Rush with real-world implications: Investors have to find new sectors, new frontiers for capital accumulation that will generate profits, and if you happen to find it first you can enjoy the super-profits, or rents, from cornering that market, at least until the other guys (and I do mean guys) show up.

Harvey envisions this phase of late-stage neoliberal capitalism as a huge pool of surplus capital constantly on the move, swishing around every corner of the Earth in search of new opportunities for investment, to corner that niche and suck a few million extra bucks in rents out of it before moving on to the next thing.

Well, as of now, capitalism has indeed saturated every corner of the world. Now what? This is where the dispossession part comes in. Looking at a world previously dominated by a mixed-economy system — where many key industries and social services were state-owned or state-administered — under neoliberalism those become fair game for privatization, exploitation and accumulation.

Unfortunately, these industries and services — such as water delivery, education, healthcare, utilities, land reform projects, and more — were taken on by the state precisely because the state is the only entity that can invest on that scale without the expectation of profit; states invest, as the developmentalist wisdom goes, to provide a social good for the people and subsidize infrastructural capacity for domestic production. That had kept both costs and prices low, and kept the people more or less happy.

Privatization not only dispossessed the state — and by extension, all the people who pay taxes to the state — of vital services and functions whose first priority was to serve the people, but the resulting price hikes, service fees, and other rent-seeking changes to those systems as they were taken over by for-profit multinational corporations quickly made those services inaccessible to a vast number of poor and working people, especially in the Third World but it’s been coming back home for a while now. Just look at the catastrophic results of the neoliberalization of the public university system today.

Privatization devastated low-income communities around the globe, often dispossessing them of many other things besides the social good in question. Another solid investment for surplus capital is in land and real estate; real property. And here’s where the dispossession is most obvious: the 2008 financial crisis directly dispossessed something like 6 million homeowners through foreclosure; whole neighborhoods in certain cities literally just emptying out, leaving a huge amount of abandoned, bank-owned housing stock. Guess who stepped into this new frontier of accumulation that just opened up? Hedge funds. Large institutional investors like Blackstone and SMS Properties, who now own huge swaths of our major cities — I believe there is a hedge fund that bought up fully a third to a half of West Oakland, for example.

Not so much in the US, but in other parts of the world (particularly in the Anglophone countries), real estate also became the go-to for Chinese investors to “park” surplus capital as they await the buildout of the Belt & Road Initiative. It was a huge windfall in that these enormous pools of capital could easily buy the properties, give them a nominal rehab job, and rent them out at steadily increasing prices — a bonanza not just for the landlord class, but now they are actually trading derivatives in financial markets; pitching it as a safer investment than mortgages. Their monopoly power in key markets (like the Bay Area) basically guarantee that people will want to live there, and pay steadily increasing prices for it. They’ve gotten into the mobile home game as well, buying the underlying land for the mobile home park at bargain prices and jacking up space rents. And if people simply cannot pay rents at this level, they use the arbitrary power of no-fault eviction to simply kick them out, do minimal repairs for compliance, and rent it out to someone else for double the rent or more, or convert it to AirBNBs. And naturally, accompanying the growth of this scheme has been the explosion of homelessness in cities across the US and UK, and several other advanced capitalist countries.

Treating this basic necessity — and human right — to shelter as a new market to capture (hold hostage, really), and extract profits, rents, and derivatives from it, is not simply disgusting on a greed scale, although it is truly disgusting and exploitative. It is an unconscionable crime against humanity because of the sheer scale of the dispossessions underway to facilitate it on a national, even global scale. And it is of course not sustainable; sometime, likely soon, they will hit a ceiling of how much they can actually squeeze out of working people desperate enough to fork over 50% or more of their income in rent, or — what I hope will happen — is that tenants will organize to demand rent control, just cause eviction, and other protections that could cool down this market. But as long as these huge financial firms own these apartments and buildings and enjoy their rights as property owners, they can keep doing this as long as they want, as long as they can find suckers who will rent their crappy apartment at a ridiculously inflated prices. As for the people who have been evicted, or forced to vacate their apartments because they could no longer pay after a rent hike? Well, they are likely forced to move, sometimes hundreds or thousands of miles away and find new jobs and communities on their own; or they join the swelling ranks of the homeless, becoming van-lifers or rubber-tramps if they’re lucky enough to have a car or RV (mostly retired folks who still have to work at Amazon warehouses in horrific conditions to make it thru the year), or if they’re not so lucky, they will have to hit the streets — the traumatic and physically taxing work of roaming the streets, not able to sit or lie down in communities that have criminalized it, circulating endlessly between tent cities, shelters, and the rough streets, while being hounded by police, getting beat-downs or death threats from NIMBYs. A big percentage of these folks still actually work, that’s how inaccessible housing has gotten.

And — to take a concept you used two decades ago — in an age of increasing authoritarianism and rhetoric of “exterminism” — becoming part of a social group that is demonized and thrown away by society will essentially become a death sentence, unless we fight to make it otherwise.

[NOTE: I first heard the term “exterminism” from a late comrade, the Welsh communist, Mark Jones. -SG]

The last thing I want to point to regarding accumulation by dispossession is to compare it to another well-known process of dispossession: what Marx called “primitive accumulation,” or the “original” processes of enclosure of the commons and the sanctification of private property that laid the groundwork for capitalism itself, and, as several scholars argue, continues as an ongoing process of enclosure up to the present. There have been extensive debates among scholars as to whether or not accumulation by dispossession was simply another name for the ongoing process of primitive accumulation, or if it is a distinctive historical phenomenon conditioned by neoliberalism as a political-economic order.

The view that makes sense to me — at least where I’d left it at the time — is that accumulation by dispossession is distinct from primitive accumulation, and while possibly not unique to neoliberalism, has certainly been facilitated and generalized by a neoliberal agenda. Primitive accumulation, in a strict sense, retains its “original” character even as a modern process by taking something that had hitherto not been considered private property — access to a particular forest, a lake used for subsistence fishing, seeds, etc. — and encloses it, meaning to cut off access to the communities who previously held it in common, and commodifies it as private property to be bought and sold on the free market.

The example of housing I described above is a bit different from that, and importantly so. Housing is already commodified — and in the US, it’s kind of always been a commodity from jump. So what the process of accumulation by dispossession involves is a bloc of surplus capital coming BACK to a market that had previously been worked over. It could be depressed or blighted neighborhoods, as in gentrification, but as Bay Area dynamics show, does not always have to be, as an example. By dispossessing current users or residents, clears the way for a renewed cycle of accumulation.

Why is this significant?

What these dynamics imply is that surplus capital, having traveled the world and back again in the search for profits, may indeed be running out of places to go; dispossessing even lower-middle and middle class people who were employed, responsible, and doing kind of okay, in favor of a population of consumers just a step or two higher on the income ladder. Accumulation by dispossession, to put it another way, is the cannibal stage of late capitalism; incapable of changing course, nor even slowing down, it literally turns to eating itself in order to survive.



Primitive accumulation is how capital gets its foot in the door to incorporate new markets and commodities that had not hitherto been part of the system — Bolsonaro cutting the Amazon and attacking the indigenous folk who live there, for example. It’s all dispossessive. But “accumulation by dispossession,” in Harvey’s contemporary understanding, is a harbinger of capitalism’s End Times: a potentially terminal crisis of capitalism, as the expansion of capital runs up against the hard limits of geography, consumer power, and markets to exploit — not to mention the apocalyptic climate change scenario unfolding before our eyes.

While it shows that Marx was right, and capitalism does have structural limits, the way it’s going down now is nothing to celebrate. Capitalism could still limp along for a good while yet in its cannibal stage; how long it can sustain the rental racket is anyone’s guess, but there’s also disaster capitalism — one of the few markets (if you’ll excuse my callous “business” tone) that is poised for serious growth over the next few decades.

I’ve been watching that process unfold in my community in the months after the Camp Fire — not just around the survivors, but secondary spill-over effects from the fire, as working people in our town are being hit with a wave of evictions so landlords can take advantage of the “hottest real estate market in California” — and a whole lot of community destabilization and ugly politics have arisen as a result.

Privatized water, as I’ve seen, is becoming another hot spot for “climate-smart investment.” Another likely candidate, I hate to say, will be tools of war and the security state, as accelerating climate change spurs uncontrolled migration, militarization of borders, and related conflicts around the globe.

So, even though capitalism has indeed “produced its own gravedigger,” it’s still imperative for us who understand what’s happening to get moving and organize people — with a particular emphasis, in my opinion, around building solidarity economies and community infrastructure to meet the basic needs that are under threat in the near term. We have to pursue whatever means we can to reconstruct the material relations among us — housing, agriculture, clothing, child/elder care, etc. — essential functions that, if we organized even limited capacity to take care of it ourselves, builds practical autonomy and confidence as a community. We need to ease the stranglehold of life-and-death dependency through which this failing system absolutely intends to squeeze every last dollar, every last breath of productive capacity we have from us, and leave us to die when they’re done.

Building dual power, which is what Lenin called the approach I outlined above — to achieve de facto self-organization and autonomous practical control over our everyday lives, regardless of who rules on paper — will help us survive anyway when climate change hits the fan; but incidentally, also gives us a big fucking leg to stand on if we must take state power, and/or make claims on the state for resources, land, or other forms of state provision that is only possible at scale.

And finally, my last word is a shout-out to Marx himself: the increasingly urgent historical task he laid out for the workers of the world, although it obviously looks a bit different this time around — to organize, exercise our class power and actively bring about an end to capitalism, specifically to dismantle the regimes of private property that pit us against each other for the benefit of a few, as we build a new, egalitarian (and ecological) system in its place — is still 100% our task to take up and win. And as Kali Akuno of Cooperation Jackson said to me recently, we have to win — because the alternative is already showing its horrific true colors, and it’s gonna get a whole lot uglier before it’s done.