Throughline - There Are No Utopias

Episode Date: February 24, 2022

It may seem bleak, but Robin D.G Kelley's view of the world says there is no promise of liberation, only struggle. Kelley has spent his career bringing to life the stories of the Black labor organizers and anti-capitalists who are often left out of history books, from radical farmers in the South to Black unions during the Gilded Age. And he's come to a provocative conclusion: that the secret to capitalism's survival is racism. His scholarship uses historical connections between race and labor to directly challenge the premise that there can be any justice within America's current economic system — and to ask what that means for the people who seek it. This week on Throughline, a view of Black history you don't often hear in February.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from the NPR Wine Club, which has generated over $1.75 million to support NPR programming. Whether buying a few bottles or joining the club, you can learn more at nprwineclub.org slash podcast. Must be 21 or older to purchase. It is Black History Month. Class is in session. This February, AT&T brings you a new kind of history lesson with

History by Us, lesser-known stories from Black history told by those making it. A month where we celebrate and reflect on the unique contributions of Black Americans to U.S. history. Black history meant to me giving a voice to those who might not have had one. But also, it's a time for corporate branding. How hyped were y'all when you saw the Google Black History Month commercial? We see you making moves, coming together on the leaderboard, putting up numbers. These are all advertisements from AT&T, Dick's Sporting Goods, Google, and Peloton for Black History Month. And this is just the start. There are so many more of these ads you can find easily online.

They feature Black Americans on the move, working hard, laughing, being inspired. Sometimes we see historical figures like Martin Luther King Jr. or Rosa Parks in them. They are reminders that these companies want consumers to believe that they very much care about Black people and their history. Yet the hypocrisy is hard to ignore and very cringe. Companies like AT&T and Google have been accused of unfair labor practices by their Black employees. If that's not capitalism, I don't know what is. This is racial capitalism textbook 101.

This is Robin D.G. Kelly. I'm a professor of history at UCLA. I write books about social movements. That's a very humble self-bio. Robin Kelly is actually one of the most important active historians in academia today. He spent a career bringing to life the stories of Black labor organizers and anti-capitalists who are often left out of history books. He's directly challenged conventional wisdom about race and class in American history.

The central story of race and the making of the capitalist order isn't always the most obvious story. Race, and I would add gender, are modalities in which classes lived. He spent his career telling stories about Black history that aren't often told. He's documented Alabama communists during the Great Depression, bus-driving union organizers during World War II, Black miners who rebelled against their bosses, and much more. In the process, he's built a vision of history that includes racism as an inherent feature of capitalism. The story of race in the making of the global capitalist order is also about the capacity of capital in the state

to capture the white working class and tie its identity to race, as the whiteness of masculinity. So the secret to capitalism's survival is racism. The secret to capitalism's survival is racism, an idea that might make many people in the U.S., regardless of their political affiliation, uncomfortable. Kelly's scholarship uses historical connections between race and labor to directly challenge

the basic idea that there can be any justice within America's current economic system. Justice does not entail taking someone's labor from them, taking someone's money from them, taking someone's livelihood from them, taking someone's home from them, so that you can get some money in your pocket. It doesn't entail living a precarious life

all because the free market says, this is just the outcome. I'm sorry about that. You lose. Kelly comes from a tradition of historians who view capitalism and anti-racism as incompatible. In other words, there's no way to achieve equality within a capitalist system because that system will always exploit workers and create devastating inequality. So any true liberation has to be anti-capitalist. There's no way. Capitalism cannot save us. And even if you could create a capitalism that somehow is non-racial, which of course is impossible, let's say in theory you could do that, we still have deep exploitation in inequality produced by it.

In this episode of ThruLine from NPR, we're going to explore a view of Black history you rarely get every February. A historical view that connects capitalism and racism in ways that are both surprising and disturbing. Coming up, a conversation with historian Robin D.G. Kelly. This is Stephanie Dong calling from Omaha, Nebraska, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Bye. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today, or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. Part 1. Racial Capitalism In 2020, after the international outcry over the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police,

UNC Press reissued a book called Black Marxism, The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. It was written by Cedric Robinson, an American professor and thinker, and was originally published in 1983. In Black Marxism, Cedric Robinson developed the concept of racial capitalism. The idea is complex, but it basically means that race and racism are not just incidental features of capitalism, they are foundational. Robinson says that capitalism emerged from racial hierarchies that existed in the world, not the other way around.

And this idea influenced Robin Kelly deeply. Cedric Robinson was his mentor. And in his work, Kelly has continued to come back to this concept again and again. So racial capitalism for him is a way of not describing a type of capitalism, but of establishing that capitalism extracts wealth in structures value by assigning differential value to human life and labor. That is to say, some workers are more valued than others because of how they're racialized. So what that means is that whole groups of people

are determined to be less human. Certain groups are subject to slavery or land dispossession, like indigenous people, denied citizenship. They're turned into migrant labor. Migrant labor hardly has ever been racially neutral. And then the final thing about racial capitalism, which is really, I think, key, is the story of racial capitalism isn't necessarily always the story of slavery and imperialism and dispossession, but it is the capacity of capital in the state to capture the quote-unquote white working class, that is to convince white people, much like Du Bois said when he talks about the wages of

whiteness, to tie their identity, their racial identity, that is whiteness, and in many cases, their masculinity in terms of men, to the ruling class, to capital. And so capitalism's origins in the US, especially, but I think all over the world, depends not just on the subjugation of black and brown people. It's on being able to get that myth to work, to convince a whole section of the class that those other cats over there, they're not worthy of your solidarity. They should be working for you

and they should be making less than you. And what's the outcome? The outcome is the US South has a white working class that makes way less money than white working people elsewhere. Why? Because they make more than black people. That's it. I mean, and so Cedric is fond of quoting Otis Madison, who was a colleague of his, who basically says, you know, racism wasn't created for black people. For black people, guns and tanks are sufficient. It was created for white people to convince them, right?

That somehow you need to be on the side of the people who exploit you. You know, and that is the magic of racial capitalism. The secret to racial capitalism is the capacity to once again capture white working people who are convinced that somehow being white is a thing and that they deserve some things as a result of it. And yet it ends up exploiting them as well, but differentially. So I'm just thinking of like Fred Hampton's quote. I think the quote is, we believe that racism is an excuse used by capitalists. We're not a racist organization because we understand that racism is an excuse used for capitalism.

We know that racism is just, it's a byproduct of capitalism. Fred Hampton was the influential leader of the Illinois Black Panther Party. He was killed by Chicago police in 1969. Does racial capitalism in theory push back against that at all? Or is it really just kind of in the same neighborhood of argument? Right. Well, this is where I get myself in trouble because I actually believe that a lot of people use the term racial capitalism in multiple ways, in some ways that are really problematic. It sometimes translates into people thinking it is either a type of capitalism or it gives

them the excuse to avoid class. And I actually agree with Fred Hampton. And I think that there's an argument to be made. Yes, capitalism uses difference as a way to generate surplus, to extract surplus, and to be able to build and create a kind of protective army of labor. That is the army of labor that believes that because they get a piddling more, because they don't have to be subjected to segregation, because they have all white waiting rooms or could be in the white section, that somehow the wages they make have a little bit more magic to them. When you break it down, and this is what I think Fred Hampton was saying, when you begin to break down where that surplus actually goes, only a piddling of it actually goes to white working people in this kind of so-called middle class, right? But most of that goes to capital. They are able to make more profits as opposed to fewer profits

because of racial capitalism. Okay, so we should stop here for a second and explain a few things. First, you're hearing a lot of Marxist ideas from Robin Kelly about labor and economics. Here's the most basic way to understand it. The concept of Marxism comes from Karl Marx, who was a German economist active in the mid-1800s. He co-wrote a pamphlet called the Communist Manifesto. In it, he claimed that workers would rise up and end the exploitative system of capitalism, that workers would seize the means of production in a mass revolution.

In other words, the workers and the factories would take power from the owners and industries would be owned by the public. And so it's easy to see why this idea would appeal to economically exploited Black Americans like Fred Hampton. It's through this lens that Robin Kelly sees history. So what racial capitalism actually acknowledges is that, you know, the racial difference isn't just a chimera. It's not just fake. It's real. But it's real in a way in which its mechanisms allow for three things to happen at once. The extraction of greater surplus, the violent subjugation of people who were considered to be not fully citizens, not fully human, not fully accepted.

And then the third thing it ultimately does is it creates structures that go beyond direct capitalist exploitation, but state structures. Like, for example, for groups to be taxed through things like regressive tax, sales tax. And sometimes those sales tax goes to subsidizing things that mostly white and middle and upper class people benefit from. It permits things like disenfranchisement, the political war against people of color, not allowing them to vote or participate in democracy and justifies that because again, racial capitalism allows a particular part of the class to say, this is okay with me. And so what it essentially does, racial capitalism actually subsidizes white wealth accumulation, partly by taxing people who can't benefit from government expenditures. So it is a state process as well of, you know, redistribution of wealth. But what it

doesn't do is that it doesn't eat at its own. It doesn't actually undermine capitalism itself. And it doesn't undermine the extraction of surplus from white people and poor white people and working white people. You know, they just get a little more. But it's not necessarily, it doesn't translate into liberation. And that's what Fred Hampton was trying to say. Liberation. We usually hear that and think about political freedom, or in the context of Black history,

freedom from enslavement. But the liberation Fred Hampton and other Black Marxists were advocating for fell more in line with the liberation of the Communist Manifesto. They believed that true freedom must include freedom from the economic oppression of capitalism.

That the working classes, who represent the majority of the people should be in control of the country instead of the elites. So how did Robin Kelly come to agree with Fred Hampton? And how can his story inform our own view of how we got to the present moment? Coming up, Raising Robin Kelly. Hi, my name is Anna Messer, calling from Nashville, Tennessee, and you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands.

Find the unforgettable at AutographCollection.com. Part 2. The Ether. The revolution has come. Off the page! Time to pick up the gun. Off the page! The revolution has come. Off the page! Time to pick up the gun. Killage, looting, murder, and arson have nothing to do with civil rights. In New York City during the 1960s, Harlem felt like the center of a revolution.

We want some action now. Action has to come. You wanted some action then, didn't you? Because you don't like the idea of white people shooting black people down, do you? And you're ready to do something about it, aren't you? We know you are. And Robin D.G. Kelly grew up in the

thick of it. Children of your generation, when it's time for them to take over this ghetto here, which is their home, they will be the ones to say what will go on, what will not go on, what they will accept and what they will not accept. I mean, this is the age of the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army. Revolution was taking place all around us. You are defending yourselves. You're defending yourselves. You're defending the struggle.

You're defending the cause of liberation. It's that we will not stop until there are no more prisons. No more prisons in our community. no more prisons. This is sort of the high point of that movement. But I'm still a kid, so I'm not really aware. I can't say with all honesty that I was having conversations. But what I can say is that it was really in the ether. Robin was raised in the 1960s, mostly by his single mother. Along with his older sister and younger brother, they grew up in a tenement apartment on the border of Harlem and Washington Heights.

Living in a household where my mother, her focus was on non-Western religions. So it wasn't a typical household. My mother's a hippie. She's walking around barefoot with long hair in a poncho in Harlem, reading the Bhagavad Gita. And what it meant was that there were no boundaries or borders. The United States didn't exist as an enclosure.

South Africa is a country of many races. That is growing from all the various reasons. The entire globe was at our disposal and being talked about. Whether in the streets, people talking about Africa or Haiti, in my house talking about India, Hinduism, listening to street corner speeches about Mao Zedong and black liberation. The thing is, my home life in New York was actually great. In other words, I didn't come from a broken home. I came from a really stable, beautiful, spiritually grounded, little tiny tenement apartment. That was foundational. That was the basis of the outlook.

But the idyllic, stable life Robin experienced in Harlem changed when he and his sister were forced to move across the country to live with their father in Seattle. It was the early 1970s. He was in fourth grade. And like many other kids from the city, he was bused to a school in the suburbs. So you go from Harlem to living in the central district of Seattle, to getting on a school bus to go out to the suburbs, which are hostile and racist. I don't use the word racist lightly. They're not just racist because they're white people who are not nice.

They did mean things to kids, Black kids, and treated us like we were not even human. Despite this harsh change in environment, Robin and his sister got straight A's. But this didn't protect him from bad treatment, even from his teachers. Because I got straight A's, I had teachers who just literally wage war on me. I had a homeroom teacher in the seventh grade. We didn't have report cards sent to us. The homeroom teacher would hand them to you. And so she would open them up and look to see what you got.

And every time it got to me, she would look at me with contempt and throw the report card down and just do a huff and puff. Was all this difficulty worth it? Did Robin and his sister receive a better education at the suburban school? According to him, no. The overcrowded school he went to in Harlem was more academically challenging than the suburban one he was bused to in Seattle. And this tells you something about the experiment of desegregation and what it was supposed to produce and what a failure it was in terms of this assumption that moving black and brown kids into white spaces will make them better people and make them more knowledgeable. By the time he was in high school, Robin and his sister moved again.

They went back to live with their mom, but this time in Southern California. And at that point in his life, there were very few people who would have guessed that Robin would one day become a well-known, successful academic. I was really typical, you know, meaning that my sister was ahead of me. She's really smart.

She was the scholar. I'm famous at Pasadena High School in 1980 for one thing, and that is that I threw the party of the year. Tell us more about this party. Back in the days of house parties, I threw the party of the year. We had a DJ. They were playing the whispers over and over again. This was like the days. And my future wasn't destined to be involved in organizing, activism, scholarship, none of that.

And after high school, Robin applied to Long Beach State, not entirely sure what he even wanted to study. First photography, and for about two weeks, he was a business administration major. Business administration? Me! Me! It doesn't make any sense, right? I'm like the anti-capitalist, right? But I didn't even know what that meant. During that first year in college, Robin experienced two traumatic events that would change the course of his life.

The first happened soon after he joined an all-Black fraternity. Robin experienced two traumatic events that would change the course of his life. The first happened soon after he joined an all-Black fraternity. And one night, we're going to get some chicken. And long story short, a group of six white boys, armed with two-by-fours, bolt cutters, pipes, jump out the car. And for no other reason that we're Black, chase us down. And I'm in a chicken place, and I get beat up, and I'm hospitalized. Then, just a few weeks after Robin was attacked on the street, he was attacked again.

This time, by the police. They thought I was a criminal, grabbed me, threw me on the ground, dumped all my books in the mud. You know, I used to walk around with a legal briefcase. That's what a nerd I was, right? All my books in the mud, and I'm laying there, and they got their their hands on my neck and my arm behind me, and my arm is actually in a small kind of cast because I had a hairline fracture from being beaten up for the white boys. These things happened to Robin at the same time as he was getting into campus politics and Black Studies, reading Frederick Douglass, Chancellor Williams, Sheikh Untadiab. And he started to make connections between his life and the things he was reading. I minored in Black Studies and decided on history. And I decided on history because history,

one, as a discipline, seemed to combine all the things I was interested in, but also was the avenue for the questions I wanted to understand. That is, what is the source of state violence and racism? What have we done in the past to try to overturn that? He found himself surrounded by nurturing professors who encouraged him to be an intellectual, to challenge his own assumptions and open himself to new ideas. But according to Robin, it was what was happening outside the classroom that really shaped his worldview. I was the vice chair of Black Student Union at one point. I was involved in a study group organized by the All-African People's

Revolutionary Party, AAPRP. And we'd study Walter Rodney, Franz Fanon, C.L.R. James, Angela Davis, Kwame Nkrumah. So this was outside the classroom. This is where I got the real education. And when you discover that your heroes are Walter Rodney and C.L.R. James, both of whom wrote these history texts. That's the point at which I'm like, history's for me. You know, not because I want to be a historian, but by that time, I just wanted to be just like any grown person, a communist.

That was my goal. I just, I want to be a communist for life I want to make revolution and it's like of course you've got to be a historian to be a real good communist not the other way around coming up how Robin Kelly applies the lessons of the past

to the challenges of today. My name is Nick Joan. I'm from Honolulu, Hawaii. You're listening to ThruLine with NPR. Thanks for what you do. Part 3. There are no utopias. Back in 2020, just a few months after Amazon opened a new warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, workers started organizing.

A fight that's still playing out today. We're being treated like we're prisoners. Who's there to get a job done? What's your biggest frustration there? Job security, respect, your safety, well-being. The community don't realize is what's going on behind the curtain. What are the people there going through just to make sure that we're getting our packages? It's time for us to make a stand. It's time for some changes. Many of the workers wanted better working conditions, better treatment and pay. So they attempted to join the retail, wholesale and department store union. Labor

organizations around the country were energized by what they saw. It was the largest unionizing effort in Amazon's history. Momentum was growing, but Amazon wasn't happy. It was announced that a vote would take place among the employees of the warehouse about whether they should join a union. Amazon lobbied hard against it. And in the end... Amazon walked away with a victory Friday in its battle against the effort to unionize

a Bessemer, Alabama warehouse. Workers voted at a more than two-to-one margin not to join the retail, wholesale, and department store union. But not long after the vote, the National Labor Relations Board, a federal regulator, began investigating whether Amazon illegally interfered with the vote. One of the key and most controversial pieces in focus, a mailbox. Amid the voting process, a mailbox was installed in the warehouse's private parking lot that Amazon says was meant to make voting, quote, convenient, safe and private. Union organizers, though, say the mailbox was in view of company surveillance cameras and led many workers to wonder if their votes were being monitored.

The investigation concluded that Amazon tampered with the election, so they ordered a second vote. The voting is set to end later in March. Now, it would be easy to see what's happening in Alabama in isolation, outside the context of history. But if you scratch beneath the surface, you will see a story of race and class and labor rarely told. The fact is, nearly 100 years ago, there were intense, radical labor organizing efforts happening in Alabama by farmers, communist farmers, most of whom were Black. Robin Kelly tells this story in Alabama in 1929, you would never ever guess that the Communist Party would ever even be there, let alone have a presence. In fact, in 1929, you wouldn't even guess that there'd be a union movement. Yet, that same year, communist organizers began arriving in

Alabama with the goal of organizing farmers and workers. It was the height of the Great Depression, and they quickly gained support from the local people. And it happened as a result of a whole bunch of different things converging. You know, one, it's not as if there was any shortage of black or white workers willing to fight. But the Communist Party came at the right time. And they came at a time when black working people in the countryside and in the cities were waiting for the return of Reconstruction. They're like, OK, these Yankees, they left us, you know, in the 1870s. I know they're coming back.

So imagine being a communist, even a black communist, because they're mostly black communists, showing up. And you're like, you know, I'm here, I'm building a movement, blah, blah, blah. I say, yes, of course, yes. You know, we've been waiting for you, you know. And then the other thing is that they brought with them a connection to a world movement.

So imagine you're handing out or selling these newspapers to a southern worker or a liberator, and a lot of these folks can't read or write. So they got young girls who are reading out loud under the shade of a tree. Stories about the revolutions in Kenya, in South Africa, what's happening in the Soviet Union. And they learn that this is part of an international movement. So you're sitting there thinking, oh, okay, well, I want to be part of that. And you know what happened? Some of those Black folks, especially in the rural areas, wrote letters addressed to Stalin. They wrote letters to Stalin and saying, look, you know, we need help. Send us some troops. Send us some comrades. And what happened was, it was the belief that if anything were to happen, you had these backup troops. You know, and I interviewed people

who believe that, you know, who said, you know, we were willing to go on strike against the plantation owners because we knew that if they started trying to kill us, that Stalin would send troops. They'd come in through Mobile. They'd march up through southern Alabama, and they'd be in trucks. And each truck would have seven men, and they'd have guns. And those seven men would go out, and they'll take out the plantation owners. You know, they believe that. And that is resonant with another thing that happened. And that is with Roosevelt and the New Deal, workers actually believe the federal government was on their side. So imagine you've got the Soviet Union on your side for one particular constituency. You've got the federal government on on their side. So imagine you've got the Soviet Union on your side for one particular constituency.

You've got the federal government on your side. You believe it. That's actually doing things that didn't happen before. Passing labor laws, imposing, legislating the right to organize. So they began winning union elections. Not just the communists, but the working class as a whole. They're building power, building power.

That's what's different. When Amazon workers tried to have their election and go on strike, what was different is the support, the outside support, the feeling that you're not isolated. That made a huge difference. And what happened in terms of the history of labor is that when labor becomes quite powerful and robust and militant in Alabama in the 30s and 40s, what do they get? They get the Cold War. Less than 50 years after the communists

seized power in Russia, almost a billion people are under their control. Four out of every ten of the world's population oppressed. And the conspiracy that is communism is stronger, more determined than ever. This is a documentary from 1962 called The Truth About Communism. That's Ronald Reagan narrating. A communist philosophy that the end justifies the means has caused pain out of all proportion to the pitiful social progress communism's achieved.

And yet it has spread at a fantastic speed and demonstrated a frightening vitality. This was essentially a propaganda film that retold the story of communism through an American lens. It was part of the larger conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States in what we today call the Cold War. This tension between the countries created a difficult environment for Americans who were leftists because they were often immediately associated with ideology of the perceived enemy, the Soviet Union. The FBI often targeted individuals and groups who were even remotely connected to communism. If a person supports organizations which reflect

communist teachings or organizations labeled communist by the Department of Justice, she may be a communist. If a person defends the activities of communist nations while consistently attacking the domestic and foreign policy of the United States, she may be a communist. There were even public congressional hearings where prominent left-leaning Americans were forced to publicly defend themselves and their loyalty to the United States. a supporter of, a member of, or a sympathizer with any organization known to me to be, or suspected by me of being controlled or dominated by communists. And on top of all that, some labor movements, like the Alabama Communists, were attacked under the pretense that they were disloyal. There was a war against labor.

And then we tell the story all the way up to the 1970s when the largest strike wave since 1946 was in the early 70s. And some of those strikes were in Alabama, quite militant, struggling, winning. And what do they get? They get neoliberalism. backed by the state that says that capital makes jobs. Rich people are the ones who are going to save us. That's why we need tax policies in which rich people can keep as much money as possible and working people can get paid as little as possible and that's going to keep our economy going. That becomes the prevailing logic of the world we're in now. The Cold War was really key for crushing labor insurgency. I really want to make that point because sometimes we think, well, you know, just people are just not as militant as they used to be

and, you know, people are just like, just too lazy. And so we wonder why it's hard to organize a union, and yet they're still there. And Alabama has a rich, amazing history, and those people are still there fighting the good fight. Jeff Bezos putting an angry customer on blast. The Amazon CEO sharing an email criticizing his support for the Black Lives Matter movement. The Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, saying he'd be happy to lose customers who oppose that company's support of Black Lives Matter. Bezos taking a screenshot of the email and then posted it on Instagram. In June 2020, Amazon publicly supported the Black Lives Matter movement.

They announced that they would donate $10 million to organizations that would, quote, bring about social justice and improve the lives of Black and African Americans. This included the Black Lives Matter organization. I think, to put it very simply, the attempt on the part of corporations to buy off these insurgent movements, it's an old strategy. It happens. It always happens. But it's also very telling

that people would even take the money because this is the most effective way to neutralize movements. I mean, it's way more effective than just sending the police out to just beat people up. Once a corporation gives them money and you're doing commercials for those companies, you owe them something. But more importantly, and this is, I think, the heart of the matter, is an indication of what are you fighting for? You cannot say I'm in alliance with the very corporation

who is extracting all kinds of wealth at the expense of people's crushed, destroyed, overworked bodies. And you're going to take their money? So the thing I'm struggling with a little bit, right, or that just like as a, like as we think about what the 20th and 21st century look like in terms of quotequote progress, right? In terms of the reduction of infant mortality rate and violence, generally speaking, being sort of

reduced globally. A lot of people would say, well, capitalism and the pushback against it, maybe, right? Like the tension, that space between the tension, the anti-capitalist, I should say, and the capitalist, that space has generated actually a lot of productive growth and benefits for all of us. Right. So is it despite capitalism or because of capitalism? Okay. This is a really great question. Let me see how to enter it. So let's begin by acknowledging that capitalism is a dynamic system. And it has to keep changing because it has built-in systemic crises.

Sometimes these crises are periodic, cyclical. Some of the crises are structural, where it just cannot get out of itself. And some crises are just like crises that really require radical transformation. But here's the thing. Those crises are often brought about by exactly what you talk about. That is the struggles of working people, the struggles of the poor, the struggles of other nations. Sometimes they're caused by other things, but actual human activity, the demands, the demands on the welfare state, right? In the 1960s, the National Welfare Rights Organization, their demands in organizing forced the state to give over a lot more money, not enough to live on, but more money than they did, which then created a kind of a crisis for the state and for state financing.

So on the one hand, it is true infant mortality rate has declined. Yes, there's been diseases eradicated, sometimes not by capitalism though, but by public health, supported with state funds. Oh, but who cares about that? But capitalism is not the reason for it. It's in spite of capitalism. Right. When we look around the world, one of the great magical things that allowed us to have cheap clothes and look fancy and go to H&M was the fast fashion that has exploited sweatshop labor in Central America, in Haiti, in Vietnam, in China, that's producing all these clothes really quickly. And as much as China did raise standard of living, no question about it, Vietnam did raise standard of living, no question about it, coming out of a war, But it's still sweatshop labor, still labor that's being paid very low wages.

And we know this because unions are fighting to raise those wages. All these things have happened all because of capitalism, which has led to immiseration, poverty, destruction of the environment. Even if more people have cell phones than they did before. This vision of a kind of society which fights all of the kind of isms, racism, ableism, sexism, all these things, are one of the lessons we've learned about human history and especially about how communism actually unfolded in like the soviet union for example that right these kind of some would call utopian visions of a society can they be dangerous in the sense that they embolden people or give them a kind of sense of almost like a

religious fervor in their sense of like righteousness and what needs to happen for society. Is it in itself like a thing that we should be cautious of? Let me step back for a second and just say that, you know, utopia, the definition of utopia is nowhere. Okay, that's the formal definition. And I would argue, I'm the first to say, that what we think of as state socialism or communism has been a disaster. I'm the last one to defend what actually becomes,

in the case of the Soviet Union, for example, not socialism at all, but state capitalism that's redistributive. That's of the Soviet Union, for example, not socialism at all, but state capitalism that's redistributive. That's what the Soviet Union became. And China's the same thing. China did amazing things in terms of being able to raise the basic standard of living, but China's a state capitalist neoliberal society. We don't have a communist country anywhere in the world. We've never actually had one. It has never happened. Having said all that, can utopian hopes lead to kind of like false expectations? Part of the power and I think failure of countries that embrace the name of being communist or socialist is that that's what they did. Stalin kept saying, you know, we're the best. We're going to give you

the best, you know, and so don't even look anywhere else. You know, don't complain. We're going to provide for our people. So under Stalin, you have things like five-year plans, which are all based on production, which is not necessarily always a good thing. But the five-year plans were meant to prove the superiority of the Soviet system and silence dissent. Because when we ask the question, what do people actually need? Sometimes it's not just money or housing. Sometimes it goes deeper than that. Now, the revolutionary tradition out of which I come, or that I embrace, is one that says, there are no utopias.

We have to keep remaking our vision over and over again and remind us what we're doing is only struggle. This only struggle. No promise of liberation. You know, only the promise of struggle. And what that means is that we have to constantly rethink where we are. And if we see that the systems that we're creating are actually in the hands of a few people who are making determinations for us, that's not good.

And I'm not saying that we need to go back to some, you know, romantic notion of what socialism was supposed to be. But whatever we need to do, we need to do it fast. We need to do it in a way that we put at the center life needs, life needs, human needs, and that is all of life needs to reproduce ourselves, to be good people. And at the center of all that, of course, is love. Agape, as Dr. King would say, the constant struggle to make community. Because the deeper our communities, the harder it is to break us apart. And it means being in the community of people you may not like, but that's how we move forward.

And with all of our mistakes and errors and all of our misjudgments, we move forward together. And that's without the expectation that there's going to be some kind of rainbow at the end and which we're all going to be happy. I avoid optimistic and I avoid pessimistic. I don't even use hope. I always use struggle. And why do I do that? Because I think that you cannot be an intellectual in a think tank, sitting around thinking about these things on your own or run a blog and decide what needs to be done. You can only do it in struggle with other people.

Because that's the source of ideas. That's it for this week's show. I'm Rondabdil Fattah. I'm Ramteen Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me and Lawrence Wu. Lane Kaplan-Levinson. Julie Kane.

Victor Iveyes. Skylar Swenson. Monsi Krona. Yolanda Sanguini. Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vocal. Thanks also to Casey Miner, Kumari Devarajan, Anya Grunman, and Tamar Charney. Our music was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes Thanks to Andy Huther for mixing the episode. And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, please write us at or hit us up on Twitter at

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