The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights

Since the Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights helped sponsor and support Class War: The Jacobin Board Game, I decided to pick up a copy and test it out with my friends with a socialist/anarchist game night.

The Good

This game isn’t hard to figure out and once you have it setup and you’ve figured out the rules, it’s really enjoyable. The game also looks sleek and feels fun. It has an almost Bojack Horseman vibe to it with the animal workers and capitalists animating the cards. 

If you regularly do game nights with friends, this is going to be an easy game to incorporate into your collection and, despite it being only a handful of economic and workplace scenario larger card pieces, the smaller capitalist and worker cards themselves and what you draw from your corresponding deck make this game a new experience each time you start another round.

The Okay

It does feel educational. While it’s overall fun, I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that I played a similar game in my high school economics class. Being a PhD student and an educator for the Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights means that the educational feel didn’t bother me much, but it would be fun to add in a few more outlandish features of this game, maybe in the way of an expansion pack, to mix in a bit more humor with the educational feel.

I will also note that when I did play a similar game something like 20 years ago in high school, that game was very much pro-capitalist with a capitalist point of view and this game is very much not that. 

The Bad

Honestly, the worst part about this game is being a capitalist. As a group of solid leftists, none of us were really all that committed to playing the part. We ended up agreeing that we’d rotate and take turns, just to make the gameplay fair for all of us.

But if you have friends that aren’t yet radicalized, that don’t see the harm in capitalism, and who think that workers are demanding too much, giving them the role of the capitalist and playing this game is a great way to teach them about the exploitatively properties of capitalisms all while pretending you’re having a fun little game night. 

The History of Capitalism is the History of Exploitation.

In the early modern period, capitalism and oppressive power structures like racism, sexism, ableism, and classism (just to list a few) formed in such a way that they are not only entangled but nearly impossible to distinguish from one another; further, the underlying foundation of modernity as an overarching period, which started in roughly 1450 A.D.E. and continues today, is one rooted in capitalist power that exploits the bodies, hearts, spirits, and minds of the masses for the profit of the few. Cedric Robinson observed that “the historical development of world capitalism was influenced in the most fundamental way by the particularistic forces of racism and nationalism” and coined this term “racial capitalism” within his works.

Silvia Federici, in her works, agrees and expands upon this notion of differing forms of oppression and capitalist development:

Capitalism was not the product of an evolutionary development bringing forth economic forces that were maturing in the womb of the old [feudal] order. Capitalism was the response of feudal lords, the patrician merchants, the bishops and popes, to a centuries-long social conflict that, in the end, shook their power, and truly gave ‘all the world a big jolt.’ Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle.

There were a few major concessions made when capitalism came to power; in Federici’s works, she notes that women’s autonomy, women’s labor, and women’s ability to procreate future workers were one such concession. While men lost the ability to use common, open land to hunt and farm, they were able to claim their wife’s or daughters’ wages, control their social lives, and control their ability to procreate, etc.

In other words, one of the first things capitalism did when it came to power was to deny the rights of women within their society in addition to painting anyone outside of their society as the “other,” using race as a reason for crusades, wars, slavery, and future colonial expansion.

Can Capitalism Exist Alongside Human Rights?

Capitalism today has not varied far from its roots: we still live under a system of exploitation that thrives on perceived differences that explicitly exploits bodies that diverge from the white, cis, able, wealthy, land-owning, and male heteronormative subject capitalism is designed to benefit. Nowhere is this exploitation more apparent than in colonial practices – practices that nations like England began to develop and engage in (most infamously) with the nation’s second public joint-stock company, The East India Trading Company, founded in 1600. There is little to no difference between the exploitative practices of the early joint stock companies that expanded to colonize and oppress the people of India, Scotland, Ireland, and, later, most of the world (England became a nation in which, infamously, the sun never set) while heavily polluting the seas and destroying the environment of the local’s land than there is between Elon Musk and Space X polluting low-income neighborhoods of color, heavily polluting the atmosphere and the wetlands next to their facilities every time they launch, and sacrificing human lives while contributing to the destruction of this planet in order to colonize space.

Capitalism is rooted in exploitation and expansion; with the world now encapsulated in the system, the system itself must look for new places to expand and new planets to exploit at the cost of our current planet and the current people living here. There is no room for human rights in a system that is more concerned with its own survival than with ours. There is no room for human rights in a system that sees any variance from the rich, white, cis, able, straight, and male as not only a threat, but uses this variance as a justification for further exploitation, alienation, and outright abuse. In the early modern period this abuse came at the hands of men in power and colonizers; today, politicians, police, and the military fill that role. While time has passed, the capitalist system has failed to evolve in the way of human rights and instead finds new measures, often through reforms presented as solutions to the system’s inherent brutality, to reinvent the same means of violent oppression of the past.

Capitalism, and capitalist reforms, will never undue the systems of oppression in place because the very foundation of capitalism are these same systems: racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, classism, alienation, exploitation, etc. As Audre Lorde said, it is:

Only within that interdependency of difference strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters. Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being.

Human rights like freedom and equality cannot and do not exist under capitalism. Further, other rights like housing, food, water, healthcare, open land, and even life cannot and do not exist under capitalism. It is up to us to see the system for what it is: manmade by those in power to maintain their power and status. Capitalism was constructed and, like all constructed things, it can be dismantled and a new era that we design based on human rights and not exploitation, alienation, oppression, and difference can be ushered in.

Sources:

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and The Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004.

Lorde, Audre. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House. Penguin Classics, 2018.

Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. U of  North Caroline Press, 2000. 

For this and other blog posts in a downloadable, shareable format, check out our new Education Materials page.

There’s a biopic out now about Lucille Ball called Being the Ricardos that has mixed reviews (something like a 6.6 on IMDb from users and a similar 68% on Rotten Tomatoes). But there are some things the movie gets right about Lucille – like her ties to the Communist Party and Lucy being targeted during the McCarthy Red Scare in 1952 when she testified for the first of two times in front of the FBI and their Un-American Activities Committee. 

While Lucy was cleared by stating she registered as a Communist for her grandfather and never voted Communist and the committee believed her, there’s a lot from Lucy herself both in her show, I Love Lucy, and in things she later produced as an executive at Desilu Productions that really calls that testimony into question. Maybe Lucy wasn’t an active Communist, party-wise, but she embodied leftist ideals and challenged the status quo of the American housewife and even the idea of what an American marriage could be on television. 

Why do I think leftists should love Lucy, despite her denouncement of Communism when under investigation and under threat of possible blacklisting in Hollywood? Because Lucy’s actions speak louder than her words, spoken under threat of loosing her platform and livelihood. Here’s a few things about Lucille Ball that shows even if she wasn’t a comrade, she was an ally:

1. Lucy from I Love Lucy challenged the notion of the 1950s housewife. She wasn’t happy to cook and clean. She didn’t budget well. She was ambitious and wanted to be out of the house and in show business. She disobeyed her husband. While all of this was presented to American audiences under the guise of comedy, Lucy and her show quickly became a favorite among American audiences because of the freedom she embodied in a system that would otherwise have women restricted to the home, obedient, and complacent. 
   
   
2. Lucy and her costar/husband Desi (who played Ricky on the show) were the first interracial married couple to be featured on T.V. Lucy, in fact, had to fight to get her husband cast in the show as her fictional husband because studio executives didn’t see a “red blooded American girl” falling in love with a Cuban. The show had to constantly fight executives to break boundaries, but break boundaries they did. In addition to being the first interracial couple on T.V., the show was also the first to feature a pregnant woman (despite no one being able to say the word pregnant) and, towards the show’s end, the first show to have a married couple share the same bed. Lucy, as an executive at Desilu Productions, would continue this trend of breaking boundaries.
   
   
3. Lucy saved Star Trek. Lucy and Desi divorced in 1960 and, in 1962, Lucy bought out his shares in their production company, Desilu Productions, making her head of the largest independent studio in Hollywood. In 1964, Roddenberry couldn’t find a home for his sci-fi show, which seemed alien to studios like CBS which rejected it. NBC took a shot an ordered a first episode for Desilu to produce but by then, executives other than Lucy at Desilu were balking at how expensive the first episode would be and wanted to pull back on producing the show. Lucy overrode them all and is credited for saving the show, and in 1965 the pilot was produced and two more episodes were ordered – which became the 1966 television pilot of Star Trek, also known as a show about international space communism where mankind grew out of the need for capitalism and instead embraced curiosity and their differences to explore the universe. Was the show a perfect lefty show? No and there’s some questionable colonial themes (amongst other issues), but did it introduce the idea of international unity, racial equality, mutual aid and support, a system without money, and, most importantly, tribbles to the American masses. And, in continuing with first for Lucy, Star Trek also featured the first interracial kiss between a Black actress and a white actor. 
   
   
4. I Love Lucy was critical of capitalism in many of their episodes where Lucy participated in the workforce and sided with the workers. As I write this, three popular episodes of the show come to mind: “Lucy’s Italian Movie” where she stomps grapes, “Lucy and the Chocolate Factory” episode here she and Ethel work on a chocolate assembly line, and the “Vitameatavegamin” episode or where Lucy gets drunk taking a vitamin for a commercial shoot. While portrayed as part of a movie shoot, Lucy illustrates the intense labor it took to stomp grapes into wine and, in her signature comedic fashion, shows how exhausting physical labor is in “Lucy’s Italian Movie.” As a child watching reruns of this episode, I got the humor of the situation, but I also appreciated the amount of work it took to produce a lot of the goods we take for granted since industrialization has automated many aspects of production. But Lucy also challenges this idea of industrialization in the “Lucy and the Chocolate Factory” episode where she and Ethel fail, miserably, to work on a chocolate factory line. This episode illustrates that automation doesn’t always make things easier for the worker and, despite the ability to produce more at faster rates, capitalists still try to push the human part of production past impossible limits and actively overwork their laborers. Lucy was able to pull off critiques like this because they were presented under the guise of humor.
   
   In the “Vitameatavegamin” episode, Lucy gets progressively more and more drunk as she does take after take of a vitamin commercial. On the surface, this one seems like less of a critique of capitalism to me and more of a critique of how studios treated and drugged women at the time like Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe. I think we often see these two actresses as stand-alone in the way studios abused and drugged women for production purposes, but this was standard practice for many women in the industry at the hands of these large studios. With the original air date of 1952, the “Vitameatavegamin” episode fell a decade before Marilyn died from an overdose and a decade after Judy Garland starred in The Wizard of Oz and spoke about how she was drugged on the set to make her peppy for a take or to wind her down so she could get some rest. Lucy being drugged on set, in this case accidently, was poking fun and shedding light on a dark trend in Hollywood and how women were treated on sets. Lucy herself escaped this treatment thanks to being head of her own studio and working independently, but that doesn’t mean that she wasn’t privy to what other actresses had to endure to be part of the industry. 

The fifteenth episode of Exit Capitalism, Stage Left is out now. This podcast is supported by The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights.

In this episode, we go over an old relevant interview that highlights what’s going on with UAW workers in the past and what has lead to a strike now, as well as what the strike means to workers and the unfair labor practices of the UC’s bargaining team.

This episode also looks at the strike going on with railroad workers, the fact that congress is attempting to force them back into work, and that the senate doesn’t seem to have enough votes on their side to give railroad workers at least 7 days of sick leave, instead of the 15 they are asking for, and that the contract that will pass through our federal government will probably leave railroad workers with 1 sick day a year.

Don’t forget to send us your questions for the last segment of our podcast at exitcapitalismstageleft@gmail.com. 

We at the Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights stand in solidarity with the striking UC workers.

The thirteenth episode of Exit Capitalism, Stage Left is out now. This podcast is supported by The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights.

This episode is the first in our education series which looks at the origins of capitalism in the early modern period. In part I of the series, I explored early modern English history, Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, and William Shakespeare’s works to look at early aspects of separation, dehumanization, and exploitation and how those aspects of capitalism manifest in The Tempest. This is Part II in the series in which we talk about early modern critiques of patriarchy, mercantile capitalism, the erasure of the labor of country people by pastoral works, and more while exploring Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlow and Lady Mary Wroth’s sonnets.

This podcast includes works from:

• “The Reformation, Inter-Imperial World History, and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus” by Jane Hwang Degenhardt
• Critiques of Michael Keefer
• Nicolas Kiessling’s article “Doctor Faustus and the Sin of Demoniality”
• Clarance Green’s “Doctor Faustus: Tragedy of Individualism”
• And more!

Education material attached to this and the last podcast can also be found in our education section of the website.

Don’t forget to send us your questions for the last segment of our podcast at exitcapitalismstageleft@gmail.com. 

The twelfth episode of Exit Capitalism, Stage Left is out now. This podcast is supported by The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights.

This episode is the first in our education series which looks at the origins of capitalism in the early modern period. In part I of the series, I explore early modern English history, Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, and William Shakespeare’s works to look at early aspects of separation, dehumanization, and exploitation and how those aspects of capitalism manifest in The Tempest.

This podcast includes works from:

• Silvia Federici – Caliban and the Witch
• Francisco de Victoria’s lecture – “the Indian problem” from 1539
• Dr. Virginia Mason Vaughan and Alden T. Vaughan’s article “The Tempest and Early Modern Concepts of Race.”
• Claire Waters “The Tempest’s Sycorax as ‘Blue Eye’d Hag’: A Note Towards a Reassessment”
• Jerry Broton’s The Sultan and the Queen: The Untold Story of Elizabeth and Islam

Don’t forget to send us your questions for the last segment of our podcast at exitcapitalismstageleft@gmail.com. 

On Sunday, June 26th, 2022, Mimi Soltysik’s widow, Lynn Lomibao, hosted an art show in loving memory of Mimi who passed on June 28th, 2020 titled Good Grief.  Mimi was not just an activist, the 2016 presidential nominee for The Socialist Party USA, an organizer for the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, and the former educator for The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights, but he was also a loving husband and friend to his wife and fellow activist, Lynn.

I am not an art critic, but you don’t need to be an art critic to be moved by art. As someone who both knows Lynn and knew Mimi, this show and the art on display moved me deeply. Lynn, while talking to attendees, noted that she started to paint after Mimi’s diagnosis. Upon seeing her paintings, Mimi remarked that they’d get Lynn an art show to display her amazing works.

With her permission, we’re sharing the art pieces she’s created during her grieving process that were featured at the show.

I grew up in a church community that pitted people against each other and called it “Christianity.” As a pastor now myself, I know there’s another way.

By Aaron Scott | June 1, 2022

I grew up in rural upstate New York, where life was difficult and often isolating. Folks in our community were very poor, but we took care of one another. Neighbors lavished affection and support on my family.

Still, there was a deep undercurrent of abandonment and anger.

Far from the South, Confederate flags pierced the landscape. And at church, there was often little help for people struggling to overcome isolation, daily struggles, or poverty. Instead, the focus of church life for many people around me was the sin of sex — especially homosexuality.

Now, my dad was a minister, and my mom and grandma were hard-working union organizers. So even at age 9, this hyperfocus on homosexuality made no sense to me. People didn’t have heat in the ice-cold New York winter. But instead of trying to change this, the church focused on sex?

Instead of directing people’s anger at our unequal political system, the church directed this rage at love: men loving men, women loving women. And at people realizing that they had a different gender from the one assigned to them at birth.

When it wasn’t about that, it was about some vague notion that people with different skin colors, languages, or religions somehow took jobs from rural white people, or were supposedly paid more for doing less work.

It was about the idea that poor moral character, rather than an unjust economic system, led some in our community to escape into alcoholism, drug use, and addiction. It led many of us to blame other struggling people — across race and religion — for our own legitimate suffering.

I grew up surrounded by this culture of anger and hate, which pitted people against one another and called itself, perversely, “Christianity.”

But thanks to my family, who fought for the rights of hard-working people, I knew there was another way besides this distorted moral narrative of Christian nationalism. I didn’t know if I could find it within the church, but I wanted to try.

I obtained a scholarship to a parish in Central America, where folks were also quite poor, but where Christianity looked very different. It was a Christianity that sought liberation from all forms of oppression.

This experience prompted me to follow my calling to become a pastor. I wanted to find paths that healed rather than blamed. As part of my personal healing, I accepted the God-given revelation that I am a man, despite being raised as a girl — something I’d known deeply since childhood.

Blessed with this grace, my pastoring eventually led me to another rural impoverished community full of the same struggles — but also the same wisdom and leadership — as my home community.

I co-founded Chaplains on the Harbor in Grays Harbor County, Washington, with other liberation-minded pastors. We walk alongside people who live in poverty, struggle with addiction, and seek connection. We walk alongside them as they make the journey from detoxing on the floor of the county jail to testifying about their experiences and insights in the halls of power.

Now I’m a proud, loving father and part of a national, faith-led movement called the Poor People’s Campaign. We are hundreds of thousands of people strong, working for justice for the 140 million of us in the United States who are poor and low-income.

We work to transform systems of inequality rather than blame people for struggles outside of their control. We don’t identify sexuality, gender, race, or religion as the source of evil. We identify the political choices that create suffering — and work to change them.

Like Martin Luther King Jr., Sojourner Truth, Marsha P. Johnson, and my own mom and grandmother, we love, testify, and march. We’ll be marching in Washington, D.C. for transformation on June 18th. Please join us — in person or virtually.

When we bring everyone in with grace and love, we can truly be free.

Aaron Scott is a co-founder of Chaplains on the Harbor and a member of the Washington State Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. He grew up in Mechanicville, New York. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

The tenth episode of Exit Capitalism, Stage Left is out now. This podcast is supported by The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights.

In this episode, I discuss the premature re-openings, lifting of mask mandates, and the long-term effects of COVID on people who catch the disease – vaccinated or not. I myself am not a scientists, but I am a researcher and in this podcast we go over scientific sources analyzed by experts on what’s going on in the U.S. as far as COVID-19 goes.

In this episode, we also talk about:

• Elon Musk buying Twitter
• Don’t Say Gay and anti-Trans medical recommendations in the state of Florida
• Intercepted – a podcast by The Intercept
• The Maggie Phair Institute’s Instagram
• And why do people keep asking me questions about Elon Musk?

Don’t forget to send us your questions for the last segment of our podcast at exitcapitalismstageleft@gmail.com.