What I’m trying to get at with this one is that sharing information, knowledge and skills disperses influence/power among more people, which strengthens and spreads organizational capacity.
Over-centralization generates hierarchical concentrations of influence/power that make an organization brittle, rigid, unadaptable, and vulnerable (too much strength concentrated at the top makes decapitation a simple way to break a structure). It also strangles the initiative and creativity of those involved, and restricts collective evolution.
This is not to pit the two energies against each other as “dispersal good; centralization bad” — without some centralization of political line, aka political unity, coordinated action can’t even happen. I see centralization/unity/coordination and decentralization/dispersal/democracy as two states of a dynamic wave — you can’t really separate them — each exists in relation to the other. What goes wrong is when the balance is off — then things get wobbly and off-kilter. Vigilance and care — by everyone!! — to constantly recalibrate is needed to stay in balance.
Take care and stay vigilant as you navigate the tricky waters, my friends 🌊
As waves of crises loom and crash, we can feel overwhelmed — there’s so much crying out to be done!! We may feel urges to respond to every outrage, but individually we just can’t — the system’s attacks come fast and furious from every side.
But collectively we face in all directions, and as a whole we do respond to every outrage, in countless ways.
The battlefield is everywhere. Each of us can figure out where and how we can access levers of change, where we each fit into the larger collective global movement. We can strenghten our connections so our work mutually builds on each other’s and co-evolves.
It’s a learning process with constant adjustments and realignments, mistakes and lessons, learning by trying and by doing and by communicating and sharing. As long as we keep oriented toward a future where all can thrive free of exploitation and oppression — and if we each do our part to get there, large or seemingly small (it’s never, never insignificant) — then we have a chance.
Capitalism is so voracious that it can even commodify the critique and resistance that’s meant to undermine it. It’s a pretty damn formidable opponent. As I was thinking about that, some things that aren’t commodified also came to mind, many of them deemed “worthless” in market terms, but not at all so in broader reality… like a feather on the ground, a frog’s chirp outside the window, a knowing glance of shared understanding. Love to you all today as you defend your hearts and labors against commodification 💚
“Comrades” is about that feeling you get when you’re working collectively for a common purpose, toward a common goal. You’re simultaneously able to multiply yourself, expand your voice and reach beyond what you ever dreamed possible or will ever know about, like ripples in a pond, and at the same time you lose yourself in a larger entity like one bird swooping in perfect unison with your flock, the flock you love and belong to deep in your soul, so that “I” and “we” lose any difference in meaning, like playing your specific notes with your specific instrument in a great orchestra, contributing with all your overflowing heart, both lost in and essential to the sound that’s infinitely more magnficent than anything you could ever do or create alone.
I made this drawing to share and spread that feeling, in the hope that it will resonate with you and reverberate further outward, that it will spark you to recall and/or anticipate this experience with optimism and the knowledge of profound connection with all the many people around the world who are on the same side, trying in all sincerity, near and far, past present and future, known and unknown in a great web of messy but directed energy and effort to wrest a just and caring way of life out of the remnants of this oppressive exploitative ecocidal nightmare — and that it will encourage you to take your part, whatever that may be, in this collective struggle.
Ink, watercolor, acrylic marker, and color pencils on paper, 2022
One is breakdown and overwhelming disasters generated by the contradictions of the system itself, that ultimately make it impossible for capitalists to continue to run their enterprises. Their desperate attempts to retain power through the uncontrollable unraveling will generate a snowballing of mass suffering and death, with possibly an unlivable planet at the end of it, a silent steaming radioactive rock.
The other way out is for the international working class, through a collective act of self-emancipation, and leading an alliance of all people resisting capitalism-imperialism, to take away the power of the capitalist class while building new social structures capable of meeting the needs of humanity as an integral element of the living Earth.
Private ownership and monopolizing of the means of living is a recent social construct that has no legitimacy. It’s an absurdity, an ultra-violent crime of mass murder. We’ve been indoctrinated for generations to accept domination and call it freedom. The natural world gives to one another. Our separation from that web of reciprocity was/is massively wrong. We need to repair our relationship with Earth, with everyone in the largest sense.
When we talk about the need to transform society to one that isn’t dominated by capitalism, there are various verbs that offer themselves, each with its own nuances of meaning that map distinct action pathways.
Do we “end” capitalism? I like this verb for its broad open-endedness, its ability to encompass the totality of all the different aspects of the mode of production that need to cease. But the shadow side of this word is its shapeshifting ambiguity — it could also shrink its meaning to imply that capitalism is a bad behavior that we could just decide to stop doing, or a policy that could be abolished through an act of will.
Which brings us to the phrase Abolish Capitalism — which has a formal institutional vibe that doesn’t resonate with me very much, as if it’s saying that it could be ended by a legal maneuver, by decree. And we all know that The Law is capitalist law, so that’s not happening.
Transforming capitalism is just reforming it, so I don’t like that word used that way. But to transform society away from or beyond capitalism — that works.
Overthrow is a frequently employed verb, describing the removal of the ruling class from power. It refers specifically to the political field, so what about the rest? Capitalism has invaded/overtaken/harnessed not just politics but all areas of human life: culture, ideology, spirituality — and it’s specifically rooted in the economy. The word “overthrow” doesn’t speak directly to that. BUT — taking the economy out of capitalist control (seizing the means of production) is not just confined to the economic field but also ecompasses a political act. It is a fight for the power to decide how society’s needs will be met. In order to take over the economy, the working class will have to conquer political power — this is why the political conflict is said to be the “principal contradiction” of a class-divided society. Its the battle that needs to be won in the superstructure as a condition of the fundamental contradiction being addressed in the economic base.
Sometimes I use the phrase “kill capitalism” as an emotionally charged and very simple expression of hostile antagonism. The verb “kill” reverberates with the implication that capitalism is alive. While perhaps capital isn’t a sentient being, it does have its own self-propelled motion, its own life in a sense, independent from human will. (Which is why overthrowing the capitalist ruling class, while necessary, won’t be enough to actually put an end to capitalism — even though it’s an important step that can’t be avoided).
“Smash” or “crush” serve to communicate hostile antagonism too. I liked these words better when I was younger for some reason (haha). Now I feel that they’re kind of one-sided, that they carry an aura of nihilism. Like the prospect of capitalism collapsing with no organized counterforce arising to replace it as a better structure for human society, thus leaving the field open for exploiters and oppressors to reorganize, the non-class-conscious contexts in which these verbs are often used bring to my mind a chaotic and uncontrolled slide into even worse widespread violent misery. (Should the words be asserted by working class-led organizations, though, my misgivings would transform into excited hope).
I really like the totality and grit expressed in “overcome,” though I’m uneasy with the lack of class antagonism in that word, as if capitalism is a problem we can solve within ourselves, like shaking an addiction or climbing a mountain.
I’m constantly looking for ways to express in combination the deliberate ending of capitalism intertwined with the rising of lifeways that allow for a thriving world. “Transformation” is what I gravitate to (referring not to capitalism of course, but to human society as a whole). Even that nice big word doesn’t really encompass the whole thing exactly the way I’d like to express it, though.
Every phenomenon contains interdependent contradictory elements that are in constant push-pull motion. Real life (as opposed to theoretical abstraction) is complex, and discrete entities encompass multitudes of contradictory processes, are affected by other various phenomena beyond their boundaries (boundaries that are often arbitrarily conceptualized), and are themselves elements of larger contradictions. Still, each has an essence, a fundamental contradiction that determines its existence, nature, and development — one that if its dominant aspect was overturned, would transform the whole phenomenon into something completely different from its previous self, with a new contradiction at its core.
A revolution is a total transformation of society. What is accepted as normal today will seem absurd tomorrow.
Revolution is not just fixing what’s wrong with the picture; it’s breaking the entire framework.
It is an overturning, an overcoming of all the imposed restraints that are preventing us from being in harmony with our surroundings and each other.
Uprisings, insurrections and general strikes are not in themselves revolution — though these can be revolutionary tools to weaken dominant structures while building new ones.
An aggregation of reforms doesn’t add up to a revolution — though fighting for reforms can strengthen us to push the struggle further toward that horizon.
Revolution is not simply a change in government, but requires the overthrow of all exploiters. It is the self-emancipation of the working class, a take-over and redistribution of power that ends structural exploitation in the social economy, and opens the door for power itself to dissipate.
Revolution goes beyond expropriating and sharing existing wealth; it is a reconception of what constitutes value.
We will transform the way we collectively meet our needs, make decisions, and understand ourselves. Our concepts of “we” expand far beyond current boundaries, as we move toward lifeways for a thriving world.
Revolution is an emergent process that can’t be commanded, but on the other hand is completely contingent on our actions.
After spending some time reviewing and thinking about my art practice of the last few years, during which I tried a lot of different things and learned much, but was consequently a little all over the place, I’ve clarified what I plan to focus on for the coming year (or more): Affirmations for Revolution.
I’d like the project to consolidate some thoughts based on my experiences and observations from decades of being involved in collective political initiatives and making art.
My intention currently is to articulate an overarching conceptual framework (worldview) using art with accompanying short texts. There will be different groups of image/text pieces digging into topics like economics, politics, culture, class struggle, emancipation, blahbity blah — plus sub-topics galore.
I’ve tried writing a lot of this out before, but all the overlapping facets and looping trails of logic have been too overwhelming and I’ve gotten bogged down, lost. I have a hard time with long forms of writing. Maybe breaking it down into little chunks will help me sort it out. We’ll see!
Ideas about these topics are constantly appearing and evolving in my mind, so whatever I write/paint/draw isn’t meant as a prescription for anyone else. But I want to share as a way to connect (which is one major purpose of making art) and in case they may be useful to others. We all shape culture by whatever we do and say; I’d like my small contribution to be intentional as much as possible. Or maybe the process will be interesting. Feel free to take whatever resonates with you, and leave the rest.
I remember years ago walking down the street looking at trees, wondering what do we need art for, what do we need paintings of trees for, when the trees themselves are right here and they’re more beautiful that any interpretation of them can possibly be, and we can simply look at them directly?
I wondered: isn’t art just a poor substitute for reality? Doesn’t a painting of a tree (for example) just put itself between us and the real tree like a wall, allowing us to ignore the real tree and care less about it, in favor of the fake image? We might assume that depictions of nature in art are meant to connect us with it and help us appreciate it more, but doesn’t image-making in fact distract our attention away from the real world and thereby contribute to the disconnection of humans from the rest of nature, which is a big part of the problem that’s facilitating the destruction of the planet?
I agonized over this, felt confused, and for a long time didn’t draw the beings around me. But I draw some of them now, from an impulse and with a feeling that is the opposite of disconnection, but is more like respect, reverence, love — and wanting to share that with other humans. The act of drawing someone can be a process of learning to know them. It’s close observation and bringing whom we see into our own bodies from our eyes to our hands as we create an interpretation that’s a combination of them with elements of our own imagination. It’s a very intimate act of connection that should be done thoughtfully and with respect.
Recently I drew a spiny orb weaver. I’ve also painted one, and made a wood cut-out of one. I am aware of a danger of symbolizing them. I think about this as potentially a problem.
I see these kind of spiders every day. I say hello to them. I try to stay out of their way, ducking under their webs rather than breaking them, if they’re in the middle of my path. I notice them with an open heart, with affection. And yet with a very few exceptions I don’t recognize or distinguish between individual ones. I like them as a species — I’m not sure that’s enough.
Do I offer the real ones less attention because I’ve made images of them? Does looking at the art take away from interacting with the spiders outside? I reflect on my behavior and don’t think that’s happening. Instead, creating and viewing the images seems to lead me to be more aware of the real ones because it would feel weird, out of alignmnet, hypocritical, to care more for the images than for the beings themselves. The art brings the spiders into more mindspace.
When I share the images, I’m inviting others to offer attention and connect together in care for these kind of spiders (and individual ones, plus other kinds of spiders by extension). The image is saying: spiny orb weavers are important. They are not to be dismissed or ignored. They are to be honored and respected, known and loved. When we see them don’t sweep their webs aside, but say hello.
Still I recognize the dialectic at work here, a unity of opposites: the danger of disconnection through mediation is always present and intertwined with art-as-connection. It’s not one way or the other but always both, and our intention matters, and it’s necessary to be careful.
A couple of years ago I received an email from a small local paper that included an invitation to be interviewed for an article about this:
“In our next issue, we want to include an article about How to better take care of our environment. We want to draft an article with those little actions people can do to help reduce problems regarding climate change, protect ecosystems and natural resources such as water; the ocean, and in general our planet. For instance, cleaning up beaches, not buying bottled water, recycling, etc.”
My reply:
“Thank you for thinking of me! Would there be room in your article for me to address the overall systemic transformations that would be needed to stop environmental destruction? From my worldview, I can’t really address individual actions without putting it in a social context that questions the entire economy. If that would work for your piece, then I would like to participate. I could talk with you later today or sometime tomorrow. If not, then I’m probably not the right person to interview.”
We went back and forth a couple of times and I was pretty clear where I stood:
“I should tell you that my perspective is anti-capitalist, which might be kind of beyond the scope of your article.”
…but she said she still wanted to do it. So I talked with her on the phone, and then wrote up the following and sent it to her.
I never heard from her again…
****
5 Simple Daily Lifestyle Changes to Help Save the Planet:
1. Unite with your coworkers to struggle collectively against your employers for higher wages and shorter workdays in order to weaken the capitalist class and strengthen the working class as a whole to take over the means of production, defeat capitalism/imperialism (and its imperative to exploit labor for private profit through converting the natural world into commodities), and then run society in the interests of all, paving the way to end class divisions and ecocide altogether.
2. If you’re not part of the working class, act and build movements to act in solidarity with the struggles of workers against their capitalist exploiters, and for international working class unity, in order to weaken the global capitalist class, etc. (see above).
3. Speak up, act and build movements against all forms of oppression that serve class domination and imperialism. Dismantle institutional structures of oppression such as patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism and nationalism while challenging individual expressions of these.
4. Free all domesticated land such as lawns, industrial monocrop farms, golf courses, and city swales and allow these areas to revert back to the wild; ban the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides; and make sure all of society’s food is cultivated and obtained in ways that are in harmony with the thriving of the natural world.
5. Act from the knowledge that ecocide is a consequence of the global capitalist class imposing its economy over the world. Both individual and collective acts of intended resistance can often be recuperated back into the capitalist framework, and we must strive to make sure that our actions actually contribute to the weakening of capitalist domination.
I asked myself why I looooove making funny animals and plants in bright colors so much. Part of it is the pleasure of searching for balance in the tension of opposites — finding the sweet spot between simplicity vs complexity, respect combined with humor, color contrast, how abstract they can be while still remaining recognizable. I like exploring the relationship between the symbolic and the real. And it’s very soothing to make patterns. And certain bright colors just make my eyes feel happy.
I used to believe that it doesn’t matter what your intentions are unless you act. That doing is determining; thinking is unreal. This belief didn’t correspond to my own behavior though, mucking about in the superstructure of ideology and culture all my life, even when I had jobs in places where opportunities for battles abounded on the economic front.
I missed those opportunities, didn’t even see them because of the political orientation I’d been trained in by the group I was part of for 15 years of my young adulthood. Though for revolution against capitalism/imperialism, they had lost their focus on the core of class struggle.
The misalignment persisited for decades. Even when I saw it and tried to flip it, with my limitations I just ended up reinforcing it. Now I’m too far down a path that’s shaped me into who I am, and I probably won’t find my way back to those kind of ripe workplace situations in this lifetime. Though who knows.
Anyway it’s not that I ever thought that superstructural activity was useless, far from it — I spent most of my efforts there. But I considered it a means to another end. I understand now that I had a non-dialectical approach to the intertwinement of ideology and practice.
* The land is the material basis of our lifeways, how we meet our material needs, and this is the foundation of human culture. Our cultures are shaped by place and time, evolving through history and reflecting our changing relationships with our surroundings and with other social formations.
* Creating is a human impulse echoing nature’s constant creation. We apply our inherent creativity to all sorts of activities, from having children to cooking to fixing cars to sharing our stories to finding a new way home.
* In societies where divisions of labor developed, though much production was still centered in the home, some people became artisans, focusing on making specific things as their primary social economic activity. The artist came to be, servant of religion and royalty. As capitalism emerged it harnessed art to its own pursuits (as it did with science), standardizing it, professionalizing it, and hairsplitting it into ever more numerous separate forms and fields.
* We are discouraged from understanding our daily activities as creative, so that our natural impulse to create can be commercialized and sold back to us.
I’m thinking about contradictions within contradictions. This is how I view what is unfolding: Within capitalism’s fundamental contradiction (capital vs labor), capital is the dominant force — it possesses the power to force the whole society to serve it. To become that powerful, capitalists had to become a self-conscious unified class (a “class for itself”). Working people are not currently unified enough to exercise collective class power — though that power is always inherent as potential, constantly emerging from the dynamic of capitalism. It takes a lot of energy for the capitalists to keep suppressing and smashing it. As the working class-in-itself coalesces and strengthens into a class-for-itself, at the right moment it can rise and prevail.
This capital-vs-labor contradiction is considered “fundamental” because the ongoing clash between these two interlocked opposing forces determines the way of life for the whole society. The constant battle between classes determines the course of history. Within the dynamic of this contradiction there are many others, including those internal to each main side. For example, competition generates conflict between concentrations of capital centered in different nations, and/or centered in different forms of investment.
Conflicts within the capitalist class have been growing ever more acute since the last time they readjusted their system by redividing realms of control through inter-imperialist war, and are now coming to a head once again, filling the political arenas of various centers of capital with loud messy drama sometimes to the point of absurdities that would be laughable if they didn’t reflect such a dangerous situation.
Capitalism is a mode of production, the whole arrangement of society organized for the production of goods that meet our needs — like food, clothing and housing.
It’s not only an economic system, but it also includes a political system, and a system of beliefs, that all reinforce each other. For example, how is it that one person is allowed own a factory that a hundred people work in? It’s only because we have been taught to believe in the right to private ownership.
Capitalism is based on class divisions. Under capitalism, there are two main classes that are in conflict with each other: capitalists and workers. The capitalists own the means of production — the factories, land, and raw materials. They own it not because they worked for it, or because they’re better people or because they deserve it, but usually because they or their ancestors stole it. The wealth of the capitalist class in the US was built on genocide, land theft, and slavery. Most wealth is inherited from those historical crimes. And today they increase it through wars of conquest and the global exploitation of workers.
Capitalists dispossess the working class so they can force us to work for low wages. Because we don’t own land or factories or raw materials, we can’t produce what we need. So our only option is to work for them.
Our labor increases their wealth, while they pay us as little as they can get away with. Wages are supposedly set at what we need for our survival—to pay our rent and feed our families. But we all know that it’s never enough. When we’re organized, we can fight for higher wages, but individually we’re caught in a bind: we can either work for what they offer, or we can starve.
The big scam of capitalism is that wages are supposedly a fair trade of money for the amount of time that we work. But capitalists are not buying our time—they are buying our labor power, our ability to work. When we produce goods for them, they sell them at a price higher than what they paid us. Where did this extra value come from?
1) Through visual metaphor, symbolism and mapping, art can uncover the
underlying structures of a society that we generally take for granted as normal.
Art can reveal invisible forces and mechanisms that perpetrate an irrational
economy, a political clusterfuck, and a collective ideological fog. When we can
perceive and name these forces and mechanisms, we discover that the problems
they generate are not in fact natural, but are socially constructed
monstrosities. We no longer need to accept them.
2) The revolutionary movement, the drive to freedom, is always arising;
it is a fundamental urge of living beings. The capitalist class, desperate to
maintain dominance, constantly attempts to twist this urge against itself and
to conceal it, to make us believe it doesn’t exist. The oppressor culture
attempts to co-opt every expression of the revolution, artistic and otherwise, to
force it to submit to and serve the profit imperative. Only by exposing and
facing this, can we break the spell.
3) By focusing attention on emerging tendencies, art can assist potentialities
into existence. Art can shine a light on revolution’s path, revealing what’s
happening at those edges of history that are starting to take shape just beyond
our general collective perception. When we can see a path, we are no longer
lost. We can start to move together in an intentional direction, toward a
future we choose.
PS: Art is many things to many people. I’m not asserting a concept of
what all art “should” be, but to clarify for myself (and for anyone who finds it
useful) some ways that art can contribute to the revolution.
PPS: These functions are not restricted to art, but can also be accomplished
through speaking, writing, and other forms of communication.
Today we’d like to introduce you to Stephanie McMillan.
Stephanie, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
As a teenager in the Reagan era, I awoke to the terrifying threat of
nuclear war and wrote my first opinion piece with my first political
illustration for my high school paper. I became active in the anti-war
movement, as well as around other issues like abortion rights and
against police brutality. Much of my artwork over my lifetime has been
intertwined with efforts to overcome oppression, exploitation and
ecocide, and for a just and sustainable society.
I started drawing
cartoons professionally in 1992. My comics, editorial cartoons, and
illustrations have appeared worldwide in hundreds of publications since
then (including my hometown paper, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel), and
have won awards including the RFK Journalism Award. They’ve been
included in exhibits at the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum, the Museum
of Comic and Cartoon Art (NYC) and other venues, plus a solo show at
Cal State/Northridge. I had a comic strip syndicated through United
Media and Universal for several years and wrote and illustrated several
books including a graphic novel about the Occupy movement. Most
recently, I illustrated a children’s book called “Songbird, Fly!”
written by my partner Christopher Burns, about a bird who escapes her
cage.
Chris and I currently run the Arts and Crafts Social Club, a
studio in the Flagler Village neighborhood of downtown Fort Lauderdale,
where we offer classes, paint-and-sip parties, and other events. We
really enjoy meeting people and creating a fun atmosphere where we can
all make art together! We also use it as a place to make our own
artwork. During the past year or so I’ve been focusing a lot on acrylic
painting, though I’ve also been playing around with all sorts of
materials, from gouache to papier-mâché.
I simply love making
things. I always have. My mother inspired that in me, by doing all sorts
of crafts with me and my brother and our friends around the kitchen
table when we were little. I’ll always be grateful to her for awakening
and encouraging my creative spirit.
Can you give our readers some background on your art? Three visual and thematic elements run through my work in general (while each piece may not contain all three):
1) Social messages:
While
art is fun to make and enjoyable to look at, the primary purpose of my
work overall has been to help contribute to social change, by
facilitating communication about the state of our world that may lead to
action. I love when someone uses one of my drawings or cartoons to
illustrate a flyer or on a sign at a demonstration. What thrills me most
is when someone tells me it inspired them or helped them feel stronger
in their own fight against the system.
2) Comics:
Because of
my long stint as a cartoonist, most of my work (no matter what the
medium is) contains visual elements of comics: bright, flat colors, bold
shapes, humor, exaggerated expressions, words, and messages. I’ve taken
to heart the well-known saying: “If you want to tell people the truth,
make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.”
3) South Florida:
I’m
second-generation born and raised in Fort Lauderdale, FL after my
grandmother arrived in 1921 as a school teacher. I love the amazing
plants and animals who live in this unique bioregion, and they often
appear in my artwork along with bright tropical colors.
What
responsibility, if any, do you think artists have to use their art to
help alleviate problems faced by others? Has your art been affected by
issues you’ve concerned about? There is tension between one
of the most important social roles of art — to reveal hidden truths —
and the artist’s need to make a living by selling their work in a
profit-driven marketplace that operates best when those truths remain
obscured. There is so much pressure for artists to create purely
decorative or amusing entertainment, rather than follow their own vision
and life’s purpose.
Two overarching trends are greatly affecting
everyone’s situation, including artists: 1) global warming has advanced
to the point that social transformation is now an urgent necessity for
the survival of life on Earth; and 2) the political representatives and
institutions protecting the interests of those at the top of the
capitalist/imperialist system are aggressively trying to hold onto their
dominance in an increasingly unstable global economy and in the face of
rising popular discontent.
In this challenging context, the
development of the internet has made it easier for artists to connect
directly with their audiences and more readily participate in efforts to
deal with our collective situation (as well as make a living). We no
longer need to rely on the old gatekeepers (though new gatekeepers and
obstacles keep popping up).
Even with its limitations, the
internet has allowed for a flowering and democratization of the arts
(and other forms of communication) that couldn’t exist earlier. Our
culture has opened up a great deal and is evolving rapidly, and so many
important conversations are happening.
At the same time, those
currently on top are trying to push all that back in the box. But we
can’t back down. We each need to do our part to ensure that open
communication wins so that together we can figure out paths for a viable
future.
What’s the best way for someone to check out your work and provide support?
Drop by the Arts and Crafts Social Club during our open studio hours or
the monthly Flagler Village ArtWalk (6-10pm on the last Saturday of
each month except December) to see recent pieces and whatever we’re
currently working on.
The work that’s displayed there is
mostly fun, colorful, and lighthearted, inspired by our tropical South
Florida surroundings. I recently started an Etsy shop to sell some of
it: https://www.etsy.com/shop/tropicalpop
My more political work is on my website: stephaniemcmillan.org, where I sell paintings, prints, books, and other items. Purchasing my work or joining my Patreon page (patreon.com/stephaniemcmillan) supports my ability to make more of it, which I really appreciate.
If
you happen to be in Tallahassee, a few of my paintings will be included
in the “Art of Resistance” show at 621 Gallery, Sept. 29-Oct. 27.
I’d like to say something that I’ve been thinking about for a while. Reflecting back on my decades-long political life with its many ups and downs, I realize that I’ve sometimes thought and acted in ways that have been dogmatic, judgmental, sectarian, controlling, co-dependent, and arrogant (I have other flaws too but let’s leave them for another day).
Of course we must all make judgements and choices about who and what to give our time and energy to, based on what we know at the time. But I’ve often just assumed that I fully understood situations and people. I believed I knew what other people should do or say, and even how they should do or say it, better than they did themselves.
All of us try to know as much as we can, and we inevitably form opinions, but as limited individual beings we can only understand so much. We can’t grasp the entire complexity of situations or see into the future. We can only read so much of what’s in another’s heart, or guess where the movement of history might take their lives and thoughts, what they might do, and what their myriad effects on others might be.
It’s so easy to judge another and dismiss them while feeling self-righteous. For all the times I’ve done that to anyone in the broadly-conceived anti-capitalist camp or among the masses exploited and/or oppressed by capitalism, I sincerely apologize. I struggle not to do it any more.
To be clear, this reflection is not a descent into agnosticism – I still have utter certainty about fundamental things (capitalism is killing us, and only the working class can lead humanity out of it) – and I know what side I’m on in the epic class struggle that defines our era, the outcome of which determines our collective future. And I still have my opinions about the process.
I just wanted to apologize to those generally on the same side who I may have treated or thought of with insufficient regard, kindness, or respect (even if I believe you’re wrong about something). I would rather assume that we are each doing the best we can, and I appreciate all of you who are struggling to survive under capitalism and for a way forward out of it.
I was thinking about how solidarity is our “secret weapon”, the one thing we have that can’t be corrupted by capitalist interests, the key to getting out of this mess. It’s the glue that holds us together when those in power are doing everything possible to divide us. It’s important to talk about why capitalism is evil and needs to be overcome, but it’s not enough to focus only on that. The collapse or destruction of capitalism won’t necessarily lead to a better place all by itself. What do we have that transcends it? The fact that we’re fighting for all of us! The fact that we either ALL get there or none of us do. No one can co-opt that because every other social initiative is only for the benefit of some, not for all. A while back I made a drawing with “Solidarity” on it, but it wasn’t completely satisfying — I’ve had a persistent feeling that it lacked something. Adding “power” to the equation solves it for me. Of course solidarity (like love, caring, friendship) is good in itself, not just a means to an end…BUT my mind is also constantly on the massive problem that we need to solve. And solidarity is what can give us the power to do that. “Solidarity is Power” says both what we need and how to get it.
I painted two pieces last night. They’re both on the angry side.
My artwork seems to be falling on two sides of the anti-capitalist emotional spectrum lately: rage and horror on the one hand, and on the other hand, faith that humans can get our shit together and support one another to overcome it all. I keep thinking of Gramsci’s well-known statement: “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” I don’t feel like that exactly; my optimism isn’t a matter of *will* but just bubbles up naturally. It does go against my “intellect” — if I have to look at facts, I do believe that most life on Earth is likely fucked (unless there’s some surprising turn). But I’ve often been wrong. And my intuition still insists on hope.
Anyway these two approaches keep coming out in my work. I’m thinking of grouping and naming them accordingly, with contradictory words or phrases in the spirit of Gramsci’s statement. Maybe “Rage” and “Defiant Heart” or something like that.
I started this without having an idea of where it would go. Some thoughts that arose in my mind while painting it:
Structure (economic activity) determines superstructure (culture & politics), but not absolutely. Ideas escape the confines that have been set up by economic imperative. Along with its designed parameters, the economy has also pushed for overflow to happen, inevitably and integrally. That’s evolution, which is always a process of active contradiction. The structure is still there underlying everything, but it begins to blur and go off-kilter as the superstructure pulls out of it and drags it along, pulling it out of shape even while it’s being shaped in turn.
Art is emotion made concrete. Art hurts and art heals. Art makes us think, know, and believe. Art is sharing from within. Art reveals and conceals. It alienates and connects. Through art we may discover truths. Art is our consolation. Art is our weapon. Art is more than painting, drawing, singing and dancing; it is also cooking, customizing a motorcycle, raising a child, cultivating a garden, relating history, making an argument. Art is the creative spirit expressing itself through us all. Art is life. Art is for everybody.
Art is not a spectator sport. Art is a process. It’s a vehicle for self-discovery and for contemplation of the world’s phenomena. Art is transformative. We don’t just look at it; we do it. The point is not only “what it means” but “what I thought about while creating it.” Art is a doorway. It invites us to relax into an idea. It unravels structured thought into intuition. Observation becomes insight.
Acrylic paint and paint marker on canvas, 16″x20″.
I painted this in defiance of all the unquestioned worshiping in South Florida of this oil and railroad tycoon/land developer. He’s a very big deal around here, considered a great man. My studio is actually located on a street — one of many — named after him, in a whole neighborhood called Flagler Village. I think it should be renamed to “Flagler Was an Evil Fucker Village”.
So what did he do wrong?
He was a co-founder (and partner with Rockefeller) of Standard Oil, which captured a monopoly on oil refining in the US, ushered in the age of fossil fuels, accelerated the ubiquity of their use and thereby global warming. He then used his Standard Oil fortune to break South Florida open like a ripe fruit, building a tourist resort empire with hotels and railroads, leading to the natural ecosystem being largely wiped out.
One may argue that it was all inevitable because of larger economic forces in an era of capitalist expansion, and if he didn’t do all that, then others would have. Nevertheless he is the one who actually did it…which is why contemporary developers and other predators who follow in his footsteps have engineered a culture of reverence around him. Thus the need to insist that he deserves contempt and disgust from the rest of us.
I painted this during the period when actors and others began speaking up against sexual abuse in the workplace. It started out being about that, but is really about so much more. I wrote a little statement to go along with it…
***
I appreciate so much anyone who speaks out against any kind of abuse, and right now, all the women currently speaking out against sexualized abuse in the workplace. Just naming it for what it is, is a huge accomplishment. We were silenced for far too long.
When I was in my teens and twenties, 30+ years ago, workplace sexual harassment (as well as “date rape”) weren’t even socially recognized concepts. So when they happened, the only way to deal with it was on an individual basis, with little or no support. At work, choices were limited: do we confront the creep, which might put us in a perpetual state of war with him and maybe also everyone else in the place, get us labeled as a troublemaker, and risk losing the job? Or we could try to avoid being alone around him, but stay in a constant state of anxiety and silent rage, and leave if it got worse. Or we could normalize it, convince ourselves that nothing’s wrong, and start drinking too much.
When I was 19, at one job interview I was told straight out that the job included sex with the owner, and if I had a problem with that I shouldn’t even bother applying. Back then, the only option I saw was to leave in disgust. Hell, even as recently as a couple years ago, one of my clients decided to parade around in only a towel during a work meeting. I dropped him as a client, but never confronted him about it. I was embarrassed and didn’t want to seem intolerant. Like many women, I was so conditioned in codependency that I dreaded making him feel uncomfortable more than I cared about my own discomfort — how twisted is that???
But there is courage and strength in numbers. With back up, we can do so much more. We can crush those creepy fuckers. I hope this new spirit of defiance spreads to every workplace in the whole damn world.
The fact that these accusations are spreading like wildfire, forces society to name this abuse for what it is, and acknowledge its pervasiveness. There’s no longer any excuse for saying it’s no big deal. There’s no longer any excuse for not backing up your coworker who makes a complaint.
The only way to stop abusers is to make them face extremely unpleasant consequences. They only stop when they’re forced to. Until now, being a workplace predator usually didn’t entail consequences for him; only for his victims. But today we have the chance to say: you’re done. Your career is over. Everyone hates you. This time it’s not MY life being ruined – it’s YOURS.
The spotlight on this issue may seem sudden, but it’s the culmination of many years of patient organizing and speaking out with little result. Now a tipping point has finally been reached. Organizers around many issues – homophobia, civil rights, police brutality, ecocide – toil for decades before crimes finally become widely seen as such, and can no longer be ignored. This doesn’t mean they’re resolved – far from it – but it’s a necessary step toward that possibility.
The “me too” movement makes me think about what other kinds of normalized systemic abuse might come to be seen for the crimes they are, might reach that tipping point and suddenly become unaccepted. If we’ll one day say to some corporate polluter: you really fucked up, your career is ruined, you’re never going to work again. That we’ll say: you put a cancer-causing chemical in people’s food, you cut down trees to build a mall for your own profit, you crafted a law against distributing food to homeless people, you denied someone health care, you threatened humanity with nuclear annihilation – you’re going DOWN!
How far could this go? Let’s dream big. Why not go for taking down the entire capitalist system, the root of so much misery and oppression?
To make that possible, another normalized workplace violation needs to be exposed for the crime that it is, so that, too, it can no longer be ignored, excused, or tolerated. That crime is profiting off the labor of others. That crime is exploitation.
Imagine if we heard people on TV saying: “I was denied the means to obtain food or shelter unless I agreed to do whatever business owners asked of me for eight or ten or sixteen hours a day, and when I complied, I was only paid a small fraction of the value that I produced, and they stole all the rest for themselves.” And then imagine that instead of everyone going, “Eh, that’s just how it is, deal with it,” that mass outrage spread like wildfire. And then imagine that everyone subjected to these criminal acts began refusing to accept it, and that a majority of the population supported their resistance. Imagine the exploiters disgraced, isolated, driven from our midst. The way that everything humanity produces would have to change. Think about what else could melt away once that happened: wealth inequality, imperialism, ecocide. The control that capitalists currently have over the world would be broken.
Today, workers who speak out against exploitation are not generally listened to. They’re labeled complainers and troublemakers. They’re told that their abuse is not a problem, but a normal and necessary function of human society. They are told to suck it up and take their heartache to the bar on the weekend.
Sound familiar?
But we should consider it a badge of honor to be a troublemaker against abuse and exploitation. Let’s all be troublemakers. Let’s stop protecting or being loyal to our oppressors, our exploiters, our enemies. Call out their crimes for what they are, name the abusers and their violations against us, and stand up for each other in increasing numbers until justice can no longer be denied – until we can deprive predators of every systemic structure that has allowed them to exist.
* Beliefs may change. Principles don’t.
* Some weeds shouldn’t be allowed to establish themselves.
* True love and happiness are real and possible, if we stay open and attentive and daring and lucky.
* Past conditioning can be overcome.
* It’s ok to just have fun sometimes, in spite of concurrent global catastrophes etc.
* It’s not ok to avoid communicating that something is wrong, when it is.
* A build-up of contradiction, if not mitigated, will burst.
* Letting go is a necessary part of transformation and renewal.
* Death is everywhere, and inevitable, and so is life.
* To non-workers, the working class is virtually invisible, and most non-workers like it that way.
* Capitalism is ultra-scary and dangerous, but the people are smart and brave and creative and resilient.
* Anything can happen. What we do is the only part of that equation that we have any control over.
– Instead of the small class of capitalists controlling society, we can make our own decisions about work and social life.
– Instead of some of us being forced to work too many hours while others are unable to find a job at all, the work can be divided so everyone works a reasonable amount.
– Instead of competing against one another for scarce jobs, everyone can do meaningful and useful work that contributes to society.
– Instead of capitalists pitting us against each other by fostering racism, sexism, nationalism and other forms of oppressive ideologies, we can unite for the common good.
– Instead of the fruits of our labor enriching the few while the majority is kept in poverty, it can be distributed to provide food, shelter, medical care, household goods, education and recreation for everyone.
– Instead of destroying the environment for higher profits, we can implement sustainable ways to meet the needs of humanity and the planet.
– Instead of sacrificing our safety and health to cut costs, our well-being will be prioritized.
– Instead of half of the world’s food being wasted because it’s not profitable to sell it, we can eliminate hunger.
– Instead of being forced to wage wars of conquest for capitalists, the workers of the world can cooperate in peace.
Workers already provide all the goods and services for society. The global working class can decide together what we need, and how it is produced and distributed. Power is in our hands – if we organize, rise up and take it!
Capitalism is a mode of production – a totality of social relations that shapes how the society as a whole reproduces itself, how we all meet our needs, how we get from one day to the next. There are different modes of production, distinguished from one another by what drives the economy. This economic foundation generates, and is in turn supported by, a corresponding political system (which keeps one class in power over everyone else), plus prevailing ways of thinking that make it all seem natural and inevitable (such as the idea that “poverty we shall always have with us.”)
Other contemporary and recent modes of production besides capitalism are slavery and feudalism. All of these have one thing in common: class divisions that facilitate the accumulation of wealth by a small parasitical minority on the backs of the producing majority.
For slavery and feudalism, the new wealth taken possession of by the ruling class is the product itself. Under feudalism, a landlord takes half or a third of a peasant’s grain, whatever the quantity is and however much work the peasant put into it. But capitalist accumulation runs on a different formula. For capitalists, the product itself is not the point—the wealth they accumulate is the labor power extracted from workers in the production process. Labor power is wealth crystalized in commodities, in the form of surplus value (a form of profit). The particular kinds of commodities we produce don’t really matter; the money is made in the production of them.
In order not to starve, workers, who possesses or control no means of production, must sell our labor power, or ability to work, to the capitalist, for wages. (Our predicament is no accident, but has been engineered through systematic historical dispossession of formerly self-sufficient, land-based people.)
The big scam of capitalism is that wages are supposedly a fair trade of money for the amount of time that we work. Wages are generally based on what capitalists decide that we need for our survival—to pay our rent and feed our families. But in reality, capitalists are not buying our time—they are buying our labor power, which they use to produce commodities for them, that they later sell at a price higher than what they paid us. This profit is reinvested as new capital, which causes businesses (and the economy as a whole) to constantly grow larger.
An old comrade of mine died last spring. Around 25 years ago we were part of a team distributing “Revolutionary Worker” newspapers in Miami neighborhoods. After I left the RCP a few years later, we ceased working together but remained friends.
He left behind a box of pamphlets from the mid- to late-1970s issued by various New Left groups in the Bay Area, where much of his political development took place. I put them out on the porch and have been slowly going through them, curious about how the Left conceptualized revolutionary activity back then, and looking for clues as to why it largely abandoned class struggle in favor of social justice activism.
Judging by these pamphs, which were issued by at least half a dozen different communist organizations, it seems like the political scene in the Bay Area was pretty lively. Most of the texts are long, highly detailed polemics against rival communist groups, on questions ranging from the socialist character (or not) of China and Albania, to whether all forms of nationalism are reactionary (or not).
Personally, I’m interested in their attempts at participating in workers’ struggles and spreading revolutionary class consciousness among workers. Most, if not all, of them claimed to recognize the need for the working class (or some “most oppressed” section of it) to lead the struggle against capitalism/imperialism, but they seemed to have spent much of their energy attempting to be the leaders themselves, and going for each other’s throats in competitive attempts to become “The” Party.
I looked up the pamphlets online and in case you’re interested, many of them can actually be found in this vast archive of “anti-revisionist” struggle: https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/erol.htm
For someone unfamiliar with this history, these arguments between highly specialized groups can seem mind-boggling, with demarcations of line being pared down to what might seem an almost obsessive and insane narrowness. But keep in mind that it was a different time: social and political struggles were flaring up globally, including in the US, and as any movement matures, political differences translate into differences in approach and strategy that really do matter. So I’m not ridiculing the need for demarcations and polemics, which are always present whenever people try to do anything together (“Let’s watch Mistresses.” “Hell no, the acting has really gone downhill.”)
But it must be asked: where are they now? Did all that passionate quarreling make any difference at all, did it help advance working class power in the struggle against capitalism, or was it just a “tempest in a teapot”? Did it reflect an appropriate assessment of and response to the actual conditions that existed at the time?
Since class divisions formed among humans thousands of years ago, class struggle has been the driving force of all major social change. While in any given society there may be a variety of different classes, the central struggle, the one that shapes all the others, is that between a class that produces the bulk of what the whole society needs, and a non-productive, parasitical class that controls production and steals the social product.
To defend their ruling position and assert their interests, a class must dominate the entire society: by claiming ownership and taking possession of the means of subsistence and production (land, waters, resources, factories, etc), holding political power to facilitate the running of their affairs and to repress dissent, and directing the flow of information and development of knowledge, persuading people through culture and education into understanding the arrangement as natural and desirable.
Owners and producers are the two fundamental classes of any class-divided society, because the struggle between them determines its mode of production, the parameters of how things are produced and distributed, as well as everything else that can go on in that society. Slave owners and slaves struggle for and against slavery. Landlords and serfs or peasants struggle for and against feudalism. Capitalists and workers struggle for and against capitalism.
Capitalism, even in deep crisis, will never cease struggling to adapt and grow. It will not collapse or dismantle itself, until it destroys the planet and everyone on it. So it falls on us to destroy it. In destroying capitalism, we construct something new. Revolution is the total transformation of the way everything is produced, the social relations of domination that go along with it, and the ways of thinking that keep us trapped.
We need to understand our roles in the revolutionary process so that we may direct our energies to contribute the most we possibly can. The more intentional we are, the more effective we can be as consciously active agents for emancipation and social transformation.
There is no formula or plan to tell us what to do. We learn what we can from the millions of revolutionaries who have existed everywhere in the world throughout history, but each place and time is different, so whatever worked for them can’t automatically be applied to our circumstances. While relayed experiences, theories and observations are extremely useful, the revolution can’t be simply handed to us by others; we have to figure it out for ourselves.
We learn by doing. We can only master something if we practice it. This is true for playing a musical instrument, making furniture, or organizing for revolution and building a new society. Knowledge doesn’t come from the sky or from inside our heads; it comes from the real world and our experience of it. We make decisions about what to do, based on our interpretations of reality.
Many people call themselves revolutionaries because they possess and express “correct” beliefs, or write up the perfect programme or position paper. But no amount of study of theory, no amount of discussion, no collection of brilliant insights can ever change things — unless they are based in reality and are in turn implemented in reality. Theories that don’t come from practice can’t connect to reality. And they’re useless until they are actually USED. Knowledge is not an end in itself, but a guide to action, a tool to affect the material world. It is in use that it becomes embodied, and real.
Since none of us can destroy capitalism alone; we need to act collectively. The reason we need theory is to construct a shared frame of reference with which to share knowledge and experiences, so we can overcome what divides us, and organize our disparate spontaneous acts of resistance into a unified and powerful social force.
“Capitalism and Climate Change: The Science and Politics of Global Warming” by David Klein (and which I edited and illustrated), was reviewed by Michael Gasser.
*** Climate Change: A Radical Primer
by Michael Gasser
Review of Capitalism & Climate Change: The Science and Politics of Global Warming
By David Klein, illustrated and edited by Stephanie McMillan
An ebook available for download at Gumroad, a site where people can sell their work directly to their audience: https://gumroad.com/l/climatechange#. You choose your own price.
MOST BOOKS ON ecosocialism, while they may be of interest to those who already know something about socialism, especially those who already are socialists, are not particularly useful for those who want to be aware of both what climate change is and what capitalism is.
Naomi Klein’s best-selling book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism and the Climate, filled part of this gap, but as several reviewers have noted(1), by “capitalism” Naomi Klein seems to mean the variant of it that is usually called “neoliberalism,” the austerity and privatization enforced around the world by international financial institutions since the 1980s. As valuable as her book is, it is not, and does not pretend to be, a Marxist take on the crisis.
With Capitalism & Climate Change ecosocialist David Klein, with considerable help from revolutionary cartoonist Stephanie McMillan, gives us the best available primer, from a radical perspective, on what the ecological crisis is about and what is causing it. Far from challenging Naomi Klein’s similarly titled book, however, David Klein frequently relies on Naomi Klein, and in some ways, the two books complement each other.
Because they appeared within months of one another and because of their similar titles, it is natural to want to compare them. (For simplification, in what follows when I write simply “Klein,” I’ll mean David Klein).
Capitalism & Climate Change is divided into two sections, the first covering the nature of the climate crisis itself, the second capitalism’s role in creating the crisis, its inability to get us out of it, and what we can do about it.
What Science Tells Us
Klein starts Part 1,“What does climate science tell us?” with a look at the climate change denial movement, how it is funded, and how it challenges mainstream climate science. While some of this section will be familiar from Naomi Klein — who also begins with this topic — what will be new is the discussion of the lengths the deniers and their financial backers have gone to to intimidate mainstream climate scientists, up to and including anonymous threats against individual scientists.
In more ways than one, the climate change deniers, or more significantly their financial backers, mean business!
Here’s what they said:
“Capitalism must die! Your economic guidebook to revolution,” by Aaron Leonard
Why it’s great: Spoiler alert: capitalism is terrible. How do we know? Because author Stephanie McMillian’s colourful cartoons definitely told us so! Her playful blend of colours and style is inviting and brings us in to the serious message that capitalism is definitely destroying the world.
Why you should read this: Aaron Leonard conducts a very illuminating interview with the author where she candidly discusses why we so urgently need to defeat capitalism. Couldn’t be a better time to read it.
Capitalism is an ever-expanding, extremely destructive mode of production that has come to dominate the world; pretty much all social production has been integrated into its framework.
The ways capitalism presents itself to most of us is through its many wretched effects: ecocide, oppression, imperialism, poverty and so on. Any or all of these may motivate us to oppose it. When we decide to organize against capitalism, we often tend to go after these effects. We protest and resist them. And they absolutely must be protested and resisted.
But I’m going to argue that if that’s all we do, we may be able to mitigate some of these miserable conditions that way, but we aren’t going to be able to get rid of capitalism, the system that causes and maintains them. We won’t even harm it. We not even touching it.
To destroy capitalism, we need to understand exactly what it is and what drives it.
Capitalism is a mode of production, that is, it is an ensemble of social relations that shape how the society as a whole reproduces itself, how we meet our needs, how we get from one day to the next. Every mode of production includes an economic foundation or base, which generates and is in turn supported by a political and ideological superstructure.
While we must attack capitalism politically and ideologically, these alone will not destroy it. Our strategy needs to go beyond addressing the superstructure and gets at the economic core of how capital reproduces itself. We need to destroy the production and accumulation of capital.
What does ending the oppression of women look like? How will we know when we’ve achieved it? When we’re allowed to get free abortions whenever we want? When we no longer have to fear or experience rape? When we stop sex trafficking? When we all feel positive about our bodies and minds? When all girls in the world are educated? When we achieve equal pay?
We want all these things, of course. We need them. They’re essential. But are they enough? Don’t we need more than that? I’m going to suggest that if we focus our energy only on these specific issues, then we’re setting our sights too low.
If we fight around them directly, we may get some victories. But these victories will be temporary, partial, and incomplete. Because as long as we live under capitalism, we will never get the whole package. We will never be truly free.
If we achieve equal pay, we’re still wage slaves. If we’re taught to read, the material we have access to is still determined by others. All our relationships—every kind of relationship—are still distorted and deformed by market forces. We’re still caught in the nightmare, still under the domination of the capitalist class, those few bloated parasites living off the blood and sweat of the vast majority of humanity.
Capitalism Must Die! A basic introduction to capitalism: what it is, why it sucks, and how to crush it 2nd edition
by Stephanie McMillan
(INIP, 2015; $27.00)
What is capitalism, how does it work, and why, oh why, is it so terrible? All of these questions, and more, are answered by author Stephanie McMillan in her recent book, Capitalism Must Die! A basic introduction to capitalism: what it is, why it sucks, and how to crush it. McMillan uses her 30 years of experience in organizing against capitalism and her clever cartoons to debunk and deconstruct this destructive practice and create a useful tool readers can put into practice.Aaron Leonard recently corresponded with McMillan about her book, capitalism, cartoons and other matters. This interview has been edited.
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Some of your images are so playful, yet your message is so serious — how did you arrive at a place of undertaking radical politics through comics?
I loved drawing, and reading comics, ever since I was a kid.
By age 10 I had learned to draw Snoopy by tracing Peanuts, and decided I wanted to be a cartoonist someday. I was in high school during the Reagan years, as the U.S./USSR inter-imperialist struggle was heating up [in the form of the Cold War] to what seemed a very dangerous pitch. I wrote my first article for the school paper, with an accompanying illustration, about the dangers of and need to oppose nuclear weapons.
Then I went to college in New York, studying animation while organizing with the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade (RCP) [the youth group of the U.S. Revolutionary Communist Party]. I quickly realized that it was more important to focus on revolutionary change rather than pursue a career for myself, but my father, dying of cancer, asked me to finish school and graduate. After fulfilling my parents’ wishes, I spent the next period of my life organizing, while supporting myself with a succession of temp/clerical, factory and retail jobs.
In the late 1990s, for various reasons, I left the RCP. I still wanted to contribute to the cause of revolution, but now had no organizational framework in which to do that. I thought about how an individual could reach people with ideas and make a social impact. I decided that comics could be an effective vehicle because they are appealing, fast and easy to produce, and can carry a message to a wide audience.
My cartoons evolved through several stages, including traditionally formatted editorial cartoons, gag cartoons, and a sequential narrative comic strip. Recently I was challenged by a comrade to develop a “proletarian conception of cartoons,” and that’s led to a new series of comics that go beyond a critique of capitalism to also assert a working-class alternative. They’re often paired with theoretical and political texts.
Comic Riffs
Kickstarter of the Day: Stephanie McMillan affirms your anti-capitalism (plus: goats!)
By Michael Cavna
June 9 at 2:00 PM
IN HER BATTLE against capitalism, cartoonist-activist Stephanie McMillan does need funds to raise awareness of global plights through her art. And one of the reliable ways so far has been turning to the power of the crowd.
“I love the crowdfunding model, because it requires developing a strong relationship with readers, who decide what work they want to help succeed,” the Florida-based illustrator says as she seeks backing for her “365 Affirmations for Revolutionary Militants” desk calendar. “It’s a way to find out quickly if a project is a good idea or not.”
Comic Riffs caught up with McMillan, who has won an RFK Award for her comics journalism on the Occupy movement, to talk about financial models, the modes of profit and production — and which furry animals best embody her cause:
MICHAEL CAVNA: I know you’ve had success with crowdfunding in the past, Stephanie (i.e., “Mischief in the Forest”). What spurred you to turn to Kickstarter for your new project?
Capitalism Must Die! A basic introduction to capitalism: what it is, why it sucks, and how to crush it
Some 20 years ago, while creating a book of Mike Alewitz’s labour murals, the artist and I faced the inevitable question: what would a revolutionary artist want his book to be called? He insisted on a word that seemed to me long outdated, belonging to another, faraway world: agitprop. As in, the way that the Communist International of the 1920s, before (and, lamentably, also after) Stalin’s seizure of power, described the agitation and propaganda value of art. It seemed to me, notwithstanding my own lifetime of left politics, so very unartistic.
Alewitz was stubborn (and he won): the point of his art had been from the beginning to transform society by visually assaulting capitalism and capitalists, by telling the stories of the working class and the oppressed. Perhaps I should add that most of his revolutionary murals – from St. Paul, Minnesota, to New York, to Nicaragua, to the Connecticut community college where he has taught for decades – have been painted over. The people in power clearly don’t like his artistic message.
Stephanie McMillan is an agitprop artist and no doubt proud of it. The granddaughter of a once-famed German animator, she studied at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts with the political descendants of blacklisted animators in the U.S., and then turned in the 1990s to cartooning. It was in her nature to begin self-syndicating, an ambitious and (for most artists) frustrating – make that heartbreaking – effort to succeed on their own terms. Thanks to skill and temerity, she broke through to big as well as small publications, and, in 2012, won the Robert F. Kennedy award for editorial cartoonists. She also set herself on being a political organizer, from anti-poverty groups to Occupy and beyond. In a commercial publishing world with scarce room for left-wing artists, she has brought out two books from Seven Stories Press and other works that could be considered semi-commercial (as in, distributed by herself and her supporters without much commercial publicity or attention). “Undaunted” is her middle name, or should be.
The actual art in Capitalism Must Die! can only be described as utilitarian, serving the purpose of illustrating the ideas in her prose. The prose is straightforward and reminds me of the “basics” in the socialist study classes of my youth (during the early 1960s). We did not get into ecology back then, but the historic rise of capitalism, grinding the faces of the poor, the spread of the system across the planet (true to Marx’s own formula) to newly available resources and oppressed populations – all of this seems familiar. What is new here, in a society of declining literacy, is her skill in mixing images and interpretive paragraphs. Any young person who hates their job, or can’t find one, can understand intuitively her description of exploitation as the source of profits. McMillan excels in using this seemingly obvious point to explain how the system at large is fast murdering the planet.
She writes and draws as a socialist revolutionary who knows that working-class folks will not automatically be won over to understanding that something drastic both needs to be done and can be done. If there is a rub, it is in her appeal for a renewed Marxism-Leninism dependent on a vanguard party (“The trouble with Leninism,” an old anarchist postcard of the 1960s read, “is that everyone wants to be Lenin.”). On the positive side, she has plenty of useful suggestions – including points that many of us have tried to live by – on being democratic, patient (even in disagreements with other radicals), and determined to carry through for the long haul.
No one should expect an artist to have all the political answers. Stephanie McMillan prompts the questions and helps her readers along, and that is a lot. Read this book and pass it along to a young person, too.
Paul Buhle co-founded the New Left journal Radical America in 1967 at age 22 and has edited a dozen non-fiction comics and books including Insurgent Images: The Agitprop Murals of Mike Alewitz.
In an era of wars and revolutions
American socialist cartoons of the mid-twentieth century
By Carlo and others; edited by Sean Matgamna
London, England: Phoenix Press, 2013, 314 pages, $15 paperback.
Capitalism Must Die!
A basic introduction to capitalism: what it is, why it sucks, and how to crush it
By Stephanie McMillan
Fort Lauderdale, FL: Idees Nouvelles, Idees Proletairiennes, 2014, 241 pages, $12 paperback.
HEAVILY MUSCLED, BLACK and white, mostly (although not all) male proletarians confront profit-bloated moneybag (all white male) capitalists, Jim Crow racism, the war industry, and the grim visage of Stalin.
A one-eyed fighting rabbit, “Bunnista,” takes on the greedy bosses (mostly but not all white and male) and their “omnicidal” system destroying the planet in the course of exploiting labor and nature.
The first set of images dominate the collection In an era of wars and revolutions, compiled by Sean Matgamna, a leading member of the Alliance for Workers Liberty (AWL) in Britain. The second, the creation of Stephanie McMillan, is an illustrated manifesto setting out her Marxist-inspired account of how capitalism operates and the necessity to overthrow it.
Both are entertaining as well as educational, and put together certainly throw some light on changes in radical political culture over the past seven or so decades. Matgamna has compiled an assortment of mostly Trotskyist and Third Camp cartoons from the immediately pre-World War II period through the mid-1950s, with a handful of earlier contributions from the 1920s Communist press.
The coloration of these cartoons is generally pretty dark, and much of the imagery is likely to strike today’s readers as rather grim and outdated. It’s worth keeping in mind, however, that these cartoons and the papers where they appeared — The Militant, Daily Worker, Labor Action, Socialist Appeal, etc. — actually addressed a working-class audience engaged in a labor movement that was stronger and substantially more politicized than today’s.
Matgamna acknowledges the masculinist shortcomings of the works: “The socialists who drew these cartoons were, themselves and their organizations, militant for women’s rights, but little of that is in their work…Even so, the old symbols, the fat capitalist and the big powerful worker, are still intelligible. They depict truths of our times as well as of their own.” (1-2)
Stephanie McMillan brings the same hatred of exploitation and oppression, along with the ecological and feminist priorities of today’s movements. Her Bunnista character, whom I take to be an alter ego of sorts, appears to have evolved in recent years from a mainly environmental activist to a fully-fledged revolutionary fighter.
One feature I especially appreciate — missing in the period cartoons chronicled by Matgamna — is McMillan’s ability to turn a humorous critical light on the movement itself. Recycling a classic radical joke, one of her characters pronounces that “Being a revolutionary militant requires tremendous sacrifice, resolve, persistence, and hard work. It ends in violent death or prison.” To which Bunnista replies: “Your recruitment pitch could use some work.” (178)
In another case, without quoting Marx, she nicely paraphrases his classic quip about the arm of criticism and the criticism of arms. (241)
In a welcome development, both of these books are “licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution — Non-Commercial” licensing arrangement. That means the art can be used with attribution, for non-commercial purposes and without alteration.
One could discuss the cartoons and text at greater length, but better to look for yourself. Ordering information: Phoenix Press, 20E Tower Workshops, Riley Road, London SE1 3DG, England; Stephanie McMillan, P.O. Box 460673, Fort Lauderdale FL 33346; steph@minimumsecurity.net.
Feeling Trapped in a Dead-End System?
Cartoonist Stephanie McMillan’s Affirmations Encourage Resistance
by MARK HAND
Activists and organizers for social change undoubtedly experience periods of burnout. Working long hours — typically without pay and little appreciation — on campaigns, issues and causes where victories are few and far between can be demoralizing. Some activists get so frustrated with the perceived lack of results from their hard work, the divisions within the Left, and the rampant apathy among the general public that they give up entirely and retreat from activism.
Cartoonist, writer and organizer Stephanie McMillan saw the depression, feelings of hopelessness and other difficulties faced by her fellow activists. And she wanted to do something to help people overcome these. So she started writing uplifting messages to empower individuals to continue working for a better world. She calls her inspirational messages “Daily Affirmations for the Revolutionary Proletarian Militant.” Similar to the memorable characters in her popular comic strips Minimum Security and Code Green, McMillan’s affirmations are accompanied by cute and colorful animals, plants and insects.
McMillan is almost finished writing 365 affirmations, and when she puts the final touches on the last one, she hopes to gather them all up and offer the entire collection as a 365-day perpetual desk calendar. The Fort Lauderdale, Fla., native is holding a campaign that ends June 12 to raise enough money to get the calendars printed.
In mid-May, a few days after McMillan launched her fundraising campaign, I asked her why she decided to write these affirmations. The conversation then moved on to broader questions about living in a world filled with barriers to positive change.
Mark Hand: When did you start writing and drawing the Daily Affirmations for Revolutionary Proletarian Militants?
Stephanie McMillan: I started on January 1, 2014, to provide an alternative for revolutionaries to the same old New Year’s resolutions. I intended to post them every day for a year, but some of them straggled into 2015. I’m finishing up the final 34 this month, daily through June 12, to wind up with 365 on the final day of the Kickstarter campaign.
MH: What inspired you to write them?
SM: Capitalists constantly push us to want things that keep us trapped in the system and obsessed with trivialities that distract us from resistance. All kinds of support is available if we strive to make money, worship a god, lose weight, find romance.
But there is a huge lack of inspirational literature to encourage and uplift people whose lives are dedicated to social transformation. Most writing on the Left is theoretical and political — these are obviously crucial, but there isn’t much that addresses us on the ideological level, on helping us change our ways of thinking so we stay strong, on track, and motivated, that helps us establish standards of behavior that serve our goals. All we hear is the constant barrage of capitalist ideology telling us that we’re wrong, our aspirations are impossible, we’re crazy to try, and “we can’t beat ‘em, might as well join ‘em. No wonder many people feel so hopeless, depressed and overwhelmed.
I started writing the Affirmations to bolster my own resolve and strategic optimism, and when I started sharing them, I saw that they filled a strong need for many others as well. So I decided to draw them regularly.
by Gary Potter,
Professor, School of Justice Studies
Eastern Kentucky University
April 16, 2015
Almost every semester I teach an undergraduate or graduate course in criminological theory. At best I can devote three weeks to radical, critical and feminist criminology because of the plethora of other lesser theories in the discipline. It is almost absurd to suggest that I can, even superficially cover the 1,152 pages of Marx’s Das Kapital and the 912 pages of The Grundrisse (Penguin Books editions) in an hour or two. The truth is that I am in my 30th year of trying to read and understand The Grundrisse myself. Even if I had a full semester devoted to a critique of capitalism trying to make the esoteric concepts and ideas relevant to students, particularly undergraduates, is an insurmountable task. Well, at last help has arrived!
Stephanie McMillan has produced a 244 page book of texts and cartoons titled Capitalism Must Die! What It is, Why It Sucks, and How to Crush It which makes the complex and indecipherable easy to understand. Available here: https://stephaniemcmillan.org/shop/
In Part 1, Ms. McMillan explains in easy to read text and with wonderful illustrations how capitalism works and why it must constantly and rapaciously grow through exploitation. In Part 2 she offers ideas on how we might organize to confront this ruthless system of global exploitation.
If capitalism keeps chugging along, we’re all in big trouble. That’s the prognosis of Stephanie McMillan, an award-winning political cartoonist and author of the new book, Capitalism Must Die! A Basic Introduction to Capitalism: What It Is, Why It Sucks, and How to Crush It.
The most urgent reason to stop capitalism in its tracks, according to McMillan, is its prominent role in harming the planet. Capitalism possesses an inherent growth imperative. This means that the normal functioning of capitalism is causing water shortages, ailing oceans, destroyed forests and ruined topsoil.
But even if an ecological catastrophe weren’t upon us, capitalism would still need to be dismantled because it’s based on exploitation, McMillan said in an interview. “There’s no reason why the social result of production needs to be in private hands and that only a few people should own what everybody produces,” she said.
McMillan uses her book to introduce and popularize basic concepts of revolutionary theory. “I wanted to provide something that was accessible to people, that people wouldn’t be afraid to pick up,” she said. But once they pick it up, readers will find a “doorway into deeper levels of theory because we always need to learn more about the system,” she explained.
CSUN did a week of lectures in October, titled “Comics v. Capitalism v. Climate.” The first presentation I caught was given by Professor David Klein and Stephanie McMillan, who spoke fearlessly about the incompatibility of capitalism and
…. well … life.
Jen:
Stephanie McMillan, you critiqued capitalism for needing exponential expansion in order to survive. You offer, in response to this destructive system, inspiration via cartoons, and suggest that transformation away from capitalism will be economic, political, and ideological. You also emphasize that the working class are the only ones that are able to offer a solution. My first question then is – if we live in a system that sucks every last ounce of energy out of its workers, (giving them less than enough to live decently as human beings) then where are they going to find the time or strength to study economics, become politicized, or develop an ideology?
We all know that capitalism is killing the world. In order to stop it, we can’t just keep resisting its effects. Capitalism doesn’t care if we protest on street corners a thousand times; that just proves how tolerant and democratic it is. The solutions are not to be found within its framework. They are even less to be found at the individual level. We don’t actually have power as consumers – they would like us to think we do, but we can’t buy, or not buy, our way out of it. It is a social system, a class system, and can only be addressed at the level of collective, organized class struggle. We need to understand capital, how it works, the mechanisms that keep it in place, and the core of its functioning.
Capitalism is a mode of production based on the exploitation of labor in the generation of surplus value. This means that workers are paid a certain amount of wages for a day’s work, but what they produce is worth more than that. The extra value is called surplus value, and the capitalist just steals it. This is what all profit is based on. This is what private property is all about – its considered normal for the social means of production, the factories and land that produce the things we all use, to be privately owned, and for those owners to simply take whatever is produced with them.
We really need to understand the methods used by NGOs* to undermine radical political organizing efforts and divert us into political dead ends. The People’s Climate March is a good case study because it’s so blatant.
In South Florida, we saw the exact same process after the BP oil spill. Once the NGOs came in to the organizing meetings and were given the floor, all potential resistance was blocked, strangled, and left for dead. NGOs will descend on any organizing effort and try to take it over, dilute it, and bring it eventually to the Democratic Party. We can also see an identical set-up with the established labor unions and many other organizations.
If organizers are being paid, usually they are trapped in this dynamic, whether or not they want to be. While combining a job with organizing to challenge the system sounds very tempting and full of potential, it’s overwhelmingly not possible. They are two fundamentally incompatible aims, and those funding the job definitely do not have the aim of allowing its employees to undermine the system — the very system that allows the funders to exist, that they feed off of. Capitalists aren’t stupid, and they know how to keep their employees chained to a post, even if the leash feels long. With NGOs, capitalism has set up a great mechanism for itself both to generate revenue, and to pacify people who might otherwise be fighting to break the framework. “The unity of the chicken and the roach happens in the belly of the chicken.”
The subtitle to Captalism Must Die! doesn’t pull any punches. Artist/writer Stephanie McMillan’s latest book is “A basic introduction to capitalism, what it is, why it sucks, and how to crush it.” ‘Nuff said?
This is not, like McMillan’s previous books, a narrative with sequential art, which may disappoint fans (I confess, it did me at first). Instead, it’s a more text-heavy non-fiction book explaining capitalism and class theory, interspersed with one-page cartoons that serve as ‘in other words’ visual explanations of McMillan’s at times jargon-y text. Also as necessary pauses, breaths, and laughs.
Early on, McMillan states that she’s not trying to write an academic-sounding text, but rather something that’s accessible and easily understandable. The problem is that she’s dealing with Theory-with-a-capital-T: that is, what is known in academic/university circles as Marxist theory, but is called by people who actually try to live it as ‘class theory’ and/or ‘proletarian theory,’ and therefore the use of some academic-y terminology is inevitable, and therefore maybe a little intimidating and/or the cause of eye-rolling to casual readers.
Some years back political cartoonist Stephanie McMillian did a visitor period at Twin Oaks and I had fantasies of one of the communities new industries being radical humor. She is a clever, quirky, cartoonist with an impossible message to deliver and just the right tool to do it. Her latest salvo in this on-going public education and activation campaign is on target and at exactly the right price.
Your kids deserve this book
I discovered Stephanie’s work while I was staying at an amazing squat in Barcelona called Can Masdeu. The squats library had a copy of the book she illustrated, As the Word Burns: 50 simple things you can do to stay in denial. Which is a quick read, if it does not cause your brain to explode.
Reviews may contain information that could be considered ‘spoilers’. Readers should proceed at their own risk.
Grade: 7
With a subtitle like “A basic introduction to capitalism: what it is, why it sucks, and how to crush it,” Capitalism Must Die! is a book with a clear sociopolitical agenda. If you think you will hate it based on the title alone, you probably will. With that said, the book provides an overall well-written, easy to understand introduction to anti-capitalism in the Marxist tradition. It defines terms without using a lot of jargon, and uses short comics and cartoons to introduce and illustrate difficult concepts with real-world examples. The tone of the writing is forceful and impassioned without being overly preachy or antagonistic toward the reader, which can often put people off of explicitly political books. McMillan has clearly spent a lot of time in activism and political education, and it shows in how fluently she translates high theory into everyday language.
9/20/16
Capitalism, even in deep crisis, will never cease struggling to adapt and grow. It will not collapse or dismantle itself, until it destroys the planet and everyone on it. So it falls on us to destroy it. In destroying capitalism, we construct something new. Revolution is the total transformation of the way everything is produced, the social relations of domination that go along with it, and the ways of thinking that keep us trapped.
MOST BOOKS ON ecosocialism, while they may be of interest to those who already know something about socialism, especially those who already are socialists, are not particularly useful for those who want to be aware of both what climate change is and what capitalism is.
Why it’s great: Spoiler alert: capitalism is terrible. How do we know? Because author Stephanie McMillian’s colourful cartoons definitely told us so! Her playful blend of colours and style is inviting and brings us in to the serious message that capitalism is definitely destroying the world.
