Year: 2014

Sunil Dutta, the cop who tells us to follow orders and we won’t get brutalized, defines excessive force this way: “The moment a suspect submits and stops resisting, the officers must cease use of force.” By “excessive” he means force applied beyond the moment of compliance. What is not excessive is what he will do to you if you do not comply: “if you don’t want to get shot, tased, pepper-sprayed, struck with a baton or thrown to the ground, just do what I tell you. Don’t argue with me, don’t call me names, don’t tell me that I can’t stop you, don’t say I’m a racist pig, don’t threaten that you’ll sue me and take away my badge. Don’t scream at me that you pay my salary, and don’t even think of aggressively walking towards me. Most field stops are complete in minutes. How difficult is it to cooperate for that long?”

But excessive force is not only force beyond what is required to gain compliance (a different definition than he uses), but also force that may cause significant physical discomfort or injury. Dutta’s definition implies that any degree of force can be used to gain compliance as long as it stops when the subject stops resisting. Remember, as a matter of principle, a person is presumed innocent. Detention and arrest are thus already problematic actions as they are forms of coercion being used against innocent persons (otherwise subjects under police control would be free to go). Coercion that causes discomfort to or injures the person being detained or arrested must be justified in every case, in a court of law, beyond a conviction (which justifies only the facts of detention and arrest and prosecution); unjustified, such actions constitute assault.

It makes no sense for a free society to allow police officers immunity from simple and aggravated assault laws. They are citizens subject to the same laws as civilians. We all have the burden to show why we do what we do at every point that is legally problematic if we mean to justify or excuse our actions. Of course, at the same time, the state has the burden to prove an individual did what he did not for the reasons he said he did if the reasons given differ from what the state claims. But cops cannot claim any legitimacy as an authority if they are permitted to break the laws they are obligated to enforce. Emancipation from having to justify actions that are considered criminal is the ethic of the police state, not of a free society.

There are those who think that (especially when the suspect is of a certain race) no force should be used in affecting an arrest, as if, when a suspect resists, the arresting officer is suppose to say, “Oh, you don’t want to be arrested. My bad. Be on your merry way.” The police have a duty to take a criminal suspect into custody. They are permitted in reaching this end to meet resistance with force. Force carries with it the potential for injury—as does resistance. If one is resisting lawful arrest, then the injury suffered may very well be that person’s fault. Resisting is not the police officer’s fault. He’s doing her job. If we are going to make policy that police officers can’t use force, we might as well give up and let criminals do what they want. The question is not whether force is necessary. The question is when force is excessive and unnecessary.

Update (August 15, 2021): If you read Freedom and Reason, then it will likely already be clear to you that I no longer subscribe to the argument presented below. I will not rehash in any detail my reasons for rejecting the claim that black people cannot be racist against whites. Read my blog entries over the last few years to understand why if you do not already. I hope it will suffice here to note three objections: (1) the problems of reification, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, which falsely presumes as real abstract categories either assumed or induced from evidence, (2) the ecological fallacy, which involves drawing conclusions about concrete individuals and their relations based on abstractions generated by empirical generalizations; (3) an ideological redefinition of racism meant to substitute for traditional civil rights discourse a superficially radical discourse based on notions derived from critical theory.

In the process of migrating Freedom and Reason from Blogger to WordPress, a process in which I am still involved, I had left this entry private for many years because I have felt rather embarrassed that I so boldly made an argument that is so utterly wrong, especially since I should have known it was wrong all along given that it stands in contradiction to the principles that have guided me throughout my life. I know what some will think: I was wrong then. Why am I not wrong now? How can the reader trust my judgment if I make a bad argument or believe a false thing? But the alternative is worse. A man who knows he is wrong and as a matter of habit fails to acknowledge it, and fails to address the reasons why he was wrong, denies himself the opportunity to grow. More than that, he denies others an example of how a rational person is supposed to conduct himself. How does a man expect others to be open to persuasion, to change their minds, if he himself refuses to change his own mind?

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In this essay I want to lay out an argument that stays true to a particular conception of power that, on its logic, defines the terms of accusations of racism—that is, in what situation or relations one can legitimately be said to be racist. The conclusion of the argument, which I present here for clarification, is that black people cannot be racist against white people. The conclusion depends on a particular definition of racism, which hails from, among other places, sociology, which in turn informs critical race theory on the matter. 

For an argument that claims that anybody can be racist to be valid, two things have to be true: (1) all racial groups must a priori exist in a state of equality and (2) racism must be reduced to race prejudice and/or purposeful action, the goal of which is the oppression of a racialized group. Concerning (1), it’s an empirical fact that racial groups exist in a state of inequality. This alone is enough to proceed. However, concerning (2), racism is more than prejudice and purposeful action based on race. Racism is discrimination based on race in a way that negatively affects—and this can be relative across class and gender structures—all members of a group defined as such. This means that racism concerns institutional and, more broadly, structural power and outcomes that systematically disadvantages a racial group.

The argument rests on the fact that not all groups have the same access to institutional power. If I am a member of a racial group that does not control the dominant social institutions, if I do not enjoy structural power, then I cannot translate my race prejudice into racism. My acts of discrimination are not systematic. They cannot affect an entire group. When we say racism is institutional, we mean that there are patterns of discrimination in which racialized groups are affected, with one group (in the present case, white people) benefiting from these patterns, and other groups (in the present case, black people) suffering from these patterns. By discrimination, we mean patterns of oppressive behavior—which require no prejudice; thus actions that suppress oppression are not discriminatory, even when taken up on the basis of race and come with coercion, for this would make liberation something like the equivalent of slavery.

I emphasize that institutional patterns do not depend on purposeful action (or positive racist motive, or whatever you want to call it), what some people mistakenly call “intentional”; rather, these patterns are determined/identified by results, by biases inherent in their operation. As feminist scholar Jo Freeman puts it: “institutional discrimination is built into the normal working relationships of institutions, its perpetuation requires only that people continue ‘business as usual.’ Its eradication requires much more than good will; it requires active review of the assumptions and practices by which the institution operates, and revision of those found to have discriminatory results.”

The patterns of institutional racism clearly run in the direction of white privilege and black disadvantage. Whites enjoy better and higher paying jobs, better educational outcomes, lower rates of unemployment, longer lives, fewer diseases and illnesses, lower rates of infant mortality, lower rates of poverty, lower rates of incarceration, greater home ownership, better homes, and so forth. All of these are empirically rooted in patterns of institutional discrimination. This is why affirmative action is not an example of racist discrimination; the intention of the policy is to restrict white (male) privilege, privilege given by the patterns of discrimination in US institutions. When we say racism is structural we are talking about the overall context in which these institutions function. Because of accumulated wealth in white communities, institutions systematically enrich whites and impoverish blacks.

Why did I a moment ago say that people mistakenly use the term “intentional” when they really mean purposeful? Intentionality is a legal concept which has four levels of legal and moral responsibility. The first is purpose, which means that I wanted to something to happen and I acted in a positive fashion to achieve it’s outcome. The second is knowledge, which means that I knew something would happen and I did not act to prevent its occurrence. The third is negligence, which means that I had a responsibility to know about and make sure something did not happen, but failed to meet that obligation. The fourth is recklessness, which means that I acted in a manner that caused something ill to happen, something that I did not mean to happen, but something that happened nonetheless because of something I did. Understanding intentionality is the key to understanding who is responsible for institutional racism, since white people intentionally perpetrate patterns of discrimination, even if they do not purposefully set these patterns in motion, even if they do not carry race prejudice in their thoughts. This is why there is no such thing as non-racism. Either you are racist, which includes failing to act to end racism, or you are anti-racist.

If one takes the “perpetrator’s perspective”—the perpetrator being those who benefit from the patterns of discrimination and express reluctance to act in ways that will end the circumstances that benefit them—then one will demand that the victims of discrimination prove that the perpetrator had a racist purpose in acting. On the other hand, if one takes the “victim’s perspective”—which rests on the basic moral position of sympathy—then what matters is what is actually happening. When a people are suffering oppression, they don’t wait to find individual perpetrators (which will likely never happen); they act to change the conditions of their existence.

Black nationalism and Afrocentrism are responses to white supremacy. Blacks in Africa developed nationalism as a form of resistance to European imperialism. Blacks in the United States developed nationalism as a form of resistance to white supremacy. And blacks around the world developed Afrocentrism as a means of understanding that their suffering has a common cause: eurocentrism, that is an ordering of the world on the basis of the ideas, wants, and needs of white people. In both instances, and with Afrocentrism in general, these are forms of anti-racism not racism.

It follows from the logic of the argument that it’s a basic error to treat resistance to racism as racism. It’s not racist for Africans to recognize that white people invaded their continent and ruled over them, and to realize that, for freedom to be possible, the mechanisms of racial oppression must be overthrown. Likewise, it’s not racist for black American to recognize that white people kidnapped their ancestors and brought them to the Americans to toil in forced labor camps and, in response, to develop their own political identity and to organize to overthrow the conditions that result from those circumstances. Some might find it nice that if and when white supremacy is ever overthrown that racial consciousness will also disappear, but we exist in a reality created by hundreds of years of white supremacy. Black people did not choose to be black, but they are taking control of that category to improve their lot in life. If whites say black is ugly, then blacks say that black is beautiful. Why should their children continue to believe what white people want them to believe?

This is the fundamental difference between white power and black power: white power is used to oppress black people; black power is used to liberate black people. It would be racist for me as a member of the oppressor race to tell black people to stop being the sort of black they want to be. I don’t believe Robert really believes that white people ought to be telling black people how to conceptualize themselves. Isn’t one of the reasons why we strive to overthrow white supremacy so that blacks can have self-determination?

Black nationalists do not systematically deprive whites of access to necessary resources. They are not in a position to do so. If ever black nationalism was the ruling force in this country and systematically restricted white access to necessary resources, then I would oppose black nationalism in the same fashion that I oppose white nationalism. One cannot ignore the issue of institutional and structural power. Self-determination is consistent with democracy if and only if it does not oppress other groups. I am in sympathy with black nationalism as an anti-racist strategy. This does not mean I support creating a society in which blacks rule over whites. A just society is one in which people rule themselves.

Affirmative action is a policy that suppresses the discriminatory patterns of institutions that historically and presently privilege white people. Because we are dealing with different groups, applying the same standard is discriminatory. Equal treatment is fair only if there are no group inequalities. Indeed, as Hayek took great pains to point out, classical liberals embrace strict equal treatment because it reproduces inequality.

There’s no such thing as black and Latino racism in the United States, if by this one means racism against whites (blacks can be racist against other blacks when they advance/defend white supremacy). To be sure, blacks can be bigoted against whites, but they cannot be racist against whites because they don’t have the power to do to whites what whites do to them.

Blacks operate with a double consciousness; they are racialized and operate in a white man’s world. Because whites rarely operate in the black world, they are much more ethnocentric; whites are far more white than blacks are black. For blacks not to be racist, they would have to think like white people. But majority group demands that minorities think like them is one of the hallmarks of racism. He has assumed the white man’s point of view in all of this. Whiteness, which is the racial consciousness associated with racism, blinds white people to the structural logic of racism. There is no effectively difference from the whiteness embraced by white nationalists (whom he deplores) and the whiteness embraced by those who condemn people for thinking like nonwhites.

In order to end racism, we must abolish white privilege. With the racist’s definition of racism in play, the racial consciousness and purposeful action based on race necessary to carry out this radical restructuring will itself be judged racist. Thus anti-racism becomes racism. The purpose of the argument, however fallacious, is to perpetuate an unjust state of affairs. In other words, don’t so anything to end racism lest you be racist. But, in reality, failing to end racism is racist. The is only an apparent paradox.

With the establishment of detailed rules governing its practice, the Bible is explicit in its endorsement of slavery. Yet this fact does not undermine faith in the sound moral character of the Hebrew god Yahweh (Jehovah, in the Christian tradition, or Allah, in the Muslim tradition). In rationalizing these passages, apologists argue that, in addition to being a moral guide, the Bible is also an historical document; the slavery described in the Bible reflects the social relations of ancient Hebrew society, not God’s will. Slavery is regulated by tribal law; it is not God’s law. But when the rules of slavery are discussed in Exodus, chapter 21 (the chapter immediately following the presentation of the ten commandments), the context makes it clear that slavery is God’s law. Through Moses, God conveys the rules that govern slavery.

The context is a conversation between God and Moses, which occurs between the two of them in a thick darkness. The Israelites are terrified by God, whom they cannot see in the smoky blackness, and ask Moses to tell them what God says. Moses punctuates the moment. “God has come to test you,” he says, “so that the fear of God will be with you to keep you from sinning.” (According to the Abrahamic traditions, people cannot be good for goodness sake but must terrified into a moral life.) So Moses goes off into the darkness to receive God’s law. There, God instructs Moses: “Tell the Israelites that you have seen for yourselves that I have spoken to you from heaven.”

Right away God gives Moses instructions on how to build an altar (unworked stone with no steps so that no genitals are exposed). You will recall, if you have read the Bible, that the first half of the ten commandments God gives to Moses and his followers concerns devotion to him. God asserts that he is lord, that Hebrews can have no other gods but him, that they cannot manufacture idols, that they cannot insult him, and that they are to devote an entire day of every week worshiping him, a day on which they are not allowed to work. (So important is this worshiping business that the first capital case under the new law was the stoning of a man to death for collecting firewood on the Sabbath.)

Then God says, “These are the laws you [Moses] are to set before them [the Israelites].” First on the list? slavery. 

God tells Moses that a Hebrew can buy another Hebrew, but he has to free him in the seventh year. However, there is an exception to this rule. Unlike chattel slavery in North America, Hebrew slaves are allowed to marry. If a slave marries a woman while he is a slave, his seventh year release does not cover his wife. The master retains her as his property. This is true for the slave’s children, as well; they, too, are the property of the master. Only a woman who marries a slave before he becomes a slave can be freed with her husband. The married slave will look to his seventh years with dread, since this will be the time that he will either have to leave his family and be a free man or stay with his family and be a slave for the rest of his life. The latter is an option as long at the Hebrew slave chooses it for himself; “the slave may plainly declare, ‘I love my master, my wife, and my children. I would rather not go free.’” If he does this, then his master will publicly brand him by piercing his ear with an awl, and the slave will be a slave forever. Otherwise he will have to leave his wife and children, since they don’t get the seventh year release deal.

One hell of a dilemma, no? How is it not wicked to make a man choose between freedom and slavery by exploiting his love for his family? Only cruel and immoral men make rules like this. But this is the one true and perfect God making the rule. How Christians can continue clinging to their faith in the goodness of God given the reality of this passage is a useful illustration of cognitive dissonance.

The horrors of God’s slave law do not end there. “When a man sells his daughter as a slave,” God tells Moses, “she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are.” This is an important part of the law, since this is what allows the master to manipulate his male slaves into lifelong slavery. However, the man who buys the woman may sell her back to the father if he doesn’t like her (buyers remorse). But the owner cannot sell the daughter to the gentiles. Jews can own other Jews, but non-Jews cannot own Jews under God’s law. If the master of the female slave gives her as a wife to his son, then she becomes his daughter, which frees her from slavery. This presents another dilemma: if a woman wants to be free, she has to marry the master’s son – or marry the master himself. As long as he sleeps with her, he can keep her. There is one other way for a slave woman to become a free woman: she can buy her freedom if she has the money and the master is willing to take the money in exchange for her freedom.

What happens when a man sells his daughter as a slave who then becomes the buyer’s wife and the husband finds out that she is not a virgin? The husband and the other male villagers are to bring the woman to her father’s house and stone her to death (Deuteronomy 22:13-21). This cruel law applies to marriage generally. What happens to a husband who is wrong about the virginity question? He pays a fine. That’s right: he pays a fine for attempting to incite a mob to stone a woman to death.

Are there any regulations on how slaves are to be treated? Yes. A Hebrew slave master is permitted to beat his slaves with a rod. But he must be careful not to beat the slave to death on the spot; beating a slave to death is a punishable offense. But if he is clever and beats his slave such that he or she dies the next day, then he cannot be punished. Why? Because the slave is his property. The idea here seems to be that it is unreasonable to suppose a man would destroy his own investment, so the death must be unintentional.

We established using text from Exodus (21:2-11) that gentiles can’t own Jews (the beating rule comes from same chapter, verses 20-21). What about Jews owning gentiles? That is permitted. God tells the Hebrews that they “may purchase male or female slaves from among the foreigners who live among you.” What about children? Yes, they can buy children to keep them as slaves. “You may also purchase the children of such resident foreigners, including those who have been born in your land. You may treat them as your property, passing them on to your children as a permanent inheritance. You may treat your slaves like this, but the people of Israel, your relatives, must never be treated this way.” The rule concerning purchasing gentiles is found in Leviticus (25:44-46). We have to assume that, in the case of Hebrew slaves, as discussed in Exodus, that the awl through the ear ritual is an exception to the rule that you must never treat “the people of Israel” as you would gentile slaves.

The explicit use of the designation of people as property tells us that this was chattel slavery. In other words, God tells Jews that it is okay to own other human beings, to sell them, to beat them, to even kill them (as long as you don’t look like that it what you intended).

Christian apologists often say that this is Old Testament law and that God, in establishing his new covenant in the New Testament, through the human sacrifice of Jesus, negated much of the obviously troubling ancient Hebrew law. It is unfortunate for their argument that the New Testament do not condemn slavery. Quite the opposite. In Ephesians 6:5, God instructs slaves to “obey your earthly masters with deep respect and fear.” Indeed, they are to serve their masters as “sincerely as you would serve Christ.” One would think that Christ would command the most sincere servitude from his followers, but God puts slave masters at the same level. 1st Timothy 6: 1-2 also instructs slaves to obey their masters.

Apologists will say that these commandments are not coming straight from Jesus. However, in the gospel of Luke (12:47-48), Jesus tells a parable in which the following verses appear: “The servant who knows the master’s will and does not get ready or does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked.” Here, Jesus is asserting the righteousness of slavery and of severely beating disobedient slaves. The man who is the truth and the light, the glory through which all must pass if they desire eternal life in heaven, tells his followers that it is right to own slaves and beat those who displease their masters, even the ones who did not know they were displeasing their masters. This is the man that Christians have chosen to follow.

If a realized action is the result of a gun being pointed at somebody’s head, and the action realized was desired by the person possessing the gun (or the force he represents with his armed presence), then the action realized is understood not to be the result of free will, but of coercion. Indeed, forcing somebody to do something at gunpoint is the paradigm of coercion. Of course they could make a choice to take a bullet, so there is wiggle room, but life is precious to the person possessing it, and so they are very likely to do what they are told on pain of annihilation.

Assuming both are real for the moment, the chief difference between the gun and Hell is that the consequence of disobeying the gun wielding man is immediate, whereas the consequence of disobeying the Hell wielding god is imminent. A man is more likely than not to behave in the manner prescribed by the religion that has convinced him of the realness of this terrible place. In the final analysis, the threat of Hell is no different that the threat of the gun. 

Now, most of us know that the consensus on the substance of the free will concept is that it is not implying sociopathy, but is closely associated the idea of moral (that is, social) responsibility. When one  acts with free will, that person is manifesting the social (often sublimated as metaphysical) obligation to accept responsibility for one’s actions. This represents a very real problem for religion; the metaphysical obligation supposed by the various religions is highly culturally and historical variable; no universal standard—beyond perhaps something like the golden rule—obtains. Only secular humanism, with its morality based on a scientific understanding of the material needs of humanity can produce a universal standard of moral obligation, or human rights. 

When one acts properly because it is the right thing to do, and what is right is acting to enable the material well being of persons, which includes the actor both in the way he can expect others to treat him and the way he treats himself, then one acts with free will and exercises moral responsibility. But if one acts in this way because he is fearful of the consequences of failing to act as such, then he is not expressing moral responsibility, but rather manifesting the will of another who believes he can only achieve the desired outcome with coercion.

To be sure, the view that punishment is necessary for proper moral conduct is found in history; but it is not ubiquitous in history. The alternative, which sees the harmful actions of individuals as opportunities to strength group solidarity and thereby reinforce the values that promote proper moral action, is associated with most of the human experience in a temporal sense. It is with the rise of social segmentation that one sees the rise of punishment as control and then the rise of religion as a means of justifying coercion.

Hell is nothing more than a human creation designed to coerce people into obeying a doctrine established by small groups of men for the purpose of making others do their bidding. Hell is a more efficient gun, one you hold to your own head to make you do the bidding of men for their sake—all the while believing that the mystical sublimation of their power is a real and independent and transcendent thing who cares about you. Nobody who cared about you would throw you into Hell. Only an evil thing would do that. You can avoid the inevitable conclusion that God is evil by rejecting religion and embracing universal morality.

The Cliven Bundy case is a useful example for clarifying some of the arguments that we often hear surrounding the power of government and the rights of individuals and the limits on each.

At the outset, we must remind the audience that states do not have rights. People have rights. This is why a people have the right to overthrow a government that is no longer respecting their liberties and rights. While people have rights, states have powers. In a republic form of government, these powers emanate from the will of the people. The more democratic the government, the more its manifested power reflects the popular will.

The individual states that make up the Union have powers delegated to them by the US federal government or reserved to them by the US Bill of Rights. In all cases, the US Constitution is the supreme law of the land. What the federal legislature and executive pass into law or the federal executive decrees by executive order (unopposed by Congress) or a federal court rules stands unless it is overturned by a higher court or superseded by new law. Article Six, Clause 2, of the US Constitution establishes the supremacy of the federal government. We are first citizens of the United States, after that residents of the various states. Bundy’s passport (if he has one or ever will) will identify him as a US citizen. When the South challenged this legal reality by seceding from the Union and establishing the Confederate States of America, the Union settled the question with war.

Congress’s legislative powers are enumerated in Article One, Section Eight of the United States Constitution. The Congress has the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, and imposts. The Congress has the power to call forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union, as well as suppress insurrections and repel invasions. An insurrection, or rebellion, is a violent uprising against an authority or government. The executive of the republic – the president and his agencies – has the authority as delegated by Congress to make regulations and enforce them and put down insurrections.

Here are the relevant facts: Cliven Bundy stopped paying his grazing fees in 1993. He owes the US taxpayer more than one million dollars (he admits to $300,000 of that, so that he owes some amount of money is not in dispute). In 1998, a federal court ordered Bundy to remove his cattle from the federal land, land that is neither his nor Nevada’s. The federal government owns most of the land in Nevada, and when Nevada was granted statehood, it acknowledged in its Constitution the supremacy of the US Constitution. Bundy uses federal land well beyond his family’s roughly 160 acres of land. Against federal and state law, he is grazing his cattle on taxpayer land and refusing to compensate the taxpayer for its use. Bundy has defied the law for more than 20 years. Twenty years is a lot of patience on the part of the federal government.

Bundy’s refusal to follow the law and his defiance of authority, and the rallying to his side by armed extremist elements in America’s right wing, is insurrection. To be sure, the government stood down in the face of rebellion to avoid violence, but it has the authority under the rule of law to act with armed force. That it has not—and has let the issue go for so long—testifies to the deference the US government, whether governed by Democrats or Republicans, routinely shows wealthy citizens.

One of the great ironies in American politics is that those who most aggressively champion the US Constitution and the American Republic are often the ones most likely to champion the neoconfederate position of states rights. But a person can’t have it both ways. Either one recognizes the legitimacy of the United States government or one doesn’t. And while it is not necessarily wrong to withdraw one’s recognition of the legitimacy of the any government and its laws (that is one’s right), whether one has just cause to do so depends on the reasoning—and, in any case, withdrawal of consent cannot make the person immune from the enforcement of the laws of the land.

G. William Domhoff finds problems with conspiracy theory. His essay, “There Are No Conspiracies,” is a harebrained attempt at shutting down critical thinking about how history happens. He lists five objections, none of which work.

First, conspiracy theory “assumes that a small handful of wealthy and highly educated people somehow develop an extreme psychological desire for power that leads them to do things that don’t fit with the roles they seem to have. For example, that rich capitalists are no longer out to make a profit, but to create a one-world government.” As if making profit and controlling government are mutually exclusive goals – or don’t depend on one another.

Capitalists are out to make a profit. The biggest capitalists with the most power know that they can increase their profits by controlling the global political and economic machinery. The transnational capitalist class actively seeks to bring all political power and economic activities under its control. Control over one requires control over the other. Will capitalists succeed? They largely already have. For sure, they are trying. It’s naive to believe that the most powerful groups in the world aren’t trying to shape world history towards their ends and that they are loath to do so secretly.

Domhoff scoffs at the fear that “elected officials are trying to get the constitution suspended so they can assume dictatorial powers.” This is a ridiculous claim, he writes, because it never happens. Really? It never happens? The terrible fact that political rule sometimes comes to power through conspiracy recommends conspiracy theory as a useful (albeit not the only useful) framework for analyzing history.

Domhoff writes, “Since these claims have proved wrong dozens of times by now, it makes more sense to assume that leaders act for their usual reasons, such as profit-seeking motives and institutionalized roles as elected officials.” False dilemma. It is not one or the other thing. It’s all these things. To arbitrarily close off one of the avenues for understanding history is ideology not social science.

“Second, the conspiratorial view assumes that the behind-the-scenes leaders are extremely clever and knowledgeable, whereas social science and historical research shows that leaders often make shortsighted or mistaken decisions due to the limits placed on their thinking by their social backgrounds and institutional roles.”

Criminals get busted for conspiracy all the time because they make shortsighted or mistaken decisions. Conspiracies often don’t work. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t conspiracies. Domhoff himself acknowledges conspiracy in his example of why conspiracies often don’t work: “the failure of the CIA at the Bay of Pigs during the Kennedy Administration.” The Bay of Pigs was a conspiracy that failed. Here a man is denying the existence of conspiracies while documenting one.

“Third, the conspiratorial view places power in the hands of only a few dozen or so people, often guided by one strong leader….” Most conspiracies are small and involve even fewer than a few dozen people. And, yes, very often, there is a mastermind, a ring leader. Bigger conspiracies involve more people. Conspiracies can be vast, involving several hundred people. These are, frankly, mundane facts about conspiracies.

“Fourth, the conspiratorial view often assumes that clever experts (‘pointy-headed intellectuals’) with bizarre and grandiose ideas have manipulated the thinking of their hapless bosses.” He gives no examples and I have not heard anybody who theorizes “conspiracists” make this claim. Then he writes that “studies of policy-making suggest that experts work within the context of the values and goals set out by the leaders, and that they are ignored or replaced if they step outside the consensus.” Right. There are leaders who pull the strings and when people step out of line they are marginalized or eliminated. This does not exclude conspiracy.

“Finally, the conspiratorial view assumes that illegal plans to change the government or assassinate people can be kept secret for long periods of time, but all evidence shows that secret groups or plans in the United States are uncovered by civil liberties groups, infiltrated by reporters or government officials, and written about in the press.” Which means that we know there are conspiracies.

Does Domhoff’s argument: conspiracies are not real because they are exposed by those who suspect there are conspiracies. Certainly Domhoff won’t be exposing any conspiracies: he can’t see what’s in front of him: “Even secrets about wars and CIA operations – Vietnam, the Contras, the rationales for Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 – are soon exposed for everyone to see.” Right. Those were conspiracies.

“Because all their underlying assumptions are discredited by historical events and media exposures, no conspiracy theory is credible on any issue.” He admits that we have exposed numerous conspiracies, yet no conspiracy theory is credible on any issue. The argument contradicts itself.

The Soviet Union was a union of several socialist republics established in 1922. It was the result of a series of revolutions beginning in the early twentieth century and a long civil war that ended in a communist victory in 1923. For seven decades the Soviet Union stood through world war and cold war, rising to become an industrial and military superpower that provided its people with universal access to education, food, housing, jobs, medicine, and leisure, while sharply reducing inequality and poverty and raising the overall standard of living for the population. The history shows that, far from being a “failure,” the Soviet model of development represented a viable alternative to the capitalist mode of production.

So why, I am asked, if the state socialist system was successful, is there no Soviet Union today? There is no Soviet Union today because the working class was betrayed and forces intent on establishing capitalism in the Soviet republics dismantled the system that had worked so well for the proletariat. The proletariat’s worst enemy came from within: Mikhail Gorbachev, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1985-1991, and head of state from 1988-1991. Ostensibly, to deal with the problem of an economic downturn, Gorbachev instituted a series of reforms (glasnost and perestroika) that gave greater autonomy to the republics and liberalized the Soviet economy. Instead of improving the situation in the Soviet Union, liberalization worsened the plight of the working class, sparking widespread dissatisfaction and unrest.

Liberalization weakened communist political hegemony, as well, and some republics took steps to secede from the union. In 1989, under Boris Yeltsin, Russia itself moved to declare sovereignty, thus bringing about a political crisis. In a referendum of nine republics in 1991, a majority, although voting to remain a socialist union, supported significant changes in the Soviet political-legal system. The New Union Treaty concerned Communist Party leadership, who (correctly) saw it as the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. In what is widely characterized as an attempted coup d’état, members of the CPSU, led by Gennady Yanayev, deposed Gorbachev and asserted control over the Party. The intervention lasted but three days. Key members of the military defected to a coalition led by Yeltsin. As a result, both the Gorbachev and Yanayev wings of the Communist Party were delegitimized.

From there, pro-capitalist forces quickly dismantled the Soviet Union. Yeltsin, in charge of the new Russian Federation, gave away the national wealth of the proletariat to a small corrupt network of oligarchs in a massive privatization scheme. In 1993, amid ever worsening economic conditions, Yeltsin illegally dissolved the parliament. The parliament responded by removing Yeltsin from his post. However, the military came to Yeltsin’s aid and forcibly dissolved parliament. With the military at his back, Yeltsin abolished the constitution, banned political opposition, and stepped up privatization.

This is why I say that it is inaccurate to claim that the Soviet Union collapsed. In fact, it was dismantled.