9.1 Civilization, Modernity, and the Problem of Crisis

Civilization, Modernity, and the Problem of Crisis

Civilization systems with states produce economic depressions by their very structure. These depressions are not incidental events that arise from time to time as a result of the way internal and external factors play out over time and space. The system itself continuously produces depressions (culminating in crises when extreme). The logic of depression is very simple: power and, more formally, the state classes are established on seized social and surplus value. Due to their organized armed structures, these classes, which hover above society, tend to constantly grow. However, the people who compose the labor segment of society barely make a living and die prematurely from various diseases and in wars, with their population decreasing compared to that of the state classes. The population of all classes of the state and power increase, because they are better able to feed and protect themselves and to reproduce. Because of their dynastic character, the first rulers and states favored large extended families. Power politics entails this. This systemic state of mutual imbalance means crises. As the state classes grow and become stronger, they establish themselves over the society and usurp its social and surplus value, causing the unsustainability of the system to come into play. This is the situation that is called a period of crisis.

There are two ways out of the crisis. First, the force that destroys its rivals in the escalating hegemonic wars emerges as the new hegemon. This new hegemonic power seizes its rivals’ shares, crushing them in the process and overcoming the crisis—at least relatively, and for some time—until new rivals emerge. The second option, often intertwined with the first, is efficient production and the application of commercial and industrial techniques to increase production. A hegemonic system that increases its production can secure a period of prosperity instead one of depression. The ancient civilizations, for example, experienced extended periods of depression interspersed with prolonged periods of stability. There were many crises at intervals ranging from two hundred to a thousand years. Generally, each major period of crisis resulted in a dynastic change and a shift of the center. This can be clearly seen from the Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations onward. Medieval crises shared a similar rhythm, but their duration was generally shorter. On average, these crises generally lasted for approximately 100 to 150 years.

The capitalist system’s crises, although in line with the general trend outlined above, have their own peculiarities. Initially, monetary and trade monopolies play a leading role, but their relationship to production is limited. In contrast, money is widely used in the economy. The significance of money has increased greatly due to the commodification of trade becoming a dominant feature. Over time, the monopoly of money and trade concentrates in a few hands. Under these circumstances, society’s purchasing power declines for lack of money. As a result, products remain unsold, setting in motion a depression that is initially experienced as a crisis of overproduction. The excess production cannot be sold and must be destroyed, while laborers who lack purchasing power because of the shortage of money fall into poverty and hunger. The reverse can also be experienced relatively rapidly. Production that fails to bring in any money declines even further, and the money at hand loses its relationship to production to an even greater degree. In the end, there is a lot of money but little production. The increased cost of living (inflation) creates a new crisis. The way out of both of these crises is to increase the state expenditure, alongside the traditional path of hegemonic wars, and to create a new wage-earning sector to address either the excess in or deficiency of production, as the case may be.

Such crises have been widespread and intertwined over the last four hundred years of capitalist hegemony. The intervals between crises have decreased to between fifty and a hundred years. Wars for hegemony have become more multifaceted, intense, and long-lasting compared to previous periods in civilization. Both national and international monopolies participated in these wars. Whereas there have always been local and regional wars, we are now seeing warfare with a genuinely global reach for the first time. Even more serious, however, is that society itself has been increasingly militarized by the nation-state and fully submerged in a kind of war. It makes sense to call present-day society a “state of war” society. This state of war is being imposed in two ways. First, power and the state apparatus control, oppress, and surveil any society they have wrapped themselves around. Second, the information technology (media monopolies) that has developed as a result of the qualitative revolution of the past fifty years has replaced real society with a virtual society. Both states of war can be called societycide. These new societycides, in addition to the now more limited practice of genocides, prepare the end of social nature by being more intense and continuous. Perhaps creatures resembling human beings will continue to exist, but they will do so as a fascist mob or a herd-like mass. The consequence of societycide is much more severe than that of genocide, manifesting itself in the loss of society’s moral and political nature. That human masses feel no responsibility to act even in the face of the severest of social and ecological disasters proves this. It is beyond question that we are in a situation that is more than another depression or crisis. At the risk of repetition, it might be useful to summarize how we arrived at this point, so that the overall situation is properly grasped.

a) History, from the establishment of the first power hierarchy and state sovereignty until today, is, in a way, the history of the cumulative (snowballing) growth of power. Power struggles are the essence of the history of civilization everywhere and always. Local conflicts and world wars, tribal wars and national wars, class wars and religious wars, they have all resulted in the increase and cumulative growth of power. The proliferation of power means the development of a parasitical class that lives on social value. The administration that formed a limited hierarchy at the beginning and, with its experience and expertise, sometimes made important contributions to society. But when it transformed itself into the state, it became a caste—these caste groups, in addition to their dynastic characteristics, organized as privileged classes, gaining enough advantage to consider themselves divine. Antiquity is full of god-kings and emperors who exhibited the constant growth of power and glorified themselves with such concepts. The power and state classes that organized as the triad of priest + administrator + commander were still not numerous. In fact, they constituted a very small proportion of the population. We know from countless examples that their parasitical nature nonetheless quickly became a heavy burden on society. The pyramids, temples, and arenas fully illustrate the nature of this burden.

The growth of power in no way slowed down in the Middle Ages. History overruns with power struggles that grew as they spread to a wider area. No doubt the increased productivity of society contributed to this. A broad aristocratic class arose alongside the dynastic royals. Nonetheless, it is still not possible to speak of a cancerous ruling class. The disaster began when the middle class, the bourgeoisie, and the bureaucracy began to take their place among the ruling classes, as they took over the administration of society by undermining and transforming the monarchy and the aristocratic structures. No doubt former administrations had been also disastrous, but they were not in a position to entirely swallow up society, either quantitatively or qualitatively. The upper monopolist sections of the bourgeoisie, along with an important part of middle bourgeoisie and the bureaucracy, assumed power and became state classes, replacing a handful of former dynasties and kingdoms with thousands, even tens of thousands, of new dynastic forces. This amounted to thousands of little kings replacing the single king of earlier days. The combination of the male-dominant personality,¹ which develops in the sexist society, and the forces of this new kingdom meant that social nature as a whole was conquered and colonized by the new forces of power. All the sections of moral and political society, but in particular women, were victims of this internal colonization.

Middle-class statehood has not yet been analyzed because of the close kinship between the social sciences and this class. For the state to make any sense in the eyes of society it must function as an absolutely necessary concentration of experience and expertise. It is not difficult to understand that a very limited number of people within the administration actually have that experience and expertise. The bourgeoisie and bureaucracy, with their gigantic magnitude and presenting themselves as the state’s administrative class, make the cancerous growth of power within the society inevitable.

Power and the nation-state, which denote the integration of monopolies of economic exploitation and ideological hegemony into the power apparatus, became everything, reducing society to nothing in the process. This is the essence of what we call a crisis of power. The capitalist system is the force that induces this crisis. The monstrously enlarged middle class and capital monopolies and capitalist networks that have no inhibition about using the economy for their own growth can only survive if power takes the shape of the nation-state. We call this system blockage. Thus, coming to power actually denotes the situation beyond the crisis.

b) Moral and political society, the normal state of social nature, is being stripped of its fundamental characteristics in an unprecedented way. With the onset of capitalist modernity, moral and political society, which the state developed in opposition to throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, has been forced to cede its place to the infinitely growing number of articles of positive law and state administration. With modernity, the moral and political qualities of society have been replaced by a herd made up of inconsequential ant-like individuals, known as citizens.

Contrary to what is widely believed, the so-called modern citizen, who has no moral and political concerns, is the weakest individual of all time. This individual’s link with society is limited to his “wife,” over whom he exercises imperial power. This individual is, in reality, a characterless being who has been assimilated into power and state authority in a way unimaginable in the days of the pharaoh. More precisely, in response to physical and ideological hegemony and the related informatics and technical practices, the citizen has not only surrendered to the monopolistic order but has also voluntarily become an unconditional fascist. This is what I mean when I talk about a personality crisis. Social nature cannot consist of such personalities, because its main fabric is moral and political in nature, and these qualities cannot be found in such a personality. States can make progress with these personalities, but they cannot sustain a society. More precisely, this personality is the negation of society.

Since the state cannot exist without society, we yet again have a situation where the state and society are experiencing an intertwined crisis. The capitalist individualism that created the characterless personality is nothing more than a projection of the crisis of both society and the state. Obviously, neither capital or power monopolies nor the nation-state administration—the unified state form—is possible if society and the individual are not debased in this way. The social crisis denotes something more than a structural crisis. Any structure can be replaced with a new one, but the loss of the fundamental qualities of society is not something that can easily be addressed by restructuring. That would require the rebuilding of moral and political society, which is where the difficulty lies.

c) Urbanization is the other most crisis-ridden element of modernity. Urban society developed in dialectical unity with the agrarian-village society and played an important social role in the development of rationality and industry at a point when environmental conflict had not yet developed. The role of the city was distorted by the process of the state formation. Once transformed into the ruling class’s base, the city took on a structure and mentality that proved detrimental to agrarian-village society and ecology as history unfolded. Once the manufacturing and merchant classes attained a central position, the city began to act against society. The negative functions of the city were limited during antiquity and the Middle Ages but increased in the extreme with modernity. The cancerous growth of cities with the onset of the Industrial Revolution made them centers for the destruction of traditional society. The industrial city is not a city at all; it is urbanization without cities and cities ceasing to be cities.² Never mind cities with millions of people, even cities with several hundred thousand run contrary to sound urban logic. There should be no cities with populations in the millions, but several cities with a total population reaching a million would be possible. A city with a population of five million would, in fact, constitute at least fifty distinct cities. This is the destructive feature of the cities for society. Neither normal societies nor the environment can hope to sustain such cities.

The rationale behind the explosion of such cities is based on the colonization of noncapitalist society, the proliferation of power, and the ascent of the middle class to ruling positions. All three developments took place through the elimination of moral and political society. They not only eliminated agrarian-village society and the migrant communities but also the material and immaterial culture of the traditional segments in the cities that served a positive function, including artists, craftspeople, intellectuals, and other laborers. The transition from city society to the city of the masses took place with the rural areas moving to the outskirts of cities, becoming more like tightly controlled colonies in the process. The state and capital monopoly devoured the city and the city devoured the rural areas. As for the society that is actually not a society, it has devoured the environment. As there is now no rural society, no environment, and no traditional city laborers or intellectuals to sustain the city, the situation is once again beyond crisis.

Like environmental disaster, a real societycide is closely associated with this cancerous city. Different scientific disciplines have concluded that having a large number of cities that a region, or even a country, cannot sustain deals deadly blows to the planet’s ecological equilibrium. The indicators of this liquidation of society are the destruction of the moral and political fabric of society by the ruling middle class, with its cancerous growth, the proliferation of unemployed masses, and a growing multitude of irresponsible citizens.

d) The growing hegemonic power of the anti-economy monopolies has subordinated economic resources to the accumulation of profit and capital, moving society away from the objective of satisfying its basic needs. Contrary to popular belief, capitalism is not the most productive economic system but an anti-economy monopoly; the systemic economic depressions prove this. Despite all the theses developed by political economy to prove the opposite, the capitalist monopoly networks have transformed the economy from a system of production that meets basic human needs into a system that continuously procures accumulation of profit and capital incomparable to anything that preceded it in history. The developments in science and technology have the potential to meet basic human needs. The right economic administration combined with existing science and technology could meet these needs. But because this would endanger accumulation of profit and capital, the monopolies would block any and all attempts to make that possibility a reality, which necessarily makes these monopolies anti-economy bodies.

As a result, we should anticipate systemic and structural depression. To alleviate the economic depressions and crises that continuously manifest themselves (to a greater or lesser degree) through excess in or deficiency of production, reflected in unprecedentedly high levels of unemployment (seldom are unemployed slaves and serfs mentioned in historical accounts), poverty, hunger, wars, and conflicts, the traditional tools used to find solutions are augmented and extended to constitute a sort of crisis regime. The anti-economy positions adopted by the monopolies necessitate this crisis regime, as there is no other way to rule. To be perfectly clear, the nation-state administration is an extraordinary crisis regime. Preventing society from being itself and transforming it into a herd-like fascist mass is not a method unique to Hitler; it is integral to the nation-state’s militaristic character. Because there is no other way to sustain the monopolist order, the nation-state, as the form of power that encapsulates society to the greatest degree possible and penetrates all its pores, must become the crisis regime. Creating a nation is a secondary objective. Nationalism, on the other hand, along with other ideological elements, is a sine qua non of this sort of administration.

Distinguishing between commercial, industrial, and financial depression is a common way of analyzing capitalist monopolies. In addition, the exaggerated phases of depression and prosperity are far from reflecting the essence of the system. Center-periphery, hegemony-competition, and the ups and downs of crises don’t reflect the essence of the system. Of course, all of these factors play a role in the development of depressions. In particular, it is true that the hegemonic phase of financial monopoly is the period in which the crisis is most obvious. But unless we understand that the system is anti-economy, these facts will not seem particularly meaningful, something any analysis must take in to consideration.

e) The outbreak of ecological crisis during modernity is no coincidence. This crisis is related to the anti-economy nature of the system. It is structural. Biological equilibrium is essentially achieved through the symbiotic relationship between species. The biological element of universal intelligence has ensured this arrangement. Earlier, I defined life as the realization and development of diversity. Biological equilibrium is dependent on just such diversity. I also touched upon the link between the formation of diversity and the ability to be free and to choose. The micro-world (the smallest particles, packets of energy and matter) and the macro-world (astronomically large matter and energy islands) work in a similar system of equilibrium. The causal relationships that create diversity are not investigated here, and, for now, we shall have to be content with saying, “It is because they are.” Perhaps we are incapable of grasping the truth because of our lack of knowledge and our misconceptions about science.

Human social nature is subject to this universal rule in its relationship with the environment. Humanity, with a nature that includes the most flexible intelligence, is the most advanced living species because of its ability to be free and to choose. This conflicts with the interests of capitalism’s anti-economic monopolies, which transmute this symbiotic relationship into a relationship of maximum sovereignty, power, and domination within society, while transforming ecological ties into the domination and colonization of nature. Just as with killer algae or any other similar species, it dominates the whole environment and all of society, ultimately outgrowing them. It becomes a giant entity (a Leviathan). A system based solely on the accumulation of profit and capital cannot act otherwise. If it acts contrary to this and bases itself on a symbiotic relationship, then the law of profit breaks down, which would force a transformation of the system.

Contrary to popular belief, nature/the environment is in an equilibrium within its own system of logic. The idea of being at the mercy of blind forces is wrong. What has broken down this sensitivity is the civilization system, or, more specifically, today’s domineering monopolist modernity. The cancerous growth of the middle class, which has become the ruling power, and the similar cancerous growth of its main living quarters—the cities—as well as a world under the sway of a chain of nation-states, are the real social causes of environmental destruction. This destruction is the result of fighting against the structures of social nature, which are laden with flexible intelligence, and transforming the symbiotic relationship with nature into one of domination and colonialism. This is why there is a very close link between social crises (better referred to as societycides) and ecological crises. The crises experienced in both areas constantly feed one another. Monopoly profit inevitably leads to an increase in population, unemployment, hunger, and poverty, and to overcome this unemployment, hunger, and poverty, the growing population turns to the environment, destroying it in the process. The forest and the flora and fauna have never faced a greater threat.

Clearly this translates into more profit for the monopolies. As this cycle continues (e.g., the population reaches ten billion and continues to grow) the ability for the world to sustain itself will dissolve completely. This is how we will arrive at the much anticipated doomsday. Just as healthy growth and cancerous growth coexisting at the level of a cell in our bodies creates chaos that leads to cancer and death, in a similar way, the growth of monopoly profit inhibits a healthy growth at all levels of social nature, triggering cancerous social and environmental developments. Furthermore, medical evidence shows that the cancers suffered by humans are the result of these social cancers. The ability of the human species, the species with the highest level of flexible intelligence, to be free and make choices is probably no less than that of an ant. Have you ever seen an ant without a job? Why does unemployment plague humans, in spite of their current level of intelligence? If the law of profit were not observed, ecological adjustments alone would create sufficient job opportunities to eliminate all unemployment. Ecologically based employment would help rescue the environment and could end unemployment once and for all. There are hundreds of similar fields of employment, but because they are not suitable to the law of maximum profit, they are not considered options. The relationship between the system and ecological soundness is problematic and completely unsustainable.

f) Liberalism, the system’s hegemonic ideology, cannot produce solutions, either in its classical or its neo-forms. Liberalism, a word related to freedom, is a concept that is strictly relative. What is freedom to one person or group is slavery for those who are at the opposite pole. The god-kings of antiquity, who had virtually unlimited freedom, created their opposite as the slave class. Freedom for the medieval aristocracy was made possible by the enslavement of broad masses of peasants and serfs. The bourgeoisie liberalism of the new age is closely intertwined with the minimum-wage slavery of the proletarian, semi-proletarian, and other laborers, who are the new slaves. While liberalism officially means freedom for all nation-state classes, for the citizens who are the modern slaves it actually means unemployment, unpaid labor, poverty, hunger, inequality, a lack of freedom, and the deprivation of democracy. We must understand that liberalism is not libertarianism in its true sense. Hegel regarded the state as the best means of achieving freedom. But, in the end, this freedom was reserved for the classes that controlled the state and the bureaucracy. Put another way, the maximum freedom for economic and power monopolies (the elites) means every type of slavery for the rest of us.

It is quite important to acknowledge liberalism as an ideology. To define it as individualism or libertarianism is inadequate. Liberalism, as a concept, came to the fore together with the famous liberté, égalité, fraternité: the concepts of liberty, equality, and fraternity of the French Revolution. As a central concept this has conservatism on its right, and first democrats and later socialists on its left. It took on a mild appearance arguing for change to the system (capitalist monopolism) through evolution rather than revolution. The conservatives were totally against progress either through evolution or revolution. They fanatically defended the monarchy, the family, and the church. Socialists and democrats thought that revolutions were necessary to expedite change. But they all shared modernity as a common denominator. They all may have had one objection or another, but at the end of the day they all thought they had ideas about modernization. You only needed to experience a transformation in the most general terms to become a modernist. The modern life, which was European-based, its foundations laid with urbanization and accelerated by the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment, represented the common horizon of the three main ideologies. The remaining issue was to determine which ideology and parties, which methodology and practices, which actions and wars, would best capture that horizon.

Liberalism understood the situation accurately. It grasped that modernity was developing with the stamp of capitalism and would continue to do so, and as a result it quickly and skillfully manipulated the ideologies and structures on both its right and its left, dividing itself into left- and right-wing liberalism. While right-wing liberalism neutralized the conservatives and turned them into one of its wings, left-wing liberalism partially positioned the democrats and socialists as its backup, this is how liberalism seized the central position. In each intensifying crisis it was able to position one or the other as backup for consolidating its position. The bourgeoisification of the aristocrats and the social democratization of a number of concessionist workers developed throughout crisis regime. Setting aside a modest share of monopoly profit was more than enough to achieve this. In this manner, not only were the opponents of the system in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries neutralized, but they were reduced to a permanent backup power for the management of the crisis-ridden system. This is how the ideological hegemony of liberalism was established.

Liberalism made use of four important ideological variants to maintain its ideological hegemony:

1) It used nationalism effectively. Nationalism was liberalism’s number one ally, both in legitimizing internal and external wars and facilitating the state’s nation building. It is effectively the first ring in an eclectic chain. Liberalism has gained much experience at overcoming the worst of crises by firing up nationalist sentiment. Nationalism was turned into a holy ideology akin to a religion. The cover that nationalism provided not only served to easily overcome crises, but it also provided monopolies with a way to cloak their most exploitative and corrupt systems.

2) The traditional religious ideology was rendered nationalistic. Under its hegemony, liberalism nationalized traditional religions draining them of their moral and political features. Or, more precisely, it turned them into national religions. Religious sentiments, deeply rooted and easily assuming a nationalist flavor, have played a similar, or maybe even more important, role in creating cohesion within society. Sometimes both ideologies have been intertwined in the attempt to build a nation on an ethnic-religious basis. Jewish and Islamic ideologies in particular easily identified themselves with nationalism. Other religions (Christianity, Far East religions, ancient religious traditions in Africa) would not waste much time catching up. Liberalism used religion to channel and integrate the immaterial cultural legacy into capitalist civilization, which had already inherited civilization’s material culture. The role of religious nationalist ideologies cannot be ignored in overcoming the unsustainable levels of systemic crisis.

3) The ideology of positivist scientism in particular made a strong contribution to liberalism as a philosophical variant. Positivist ideology benefited from the favorable reputation of the natural sciences and played a leading role in influencing both left-wing and right-wing ideologies. It is easily integrated into different ideologies as scientific label, leading to massive distortions. It particularly left its mark on the emerging left-wing ideologies, with real socialism leading the way. It was through positivist scientism that they all fell into the trap of capitalist modernism. Fascism, which drew all its power from positivist scientism, was the prominent current on the right. In this manner, positivism offered a range of ideological options to liberalism from the extreme left to the extreme right. Liberalism draws upon left-wing and right-wing options as required, always and everywhere making maximum use of them to overcome the structural crises of the system.

4) It is during the age of liberalism that sexism has been ideologically developed to the highest degree and been most frequently used. Liberalism, which took over a sexist society, did not just settle for transforming women into an unpaid labor force. It got more out of turning them into commodities as sex objects and putting them on the market. While, with men, it was only their labor that was commodified, with women, their bodies and souls were entirely commodified. In fact, the most dangerous form of slavery was being constructed. Being disparaged as nothing more than “a wife to a husband” subjects a woman to limited exploitation, but having her whole personality commodified makes her a slave living in conditions worse than those of the pharaoh’s slaves. Being opened up to being everyone’s slave is much more dangerous than becoming the slave of a state or a particular individual. This is the trap that modernity set for women. It is made to appear that women have been opened up for freedom, when, in fact, they have been degraded into the most disreputable tools of exploitation. As a vehicle for advertising, sex, and pornography, women are the basic tool of exploitation. I can easily say that women carry the heaviest possible load for sustaining capitalism.

For the system, women play a strategic role in the reproduction of power and exploitation. Men, as the representatives of the state in the family, feel they have the responsibility and the authority to both exploit and control women. By expanding upon the traditional suppression of women, men are transformed into a component of the power apparatus. The society, in this way, embraces the syndrome of thinking it has become maximal power. Women’s status gives male-dominant society an unlimited sense and thought of power. On the other hand, it is the women laborers, women themselves, who are made to pay the price for all of the negative developments—from the formation of concessionist workers to the unemployed, from unpaid laborers to minimum-wage workers. Liberalism’s eclectic sexist ideology not only distorts the situation and reflects it differently, it also generates a number of elaborately developed ideological varieties for women. It is as if women are made to espouse their slavery voluntarily. It can be said that by exploiting women the system not only overcomes its most serious crisis, it also procures and secures its existence. Women are both the oldest and the most recent colonized nation in the overall history of civilization, and in capitalist modernity in particular. If there is an unsustainable crisis in all respects, the key reason is the colonization of women.

The current world capitalist system under the hegemony of global financial monopolies experiences not only general systemic depression but also crises that are specific to finance. The general systemic depression (because it is anti-economy) is intertwined with crises specific to the area of finance (money detached from gold, even from the dollar itself, represented by various virtual arguments, such as bonds and shares), which is at its weakest point in history. The system has generally overcome its depressions in one of two ways: by continuously reproducing its power and expanding the nation-state’s repressive apparatus—all sorts of wars, prisons, mental hospitals, hospitals, torture chambers, and ghettos—accompanied by the most dangerous genocide and societycide or by the apparatuses of the liberal ideological hegemony, which continuously develop by integrating new factors. Liberalism is the ideological core that integrates nationalism, religiosity, scientism, and sexism. Its tools are schools, barracks, place of worships, the media, universities, and, most recently, internet platforms. We could also add the arts, which have been turned into a cultural industry.

Even the most ordinary of scientists would agree that both of these approaches are the development of a crisis regime not of a way to find solutions. Depressions and crises cannot be overcome as they were in the past. On the contrary, the depressions and crises that were once exceptional have become generalized and stable, while “normal” periods have become the exception. Although elements of crisis lie at the base of civilization systems, human society had never witnessed such severe crisis. Societies, if they are to survive, cannot endure this sort of crisis regime for very long. They will either go into decline and disintegrate or resist and develop new systems, thereby overcoming the crisis. We are in just such a period.

NOTES

1 The author specifically uses the term “male-dominant” rather than the equivalent for patriarchal in Turkish. There is no distinction in meaning; the author sometimes prefers to use terms that are more descriptive and reveal the content, I maintained the use of “erkek egemen” (male-dominant) rather than using “ataerkil” (patriarchy) [translator’s note].

2 Murray Bookchin, Urbanization without Cities: The Rise of Urbanization and the Decline of Citizenship (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 1992).

3 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Selected Works, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 98–137, accessed August 9, 2019, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto.

4 A small, cubical building in the courtyard of the Great Mosque at Mecca containing a sacred black stone: regarded by Muslims as the House of God and the objective of their pilgrimages.

5 Vladimir Lenin, “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky,” in Lenin’s Collected Works, vol. 28 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974), 227–325, accessed August 9, 2019, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/prrk/index.htm.

6 The word jin means woman in Kurdish, and –lojî is –logy.

7 This formulation, often attributed to Marx, comes from the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier, whom Marx quoteds. Murray Bookchin refers to this in his major work The Ecology of Freedom (Andover, MA: Cheshire Books, 1982), accessed February 9, 2020, https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/murray-bookchin-the-ecology-of-freedom#toc11. The title of this volume references Bookchin’s work.

8 Herodotus begins his history with an explanation of the causes of the wars between the Greeks and the “barbarians.” It deals with several women being “carried off,” by Phoenicians and Greeks, including Io, Europa, Medeia, and Helena, as the prehistory of the wars between the Greeks and the Persians. Reference is also made to the view if the women had not wanted to be “carried off,” they would not have been.

9 Ummah is commonly used to mean the collective community of Islamic peoples.