I live a pretty comfortable life, all things considered. My nights are spent cozy, my days are spent at a school I’m privileged enough to afford. However, even in my plucky middle class position, I’m anxious about the future and our political situation. So I can’t imagine how genuinely gross this all must be to the transgender or Hispanic communities, for example, who are genuinely suffering. Or the millions worldwide subject to the effects of climate change, effects I only feel while sunburnt during hot summer days.
We need to be grateful. My life is good, but my life isn’t universal. Sometimes it’s easy to forget and lose empathy. But to forget is to grow complacent. As members of a society, we’re obligated to contribute to it; therefore, we have an obligation to work towards its betterment.
I’m not normally one to moralize a ton. Honestly, I don’t think it gets us very far. As an approach, it’s not oriented towards solutions, nor deep analysis: all it looks like is complaining. But solidarity can’t be dumped away. We have to cling to it at all times, even just as a basic principle.
Sometimes, when I’m feeling good, I try really hard not to think about what billionaire property developer Zygmunt Wilf’s trying to do with the Second Watchung Mountain Ridge forest in West Orange, NJ. Essentially, he’s attempting to blow it up. Yes–blow it up, all to build a 496-unit housing development atop it. At the moment, the mountain is untouched, healthy land essential for various ecosystems and wildlife conservation efforts, meaning environmental groups are scrambling to prevent Wilf’s company, Garden Homes, from developing on it.
Economically, New Jersey is subject to a housing crisis. Housing’s scarce, meaning housing is pricey. But projects like this won’t help, as the housing it’d create isn’t accessible, being far away from any schools, downtown areas, or grocery stores. The few who could access it would be the wealthy, those for whom affordable housing is not made.
This isn’t worthy of our support. It’s not economically beneficial and it’s environmentally idiotic. None except Wilf and his band of investors will gain.
Election day this year was outstanding. Genuinely, just, outstanding–but maybe not perfect: Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist, came to power in NYC; but Mrs. Sherrill, a veteran and Democratic Congresswoman, is a devout moderate unlikely to enact real, lasting, or meaningful change. Her platform was nothing remarkable, new, or interesting. Her rallies preached anti-Trumpism without any platform seriously addressing inequality, climate change, or anything else of the sort beyond band-aid solutions—existential threats in many ways to not only American democracy (a debatable term given land has a bigger political say than humans) but to the foundations to our society. However, as someone not terribly averse to lesser-evilism, I absolutely do not oppose Sherrill, who has become a bulwark against Republican interests. Alongside Mamdani, I sincerely hope she delivers. And as a random idealistic 20-year-old on the internet, I wish them luck.
Panel speakers, from left to right, Sapjah Zapotitla, Willie Higbee, Samantha Henhaffer, and Tina Green. Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2025. Glassboro, N.J. (Staff Writer / Aidan Vanhoof)
With a focus on exploring intergenerational trauma and its impact on family well-being, the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) at Rowan University hosted a panel discussion with several specialists on the matter.
Roughly 75 students and staff attended the panel, which took place on Nov. 4, 2025, in the Eynon Ballroom.
Those who spoke as panelists at the event included Samantha Henhaffer, an academic support coordinator here at Rowan University; Willie Higbee, a lead clinician at Acenda Integrated Health; and Tina Green, a licensed professional counselor for Rowan’s Wellness Center, as well as regular audience input.
The panel was moderated by senior psychology major Sapjah Zapotitla, who asked the panel different questions and guided the discussion.
Per the event’s title, “Family Health & Wellbeing: Discussion on Trauma and Intergenerational Family Wellbeing,” most of the focus was placed on families. However, plenty of time was spent discussing themes of student health, spirituality, and gender norms.
“I want to flip the script. We can be united, we can be together. Disagreeing is good, but we shouldn’t hate each other if we disagree,” said Zapotitla.
The event’s purpose was to support students’ mental health and raise awareness for intergenerational trauma.
“I’m here to make sure that mental health resources are widely known and available for community members and especially those within our universities,” said Higbee. “Young adults are especially vulnerable as they start their new chapter in their lives, and so finding a way to make sure they remain connected is super important.”
Audience members were occasionally given a microphone to answer questions and discuss. Out of the 11 questions asked throughout the panel, only two included questions from audience members who spoke on their own personal experiences and struggles while encompassing themes of masculinity, social expectations, and regret, among others.
“Although there’s a lot of resources, we often distract ourselves from those things because we have so many things that we’re doing. With all your obligations, you still have that big emotional burden, and it can really cloud your mind and keep you from reaching out,” said Asha Snyder, a sophomore international studies major.
UNICEF is an agency providing humanitarian aid and funding for families and children all over the world.
Rowan’s chapter, founded by senior psychological science major Aniket Shafin last spring with a focus on international issues and cultivating community, has hosted two prior events: a bracelet-making fundraiser back in October titled “Beads for Better Futures”, and a discussion for Women’s History Month back in March titled “Women With Purpose.”
“So if you want to learn more about international relations, youth and diplomacy, or if you care about children and mothers’ well-being, I would say connect with us,” said Shafin.
Overall, while it lasted about 20 minutes less than expected and began 15 minutes late, the panel received a positive reception and consistent engagement from the audience.
The event included free food, beverages, and a service dog for anyone in need, as well as a table for N.J. Family Success Centers, where flyers were given out with information about resources for families before they find themselves in crisis.
For comments/questions about this story, DM us on Instagram @thewhitatrowan or email ottoch32@rowan.edu
And we should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.
— Friederich Nietzsche
Like many teenagers, Nietzsche was my philosophical gateway drug. As a burgeoning political agent about to graduate high school, I felt a profound sense of anger towards the conservative religious forces in America, whose confident ignorance was, to me, a slap in the face to everything democratic and right in the world — an ethical worldview ironically influenced by Christian thought. So, it should make sense that his radical discomfort with organized religion resonated with me.
In that sense, I was raised as a sort of ‘cultural Christian’. I hear that term used a lot by people like Richard Dawkins, who seek to maintain a Christian culture and society without the metaphysical baggage that comes with it. From a utilitarian perspective, Christian ethics are exceptional for keeping society together, ensuring orderly function, thus, a more comfortable society. With it, surplus good. And Kantian thought is essentially Christian ethics turned rational. In either case, we’ve got a pretty solid moral base.
However, Nietzsche saw this, thought about it, and realized something: Christians, who preach altruism and purity, whose worldview is contingent on faith as a weapon against selfishness and nihilism, are selfish themselves. Religion doesn’t actually make you selfless. You don’t give a damn about your neighbor, you give a damn about being seen as good, upstanding, and the validation that comes with it. You want to gain approval, and thus feel recognized and validated. Inadvertently, it’s basic Hegelian recognition: we only interact with others to validate ourselves.
Through this, he ripped into Christian morality. It contradicts itself: Assuming he exists, how can we find goodness through God if God himself endowed us with a selfish nature? If we mirror God, then he himself must be selfish, meaning he lacks the so-called “ultimate goodness” ascribed to him. If he doesn’t, then ethics remains a social construct: meaningless in itself, as it’s imposed upon us, reliant on illusions of cosmic punishment and coercion to negate a selfish nature.
It didn’t help that a good number of Christian ideas rely on a suppression of desire. It’s a limit to ourselves, our desires, and, by extension, a limit to the ways we can express ourselves. And we can’t genuinely be ourselves, achieve our goals, and truly bring about great change in society if we can’t express ourselves in the first place.
This means, in a way, many Christians are forced to lie to the world while prohibiting themselves from achieving great things. To Nietzsche, this sounded like a perfect storm for nihilism.
The Industrial Revolution & the Death of God
Fundamentally, one now feels at the sight of work — one always means by work that hard industriousness from early till late — that such work is the best policeman, that it keeps everyone in bounds and can mightily hinder the development of reason, covetousness, desire for independence.
— Friederich Nietzsche
After this, he would dedicate a good portion of his work to combating nihilism and a gradual increase thereof. Around the enlightenment, he saw a rise in meaninglessness, which he attributed to a loss of religious faith, in part brought by empiricism and rationalism. In Beyond Good And Evil, in a passage attacking rationalism, he writes,
For it may be doubted, firstly, whether antitheses exist at all; and secondly, whether the popular valuations and antitheses of value upon which metaphysicians have set their seal, are not perhaps merely superficial estimates, merely provisional perspectives…
He outright denied the concept of true and false, preferring to live in a nebulous third space: true and false as something constructed to cope with an incomprehensible world. All we have is approximations of value. Thus, without a metaphysical basis to true and false, even the sciences turn a tad nihilistic.
In essence, with the death of God, everything looks pitifully small and nothing has any genuine value.
Nietzsche mourned this. The world had lost its color, its character and soul. Both literally and figuratively: our lives and the planet giving them a home aren’t some cosmically endowed expression of a divine creator, but a pathetic accident, a coincidence; self replicating molecules lying to themselves for fear of negative neural chemicals. Obviously, this isn’t a fun thought, and it wasn’t for the people of Nietzsche’s time (mid to late 19th century Germans).
I’m sure you know what was happening around then. Not only was Germany experiencing a collective decline in religiosity, but the world around him was cloaked in a thick smog. Factories produced commodity after commodity, as wealthy industrialists (whom Nietzsche regarded highly) led laborious armies toiling away for pitiful wages.
Just a century prior, Germany was downright feudal. Its rapid industrialization was crowning, it hadn’t even reached infancy. But by Germany’s unification in 1871, it’d accelerated rapidly. And by the roughly ten years in which Nietzsche wrote most of his body of work, Germany was a serious industrial power, their economic force crystallized into what would some day devolve into the first world war. Monoliths of capital would rise from the ground; peasants were imported from the country to the cities; and a new aristocracy turned against the old, squabbling over territory once dominated by an inbred nobility.
Nietzsche looked on with awe, watching as a new species of elite dominated the unchanging. His love for the powerful and grand had a new batch of idols. Some, like Karl Marx, watched with horror as the propertyless lived in widespread austerity. His hatred for the powerful and dominant had a new batch of enemies.
In either case, class dominated their view. That includes their understanding of morality.
Where does morality come from?
If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation?
— Karl Marx
Morality was a solely selfish endeavor for Nietzsche. To him, historically, morality grew as a symptom of class. The poor, often the slaves of the ancient world, watched as their masters lived in luxury, eating what and when they wished, living in homes that didn’t fall with each gust of wind. Then, they looked at their own conditions: starving, decrepit, dingy. So, by vilifying wealth, as Jesus did, they can glorify their own poverty while painting the wealthy as evil. If they make altruism good and selfishness bad, they can manipulate the elite into wealth distribution, thereby getting a taste of opulence. It was, basically, a sort of ‘class jealousy’: if I can’t have it, you can’t have it.
It’s not impossible to see this attitude nowadays. Socialists look up at billionaires and see a class of selfish balls of greed, struggling to gift to the worker even the slimmest morsel of capital. More moralistic working class movements like socialism glorify working class conditions while vilifying the elite — Nietzschean morality embodied.
On the opposite end, modern day hustle culture reveals a working class desperate for wealth, deifying the powerful in the hopes of reaching such a point themselves. This doesn’t do much to vilify the wealthy. In fact, it doesn’t at all. If anything, it vilifies the working poor, revealing a culture symptomatic of elite manipulation: the worker internalizes the beliefs of their ruler, thus glorifying them. This is pure Marxian historical materialism, the mirror image of Nietzsche’s thought. To ossify power, the ruling class, wielding control over cultural, religious, and intellectual institutions, systematically distorts culture to legitimize their position. Workers, peasants, and so on — they internalize it, regurgitating it.
For example, the peasants of the Middle Ages, unable to read or write, understood the Bible only through authority; with it, the Bible was understood to be a mechanism legitimizing Church and monarchical power. Nobles were endowed by God with special privileges, the monarch was an extension of God’s hand, and the Church was pure in every sense of the word. It’s easy to see elsewhere, especially with the aforementioned hustle culture, organizations like the Depression-era Spiritual Mobilization, modern day prosperity gospel, or Donald Trump.
In either case, polar opposite thinkers, an elitist and an egalitarian, apply nearly identical yet somehow antithetical theories of morality, culture, and society. However, Nietzsche’s theory never fully follows through. According to Marxist theory, socialism, a principally Marxist approach, emerges the moment the working class realizes how dreadful its conditions are. Their wages are stolen, their quality of life is driven into the ground, and inequalities expand as imperialist forces recolor the globe. It would be surprising if the exploited didn’t turn resentful.
Morality is a social construct; Nietzsche understood this. Yet his theory looked, not at those who control the social element — i.e., the class operating religion, education, propaganda, art, defining what can and can’t be done, and so on — but the class helpless to influence it.
This elitist, pitiless view of the poor, whose psychology was to him resentful, self-indulgent, and dependent on the strong to survive, inspires his solutions to existential despair. God is a father figure, a parent to wantonly save his flock from the forces of evil. Nietzsche thought this was the problem. How can we face our world, and thus live a life fully steeped in it, if we throw our goalpost far beyond it? Marx thought this way, too, feeling that the working class used religion as a distraction from austerity.
We needed to, not only live fully grounded in reality, but dominate it. We must turn ourselves into a force to be reckoned with, whether economically, politically, or creatively: the Übermensch. The world ought to bend to our will. At that point we’ve transcended transcendence, needing only ourselves to tolerate an otherwise nihilistic life.
To him, elitism was the antidote to nihilism.
In a sense, he was right. We cannot live passively, interacting with the world only insofar as it interacts with us. By seeing ourselves mirrored in outside reality, the world grows, not only a little bit more human, but a little bit more like us. And if this mirror is social, like in the case of charity work or political activism, it’s self-validating, self-recognizing. It reinforces our identity by echoing it. This, in turn, gifts us purpose in life.
This isn’t economic or political elitism. Mainly, it’s humanistic. It’s the arts, humanities, and so on, economic domination being only the accumulation of capital, a goalpost that constantly shifts, constantly distances itself from you. In a way, it spurs desire, making us happy. But, in a way, it’s just another way to cope. It’s steeping oneself in an ideology — that of capital — ignoring reality itself. In other words, it’s shallow, meaningless.
Yet, Nietzsche justified warlords and dictators like Napoleon. He called himself an aristocratic elitist, and he despised the utopian socialists of the time. He briefly criticized capitalism, as labor conditions at the time meant workers wrestled with nihilism each time they travelled to work. Yet, his industrialist obsession prevented him from seeing the real problem: labor itself was miserable, alienated, and arbitrary. It wasn’t just material conditions — people get used to filth, as much as we don’t like it. It was their labor, a defining feature of social identity, which caused nihilism, and, by extension, the widespread psychological repression of millions.
From Karl Marx’s Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,
The object which labour produces — labour’s product — confronts it as something alien, as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour which has been embodied in an object, which has become material: it is the objectification of labour. The realization of labour is its objectification. Under the conditions of political economy this realization of labour appears as loss of reality for the worker; objectification as loss of the object and bondage to it; appropriation as estrangement, as alienation.
Labor, because its fruits are beyond the worker and made abstract by profit, turns repetitive and estranged. Yes, nihilism comes with a collective abandonment of faith. Yes, nihilism comes with an inactive population of atheists. However, nihilism comes most of all from an estrangement of identity, one accompanying an estrangement of labor.
In essence, alienation spawns nihilism: Nietzsche saw a population alienated from the universe they lived in, void of a deeper connection to it than that of an infantile observer. Marx saw a population alienated from their labor, void of a deeper connection to their occupations and communities than that of a stranger. They were both correct.
Families navigate a trunk or treat held in Glassboro at South Delsea Drive Park on Oct. 22 from 6-8 p.m. (Aidan Vanhoof)
Oct. 22, 2025
Glassboro, N.J.–Thousands of adults and children gathered in costumes at South Delsea Drive Park in Glassboro for a trunk or treat, handing out and receiving candy in the Halloween spirit.
Alongside the decorated cars and displays, the event that took place on Wednesday, Oct. 22, from 6 to 8 p.m. featured bounce houses, a DJ, a haunted house, a food truck, and emergency services.
“All of us together as a community decided to come down here to really make it an event,” said Megan Varrel, a media manager from Glassboro.
This event is the third annual trunk-or-treat hosted by the city of Glassboro. Before, the police, fire, and economic development departments each held separate events. However, three years ago, they merged each into one larger event.
“We did that three years ago to have a bigger and more impactful event that’s more than just a trunk-or-treat,” said Varrel.
They expected about 1,500 people and 40 displays to show up, according to Varrel. But once it was over, some placed total attendance closer to 2,000, though a few attendees thought this was below average.
“For the past couple of years, this is less than average,” said Donna Grow, a retired office manager from Glassboro.
The immense turnout could be seen in the line, which extended hundreds of feet with an hour-long wait, though wait times varied throughout the evening.
“We just got here, but my dad came and saved the spot for us. So he was waiting for an hour … usually it’s best to come before they open and just wait in line,” said Erin Decker, an ultrasound technician from Washington Township.
Families enjoyed the event, citing the vibrant and thematic trunk decorations and a family-oriented atmosphere.
“It’s lovely. Everyone’s having a good time,” said Grow.
Decker thought it was fun for everyone, in particular the children. She specified the Chick-fil-A stand as a stand-out part.
“It was really fun, really cute. And Chick-fil-A comes, and you get free stuff,” said Decker.
Those who brought displays came for myriad reasons. One display owner, Julia Beach, a freshman CSI major at Salem University, loved seeing the costumes. Her display followed a fortune-telling and magic theme.
“The kids are so cute, with all their little costumes. You look at them, and they’re so adorable,” said Beach.
Towards the end of the trunk-or-treat, city employees picked who they thought had the best display, the reward being a basket with gift cards. This year’s winner, Glassboro Republican city council candidate and hair stylist, Kristen Dutch, won last year, too.
“We just want to give back to the community,” said Dutch.
The bounce houses were hosted by Empire Events, and the DJ was Danny Montgomery from New Day Entertainment.
For comments/questions about this story, DM us on Instagram @thewhitatrowan or email features@thewhitonline.com
Camden, N.J. — Marlene Laneader poses next to a dog owned by Donna Emma, a retired social worker who lives in Deptford, whom Laneader calls “Ding Dong Lady” for her large dessert donations on Oct. 26, 2025. (Aidan Vanhoof)
by Aidan Vanhoof
Camden, N.J. — On the last Sunday of every month, charity organizer for Good Samaritan Ministry Marlene Laneader and a crew of volunteers load her car with hundreds of sandwiches, toiletries, and other necessities, travel to Camden, N.J., and distribute them to those in need.
On Sunday, Oct. 26, the 67-year-old began on the streets, blaring her horn and hanging out her car window. Some recognized her, some didn’t, but most heard her go-to aphorism, “Go Birds,” followed by the regular calls for anyone seeking resources.
“Nobody should go to school hungry. Nobody should go to work hungry. It’s not just poor neighborhoods anymore. It’s every neighborhood, and it drives me cuckoo that people aren’t helping anybody anymore,” said Laneader.
Volunteers then stopped at the Home of the Brave, a Camden homeless shelter for veterans, where attendees enjoyed donated snacks and Primo Hoagies’ roast beef and turkey sandwiches donated by Paul Franke, a local businessperson, who gives 50 a month.
Camden, N.J. — Food and snacks cover tables at the Home of the Brave homeless shelter on Oct. 26, 2025. (Aidan Vanhoof)
Despite dedicating swaths of her time to a veteran’s shelter, she doesn’t just serve veterans. Laneader cited those who serve only a specific community as a “pet peeve” of hers, preferring to help anyone who needs it.
“We don’t just feed the veterans. We feed the whole house. That’s one of my biggest pet peeves, because how do you go to the front of the building where everyone’s smelling food and just feed a portion of the building,” said Laneader.
She began in 2014, when she noticed a Facebook post about a homeless second-grader.
“One of my friends wrote that she had a second-grader that was homeless, and I couldn’t get that concept out of my mind,” said Laneader. “My other girlfriend wrote that her and her boyfriend were going to go out and give out sandwiches. And I wanted to join them, and so I posted about the sandwiches and I posted about this little girl not having a coat. And it just took off, people wanted to help.”
Since then, she’s been deeply invested in charity work. She says she’d do anything for those in need, describing herself as a rebel who “will arm wrestle you in the front.”
“That’s my Camden, baby. You want to mess with me, I’ll mess with you,” said Laneader.
At the moment, she’s most in need of soap, shampoo, and toothpaste. However, she says anything helps, even items that may otherwise seem unhelpful.
“I want to fill hungry bellies, and it’s going to get worse. So if it can get me people to help me feed five more bellies, I’m in,” said Laneader.
Laneader emphasized that she wasn’t alone in her efforts. On Sunday, the approximately 40 volunteers working for the Divine Deli at the Church of the Incarnation in Mantua produced 651 sandwiches, but they’ve made upwards of 1,000 on past occasions, according to Shannon Alessandrini, a stay-at-home mom from Mantua working alongside Laneader.
The remaining food goes to various other shelters with the help of Mullica Hill realtor Bob Kraemer, who covers soup kitchens and domestic violence shelters in Vineland, according to Laneader.
Besides the sandwiches, volunteers often bring their whole families, crafting place mats, decorating bags, and writing supportive notes, cards, and banners.
“People sign up to do different things… We have kind of an assembly line,” said Alessandrini.
Mantua, N.J. — Volunteers assemble sandwiches for the Divine Deli at the Church of the Incarnation’s Kernan Center in Mantua on Oct. 26, 2025. (Aidan Vanhoof)
In addition to this, once a month they personally cook an elaborate dinner for the hungry at Home of the Brave. Last time, they had former NFL player Art Still attend.
Across her now 11 years of volunteering in Camden, she’s been shot at and carjacked. But she continues, and she appears to have no intention of stopping.
“I start screaming at the top of my lungs… I turn around. And I see all the guys are on their bicycles in their wheelchairs rolling over to me. Not Ms. Marlene, not our mom,” said Laneader. “Sometimes I get up, and I’m like, ‘this year’s the last one,’ but I’m still going.”
“A great man is not missed until you feel the loss of his greatness.”
-Juan Miguel Torres
My uncle — Juan Miguel Torres — was a truly great man. In March of this year, I visited some family in Florida. I’m not sure when or why, but at one point we started talking about my uncle, whom we call Ruben, and the life he’s lived. A life which, in the time I have spent on this Earth, I have grown to feel needs to be observed. Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and while I do not entirely subscribe to that idea I feel it is applicable here: Ruben was an incredible man whose life and work deserve to have, at the very least, a 20-year-old college student write about it— and absolutely more people than that should learn from it.
Since then, I’ve started researching his life. The stories I was told were amazing — stories of advocacy, altruism, and art. However, such stories can describe, but by doing so they only scratch the surface. I hardly knew him as a kid. He died when I was just 11-years-old. As a result, I can’t talk to him. Despite this, I would say that death merely turns a person from matter to memory. In this sense he is kept alive, and I hope through this essay of sorts that I can preserve and deepen this memory. Not just by repeating stories — which I do not dare undermine the importance of — but by exploring his art and his work as much one might explore his career and family life.
Ruben was born in 1947 in Barranquitas, Puerto Rico. Eventually, he would move to North Philadelphia at the age of four. Being the son of Latino migrants in the 1950s, he learned a good bit about resilience; and, with that, did not take from struggle a desire to further struggle, but a desire to cease struggle for others. Paradoxically, this would elevate him above most of his peers by grounding him alongside them. In other words, he embraced the challenges in his life. In this, he acted alongside them. Yet, he rose above those challenges and became a better person for it. In this, he acted above them.
He wrote in a private letter:
I tend not to be afraid of what the future may bring. I try my best to always tell myself that I am the master of my future. I am responsible for my future. I never allow myself to be a victim. If something happens to me… I don’t mope and crawl in a corner.
Struggle isn’t always something made to ruin, but to build. Just as in order to build muscle, one must first destroy it. To quote poet Charles Bukowski, “what matters most is how well you walk through the fire.” Some understandably don’t see it that way, but this small detail — that he didn’t let something as challenging as his circumstances stain the rest of his life — is a simple detail I admire. And it would help in defining who he became later in life, as I will hopefully display.
He spent his childhood immersed in the local Puerto Rican community, while he bounced between Camden and Philadelphia, the two cities across which his family was spread. When he was 17 he successfully fought for the construction of a much-needed public library in his neighborhood. He soon joined a series of Puerto Rican advocacy groups—Puerto Rico was poor, and its people faced prejudice and contempt: a radicalizing experience for Ruben. Then, he went underground, hardly talking to anyone. As it turns out, during this time he was active in a radical militant left-wing organization referred to as the National Caucus of Labor Committees—whom he joined following an event held by a front for the Communist Party. Outside the rally sat leftists of a rival organization—the aforementioned NCLC—who were polemicizing against the Communists. At the time, the NCLC was functionally a political party. It was these polemics that persuaded him to join.
While at Temple University, still involved with the labor committees, he worked as an editor for a bilingual newspaper. Eventually, juggling the two became impossible, and he stopped journalism, dedicating himself to activism. From then on, he agitated repeatedly against the Communist Party. In his notes, he describes “gang fights” with the Communists, one of which got him into legal trouble, motivating him to move away from Philadelphia and organize elsewhere. So he continued the struggle for years and organized across Albany, Youngstown, Chicago, Detroit, and New York, migrating from place to place. He lived a deeply chaotic life during this time—a lifestyle that would someday alienate him from his first wife.
As it turns out, the NCLC, led by Lyndon LaRouche, had developed a number of ‘cultlike’ tendencies, pushing Ruben to leave the NCLC in 1982. It had isolated Ruben from most of his family and friends, explaining his apparent disappearance. It seems like most of those I spoke to had little idea as to what he was doing during this time; it took reading private letters shown generously to me by his wife to know what went on. Everything I thought beforehand was just speculation. However, Ruben sustained a commitment to activism, writing in one of the aforementioned letters:
Those of us who have a deep commitment to make change start thinking we can change the world. As we get older and wise, we realize that it just ain’t so. But my heart is the same. My eyes moisten still when I see injustice and my anger still awakens. It’s the juice that keeps me centered and focused.
I’ve heard from my father that his more ‘radical’ leanings managed to land him on a no-fly list. This would make a lot of sense, even if it hasn’t yet been verified by anyone else: the NCLC was known for harassing FBI agents and had at one point been described by the FBI as a “violence-oriented Marxist revolutionary organization.” That’s no small deal. Strangely, I still respect what seems to be Ruben’s radical devotion to political change, even if he picked the wrong organization. Suppression is a badge of honor to any good activist or journalist. As what other reason is there to do anything of the sort except defiance? Truth is valueless unless it liberates — against power, against ignorance, or against fear.
In 1982, just after his exit, he became a bus operator for SEPTA (the public transit system in Philadelphia). He enjoyed it for its chaotic nature, swiftly rising in rank; at one point he managed two divisions (a role from which he got a few promotions). He was highly active in COMTO—an organization supporting minority workers in transportation. He remained high in rank until he left the transit business 22 years later.
Following this, Ruben dedicated himself to humanistic study: to the arts, philosophy, and history. He mentions at points in his letters how different he would have been, given he had stayed in the NCLC. We will never know, but we do know that his exit and subsequent studies made him the best version of himself. As a young man, he was angry and he was idealistic. He describes himself as a “Puerto-Rican Nationalist” a few times. But he matured, allowing himself to grow open-minded while keeping the same passion for politics that defined his earlier life. A desire to see a just world kept him going, his maturity kept him rational. He wrote,
I am too much of a realist to think that the world will conform to me but I am not that much of a defeatist to think that I will conform to the world.
Then, in 2003, he reunited with his high school sweetheart, Ann O’Donnel, and in that time he wrote hundreds of poems and letters to and about her. It’s clear to me, despite hardly having known him, that he loved her immensely. Some of his writing is readable on his website, all of it is beautiful and exhibits a tremendous love for her. In particular, his brief essay melting the snow. My favorite passage from it being,
many years passed. every year he could count the times that he felt a glimmer, like someone touching him on his shoulder, but he’d turn, only to find no one. a ghost of her no doubt.
In 2009, at the age of 62, he battled stomach cancer, which drove him in the direction of photography. He would join photography school and marry Ann that same year. It was between this time and his death where his photography flourished; thus, it seems, his creativity soared. In 2013, he was honored with the Medal of Courage Award and became an active member of the Power Over Cancer dragon boat team.
He died in 2016 when his stomach cancer tragically returned, and a few of his poems (and the quote below) reflected on death. In retrospect, they’re sometimes rather ominous, but this property only makes them more powerful. Take his poem aptly titled death:
i feel a creeping void
an unfilled part of me
being occupied
by a hollow nothingness.
a solitary movement
something barren
crawls up my legs
mesmerizing my nerves.
alone
i sense my death
my life has vanished
bare
without me.
deprived
destitute
i reach out
For my last breath
i yearn
but then
my life without me cries
how fruitless
how vain
or, presumably writing about Ann towards the end of his life, he wrote:
I can die now, darling, and I would feel that at least now I have no regrets. Imagine dying with my last thought being a regret over never having met you again, never knowing what became of you. So now, I smile, even with tears in my eyes, and appreciate the hand of God, what must have been a greater plan that sought to do right by us.
It’s grim, and that’s the point. But these poems and these quotes — when mixed with the overwhelming joy found in some of his other work, whether it be photography, poetry, or essay writing — add nuance. After all, there can be no joy in life without sadness and there can be no good in this world without evil — the same goes for art.
From his youth, he immersed himself in art. Art would feature itself everywhere in his life, in particular that of the impressionists. Van Gogh, Monet, Cezanne, Chardin, Vermeer and Rembrandt were his favorites. This love for art would never disappear, forming fundamentally who he was and who he became.
His journey in photography began later in life, but carried with it an impressionist edge: from his artist statement, “I photograph in a painterly style, determined not to rebel against representational or impressionist art but to utilize the art form’s fundamentals to continue to capture the inner essence and beauty of what I photograph.”
His wife, Ann, told me about his time as a photographer, saying, “He began his journey with photography after his cancer diagnosis. He took classes and worked diligently to perfect his craft. He would spend hours in the basement working on still lifes. He even had a few exhibits at a local restaurant and Penn Charter private school in Philadelphia. He donated the sale proceeds to the Cancer Support Community of Philadelphia where we were members. Juan was very generous and kind that way. He always gave more than he took.”
Art isn’t just abstract ‘expression’—it’s living as per who you are: as the most powerful form of expression will always be one’s own actions. In this way, he was an artist in the purest form. His photos were a privilege to observe, but just as much a privilege even for those who could not see them. As he ensured that whatever he could do for others, he did. He was a man whose life was nothing except an expression of himself and his ideals: not only his emotions or innermost feelings, but his values and beliefs about how the world should be.
He was also a prolific poet, and armed with a profound style of prose, he would fight for, and, thus, live according to, what he believed in. His poetry and few essays (my personal favorite being as she pushes to be free) are both powerful and beautiful. Some passages, too, from unpublished letters, lend a deep philosophical edge to his writing — passages like this:
In our arrogant youth, we rebelled against fate’s plan and we now feel the pain of that decision. Now fate leaves us to ourselves, leaving it up to us to decide. So you ask what now? Yes, what now is the proper question. The answer will unfold just as easily as the question asked. Only, the question will unfold slowly and when it does, acting on it will be the challenge.
I chose this quote initially because of its decisively existentialist flavor, mirroring Sartre’s “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” But besides this, the prose is something more powerful than anything most people (especially me) could possibly write. Within 71 words he summarizes, both in form and in syntax, a profound philosophical concept: if we decide what to do with our lives, then the question of “What now?” is arguably the most important, and the first thing, we can and should ask.
It seems to me like almost everything he did was done in accordance with this maxim. He did not by any means waste the life he had. It is this life — a life guided by principles, ethics, creativity, and beauty — I’ve grown to admire. I’d like to end this brief essay with one more of his quotes, which I feel encapsulates his philosophy in life:
You can’t live your life by yourself simply because life is much more than yourself. Life is you and the people around you. It’s what you think of yourself and what you think of others. It’s giving to yourself and giving to others as much as it is taking from yourself and others. Life surrounds no one person but envelops one whole people.
A person’s life — no matter how much money they make, how athletic they may be, or how famous they’ve become — is seldom complete until they’ve loved and they’ve been loved. Meaning accompanies one’s friends, family, and peers at the hip, and comes from few other places. Love, in the myriad forms it takes, is everything. Ruben knew this and thus lived a profoundly meaningful life — a life I hope to replicate in my own way.
Ruben was a beautiful person who left joy in his wake. He was, and remains, an example to us all. I wish I knew him better, but I’m glad nonetheless that I’ve had the opportunity to learn who he was. He lives on in memory, as we all will someday.
Information about Rubens life was pulled from the website Ann made for him following his death (theycalledmeruben.com), his obituary, testimonials, and private notes/letters. All pictures are either Ruben himself or taken by Ruben.
“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us.”
— Marshall McLuhan
Having been born in 2005, just prior to the iPhone and just in time for social media, it didn’t take long for my father to familiarize me with the internet. He taught me technological literacy from a young age. Being an engineer himself, to him, the emerging technological world was nothing except beautiful; a new, unprecedented time to explore and admire with everyone else in the world.
His love for new technology seemed genetic, as it soon revealed its nerdy little face in me. From a young age, I mirrored my father perfectly. I looked like him, still look like him, and his personality and interests were contagious, as each one infected me minutes after they did him. I dressed up as a naval engineer — his occupation — for first grade’s career day. Every Christmas, I’d receive engineering kits and electrical playthings. When considering my future, engineering was a consistent and desirable option, alongside the tragically fantastical career dreams each child has and loses as time goes on.
This lasted until the eighth grade, when, in picking between trade school or public high school, I seriously considered pursuing engineering, realized I hated it, and decided against it. Math was nihilistic to me, but writing gave me a purpose.
This made it clear that engineering wasn’t my calling. This was among the few key differences between me and him. I love philosophy and critical theory, he loves science and mathematics. I love writing and the arts, he loves experimentation and certainty. As is reflected in my pursuit of journalism, I wanted to question everything, spiral into chaotic abstract dialectics while harassing public officials. As an engineer, nothing about that was and still is appealing to him. I suspect it’s the uncertainty: I like open-ended questions, he likes something solvable.
However, we remain quite close, and as time sewed a modicum of division between us, we kept one of many similarities: technology. As an aspiring engineer, I loved watching as new technologies came out. And while a new generation of quirky, ingenious CEO’s acted as figureheads ushering us into the unknown, it felt like I was coming of age in a world just being born.
However, as Antonio Gramsci said,
The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.
The Monsters of Our Time
The monsters we face today are artificial, concocted by those same geniuses I once admired. It’s an ugly and intimidating time to be shoved into adulthood.
Yet, while times have undeniably changed, that love of technology hasn’t disappeared, though maybe it’s been tinged with a clear concern for the future. I still find myself entranced by the gorgeous pictures taken with cameras orders of magnitude smaller than cameras of the same quality ten years ago. Or when I access thousands of years of learning and knowledge within seconds with unreal ease. It’s surreal living in the future envisioned by the past, with handheld computers and robotic servants capable of near-sentience.
Sometimes, if I squint hard enough or cover my ears, I can see the dream my parents raised me to believe in. When my father talked to me about politics, he’d outline to me the wonders of the market economy. Any systemic problems could be reformed away, any crisis or injustice could be brought to balance with an economy in equilibrium.
It’s not uncommon to see bits of this utopia in our current reality. ChatGPT is an astonishing research partner, my cell phone feels essential to life, and I’m writing this with an $80 keyboard.
But any amount of optimism welcomes its opposite. OpenAI pollutes unrelentingly to refine an unsupervised technological time bomb; my cell phone shouldn’t be necessary to life, and consumerism assumes fulfillment can be commodified. Each of these are blights on society, yet their convenience veils their destructive tendencies, making us complacent in the face of brazen injustice.
It’s not a problem with the products themselves. It’s a problem with why and how they’ve gone about the innovation preached to me by my father.
Convenience has come at the cost of our humanity. Per the logic of the modern world, there is no such thing as free lunch; every positive comes with a negative; each thesis comes with its antithesis.
My relationship with technology, therefore, is a mixed one. On one hand, innovation can be a symptom of deeper exploitation. On the other, it’s a wonder of human achievement. All I know, and all I believe I can know, is that the world I’m preparing to join is a daunting one. It’s uncomfortable because it’s unknown, yet in that same sense, it’s original. It’s new, unprecedented, meaning it’s scarce, and scarcity begets value.
A New Hansel & Gretel
It’s something I need to embrace. What else can I do? I can reject AI, then watch as my peers outpace me in virtually every way. I can stop using my cell phone, then cut myself off from the outside world. I can buy a typewriter and mail drafts to my editor when I’m assigned something remote. Time won’t wait for me or anyone else, no matter how much I complain about oligarchs or democratic backsliding or right-wing ideology. Politics, clearly, is a big part of my life; I think and care a lot about it. But doing something about it asks that I embrace the tools at my disposal, not cover my ears and shout.
Old-guard newspapers learned that lesson. Their business model simply hasn’t adapted to the modern age. Consequently, journalists like me are stuck with mass layoffs and a profoundly competitive job market. It’ll likely improve as the industry rebounds, but this doesn’t offer me much hope. As technology advances, will another round of layoffs happen? Will I be one of them? That is, assuming I discover solid employment after graduation.
My girlfriend, Nicole, regularly feels the same, being an art student. Together, we make an anxious pair. Yet, anxiety is an often irrational emotion. It’s an underlying concern, a nervousness nagging at you that refuses to die. Many, including myself, take medication to ease it. However, medication can’t give me a stable income or a full-time job.
I shouldn’t be surprised. Every technological revolution does the same thing: displace workers. But everyone ends up okay. Blue-collar factory work travels overseas, while white collar information processing lingers. Eventually, as the economy inflates, more blue-collar jobs migrate away, along with the domestic working class.
Jobs once filled by humans are automated, leaving little space for actual workers. Wealth is transferred upwards, making the economy richer but the people poorer. Yes, we recover from job displacement. But this time, the next time, the time after that, and so on — eventually, there won’t be jobs to displace. Only austerity.
As jobs require exponentially more education, degrees lose their value. People need degrees, so more people get degrees, making the job market ruthlessly competitive. More people fight for fewer jobs, fewer jobs mean less income. As the economy advances, the interests of the average person are swept away like dirt.
This doesn’t sound like the futuristic utopia I was promised.
The Ugliness of the Entrepreneurial Spirit
I’d love a utopia, I think we all would. So now we’re stuck questioning why everything’s lost its utopian luster. If we don’t know what to fix, we don’t know how to fix it.
My father is a centrist Democrat, but a specific kind. He hated corporate exploitation, but bent the knee to the innovation exploitation wrought. He simultaneously despised and admired the Sam Altmans and Elon Musks of the world, although Trump and his band of oligarchs, like Altman and formerly Musk, have mostly soured his view. But most of the time, technological acumen subsumed Altman’s corporate recklessness or Musk’s general purpose ignorance.
To my father and myself for most of my life, entrepreneurship gave us a potential utopia, so why not love it?
But by glorifying entrepreneurship, we deify personal, subjective greatness instead of working towards the interests of greater society. This ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ doesn’t come from me, or you, or the entrepreneur themselves. Owning a business isn’t some innate feature of the universe; it’s not bound to human nature.
It’s bound to one thing:the free market.
Media theorist Marshall McLuhan wrote in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964),
The medium is the message.
The internet as a platform is more influential than the websites comprising it, the 24-hour news cycle as a method of information distribution has more influence than the stories it issues, and so on. I’ve been morphed into who I am today, in part by my cell phones, not so much by what I looked at on them.
Similarly, the billionaires who are so easily blamed for each and every problem my generation faces shouldn’t be blamed. They’re doing precisely what they’re supposed to do as businesspeople: inflate until they pop. It just so happens that, by turning our world into their world, the rest of the world suffers.
I don’t think I’m unreasonable to prefer something better. Something that doesn’t artificially produce and perpetuate the problems we’re trapped with, like climate change and global austerity, for profit or personal gain.
The Entrepreneurial Spirit as a Systemic Symptom
People sometimes imply my clear radical anti-capitalism is just youthful fervor. They’re probably right. As a dedicated pragmatist, my father’s responses normally orbit the efficiency of capitalism when compared to Soviet central planning, even though ironically I’m a devout anti-authoritarian myself.
But that doesn’t change the fact that framing the entrepreneurial spirit as more than a lust for profit, as if it’s a mark of creativity, bravery and daring, bothers me constantly. There’s nothing wrong with owning a business, but it doesn’t make you a knight — it makes you a soldier of fortune.
There is virtue in entrepreneurship. But it absolutely cannot be understood in isolation, so it cannot be evaluated in isolation, either. I respect those who start a business, innovate, and make the world even the slightest bit better to live in. I adore the delicious cookies baked by my local bakery, or the services from the mechanic just down the street from me. But they’re not such valuable pieces in our community for their business alone. It’s what they bring to the table that matters. They’re good because they give high-quality service while treating their employees and communities with dignity and respect. Anything else is just economic activity — virtueless in itself.
On the contrary, my father’s love for billionaire innovators wasn’t virtueless. But every second spent bowing to progress is one spent unaware of the weight it carries.
McLuhan and Marx
Nothing can be honestly understood in isolation. Likewise, media is hardly the sum of its isolated, remote parts. Marshall McLuhan was a systemic thinker. To him, history isn’t a sequence of somewhat disconnected, sporadic events or ideas, but the advancement of large-scale systems clashing against each other with monolithic antagonisms defining them.
In other words, historical materialism beautifully applied to the media landscape.
However, he deviates from Marx in one key way: to a Marxist, it’s not so much the medium defining the message, but the system defining the medium and the message simultaneously.
Marx, like McLuhan, was a pure, unadulterated systemic thinker. A culture like ours, favoring individual achievement instead of collective flourishing, is built to serve a master. Each device, each gadget and technological tidbit, doesn’t spawn from thin air. It’s made to fill a gap in the market, a gap unfilled or underappreciated by other innovators. Anything subject to the market contours to capital. The medium is shaped by capital; the message is whatever is profitable.
Marx and McLuhan are inseparable: the base-superstructure, economic determinist materialist logic Marx flourished in is precisely the same as McLuhan’s materialism and technological determinism. To Marx, the base is political economy, like corporations and the state. The superstructure comprises culture, media, and social hierarchies formed by political economy. The base is vastly more influential, as it fundamentally drives every other aspect of society.
When applied to McLuhan, the base is the medium; the superstructure is the message. The medium is vastly more influential, as it fundamentally drives every way the medium is used, i.e., the message. They don’t just correlate — McLuhan applied Marxian logic directly. Through this, McLuhan conjured a powerful framework for understanding technology.
A New Uncertainty
Moreover, like Neil Postman, we’re stuck with fear. Neil Postman opposed computers in classrooms, claiming they stripped education of its most important feature: socializing. While he died decades ago, Postman’s skepticism towards technology’s social impact extends to the modern day.
Personally, I make regular use of social media, but mostly out of necessity. The conquering of analog spaces by technology ensures we can’t function without it. Our world has been shoved into cell phones, distilled into Instagram posts and short paragraphs on X. All of which lacks connective tissue. I’m not by any means the first to say social media divides us as much as it brings us together. It’s made, ideally, to help us socialize. But by permitting us to project our ideal selves, i.e., what we think the world wants to see us become, it’s rendered a widespread clash between false identities. Like oil and water, they’re interacting, but they remain fundamentally separate.
On a more economic level, technological advancement turns collective labor solitary, as was seen with the Industrial Revolution. New divisions of labor emerged, wherein skilled tradesmen became machine operators, pulling levers and shoveling coal behind an isolating wall of smog. They no longer had to collaborate to complete a task — machines could do that for them.
Every technology is inseparable from its origins. Just as it’s an extension of ourselves, it’s also an extension of the systems realizing it. Therefore, it’s a double-edged sword: with each refinement, with each step forward, we are set back just as far.
These setbacks often attract more attention, mostly because reporters focus predominantly on said setbacks. After all, the societal good brought by a widespread knowledge of cute puppy videos is nothing compared to a government shutdown, regime change, and so on. But sometimes, we all need something. A crutch or anything soft to cushion our fall.
Specks of horror float around in my and many others’ heads, and have for decades. My father had nuclear war to worry about, after all. I yearn for a world devoid of existential threats. We all do — or at least, I hope we all do. Yet, it’s in the medium’s nature to cover the disquieting. Maybe, like a tough parent, we need a thorough sandblasting from time to time. Just because it squelches optimism, doesn’t mean it should be feared. In that way, anxiety is often a symptom of a fading indoctrination.
Despite this, my father was right to feel optimistic. Just as I walked in my father’s footprints, thinking his route was the safest, he walked in those of the media, his education, and his own parents. He was born at the tail end of America’s economic zenith, July 1969. His childhood crescendoed into the 1980s, with Reaganomics bringing new wealth and new risks. The Cold War offered a virtually flawless ideological enemy, and America appeared to be on top of the world.
During this time, the Bretton Woods Agreement died, spurring the slow decline of American capitalism to be replaced with what philosopher Yanis Varoufakis calls techno-feudalism. Under techno-feudalism, capital flows, not from private property, but from near-monopolistic control over distribution (e.g., Amazon), control over the flow of money (e.g., Wall Street, banking, etc.), and financial domination over computation (e.g., Silicon Valley). Applying Marx once again, he wouldn’t seek to “seize the means of production” anymore, but the means of computation and financial gatekeeping.
My father’s and my own indoctrination alike don’t demand a totalitarian state — indoctrination shapeshifts according to its role. It’s materialistic, as in, it takes the form of commodities. And it’s symbolic, as in, it disguises. For example, the recoloring of greed via the worship of enterprise and the fruits thereof as “vision” or “ambition”.
My father grew up in a world wherein optimism was the only rational response. I’m growing up in a world hinged on the opposite. Everything about the modern world, with its searing bright lights and pessimistic futurism, tells us one thing: something isn’t right. Or, at the very least, I hope something isn’t right. If everything is as it should be, nothing can be as it needs to be.
In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Wooden Shoe Books is the state’s only leftist bookstore. Selling anarchist, Marxist, and generally anti-fascist leftist literature, they serve an important role: to preserve radical ideology in a world in desperate need of it. Their anarchic ideology isn’t just posing: they’re fully volunteer-led and non-profit; in fact, they describe themselves on their website as “anti-profit,” writing,
We seek to be an example of the society we envision and what we are working towards as radicals… We are a non-hierarchical collective that hopes to empower members through worker self-management and a consensus decision-making process.
Walking in, this mentality is clear. Anarchist and Marxist literature sits in full display on shelves and tables; posters and stickers decrying the state and capitalism cover every surface without a book.
But is their ideology, anarchism, a genuinely anti-hegemonic ideology like they claim it is? Does it seriously challenge the status quo? In this essay, I’d like to explore the idea of hegemony, how to prevent it, and whether prevention is even possible.
Rebellion feeds into itself
… Power is exercised rather than possessed; it is not the ‘privilege’, acquired or preserved, of the dominant class, but the overall effect of its strategic positions — an effect that is manifested and sometimes extended by the position of those who are dominated. Furthermore, this power is not exercised simply as an obligation or a prohibition on those who ‘do not have it’; it invests them, is transmitted by them and through them; it exerts pressure upon them, just as they themselves, in their struggle against it, resist the grip it has on them.
— Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish (1975)
Foucault’s idea that power is self-reinforcing applies well here. Rebellion can’t be formalized. By formalizing rebellion, it’s made another form of conformity, a doctrine to be followed. Revolution — rebellion to enact something new — embodies this: to rebel for a new world implies the creation of new conditions to rebel against.
Let’s take art. To create, one expresses oneself, as even when art expresses a collective act, like a mural or a band, it’s either a subjective interpretation of a collective thing, or a series of such interpretations. For example, when a band writes a song together, the lyrics and melodies they create, while they feed off of one another, are only as strong as the individuals who created them. Each lyric comes from the mind of a single person, another edits it, another moves a line around, and so on. Each movement, each action, is the action of an individual, which eventually results in a greater ‘collective action.’
Either way, the creative act is defiant. It abandons society and distills this abandonment into a product, expressing the independent self, or at least as independent as they can be. However, each individual, given that they absorb external influences, unloads these external biases onto the page, canvas, mic, and so on. So, while art still mirrors the individual (as the individual remains the filter through which external factors travel), the individual also mirrors greater society. In this process, hegemonic systems gain territory over art.
Such systems are discovered easily in the bourgeois influence over the arts. Yet, they’re also found in artistic movements on their own. The ‘movement’ is hegemonic, similar to ideology. By being a separate movement, it’s severing itself from a previous status quo, rebelling, creating a new status quo, and morphing into a revolution. By gaining independence, it produces new conditions to be defied, perpetuating the cycle of artistic rebellion and originality.
Let’s take modernism, once revolutionary. Now it’s a well-established style taught to art students. Rock music was once outrageous. Now it’s stereotypical, not solely among baby boomers. Each revolution becomes tradition — what was once new grows old, what was once thrilling turns boring.
Trotsky’s permanent revolution
Trotskyism echoes here: A revolution cannot stop in one country. It has to continue, spreading itself across the globe, engulfing the world in socialism and rendering the working class a unified whole; a new hegemony. At this point, the revolution will have been complete.
Leon Trotsky writes in Theory of Permanent Revolution (1931),
The dictatorship of the proletariat which has risen to power as the leader of the democratic revolution is inevitably and very quickly confronted with tasks, the fulfillment of which is bound up with deep inroads into the rights of bourgeois property. The democratic revolution grows over directly into the socialist revolution and thereby becomes a permanent revolution.
By continually rebelling against previous systems and establishing new systems, hegemony doesn’t disappear. It repeats itself. And, internationally and domestically, Trotsky’s theory faced further challenges. Stalin, due to Western pressure and the frequent failure of foreign revolutions (e.g., the German revolution), decided against world communism. He dissolved the Soviet Comintern and concocted a theory of ‘socialism in one country’ as an alternative to Trotsky’s — his political and theoretical rival at the time.
Trotsky mistakenly assumed foreign proletarian movements could dissolve domestic hegemony. But hegemonic systems, e.g., capitalism, naturally become worldwide as they develop; meaning Western support, alongside basic military superiority, crushed working-class movements as quickly as they emerged.
The Soviets certainly could provide support, and they tried in some cases, such as Cuba, Vietnam, China, and North Korea. But by ignorantly attempting to rival Western powers militarily and economically, they dedicated swaths of their economy to military and foreign projects instead of domestic human wellbeing. They were a developing nation, one still escaping a brutal monarchical feudal system — they were not a capitalist power with centuries of development.
So while Trotsky’s theory was a tad unrealistic, so was Stalin’s. Stalin’s nationalistic obsession led to external pressure and an inevitable authoritarian backslide; Trotsky’s theory could only work in a developed nation with resources to spend on foreign aid and combating rival hegemony.
In either case, it’s a contradiction: hegemony requires either obedience or a clone. It’s a virus that kills or spreads depending on the host’s response.
The state’s role in combating hegemony
Considering this, we land right back where we started: with the rebel’s paradox. To rebel requires perpetual rebellion, which means submission to a sort of ‘doctrine of rebellion.’
Let’s take punk music: the punk community, spawning from early skinhead movements, ska music, and various alt-rock bands of the 1960s (e.g., the Velvet Underground) served as music’s voice for defiant, polemical, politically charged youth anger. However, by focusing mostly on defiance, those deemed ‘not defiant enough’ were kicked out, creating an in-group; a new status quo, i.e., hegemony. The punk movement would die out over time, its corpse fertilizing various new subcultures.
The anti-gatekeeping gatekeepers killed themselves off.
Similarly, the Soviet Union, early on, ended workers councils (soviets), taking away worker control over the means of production. This is why Trotskyists criticize central planning, calling it state capitalism instead of socialism.
Ironically, Trotsky initially supported these measures, grifting his way through the Bolsheviks’ ranks despite his previously extensive criticism of Bolshevism’s right-leaning tendencies.
In part, the Russian proletariat was nonexistent at the time, meaning socialism couldn’t exist in a fully developed form. Workers councils wouldn’t have made sense, as there weren’t any workers to council. But as the Soviet Union rapidly developed into an industrialized power, workers’ rights only shrank. Stalin initially stripped back any workplace democracy or scientific planning previously implemented under Lenin, and future reforms failed to render the Soviet Union genuinely socialist.
Working-class state hegemony destroyed working-class power.
Is anarchy the solution?
To liberate the working class, and by extension, to liberate oppressed classes everywhere, hegemony itself must be identified as the problem. Material needs may be satisfied. Comforts, like stability, once afforded only by the ruling classes, may be distributed universally and without cost. But it doesn’t matter. The exploitation inherent to class society arises, this time between the state and the worker, the ruler and the ruled. Avoiding this implies not only ending private property, but ending hierarchies of coercive authority.
Chris Harman writes in A People’s History of the World (1999),
Humanity increased its degree of control over nature, but at the price of most people becoming subject to control and exploitation by privileged minority groups.
Such groups could only keep the surplus [resources] in their own hands at times when the whole of society was suffering great hardship if they found ways of imposing their will on the rest of society by establishing coercive structures — states. Control over the surplus provided them with the means to do so, by hiring armed men and investing in expensive techniques such as metal working which could give them a monopoly of the most efficient means of killing.
Armed force is most effective when backed by legal codes and ideologies which sanctify ruling class power by making it seem like the source of people’s livelihoods.
When agriculture emerges, a surplus of resources comes with it. Thus, control and distribution systems for that surplus, with this, the state and a class of police, soldiers, and those who manage them. Class is the immediate consequence of statism. In other words, socialism demands a horizontal — never vertical — distribution of authority. In essence, anarchy. What anarchy looks like depends on who you ask, on historical progression, and on material conditions.
Emma Goldman writes in her essay Anarchism: What It Really Stands for (1911),
It is a living force in the affairs of our life, constantly creating new conditions. The methods of Anarchism therefore do not comprise an iron-clad program to be carried out under all circumstances. Methods must grow out of the economic needs of each place and time, and of the intellectual and temperamental requirements of the individual.
Anarchy isn’t the absence of organization. It’s a new form of organization, based entirely on free association between people whose lives don’t depend on the state, but on each other and themselves. Each person, by freely associating with groups, ideas, and societal roles, without coercion or command, guides society, alongside their groups, in a sort of ‘market of roles.’ What doesn’t need to get done, or what people don’t want to do, doesn’t get done. Groups dedicated to it die out, and vice versa.
This interaction between organizations, which clash in a separate yet necessarily intertwined way, drives the anarchist economy. It’s not democracy, nor is it authority. It’s absolute liberty, not to do as one wishes — like rob, rape, and murder — but to associate as one sees fit.
Goldman writes,
That being the ideal of Anarchism, its economic arrangements must consist of voluntary productive and distributive associations, gradually developing into free communism, as the best means of producing with the least waste of human energy. Anarchism, however, also recognizes the right of the individual, or numbers of individuals, to arrange at all times for other forms of work, in harmony with their tastes and desires.
Trotsky, Stalin, punks, and artistic revolution all have one thing in common: they assume authority isn’t the problem. The punks religiously opposed authority. Yet by doing so, they enforced an anti-authoritarian doctrine. Stalin cultivated a profoundly oppressive political class, and Trotsky assumed a universal socialist hegemony would somehow end hegemony, domination, and exploitation. Each is a case study against replacing domination with domination to destroy domination. History repeats itself over and over again, dialectically. Materialist analysis leads us to one culprit: class. But the state is the mother of class.
Of course, anarchy doesn’t mean all authority disappears. It’s reframed as refusal, but it’s authoritative nonetheless. But the authority anarchy thwarts isn’t hierarchies themselves, but coercion. It’s the absence of commands. The only rule one’s held to is the lack thereof. Respect, community, protection, and so on — they remain. Social norms bind the anarchic commune; people may even pick someone they admire and treat them as a guiding force. But they won’t have a gun to their head, they won’t have a police officer shouting at them to obey.
The structure is hegemonic, but the hierarchy is not — exploitation ceases.
Anarchism destroys itself
Yet, is any of this actually practical? We’ve all heard the criticisms of anarchy: chaos, mayhem, selfishness, and aimless nihilism. But this misunderstands anarchy and the supposed ‘human nature.’ Anarchy can be organized, such as through anarcho-syndicalism’s federalist model. And humans are naturally collaborative, as proven through ancient primitive communism, as well as primitive societies today.
The end goal of any communist ideology is, in that sense, essentially anarchy. The critical aspect of anarchy, dividing it from something like Trotskyism, is the absence of a transitional state. Anarchists topple the state, society is free; socialists topple capitalism, society is free. One goes for everything, the other only eats half.
The Marxist approach risks perpetuating hegemony, but doesn’t anarchy do, too? If society is kept together socially, what if that social element itself grows oppressive? What if conformity to the culture keeping anarchy alive becomes the rule, and a new authority emerges? People, psychologically, cite and rely on authority. The big Other, symbolic order, alongside libidinal obsession, dominate our lives. The state only asks that people truly believe in it. The population must have faith; otherwise, the symbolic systems preventing the state from collapsing in on itself die out.
The state, fundamentally, is the symbolic order formalized: it’s the subjective understanding of symbolic, communal systems, manifested materially.
In other words, a new state structure can emerge without material causes. All it requires is someone manipulative enough to centralize power. So how can anarchy be protected without a regulatory structure? To rephrase, how can anarchy survive without a state? Anarchism demands a rational population, but psychologically, we’re equally irrational and rational. We have a whole subconscious and deeply unreasonable world framing massive portions of who we are and who we will become.
And how can anarchy restructure society and end capitalism while foreign hegemonic systems remain? The anarchic militia can’t defend itself against the United States’ military or the economic force of Western Europe. How can the federalist structure of anarcho-syndicalism keep itself together without a centralized authority? Mutual trust and self-interest, as I’ve established, are cheap compared to the state’s binding power.
How can the working class direct its political interests meaningfully without a vanguard party? Donald Trump’s populism used socialist tendencies and turned them fascistic. How can we prevent such a thing without a vanguard to direct class consciousness?
Anarchy is synonymous with statism, as each breeds its opposite. A socialist worker’s state, one without the hellish totalitarianism of Maoism and Stalinism, may be the only path to genuine liberation: whether from class division, the environmental devastation of climate change, or the emergence of new technologies and conflicts bent on humanity’s destruction.
Capitalism only continues to spread one class from the other, while a vile cabal of oligarchs exploits every resource, including people, they can. The question, however, remains: Where to now?
Climate change is impossible to end with grassroots action — state intervention is necessary. The material causes for climate change are strictly capitalist production; thus, capitalist production must end for climate change to end.
Material inequality, following the state’s death, will likely remain, and a socialist state assigned the task of resolving inequity seems to me like the only path forward.
Anarchy is an ideal, anti-authoritarianism is a necessity, but it’s as much an ideal as it is a tragic fantasy: anarchy is unachievable by anarchist means. Yet, with the virtues of anarchism, we are left with yet another irony: like anarchism, socialism is unachievable by socialist means. The only certainty is that power regurgitates itself.
Politics is a game of contradictions. The key is deciding which side is less wrong than the other.
Aidan Vanhoof 