"Power Anywhere Where There's People": A Speech by Fred Hampton (1969)

The following is the full transcript of a speech given by Chairman Fred Hampton Sr. at Olivet Baptist Church in Chicago in 1969.

Power anywhere where there's people. Power anywhere where there's people. Let me give you an example of teaching people. Basically, the way they learn is observation and participation. You know a lot of us go around and joke ourselves and believe that the masses have PhDs, but that's not true. And even if they did, it wouldn't make any difference. Because with some things, you have to learn by seeing it or either participating in it. And you know yourselves that there are people walking around your community today that have all types of degrees that should be at this meeting but are not here. Right? Because you can have as many degrees as a thermometer. If you don't have any practice, they you can't walk across the street and chew gum at the same time.

Let me tell you how Huey P. Newton, the leader, the organizer, the founder, the main man of the Black Panther Party, went about it.

The community had a problem out there in California. There was an intersection, a four-way intersection; a lot of people were getting killed, cars running over them, and so the people went down and redressed their grievances to the government. You've done it before. I know you people in the community have. And they came back and the pigs said "No! You can't have any." Oh, they dont usually say you can't have it. They've gotten a little hipper than that now. That's what those degrees on the thermometer will get you. They tell you "Okay, we'll deal with it. Why dont you come back next meeting and waste some time?"

And they get you wound up in an excursion of futility, and you be in a cycle of insaneness, and you be goin' back and goin' back, and goin' back, and goin' back so many times that you're already crazy.

So they tell you, they say, "Okay niggers, what you want?" And they you jump up and you say, "Well, it's been so long, we don't know what we want", and then you walk out of the meeting and you're gone and they say, "Well, you niggers had your chance, didnt you?"

Let me tell you what Huey P. Newton did.

Huey Newton went and got Bobby Seale, the chairman of the Black Panther Party on a national level. Bobby Seale got his 9mm, that's a pistol. Huey P. Newton got his shotgun and got some stop signs and got a hammer. Went down to the intersection, gave his shotgun to Bobby, and Bobby had his 9mm. He said, "You hold this shotgun. Anybody mess with us, blow their brains out." He put those stop signs up.

There were no more accidents, no more problem.

Now they had another situation. That's not that good, you see, because its two people dealing with a problem. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, no matter how bad they may be, cannot deal with the problem. But let me explain to you who the real heroes are.

Next time, there was a similar situation, another four-way corner. Huey went and got Bobby, went and got his 9mm, got his shotgun, got his hammer and got more stop signs. Placed those stop signs up, gave the shotgun to Bobby, told Bobby "If anybody mess with us while were putting these stop signs up, protect the people and blow their brains out." What did the people do? They observed it again. They participated in it. Next time they had another four-way intersection. Problems there; they had accidents and death. This time, the people in the community went and got their shotguns, got their hammers, got their stop signs.

Now, let me show you how were gonna try to do it in the Black Panther Party here. We just got back from the south side. We went out there. We went out there and we got to arguing with the pigs or the pigs got to arguing-he said, "Well, Chairman Fred, you supposed to be so bad, why dont you go and shoot some of those policemen? You always talking about you got your guns and got this, why dont you go shoot some of them?"

And I've said, "you've just broken a rule. As a matter of fact, even though you have on a uniform it doesn't make me any difference. Because I dont care if you got on nine uniforms, and 100 badges. When you step outside the realm of legality and into the realm of illegality, then I feel that you should be arrested." And I told him, "You being what they call the law of entrapment, you tried to make me do something that was wrong, you encouraged me, you tried to incite me to shoot a pig. And that ain't cool, Brother, you know the law, dont you?"

I told that pig that, I told him "You got a gun, pig?" I told him, "You gotta get your hands up against the wall. We're gonna do what they call a citizens arrest." This fool dont know what this is. I said, "Now you be just as calm as you can and don't make too many quick moves, cause we don't wanna have to hit you."

And I told him like he always told us, I told him, "Well, I'm here to protect you. Don't worry about a thing, 'm here for your benefit." So I sent another Brother to call the pigs. You gotta do that in a citizen's arrest. He called the pigs. Here come the pigs with carbines and shotguns, walkin' out there. They came out there talking about how they're gonna arrest Chairman Fred. And I said, "No fool. This is the man you got to arrest. He's the one that broke the law." And what did they do? They bugged their eyes, and they couldn't stand it. You know what they did? They were so mad, they were so angry that they told me to leave.

And what happened? All those people were out there on 63rd Street. What did they do? They were around there laughing and talking with me while I was making the arrest. They looked at me while I was rapping and heard me while I was rapping. So the next time that the pig comes on 63rd Street, because of the thing that our Minister of Defense calls observation and participation, that pig might be arrested by anybody!

So what did we do? We were out there educating the people. How did we educate them? Basically, the way people learn, by observation and participation. And that's what were trying to do. That's what we got to do here in this community. And a lot of people don't understand, but there's three basic things that you got to do anytime you intend to have yourself a successful revolution.

A lot of people get the word revolution mixed up and they think revolutions a bad word. Revolution is nothing but like having a sore on your body and then you put something on that sore to cure that infection. And Im telling you that were living in an infectious society right now. Im telling you that were living in a sick society. And anybody that endorses integrating into this sick society before its cleaned up is a man whos committing a crime against the people.

If you walk past a hospital room and see a sign that says "Contaminated" and then you try to lead people into that room, either those people are mighty dumb, you understand me, cause if they weren't, they'd tell you that you are an unfair, unjust leader that does not have your followers' interests in mind. And what were saying is simply that leaders have got to become, we've got to start making them accountable for what they do. They're goin' around talking about so-and-so's an Uncle Tom so we're gonna open up a cultural center and teach him what blackness is. And this n****r is more aware than you and me and Malcolm and Martin Luther King and everybody else put together. That's right. They're the ones that are most aware. They're most aware, cause they're the ones that are gonna open up the center. They're gonna tell you where bones come from in Africa that you can't even pronounce the names. Thats right. They'll be telling you about Chaka, the leader of the Bantu freedom fighters, and Jomo Kenyatta, those dingo-dingas. They'll be running all of that down to you. They know about it all. But the point is they do what they're doing because it is beneficial and it is profitable for them.

You see, people get involved in a lot of things that's profitable to them, and we've got to make it less profitable. We've got to make it less beneficial. I'm saying that any program that's brought into our community should be analyzed by the people of that community. It should be analyzed to see that it meets the relevant needs of that community. We don't need no n*****s coming into our community to be having no company to open business for the n*****s. There's too many n*****s in our community that can't get crackers out of the business that they're gonna open.

We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I'm talking about the white masses, I'm talking about the black masses, and the brown masses, and the yellow masses, too. We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don't fight capitalism with no black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism.

We ain't gonna fight no reactionary pigs who run up and down the street being reactionary; we're gonna organize and dedicate ourselves to revolutionary political power and teach ourselves the specific needs of resisting the power structure, arm ourselves, and we're gonna fight reactionary pigs with INTERNATIONAL PROLETARIAN REVOLUTION. That's what it has to be. The people have to have the power: it belongs to the people.

We have to understand very clearly that there's a man in our community called a capitalist. Sometimes he's black and sometimes he's white. But that man has to be driven out of our community, because anybody who comes into the community to make profit off the people by exploiting them can be defined as a capitalist. And we don't care how many programs they have, how long a dashiki they have. Because political power does not flow from the sleeve of a dashiki; political power flows from the barrel of a gun. It flows from the barrel of a gun!

A lot of us running around talking about politics don't even know what politics is. Did you ever see something and pull it and you take it as far as you can and it almost outstretches itself and it goes into something else? If you take it so far that it is two things? As a matter of fact, some things if you stretch it so far, it'll be another thing. Did you ever cook something so long that it turns into something else? Ain't that right?

That's what were talking about with politics.

That politics ain't nothing, but if you stretch it so long that it can't go no further, then you know what you got on your hands? You got an antagonistic contradiction. And when you take that contradiction to the highest level and stretch it as far as you can stretch it, you got what you call war. Politics is war without bloodshed, and war is politics with bloodshed. If you don't understand that, you can be a Democrat, Republican, you can be Independent, you can be anything you want to, you ain't nothing.

We don't want any of those n*****s and any of these hunkies and nobody else, radicals or nobody talking about, "I'm on the Independence ticket." That means you sell out the republicans; Independent means you're out for graft and you'll sell out to the highest bidder. You understand?

We want people who want to run on the People's Party, because the people are gonna run it whether they like it or not. The people have proved that they can run it. They run it in China, they're gonna run it right here. They can call it what they want to, they can talk about it. They can call it communism, and think that that's gonna scare somebody, but it ain't gonna scare nobody.

We had the same thing happen out on 37th Road. They came out to 37th road where our Breakfast for children program is, and started getting those women who were kind of older, around 58---that's, you know, I call that older cause Im young. I aint 20, right, right! But you see, they're gonna get them and brainwash them. And you ain't seen nothin till you see one of them beautiful Sisters with their hair kinda startin getting grey, and they ain't got many teeth, and they were tearin' them policemen up! They were tearing em up! The pigs would come up to them and say "You like communism?"

The pigs would come up to them and say, "You scared of communism?" And the Sisters would say, "No scared of it, I ain't never heard of it."

"You like socialism?"

"No scared of it. I ain't never heard of it."

The pigs, they be crackin' up, because they enjoyed seeing these people frightened of these words.

"You like capitalism?"

Yeah, well, that's what I live with. I like it.

"You like the Breakfast For Children program, n****r?"

"Yeah, I like it."

And the pigs say, "Oh-oh." The pigs say, "Well, the Breakfast For Children program is a socialistic program. Its a communistic program."

And the women said, "Well, I tell you what, boy. I've been knowing you since you were knee-high to a grasshopper, n****r. And I don't know if I like communism and I don't know if I like socialism. But I know that that Breakfast For Children program feeds my kids, n****r. And if you put your hands on that Breakfast For Children program, I'm gonna come off this can and I'm gonna beat your ass like a ...."

That's what they be saying. That's what they be saying, and it is a beautiful thing. And that's what the Breakfast For Children program is. A lot of people think it is charity, but what does it do? It takes the people from a stage to another stage. Any program that's revolutionary is an advancing program. Revolution is change. Honey, if you just keep on changing, before you know it, in fact, not even knowing what socialism is, you dont have to know what it is, they're endorsing it, they're participating in it, and they're supporting socialism.

And a lot of people will tell you, way, Well, the people dont have any theory, they need some theory. They need some theory even if they don't have any practice. And the Black Panther Party tells you that if a man tells you that he's the type of man who has you buying candy bars and eating the wrapping and throwing the candy away, he'd have you walking East when you're supposed to be walking West. Its true. If you listen to what the pig says, you be walkin' outside when the sun is shining with your umbrella over your head. And when it's raining youll be goin' outside leaving your umbrella inside. That's right. You gotta get it together. Im saying that's what they have you doing.

Now, what do WE do? We say that the Breakfast For Children program is a socialistic program. It teaches the people basically that by practice, we thought up and let them practice that theory and inspect that theory. What's more important? You learn something just like everybody else.

Let me try to break it down to you.

You say this Brother here goes to school 8 years to be an auto mechanic. And that teacher who used to be an auto mechanic, he tells him, "Well, n****r, you gotta go on what we call on-the-job-training." And he says, "Damn, with all this theory I got, I gotta go to on-the-job-training? What for?"

He said, "On on-the-job-training he works with me. Ive been here for 20 years. When I started work, they didn't even have auto mechanics. I ain't got no theory, I just got a whole bunch of practice."

What happened? A car came in making a whole lot of funny noise. This Brother here go get his book. He on page one, he ain't got to page 200. I'm sitting here listening to the car. He says, "What do you think it is?"

I say, "I think its the carburetor."

He says, "No I don't see anywhere in here where it says a carburetor make no noise like that." And he says, "How do you know its the carburetor?"

I said, "Well, n****r, with all them degrees as many as a thermometer, around 20 years ago, 19 to be exact, I was listening to the same kind of noise. And what I did was I took apart the voltage regulator and it wasn't that. Then I took apart the alternator and it wasn't that. I took apart the generator brushes and it wasn't that. I took apart the generator and it wasn't that. I took apart the generator and it wasn't even that. After I took apart all that I finally got to the carburetor and when I got to the carburetor I found that that's what it was. And I told myself that 'fool, next time you hear this sound you better take apart the carburetor first.'"

How did he learn? He learned through practice.

I dont care how much theory you got, if it don't have any practice applied to it, then that theory happens to be irrelevant. Right? Any theory you get, practice it. And when you practice it you make some mistakes. When you make a mistake, you correct that theory, and then it will be corrected theory that will be able to be applied and used in any situation. Thats what we've got to be able to do.

Every time I speak in a church I always try to say something, you know, about Martin Luther King. I have a lot of respect for Martin Luther King. I think he was one of the greatest orators that the country ever produced. And I listened to anyone who speaks well, because I like to listen to that. Martin Luther King said that it might look dark sometime, and it might look dark over here on the North Side. Maybe you thought the room was going to be packed with people and maybe you thought you might have to turn some people away and you might not have enough people here. Maybe some of the people you think should be here are not here and you think that, well if they're not here then it won't be as good as we thought it could have been. And maybe you thought that you need more people here than you have here. Maybe you think that the pigs are going to be able to pressure you and put enough pressure to squash your movement even before it starts. But Martin Luther King said that he heard somewhere that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And we're not worried about it being dark. He said that the arm of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward heaven.

We got Huey P. Newton in jail, and Eldridge Cleaver underground. And Alprentice Bunchy Carter has been murdered; Bobby Hutton and John Huggins been murdered. And a lot of people think that the Black Panther Party in a sense is giving up. But let us say this: That we've made the kind of commitment to the people that hardly anyone else has ever made.

We have decided that although some of us come from what some of you would call petty-bourgeois families, though some of us could be in a sense on what you call the mountaintop. We could be integrated into the society working with people that we may never have a chance to work with. Maybe we could be on the mountaintop and maybe we wouldn't have to be hidin' when we go to speak places like this. Maybe we wouldn't have to worry about court cases and going to jail and being sick. We say that even though all of those luxuries exist on the mountaintop, we understand that you people and your problems are right here in the valley.

We in the Black Panther Party, because of our dedication and understanding, went into the valley knowing that the people are in the valley, knowing that our plight is the same plight as the people in the valley, knowing that our enemies are on the mountain, to our friends are in the valley, and even though its nice to be on the mountaintop, we're going back to the valley. Because we understand that there's work to be done in the valley, and when we get through with this work in the valley, then we got to go to the mountaintop. We're going to the mountaintop because there's a motherfucker on the mountaintop that's playing King, and he's been bullshitting us. And weve got to go up on the mountain top not for the purpose of living his life style and living like he lives. We've got to go up on the mountain top to make this motherfucker understand, goddamnit, that we are coming from the valley!

Capitalism, Fascism, and the Tactics of Terror

 (Courthouse News Service photo/Karina Brown)

By Kenn Orphan

“There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” – Vladimir Lenin

Between 1973 and 1990 scores of people were disappeared by the US supported fascist regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. They were incarcerated, tortured and thousands were murdered. In fact, the official total of those killed by the regime is just over 40,000. But some critics suggest it was much higher. Pinochet was able to do all of this with the blessing of the CIA who assisted him in the coup against the elected President, Salvador Allende, and in his reign of terror afterward in Chile. The painful lessons of the Pinochet years have often been obscured under neoliberal historical revisionism, but with what is currently unfolding in cities like Portland, Oregon, it is urgent to revisit them.

When Donald Trump’s federal agents rolled into Portland last week, they began to employ classic police state tactics of intimidation. Tear gas was employed, “non-lethal” munitions, and the psychological terror of unmarked vans snatching protesters, and even those simply standing by, off the streets without arrest warrants and whisked off to undisclosed locations. The use of forced disappearance should not be underestimated because it is, perhaps, the most effective tactic at crushing dissent and eliminating political rivals.

Under the fist of General Pinochet, the state became a ruthless force of terror. In September of 1973, at least 10,000 people, many of them students, activists and political dissidents, were rounded up by the military shortly after he took the office of the presidency by a US supported and orchestrated coup.They were taken to the National Soccer Stadium in Santiago where they were subjected to torture or were massacred outright. Thousands of bodies were buried in mass graves. Thousands were never recovered as they were discarded in rivers and even in the Pacific Ocean. Even today, families await justice and the chance to bury their loved ones.

Forced disappearances are a crime against humanity according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. And there is no statute of limitations on this crime. But, as we have seen over the past few decades, the US government and military cares little for the international rule of law. Indeed, it has enjoyed impunity for its atrocities while those who violate these statutes in the Global South are often brought to trial and punished severely. The US invasion of Iraq, along with the occupation and atrocities are clear examples of this. And under Trump, the American Empire has divorced itself even more from international bodies that seek at least some regulation of state excesses or the management of crises. His withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change and his recent withdrawal from the World Health Organization during a global pandemic point to a brazen disinterest in engaging with the international community.

Pinochet’s Chile was not alone in its use of forced disappearances. During the Dirty War in Argentina at least 30,000 people were disappeared and murdered by the US backed, rightwing military junta. In fact, under the US implemented and CIA backed and assisted “Operation Condor,” which targeted leftist or socialist political activists, student organizers, and academicians, the entire South American continent became a killing field from the 1970s well into the 1980s. Unsurprisingly, the genocidaire Henry Kissinger was deeply involved in these atrocities in much the same way as he was in Southeast Asia and on the African continent. And he assisted in marrying federal agencies, surveillance and state police, and paramilitary mercenaries and death squads to one another in order to carry out the crimes successfully.

It is not hyperbolic for there to be great alarm over Trump’s use of forced disappearances. Although there have been no deaths because of it, his flouting of the rule of law and use of this tactic of terror is not an accident. And the people under him have proven time and time again that they are ever willing to carry out his orders. As the election looms in November, we should not underestimate the timing of this either. Across the nation protests have arisen to confront the long legacy and continuing ruthlessness of racist, police state violence. The rage has been simmering for a long time, and the murder of George Floyd ignited and galvanized millions to take a stand. To Trump, who is one of the most overtly racist presidents to have taken office since Woodrow Wilson or Teddy Roosevelt, this represents the greatest threat to his legitimacy.

The US is now leading the world in cases of Covid-19 with over 140,000 deaths. Indeed, the pandemic is currently wreaking havoc on an American healthcare system which was already suffering from disorganization and beholden to the whims and will of merciless capitalist predation. When Trump came in, he literally threw out the handbook on how to deal with global pandemics, so the ongoing protests to police brutality provide him a perfect distraction from his colossal blundering and incompetence.

And of course, there are other ingredients to this recipe for disaster. Trump faces a weak candidate in Joe Biden, who cannot seem to form a coherent opposition to his blatant fascist impulses. If there is no meaningful alternative that represents real change in ordinary people’s lives then, like it or not, the people will not bother to vote. There is also the precarious economic situation, the elephant in the room that few wish to acknowledge. With millions unemployed and facing eviction or foreclosure, the elements of fascism may be coalesced even further. God help us if a climate change fueled catastrophe comes this summer or in the fall, because it will be the perfect storm for him to pull whatever levers necessary for him to quell dissent and remain in power. He has such mechanisms at his disposal thanks to the Patriot Act and the NDAA. He can detain any US citizen indefinitely by merely labelling them a terrorist, thanks to legislation designed and endorsed by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. And he has already begun branding anyone who opposes his tyranny, like Antifa and Black Lives Matter, with that spurious charge.

The uprisings taking place across the US are the stirrings of a global mass movement that shows great promise. That they are taking place in the most wealthy and powerful empire on the planet is an indication that this empire itself is beginning to unravel under the weight of its hubris and a long legacy of cruelty, racism and brutality. But no one should underestimate the tremendous pain a wounded giant can inflict as it falls. Its violence is unoriginal, but it will use the only tactics it knows. And we should remember that it is quite familiar with atrocities because it has visited them frequently on the Global South for decades. Portland is a portent. And, as Lenin inferred in the quote above, things can happen rapidly and in a short span of time. We would be wise to heed these urgent lessons before it is too late.

Chicago’s Unemployed Rebellion

[Artwork by Mara Garcia, @magavitart]

By Eric Kerl

Originally published at Rampant Magazine.

he social, political, and economic crisis currently unfolding, shaped by a global pandemic, is a damning indictment of modern capitalism. In its first two months, more than 30 million people in the United States have lost their jobs. While business leaders cavort with the Trump administration and right-wing states’ rights advocates demand to reopen the economy, the crisis will only deepen. Indeed, many economists predict that the fallout will be the worst since the Great Depression.

The crisis of the 1930s culminated in the rise of fascist power in Europe. In the United States, it ushered in the New Deal coalition and the expansion of the welfare state. But, by the end of the decade, only the slaughter of World War II finally jumpstarted the global economy through sheer barbarism and unrestrained weapons production.

Like Donald Trump and the rest of today’s ruling class, leading capitalists of the 1930s had little to offer the majority of people after the stock market crashed in 1929. Unemployment, poverty, hunger, and homelessness mushroomed. As the crisis deepened, the industrial overlord, notorious anti-Semite, and failed presidential hopeful Henry Ford advised poor people to take up sharecropping to feed themselves. With paid advertisements in newspapers across the country Ford claimed, “Stocks may fail, but seedtime and harvest do not fail.”[1] Meanwhile, ecological catastrophe devastated the dustbowl-ravaged Great Plains and displaced more than 3.5 million people. By 1934, the Yearbook of Agriculture announced:

Approximately 35 million acres of formerly cultivated land have essentially been destroyed for crop production. . . . 100 million acres now in crops have lost all or most of the topsoil; 125 million acres of land now in crops are rapidly losing topsoil.

While millions went hungry, Ford partnered with the growing Nazi war machine. During the first six months of 1932, Ford’s meagre operations in Germany struggled to make money. Although the plants were ridiculed as “foreign” by the wave of German nationalism, Ford swooned over Hitler’s new plans to shift automobile manufacturing into overdrive, fueled by government cash.  By 1937, Ford was a certified manufacturer of trucks and cars for the Nazi regime’s military.

Back in the United States, Ford summoned the police and National Guard against unemployed workers. During the spring of 1932, three thousand unemployed workers protested outside Ford’s behemoth River Rouge complex in Detroit demanding relief. Police attacked the protesters, injuring dozens. Four workers were shot and killed, including Joseph York, a twenty-three-year-old unemployed worker. The following day, York’s girlfriend, Mary Grossman, faced down the murderous cops:

Yes, I was there. I’m not sorry. I did it for starving millions. Blame capitalism which is the cause of all suffering. Now don’t talk to me![2]

Similar protests erupted in cities around the world, often organized and led by Communist Party members and other radicals. Politicians and media outlets routinely decried the reds and riots of unemployed. International headlines of the time read: “Spanish Jobless Riot,” “Canadians Attack City Hall,” “British Hunger Army Ready to Invade Commons,” “Police Battle Reds with Tear Gas at Detroit Factory,” “Police Protect President from Hunger Parade,” “German Jobless Charge Cabinet, Plunder Dole,” “Red Rebellion Flares in Spain,” and “Batons of Police Halted Red Mob in Washington Riot.”

Yet, as the American Civil Liberties Union noted at the time, “It is a matter of common knowledge among relief workers that vigorous demonstrations—so-called ‘riots’ by the unemployed, produce an almost miraculous effect in loosening the public purse-strings.”[3]

Chicago’s Unemployed Rebellion

During the first month of 1928, nearly two years before the stock market crash of 1929, the entertainment industry magazine Variety expressed its anxiety for Chicago’s theater business. Unemployment, the article noted, was the highest since 1922. And theater-goers had reason to be uncomfortable: “The horde of ’boes and panhandlers infesting the Loop makes New York Times Square parasites seem like a coterie of philanthropists in comparison.” Still, the article remained naively optimistic. “Because of sound financial qualities, it is believed by authorities here the unemployment wave will be relieved considerably this year.”[4]

Instead, the number of unemployed Americans surged from 3 million to 15 million. By 1932, half of Illinois’s workers were jobless. In Chicago, where 60 percent of the state’s unemployed lived, a deep social crisis was underway. One report noted at the time,

There are several Chicago garbage dumps, some of which are under city supervision and some private. About a dozen places where garbage is dumped were visited by different members of the committee; and in every place where “soft” garbage, such as the remains of food, were found, people were reported to be picking it over and eating from it at the dump or taking it home to cook.[5]

The influence of communists and revolutionaries helped galvanize the unemployed into a fighting force, and authorities grew panicked about the increasing militancy and organization of the movement. While cops beat marchers in Detroit and New York City, Chicago police ransacked offices of unemployed and radical organizations throughout the city. Despite the repression, 50,000 workers mobilized in Chicago streets on March 6, 1930, for a national day of action billed as International Unemployment Day.

Less than a week later, three policemen were shot and eleven “communists” were arrested at the north end of Michigan Ave during a “riotous demonstration.” Those arrested included Bryan Moss, Ben Koblentz, Mrs. Anna Rejba, Martin Rich, Evelyn Weiner, William Bart, Frank Cordisco, William Bart, Morris Krivin, Anna Grossman, and Ida Mittelman. Their defense lawyer was Albert Goldman, an antifascist organizer who later emerged as a leader of the fledgling US Trotskyist movement, lead counsel for the Teamsters during the 1934 Minneapolis strike, and a mayoral candidate in Chicago. Ultimately, a “communist parade” preceded their acquittal, “in which several thousand men and women, half of them Negroes, participated.”[6]

The following July, the Communist Party’s Trade Union Unity League initiated a call for a national conference of unemployed councils.[7] More than 1,300 delegates from CP-affiliated organizations and unions met in Chicago. Black workers comprised an important number of the representatives and the conference highlighted racial justice demands in the unemployed movement.

As unemployed workers flooded into Chicago from the Midwest and South in search of jobs, unemployed councils blossomed in neighborhoods across the city. Rent strikes, anti-eviction blockades, and street mobilizations occurred across the city and demonstrations targeted the role of cops in carrying out the evictions and repression. One Chicago Tribune article described a typical action;

300 men and women gathered outside the stations. Policeman Dominick Varsetto, assigned there, closed the door. Members of the group pounded upon it until they broke the glass, but no further damage was done. At that moment Liet. Make Mills of the industrial squad and Capt. Phil Parodi of the Maxwell street stations arrived with eight police squads. Leaders of the crowd made soapbox speeches before the gathering dispersed. Liet. Mills arrested five alleged ringleaders: Joseph Shoster, no address; Edward Van Horn, 642 Liberty street; Joseph Bebko, 1717 West Madison street; and James Adams, no address.[8]

Still, aid to one hundred and forty-three thousand Chicago families was cut by 25 percent, and perishable food supplies were slashed by half in 1932.[9] In neighborhoods across the city, Chicago’s poor rebelled in a firestorm of organizing and riots.

On a cold, rainy Halloween, 2,500 unemployed gathered at the corner of 22nd and Wentworth. On the city’s West Side, 3,000 gathered at Union Park. In Washington Park on the South Side, 2,000 protesters gathered. Along with thousands from other parts of the city, they converged in the Loop, wearing red armbands, red dresses, and carrying red umbrellas and red flags. One journalist reported,

As the singing, shouting, hunger armies moved toward the meeting place from north, west and south, their forces were constantly increased. Detachments joined on the end of the lines until, by the time the three groups were a few blocks apart in the loop, a total of some 15,000 persons was moving.[10]

Military veterans carried a banner that read, “Wilson’s heroes; Hoover’s hoboes.” Other contingents included a group of Italian antifascists and “a platoon of children, 7 to 10 years old, carrying empty milk bottles.” Unemployed Black workers highlighted the case of Scottsboro and pressed the issue of racial justice.

Less than a month later, “a genuine united front of working class organizations was constituted” in Chicago to fight the 50 percent reduction of relief. Unemployed organizations from across the city, along with the Communist Party, Socialist Party, and the Workers League, organized the event. As one participant described:

The call for the conference signed by the three organizations met with a huge response everywhere. The masses reacted as never before, and the conference bore testimony of this fact. 750 delegates representing 350 organizations made up the conference. Included in the conference were over 40 church organizations composed entirely of unemployed workers, the Farmer-Labor Party, the A.F. of L., fraternal organizations, the TUUL.[11]

The city’s authorities responded with a wave of repression, arrests, and deportations of unemployed and radical organizers. While the Chicago Police Department flaunted its racism and brutality routinely, the frequent deployment of cops also provided opportunities to exhibit their bumbling idiocy. On a Saturday afternoon in 1934, just four days before Thanksgiving, four thousand Chicagoans marched to City Hall with demands for unemployment and relief benefits. Nearly two hundred cops were stationed inside the building “in case trouble developed.” When none developed, one of the jackass cops “tossed a few firecrackers under the feet” of a Black cop. A frenzy of gunfire erupted inside the building and seven cops were shot in the barrage of friendly fire.[12]

Winning relief

Like Henry Ford’s sharecropping schemes, government and business leaders had no genuine relief to offer millions of poor and hungry workers. Genuine programs, of course, were organized and advocated by the unemployed themselves. In Pennsylvania, insurgent rank-and-file coal miners pressed their demands for the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill.[13] In Charlotte, North Carolina, the unemployed council organized militant, interracial demonstrations in support of the bill.[14] In Chicago, hundreds of delegates from the Illinois Workers Alliance, Emergency Workers Union, and other organizations of the unemployed—representing about 750,000 workers—endorsed the bill in the fall of 1934.

The Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill was unveiled by the Communist Party in the summer of 1930 and quickly won the endorsement of three thousand five hundred local unions. As Chris Wright described the bill,

In the form it would eventually assume, it provided for unemployment insurance for workers and farmers (regardless of age, sex, or race) that was to be equal to average local wages but no less than $10 per week plus $3 for each dependent; people compelled to work part-time (because of inability to find full-time jobs) were to receive the difference between their earnings and the average local full-time wages; commissions directly elected by members of workers’ and farmers’ organisations were to administer the system; social insurance would be given to the sick and elderly, and maternity benefits would be paid eight weeks before and eight weeks after birth; and the system would be financed by unappropriated funds in the Treasury and by taxes on inheritances, gifts, and individual and corporate incomes above $5,000 a year. Later iterations of the bill went into greater detail on how the system would be financed and managed.[15]

The bill was eventually co-opted and presented to Congress by the self-described “La Follette Republican” Ernest Lundeen of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, a rabid isolationist and Nazi sympathizer.[16] Like the homegrown fascist radio personality Father Charles Coughlin he railed against the crimes and inequality of capitalism. But his neck swelled over the threat of communism and its advocacy for racial justice.

Nevertheless, the groundswell of action and organizing by socialists, communists, and unemployed workers—Black and white—ensured that Lundeen’s bill would “extend to all workers, whether they be industrial, agricultural, domestic, office, or professional workers, and to farmers, without discrimination because of age, sex, race, color, religious or political opinion or affiliation.”[17] Indeed, a New York Post poll showed that 83 percent of its readers preferred the more radical Lundeen bill over the Social Security Act.

The strength and popularity of the unemployed movement and genuine relief coincided with a massive strike wave that reached from San Francisco to Minneapolis, Toledo, and the textile mills of the South. While sectarian squabbles often counteracted the potential for solidarity in other areas of work, the Communist Party and Socialist Party both appealed for common, united front approaches to unemployment. For the CP, their united front demands included:

1. Decisive wage increases and reduction in hours, supporting a bold strike movement to win them

2. For the immediate enactment of the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill

3. For the immediate enactment of the Farmers’ Emergency Relief Bill to secure for the farmers the possession of their lands and tools, and to provide abundance of food to the masses

4. For the immediate enactment of the Bill for Negro Rights

5. For the united struggle against war and fascism

6. For the broadest possible united action in localities, in factories, in trade unions, and on every question affecting the workers and toiling masses, to win better conditions[18]

Ultimately, the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill was defeated in favor of Roosevelt’s watered-down policies of the second New Deal. But it was not a foregone conclusion that something more radical—genuine relief—was within the grasp of the unemployed movement.

And, the current crisis of unemployment and poverty will not be magically solved by today’s politicians. Only our own self-activity can win genuine relief from this most recent and profound crisis of capitalism.

Notes

[1] “Henry Ford on Self-Help,” advertisement prepared and paid for by the Ford Motor Company as a contribution to public welfare, Chicago Tribune, June 1, 1932, 14.

[2] “15 Arrested After Police Slay Four in Unemployed Riot,” The Pantagraph, March 8, 1932, 1.

[3]  Quoted in Edgar Bernhard, Ira Latimer, and Harvey O’Connor, Pursuit of Freedom: A History of Civil Liberty in Illinois, 1787–1942 (Chicago: Chicago Civil Liberties Committee, 1942), 158, accessed at: http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:pursuitoffreedom00chic.

[4] “Chicago’s Heavy Breadline Tells of Unemployment,” Variety, February 1, 1928, 12.

[5] Quoted in Edgar Bernhard, Ira Latimer, and Harvey O’Connor, Pursuit of Freedom: A History of Civil Liberty in Illinois, 1787–1942 (Chicago: Chicago Civil Liberties Committee, 1942), 157, accessed at: http://hdl.handle.net/10111/UIUCOCA:pursuitoffreedom00chic.

[6] “Jurors Acquit 11 Alleged Reds; Fired by Judge,” Chicago Tribune, April 20, 1932, 19.

[7] Solomon, Mark, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 148.

[8] “Seek to Raise Cash Pending U.S. Relief Loan,” Chicago Tribune, July 21, 1932, 2.

[9] “Relief to 143,000 Chicago Families Is Cut 25 Percent,” Alton Evening Telegraph, October 27, 1932, 1.

[10] Robert T. Loughran, “Radicals Parade under Guise of ‘Hunger March’,” Freeport Journal-Standard, October 31, 1932, 1–12.

[11] Albert Glotzer, “Stalinists Make Right About Face in Chicago Unemployed United Front,” The Militant, Vol. V, No. 28 (November 26, 1932), 1–2.

[12] “Hunger March is Peaceful but 7 Policemen Hurt,” Jacksonville Daily Journal, November 25, 1934, 8.

[13] Walter Howard, Anthracite Reds Vol. 2: A Documentary History of Communists in Northeastern Pennsylvania During the Great Depression (iUniverse, 2004), 152.

[14] Gregory S. Taylor, The History of the North Carolina Communist Party, University of South Carolina Press, 2009, 73–74.

[15] Chris Wright, The Hidden History of American Radicalism: The Campaign for the Workers’ Unemployment Insurance Bill” Counterfire, April 25, 2020, https://www.counterfire.org/articles/history/21138-the-hidden-history-of-american-radicalism-the-campaign-for-the-workers-unemployment-insurance-bill.

[16] B.W. Hart, Hitler’s American Friends: The Third Reich’s Supporters in the United States (New York: St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2018).

[17] M. Poole, The Segregated Origins of Social Security: African Americans and the Welfare State (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 22.

[18] United States Congress House Committee on Un-American Activities, Hearings before the Committee on Un-American Activities, House of Representatives, Eighty-Fourth Congress, Second Session (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1956), 231.

Social Distance with a Vengeance

(Kevin Frayer/Getty Images)

By Werner Lange

Long before the practice of social distancing became the new normal, there was the concept of social distance. Named after its founder, the Bogardus Social Distance Scale was developed within the Chicago School of Sociology during the turbulent 1920s to empirically measure the degree of affinity (or lack thereof) Americans felt for members of various racial and ethnic groups in our highly diverse society. Seven categories of “social distance” were established ranging from willingness to marry a member of specified groups to outright exclusion of all such group members from the USA;  the higher the number on a scale of 1 to 7, the lower the affinity and greater the felt social distance. Not surprising for a white-supremacist society, European-Americans consistently ranked as having the lowest social distance standing in several nationwide surveys over a 40 year period, while Americans of color had the highest.

Particularly instructive for our troubling times is the comparatively high social distance score consistently expressed toward the Chinese, an ethnic group that has  never fully escaped the racist stigmatization of the “Yellow Peril”. In fact, precisely that virulent castigation gained new life with repeated recent presidential denunciations of the coronavirus as the “Chinese virus”. Not satisfied with raising the specter of a new deadly Yellow Peril, Trump used his press conference of March 19 to even evoke the ugly spirit of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 by congratulating himself for having “called for a ban for people coming in from China”. Such Sinophobia is viciously echoed at increasingly alarming rates in the streets of America and in the halls of Congress, where a US Senator recently blamed the “culture where people eat bats and snakes and dogs” for the coronavirus pandemic.

These utterly racist mindsets are not far from genocidal ones, patterns of barbaric thought and behavior hardly alien to the American experience as evidenced by the smallpox infestation of blankets given to Mandan Native Americans in 1837. In the midst of this pandemic, depraved visions of genocide once again rear their ugly heads. What else could have motivated the Trump regime to attempt, by a billion dollar bribe, to acquire exclusive rights and use of a developing coronavirus vaccine from German scientists? The prospect of witnessing others succumb by the millions to the pandemic while chosen Americans are safely vaccinated evidently fits the racist, even genocidal, game plan of this criminal regime.

That barbaric game plan is all too evident in regard to Iran. As of mid-March, Iran has suffered over 1,280 fatalities and 17,300 confirmed cases of coronavirus infections, the third highest of any nation in the world. Especially vulnerable are some hundred thousand Iranians who have survived the chemical weapons attacks by Hussein during the Iran-Iraq war but suffer from various lung ailments from that brutal conflict. Rather than lift the onerous sanctions imposed on Iran which deprive the beleaguered Iranian people of urgently needed medications and supplies, the Trump regime resorted to a new round of draconian sanctions on March 17 to intensify its “maximum pressure campaign” illegally implemented in 2018. The sanctions, a clear form of collective punishment, have already imposed enormous suffering upon countless Iranians. With the advent of the coronavirus pandemic, these immoral sanctions are guaranteed to dramatically increase the Iranian body count, something that only a genocidal mindset could wish and seek. Yet with remarkably few exceptions, a roaring silence emanates from our national leaders regarding the calamity caused by these criminal sanctions. And the criminals themselves, ones responsible for the recent assassination of a beloved Iranian leader, likely greet the growing calamity in Iran with glee. There is no room for such barbarism in the greater moral universe to emerge from this crisis.

The social distance scale did not envision genocide as an option, and social distancing in our times is designed to keep people six feet apart to help prevent putting them six feet under. Hopefully we, as a more enlightened human family, will come out of this pandemic with an operative mindset much different than before.  Once this crisis is over we need to practice just the opposite of social distancing physically and massively implement social proximity mentally by finally overcoming the racist legacy manifested and measured by the social distance scale, let alone forever cleanse the world of genocidal thoughts and practices. We must recognize, like never before, that we are one human family united by a common origin and common destiny. Whether that destiny is to be peaceful co-existence or no existence largely depends of the extent to which, we, as one wounded but healed global family, make a paradigm shift from hate to love.

American Violence in Chicago and Beyond: The Morbid Symptoms of Our Interregnum

By Jim Burns

On November 24th, Chicago police officer Jason van Dyke was indicted on first-degree murder charges for the public execution of 17 year-old Laquan McDonald in October 2014. The same week, the Chicago Police moved to fire police detective Dante Servin for murdering 22 year-old Rekia Boyd in 2012, and on December 1st, Mayor Rahm Emanuel fired Chicago Police Commissioner Garry McCarthy. Those events have shed even greater light on the systematic racist violence woven through the history of the Chicago Police Department and the city government more broadly. That brutal history includes the Department's complicity in the assassination of Chicago Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton and fellow Black Panther Party leader Mark Clark in December 1969.

The most recent stories about police violence in Chicago are occurring at the same time as allegations have surfaced about the Dothan, Alabama Police Department. According to documents leaked by department whistleblowers, a group of narcotics officers planted drugs and weapons on African American men "for years," and the District Attorney covered-up an ensuing internal affairs investigation to protect the officers' careers (see Carroll, 2015). The unit's supervisor, current Police Chief Steve Parrish, Sgt. Andy Hughes, now Alabama's Director of Homeland Security, and other officers involved were reportedly also active in a Neo-Confederate organization, which advocates the return of Blacks to Africa and has called the Civil Rights Movement a "Jewish conspiracy." The actions of those officers could impact hundreds of criminal cases in which African American men were prosecuted and many sent to prison. Those White police officers viewed Black men as nothing more than commodities on which to build their careers, and many have reportedly received promotions and now occupy leadership positions in law enforcement.

Back in Chicago, Emanuel's firing of Police Commissioner McCarthy cannot obfuscate the culpability of Emanuel himself, Cook County Prosecutor Anita Alvarez, and perhaps others in what Columbia Law Professor Bernard Harcourt characterized in the New York Times as a cover-up of Mr. McDonald's murder during Emanuel's re-election campaign. Considering the city government's extensive history of numerous forms of violence against Persons of Color and its willful negligence, abuse of power, and betrayal of the public trust, Harcourt and others are calling for the resignations of Emanuel and Alvarez as well. Further, cover-up allegations must be investigated, and if warranted Emanuel, Alvarez, McCarthy, and any others involved should face criminal prosecution.

In addition to the police murders of Mr. McDonald and Ms. Boyd, the Guardian (see Ackerman, 2015) earlier this year filed a transparency lawsuit and reported an "off-the-books interrogation warehouse" at Homan Square where between August 2004 and June 2015 the Chicago Police "disappeared" more than 7,000 people, nearly 6,000 of whom were Black. The Guardian report indicates that police allowed lawyers to access Homan Square, for only 0.94% of the 7,185 arrests logged during that 11-year period, and reportedly held those arrested for hours or days, denied them phone calls to their families or attorneys, and pressured many to become informants.

Another example of the City of Chicago's institutional violence against communities of Color includes Emanuel's 2013 closure of 49 public schools that served primarily African American and Latino communities, the largest mass closure of public schools in a single city ever, despite massive protests by teachers, led by Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, parents, students, and community members. Speaking on Democracy Now! in 2013, education historian Diane Ravich characterized Emanuel's school closures, also a contentious issue in his re-election bid, as an economic development plan predicated on gentrification and the privatization of public education in the form of charter schools, which will transfer public funds to private edupreneurs. That same racist neoliberal formula has eviscerated public education for poor communities of Color in places like New Orleans and Philadelphia as well.

The contemporary violence perpetrated by the criminal injustice system against communities of Color, exemplified by the murder of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his murderer, and the police murders of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, and too many others also brings into sharper focus the long and complex history of multiple forms of institutional violence targeted at African Americans and many Others at the behest of corporate power. In Chicago alone, examples of police violence against African Americans and organized labor include the Haymarket Labor Uprising of 1886, the Pullman Strike of 1894, the 1919 Race Riots, the 1931 Chicago Eviction Riot, and the 1968 police violence directed at anti-war protestors during the Democratic National Convention.

Racist Violence and the History of Public Policing

The recent visibility of violence against African Americans makes clear the long history of institutional racism in policing and the criminal justice system more broadly. Marlese Durr's research traces contemporary police violence against African Americans to the beginning of colonial policing, which in the American South centered on slave patrols, the first publically-funded police departments. As Black Americans migrated to Northern cities from the South due to vicious political, social, and economic repression and violence during early Reconstruction by the military, state militias, and the KKK, which took the place of disbanded slave patrols, Northern police adopted violent tactics similar to Southern slave patrols to control and segregate African Americans from Whites (Durr, 2015). Current aggressive police practices such as racial profiling, stop-and-frisk, and driving while Black, as well as the unjustified use of deadly force continue the slave patrol ethos in modern policing and other judicial and political institutions (Durr, 2015).

Durr's work and scholarship by Michelle Alexander and Bryan Stevenson on the Post-Jim Crow racism underlying our criminal injustice system, the neoliberal prison-industrial complex, and school-to-prison pipeline further illuminate the complexity of institutional and individual racialized, classed, gendered violence ubiquitous in U.S. history.

Individual and Institutional Violence in Broader Historical Context

The history of the U.S. is the history of militarism and violence. In American Violence: A Documentary History, Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace (1970) documented American political, economic, racial, religious, police, and personal violence as well as domestic terrorism, from the violence between Puritans and Pilgrims to the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy. Hofstadter and Wallace noted that American violence is widely regarded as representative of a history, but not a tradition for two reasons:

"First, our violence lacks both an ideological and geographical center; it lacks cohesion; it has been too various, diffuse, and spontaneous to be forged into a single, sustained, inveterate hatred shared by entire social classes. Second, we have a remarkable lack of memory where violence is concerned and have left most of our excesses a part of our buried history." (p. 3)

While I agree that Americans, particularly White Americans, suffer, as Hofstadter and Wallace put it, a pervasive "historical amnesia" about domestic violence, I disagree somewhat with the contention that American violence lacks cohesion, particularly in the current historical moment. Perhaps this is because Hofstadter and Wallace defined violence purely in terms of physical violence rather than interrogating American violence in both its physical and institutional forms. Their organization of American violence in terms of religious, racial, class, and political violence suggests a cohesive ideological nexus through which acts of individual violence have occurred in the context of institutional support of the corporate state. Over the last five decades particularly, many assumptions that have historically driven classism, racism, gender discrimination, religious intolerance, nativism, militarization, and a hyper-masculine ethos of violence as restorative have coalesced through the enthrallment with neoliberalism into an ideology that rationalizes, celebrates, and markets violence.

Thus, during the same week that Jason van Dyke was indicted for Laquan McDonald's murder, Robert Lewis Dear allegedly murdered three people and wounded nine others at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. While Dear, a White 57 year-old male, was being taken into custody-a radically different fate than that which befell Mr. McDonald and Ms. Boyd-he reportedly repeated the words "no more baby parts," a reference to an incendiary undercover, heavily edited video created by an anti-abortion group that purports to show Planned Parenthood employees discussing the sale of fetal tissue (see Holpuch, 2015). Evangelical Republican presidential hopeful and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who has long articulated staunch anti-abortion and homophobic rhetoric, called the Colorado Springs attack "domestic terrorism, especially for those of us in the pro-life movement" (see Bobic, 2015). Yet considering the history of outrageously violent rhetoric and actions among many in the "pro-life" movement, Huckabee's condemnation seems more a disingenuous attempt to distance himself from his own violent rhetoric to bolster his failing presidential campaign.

Reflecting further on Huckabee's statement equating the Colorado Springs massacre with domestic terrorism reminds me of a 2013 National Public Radio interview with John Lewis on the 50th anniversary of George Wallace's 1963 inaugural address after being elected Governor of Alabama in which he vowed "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" (see NPR, 2013). Lewis reflected on the power of words to create a climate in which some rationalize an entitlement to violence:

"My governor, this elected official, was saying in effect, you are not welcome, you are not welcome. Words can be very powerful. Words can be dangerous. Governor Wallace never pulled a trigger. He never fired a gun. But in his speech he created the environment for others to pull the trigger in the days, the weeks, and months to come."

Considering the deep and complex history of multiple, intersected forms of violence in the U.S., is it any wonder that America has descended into a de-socialized milieu marked by fear and the militarization of our social and political institutions? The twisted neoliberal ethos of markets above all else, bereft of any ethic of social responsibility and imbued with voracious selfishness and greed thrives on the manufacture and manipulation of crises through which all forms of wealth are redistributed upward to an oligarchic elite. That elite, who consider democracy itself a disposable excess and an impediment to capitalism, has largely succeeded in reconfiguring the state to serve the interests of corporate power. Corporate power has thus become overwhelming, ubiquitous, invisible, and unaccountable, professes no loyalty to any nation-state, has rendered establishment political parties a joke, and elections a high-priced reality show-like farce. The corporate state has facilitated the concentration of wealth and power into so few hands that the state wields what Max Weber called the monopoly of the use of force solely in service of a corporate oligarchy against a sea of dispensable people.

The lexicon of neoliberalism has functioned similarly to George Wallace's hateful words by dispossessing burgeoning groups of people of any opportunity for a decent life. As Michael Kimmel demonstrated in Angry White Men, the violence and rage we see engulfing America and the world is gendered, raced, and classed. Despite maintaining control of every social, political, and economic institution, White men portray themselves as victims of discrimination because they interpret those social, economic, and political positions of power as their birthright. As women, racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ people, immigrants, and many Others have demanded equality and the breakdown of White, straight, patriarchy, some White men, particularly working-class Whites who have suffered economic dispossession, have turned their simmering rage into what Kimmel calls an aggrieved entitlement to the use violence to restore their thwarted sense of masculinity. Most outrageous, neoliberal elites and political demagogues have carefully cultivated that sense of aggrieved entitlement, and, like George Wallace more than 50 years ago, created a fertile ground for the mindless violence now consuming us.

Safe Spaces, Discomfort, and Transformation in a Death-Saturated Age

Violence against African Americans, Women, Queer Communities, Native Peoples, Immigrants, Organized Labor, and many Others has a long history and has taken many forms in the nexus of corporate-state power: slavery; the violent suppression of civil and political rights; genocide against Native Americans; the proliferation of the militarized carceral state; the poverty created by what Chris Hedges calls capitalist "sacrifice zones" filled with destroyed environmental landscapes and disposable people; massive educational inequities; and union busting to name a few. The concomitant upward redistribution of wealth and power has reached the point at which we find ourselves in what Henry Giroux (2014), quoting Robert Lifton, calls a "death-saturated age" in which "Political authority and power have been transformed into a sovereignty of corporate governance and rule" (p. 183). Giroux (2014) further warns:

"The United States has moved from a market economy to a market society in which all vestiges of the social contract are under attack, and politics is ruled by the irrational notion that casino capitalism should govern not simply the economy but the entirety of social life. Since the new Gilded Age began, not only are democratic values and social protections at risk, but the civic and formative cultures that make such values and protections central to democratic life are in danger or disappearing altogether." (p. 184)

Educator and education researcher Lisa Delpit (2012) has written that "true culture supports its people; it doesn't destroy them" (p. 7). The market society of which Giroux (2014) writes has only hardened ethics of cruelty and violence such as racism, gender discrimination, homophobia, religious intolerance, hyper-nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, etc., which have always existed in the U.S., but have increasingly been mobilized to the extent that they have come to define America. That viciousness and the anti-politics associated with the creation of a market society has spawned a destructive, survival of the fittest anti-culture expressed in Margaret Thatcher's cruel maxim that "there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families" (Giroux, 2014, p. 187). Sadly, Tocqueville saw the darker side of Thatcher's de-socializing hyper-individualism in his 19th Century study of American democracy:

"Individualism is a recent expression arising out of a new idea. Our fathers knew only the word egoism….Individualism is a reflective and tranquil sentiment that disposes each citizen to cut himself off from the mass of his fellow men and withdraw into the circle of family and friends, so that, having created a little society for his own use, he gladly leaves the larger society to take care of itself." (2004, p. 585)

Considering the pervasiveness of the neoliberal marketizing ethos as it seeps into every social and political sphere, is it any wonder that everyone and everything has become commodified with a "market value?" Our environment is valued only to the extent that the "surplus value" can be extracted from its resources. Human value lies in the ability to serve the market society through consumption, debt, and adherence to a cruel ethos of self-interest driven, as Toni Morrison (2015) writes, by a perverse sense of individualism as a taxpayer with no sense of obligation to serve others as a citizen.

My greatest concern as a teacher lies in the cooptation of education, both in formal and informal educational spaces, by neoliberal edupreneurs. Marketized education reframes schools, colleges, universities, and public educational spaces as profit centers for all sorts of "educational" products and envisages education as a reductive, instrumental system of technical training and disciplinary control by which to churn out compliant worker/consumers bereft of the critical conscience to question institutional power or imagine any other future than the present that has been engineered for them. As Giroux (2014) explains:

"Public education has become a site of pedagogical repression, robbing students of the ability to think critically as a result of the two political business parties' emphasis on education as mindless testing, standardization, and the deskilling of teachers….low-income and poor minority students increasingly find themselves in schools in which the line between prison culture and school culture is blurred." (p. 184)

Just as outrageous in the context of a history of institutional violence against Persons of Color are the rants by privileged White anti-public anti-intellectuals like Kathleen Parker, who excoriated "thin-skinned" students and "safe spaces" in a November 24th Washington Post op-ed. Considering the proximity Parker's own "hissy fit" to anti-racism actions at numerous colleges and universities and public mass actions against police violence, Parker's commentary is uninformed, flawed, and racist as well. What Parker and those of her privileged ilk prove incapable of even attempting to understand is that their entire lives, as has mine as a White, straight, cisgender, middle-class American man, have been lived in one continuous safe space in which their Whiteness, class, and culture have been unreflectively affirmed in every textbook they have ever read, every relationship they have been privileged to have chosen, every form of media they have seen, and the very society they have, as Tocqueville wrote, created for themselves. They have never had the courage to confront their partial experiences and flawed assumptions about themselves, their culture, history, and Others, and they have worn their culture and Whiteness as a "neutral norm" against which all else is Other. They have been privileged to live in a safe space described by the late Ronald Takaki as the Master Narrative of American History:

"According to this powerful and popular but inaccurate story, our country was settled by European immigrants, and Americans are white. 'Race,' observed Toni Morrison, has functioned as a 'metaphor' necessary to the 'construction of Americanness': in the creation of our national identity, 'American' has been defined as 'white.' Not to be 'white' is to be designated as 'Other'-different, inferior, and unassimilable." (Takaki, 2008, p. 4)

The Master Narrative derives its power of marginalization through expunging the histories of Others. It is a selective history in which stories that support the Master Narrative are included, while the stories of Others that might trouble the false narrative of a righteous, "exceptional" White Christian nation are selected out. One recent example includes the McGraw-Hill Company's catering to the Texas State Board of Education's historically nativist anti-intellectualism by creating a World Geography textbook that discusses Slavery as part of a pattern of immigration that brought "millions of workers from Africa to the Southern United States to work on agricultural plantations" (see Fernandez & Hauser, 2015). Another is the effort by then Republican Governor Mitch Daniels, who embodies the trend of non-academics running colleges and universities as the current president of Purdue, to ban the use of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States in public universities in Indiana (see Jaschik, 2013a, b). In response to Daniels' anti-intellectual attack on Zinn, John Tirman of MIT noted:

"As to the anti-American canard, I see this as the last refuge of a politician who is quite ignorant of the discourses in many quarters of American intellectual and activist life….Daniels does not understand that a vibrant civil society has many voices, many perspectives. To be contrary to the old mainstream construction of history is not equivalent to being anti-American. That should be obvious, but to a politician who still seems to be campaigning for something, it never will be. His unsuitability to be Purdue's president is glaring." (See Jaschik, 2013b)

The Morbid Symptoms of the Interregnum

The fundamental aims and philosophy of mass education, curriculum, and pedagogy have always been highly contested, and the pendulum has historically swung back and forth between capitalism and democracy, between justice and injustice. Today, however, the anti-politics of the market society created through contemporary neoliberalism have become so de-socialized and democracy itself so eviscerated that formal political mechanisms no longer seem capable of controlling the obscene excesses and multiple forms of violence inherent in unfettered capitalism. As our public institutions, particularly schools, universities and other public educational spaces, succumb to the logic of the market society, they increasingly become complicit in what Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed called the banking concept of education. Banking education suffers a "narration sickness" in which teachers-and I argue anyone in a pedagogical role in formal or informal educational spaces-talk about "reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable" and expound "on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students" (Freire, 2009, p. 71). Banking pedagogy views human beings as empty vessels to be filled with the knowledge and dispositions to benefit the oppressor, an utterly de-humanizing process.

John Ralston Saul, in The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World, quotes Antonio Gramsci, who wrote: "The old is dying, the new struggles to be born, and in the interregnum there are many morbid symptoms" (p. 215). People all over the world are seeing neoliberalism and all its pathologies, which extend far further into history than the neoliberal era itself, for what they are: broken promises that have broken societies, souls, and threaten to break the world. It is, as Saul writes, a dangerous time in which those who cling to power and its accouterments do so with such violence that they are blinded to the inevitable collapse of their system and the beliefs and assumptions on which the system rests. Yet Saul also asserts that we have choices:

"The belief that we do not have choices is a fantasy, an unfortunate indulgence in abdication. And so the curious thing about inevitability is that it tends not to last very long. The more the true believers in a reigning theory of truth insist that its growth is inevitable and therefore eternal, the faster the rest of us, who have a bit of distance, tend to decide that we do have the power of choice. And all things considered, we would rather choose some other approach" (p. 13)

In contrast to the banking concept of education, and our passive acceptance of the inevitable, Freire (2009) proposes a libertarian education as a process of reconciliation. Although Freire's writing in Pedagogy of the Oppressed was contextualized in adult literacy education, his conceptualization of liberating education has implications for all aspects of education, society, the economy, and governance. The key to liberation lies, as Freire wrote decades ago, not in integrating Others into the existing system-the inevitable-but in transforming institutions and structures as radically democratic so that everyone, can become "beings for themselves." Importantly, that transformation requires coalition building among and between some seemingly unlikely partners, who as yet fail to recognize their common interests in transforming the world through breaking hegemonic power and reframing power relations as more just.

In the epilogue of American Violence, Richard Hofstadter referred to the fatalism expressed by Lincoln, who saw the Civil War as divinely ordained as a "terrible but just way" of ridding America of slavery (p. 478). Yet Hofstadter, like Saul, condemns such fatalism as "hardly suitable to those who sense a potential catastrophe that they can still hope to avert," further noting: "The metapolitics of divine judgment are the last resort of those who have failed; the appeal to human judgment must be the first resort of those who expect to succeed" (p. 478). In the last analysis, we are in Gramsci's interregnum filled with morbid symptoms. Proceeding with educated hope and the expectation to succeed requires not a return to some romanticized notion of citizenship, but a fundamental rethinking of what radical democratic citizenship might mean. And this will require all of us to, as the late Dennis Carlson urged, sail from our safe harbors and rethink the world in new ways.

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