Whose lessons? Which direction?

[Pictured: Poster, 1962, by Nina Vatolina. The text reads: 'Peace, Labor, Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood, Happiness.']

By Jodi Dean

Republished from Liberation School.

As obituaries for neoliberalism pile up on our nightstands and Antonio Gramsci’s adage that the old is dying and the new cannot be born appears newly profound, we turn to the past for direction. What successes should guide us? What can we learn from our failures? If we are to advance politically in the twenty-first century, we need to learn the correct lessons from the twentieth. But what are they?

For some on the left, the problems we face today are as they have ever been failures of organization and collective commitment. A disciplined and organized working class could do more than compel concessions from capital; it could transform society. What’s needed is the revolutionary party. Others on the left blame labor’s political weakness on refusals to compromise. Militant organizations aren’t solutions. They’re errors. Only when unions and left parties accept capitalist social property relations do workers earn their seat at the table and engage in the bargaining that increases their share. Communist parties hinder such acceptance.

Forty years of neoliberalism reveals the bankruptcy of the latter perspective. Capital makes concessions only when it has no other choice. Ruling classes across the Global North have dismantled public sectors and decimated middle classes rather than provide the tax support necessary for maintaining social democracy. They’ve rolled back hard-won political and social gains, treating basic democratic rights as threats to their power. While strong tendencies on the right recognize radicalization as necessary for politics in a period of uncertainty and double down on their various illiberalisms, opponents of revolution insist that the lesson of the twentieth century is the necessity of compromise. Presuming there’s no alternative to capitalism, left Thatcherites declare that progress depends on leaving behind our communist baggage.

One instance of this perspective is Jonah Birch’s “The Cold War Made it Harder for the Left to Win” [1]. Criticizing Gary Gerstle’s argument in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, Birch rejects Gerstle’s claim that it was the communist threat that made significant reform possible in the twentieth century [2]. With homogeneous Sweden as his example of social democratic success, Birch asserts that conditions were worse for labor in countries with large communist parties. He concedes that the socio-economic context that led to economic growth after World War II is unlikely to reappear. Nevertheless, Birch advises the left to accept the lesson that communists hurt the working class.

The struggle against white supremacy and fascism is class struggle

Birch’s deeply conservative message moves to the right of mainstream liberal recognition of the impact of the court of world opinion during the Cold War. It is widely accepted that competition with the Soviet Union for hearts and minds pushed the U.S. to take steps toward the abolition of Jim Crow apartheid and institutionalized white supremacy. The denial of voting rights and violent repression of activists damaged the country’s reputation as democracy’s global defender. As soon as one acknowledges the multiracial and multinational character of the working class, one realizes how the Swedish fantasy operates (even in Sweden, as Tobias Hϋbinette demonstrates in a recent piece in the Boston Review) to make a small subset of struggles—the wage struggles of white workers—stand in for the broad array of struggles of the diverse multinational working class [3].

In the U.S., for example, communist involvement in the fight against lynching, segregation, and Jim Crow was more than a propaganda point in the Cold War’s great power conflict. From its early years, the Communist Party recognized that workers would only prevail if they were united. So long as Black workers were paid lower wages than white workers and so long as Black workers excluded from unions were available as strikebreakers, the position of all workers was insecure. The struggle against white supremacy was thus central to building the collective power to win the class struggle. This analysis of the national composition of the working class under conditions of white supremacy and racism committed communists to deepening engagement in “Negro work” in multiple arenas. These arenas included organizing agricultural and domestic workers, taking on legal campaigns on behalf of the falsely accused, and drawing out the connections between the conditions facing Black people in the U.S. and oppressed and colonized people all over the world. Even more broadly, the Party demonstrated how anti-fascist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist movements for peace were indispensable to class struggle insofar as they all took aim at U.S. monopoly capital [4].

Communists were at the forefront of the struggle against fascism and its doctrine of Aryan superiority. Birch treats the French and Italian Communist Parties as divisive organizations. He blames them for splitting the labor movement in their respective countries, thereby marginalizing the left and isolating the working class. On the one hand, Birch’s charges are belied by his own evidence: in both countries the communists regularly won around twenty percent of the national vote in elections, hardly an indication of marginalization and isolation. Multiple localities and municipalities had communist leaders. On the other hand, Birch’s myopic focus on the expansion of social programs as the single measure of political success leads him to neglect central communist contributions. The partisans who gave their lives in the war against European fascisms, the thousands who carried out a heroic resistance in occupied countries, are erased from view. Surely their achievements are as noteworthy as the collective bargaining institutions, and generous social services that preoccupy Birch. And since Birch concedes that the economic conditions that prevailed in the post-war heyday of social democracy are unlikely to appear again, what is the political cost today of failing to acknowledge and learn from the courage of communist resistance?

Internationalism as the ground of struggle

The significance of the communist contribution continues to expand as we zoom out from a narrow focus on Europe. No one can deny the role of communist-led national liberation movements in the colonized world. In virtually every liberation struggle Marxist-Leninists played an indispensable part. Angola, Mozambique, Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and China are not insignificant data points just because they are not from Europe.

For decades critics of colonialism and neocolonialism have pointed out that the capitalist class has been able to secure the political passivity or even support of a large layer of the working class in the imperialist core through benefits accrued from the global exploitation of Black and brown people. These critics continue a line of argument already prominent in Lenin’s analysis of the enormous super-profits generated by imperialism. That capital is international and the struggle against it must be as well is a lesson from communists in the twentieth century that remains indispensable in the twenty-first. Workers couldn’t afford nationalist myopia then and surely cannot in today’s setting of global supply chains, mass migration, and climate change.

In the U.S., Black women in and around the Communist Party in the first half of the twentieth century demonstrated the practical implications of internationalism in their organizing. As early as 1928, Williana Burroughs emphasized concrete tasks related to engaging foreign-born Black workers in the U.S. (West Indies, South America, Cape Verde Islands, Africa) and using anti-imperialism as a point of connection (“Thousands of Negroes from Haiti, Cuba, British possessions, Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico have felt the iron heel of British or American Imperialism”) [5].

The Party took the view that Black workers in the U.S. were an oppressed national minority with a right to self-determination. While controversial within and without the Party, this line constituted a fundamental ground for unifying Black and white workers because it recognized the centrality of the struggle for Black liberation. Organizing Black workers meant organizing Black women because most Black women worked for wages to support their families. Organizing Black women meant organizing immigrants and farm workers and attending to the housing, education, and neighborhood conditions impacting workers’ lives. Organizing immigrants and farm workers meant building an understanding of the patterns of oppression and resistance facing all workers. Internationalism was more than an expression of solidarity. It was a principle with repercussions for domestic organizing.

Claudia Jones’s famous International Women’s Day speech from 1950 described the global peace movement and signature campaign against the A-bomb, Marshall Plan, and Atlantic war pact. Jones noted women’s organizations’ opposition to NATO, “which spells misery for the masses of American women and their families.” She advocated rousing the internationalism of American women in protest against “Wall Street’s puppets in Marshalized Italy, in fascist Greece and Spain.” And she linked the Justice Department’s attack on the Congress of American Women as “foreign agents” with the group’s long-standing advocacy of women’s equal rights, Negro-white unity, and child welfare and education [6].

The resolute internationalism of communists in the twentieth century was indispensable to confronting imperialism and colonialism. We build the power of the working class by emphasizing the patterns of oppression and resistance, linking struggles, and targeting capitalism as the system to be defeated.

Anti-communism is the enemy

Over the last decades of neoliberalism, the right has advanced. In the U.S., UK, Brazil, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Poland, Sweden, and elsewhere, conservative parties use nationalism to reach out to those left behind by globalization. When socialists take as their measure of success the wages of an outmoded, masculinist, and Eurocentric image of the working class, they undermine their capacity to build mass unity, strengthening the hand of the right. Insistence on the multinational composition of the labor force of all the so-called developed countries gives the lie to nationalist and isolationist fantasies as well as to the patriarchal conceptions of the family that support them.

A component of right-wing advance has been its relentless assault on communism. Thirty years after the defeat of the Soviet Union, conservatives attack even the most common sense of public measures as communist plots. More subtle but no less reactionary are the epistemological dimensions of anti-communism, what Charisse Burden-Stelly theorizes as intellectual McCarthyism [7]. Anti-communism persists today in the suppression of knowledge of the continuities between anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist struggles. Instead of the site where those struggles were unified, communism is treated as a dangerous and alien ideology. Its role in the fight against white supremacy domestically and internationally is buried.

For anti-communists disorder is foreign—the refugee, the immigrant, the Black, the Muslim, the Jew. Anti-communists disavow the capitalist disorder of competition, markets, innovation, dispossession, foreclosure, debt, and imperialist war. Dramatic changes in the character of work, communities, and life that accompany disruptive and ubiquitous technology; urbanization and rural depopulation; shifts from industry and manufacture to services and servitude; the intensification of competition for decreasing numbers of affordable houses and adequately compensated jobs—these all congeal into a disorder to be dealt with by the assertion of police, family, church, and race. Anti-communism remains the lynchpin of this assertion.

The fear that anti-communism mobilizes is a fear of loss, a fear that what you have will be taken from you, what Slavoj Žižek refers to as the “theft of enjoyment” [8]. Marx and Engels call out this mobilization of fear in The Communist Manifesto when they address charges that communists want to take people’s property. They write, “in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths” [9]. The anti-communist mobilization of fear conceals the absence of property, wealth, job security, success, sovereignty, and freedom. It posits that we have them by positioning them as stolen. Communism is what prevents you from being rich, widely admired, having lots of sex, and so on. The “theft of enjoyment” fantasy obscures the fact that under capitalism a handful of billionaires have more wealth than half the planet. By positing communism as a source of deprivation, as an ideology based on taking something away, anti-communism conceals that we don’t have what is ostensibly being stolen.

Anti-communism is not confined to the political right. It often seeps into progressive and self-described socialist circles. Left anti-communists proceed as if communism were the barrier to workers’ success, as if we would all live in a Swedish social democratic paradise but for those damned communists. Not only does this deny the multiracial and international reality of the working class, but it conceals broader left political division and weakness. Virtually nowhere does the left face the choice of reform or revolution. Virtually nowhere is the left in a position where class compromise is on the table. Anti-communism obscures this basic fact.

Communism is that modern political ideology always and everywhere on the side of the oppressed. When labor begins to appear strong, when those who have been racially, sexually, ethnically, and colonially oppressed become more visible, more organized, and more militant, anti-communism intervenes to set up barriers. On the left as well as the right, anti-communism attempts to structure the political field by establishing the terrain of possibility: which political paths are available, which are unthinkable. Even in settings where communism is dismissed as itself impossible, anti-communism mobilizes social forces to oppose it. This fight against the impossible is an ideological signal: the discussion isn’t aimed toward seriously evaluating lessons and goals. It’s about shoring up the status quo, disciplining working-class imagination by preemptive arrest of any challengers to capitalist social property relations.

The political and economic situation that prevails today differs significantly from the postwar era. The U.S. has lost both its preeminent economic status and the moral position it assumed following the end of WWII (a position always fragile and contested given the U.S.’s use of atomic weapons, backing of dictatorships, imperialist and neocolonial foreign policy, and domestic police state). Unions have lost their prior bargaining power and workers their hard-won rights and benefits. Today the issue is building organizations and movements with power sufficient to compel the socialist reconstruction of the economy in the context of a rapidly changing climate. This fight is multinational and international or it is lost.

References

[1] Jonah Birch, “The Cold War May It Harder for the Left to Win Social Democratic Reforms,”Jacobin, 15 November 2022. Availablehere.
[2] Gary Gerstle,The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order(Oxford University Press, 2022).
[3] Tobias Hϋbinette, “Race and Sweden’s Fascist Turn,”Boston Review, 19 October 2022. Availablehere.
[4] See the contributions toOrganize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing, ed. Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean (London: Verso, 2022).
[5] Williana Burroughs, “Negro Work Has Not Been Entirely Successful,”  inOrganize, Fight, Win,21-25.
[6] Claudia Jones, “International Women’s Day and the Struggle for Peace,” inOrganize, Fight, Win,181-197.
[7] Charisse Burden-Stelly, “OnBankers and Empire: Racial Capitalism, Antiblackness, and Antiradicalism,”Small Axe24, no. 2 (2020): 175-186.
[8] Slavoj Žižek,Tarrying With the Negative(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 200-237.
[9] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,The Communist Manifesto, trans. S. Moore (New York: Penguin Books, 1988/1967), 237.

Liberal Democracy: The Bedfellow of Fascism

[Pictured: US Senator John Mccain on stage with Ukrainian neo-Nazi Oleh Tyahnybok back in 2013]

By Erica Caines

Republished from Hood Communist.

Antifascism, as a politic and concept, has grown more appealing in the last 6 years because of the rise of right-wing authoritarianism domestically and globally rooted in patriarchy and ongoing (settler) colonialism. Nonetheless, there remains much confusion about fascism. Earlier this month, I was a featured panelist for a roundtable discussion with the editors of For Antifascist Futures: Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis and author of On Microfascism: Gender War and Death at the Red Emma’s bookstore in Baltimore. It was a compelling cultural and political exploration wherein we engaged the feminist and anticolonial dimensions of antifascism with readers and has since led me to deeper exploration of fascism’s historical relationship to liberal democracy, in the context of this current political and pop culture infused moment. 

African revolutionaries like George Padmore, W.E.B Dubois, Walter Rodney, and most famously Aime Cesaire, have all declared that fascism was only ever considered a new phenomenon when it touched Europe, but it always existed within colonial practices applied in the colonies. As historian Allan ES Lumba acknowledges in the essay “Left Alone with the Colony,” featured in the book AntiFascist Futures:Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis 

“Fascism is not a neat category of political ideology but rather a historical reaction to recurring threat of revolutionary decolonization and the chronic instability of a geopolitical system structured around capitalist empires.” (pg. 72)

I found this particularly useful in helping to gauge the contemporary mainstream usage of fascism which has led many to believe that it’s a thing of the past, and we are simply witnessing a reemergence rather than a continuation.

When George Jackson advised in 1970 that we “settle our quarrels” because “fascism was already here,” it was with the astute understanding that the ongoing decolonization movements happening in the US and abroad were creating a crisis for the white world. Fascism, which emerged in Europe inspired by movements in the US like Jim Crow, did not break from the totalitarian logic and practice of European colonialism. Understanding ourselves as a colonized people within the US (politically, economically, and socially), we can understand that our lives are dictated by the authoritarian policies of a ruling class of a settler colony. The US has always been fascist from inception.

Yet, the US has been able to skirt its history and fascist foundation with its flippant use of “democracy”. Declaring itself as the one true beacon of democracy, “the shining city on the hill”, the US continues to play footsie with fascism in spite of its rhetoric on “human rights”. Liberal democracy breeds fascism, as it is the best ideology and state formation for providing legitimacy to capitalist dictatorship— an unbridled power of capital. Glancing upon the history of the European colonial project, one can clearly see that in all of the colonial empires, workers were provided with forms of “democratic participation” while the colonial empires simultaneously imposed fascism as governance. This should resonate with the current “democratic processes” that exist under this settler colony.

Since the 2020 election cycle began, “fascism” took on a plethora of new meanings, none of which actually accessed the ongoing material conditions surrounding the rise of fascism outside of the Republican Party. In fact, one could easily conclude that “fascists” and “republican” were interchangeable words if they paid close enough attention to the elections. But they are not. The confusion around fascism, weaponized by liberals to drive people to the voting polls, has disallowed any inspection of the primary role the Democratic Party (with its neoliberal, populist, and austerity police state policies) has played by sheltering and coddling this current iteration of fascism. 

AntiFascist Futures opens with an essay by anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj entitled “The Banality of Knowledge” that provides a great intervention in understanding the direct connections between never-ending wars and the continuation and expansion of of fascism particularly pertaining to truth and lies:

“While I recognize the ubiquity, significance, and political power of patently false claims, I want to explore a different configuration of a post-truth world––of knowledge and power––that also operates today. What if the lie, or for that matter, the secret is not the only way to undermine the power of “facts”? How else are (significant, foundational even) “factual truths,” the kinds of truths that exist in the domain of human action and are “political by nature,” rendered politically inconsequential? Given the now widely accepted aphorism that knowledge is power, in actual practice (how) does “knowing” inform politics?” (pg 24)

When we review what has been told to us about the US/EU/NATO proxy war in Ukraine, including the more than $60 billion spent to arm Azov Battelion, Ukrainian National Guard of nazis, the struggle over historical and political facts and truths becomes alarmingly revealing. Many have and continue to approach the US/EU/NATO proxy war in Ukraine as some new phenomena, while having overlooked or disregarded the 2014 coup and the 8 years-long civil war between Ukraine and the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. As such, they have dismissed the fascist elements of the Ukrainian government itself, the Azov Battellion training nazis globally (from Brazil to Charlottesville), and the United States and its allies instigating Russia over its recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics as independent states for the possibility of NATO expansion. None of this is insignificant. There has been a cost for the lies told to American citizens in order for the US to continue to garner support for its attempts to expand NATO and its own imperialist, hegemonic goals.

Mainstream media, a long arm of the state, has continued to deny the 2014 coup as well as the existence of nazis in Ukraine, going so far as to even show Ukrainian soldiers with nazi regalia on national TV. And while the Democratic Party is sounding the alarms about the “loss of democracy” with January 6th trials and another push to “vote out fascism”, they ironically continue to fund and arm nazis in Ukraine to “save democracy.” These lies, that have intentionally caused political and historical confusion, have created the space for fascism to not only grow more organized but increasingly more normalized. We are witnessing iterations of fascism play out in the contentious and close election in Brazil, for example; it can be seen in the liberal embrace of the recent appointment in Italy reinstating Mussolini’s party; even the assassination attempt of the Vice President of Argentina can be traced to a growing fascist movement.  

Instead of addressing the global impact of this lie, mainstream discourse has found ways to focus on individuals. Whether the reckless antics of a head of state or the rantings of a manic African petty bourgeois celebrity, mainstream liberal discourse has chosen to lean into liberal individualism as “analysis.” This, of course, disconnects the hate-filled rhetoric from the ruling class (which politicians and celebrities alike are subservient to) that sympathizes with fascism. This is not about individuals, however, this is about a system that continuously emboldens individuals, who then become organized; what does it mean to rail against this when we are not organized to take power? 

Public discourse prioritizing a good/bad false dichotomy has resulted in surface level conversations about antiBlackness and antisemitism that ignore the function of US imperialism that doesn’t give a damn about the African or the Jew, which is identified through these attempts to continuously expand NATO. How can one attempt to have serious discussions about antisemitism while voting for a party that continues to arm nazis, who have played an integral role in a worldwide upsurge of fascism? Are people expected to ignore the US (and Ukraine’s) vote against the UN General Assembly’s resolution condemning Nazism, neo-Nazism and all forms of racism? How does one contend with attempts to have serious discussions about antiBlackness while never challenging the expansion of AFRICOM, in spite of the uprisings in the Sahel and The Horn? Are people expected to look favorably upon the Countering Malign Russian Activities in Africa Act (HR 7311) which threatens to punish African nations for not supporting a proxy war? Does the latest efforts of western occupation of Haiti being led by the U.S. signal concern for Black lives? 

Neoliberalism and fascism are representatives of two distinct structures or expressions of the same underlying class rule and yet, contemporarily, the rise of fascism in the west is a very real response to the ravages of neoliberalism. What does that mean for the African? Liberal bourgeois democracy, historically and contemporarily, plays a role in the expansion and assertion of fascism. Until we are organized to not only recognize but understand who and what our enemies are and take power, the “discourse” will continue to launder our rage into a far more critical position than we are finding ourselves in now. 

Erica Caines is a poet, writer and organizer in Baltimore and the DMV. She is an organizing committee member of the anti war coalition, the Black Alliance For Peace as well as an outreach member of the Black centered Ujima People’s Progress Party. Caines founded Liberation Through Reading in 2017 as a way to provide Black children with books that represent them and created the extension, a book club entitled Liberation Through Reading BC, to strengthen political education online and in our communities.

Rock-A-Bye Baby: On the State's Legitimation of Juneteenth and Liberal Concessions as Political Anesthetization In Slavery's Afterlives

(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

By Joshua Briond

“Everything has changed on the surface and nothing else has been touched[...] In a way, the state is more powerful than ever, because it has given us so many tokens.”

—James Baldwin

On Thursday, June 17th, President Joe Biden signed a bill establishing June 19 as Juneteenth National Independence Day, a US federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. According to CNN, the holiday will become the first federal law holiday established since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was signed into law in 1983. Ultimately, the bill will allow a fragment of the nations’ surplus populations —excluding much of the largely racialized lumpenproletariat and underclass— a day ‘free’ from the capitalist exploitation and alienation that comes with the traditional day-to-day of the laboring class. The timing of the implementation of the national holiday—amidst rebellions, particularly in Minneapolis, in the aftermath of Winston Smith’s clearly politically-motivated, state-sanctioned assassination—cannot be understood as anything other than yet another attempt at anesthetizing the captive Black colonies in sentimentality and symbolic gestures. 

"this is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. i, too, am the afterlife of slavery."

—saidiya hartman, lose your mother: a journey along the atlantic slave route (2006)

The institution of Black slavery, that rendered Black captives as chattel, capital, productive property, was economically, culturally, and politically ubiquitous. Yet, despite its legacies and afterlives, there has been no material reckoning, or atonement for its anti-Black psychosexual and physical terror and violence. In fact, the ghosts of what is largely understood as slavery’s past, have continued to manifest in the economic polity, modern policing and prisons, and social, cultural, and ideological underpinnings, etc. Descendants of Black captives whom, in many ways, remain hyper-surveilled, overpoliced, hyper-exploited, underpaid, alienated, and often succumbed to occupation of our communities and premature death, have little-to-nothing to show for being major instruments in assembling and maintaining the global capitalist economy since we were trafficked to the Euro-Americas. But you are damn sure we have one month per year, and now an extra day, to learn about and hashtag-celebrate the most whitewashed and bleak articulations of Black historical events—events that have largely only taken place because of Black resistance to white terror, violence, and domination. 

“A critical genealogy of White Reconstruction requires close examination of the non-normative—nonwhite, queer, non-Christian, and so on—iterations of white supremacy within contemporary institutionalizations of diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism. Such non-normativities are constitutive of (rather than incidental or exceptional to) the protocols, planning, and statecraft of contemporary counterinsurgency/domestic war, extending and complicating rather than disrupting or abolishing the historical ensembles of anti-Black and racial-colonial state violence.” 

—Dylan Rodriguez, White Reconstruction 

Since 1776 and the founding of the United States of America, the white power structure has been in a constant state of attempting to—arguably, at times, successfully—ideologically and politically sedate the most wretched, particularly the Black colonies, through incremental concessions and symbolic gestures while ultimately supplementing white rule. As Gerald Horne has taught us, this founding itself was brought into being after a successful power struggle against the British rulers to preserve the institution of Black slavery. As noted by Dylan Rodriguez in the epigraph above, and throughout his book White Reconstruction, the white settler-colonial state has had to “undergo substantive reform to remain politically and institutionally viable.” This includes, but is not limited to, incremental (neo)liberal reform as sedation and the multicultural diversification of settler-colonial, surveillance-capitalist, and imperialist apparatuses.

If we are to understand the American project itself as a consequence of intra-European counterrevolution to preserve the institution of slavery. The civil war as described by Frederick Douglass, “[starting] in the interest of slavery on both sides[...]both despising the Negro, both insulting the Negro.” The Reconstruction era as an attempt to establish a workers-democracy—in the aftermath of the countless slave revolts across North America and the Civil War ultimately ending chattel slavery—only to be defeated by ruling class forces. Jim Crow as an inevitability of the settler state and its individual deputized upholders’ idiosyncratic anxieties surrounding the collapsing synonymity of Blackness and the slave positionality. The Civil Rights Movement as an understandably decentralized reformist effort toward Black freedom, through attempts to expand the civil liberties of Black people within the American colony, co-existence with whites within the white power structure that became co-opted by the state ordained Black bourgeoisie and US intelligence leading to mild concessions. Then, we—as Black people—have to understand that we have been in an outright war of attrition with the white power structure for nearly half a millennium.

It is important to recontextualize major historical events — from the Civil War, to the crushing of the Reconstruction era, to Jim Crow, to the Civil Rights Movement, to the rise of neoliberalism and the expansion of the carceral regimes posited as the solution to Black rebellion in the 1980s, to modern policing and prisons, etc. — are all distinct types of “reforms” to politically sedate Black surplus populations and sustain white settler-capitalist hegemony. 

In an interview at Howard University, Gerald Horne discusses the weakening and marginalization of Black radical independent institutions, publications, and leaders, such as Shirley Graham, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, as a trade-off to disintegrate Jim Crow in return for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and “other examples of legislation meant to chip away at Jim Crow.” Horne goes on to question whether the price for political “freedom,” in the electoral arena (which many Black radicals would argue, in the age of neocolonialism and pseudo-independence was never actually freedom) was substantial enough to warrant celebration as a form of Black progress without the economic infrastructure and self-determination needed for true liberation and justice. Just like in the 60s, as Horne notes, we are still performing uneven trade-offs with white power. We demand an end to police terror with Defunding the Police at the outset; they give us painted Black Lives Matter streets, while celebritizing, commodifying, and cannibalizing the names and faces of Black martyrs like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. We demand healthcare, living wages, and erased student loans; they give us a federal holiday. In the post-Civil Rights era, and the state’s crushing of Black Power, there has been a depoliticization, if not outright assassination, of Black politics: all symbolism, uneven trade-offs, bare-minimum concessions, and identity reductionist representation as a substitute for actual Black power and self-determination. In the era of neo-colonialism, with the expansion and symbolic inclusion into the plantation economy through our coerced [lumpen]proletarization, we have been anesthetized to our continued exploitation, alienation, destruction, and genocide. Liberal multiculturalism, reform, or as I would call it, political anesthetization, at the very least, temporarily, has been able to halt the “problem” of black resistance.

“The understanding that modern policing has emerged out of the dreadful history of Black enslavement brings with it an urgent need to acknowledge what is not yet behind us. The plantation isn’t, as so many of us, Black and otherwise, think or at least wish to believe, a thing of the past; rather, the plantation persists as a largely unseen superstructure shaping modern, everyday life and many of its practices, attitudes, and assumptions, even if some of these have been, over time, transformed.”

- Rinaldo Walcott, “On Property” 

Though there has been a virtual erasing of our chains and the physical plantation (at least for those of us who are not “legally” incarcerated), the plantation economy has expanded and the mere logics and ideological production have remained the same: keep the slave(s) in check. The white power structure has always been concerned with keeping its thumb on the pulse of its slave population. There has been a non-stop, coordinated counterinsurgent effort by the white power apparatus to divert energy away from the inevitable radical potentialities of the slave, colonized, dispossessed, and superexploited classes—especially as capitalism’s contradictions become far too blatant to disguise. The marking of Juneteenth National Independence Day is just a continuation of the settler society’s legacy of empty promises and symbolic gestures to supplant material gains and maintain their hegemony. 

The United States is incapable of bringing about true justice or accountability for the crimes of its psychosexual and political economy beyond these hauntingly insulting and psychopathic attempts at state recognition of its own historical aberrations through moral symbolism. True justice and accountability must be avoided at all costs by this power structure, as this would inevitably expand the political imaginations of people, leading to the incrimination of every cop, soldier, politician, wall street hack, ceo, etc., and exposing itself for what it is: illegitimate and obsolete. Once you realize that all of the violence being exported everyday in and around the US are not individual aberrations that could be changed with a shift in political leadership, but an inevitable and continual outcome of superstructures built on and sustained through anti-Black slavery, capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, everything begins to make sense. It is liberatory. Heartbreaking. Infuriating, even. Because the solution becomes clear. It is the solution that everyone—whether subconsciously or not—is doing everything in their power to avoid coming to. It is the solution the United States and its propaganda networks spend billions of dollars every year to shield from the psyches of its captives. It is what Black captives in Haiti realized circa 1791, and are still being punished for ‘till this day. 

There is a special, psychopathic irony in the legitimation of Juneteenth through the colonial-capitalist state’s immortalizing of the liberation of the slaves through the very structural foundations in which said slaves were rendered productive property as captives, in which the legacies of slavery remain pervasive across social, cultural, political, and economic lineages. Not to mention the colonial and imperialist technologies inspired largely by the events of (anti-)Black slavery and colonialism, exported across the imperialized world for the purposes of land, capital, and resources—under the guise of (white) freedom and democracy. To paraphrase Frederick Douglass, what is the state’s recognition of Juneteenth to its Black captives? To the Afro-Palestinians living under the world’s largest open-air prison on the United States’ dime? Or the slave-labor of mineral miners in the Congo supplying the U.S. resources? How can visualizations of Nancy Pelosi and Black lawmakers singing Lift Every Voice and Sing in ceremony for the bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday—while actively rejecting Black organizers’ rallying cries that could improve Black people’s material conditions and save lives, such as Defunding the Police— signal anything other than yet another colonial lullaby to anaesthetize our dreams and efforts toward Black liberation and self-determination? While openly and unapologetically pledging their allegiance to multiculturalist white supremacy in the age of neocolonialism? 

“Let me put it this way, that from a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports, and the railroads of the country, the economy, especially of the southern states, could not conceivably be what it has become, if they had not had and do not still have, indeed, for so long and for so many generations, cheap labor. I am stating very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked the cotton, and I carried it to the market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing[...] This, in the land of the free, and the home of the brave. And no one can challenge that statement, it is a matter of a historical record. In another way, this dream is at the expense of the American Negro.”

—James Baldwin, 1965

On Police Abolition: Decolonization Is The Only Way

(Photo taken by Jordan Gale for The New York Times)

By John Kamaal Sunjata

The United States is a project of both anti-Blackness and racial-colonial power. From the founding of this white supremacist settler-colonial state, Black people have endured 250 years of slavery, ninety years of Jim Crow, sixty years of “separate but equal” legal doctrine, and thirty-five years of explicitly anti-Black housing laws among other insidious forms of de jure and de facto racial discrimination. The racial capitalist state and its policing functionaries employ state violence as a means of containing and controlling the working-class, especially racialized and colonized domestic peripheries. The late political prisoner and revolutionary ancestor George Jackson (1971, p. 99) writes the following:

The purpose of the chief repressive institutions within the totalitarian capitalist state is clearly to discourage and prohibit certain activity, and the prohibitions are aimed at very distinctly defined sectors of the class- and race-sensitized society. The ultimate expression of law is not order—it’s prison. There are hundreds upon hundreds of prisons, thousands upon thousands of laws, yet there is no social order, no social peace. …Bourgeois law protects property relations and not social relationships.

The United States is a punitive carceral state with 25 percent of the world’s population behind bars despite comprising only 5 percent of the world’s population (Collier, 2014, p. 56; Hayes, 2017, p. 17). The American criminal so-called “justice” system holds almost 2.3 million people in 1,833 state prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile prisons, 3,134 local jails, 218 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. settler-colonies (Sawyer & Wagner, 2020). U.S. incarceration is disproportionately racialized, targeting Black and brown people who represent 60 percent of the incarcerated (Marable, 2015). If Black and Latino people were incarcerated at the same rate as whites, their imprisoned and jailed populations would decline by almost 40 percent (NAACP, 2019). The problems are not rooted in crime but policing itself which constructs, (re)produces, and institutes white supremacy and anti-Blackness through racial capitalism. The police have been waging asymmetric domestic warfare on Black people, encircling, and capturing their prospects for self-determination and self-actualization. From the Greensboro Massacre of 1979 to the murder of Marcus Deon Smith of 2018 to the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the only solution for Black liberation is abolishing the police and freeing what is essentially a semi-colony of peripheral peoples.

This essay has five sections. This first section discusses the problems of policing. The second section explains the history of U.S. policing and its development. The third section lays out the failure of liberal reforms to grapple with policing as an institution. The fourth section argues the case for police abolition. The last section concludes.

The History of U.S. Policing

The earliest origins of policing in the United States evolved from directly slavery, settler-colonialism, and brutal control of an emergent industrial working-class (Vitale, 2017, p. 34). The organization of police forces within the United States was modeled after that of England. In the early colonial forms, policing was informal and communal, which is referred to as the “Watch” or private-for-profit policing, also known as the “Big Stick.” These policing models had little with fighting crime and more to do with “managing disorder and protecting the propertied classes from the rabble” (Vitale, 2017, p. 35). Strike-breaking and labor surveillance were among the most important services provided by private-for-profit policing, the Pinkerton’s were among the more notable agencies (Spitzer, 1979, p. 195). The “Big Stick” dissolved when 1) company towns declined, 2) labor costs grew more socialized, 3) organized labor grew in its militancy and strength, and 4) major changes happened in U.S. socioeconomic infrastructure (1979, p. 195).

The watch system was not particularly effective at halting crime as watchmen were often drunk or asleep on duty (Potter, 2013, p. 2). As a method of process improvement came the implementation of a system of constables—official law enforcement officers—who were normally paid according to the warrants they served (2013, p. 2). Informal policing models persisted until 1838 when Boston implemented a centralized municipal police force based on the London Metropolitan Police force and New York followed suit in 1845 (Vitale, 2017, p. 36). The main functions of the London Metropolitan Police Force were “protect property, quell riots, put down strikes and other industrial actions, and produce a disciplined industrial work force” (Vitale, 2017, p. 36).

In Southern states, modern U.S. policing developed from the “Slave Patrol” (Potter, 2013, p. 3; Vitale, 2017, p. 46). Slave patrols were tasked with developing terroristic infrastructure designed to prevent slave revolts (Hadden, 2001, p. 20; Vitale, 2017, p. 46; NAACP,  2019). They were vested with the power to “ride from plantation to plantation, and into any plantation” taking up slaves who did not have a ticket from their masters (2001, p. 20). The slave patrols could forcibly enter any private property[ii] solely on the suspicions of harboring runaway slaves (Vitale, 2017, p. 46; NAACP, 2019). The slave patrols had three primary functions: 1) chase, apprehend, and return runaway slaves to their owners; 2) organize terror squads to deter slave rebellions, and; 3) maintain legal and extralegal disciplinary measures for slaves who violated plantation rules to produce desired behavior (Potter, 2013, p. 3; NAACP, 2019).

White people had “tremendous social anxiety” about large groups of unaccompanied slaves and free Blacks intermingling. The police responded by regulating their behavior through the “constant monitoring and inspection of the [B]lack population” (Vitale, 2017, p. 47). After the Civil War, slave patrols were replaced by modern Southern police departments who controlled freed slaves who were now entering the workforce which was primarily agricultural (Potter, 2013, p. 3). The work of the modern police force included enforcing Jim Crow segregation laws and denying Black people equality de jure and de facto (2013, p. 3). The primary concern during this period was forcing Black people into sociopolitical docility (Vitale, 2017, p. 47). More than a response to crime, the police are for instituting a social order that is safe for capital penetration for the sake of capital accumulation, especially from the Black masses (Marable, 2015, p. 94). Capital accumulation requires a stable and orderly workforce for a predictable order of business (Potter, 2013, p. 4). The racial capitalist state, therefore, absorbs the costs of the private sector, protecting its enterprises. The environment must be made safe for capital through an organized system of social control (Potter, 2013, p. 4; Vitale, 2017, p. 34; Marable,  2015, p. 95). Under a system of racial capitalism[i], Black people are among the most brutalized by the carceral state.

The Failure of Liberal Reforms

Liberal efforts at reforming the police have largely been adject failures mostly because liberals misunderstand the role of the police. They ignore that policing itself is an inherently anti-Black institution that is premised on the repression of the domestic Black periphery for the purposes of capital penetration for capital accumulation. The role of the police has served to protect white supremacy and wealth creation for white people while denying Black people essential human rights (Vitale, 2017, p. 33). In the face of 400 years of anti-Black policing institutions that have, through every evolution, maintained a systemic logic of settler-colonialism that relegates the Black masses to a semi-colony within white America, liberals have proposed more training, more diversity, and community policing (Vitale, 2017, p. 33; Samudzi & Anderson, 2018,  p. 13; Rodríguez, 2021, p. 45).

The push for more police training is well-intentioned but it misses the point. Whenever a Black person is killed by police, a common refrain from liberal reformers is “improve use-of-force training.” If these same reformers were around during slavery, there is no doubt they would have called for slave masters to employ more ethical whip deployment techniques. Despite the racial bias training that many officers have undergone, researchers have found that outcomes remain unchanged with respect to racial disparities in traffic stops and marijuana arrests (Vitale, 2017, p. 8). Racist policing is not merely a matter of individual bigotry but institutionalized racism. Asking for increased training of police so police learn “restraint” ignores how the police already exercise restraint against populations that are not marginalized and not targeted. The Capitol Hill riots were illustrative of the police’s ability to show remarkable restraint. The mostly white rioters were not subjected to nearly as much force as Black protestors are for nominally peaceful protests (Henderson & Alexander, 2021). Any training that justifies the institution of policing will only strengthen its white supremacist and anti-Black logics, even if there is a rhetorical shift from “Warrior mentality” to “Guardian mentality.”

Another common liberal reform to policing involves diversity hires, in hopes this will result in communities of color being treated with “greater dignity, respect, and fairness” (Vitale, 2017, p. 11). There is no evidence that diversifying police forces affects, much less reduces, their use of force (Friedrich,  1977; Garner, Schade, Hepburn, & Buchanan, 1995; Brown & Frank, 2006;  Lawton, 2007). This tactic of reform is even more insidious because it is a method of counterinsurgency through promiscuous inclusion (Rodríguez, 2021, p. 45). Through political warfare against the domestic Black periphery, the racial capitalist state seeks to (neo)colonize its colonized subjects within their own communities.

Diversity is a tool for manufacturing credibility, increasing external institutional legitimacy without dramatically changing internal institutional formations or technologies of repression (2021, p. 45). Diversity changes the presentation of the white supremacist order, but it does not change its outcome: domestic warfare (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 13; Rodríguez,  2021, p. 51). White supremacy is a multicultural enterprise: just because the beneficiaries of the racial-colonial order are primarily white does not preclude the use of semi-colonized peoples to accomplish white supremacist ends. Diversity hires will not solve the problems of policing, but they will ensure the white supremacy runs through a sepia filter.

Liberal reformers may present “community policing” as possible reform and prima facie, it sounds reasonable. Who would not want neighborhood persons, known and respected by the communities they live, as officers? The answer to that question maybe someone who understands the role and the institution of policing. Police are tasked with criminalizing disorderly conduct, using up to and including lethal force, and responding to populist resistance with state-sanctioned assertiveness. This is well illustrated in the city of Greensboro, North Carolina by its City Council. At a Greensboro City Council meeting from July 31, 2020, the members of the City Council spoke favorably of community policing. Councilwoman Marikay Abuzaiter is on record saying, “[I]f we ever did consider incentivizing [police officers to live in the neighborhoods they work]. I would think the Chief would need a big raise in his police budget because you are looking at money there.” In the same session, Councilwoman Sharon Hightower said:

In reading articles about ‘community policing,’ it never emphasizes resident, it always talked about relationships. And we can start to build relationships, so we can eradicate this distrust in my community because right now, a lot of people I talk to in my community see a police car and their hair stands up on their neck. So, let’s start to work on that. Build that trust, and if somebody moves in the neighborhood? Great, that’s fantastic. …Let’s spend our resources where we get the most bang for our buck. As community talks about more investment in community problems, let’s do that.

It was certainly admirable that Councilwoman Sharon Hightower wanted to “eradicate distrust” and “build relationships,” but the solutions to the problems for the domestic Black periphery of Greensboro are rooted in anti-Black racism and racial capitalism more broadly, not a lack of police presence. What tools do the police possess for “community”? Punitive enforcement actions such as arrests and ticketing (Vitale, 2017, p. 16). Community policing is only possible as a solution if the police do not have police powers. Attempts at community policing, as demonstrated by the Greensboro City Council members, prioritizes giving more resources to the police to live in neighborhoods than giving resources directly to the marginalized members of the communities. Community policing does not empower the domestic Black periphery, but it strengthens the tools of repression and suppression on the part of the police by increasing their proximity to the territories they occupy.

Recently, the #8CantWait campaign has gathered significant support from liberal reformers who wish to address “police brutality.” It is a set of ideas from the nonprofit Campaign Zero, with policy proposals such as ban chokeholds, change reporting standards for use of force incidents, require police officers to warn before they shoot, and more (Murray, 2020). The #8CantWait campaign is not trying to solve racist policing, it is trying to reduce police killings by 72 percent (2020). Mayor Nancy Vaughan endorsed the #8CantWait proposals (Greensboro City Council, 2020):

I have been looking at some resolutions, I have been looking at one from the city of Memphis who is codifying the #8CantWait, we are looking at making it for the City of Greensboro. It has not been finalized but I would like the City Council to look at, once we get it all written up for the City of Greensboro, passing a resolution for the #8CantWait. I don’t want to wait until [the] next meeting because it’s quite a ways [sic] out, so maybe we could have a meeting and a work session because our next meeting is quite a ways away and the #8CantWait and I don’t think we should wait.

After a similar comment from Councilwoman Sharon Hightower, Greensboro Police Chief Brian L. James responded, “In reference to the #8CantWait and looking at that, we are almost there with some of the things that I have recently [done] and some of the things that I did previously as well as our regular policies and there’s one on the #8CantWait that I would like to have some conversation with y’all around the specific wording…” This underscores not only the uselessness of the #8CantWait campaign but the overall failure of liberal reforms to produce meaningful structural change.

The Argument

The concrete historicity of the United States’ state-imposed, state-promoted, and state-tolerated anti-Black racial-colonial violence and white supremacist domination has perpetuated a consistent and persistent situation of Black devalorization, disinvestment, devastation, destruction, and dislocation. White supremacy articulates and structures the American polity; race as a social construct articulates and structures every social relation and institution. This reality produces a domestic Black periphery, an underclass—a subproletariat—that exists as mere residents of a settler-colony (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 6). The Black community itself exists as semi-colony within the United States wherein the police are an occupying army (Allen, 1969).

The police have consistently represented (and erected) institutional barriers to Black agency, equality, self-determination, and political expression. That is because policing within the United States is inherently white supremacist and extends the logics of racial-capitalism and anti-Blackness throughout the political economy. With the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865, slavery was only abolished as “except as punishment for crime [emphasis added]” (Gilmore, 2020). Black people have been subjected to targeted police surveillance, coercion, force, and incarceration. Slavery was never abolished, it was reformed.

For the domestic Black periphery, the American carceral state and its functionaries have always been in a state of permanent asymmetrical warfare against them (Vitale,  2017, p. 27; Burden-Stelly, 2020, p. 8; Rodríguez, 2021, p. 42). James Baldwin compared policing Black communities to settler-colonial occupation (Baldwin, 1966):

And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover—even in a country which makes the very grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity—quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty. … Occupied territory is occupied territory, even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered, and it is axiomatic, in occupied territory, that any act of resistance, even though it be executed by a child, be answered at once, and with the full weight of the occupying forces.

Black people are not citizens, we are residents of settler-colonial occupation. Black lives do not matter under a regime of racial capitalism and ironically enough, Black people were at our most valuable (i.e. most insulated from public executions and imprisonment) when we were legal chattel. In that sense, doing irreparable damage to property-in-chattel was bad for business and few slave patrollers wanted to foot the bill (Marable, 2015, p. 97). A citizen would have a Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial, but the residents of the domestic Black periphery can be legally and extralegally murdered by police with impunity (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 14; Briond, 2020).

The regime of racial capitalism has at its heart, private property ownership, an institution fiercely protected by the carceral state and its settler-colonial agents in policing. Racial capitalism reproduces and buttresses itself and the white supremacist order through a series of supposedly race-neutral policies (Stein, 2019, p. 44). Race-neutral policies themselves have been used to both “discredit and rationalized practices that perpetuate racial stratification” (Siegel, 2000, p. 106). Hence why white supremacy and the anti-Black order it entails can “coexist happily with formal commitments to objectivity, neutrality, and colorblindness” (Harris, 1994, p. 759). The earliest origins of property rights are rooted in racial domination and the interactions between race and private property have played a critical role in subordinating the domestic Black periphery within the American political economy (Harris C. , 1993, p. 1714). Whiteness itself, as a historized social and legal construct, marks power and domination over non-white others (Mumm, 2017, p. 103). Whiteness is valorized and private property ownership is an expression of whiteness; thus, property ownership is conflated with (white) personhood under racial capitalism (Safransky, 2014, p. 238; Bhandar & Toscano,  2015, p. 8). That is why in American society it is perfectly acceptable for white people to kill Black people in defense of private property; however, the domestic Black periphery can never destroy private property in response to the murder of a Black person. Blackness itself represents powerlessness, enslavement, and dispossession (Burden-Stelly, 2020).

The domestic Black periphery exists at the nexus of indispensability and disposability (Burden-Stelly, 2020), subhumanity and superhumanity. The technologies of white supremacy and their accompanying legal strictures and structures reify white supremacist ideologies into the carceral state. Black people represent 28 percent of all people killed by police in 2020 despite being 13 percent of the United States population (Sinyangwe, 2021). Black people are three times more likely to be killed by the police than white people are, and Black people are 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed as well (2021). This demonstrates that “[a]t any given time our government can utilize and maneuver the boundaries of legality and illegality as applicable to the material interests of the ruling class” (Briond, 2020).

Freedom for the domestic Black periphery poses an existential threat to white supremacy as a political economy within the United States because “free[ing] Black people necessitates a complete transformation and destruction of this settler state” (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 13). The United States cannot exist without the predominant systems of domination and oppression of Black people; it cannot exist without the hyper-policing and hyper-regulation of Blackness. For an internal semi-colony to be free across a geospatial territory, it must be decolonized. For an enslaved people to be free, they must not reform slavery’s conditions but abolish it in its totality. Police abolition is but one step, but a necessary step, in the Black liberation struggle.

Conclusion

The domestic Black periphery can never know freedom so long as policing exists within this settler-colonial state. So long as the Black masses exist as mere residents, citizens in name only, as a semi-colony of white America, constantly surveilled and brutalized by arms of the state, the United States will exist. The United States as a carceral nation begets anti-Black oppressive systems and institutions and that is best exemplified through the police, who act as an occupying army in Black territories, rather than guardians within Black communities. The ideological resistance to police abolition within Greensboro is in part informed by the “racialized colonial logics of the biologically determined criminal, slave, and savage” (Briond, 2020).

There is a Hobbesian assumption that the domestic Black periphery will descend into “the state of nature” unless they are constantly patrolled, surveilled, and policed according to the logics of settler-colonial occupation. The underlying fear has been a constant feature of white supremacist anxieties, a justification for ceaseless instances of anti-Black violence by police who see Blackness as a synthesis of subhumanity and superhumanity incarnate. The amazing feat of political economy has been the militarization of police, the multiculturalism of white supremacy via diversifying the police force, and the escalation of wanton violence against semi-colonized subjects. The central contradiction of the United States is settler-colonialism, the structural location of the domestic Black periphery as simultaneous indispensable and disposable. If Black masses are semi-colonized, the solution is decolonization. If slavery was merely reformed, slavery must be abolished in all its iterations. The U.S. police are the representation and manifestation of modern-day slave patrols. For these reasons and others, the police must be abolished in their entirety and other carceral institutions as well.

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[i] Racial capitalism does not describe a distinct permutation of capitalism or imply there exists a non-racial capitalism, but rather emphasizes that, in the words of Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines.” As a system of political economy, it depends on racist practices and racial hierarchies because it is a direct descendent of settler-colonialism. It is a translation of the “racial, tribal, linguistic, and regional” antagonisms of European feudal society, reconstituted for the American context. It profits off the differentiated derivations of human values, non-white people are especially devalorized and their exploitation is a justifiable and profitable enterprise (see Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

[ii] Private property is not the same as personal property, which is almost exclusively wielded for its use value, it is not a personal possession, it is social relation of excludability. It is the ownership of capital as mediated by private power ownership that removes legal obstacles for one’s existence and provides an unalloyed right to violence. It is “the legally-sanctioned power to dispose” of the factors of production and “thus dispose of [labor-power]: property as synonymous with capital.” Toscano, Alberto, and Brenna Bhandar. “Race, real estate and real abstraction.” Radical Philosophy 194 (2015): 8–17.

The Tragedy of the American Carceral System

By Aneesh Gogineni

On January 31st, 1865, abolitionists countrywide celebrated as the 13th amendment narrowly passed in the 39th Congress of the United States. Taught in American schooling systems through a very whitewashed, watered-downed version of history, most Americans view the 13th as the ultimate blow to slavery set us on track to the illusion in which we live now, where conditions seem equal for all on the surface level. Similarly, many Americans believe that legal segregation stopped after the Civil Rights act. However, both of these conclusions indirectly forwarded to the population by American schooling are far from the truth.

The 13th amendment provided a loophole to maintain and mask the subjugation deemed necessary by capitalism to exploit labor and prevent class solidarity by removing any perception of a problem with capitalism but rather shifting it to criminals. Section 1 of the text of the 13th amendment reads, “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” The text rules slavery and involuntary servitude illegal in all instances EXCEPT that of punishment for convicted criminals. In this new era of Reconstruction, white capitalists needed a new method of legal subjugation of black people to distract white workers and continue implicit racial biases. And thus, the Prison Industrial Complex was born.

Since its inception, the Prison Industrial Complex has not served to protect our communities but rather has served to protect property and subjugate minority populations. Through the Jim Crow era, the prison industrial complex did what it does best — incarcerate large populations of black people. However, heading into the 1970s and 80’s as policies were becoming more progressive, prison populations globally and domestically were dropping. Crime rates and the need for law enforcement/imprisonment were very low. Incomes arguably the worst president of the 20th century — Ronald Reagan. As Reagan introduced trickle-down economics and the drug war, prisons were built in California although the crime rates were dropping. As Reagan criminalized marijuana, crack cocaine, and all drug “abuse”, he was able to drastically alter our incarceration rates. Through methods like supporting the Contras, a far-right drug organization stopping socialist change in Nicaragua through having them SELL DRUGS TO BLACK COMMUNITIES IN LA. This is one example of the true impact of the War on Drugs. It justified Reagan and the CIA intervening throughout Latin America, exploiting the resources and labor of workers in the Global South, and then incarcerating millions of black people in the US. Through laws like the 3 strikes law, America was able to justify its mass incarceration of predominantly black people and low-income workers throughout the US.

The 13th amendment has allowed slavery and Jim Crow to manifest themselves within the prison industrial complex. Prisoners work for hours a day with almost no pay. They live in horrible conditions and have no true education or rehabilitation. They have no true chance of re-entering society with a second chance. Reminiscent of Jim Crow, released felons cannot vote, don’t have access to the same housing benefits, job benefits, unemployment, etc. This essentially screws them over and incentivizes them to commit more crimes. Therefore, the US has the highest reincarceration rate in the world, nearing 50%. This has become an industry (thus the label “Prison Industrial Complex” as a critique of the system). With private prison corporations like CoreCivic (formerly the CCA) teaming up with the Drug Enforcement Administration to imprison black people, these corporations have capital incentive to imprison people. This results in tragedies like judges being paid to sentence black teens to longer sentences so that the corporations can make money. The problem extends farther than just carcerality, but also within our capitalist systems that lead to inevitable exploitation of workers subjugated in these conditions. This system justifies these carceral systems within the US.

This rotten system has evolved and maintained its dominance through “acts of purity.” By enacting superficial police and prison reform like body cameras, this reform has justified and legitimized the system without attacking the true roots of the system. Thus, we must aim for more radical means to infiltrate/abolish the system than simple reform. Abolitionist justice involves more than attacking carceral systems head-on, but rather dealing with the root cause of this very problem. Through wealth redistribution, education, and programs like AdvancePeace or CureViolence, Abolitionists must engage in these radical means as a method to reach ultimate abolition of these systems. Social programs and services must also happen simultaneously as abolition as a means of empowering the workers of the world to reach the ultimate end goal of communism/socialism.

Notes

For more information and in-depth analysis on issues of carcerality, these two books are wonderful sources.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of ColorBlindness— by Michelle Alexander.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5e0185311e0373308494e5b6/t/5e0833e3afc7590ba079bbb4/1577595881870/the_new_jim_crow.pdf

Are Prisons Obsolete — by Angela Davis

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/angela-y-davis-are-prisons-obsolete.pdf

A Brutal History: Slave Patrols and Building a Racist System with Political Power

By Kaity Baril

In the US, the modern context of ruthless policing or oppressive social control originated as far back as the 1790s. The Charleston City Watch and Guard controlled the movement of the slave population at the time. The Guard was armed with swords and pistols, and it imposed a nine o’clock curfew for Black residents of the city. White slave owners wanted to prevent uprisings and revolts. Patrols closely monitored those in captivity, especially when they were working outside of the sight or the control of the enslaver. 

The creation of the first publicly funded police force, in Boston, was in the 1830s. By the 1890s, every major city in the United States had a police presence, born from racist, slave patrols in the era of slavery and relied on through  Black Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era. 

Now, rather than upholding slavery, cops enforce laws and policies similarly meant to control the lives and movement of Black people. The late 1960s and early 1970s was a period of enormous social turmoil that raised the possibility of revolution. All fundamental institutions of society—the government, the “free” market, the military and war, the police, the nuclear family, white supremacy and others—were challenged. The elite, white, ruling class responded to these direct challenges to their power with Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Crime,” followed by Nixon’s “War on Drugs,” which were jumping off points for subsequent administrations to maintain their preferred social order. The “War on Drugs,” renewed with vigor by Ronald Reagan, still rages, and the U.S. has had the highest incarceration rate in the world since at least 2010. The increase of law enforcement in schools creates a “school to prison pipeline,” in which out-of-school suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests are increasingly used to deal with student misbehavior, especially for minor incidents, and huge numbers of children and youth are pushed out of school and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Not surprisingly, children of color (as well as children with disabilities and children from other vulnerable populations) are disproportionately targeted with these punitive measures.

During the 1980s, the ideology of “zero tolerance” school discipline originates from the “get tough on drugs and crime” policies of that era. This was also the dawn of mandatory minimum sentencing laws — fixed sentences for individuals convicted of a drug crime, with no judicial leniency allowed.  More than 1.6 million people are arrested, prosecuted, incarcerated, placed under criminal justice supervision, and/or deported each year on a drug law violation. “Three-strikes” laws, now in place in 28 states after first appearing in 1994, require anyone previously convicted of two or more violent crimes or serious felonies to receive a life sentence upon a third felony conviction,, regardless of the circumstances or, as in California, sometimes even the severity of the offense (e.g. felony petty theft).  

The Clinton Administration’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 was the largest crime bill in the history of the country. It provided 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons, and $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs.

The “War on Terror,” following the September 11, 2001 attacks, was a catalyst for the use of military grade weapons on protestors, most conspicuously in Ferguson in 2014, following the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown. So began the Black Lives Matter movement. 

Cops are Tools of Class Oppression and Mass Incarceration

For decades, starting in 1966, school districts across the country employed the “Officer Friendly” program that brought cops into local Elementary classrooms. Their goal was to indoctrinate children with the belief that the police are an indispensable part of society, who not only uphold the law but protect them. Perhaps this is because the police were established to protect the interests of the wealthy. Racial violence has always been a part of the mission to protect private, crooked institutions.

The institutions that the State has endowed with the most direct power over people’s lives, and a disproportionate share of tax dollars, are the police, prisons, courts, and the military. These enact forms of legalized punishment and repression under the guise of neutrality by being “bound to laws.” In reality, the laws primarily serve one class: the wealthy. Cops are the primary line of defense for a small fraction of the U.S. population – a handful of private corporate owners. A clear example of this is the role police played in the housing crisis. 

The number of empty, unsellable homes far exceeds the number of homeless. Based on currently available numbers, there are about 31 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S. If policing served the people, cops would have arrested the bankers and the white collar criminals who made enormous profits by manipulating the housing market, even after their schemes created a massive global recession in 2008, and a spike in homelessness. Cops would be helping to seize homes to end, not create, homelessness. Yet evictions continue on a daily basis.

Who does policing target? Police are typically deployed to criminalize poverty, concentrating their efforts on criminalizing those with dark skin, forcing millions of people – primarily people of color, people with mental illness, and those in poverty – into the prison system, depriving them of voting and employment rights, and thereby preserving privileged access to housing, jobs, land, credit, and education for whites. Police are used to break strikes and assault picket lines, where workers are struggling for basic human rights and better conditions. Protests and uprisings during the Black Lives Matter movement have resulted in the use of military crowd control techniques. The political aim of the police is seemingly to silence the demonstrators and curtail their constitutional right to free speech and freedom of assembly, especially Black, Brown, Indigenous folks, and communities of color.

The Violent Military Industrial Complex Leaks into the U.S. Police State

The Military Industrial Complex is directly connected to policing and the Prison Industrial Complex in this country. American policing has become unnecessarily and dangerously militarized, in large part through federal programs that have armed state and local law enforcement agencies with the weapons and tactics of war, with almost no public discussion or oversight. The U.S. already acts as the police force of the world, enforcing authority through drone wars, proxy battles, and meddling. Black liberation is a global struggle, and there is a link between racial oppression internationally and domestically. A militarized police is only equipped to escalate situations.

Throughout US history, the police (including federal policing agencies like the FBI) have attacked and undermined social justice organizations and efforts, at home and abroad, through various forms of surveillance, infiltration, sabotage, and assassination. The political function of the police destroys any form of revolution, so it’s no surprise that in the 10 years of anti-establishment social unrest between 1965 and 1975, the number of police officers grew by roughly 40 percent nationally. In 1974, $15 billion was spent on criminal justice, 57 percent going directly to police expenditures4. With this increase of spending, the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO “neutralized” political dissidents and threats, like the Black Panther Party, through subterfuge and extreme violence. In league with local police units, the FBI declared war on radicals and groups from nationally oppressed communities. Then, the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams were first formed in Los Angeles in 1968. Fifty years later, the US still holds these political prisoners captive, like Mumia Abu-Jamal. The Free Them All Campaign continues to advocate for their release, even as the police continue to use these tactics against protestors today

Using federal funds, state and local law enforcement agencies have amassed military arsenals to wage the failed “War on Drugs,” disproportionately in communities of color. Aggressive enforcement of this mandate from decades ago has lost its public mandate, as 67 percent of Americans think the government should focus more on treatment than on policing and prosecuting drug users. Aggressive drug arrests and prosecution has impacted millions of lives , disproportionately in communities of color, though drug use rates are quite similar across race and class. Law enforcement agencies’ routine use of heavily armed SWAT teams to search people’s homes for drugs is the same hyper-aggressive form of domestic policing that killed Breonna Taylor.  

The militarization of American policing is evident in police officer training, which encourages them to adopt a “warrior” mentality and view the people they are supposed to serve as enemies. It’s also evident in the equipment they use, such as battering rams, flashbang grenades, and APCs. The 1033 Program transferred surplus military equipment to civilian police departments. Only 45 days after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Congress effortlessly passed the Patriot Act , which George W. Bush signed less than a month after the United States invaded Afghanistan, as part of the “War on Terror”. It broadly expanded law enforcement powers to search, surveil, investigate and indefinitely detain people. Among its effects, the Patriot Act has been used to expand the racist war on drugs. 

Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security, created in 2002 to coordinate government intelligence gathering in order to improve counterterrorism efforts,  has set up centers with the FBI and local police that have been used to spy on protest movements, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter. More than 7,000 people were arrested during the Occupy movement over the course of just a few months. These arrests, alongside incidents of police brutality, were intended to stamp out a movement that took aim at the face of class oppression from the rich, elite of Wall Street.

Since May 2020, the uprising spurred by the police lynching of George Floyd, has intensified the militarized mobilization of law enforcement. The police forces are equipped in full riot gear and use weapons designed for war. Black and Brown activists in the United States, especially during the Ferguson protests, have described domestic police departments as “occupying forces,” much like those in Afghanistan or Yemen or Palestine. In fact, allowing Israeli forces and U.S. participants to learn from each others’ violent practices and tactics results in the violation of the human rights of Black and Palestinian people, but there are efforts to end this through a campaign called, “End the Deadly Exchange.” Our police, at the behest of local government, wield not only military arms, but what they’ve learned from the military’s formal joint training, tactics (both street combat and psychological operations), and other means of  suppression. At least 200 cities in the U.S. had imposed curfews by early June, while more than 31 states and Washington, D.C. activated over 75,000 National Guard personnel, arresting over 10,000 people. Yet widespread police brutality and the mobilization of military law enforcement tactics, like kidnapping protestors, have only furthered massive civil unrest. 

The Case for Revolutionary Optimism: A Path towards Abolition

So, how do we fight an institution doing what it has been designed to do, one that’s protected by government leaders and employment contracts, and is therefore incapable of reform?  The problems of punitive, racist policing are cultural — ingrained in our society — and cannot be solved by merely identifying a couple murderers or “bad apples,” if you will. 

Given how corrosive policing has historically been and continues to be, it shouldn’t be surprising that with alternatives, our society could flourish without cops. Policing could, and should, be defunded and abolished.

A society that prioritizes human needs ahead of profit means communities that have sufficient housing, food, health care workers, prisoner re-entry services, and community practices that hold all of its members accountable for any harm and enact restorative justice. Mutual aid, rather than one-time giving events, would allow us to share our skills collectively and all contribute. 

It may seem implausible or unreachable. It requires divesting from police, prisons, and the military, and instead, investing in communities of color and supporting the public policies that encourage, not inhibit, family-sustaining wages, job development, education, and the equitable distribution of resources. We cannot accept corporate, private interests to define our way of living. The ruling, capitalist class is in power, controls our government policies, and we must not capitulate to the world they want us to live in. It is one with an illegal slave system that is the Prison Industrial Complex. A society with an abolitionist as a focus will not be built on the violence of a capitalist state designed to defend property and capital, but one in which the people are empowered to provide for each other. 

We must build class unity and solidarity through organizing within our communities to protect one another. There are few tools within the system to fight the State’s abuse politically and legally, but we can ask for the immediate release of inmates in this country’s tortuous prison system; the end of three strikes and overly harsh sentencing guidelines; changing the 13th Amendment to eliminate the clauses that allow for slavery and “involuntary servitude” for people who are convicted; the end of qualified immunity for officers; the repeal of federal programs that send military equipment to local police; the end of “Broken Windows” policing tactics, including stop-and-frisk and other police harassment tactics; the prohibition of no-knock entry; and laws that make it harder for the police to obstruct free speech activity. 

While these are only reforms, we can also strengthen community accountability models that critique punitive systems that maintain repressive, colonial ideology.  Together, we can connect movements, groups, and individuals to transgress the boundaries of institutions. These alternatives must include continuing critiques to improve social conditions, as well as provide accessible, sustainable levels of resources that are consistent with anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism principles. This is how we can transform and empower communities towards justice and abolition.

Breonna Taylor and the Framing of Black Women as "Soft Targets" in America

By Ameer Hasan Loggins

Originally published at the author’s blog.

12:38 a.m. was the last peaceful minute of Breonna Taylor’s life.

On March 13, 2020, at 12:38 a.m., Breonna Taylor and her partner Kenneth Walker were asleep in bed. At 12:39 a.m. officers beat on her door for approximately one-minute. During that 59-seconds of banging, Taylor screamed “at the top of her lungs,” “Who is it?” But no one said a word. “No answer. No response. No anything.” The boogeymen kept beating on her door. By 12:40 a.m. Plainclothes Louisville Metro Police Department Officers Myles Cosgrove and Brett Hankison, as well as Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, shattered the forest green front door of Breonna Taylor’s apartment with a battering ram.

“Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.”

The police blindly shot over 20 rounds of bullets into the home of Breonna Taylor. Eight of those officers’ bullets found their way into Breonna’s Black body.

Sgt. Mattingly spoke to Louisville Police internal investigators roughly two weeks after Breonna’s killing. During that conversation he said officers were told her ground floor apartment was a “soft target” and that Taylor too was a soft target, because she, “should be there alone.”

A “soft target.”

A soft target is a person, location, or thing that is deemed as unprotected. As vulnerable. As powerless against military or terrorist attacks. Attacking soft targets are meant to, “disrupt daily life, and spread fear.” They are meant to target, “identities, histories and dignity.” They are meant to ambush and bring unexpected carnage. In 1845, attacking soft targets is how James Marion Sims, who is considered to be “the father” of modern gynecological studied, was permitted to experiment on enslaved Black women without consent, without anesthesia, and without consideration of their humanity. In 2015, attacking soft targets is what lead to 13 Black women testifying against Officer Daniel Holtzclaw. They spoke of how Holtzclaw targeted them during traffic stops and interrogations. How the officer forced them into sexual acts in his police car or in their homes. Prosecutors spoke to how Holtzclaw, “deliberately preyed on vulnerable Black women from low-income neighborhoods,” while committing his acts of sexual terrorism. 170 years separates the hellish acts of Sims and Holtzclaw, but what bridges the gap in time between those two men serially targeting the identities, dignities, and humanhood’s of these Black women is an unbroken history of war being waged on their entire self.

I cast my mind back to Malcolm X’s rebuking of this nation in 1962, when he said, “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.” Here we are, in the year 2020, and the Louisville Police are framing Breonna Taylor as a “soft target.” It’s as if Brother Malcolm was talking about Breonna’s death before she was even born into this world. Before she was awakened by police pounding on her front door. Before she had a name that needed to be said. While Malcolm’s words may feel prophetic in their preciseness, they are not. They were painfully predictable. Malcolm lived, and died in anti-Black America. He was a scholar of America’s history of anti-Blackness.

There has never been a period in the history of America where Black women’s bodies, hearts, minds and beings have not been reduced to being treated as soft targets.

Black women have always been exploited in America. Violated in America. Terrorized in America. Killed in America. The relationship between Black women and America was birthed in targeting and torture.

In Antebellum America, white owners of enslaved African women freely and with legal impunity raped them, often in front of their own families and fictive kin. In Jim Crow America, close to 200 Black women too were murdered by lynch mobs in the American South, many of whom had been raped before having their necks bound and burned by knotted nooses before being hanged to death.

Black women too, were strange fruit.

Black women like Eliza Woods. Woods was a cook. A cook, who in 1866, was accused of poisoning a white woman to death by the woman’s husband. She was arrested and taken from the county jail by a lynch mob. She was stripped naked. She was hung from an elm tree in the courthouse yard. Her lifeless body was then riddled with bullets as over a thousand spectators watched.

In 1899, the husband admitted that he poisoned his wife — not Woods.

Black women like Laura Nelson. Nelson allegedly shot a sheriff, in 1911, to protect her 14-year-old son. A mob of white people seized Nelson along with her son, and lynched them both. Laura Nelson, “was first raped by several men. The bodies of Laura and her son were hung from a bridge for hundreds of people to see.”

Elderly Black women like 93-year-old Pearlie Golden (2014), 92-year-old Kathryn Johnson (2006), 66-year-old Eleanor Bumpurs (1984), and 66-year-old Deborah Danner (2016), all were in their homes and shot to death by the police. Michelle Cusseaux (2014) was 50-years-old. Kayla Moore (2013) was 41-years-old. Aura Rosser (2014) was 40-years-old. Tanisha Anderson (2014) was 37-years-old. Natasha McKenna (2015) was 37-year-old. Alesia Thomas (2012) was 35-years-old. Miriam Carey (2013) was 34-years-old. Charleen Lyles (2017) was 30-years-old. India Kager (2015) was 28-years-old. Sandra Bland (2015) was 28-years-old. Atatiana Jefferson (2019) was 28-years-old. Mya Hall (2015) was 27-years-old. Meagan Hockaday (2015) was 26-years-old. Shantel Davis (2012) was 23-years-old. Korryn Gains (2016) was 23-years-old. Rakia Boyd (2012) was 22-years-old. Gabriella Nevarez (2014) was 22-years-old. Janisha Fonville (2015) was 20-years-old.

The police did not give a damn about the ages of these Black women. They did not care if they had nearly lived for a century on this earth, or if they were just a few years removed from their high school graduation. They killed them just the same. The police have shown that anybody, at any age, can be on the fatal end of their force, if you were born with Black skin.

Aiyana Mo’nay Stanley-Jones was only seven-years-old. On May 16, 2010, at 12:40 am, a Detroit Police Department Special Response Team Officer ended her life. Her last peaceful minutes in this world were spent sleeping on the couch, near her grandmother. That’s before a no-knock warrant (at the wrong apartment) was executed. That’s before law enforcement threw a flash-bang grenade through her family’s front window. That’s before the grenade burned the blanket covering Aiyana’s body. That’s before the wooden front door exploded under the force of police boots. That’s before Officer Joseph Weekley fired a single shot, that entered Aiyana’s head and exited through her neck — all while an A&E crew were filming an episode of the cop- aganda program, The First 48.

There is no softer target in this world than a sleeping child.

Aiyana never had the chance to reach womanhood, but had she, her “soft target” status, both in perceived personhood and lived location, would have left her vulnerable to domestic anti-Black police terrorism attacks. The disturbing truth is that, as Kimberlie Crenshaw notes, “about a third of women who are killed by police in the United States are Black, but Black women are less than ten percent all women,” in this country. This speaks directly to the hazard level and susceptibility to anti-Black police terrorism faced by Black women of all ages in America. The devil is in the details. Look directly into the data, and see how many of the law enforcers who have killed Black women have been convicted of committing a crime. The American Judicial System does not protect Black women. It too treats them as soft targets. The lack of Black women’s names being said in conversations surrounding anti-Black police terror speaks directly to their deaths and narratives as being deemed as unworthy of outrage. Of newsworthiness. Of action.

Breonna Taylor’s killers are free. Brett Hankison, Jonathan Mattingly, and Myles Cosgrove are walking the streets…free. Breonna was shot dead in her home in March, and we are in the month of August. 143 days have passed…and her killers are free. There is no justice to be had for Black women when the intersections of their Blackness, their class, and their gender mark their bodies, their homes, and their narratives as “soft targets” to be attacked with little to no consequences.

The politics of Black women being unprotected against targeting in America, predates America being a sovereign nation. It goes as far back as Virginia’s December 1662 decree, “that the children of enslaved Africans and Englishmen would be ‘held bond or free according to the condition of the mother’ which, in effect, monetarily incentivized the sexual terror against Black women, “as their offspring would swell planters’ coffers — a prospect boon to countless rapes and instances of forced breeding.” One must understand, when you witness Black women passionately protesting on behalf of Breonna Taylor, yes, it is a fight for Black women today, but it is also a part of the uninterrupted fight Black women have always faced in America — the fight against being casualties of “soft target” terrorists attacks.

Coronavirus and American Exceptionalism

By Matthew Dolezal

Republished from the author’s blog.

America is the Fyre Festival of countries. It is pure hype with little to no positive results. It is a back-alley drug deal culminating in a sweaty palm gripping a wrinkled bag of oregano. It is broken promises, shattered dreams, and shameful regret. All our lives we are told with inflated enthusiasm, with charismatic apologia, that America is a spectacular monument to freedom and democracy, a “shining city upon a hill” and a beacon to lesser nations. We are told our country is “exceptional.” And all our lives we wait for supporting evidence to verify these sensational claims as we gawk with confusion at our surroundings.

In a sense, the “exceptionalism” narrative is true, but not in the sense the propagandists and gatekeepers from prominent institutions had intended. As we reevaluate the very notion of American policing — from its origins in southern slave-catching patrols, to its use as a violent deterrent against labor and civil rights struggles, to its ruthless enforcement of Jim Crow and the War on Drugs — we are also faced with a more profound question regarding the very nature of our “great” nation.

America is a political project founded, at first, by the violent ethnic cleansing of its indigenous inhabitants, then, by the colonizing of the blood-drenched land mass and, finally, by the instituting of industrial capitalism through a slavery-based economy. The European colonizers fought resolutely to maintain this barbaric system of kidnapped, forced, torturous, uncompensated labor in what historian Gerald Horne refers to as “the counter-revolution of 1776.” The subsequent development of white supremacy as a ubiquitous ideology then served the economic elite faithfully as a successful “divide and conquer” mechanism for decades and centuries to come.

As V.I. Lenin’s groundbreaking observations regarding imperialism as “the highest stage of capitalism” foresaw, the U.S. began expanding beyond its own borders — those which were initially forged through violent conquest, land theft, and treaty violations. In a stage of neocolonial domination beginning primarily with the Spanish-American War and continuing with covert military coups and death squads in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, the U.S. brutally secured natural resource acquisition for Western capital. The American military, globally perceived as the greatest threat to world peace, has an estimated 700 bases in 130 countries. In recent decades, the so-called “War on Terror” has taken the lives of approximately 1.3 million people. This inherently bellicose organization serves as a de-facto police force for the World Bank and the IMF, punishing any attempt at national sovereignty outside the confines of Western neoliberal capitalism.

The domestic effects of neoliberalism display themselves with such starkness that multi-billion dollar PR industries and corporate news media organizations make it their livelihoods to gaslight us and whitewash our own tangible material conditions. As the brief foray into a “prosperous” standard of living was dismantled by bipartisan Reaganomics, disillusioned Americans rejected their own ostensibly enlightened political process by refusing to vote in elections. Wealth concentration continued unabated, with three men now owning more than half the population. The prison population increased unabated, and is now the highest in the world. The for-profit healthcare system, claiming tens of thousands of innocent lives each year, continued unabated, and is now an outlier in the so-called “developed world.”

As the federal government doubled down on its commitment to serving the interests of private capital, public institutions and services were systematically gutted. This profound dedication to “profit over people,” specifically in the realm of healthcare, set the stage for America’s exceptional death toll in the wake of the voracious coronavirus pandemic. The flip side of this carnage is, of course, the ability of the ruling class to further enrich itself amidst the chaos. In a natural evolution of what Naomi Klein refers to as “disaster capitalism,” we are now well on our way to anointing the world’s first trillionaire.

If America was a political satire film, the coronavirus pandemic would be its whimsical climax; its Dr. Strangelove mass-nuking scene juxtaposed with a comforting musical score. Once again, we are exceptional, but in a rather insidious and villainous sense. In a black humor sort of way, America is the laughing stock of the world. The Global South must think our chickens are coming home to roost, just as they had on 9/11. Our lofty ideals are effortlessly unraveling before the eyes of billions, culminating in an unsightly mountain of corpses and petroleum-based consumer goods. Indeed, the empire wears no clothes.

As the late comedian George Carlin said, “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” In lieu of the fabled “land of the free,” what persists is simply an empire in decline; something more resembling an American Nightmare for the vast majority of those affected, both domestically and abroad. All possibilities for revolution or even reform have failed. America is the Titanic of countries; an ostentatious facade naively heading toward utter destruction. The question now is who will survive this final, epic, prolonged plateau; this dark moment while the glimmering vessel ominously rests vertically, partially above water; this death rattle before rapid descent into oblivion.

Racial Justice is Climate Justice: Racial Capitalism and the Fossil Economy

By Julius Alexander McGee and Patrick Trent Greiner

“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be...This is the inter-related structure of reality.”

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter From Birmingham Jail

The narrative of oppression moves through dialectical pressures. Capitalism evolved from the feudal order that preceded it, creating new forms of racial oppression that benefited an emerging ruling class[1]. Racial tensions evolve alongside economic oppression that subjugates labor to capital. The preceding racial order molds to emerging mechanisms of expropriation and exploitation by way of force and resistance. Beneath the surface of these tensions lies the interconnected threads of ecological and human expropriation. At the heart of all oppression, lies the manipulation of reproduction. The social processes necessary to reproduce black and brown communities, the ecological processes necessary to reproduce various species, and the dialectical processes that exist between humans and nature that are necessary to reproduce societies; the history of oppression is a tapestry of exploitation and expropriation interwoven so as to reproduce the means of maintaining the ruling class lifestyle. From afar this tapestry looks like a single garment; enslavement, capitalism, colonialism, etc. all coming together to produce the image of modernity, but on close examination one can see the interlocking threads of history weaving together a tapestry of oppression.

Fossil fuel consumption is a ubiquitous form of oppression that intersects with other oppressive structures, empowering those who call upon them to more efficiently extract surplus from various processes of social and ecological reproduction. As Malm writes, “The fossil economy has the character of totality... in which a certain economic process and a certain form of energy are welded together[2]” (12). We must not ignore, however, the ways in which oppressive structures and processes of social reproduction are welded into this totality as well. The expropriation of Black bodies cannot be reduced to mere economic relations, nonetheless racial oppression has always served economic interests. Thus, it is our goal to identify how the ongoing process by which fossil fuels and racial oppression are fused to one another and how that fusion changes the economic character of racial capitalism. This will not be a detailed narrative. Our goal is to develop a heuristic to better understand the connection between racial justice and climate change. To this end, we start with the claim that racial justice is climate justice.

Fossil fuels are the loom that weaves the tapestry of oppression into a functioning whole, systematically influencing the lives of the enslaved, imperialized, colonized, and exploited. Fossil fuels have become the bedrock of economic growth and the basis of most social reproduction. By social reproduction we mean human institutions that maintain the genealogical infrastructure of society. The family, schools, food, language, all of these are essential to reproducing a community's way of life. The dialectical bounding of economic growth and social reproduction is mediated through the consumption of fossil fuels. The family uses energy derived from fossil fuels to survive; schools use electricity to reproduce knowledge; food is produced and transported via networks of fossil fuel consumption; language is increasingly tailored to the needs of economic production.  Economic growth is itself a process of reproduction. Growth within the tapestry of oppression reproduces the conditions of much of contemporary social life, but its primary function is the protection and improvement of ruling class livelihoods. The legitimacy of the capitalist class derives from their ability to sustain economic growth. Economic growth is maintained by fossil fuel consumption. The residual impact of this pairing is the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, as well as the transformation of any earth systems that don’t readily lend themselves to the perpetuation of such emission.

All oppression is unsustainable. Oppression produces contradictions that undermine the mechanisms of both social and ecological reproduction. In the case of fossil fuels, humans burn the buried remains of plant and animal species that lived millions of years ago to change the landscape of the living. Fossil fuels embody the death that was essential to our life; they have already contributed to the reproduction of lifecycle processes. When humans use fossil fuels as the basis of social reproduction, they are choosing to live based on death instead of life. The reproduction of economic growth, which is essential to the capitalist classes' rule, is undermined by climate change. Carbon dioxide emissions are the largest contributor to climate change, which threatens the reproductive capacity of the tapestry of oppression. Changes in weather patterns contradict the ecological and social processes that the capitalist class expropriates and oppresses to reproduce their way of life. However, because fossil fuels weave together all forms of reproduction, it is not just the reproduction of the capitalist class that is threatened by climate change, but that of all subjects composing the weft and warp bound together by fossil fuels to create the great tapestry of oppression.

Economic growth is mediated by fossil fuels through the exploitation and expropriation of labor. Exploitation is labor that reproduces the conditions of the capitalist class. The surplus derived from labor exploitation reproduces class dynamics within the tapestry of oppression. Expropriation is the process of confiscation that yields the labor and natural resources that reproduce the existence of those living within the tapestry of oppression- particularly those most deeply exploited. Ecological processes, subsistence living, culture, etc., these forms of reproduction are often tailored to the needs of the ruling class. In order to reproduce their means, the oppressed must pay tribute to the capitalist class. However, the tapestry of oppression is not totalizing. The oppressed resist subjugation through the development of new forms of social reproduction.

There have always been alternative modes of social reproduction. However, reproduction outside the tapestry of oppression threatens the existence of the capitalist class. Therefore, the capitalist class views these forms of reproduction as disposable. Those who are expropriated are disposable insofar as the mode of social reproduction they rely upon, and in many instances their very existence is determined by the whims of the capitalist class. When the mechanisms of reproduction fall outside the realm of what can feasibly be expropriated, the capitalist class corralls processes of social reproduction from geographically and culturally distant populations into the service of capital accumulation. This process is known as primitive accumulation.

Primitive accumulation operates on the color-line as piezas de indias. Piezas de indias was a term used during African enslavement to quantify the productive capacity of enslaved peoples[3]. Specifically, piezas de indias measures qualities and characteristics of enslaved Africans that were developed prior to their enslavement. The term denotes a measurement of the value of a theft. “Marx had meant by primitive accumulation that the piezas de indias had been produced, materially and intellectually, by the societies from which they were taken and not by those by which they were exploited[4]” (121). Primitive accumulation, like all forms of oppression, is a process that is productive of contradictions. These contradictions contain legacies of opposition to the tapestry of oppression. It is here that one finds the germ and trajectory of the Black radical tradition. Primitive accumulation occurs on a spectrum. Material and intellectual theft is not homogenous, though it does often take shape around the color-line[5]. Piezas de indias is primitive accumulation specific to Black folks. In this essay, we identify the ongoing transformation of piezas de indias through three major shifts in the distribution and production of fossil fuels: 1) the first industrial revolution, 2) the second industrial revolution, 3) the neoliberal revolution.  

Although it is still common for historians to refer to a single industrial revolution (much like it is common to refer to a single agricultural revolution[6]), many U.S. historians refer to a second industrial revolution as well[7] [8]. The second industrial revolution occurred during the early and mid 20th century with the electrification of rural and urban towns, increases in railroad use, and the emergence of the automobile industry. This is distinct from the first industrial revolution, which started in Britain in the late 18th century, gradually spread across Europe and the U.S., and is defined by the increased use of steam engines and the rise of textile manufacturing in cities. For our purposes, both of these industrial revolutions are understood as forms of primitive accumulation perpetuated by piezas de indias. By this, we mean that primitive accumulation during the first and second industrial revolutions functioned through uneven and combined development, creating unique dynamics of interdependence within the tapestry of oppression.

The First Industrial Revolution: King Cotton and Racial Capitalism

If fossil fuels are “a train put at a point in the past on the current perilous track2”, African enslavement is the track by which the train moves. The bulk of the fossil economy, which emerged in Britain during the 18th and 19th centuries, was initially centered on textile production. The raw materials that made industrial production of textiles economically preeminent were extracted by enslaved bodies on cotton plantations in the United States. As competitive capitalism grew in British towns, largely a result of innovations related to the steam engine, enslavement grew to meet the productive demands of the emerging industries. By the mid-19th century, the United States accounted for three quarters of global cotton production[9]. The majority of the southern states’ cotton was sent to Britain and the northern U.S.to be manufactured into clothing in industrial factories. Eli Whitney’s cotton gin drastically increased the productive capacity of cotton plantations, and thereby accelerated enslavement[10]. From 1790 until the United States’ congress banned the importation of slaves from Africa in 1808, southern plantations imported around 80,000 enslaved Africans. In fact, so powerful was the economic imperative of expropriation, that despite the ban on the import of enslaved peoples to the U.S. slave ships continued to find their way to American shores until 1860- when the slave ship, Clotilda, brought 110 west Africans to the coast of Alabama[11].

Racial capitalism as a concept is synonymous with the Black radical tradition. Enslaved Black folks played a pivotal role in resisting the fossil economy from its inception, as their labor was essential to the rise of industrial capitalism. Slave rebellions, such as the German Coast Rebellion and Nat Turner’s Rebellion, threatened the hegemony of the southern bourgeoisie[12], which in turn threatened the flow of cotton to industrial centers. The Southern bourgeoisie were aware of their influence on industrial capitalism. King Cotton Diplomacy was implemented during the Civil War to coerce European nations into supporting the South’s secession efforts. These efforts failed for many reasons; the British and French had stockpiles of cotton due to previous surpluses, and the British were able to expand cotton extraction via their colonies. However, an often ignored factor that contributed to the failure of King Cotton Diplomacy was the general slave strikes throughout the South, where hundreds of thousands of enslaved Black folk fled plantations to support the war effort. The general slave strikes also provided the Union army with much needed reinforcements, which helped end the war swiftly[13] [14].   

Although the British refrained from taking an explicit “side” during the war, which was in part fueled by their reliance on grain produced in northern states[15], they partook in many efforts to support the southern states’ secession. This included efforts by the British bourgeoisie, who built the majority of ships used by the confederate navy[16]. It is clear that the British had a vested interest in maintaining enslavement in the United States. Although the British had previously outlawed slavery across its empire, the Black radical scholar Eric Williams made it clear that this was not due to a moral shift in British sentiment toward enslavement. The abolition of slavery in the empire served the interest of the emerging industrial bourgeoisie, who used reparations paid to indebted plantation owners to finance industrialization[17] [18].

Following the abolition of slavery, millions of Black folk were denied just compensation for the socially and environmentally destructive contradictions of enslavement, which had manifested in the early fossil economy. Instead of choosing a path toward healing, the United States government ceded power back to plantation owners, who in turn developed systems of debt peonage, sharecropping, and convict leasing, which restructured the tapestry of oppression and further tangled the oppressive threads of the fossil economy and the expropriation of Black bodies. All three of these systems of expropriation (debt peonage, sharecropping, and convict leasing) helped the United States regain its place as a global leader in cotton exports. In fact, the South’s new systems of expropriation increased the efficiency of cotton exportation to industrial centers[19]. Black folk who resisted these changes and attempted to integrate into white society became the target of new Jim Crow laws, which, among many other things, prevented Black and poor White folk from constructing their own communities. In the tapestry of oppression, the threads that bind the oppressed are mediated by the policy and ideology of the ruling class. If fossil fuels are the loom, then these forces of hegemony are the shuttle- weaving the weft of ecological devastation into the warp of social domination- the product is the legitimated mode of social reproduction and control; the tapestry of oppression. Jim Crow laws- one such shuttle- were a form of continuous primitive accumulation that disrupted communal efforts by Black folk to resist expropriation via debt peonage, sharecropping, and convict leasing. Without these efforts, it would have been difficult to corral Black bodies back into servitude in support of the fossil economy. A loom is rendered useless without a shuttle.

After surviving and resisting decades of expropriation in the southern United States, ecological and economic pressures changed the interdependent dynamics within the tapestry of oppression. The Boll Weevil epidemic of the late 19th and early 20th century decimated the South’s cotton economy creating a push factor for Black migration out of the South. Further, the reduced flow of European immigrants to the United States due to World War I, created distinct pull factors for Black migration to industrial cities[20]. From the late 19th to mid-20th century hundreds of thousands of Black folks migrated out of the South to industrial cities across the United States in what is known as the Great Migration[21]. Black migration out of the south coincided with a dramatic change in the structure of the fossil economy. While in 1860 cotton still reigned supreme as the U.S’s leading industry, by 1890 cotton was surpassed by machinery manufacturing as well as steel and iron production[22]. The new jobs in these expanding sectors were filled by Black migrants. To be clear, the cotton economy still played a prominent role in industrial manufacturing throughout the late 19th early 20th centuries, however the influx of Black workers to industrial cities provided the industrial bourgeoisie with leverage over workers by way of racial segregation.

During the early years of the Great Migration, White industrial workers in the United States formed the first national labor unions in response to the economic imbalances produced by the second industrial revolution and World War I. These unions organized mass resistance to the changing dynamics of the fossil economy, however their efforts were undermined by bourgeois racial hegemony. For example, the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, which resisted a central component of the fossil economy, freight train transit fueled by fossil fuels, was a response to wage cuts onset by the end of the Great War[23]. Black railroad workers were actively denied membership to railroad unions, stoking hostility and resentment between Black and White workers. Specifically, White workers saw the lower wages paid to Black workers as a threat to union efforts and demanded that Black workers be replaced with White workers who would be paid higher wages[24], rather than demanding equal pay for White and Black workers. The active discrimination against Black workers by unions resulted in what could be viewed as Black workers crossing the picket line, however the only accurate assessment of these events would lead to the conclusion that it was the color-line that crossed unions and the picket line that crossed Black workers. Similarly, the Homestead Strike of 1892 pitted oppressed workers against the fossil economy’s emerging juggernauts, steel and iron manufacturing. The strike was undermined by the color line and Black workers were, once again, denied union membership. In November 1892, 2,000 White workers on strike violently attacked Black workers who crossed picket lines as well as their families[25]. Ultimately, at the end of the month, the White worker's strike was brought to a close and they were left reapplying for their jobs. Resistance to the fossil economy was undermined by racial tensions. Again, instead of walking down the path of healing by building a cohesive resistance, industrial workers chose to further entrench the expropriation of Black folks and fossil fuels.     

The second industrial revolution: fossil fuels as a basis for social reproduction

If piezas de indias during the first industrial revolution is defined by enslavement, Jim Crow, and industrial labor disenfranchisement, in the second industrial revolution it is defined by political coercion and the uneven distribution of fossil fuel-based amenities.

In the early 20th century, as the U.S. emerged as a global economic hegemon, electrification became a means to expand the fossil economy through coerced consumption. Mass electrification of towns started with the construction of Pearl Street Station in New York City in 1882[26]. The first residential house to receive electricity in the U.S. was occupied by J.P. Morgan (the famous financial capitalist), who was a large financial backer of residential electrification24. Morgan was responsible for the eventual merger of Edison Electric Company and rival company Thomson-Houston, into the economic giant General Electric, which persists today as one of the largest multinational corporations. Electrification did not become ubiquitous until it braided together the ability to increase the efficiency of reproductive labor with the production of culture. Specifically, inventions such as the electric iron, washing machine, and refrigerator all increased leisure time in the home for many workers and families. This newly afforded leisure time was replaced by the culture industry[27], which used electricity to create commodities, such as the radio and eventually the television to mass produce culture.

Mass distribution of electrification was slow due to its infrastructural needs. Little is known about the first working class households to receive electricity. What is known is that early distribution was contingent on whether or not households could afford electricity24. This leads us to suspect that early on, electrification in U.S. cities was implemented along the color-line, however more research is needed to understand the totality of these effects.

Following the Great Depression, rural electrification was implemented by the Roosevelt administration as part of the New Deal in the 1930s. In his research on rural electrification in the U.S. south, geographer Conor Harrison identified the ways in which Jim Crow laws influenced rural electrification and disadvantaged Black households in the rural spaces of the region. It must be remembered that, in the 1930s, more than half of the previously enslaved Black population in the U.S. lived in the rural South[28]. Harrison argues that analyses carried out to determine where the efforts of electrification should be directed relied on a “correction factor”, which was used by federal agents in the rural electrification program to underestimate potential electricity use in Black households. Ultimately, this served to prioritize electrification of White households throughout the region. In this sense, the correction factor, similar to other New Deal policies such as redlining[29], was used to systematically disadvantage Black folk. Harrison concludes, “New energy systems do not emerge into places devoid of social order. Rather..., energy systems deployed in already uneven and racialized landscapes tend to perpetuate marginalization” (pp. 928). Again, fossil fuels were used to further wrap Black folk into the tapestry oppression. In general, one can see how many New Deal policies, such as the National Housing Act of 1934  and the Rural Electrification Act of 1935, encouraged expropriation by more tightly bounding social reproduction (in this case the need for shelter and reproductive labor necessary to maintain that shelter) with economic life. The New Deal relief efforts were implemented on the color-line. This meant that processes of expropriation, which New Deal policies facilitated, were inherently uneven. As such, the continued use of these amenities, at best, functioned to maintain the color-line.

The rise of the automobile industry is a more explicit example of uneven development during the second industrial revolution. The automobile was developed through a series of  inventions using internal combustion engines to propel horseless carts[30]. The mass production and consumption of automobiles is most commonly associated with Henry Ford, the Model T car, and “Fordism.” Fordist production combined the fragmented tasks of “Taylorism” with industrial processes to produce assembly lines of so-called “low skilled workers.” This process increased labor productivity such that working class incomes rose alongside the profits of the capitalist class. The subsequent increase in working class disposable income encouraged mass consumption, which was structured around the automobile[31] [32]. Automobiles expanded the scope of the fossil economy by making oil paramount in industrial development. This expansion was supported by the discovery of large oil reserves in the southern United States in the Spindletop oil fields during the late 19th century[33].

Automobile expansion is inexorably linked to racial segregation in the United States. The phenomenon of White flight, which led to mass suburbanization in the U.S., was encouraged by New Deal housing policies that facilitated the expansion of the automobile market. In order to pass New Deal legislation during the Great Depression, the Roosevelt administration pandered to Southern Democrats by excluding Black folks from many of the amenities granted by the New Deal policies[34] [35]. Prior to the Great Depression, many industrial cities were already heavily segregated due to racial hostilities during the first Great Migration of Black folks out of the South. Federal agencies constructed during the New Deal, such as the Federal Housing Administration and Home Owners Loan Corporation, furthered racial segregation through racial covenants and new underwriting standards that discouraged home loans in racially mixed and predominantly Black neighborhoods. New Deal legislation also disproportionately affected Black farmers through rural restructuring efforts that pushed Black farmers in the South off their land (a legacy that continues today in HUD financing to Black farmers, see NYT 1619 Project[36]). This in combination with new labor opportunities in industrial cities due to World War II, prompted the second Great Migration of Black folks out of the rural south and into urban centers.    

During World War II, the automobile industry grew exponentially due to government purchases related to the war effort30. Following the war, the United States Congress continued to support the automobile industry through legislation, such as the Federal Aid Highway Acts of 1944 and 1956. Further, after the war many Black workers who migrated into industrial cities were put out of work and replaced by White workers who had recently returned from the war. Newly constructed highways and new mortgage schemes, both of which were backed by the U.S. government, combined with the booming automobile industry to encourage White families after war to move out of the city and into suburban sprawls.

The phenomenon, known as White Flight[37], was facilitated by preexisting racial oppression, newly institutionalized racist policies, and government support for the automobile industry. In the end, White flight further tangled the reproductive needs of the capitalist class with the reproductive needs of the oppressed. In post-World War United States, the automobile became the opiate of the White working class; it liberated White folks from the drudgery of city life that had befallen Black folks and simultaneously bound them to the whims of the capitalist class. Through automobile proliferation, the fossil economy effectively weaved together the social reproductive needs of the oppressed with the reproductive needs of the capitalist class such that oppression is perpetuated through myriad dimensions of social reproduction. Where one chooses to live, and how one chooses to live, is tethered to the automobile and the mechanisms that led to its widespread use. Thus, one’s life chances- largely determined by where one is born[38]- are, in effect, patterned by the historical structures and relations that compose the fossil economy. These impacts can even be seen today, as research has shown a clear link between race in the United States and carbon emissions from transportation[39], race and access to solar energy technologies[40], and ties between life expectancy and zip code of birth[41]. Such historically produced associations have created a reality wherein Black liberation is often negotiated under the looming shadow of the fossil economy. The long Civil Rights Movement saw Black communities advocating for better schools, better housing, better access to transit, and better working conditions. Due to the second industrial revolution, most of these amenities became inexorably linked to the fossil economy. While it would be inappropriate to define the Civil Rights Movement as Black folk simply seeking better access to the fossil economy, many of the ‘rights' granted to Black folks during the Civil Rights Movement benefited the fossil economy due to the structural changes that occurred during the second industrial revolution. For example, access to public transit increasingly became a necessity for life within the city, particularly after transit funding was shifted away from cities and towards the suburbs[42]. Actions taken by Civil Rights activists, such as the Montgomery bus boycotts, were negotiated under the framework of the fossil economy. Further, legislation, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964, included policies that undermined unions’ ability to discriminate against Black folks. However, by this time many industrial unions were seeking to share in the benefits of the fossil economy, rather than deconstructing the mechanisms of capital accumulation[43] [44]. A key point here is that many of the social, political, and economic gains made during the Civil Rights Movement were premised on the unjust allocation of fossil fuel-based amenities.   

In the aftermath of primitive accumulation during the second industrial revolution, a new Black radical tradition emerged that sought to control social reproduction outside the framework of the tapestry of oppression; this movement came to be known as the Black Power Movement. Influenced by the radical teachings of Malcom X, the Black Power Movement in the United States sought liberation through controlling the means of social reproduction. The crowning achievements of the Black Panther Party, which was one of the most successful organizations in the Black Power Movement, were the free breakfast programs, free health clinics, and resistance to police brutality. These efforts actively resisted the expropriation of Black folk in the tapestry of oppression. The Black Panthers sought liberation through re-appropriating various mechanisms of social reproduction. For example, the free breakfast program was supported by local grocery stores, who donated food to the Black Panther Party[45]. The cost of this food captured the embedded cost of the fossil economy (i.e. the fossil fuels used to produce and transport the food to local communities). The cost and relative inaccessibility of this food for Black folk was a product of the uneven distribution of fossil fuel amenities, which at this point had become the basis of social reproduction in the tapestry of oppression. Thus, the re-appropriation of this food into free breakfast for hungry Black children resisted the inequality embedded in the tapestry of oppression. However, as we mentioned earlier, social reproduction outside the tapestry of oppression is a threat to the ruling class. The Black Power movement was actively targeted and opposed by the state, not because they were a violent threat, but because they undermined the internal mechanisms of social reproduction inside the tapestry of oppression; they were actively pulling at the threads, unweaving the tapestry as it wrapped around them. The ruling class was successful at corralling the oppositional social reproduction within the Black Power Movement. To resist this new threat, the ruling class implemented a new form of piezas de indias that combined the tactics used during the first and second industrial revolution -- this new form of primitive accumulation would come to be known as neoliberalism.

The neoliberal revolution: mass incarceration, gentrification, and the rise of color-blind environmentalism

Under neoliberalism, piezas de indias functions through political coercion and economic restructuring. Neoliberalism is a political and economic project that reframes the crisis of stagflation, which plagued monopoly capitalism, as a worker-induced problem[46]. Economically, neoliberalism functions through the state, which facilitates the redistribution of wealth from workers to the ruling class. Politically, neoliberalism works as a narrative to justify legislation that seeks to recapture wealth distributed by the state to workers through programs such as welfare. The mechanisms through which these processes occur are often violent. However, this violence is typically mystified through political coercion[47]. For instance, the carceral state in the U.S., which has emerged as an extension of the neoliberal state, is often viewed apolitically and ahistorically. This allows the carceral state to operate with impunity, as its violent actions are viewed as a necessary and normal response to political dissent. For our purposes, we will explore neoliberalism in the U.S. as it relates to 1) economic restructuring in the wake of deindustrialization and 2) political restructuring in the wake of the declining welfare state.

One of the first neoliberal efforts to restructure a society’s processes of social reproduction occurred in Chile in 1973, when the United States backed a coup d'état against the democratically elected socialist leader– Salvador Allende. This event is significant in that it sparked a restructuring of the fossil economy (first in Chile but eventually across most of the world), as well as the restructuring of the state’s role in managing political dissent. After being elected, Allende nationalized Chile’s copper industry, which at the time was the nation’s largest export, and Chile’s private utilities. The coup that ousted Allende was led by Augusto Pinochet, who installed a brutal military dictatorship to replace Chile’s democratic government. In addition to re-privatizing Chile’s newly nationalized copper market and public utilities, Pinochet also employed a violent military regime that was hostile to political dissent[48]. With respect to the fossil economy, one of the more significant changes that followed the re-privatization of Chile's utilities was the creation and installation of a wholesale energy market system. The wholesale energy market was a trading scheme developed by economists trained at the University of Chicago, which was an early breeding ground of neoliberal economic policies and ideology. The economic restructuring of Chile was an experiment of racial capitalism– akin to the experiments others have examined in Puerto Rico[49] and Flint Michigan[50] more recently.  

In general, wholesale energy trading is best understood as a neoliberal project that was developed to further efforts to extract surplus from the oppressed. Rather than using the traditional monopoly structure of energy production and consumption that was developed during the second industrial revolution– an approach which saw electricity monopolies profit by reducing the cost of production relative to that of consumption– wholesale energy markets break down monopolies into smaller, more competitive producers and distributors. Electricity producers compete with one another by selling energy to distributors at variable rates. Under this scheme, households often pay a fixed rate for electricity, which further normalizes the ubiquity of fossil fuel consumption while also rendering the cost of production invisible to consumers within the tapestry of oppression. The habits of electricity consumers under this new scheme create the conditions for a more rapid, efficacious mode of accumulation by dispossession. The term accumulation by dispossession was developed by Harvey to describe how capitalist policies under neoliberalism result in a centralization of wealth and power by dispossessing public and private entities of their wealth or land43. We employ it here to highlight that, if producers believe consumption will be higher during certain hours of the day they can alter the price of electricity sold to distributors to turn a greater profit. As a result, wealth is increasingly concentrated into the hands of energy producers- being transferred from the energy distributors and, when left unprotected by policy makers, consumers that are woven into these market mechanisms. Put differently, implementation of the wholesale market system allows for the more rapid accumulation of wealth by energy producers via a process of dispossession, or expropriation, of both the natural world and the populations who must rely on their products in order to reproduce their life cycles in the system of neoliberal capital– that most recent pattern of oppressive structures and relations being woven across the tapestry that tangles our fates.

The wholesale energy market exacerbates the tendency towards uneven development within the tapestry of oppression by making energy saving techniques carried out within the home mutually beneficial to electricity distributors and consumers. The ability to reduce electricity consumption– at least during certain hours of the day– becomes a market in and of itself that is supported by electricity distributors[51]. For example, energy distributors such as Pacific Gas and Electric[52], and Portland General Electric[53] have created incentive programs to increase energy savings within households in their distribution network. While on the surface these incentives appear to be potential points of disruption to the fossil economy, in actuality they represent an alliance between energy distributors and wealthy home owners who work in tandem to shift the burden of the accumulation by dispossession carried out by energy producers onto poorer and disproportionately Black households. The accessibility of energy efficient appliances and energy saving techniques operate on the color-line. Black folk in the U.S. are more likely to rent their homes, to be rent stressed[54], and live in fuel poverty[55]. The material conditions of Black life prevent Black folk from accessing the energy saving techniques that are available to consumers, such as energy efficient refrigerators, modern insulation, and energy efficient heating and air conditioning. For example, renters in the U.S., which is disproportionately made of Black folks, are unable to implement many energy saving techniques– such as insulation, and energy efficient heating and air conditioning– because the choice to make such improvements is typically only accessible to homeowners, investment property owners and landlords. Beyond accessibility, the incentive structure of these types of home ‘upgrades,’ are generally expected in the long-term savings over years and decades; a cost-savings timeline which is not applicable to renters whose housing security is far more precarious (even if renters did purchase an energy efficient refrigerator, their rent may increase prohibitively in the coming months, making the investment in an energy efficient appliance more of a nuisance than a benefit.). Further, using these amenities works to alleviate the cost of electricity, which disproportionately benefits White households. Similar to the White Fight of the second industrial revolution, energy saving techniques are an opiate of the White middle class, one that works to alleviate the cost of energy consumption by further tangling the threads within the tapestry of oppression.

An important condition of these relationships, one that is unique to the neoliberal epoch of the fossil economy, is the apparent color-blindness of environmental sustainability. Household energy saving techniques that are supported by energy distributors, and many other markets as well, are touted as environmentally sustainable and are a central part of strategic climate mitigation planning. Nonetheless, these narratives are also part of a hegemonic discourse of color-blindness that masks the reality of racial oppression in the United States. Here, again, instead of walking a path that heals the planet and unravels the threads of Black expropriation, the White middle class is being coerced into an alliance with an industry that perpetuates uneven development throughout the fossil economy.

The development of neoliberalism in the United States coincided with the rise of the carceral state. In his book, Incarcerating the crisis: Freedom struggles and the rise of the neoliberal state, Jordan T. Camp argues that the carceral state emerged by creating racial enemies out of those resisting neoliberal efforts to restructure the economy. Specifically, Camp contends that the “transformation of the [carceral] state was legitimated in response to the organic crisis of U.S. Jim Crow capitalism, a transition that represented a rupture in a ‘total way of life’ characterized by Fordism’s purportedly high wages, mass production, industrial factories, assembly lines, bureaucratized unions, and mass-based popular culture44.” Black folks were disproportionately affected by what Camp calls the ‘crisis of Jim Crow capitalism[56]’. The various rebellions that spawned from this crisis, including the Harlem Revolt of 1964, the Watts Rebellion of 1965, and the Detroit Rebellion of 1967 germinated grassroots resistance to the tapestry of oppression, inducing class-consciousness. This created a crisis of capitalist hegemony, as the ideological threads that protected the policies underlying racial capitalism began to strain. These rebellions– as rebellions so often do– breached the color-line, as White and Black workers united in resistance to the economic restructuring of neoliberalism. Carceral policies emerged in response to these rebellions. It was through these new policies and discourses that the capitalist class attempted to recapture its hegemonic influence. Our metaphorical loom–fossil fuels– was fit with a new shuttle– the ideological tenets of colorblind racism and the policies of mass incarceration– to intricately interweave Black folk, Black life, and U.S. understandings of criminality in a way that maintained the tapestry’s coherence[57]. Taken together these changes culminated in the current wave of mass incarceration, a phenomena which represents the neoliberal state’s political and economic response to the rebellions of Black folk.

The political upshot of all this is that mass incarceration has effectively restructured the color-line in the United States. People of color are confronted by the police, charged with crimes, and incarcerated at disproportionately higher rates than Whites within the U.S. carceral state49. This has occurred against the backdrop of color-blind racism, and it is through the use of color-blind rhetoric that the racialized outcomes of carceral policy have come to be viewed as essential to maintenance of ‘law and order’ in the U.S.– which further disguises the raced palette of mass incarceration. Simply put, the color-line has been established around a coded language of race, which helps to legitimate piezas de indias through incarceration. Further, this process has also helped efforts to reorganize the fossil economy, making its machinery more suitable for weaving together the social and cultural structures of modernity into the totality that is the tapestry of oppression.

In a forthcoming study, we have found that mass incarceration significantly increases carbon emissions from industrial production. While on the surface the relationship between mass incarceration and climate change appears disparate, the interconnected threads of the tapestry of oppression reveal a direct relationship between mass incarceration and the fossil economy. This relationship is an artefact of the prison industrial complex, which represents a collection of political, bureaucratic, and economic interests that benefit from mass imprisonment. Economically, the prison industrial complex profits from industrial development that is interconnected with mass incarceration. Specifically, since 1980 more than 1,000 prisons have been constructed in the U.S[58]. The construction and maintenance of prisons have become a source of revenue for over 3,000 private U.S. corporations. These companies are funded through government contracts, which provide an avenue for industrial expansion. Sociologist Natalie Deckard, argues that mass incarceration works as a “locus for the coercion of demand and consumption”, compelling those who would otherwise marginally participate in markets to become active consumers[59]. Moreover, the prison industrial complex has effectively enacted policies that allow the state and private entities to profit from incarcerated labor. Prison work programs, such as the U.S. government owned corporation Unicor, pay prisoners as little as a dollar an hour for industrial labor, which helps to expand industrial development by reducing the cost of labor. Further, Unicor has a monopoly on government contracts for textile production. Fascinating here, is the reality that black enslavement is yet again being used to support the textile industry, bringing us full circle.

While the fossil economy did not encourage mass incarceration, it has benefited from mass imprisonment through the prison industrial complex. In its current state, mass incarceration, which is nothing more than a modern form of enslavement, is woven into the tapestry of oppression through the use of hegemonic ideology and policy– though, yet again, it is only the use of fossil fuels that has made such complex weaving possible. The economic crisis of the 1970s, which disrupted the structure of the fossil economy that was developed during the second industrial revolution, produced mass unrest. Neoliberal policies are a response to this unrest, which seek to further entrench Black folk into the tapestry of oppression through coerced demand and consumption. The seemingly ever-expanding carceral state creates a cycle of coerced production and consumption. Incarcerated people simultaneously consume and produce industrial goods, which benefits a small number of entities within the prison industrial complex.     

Conclusion

Black folk have been at the center of the fossil economy since its inception. At each moment of change within the tapestry of oppression, when the threads hang loose and are in need of mending, the opportunity for organized resistance has been squandered by the shuttles of white hegemony; reconstruction following the civil war, mass migration fueled by emerging industries, civil unrest after the economic crisis of the 1970s. All of these moments are defined by primitive accumulation-- by piezas de indias. The emerging renewable energy economy once again presents us with an opportunity to resist the tapestry of oppression. However, the interlocking threads of the tapestry must be opposed if renewables are going to be effective at alleviating oppression. Such resistance requires that we craft new shuttles– by introducing policies that serve as a redress to past forms of expropriation– while simultaneously constructing a new loom– one energized not by the death embodied in the carbonaceous form of fossil fuels, but by the productive, immediate, and life giving (if also fleeting) power of our Sun. Such dramatic changes require purposeful, community-based action, as the inertia of the historical forces described here is formidable. Consider a recent study published in the journal Nature Energy[60], which finds that the expansion of renewable energy consumption disproportionately burdens Black households in the southwestern United States with higher energy bills, demonstrating the long-term effects of Black expropriation within the tapestry of oppression. The expropriation of Black folk is so deeply woven into the tapestry of oppression that pulling on a loose thread without considering the structure of the whole risks disproportionately unraveling the tapestry, which has been carefully woven by way of racialized policy implementation and fossil fuel-based technologies. Combating climate change requires more than simply opposing the fossil economy; we must resist the oppression that fossil fuels have facilitated for over 100 years. The question is: will we seize this moment and unite to carefully unravel this tapestry, weaving it anew into something more just and sustainable, or will we yet again squander an opportunity for healing in favor of further entangling the threads that constitute the tapestry of oppression?   

John Kay’s 1733 Patent for the “New Engine or machine for Opening and Dressing Wool”. This patent introduced the “flying shuttle” to the loom. The introduction of the shuttle allowed looms to be operated by a single laborer, and made loom production fast and efficient enough to facilitate its role in the industrial revolution. https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Kay

Notes

[1] Kelley, Robin DG. "What did Cedric Robinson mean by racial capitalism." Boston review 12 (2017).

[2] Malm, Andreas. Fossil capital: The rise of steam power and the roots of global warming. Verso Books, 2016.

[3] Rodriguez, Junius P. The historical encyclopedia of world slavery. Vol. 1. ABC-CLIO, 1997.

[4] Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. Univ of North Carolina Press, 2000.

[5] Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. The souls of black folk. Oxford University Press, 2008.

[6] Foster, John Bellamy. "Marx's theory of metabolic rift: Classical foundations for environmental sociology." American journal of sociology 105, no. 2 (1999): 366-405.

[7] Pirani, Simon. "Burning Up." University of Chicago Press Economics Books (2018).

[8] Mokyr, Joel. "The second industrial revolution, 1870-1914." Storia dell’economia Mondiale 21945 (1998).

[9] Beckert, Sven. "Emancipation and empire: Reconstructing the worldwide web of cotton production in the age of the American Civil War." The American Historical Review 109, no. 5 (2004): 1405-1438..

[10] Green, Constance M. Eli Whitney and the Birth of American Technology. (1965)

[11] Zanolli, Lauren. “'Still fighting': Africatown, site of last US slave shipment, sues over pollution.” The Guardian (2018).

[12] The southern bourgeoisie should be contrasted with their industrial counterparts in the northern U.S., specifically due to their use of enslavement wage labor to derive surplus.

[13] Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt, ed. Black Reconstruction in America: Toward a history of the part which black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860-1880. Routledge, 2017.

[14] Roediger, David R. Seizing freedom: Slave emancipation and liberty for all. Verso Books, 2014.

[15] Ginzberg, Eli. "The Economics of British Neutrality during the American Civil War." Agricultural History 10, no. 4 (1936): 147-156.

[16] Blackett, Richard JM. Divided Hearts: Britain and the American Civil War. LSU Press, 2000.

[17] One should also not forget that it was the rift in soil metabolism between plantation and town that made the sugar trade a volatile market in need of economic restructuring.

[18] Williams, Eric. Capitalism and slavery. UNC Press Books, 2014.

[19] Woodman, Harold D. King cotton and his retainers: Financing and marketing the cotton crop of the south, 1800-1925. Beard Books, 1999.

[20] Higgs, Robert. "The boll weevil, the cotton economy, and black migration 1910-1930." Agricultural History 50, no. 2 (1976): 335-350.

[21] United States Census, “The Great Migration, 1910 to 1970”. 2012. https://www.census.gov/dataviz/visualizations/020/ (accessed 3/20/20)

[22] Economics 323-2: Economic History of the United States Since 1865 http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jmokyr/Graphs-and-Tables.PD

[23] Foner, Philip Sheldon. History of the Labor Movement in the United States: The TUEL to the end of the Gompers Era. 9. Vol. 9. International Pub, 1991.

[24] Davis, Colin J. "Bitter conflict: The 1922 railroad shopmen's strike." Labor History 33, no. 4 (1992): 433-455.

[25] Adamczyk, Joseph. “Homestead Strike: United States History.” Encyclopedia  Britannica 2020. https://www.britannica.com/event/Homestead-Strike (accessed 3/22/20)

[26] Jonnes, Jill. Empires of light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the race to electrify the world. Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2004.

[27] Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, and Theodor W. Adorno. The culture industry: Selected essays on mass culture. Psychology Press, 2001.

[28] Motion, In. "The African-American Migration Experience." URL: http://www. inmotionaame. org/about. cfm (data obrashcheniya: 13.07. 2014) (2009).

[29] Coates, Ta-Nehisi. "The case for reparations." The Atlantic 313, no. 5 (2014): 54-71.

[30] Gartman, David. Auto opium: A social history of American automobile design. Psychology Press, 1994.

[31] Vroey, Michel De. "A regulation approach interpretation of contemporary crisis." Capital & Class 8, no. 2 (1984): 45-66.

[32] Florida, Richard L., and Marshall MA Feldman. "Housing in US fordism." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 12, no. 2 (1988): 187-210.

[33] Walker, Judith, Ellen Walker Rienstra, Jo Ann Stiles, Ward Morar, and Kara Medhurst. "Giant Under the Hill: A History of the Spindletop Oil Discovery at Beaumont, Texas in 1901." (2002).

[34] Lowndes, Joseph E. From the new deal to the new right: Race and the southern origins of modern conservatism. Yale University Press, 2008.

[35] Cowie, Jefferson. The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics. Vol. 120. Princeton University Press, 2017.

[36] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html

[37] Massey, Douglas S., and Nancy A. Denton. American apartheid: Segregation and the making of the underclass. Harvard University Press, 1993.

[38] Wasserman, Miriam. “The Geography of Life's Chances” Federal Reserve Bank Boston. 2001. https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/regional-review/2001/quarter-4/the-geography-of-lifes-chances.aspx (accessed 3/24/20)

[39] McGee, Julius Alexander, Christina Ergas, and Matthew Thomas Clement. "Racing to Reduce Emissions: Assessing the Relation between Race and Carbon Dioxide Emissions from On-Road Travel." Sociology of Development 4, no. 2 (2018): 217-236.

[40] Sunter, D.A., Castellanos, S. & Kammen, D.M. Disparities in rooftop photovoltaics deployment in the United States by race and ethnicity. Nat Sustain 2, 71–76 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-018-0204-z

[41] Macintyre, S., Ellaway, A., & Cummins, S. Place effects on health: How can we conceptualise, operationalise and measure them? Social Science & Medicine, 55(1), 125-139.).

[42] Taylor, Brian D., and Mark Garrett. 1999. “Reconsidering Social Equity in Public Transit.” Berkeley:

University of California Transportation Center

[43] Obach, Brian K. "New labor: slowing the treadmill of production?." Organization & Environment 17, no. 3 (2004): 337-354.

[44] Schnaiberg, Allan, David N. Pellow, and Adam Weinberg. "The treadmill of production and the environmental state." The environmental state under pressure 10 (2002): 15-32.

[45] Austin, Curtis J. Up against the wall: Violence in the making and unmaking of the Black Panther Party. University of Arkansas Press, 2006.

[46] Harvey, David. A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, USA, 2007.

[47] Camp, Jordan T. Incarcerating the crisis: Freedom struggles and the rise of the neoliberal state. Vol. 43. Univ of California Press, 2016.

[48] Fourcade-Gourinchas, M. and Babb, S. 2002. The rebirth of the liberal creed: Paths to neoliberalism in four countries. American Journal of Sociology, 103: 33–579.

[49] Klein, Naomi. The battle for paradise: Puerto Rico takes on the disaster capitalists. Haymarket Books, 2018.

[50] Pulido, Laura. "Flint, environmental racism, and racial capitalism." (2016): 1-16.

[51] Wang, Ucilia. “Utility companies start hawking appliances” The Guardian. 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2015/may/13/utility-rebate-sdge-xcel-energy-simple-energy (accessed 3/24/20)

[52] See http://www.pgecorp.com/corp_responsibility/reports/2017/cu02_cee.html

[53] See https://www.portlandgeneral.com/residential/energy-savings/special-offers-incentives 

[54] According to a 1981 modification of the Urban Development Act of 1969, rent stressed, or burdened, households are those paying more than 30% of their income on housing. As of 2015, 24% of Black households in the U.S were bearing such a burden, while 20% of White households were. The numbers highlight the disparity more clearly when looking at households that experience a severe rent burden- defined as spending more than 50% of income on housing. In 2015 23% of Black U.S. households were severely burdened, compared to 13% of White U.S. households. https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2018/04/american-families-face-a-growing-rent-burden

[55] “Fuel poverty, is often defined as a situation where low-income households are not able to adequately provide basic energy services in their homes and for their transport at affordable cost” https://www.enerdata.net/publications/executive-briefing/fuel-poverty.html

[56] What Camp cites as ‘Jim Crow Capitalism’ encompassess the economic restructuring of the second industrial revolution.

[57] Alexander, Michelle. The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press, 2020

[58]Lawrence, Sarah, and Jeremy Travis. 2004. “The new landscape of imprisonment: Mapping America's prison expansion”. Urban Institute, Justice Policy Center.

[59] Deckard Delia, Natalie. 2017. “Prison, coerced demand, and the importance of incarcerated bodies in late capitalism.” Social Currents 4(1): 3-12.

[60] White, Lee V., and Nicole D. Sintov. "Health and financial impacts of demand-side response measures differ across sociodemographic groups." Nature Energy 5, no. 1 (2020): 50-60.

Black Bolsheviks and White Lies: Reflections on the Black Radical Tradition

By Peta Lindsay

A lot of nonsense has been written about the role of Putin's Russia in subverting "our democracy." As though our democracy had been functioning perfectly (even reasonably) well, until these shadowy Russian forces purchased a few Facebook ads that sent us all into the streets. It's a laughable concept. I'm sorry, did Putin acquit George Zimmerman or Jason Stockley? Did Putin shoot 12-year-old Tamir Rice? Russia did not carry out the drug war against African Americans or implement policies of mass incarceration, or pass voter ID laws in the U.S. - all of which have contributed to disenfranchising millions of African Americans over the years. The U.S. has a lot to answer for with regard to systematically denying the democratic rights of African Americans and this is not the first time they've tried to deflect criticism for that by blaming Russia. As a student of history I've mostly just rolled my eyes this time around while the Democrats attempt to make red-scare tactics that are very old, new again. But a recent entry in this canon of "Black activists are pawns of Moscow" writing is so insulting and patently false, that, as we approach the hundredth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, it seems very important to reply.

Last month an author named Terrell Jermaine Starr wrote a piece for The Root entitled, " Russia's Recent Facebook Ads Prove the Kremlin Never Loved Black People ."

I've enjoyed entries from The Root before, particularly in chronicling racist attacks against African Americans that are underreported in the mainstream media. But their willingness to toe the Democratic Party line, uncritically in most circumstances, has been noted.

Starr's piece is supposedly historical in scope but is premised upon a huge, glaring, historical fallacy: that of conflating the Russian Federation with the Soviet Union. In one sentence, Starr describes the two as essentially the same (showing you the level of material historical analysis he's interested in engaging in) and then for the rest of the article proceeds to whitewash the history of Black communism, using the favorite arguments deployed by racists - that Blacks who supported socialism did so because they were duped, and that the Soviet Union was only interested in Black liberation insofar as it meant spiting their enemies in the White House.

These assertions deny the agency of African Americans, many of whom were amongst the most prominent Black intellectuals of their time, who looked to the Soviet system as an alternative to American racism and exploitation. This interpretation also denies the real solidarity and support that the Soviet Union expressed in their assistance to liberation movements of many Black, brown and oppressed people all over the world. Since anti-communist propaganda is easily promulgated without evidence in this country, allow me to present some of the evidence that exposes these racist lies for what they are.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was birthed via a revolution in 1917 and overthrown via counter-revolution in 1991. While Russians were in the majority of the population, the USSR itself was actually an extremely diverse and vibrant society for all of its existence. The Soviet Union spanned 14 time zones and comprised many independent nationalities and ethnic groups, such as Tajiks, Kazakhs, Lithuanians, Tartars - all of whom spoke different languages, practiced different religions - and suffered terrible racist oppression under the Tsar. The triumph of the socialist revolution and the very existence of this unique political formation was the result of a revolution carried out by united oppressed peoples, who rose up as one and took control of society away from their Tsarist and capitalist exploiters. The Bolsheviks always took the task of uniting oppressed people and elevating their struggle very seriously. This was a key to their success and a guiding principle in their work. It was Lenin who pioneered communist opposition to imperialism and he who changed the Marxist formulation, "Workers of the World Unite" to "Workers and oppressed people of the world unite" as an expression of the priority they placed on the struggle of colonized people against imperialism.

Around the world, the 1919 triumph of Lenin and the Bolsheviks was greeted by the imperialists with great dismay and by oppressed/colonized peoples with great enthusiasm, inspiration and hope. In America, 1919 was an infamous year, known for its "Red Summer" of intense lynchings, race riots and gruesome violence against African Americans at the hands of white mobs. The Black American political movement had entered a new era of militancy, as veterans returning from WWI were less inclined to submit to Jim Crow and more inclined to fight for their dignity, wages and rights. A new wave of radical Black intellectuals all but took over the Black political scene, many from the Caribbean and mostly based in Harlem in the 1920s and 30s. These men and women were considered some of the premier thinkers and writers of their time and of the majority of these radical African American leaders-regardless of political orientation- held the Russian Revolution in very high esteem.

According to historian Winston James, in his work Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, the appeal of the Russian Revolution to Black people in America at the time lay not in their having been "recruited" by Russia as the Root article asserts, but in their own independent evaluation of the Bolshevik government and where it stood with regard to equality for oppressed and colonized people.

James wrote about three major factors that attracted Black people to Bolshevism in the 1920s and 1930s. The first was the domestic policies promoting national minorities and oppressed groups that were put in place almost immediately after the triumph of the revolution. After the revolution the Bolshevik government undertook what can be described as the most far reaching and thorough affirmative action plan that any government has ever attempted, dedicating much in the way of their limited resources towards raising the standard of living for groups who had been historically oppressed and creating conditions that could facilitate greater equality for those groups.

To Black Americans, the most convincing example was the swiftness and seriousness with which the Soviets began redressing historical inequality suffered by the Jews, including immediately outlawing discrimination against them and putting an end to the violent pogroms that had plagued them under the Tsar. In 1923 Claude McKay, the young Black intellectual, writer and poet wrote: "For American Negroes the indisputable and outstanding fact of the Russian Revolution is that a mere handful of Jews, much less in ratio to the number of Negroes in the American population, have attained, through the Revolution, all the political and social rights that were denied to them under the regime of the Czar (166)."

The other two factors explored by James were the "uncompromising rhetoric of anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and the right of self-determination for oppressed nations (165)" espoused by the Bolshevik government and the creation of the Third Communist International, an international body that openly encouraged colonized (often Black or Brown) people to rise up against their (mostly European) exploiters all over the world.

At a point when the U.S. government had systematically ignored the pleas of Black people to pass even one federal law against lynching, when city and state governments all over the country were colluding in lynchings, race riots and allowing whites who attacked Blacks to go free, or even reap rewards - it doesn't take a genius to figure out why many Black thinkers were genuinely excited that such a different kind of government, one that spoke to them and had taken action to support and defend its own national minorities, had come into the world.

Black and white (film)

Langston Hughes was a Black intellectual of this generation, this being the same generation that we associate with the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro. Of all the insults buried in that heinous Root article, the disrespect to Langston Hughes, inarguably one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, is one of the most difficult to endure. Starr paints Hughes as a dupe, someone "recruited" to champion the Soviet Union, as if the man had not traveled all over the world, studied and written extensively and was not capable of genuinely supporting a government that he believed to be on the right track. We revere Hughes' poetry that celebrates Black beauty, he is the jazz poet laureate of Black America and we love to recite his words that affirm our deep history and continued struggle in the face of white American racism. But what about his poetry celebrating the Soviet Union? Here's a link to a poem that he wrote praising Lenin . Did they break that one out at your school's Black history month event? Probably not. But that doesn't change the fact that Langston Hughes was extremely sympathetic to the Soviet Union, as is abundantly evident in his autobiographical writing, including in the chapter of I Wonder As I Wander, "Moscow Movie."

The Root provides perhaps the most cynical and shallow reading of this chapter possible, though I hesitate to affirm that that author of that piece has even actually read it. "Moscow Movie" tells an important story about a time in 1932 when Langston Hughes was invited to the Soviet Union by the government, to work on a major film production. This film was called "Black and White" and it was supposed to highlight the struggle of Black workers in the South and give an international showcase to the racism and oppression experienced by Black people in America. According to Langston Hughes, it was "intended to be the first great Negro-white film ever made in the world (80)," though unfortunately it did not come to fruition.

Hughes accompanied a delegation of 22 young African Americans who were supposed to star in the film, though it was odd that most in that group were not actors or performers by trade. Starr erroneously attributes this casting to racism, saying that Hughes determined that the Soviets were so racist that they assumed that all Black people could sing and dance (and play sports?) and so didn't bother to check the backgrounds of the people they hired for the film.

In fact, Hughes said nothing of the sort. He addressed the peculiar composition of the delegation early in the chapter, stating, "That most of our group were not actors seems to have been due to the fact that very few professional theater people were willing to pay their own fares to travel all the way to Russia to sign contracts they had never seen. Only a band of eager, adventurous young students, teachers, writers and would-be-actors were willing to do that, looking forward to the fun and wonder of a foreign land as much as to film-making. There were a few among them who wanted to get away from American race prejudice forever, being filled up with Jim Crow (70)."

It's important that Hughes highlighted their motives as traveling to seek a reprieve from American racism. So high was the esteem for the Soviet Union in the group, that "When the train stopped beneath this banner for passports to be checked, a few of the young black men and women left the train to touch their hands to Soviet soil, lift the new earth in their palms, and kiss it (73)," according to Hughes.

In his accusations of racism what Starr may be referring to is where Hughes says at one point, "Europeans as well as Americans, seem to be victims of that old cliche that Negroes just naturally sing (80)." That is hardly an indictment of any particularly Russian racism and more of a complaint on how African Americans are represented on the world stage.

Lack of specific cultural knowledge about African Americans was a problem throughout the film's production and that is what Hughes believes ultimately damned the film. Hughes was given an early copy of the script and let them know that he did not think it was usable because there were so many errors with regard to what racism and working class struggle actually looked like in the American South. Hughes said that the author of the script was well intentioned but had never been to America. He also said that information from or by Black Americans was rarely translated into Russian in those days. Even with these critiques, it's nearly impossible to interpret Hughes as being at all bitter or resentful at the Soviets for their attempt at making this film. On the contrary, Hughes wrote with unmistakable good humour throughout the chapter and also repeatedly mentioned that they were all paid in full and well taken care of, even when it became clear the film wouldn't be made.

The reception that the students received in Moscow is really remarkable, especially considering the historical context - none of which The Root brings up, of course. The students were "wined and dined" in Hughes' own words, they were put up in the most lavish hotels and treated to free tickets to the theater, the opera, the ballet and dinners and parties with dignitaries and important people, almost every night. They were official guests of the state and treated with the highest honors. No Black delegation has ever been received in America with such grace. Hughes says that they were always introduced as "representatives of the great Negro people (82)" and after describing the incredible amenities at one of the elaborate resorts they were housed in, he adds "I had never stayed in such a hotel in my own country, since, as a rule, Negroes were not then permitted to do so (93)."

On their reception by ordinary Soviet citizens, Hughes writes:

"Of all the big cities in the world where I've been, the Muscovites seemed to me to be the politest of peoples to strangers. But perhaps that was because we were Negroes and, at that time, with the Scottsboro Case on world-wide trial in the papers everywhere, and especially in Russia, folks went out of their way there to show us courtesy. On a crowded bus, nine times out of ten, some Russian would say, "Negrochanski tovarish - Negro comrade - take my seat!' On the streets queueing up for newspapers or cigarettes, or soft drinks, often folks in line would say, "Let the Negro comrade go forward." (74)

This is in 1932! Nowhere in America were Black people treated like this in 1932. Hell, many of us could not get that treatment today, if our lives depended on it (and they sometimes do). This account echoes many others by African Americans who visited or moved to the Soviet Union. In William Mandel's Soviet but Not Russian, Muhammad Ali is quoted as saying of his 1978 visit to the Soviet Union:

"I saw a hundred nationalities. No such thing as a Black man, or a white man, or 'you nigger,' or get back. People say, 'Oh well, they just showed you the best.' You mean all of those white folks rehearsed, said: 'Muhammad Ali's coming!' .. 'All hundred nationalities, pretend you get along. Muhammad Ali's coming!'…'They just took you where they wanted to go.' I know that's a lie. I got in my car and told my driver where to go. Lying about the Russians.. I jogged in the mornings in strange places where they hardly ever saw a Black man. I ran past two little white Russian ladies who were walking to work. They didn't look around and ask what I was doing. I can't go jogging in some streets in America in the morning in a white neighborhood." (85)

The Root tries to paint a picture of a USSR where the same racism that existed in Jim Crow America infected everyone there, but there simply is not enough evidence to say that was the case. They cite the experiences of one Black American man (Robert Robinson), thoroughly. But what about the experiences of the estimated 400,000 African students who were educated for free in the Soviet Union between 1950-1990? These Black youth attended technical schools, Lumumba University and the special Lenin school for leadership, they lived and traveled all over the Soviet Union and upon graduation, they would return to their homelands with skills necessary to aid in the new independence governments. Mandel interviewed quite a few Black Soviets for his book, including other African Americans who moved to the Soviet Union- and the picture they paint is very different from the one in Robinson's account. Providing no evidence, Starr also asserts that interracial relationships would naturally be a problem in the Soviet Union, saying "both Russian and white American men weren't cool with their women messing with black men." Since he introduced the term "bullshit" just before that line, I'm going to call bullshit on that.

Langston Hughes' account features many stories of the men in his group dating Soviet women and not a word about anyone batting an eye at such pairings - which in 1932, would have gotten someone lynched in the United States. Please stop projecting American racism onto the Soviet Union, when you just don't have the evidence to back that up. As W.E.B. Dubois wrote on his third visit to the USSR in 1949, "of all countries, Russia alone has made race prejudice a crime; of all great imperialisms, Russia alone owns no colonies of dark serfs or white and what is more important has no investments in colonies and is lifting no blood-soaked profits from cheap labor in Asia and Africa." The material basis for widespread Jim Crow style racism just wasn't there.

Hughes was aware that the western press celebrated the failure of the movie and spread many rumours that they knew to be false concerning the Soviet government maneuvering against the Black students. He writes that Western journalists, who saw them spending money and carousing in Moscow nightclubs, filed stories in the U.S. about how they were going unpaid and neglected.

Hughes wrote that some in his group suspected that the movie was scrapped because the Soviets were sacrificing the Black struggle to appease the American government - but Hughes himself did not believe that. He was one of the only members of the group who saw the script and he was unequivocal in stating that more than anything else, it was the script that caused the project's failure. Hughes also repeatedly mentioned the context of the international campaign in defense of the Scottsboro Boys, a Black struggle that was most certainly not being dropped by the Soviets, as all this was going on.

The Root miscasts this excerpt from the life of Langston Hughes to support their conclusion that "the Soviets' attempts to curry favor with the black struggle" was "insincere and downright fraudulent." I would counter that this anti-communist propaganda is actually "insincere and downright fraudulent" but allow me to present further evidence on the genuine solidarity expressed by the Soviet Union. Sticking with the theme, let's keep talking about film.

Focus on Africa in film

In the book Focus on African Film, noted film scholar Josephine Woll describes "The Russian Connection" between the Soviet Union and African film, an invaluable alliance in making postcolonial African cinema a reality. As alluded to in the previous section, the Soviet Union expended a lot of resources on aid and development for African nations, who were in the process of throwing off their own colonial oppressors and beginning their independence after World War II. These countries were severely underdeveloped, as chronicled by Walter Rodney and the Soviet Union was a key ally in providing material support, education and technology to allow these countries to thrive without being beholden to their former colonial masters. It's worth noting that the greatest victory for Black liberation to occur in my lifetime, the fall of apartheid in South Africa, involved a great deal of material and political support from the Soviet Union, which was integral to the success of that movement.

Film was another area in which the Soviet Union provided Africans with crucial foundational support. Ousmane Sembene of Senegal, widely considered the "father of African film" was educated in the Soviet Union. This was also the case for other pioneering African filmmakers, like Souleymane Cissé of Mali and Abderrahmne Sissako of Mauritania/Mali and Sarah Maldoror, the French daughter of immigrants from Guadeloupe who made many films about African liberation. In addition to technical know-how, the Soviet Union also provided the essential film and production equipment, distribution and promotion, to bring African cinema onto the world stage.

Dr. Woll seems to believe that the motives of the Soviets were clearly political, but also genuine. Woll wrote: "The Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath, radically altered how, why, and for whom films were made. Financial profit still mattered but it competed with other goals: educational, political, promotional. The new regime in post-tsarist Russia, like the new leaders of post-colonial African nations, willingly allocated part of its budget to subsidizing cinema because it recognized how effective the medium could be as an instrument of propaganda; and most Soviet filmmakers in the 1920s, though they had individual and often compelling aesthetic agendas, readily supported the politics of revolution (225)." In the U.S. we tend to be very cynical of the word "propaganda" but in revolutionary times, propaganda is necessary and the Africans needed aid in producing theirs. Ousmane Sembene clearly agreed; he was adamant about telling compelling political stories through his films and he fully recognized the potential for his films to "help decolonize Africa (225)."

The Soviet Union trained and equipped these African directors, so that they could bring the beauty and the struggle of their people to the world stage. The work of these revolutionary African filmmakers can be seen as a happy ending to the saga that was begun with "Black and White." While we never got the Soviet sponsored film about Black struggle in the U.S. that they wanted to produce, we have since seen a variety of films out of different African countries that highlight their struggle in similar, but undoubtedly much more accurate, ways.

Conclusion

I realize that this was a lot to write in response to a small article that was probably not even this carefully considered by the author himself. But the legacy of the Soviet Union with regard to Black struggle is unique and inspiring and should be celebrated, not horrifically distorted and denied. In Paul Robeson Speaks, the great Black American actor says:

"Mankind has never witnessed the equal of the Constitution of the U.S.S.R. . . . Firstly, because of the significance it has for my people generally. Everywhere else, outside of the Soviet world, black men are an oppressed and inhumanely exploited people. Here, they come within the provisions of Article 123 of Chapter X of the Constitution, which reads: "The equality of the right of the citizens of the U.S.S.R. irrespective of their nationality or race, in all fields of economic, state, cultural, social, and political life, is an irrevocable law. Any direct or indirect restriction of these rights, or conversely the establishment of direct or indirect privileges for citizens on account of the race or nationality to which they belong, as well as the propagation of racial or national exceptionalism, or hatred and contempt, is punishable by law." (1978, 116)

While our current President appoints KKK members to the Department of Justice and calls Nazi murderers "very fine people," while his opponent Hillary Clinton called our children "super predators" and campaigned for them to be locked up en masse- we have to appreciate how significant it is that a national government - in 1919 - put laws on the books like the ones described above. They outlawed racism. They invested heavily in Black education and Black artistic expression. They gave guns to those fighting imperialists and fascists all over the world. What more could you want? Terrell Jermaine Starr and The Root may be confused about which government cares about Black people, but I can't say that I am. I'm proud to be a socialist and I'm proud of the legacy of friendship between my people and the USSR.

As I mentioned in the start of this article, calling Africans who fight for their liberation "Commies" or "dupes" is nothing new. John Hope Franklin referred to this in From Slavery to Freedom, saying that the response to Black self-defense against race riots in 1919 caused such speculation: "Many American whites freely suggested that foreign influences - especially … Bolshevik propaganda after the 1917 Russian Revolution - had caused blacks to fight back. Perhaps there is some truth to that… However, black Americans all along the political spectrum (from conservative, to moderate, to radical left) ridiculed the claim that their new assertiveness was the result of 'outside agitation.' American blacks needed no outsiders to awaken their sense of the tremendous contradiction between America's professed beliefs and its actual practices (362)".

That remains as true today as it was when written. Additionally, I'll close with one more statement from that time, which also remains true, for myself at least. The militant Black Harlem publication The Crusader, under the leadership of fiery Black Communist Cyril Briggs declared in 1919: "If to fight for one's rights is to be Bolshevists, then we are Bolshevists and let them make the most of it!"

This article originally appeared at Liberation School .

References

Hughes, Langston. (1984). I wonder as I wander: An autobiographical journey. New York: Hill and Wang.

Robeson, Paul. (1978). Paul Robeson speaks: Writings, speeches, interviews 1918-1974, ed. by P.S. Foner. New York: Citadel.