Juneteenth: A Marxist Perspective

By Scott Cooper

Republished from Left Voice.

The United States, like all of the Americas, was built on the backs of enslaved labor, by the labor of people ripped from their homelands and brought to stolen lands. On Juneteenth, we celebrate the emancipation of the last of the enslaved Black people in the United States, as well as remember and commit to fight against the legacy of slavery. In the midst of the current uprising, this is more important than ever.

Socialists have a long history of fighting against slavery. Karl Marx, who wrote extensively about the Civil War and slavery in the United States, made it abundantly clear that enslaved Black people in North America had to be free before all the wage slaves of the working class could be free of exploitation.

Marx and the Abolition of Slavery

The materialist conception of history developed by Marx explains that human society progresses through different stages that are characterized by the material conditions of production. The Union states represented a more progressive stage in which capitalism was developing the productive forces and in which Black people were not held in bondage. The Confederacy remained in a backward stage, with vestiges of property relations that had long been overturned in Europe. The capitalists waging a war to free slaves from their bondage, with the support of the Northern working class, was to Marx, therefore, progressive.

In a letter from London dated December 10, 1861, Marx made clear that the “slavery question” was “the question underlying the whole Civil War.” Marx was a staunch supporter of a Union victory in the Civil War, and not because he supported the Northern capitalists. He argued against those who advocated simply letting the South’s secession stand and letting the Confederacy constitute itself as a new country. Marx vehemently opposed the Southern slavocracy, which profited from the hyper-exploitation of Black people and worsened conditions for workers and oppressed people as a whole. Slavery’s place was the dustbin of history. To Marx, there could be no emancipation for the proletariat while slavery continued to exist. 

Marx also made clear that the fight to free enslaved Black people in America was inextricably linked to the fight to free the entire working class from what he called wage slavery — working people having to sell their labor for 8, 10, 12 hours a day in order to survive. The fight to crush the Confederacy, for Marx, was not about the “dissolution of the Union,” but against what he saw as the true objective of the slavocracy: 

[R]eorganization on the basis of slavery, under the recognized control of the slaveholding oligarchy … The slave system would infect the whole Union. In the Northern states, where Negro slavery is in practice unworkable, the white working class would gradually be forced down to the level of helotry. This would fully accord with the loudly proclaimed principle that only certain races are capable of freedom, and as the actual labor is the lot of the Negro in the South, so in the North it is the lot of the German and the Irishman, or their direct descendants.

Revolutionary socialists view Juneteenth through the prism of Marx’s analysis. Abolishing slavery was a revolutionary act to free Black people from the most brutal bondage. It was also a victory for the working class as a whole. Marx said it directly:

The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labor. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side-by-side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.

Marx saw the defeat of the slave system as a prerequisite for building a revolutionary struggle to overturn capitalism. If humanity was to advance, a social and economic order based on slavery had to be destroyed everywhere.

The Road to Juneteenth

Before the Civil War broke out, there had already been numerous slave rebellions and insurrections in the United States. Documentary evidence suggests at least 250 uprisings or attempted uprisings involving 10 or more slaves, beginning in the 16th century. In 1800, an enslaved man by the name of Gabriel (now known as Gabriel Prosser) planned a large slave rebellion in the area of Richmond, Virginia — but news got out and he and 25 of his followers were hanged. Prosser had learned to read, and the Virginia legislature henceforth prohibited educating slaves who might, like Gabriel, be inclined to use their skills for similar purposes. Another enslaved man in Charleston, South Carolina named Denmark Vesey was executed in 1822 for planning a slave revolt in that city. In 1831, a rebellion of fugitive slaves led by Nat Turner in Southampton, Virginia, killed more than 50 white people but was put down after a few days; Turner went into hiding but was discovered more than two months later. Some 21 of the rebels were hanged and another 16 were sold away from the region.

Such slave insurrections were a prelude to the Civil War. The war itself was full of Black soldiers and sailors. In fact, by war’s end, roughly 179,000 Black men had served as soldiers in the U.S. Army — accounting for about 10 percent of the total forces — and another 19,000 served in the Navy. The Civil War took the lives of nearly 40,000 soldiers, three-fourths of whom died not in combat but from infections or disease.

These combatants served bravely and were clearly a vital component of the Union war effort. Among them were the enlisted members of the famous 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Many enslaved Black people who ran away from Southern plantations to Union encampments enlisted in the Army to fight against their former owners — with weapons supplied to them by the U.S. government. These actions by Black slaves forced President Abraham Lincoln’s hand. Originally, Lincoln insisted the war was not about slavery — despite every document of the Confederacy making clear the exact opposite — but an effort to save the Union. But as former slaves rose up against their masters and joined the war effort, Lincoln could either embrace them as allies in the war or continue to risk both a bloody war and a more widespread slave rebellion. Due to the actions of runaway slaves, Lincoln chose the former. 

Over a year into the war, on September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which would go into effect on the following January 1. It declared that enslaved Black peoples in the Confederate states were free. If they escaped across Union lines or were liberated by the advancing Union Army, they were permanently free. Of course, the Union went on to defeat the Confederacy — at the cost of between 620,000 and 750,000 lives. 

The proclamation wasn’t a full emancipation, even formally. It applied only to the 3.5 million slaves in the 10 states of the Confederacy and to all segments of the executive branch of the U.S. government, including the Army and Navy. It excluded the border slave states. It left a half-million enslaved people in bondage. But the fact that the proclamation was issued encouraged all those in slavery to rise up and fight, as well as to join the Union forces. This depleted the Confederacy’s labor force, which hurt the production of arms for the South’s rebellion.

The Emancipation Proclamation also brought to a halt the Confederacy’s campaign to win recognition from European countries, particularly England and France — both countries that were officially anti-slavery. But English textile mills needed Southern cotton; consequently capitalist pressure to recognize the Confederate States of America and open full trade was strong. Lincoln’s proclamation made it impossible for anyone to pretend that the war was about anything other than slavery, and the mill owners were forced to back down.

Put simply, the Emancipation Proclamation was a public commitment by the United States to end slavery. It killed the Fugitive Slave Laws and outlawed the return of escaped slaves to the South. It was a manifestation of the slave revolt, with Northern support, the South had always feared.

Of course, enforcement depended in large part on Union advances through the Confederate states — which brings us to Juneteenth.

June 19, 1865

Texas was the westernmost part of the Confederacy, having been stolen from Mexico just 20 years before. Its geographic isolation largely shielded it from the battles of the Civil War, and over the course of the war Texas filled with slaveholders who moved to escape the fighting across the Deep South. They brought their human property with them — some to work on newly acquired or established farms, but others to be domestic servants in cities such as Houston and Galveston. There were about 250,000 people in enslavement in Texas by 1865.

It took many weeks for news of the April 9, 1865 surrender by Robert E. Lee to reach Texas, and even longer — until June 2 — for the Confederate Army of the Trans-Mississippi to surrender. On June 18, 2,000 U.S. troops arrived at Galveston Island to occupy Texas for the federal government, under the command of Union Army General Gordon Granger. The next day, he stood on the balcony of the Ashton Villa and read aloud General Order No. 3:

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

This was the first news of the Emancipation Proclamation that those enslaved in Galveston had heard. Likely, few if any Texas slaves had heard that they had been officially freed more than two years earlier. A celebration broke out, and the next year, in 1866, the freedmen of Texas held on June 19 what became an annual celebration — Jubilee Day. These early celebrations became political rallies centered on registering newly freed slaves as voters. They helped spark the advances of the Reconstruction Era.

The Civil War had not, obviously, destroyed racism. White Texans, for instance, did everything they could to keep these June 19 celebrations from happening. Landowners would interrupt with demands that their laborers return to work. Cities and towns would bar Black people from using public parks, for instance, which were segregated. So, freed slaves across Texas began to pool their resources and purchase land where they could celebrate Juneteenth. Emancipation Park, 10 acres of land in Houston purchased in 1872 by a group of Black ministers and business owners, is one such location still in use today. It was established expressly for the city’s annual Juneteenth celebration.

Black people taking control of a part of their lives that the racists could not take from them — including just celebrating Juneteenth — so upset the white power structure that they created whatever obstacles they could devise. Eventually, between 1890 and 1908, every one of the former Confederate states, Texas included, passed new laws or revised their constitutions to disenfranchise Black voters, exclude them from public facilities, and enshrine the racist Jim Crow system as a new form of the old plantation.

Since then, Juneteenth has been associated with many of the struggles of Black people against racist and economic oppression. And it has taken up broader social issues as well. In 1968, for instance, the Poor People’s Campaign — organized by Martin Luther King, Jr. and then carried out under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy after King’s assassination, raised demands for economic and human rights for all poor Americans. As part of that campaign, Juneteenth was designated Solidarity Day, and 100,000 people — including many whites — marched in Washington. That day, Coretta Scott King spoke out against the Vietnam War.

Today, with the urgency of the fight against racism as strong as ever, Juneteenth stands as a reminder of the emancipation of slaves and the destruction of the South’s backward socioeconomic system. It is also a reminder of how much more work there is to do. While U.S. military bases are named for Confederate officers and statues to “heroes of the Confederacy” dot the Southern landscape, efforts to make Juneteenth a national holiday in the United States have been thwarted every time. 

Racism Cannot Be Eradicated without Eradicating Capitalism

This year, Juneteenth comes just as the fight against racism in the United States and around the world has taken a new turn. The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis cops has sparked an uprising against the structural racism that was begun in 1619, when the first Africans were brought as slaves to Virginia. This structural racism was not resolved with the Civil War.

For weeks, in the midst of a global pandemic, the streets of cities across the country have been filled with people of all races, ages, genders, and socioeconomic statuses, demanding change. These protests, by calling the police as an institution into question, are questioning a key component of capitalism  — since the police are the armed force of the capitalist state and serve to uphold capitalist property relations.

Capitalism is inherently racist. In the United States, structural racism is the direct legacy of slavery. Once slaves were freed, the Southerners who were no longer able to enslave people legally, as well as the Northern industrial capitalists, began a systematic recreation of Black oppression to guarantee their profits throughout the United States. Black people became the bottom rung of a growing working class. They were unable to unionize, paid the lowest wages, and kept out of key jobs. Attempts at Black capitalism were systematically crushed, like the Tulsa white supremacist uprising that burned Black small businesses.

After the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was enacted in 1865, formally abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude in the entire United States (and thus going further than the Emancipation Proclamation), Black Codes, state-sanctioned white supremacist violence, and the growth of the Ku Klux Klan all began. Black people were subjected to involuntary labor throughout the South as states and their cops refused to enforce statutes meant to prevent such circumstances. And then there are prisons.

The United States incarcerates more people than any other country, and more than one-third of the prison population is Black people — who are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of whites. Capitalism uses this imprisoned population as slave labor, doing all sorts of work at pennies on the dollar or for no pay at all to feed the capitalist profit-making machine.

Racism is a tool the capitalists wield with great skill; they enforce it with laws and the police. As long as capitalism exists, the capitalists will seek to elevate some people and denigrate others, sowing divisions to deflect attention away from a common enemy.

Thus, the fight to eradicate capitalism is inextricably linked with the fight against racism, and vice versa: the anti-racist struggle is the struggle for socialism. 

Lenin saw the Civil War as a revolutionary war. In a “Letter to American Workers” in 1918, he wrote words that resonate with as much relevance today as they did less than a year after the Russian Revolution. He began by celebrating the “revolutionary tradition” of the American proletariat, and pointed to “the immense, world-historic, progressive and revolutionary significance of the American Civil War of 1863-65!” And like Marx before him, he explained that the fight against the enslavement of Black people in the United States is linked to the fight against wage slavery.

The representatives of the bourgeoisie understand that for the sake of overthrowing Negro slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the slaveowners, it was worth letting the country go through long years of civil war … But now, when we are confronted with the vastly greater task of overthrowing capitalist wage-slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the bourgeoisie — now, the representatives and defenders of the bourgeoisie, and also the reformist socialists who have been frightened by the bourgeoisie and are shunning the revolution, cannot and do not want to understand that civil war is necessary and legitimate.

The American workers will not follow the bourgeoisie. They will be with us, for civil war against the bourgeoisie. The whole history of the world and of the American labor movement strengthens my conviction that this is so. 

We can honor Juneteenth in 2020 by taking deliberate steps to liberate humanity from capitalism and the institutional racism that feeds its profits.

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

Juneteenth and Abolitionist Dreams

By Justin C. Mueller

Republished from the author's blog.

Once, people dreamed of the end of slavery. Such dreams were needed, because utopias don’t birth themselves, and a world without chains was utopian before it was imagined to be inevitable. In the US, which holds 25% of the world’s prisoners, it still is.

We mark the culmination of that past utopia with the commemoration of Juneteenth, honoring when chattel slavery was finally ended in all former Confederate states. The Union Major General Gordon Granger landed in Texas, the last slaver state bastion, on June 19, 1865 with enough military power to finally enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. The Republic of Texas was already established in large part as a militant pro-slavery revolt by white settlers against the Mexican empire and it’s ban on slavery, but as the luck of the Confederacy dwindled during the war, slavers had further migrated to Texas. Fully a quarter of whites held slaves by the time Granger landed, and 30% of the Texas population were slaves.

Slavery would not die out on it’s own. It took centuries of slave resistance, abolitionist organizing, and a bloody civil war and military occupation of the South for chattel slavery and the slaver class to finally be dismantled. The re-creation of informal slavery through the Black Codes and convict leasing, debt bondage, and exploitative sharecropping conditions immediately after the Civil War, as well as the steady introduction and spread of Jim Crow laws after the end of Reconstruction led to the retrenchment of white supremacy. Yet, Juneteenth is an important holiday commemorating a rare moment of victory, however incomplete, in the dismantling of one of the systems of racial dominance and inequality that has defined the character of the United States and citizenship within it since its creation.

Utopias are won with hope and struggle, and their commemorations are time machines for drawing out their connection to the present and lessons for the future. As a memorial for the victory of a past utopia of abolition, Juneteenth can help us think about today’s struggles for abolition and the unfinished project of dismantling white supremacy. It can also, more immediately, help fuel the dreams needed to carry these utopias to fruition. We could take away many lessons, but here are three that I think are particularly important:

Lesson One: Extremism can be a more effective tool for producing a just world than moderation or compromise. The uncompromising firebrands for slavery abolition, like John Brown and Wendell Phillips, were widely castigated as impractical utopians at best and dangerously insane fanatics at worst. Alongside the persistent refusal of slaves to submit quietly to their enslavement, radical abolitionists’ firm refusal to compromise on their principles or accept “reasonable” electoral compromise with slavers played a key role in escalating the conflict over chattel slavery to the point where it could conceivably be dismantled. It was only after the smashing of the slaver regimes that the need for them to be uncompromisingly smashed could be seen as obvious or common sense. The political common sense of today is built on the dreams of dead radicals and past utopias.

The abolitionists of today who demand an end to prisons and policing are thought of as similarly unreasonable or extremist. Yet, it is by making demands that go beyond what is considered acceptable to the world as it currently is that new worlds and new boundaries of what counts as reasonable can come into being. Even when extremists don’t succeed, stridently advocating and organizing around ideas that are beyond the pale can shift what counts as a permissible reform. Remember that it is largely because of their fear of Malcolm X and the nascent, more militant Black power and Black nationalist movements that the white U.S. leadership of the 1960s eventually considered Martin Luther King, Jr. to be a comparatively safer figure to bargain with on civil rights legislation.

There are times when compromise is important in order to institutionalize political demands, but at other times compromise can be detrimental to the process of organizing people to push for comprehensive systemic change. Regardless of what a more strategically necessary at a given moment, it isn’t compromise in itself that brings about substantive or even incremental transformation.

Lesson Two: We must demand and expect more than utopia. This may seem absurd. Isn’t it unreasonable enough to demand utopia? Utopias, though, don’t require us to be naive. They can be used as standards of values and expectations that allow us, by contrast with the current world, to critically assess and understand the world as it actually is. Utopias are well-developed hopes and weaponized dreams, and they can be powerful. But, what is often forgotten about them is that they can be achieved. As underwhelming as the state of the world is today, it should be understood as the outcome of the victory of many people’s utopias, and not just the utopias of villains.

We should expect and demand utopia, not because we can’t achieve it, but precisely because we can, and will then need to demand more and continue struggling for more once those victories have been secured. Demanding a static utopia alone runs the risk of disillusionment, but being infinitely demanding of endlessly renewed utopian dreams both orients our struggles and protects us against disappointment at not achieving a static notion of a “perfect” world.

Lesson Three: Abolitionism today must be both a negative demand and a positive vision for what alternative futures are possible. Many white abolitionists were perfectly content to retire from active political life after the end of chattel slavery, even with the continuation and emergence of new forms of white supremacy and Black unfreedom. For some, like the early white settlers of Oregon, their abolitionism was even fueled by their commitments to white supremacy. Opposition is not enough. Abolitionist politics today requires not just negative opposition, such as being against incarceration or policing, but also requires what Angela Davis describes as the creation of positive social, economic, political, cultural, and institutional conditions that would make these violent institutions obsolete. Achieving these abolitionist conditions requires a utopian vision in order to guide people’s struggles and practically achieve their goals.

***

The original Juneteenth marked the utopian achievement of a negative abolition, but also the beginning of a long struggle for the achievement of a new, positive vision wherein oppression could be rendered obsolete. We must remember our past utopias, then. Not just to learn from them, mind you, but also to appreciate that they aren’t even truly past. They are ready-at-hand palettes bequeathed by the struggles of those who fought for better worlds before us, and from which we can and will find inspiration to paint the utopias of the future.