Justice Kagan’s Dissent and the Call to Abolish the Supreme Court

By Jim Dugan

Justice Elena Kagan (joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Jackson) wrote an important dissenting opinion in Biden v. Nebraska—the recent Supreme Court case concerning student debt relief. It wasn’t important because it voiced the progressive minority view of a ruling which further enforced the state policy of a country whose identity is rooted in settler colonialism, capitalist inequality, and enslavement-turned-apartheid-turned-mass-incarceration.  These dissenting opinions have been consistent through time—sometimes they are left in the dustbins; sometimes they are invoked in subsequent opinions of more popularly progressive times to overturn (in liberal fashion) historically horrific policy.  Those are important.  But this isn’t what makes Kagan’s dissent unique.  What Kagan has done, perhaps without full intention, is acknowledge in a published opinion that the Supreme Court may not live up to its ideal as a neutral arbiter—and may, in contrast, be a fundamentally undemocratic institution that sits on the side of elite power. Possibly in those aforementioned dustbins, this has been said before—but never in our era with such a high-profile case. 

Justice John Roberts drafted the majority opinion, joined by Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.  Six despot elites (Roberts—Harvard Law; Thomas—Yale Law; Alito—Yale Law; Gorsuch—Harvard Law; Kavanaugh—Yale Law; Barret—Notre Dame Law) were able to strike down a policy favored by Congress and the Executive Branch which alleviated some of the financial woes of nearly 40 million people.  Justice Kagan no doubt recognized the irony of a political body which routinely gives flowers to the idea of American Democracy despite being itself the functioning antithesis.  As the dissent reads, even though the Court “is, by design, as detached as possible from the body politic,” it decided as final verdict “that some 40 million Americans will not receive the benefits the plan provides, because (so says the Court) that assistance is too ‘significan[t].’” Justice Kagan noted the Supreme Court was selecting itself as “the arbiter—indeed, the maker—of national policy” and in doing so has become "a danger to a democratic order." 

It is undisputable that there is no democratic restraint on the Court (in fact, twice now a president who faced impeachment proceedings [first Nixon, then Trump] has appointed at least three individuals)—to call it a body of autocrats is not unreasonable. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote in her New Yorker piece, The Case for Ending the Supreme Court as We Know It, the Court is “the branch of government that is least accountable to the American public” and “has tended, for most of its history, toward a fundamental conservatism, siding with tradition over more expansive visions of human rights.”  In that article, Taylor summarized a history of biased and contradictory opinions that shifted with the tides of political power and pressure—and affirmed that “calling into question the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the court” was a necessary act should we wish “to secure our rights and liberties in the United States.”  Calls to abolish the Supreme Court were not common when Taylor raised the possibility in 2020.  And yet, less than three years later, the same concerns which justified that consideration have now been voiced from within the chambers of the Supreme Court itself.  And while Kagan isn’t likely to soon join the masses in calling for the abolition of the Court, what her dissent stands for worried Justice Roberts enough for him to end his majority opinion by calling out the “disturbing feature” of questioning “the proper role of the judiciary.” Causing misperception, Roberts claimed, “would be harmful to this institution and our country.”

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But what Roberts calls misperception is anything but.  It is seeing through the ideological construction of the Supreme Court as a removed and objective overseer, and—with candor—recognizing it for what it is:  a political body that has the ability to curtail any progressive, egalitarian-oriented thrust for the benefit of its own Class.  What the Court’s right-wing majority doesn’t want is the Public seeing the Supreme Court as an appendage to Capital and the U.S. State; and as an obstacle in our struggle for a more equitable, peaceful, and climate-stable world. They call this conclusion a misperception, and while we don’t need Kagan to tell us that we are right to think otherwise, it is striking that she did.

Aside from voiding the possibility of immediate and much needed financial relief, the most concerning thing about Biden v. Nebraska is how it continues to lay the groundwork for the Court’s ability to usurp any significant action that may be introduced to alleviate suffering as we inevitably enter new eras of economic (and environmental) crisis. The Court has now, for a third time in recent terms, invoked the ‘major questions’ doctrine to prevent forms of structural relief/industry regulation (see alsoWest Virginia v. EPA [preventing regulation of carbon emissions related to climate change]; Alabama Assn. of Realtors v. DHH [invalidating the CDC’s eviction moratorium]). What this chain of decisions indicates is that even the hard work of mobilizing to pressure politicians to act won’t be enough to secure grassroots victories. While this may be daunting to admit, it is not surprising nor is our situation unique in history. For instance, as Karl Marx wrote in his 1871 text, The Civil War in France, the Paris Commune also identified the need for judicial functionaries to be “divested” of their “sham independence” and called for judges—like other public servants—“to be elective, responsible, and revocable.” This may be a path forward to gain democratic control over the judiciary in our own extreme times.  But to be in a position to design a judicial system that works as a vehicle for our side of the struggle, we must first abolish the one that currently exists.  In sum, it all begins with the notion that Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor left us with in 2020: “It is long overdue to end the Court’s undemocratic role in U.S. society”—Now we can quote Kagan to prove it.

Too Little, Too Late: Biden's Self-Congratulatory Marijuana Reform Falls Short

By Youhanna Haddad

On October 6th, 2021, President Joe Biden issued a blanket pardon of those federally convicted of marijuana possession, noting that “no one should be in jail just for using or possessing marijuana.” This pardon, while seeming huge, releases exactly zero prisoners as no American is in federal prison for simple marijuana possession. Biden further stated that the federal government’s classification of marijuana as more serious than fentanyl “makes no sense,” with the attorney general and Department of Health and Human Services reportedly initiating a process to review marijuana’s scheduling. “Too many lives have been upended because of our failed approach to marijuana,” Biden said. “It’s time that we right these wrongs.”

Biden’s pardon disrupted the more than a century-long history of anti-marijuana policy at the federal level. While the pardon affects but a small minority of total possession convictions, the potential rescheduling or even descheduling of marijuana has not been seriously considered in the United States since the late 1980s. This is thanks in large part to the Controlled Substances Act, which schedules drugs without any regard to their scientifically understood qualities.

To examine the eclectic legal quagmire that is marijuana prohibition, one must explore the history of the plant: its use over time and geography. While the first culture to use marijuana frequently changes as anthropologists continue uncovering older instances of use, it is widely acknowledged that the psychoactive variety of the plant has been consumed for over two millennia. Little to no scholarship has uncovered any historical use of marijauna leading to the decline of living standards anywhere near the level of drugs such as opium.

In the United States, the first marijuana regulations appeared in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War in the mid-19th century. Motivated by the white-supremacist ideology of Manifest Destiny, the United States government pushed westward, running into the then much larger nation of Mexico. After the Mexican-American War, thousands of Mexicans found themselves in newly “American” territory.

To avoid sharing resources, white-American settlers employed a mixture of vigilante and state-sponsored violence to subjugate the Mexican population. They fixated on Mexican use of “locoweed” — a slang term for marijuana — and used prohibition as a means of subjugation. Criminalization thus turned Mexicans into an outlaw class. This served to both reign in the Mexican population and reinforce settler propaganda regarding the “Mexican Menace.”

But it wasn’t just Mexicans who became associated with marijuana around this time. The global phenomenon of jazz music was well underway by the early 20th century. An art form with unmistakably black roots, the popularity of jazz in urban centers led to black male performers gaining fame across the United States.

Concerns over white women in jazz clubs potentially having sexual relations with these men incited panic, particularly in white, bourgeois families. Worrying their daughters might be mesmerized by the siren song of the performers, they sought to restrict the influence of the jazz wave. This manifested in a reinvigorated opposition to marijuana — a known favorite of many jazz performers such as Cab Calloway, whose song ‘Reefer Man’ lauds the drug’s benefits. 

White imagination thus associated Latino and black peoples with marijuana. This set the stage for white outrage at the drug in order to suppress both populations. Rhetoric focused on the potential of marijuana to be used by men of color to dull the inhibitions of white women, facilitating their seduction. While the reality may have been that white women were simply interested in relations with these men, or wanted to explore jazz nightlife, the settler masses adopted this hyper-sexualized rhetoric. The newly established Federal Bureau of Narcotics capitalized on these racist lies in the early 1930s, with leader Harry J. Anslinger proclaiming that marijuana use promoted interracial sex:

“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos, and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers, and any others.”

This rhetoric, which ignored widespread white use in order to racialize the issue, was successful in convincing Congress to pass the first truly restrictive federal regulation of marijuana: The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which effectively made the drug illegal to possess or distribute. It took until 1969 for an infamous Supreme Court case to invalidate the law for its violation of 5th Amendment protections against self-incrimination. One year later, President Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act, which classified marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, meaning the federal government did not recognize any medicinal value and recognized a high potential for abuse.

While obviously nonsensical, this scheduling seemed to make sense to John Ehrlichman, who served as domestic policy chief under Nixon. In a 1994 interview, Ehrlichman stated that there was significant political motivation from the Nixon administration to target certain communities through the Controlled Substances Act. He explained that:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate [them with drugs] we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Nixon’s presidency is widely recognized as a particularly embarrassing chapter in American history, largely due to the Watergate scandal. Only escaping the scandal through a presidential pardon, Nixon was caught red-handed by the nation and world. In light of his crimes, it is unsurprising that the administration sought to quell political opposition through the legal route provided by the Controlled Substances Act.

Today, arrests for marijuana possession follow the same racist logic that birthed prohibition. In 2018, black Americans were 3.64 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana possession. In Montana and Kentucky, they were over 9 times more likely to be arrested. This is despite the fact that black and white Americans use marijuana at similar rates.

There is no state, including all states where marijuana is legal, that arrests white and black citizens at equal rates. Even in Colorado — the first state to legalize recreational use — black people are 1.54 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession (even “legal” states have possession limits).

Incredibly, there are 19 counties in the United States where black people are more than 20 times more likely than whites to be arrested for marijuana. In Georgia’s Pickens County, black people are over 97 times more likely to be arrested! These statistics demonstrate the racist nature of marijuana enforcement — an enforcement that has never separated itself from its roots as a tool of subjugation of nonwhite populations.

In the best-case scenario, Biden’s directive to reschedule marijuana would result in complete descheduling. That means marijuana would no longer be prohibited by the Controlled Substances Act. While this would undeniably be an overdue victory, it wouldn’t expunge or pardon any past convictions from draconian laws that unjustly decimated generations of black communities. Descheduling alone, therefore, does little to right the wrongs Biden claims to be so concerned about. In order to properly address this state-sponsored terror campaign, all prisoners whose charges derive from marijuana possession must be freed and their records expunged. Anything less is a frivolous distraction masquerading as a step toward justice while keeping the victims of prohibition in bondage.

The Reproductive Rallying Cry

By Audrey Elberger, Nathaniel Ibrahim, Simon Moncke, and Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

Republished in modified form from The Specter.

On June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court overturned 50 years of precedent via a 6-3 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The ruling established that states can restrict abortion as they please and without limits. The case Dobbs overturned, Roe v. Wade, constitutionally protected abortion rights through the first trimester with limitations in the second and third trimesters based on maternal or fetal health.

Planned Parenthood v. Casey later overturned this framework in favor of a viability analysis. That opened the door for states to implement abortion restrictions in the first trimester. So, even when abortion was a “right,” it really wasn’t.

Following the Dobbs decision, many online articles alerted people to “safe havens”: areas where abortion access remained protected. But these articles seldom acknowledged the fact that many lack the resources to visit safe havens. Since women, minorities, and the poor are disproportionately under-resourced, abortion access is indeed a race, class, and gender issue.

That the Supreme Court is openly hostile to the needs of these marginalized communities should come as no surprise. The institution was designed to safeguard elite interests while insulating itself from public opinion. This rift between the people and their government sharply narrows the range of political possibilities. Questions such as whether the state ought to guarantee material security for all are forever left off the agenda.

Perhaps that would change if enough Supreme Court justices had working-class interests. But the selection process makes this incredibly implausible. These days, Court appointees ascend almost exclusively from a consolidated legal class of Ivy League graduates. Currently, only one of nine justices — Christo-fascist Amy Coney Barrett — didn’t graduate from Harvard or Yale. But she still went to Notre Dame: a prestigious private institution with an endowment exceeding $20 billion.

The elite background of jurists is reflected in the Court’s penchant to side with the monied, reactionary, and powerful. It’s also reflected in which cases they even choose to hear. The Supreme Court, after all, carefully selects its cases. They receive around 10,000 petitions each year but typically only approve about 80 of them. That means cases relevant to working people are almost always sidelined.

This raises the question of how to amplify working-class interests. While the American political landscape is bleak, there are nonetheless proven strategies at our disposal. By implementing them, we can send a powerful message that our demands around reproductive rights must be met.

Throughout the United States, there are abortion funds accepting donations. Many of them use that money to help low-income people pay for otherwise unaffordable reproductive care. Abortion funds often work in conjunction with healthcare centers to fund not only operations themselves but also transportation and childcare. The National Network of Abortion Funds provides an incredibly thorough database of abortion funds listed by state.

Beyond fundraising, we can also wage the fight for reproductive rights in the streets. Direct action like protests, rallies, and teach-ins are being held by organizations across the United States. These groups may be fully geared toward the issue of reproductive health, as is the case with Planned Parenthood and Reproductive Freedom for All. Or they may be fighting for abortion rights within a larger anti-capitalist movement. Examples include the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and its young wing YDSA, among other anti-capitalist parties and organizations within the United States.

Within this broader anti-capitalist milieu, the struggle for reproductive justice exemplifies why labor organizing should lie at the base of all other grassroots efforts. Under an oppressive, capitalist, forcefully evangelical society, the individual sits powerless, unable to alter the institutions that uphold the status quo. However, by exploiting society’s unwavering reliance on endless growth, individuals can join forces with fellow workers to collectively withhold their labor until more desirable conditions are secured. While fundraising and direct action are indispensable, organizing workplaces is perhaps the best bulwark against elite capture of powerful institutions. What happened in the Republic of Ireland roughly a decade ago shows this.

For years, the island nation known for its social conservatism banned abortion in nearly all cases. In 2012, however, Irish activists organized a march for choice. Ireland soon saw massive demonstrations which attracted international attention. Even the United Nations began calling on Ireland to change its abortion laws. But the Irish government didn’t cave to this pressure. That’s when labor organizers turned to more radical measures.

On International Women’s Day 2017, thousands of women went on strike demanding better abortion laws. They managed to shut down the capital city of Dublin for four hours. This action put the Irish government on notice. The following year, they held a referendum on abortion rights with two-thirds voting to expand access.

Abortion rights in Argentina have a similar history. As in Ireland, the Catholic Church is a dominant force in Argentinian politics and has helped curtail reproductive freedom for decades. In 2016, however, women workers staged a mass strike. That was followed by huge demonstrations for abortion rights as part of a protest movement called “The Green Wave.” The Argentinian Congress finally legalized abortion in 2020.

Given these facts, us fighting for abortion rights must ask ourselves: Is my workplace unionized? If so, how can I join the union? If not, how do I start that conversation? The sooner unionizing efforts get underway in every workplace, the sooner the working-class and oppressed peoples can leverage their collective power in the name of a more just society.

How 'Justice for George Floyd!' Shook the Ruling Class to the Core

By Nino Brown

Republished from Liberation News.

On May 25, 2020, 44-year-old white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on 46-year-old unarmed Black man George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds, sadistically murdering him. Floyd was accused of using a counterfeit 20 dollar bill at a local convenience store in the middle of a pandemic that left tens of millions of Americans out of work and deeper in poverty. Floyd was a victim of the capitalist system, one of the tens of millions who were out of employment. The deadly encounter between Floyd and Chauvin was captured on video by community members and went viral shortly thereafter. 

The next day, the Black working-class communities of Minneapolis led thousands of people of all nationalities demanding justice and accountability, inspiring a nationwide protest movement against racism and police brutality that brought an estimated 35 million people into the streets in righteous and militant indignation. Solidarity protests were held in 60 countries all over the world from Palestine to Haiti to South Korea and more. As brutal force and thousands upon thousands of arrests were employed to repress the movement, the racist underbelly of so-called U.S. democracy was on display to the entire world.

One year since these rebellions began, many reforms have been passed and changes made to combat racism. Politicians and corporations have pivoted to allay the rage of the masses of people across the country sick and tired of racist police terror and the entire system of capitalism with its disgusting inequality. All across the country organizers, activists and progressive groups have demanded radical change, with some raising the slogan “defund the police” and “abolish the police” — representing a marked shift in the struggle for justice.

Derek Chauvin was convicted of two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter on April 20. Facing sentencing in June, Chauvin could be put in prison for 40 years for second-degree murder, up to 25 years for third-degree murder and up to 10 years for manslaughter. 

Yet, since that fateful day in May 2020, many more people have been killed by U.S. police. Some of these people’s names are widely known, such as Daunte Wright, Ma’Khia Bryant, Adam Toledo and Andre Brown. George Floyd’s murder was the “straw that broke the camels back.” But no matter how much negative attention the police get, as an institution of racist rule by a tiny class of the super-rich, they cannot help but enact all kinds of violence against poor and working-class communities, especially Black communities. The fundamental task of the police is to preserve the racist, capitalist status quo.

In the year since Floyd’s murder, activists all over the country have taken aim at qualified immunity, which shields officers from civil and criminal liability. President Joe Biden met with the Floyd family and other families of police brutality on Tuesday in a push to get the Senate to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. The bill would impose limitations on the use of police chokeholds, standards for no-knock warrants and limits on the sharing of military equipment by the Defense Department with police departments. Many of these reforms were already on the books in various cities and towns, yet they have not significantly hindered the police from continuing to kill and enact wanton violence on the people. The ruling class is far more reluctant about stripping the police of qualified immunity — their carte blanche to kill, maim, harass and bully. This continues to be an important front of struggle.

The police have been killing people since they were formalized as an organization growing out of the slave patrols in the U.S. South and out of the needs of the capitalist class to police immigrants and low-wage workers in the industrial North. The violence is not new, and many outright murders and assassinations have been captured on camera by civilians. So what is new? What has changed? It is the consciousness of the working class. All of last summer and even into the fall and winter, people continued to rise up against racist police terror and state violence.

As revolutionaries, we know that in order to win basic reforms and so much more, the working class and oppressed people of this country need to be organized. Our class must continue to keep the pressure on through mobilization, education and agitation — drawing in more people to the fight for justice in the immediate sense and also more broadly against racism and capitalism and imperialism. The rebellions have changed the political calculus of the ruling class and thus the terrain of the class struggle. 

In the aftermath of the conviction of Derek Chauvin, many debated what more needed to be done to win true justice. While the verdict was a victory secured through arduous struggle, we know that true, enduring justice can only be enjoyed by winning a new system that removes the basis for white supremacy and all the other unspeakable injustices in this society. To honor George Floyd’s memory, millions have and will commit themselves to this task.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Limits of Neoliberal Feminism

[Photo credit: Danita Delimont Photography/Newscom]

By Matthew John

Republished from dialogue & discourse.

On September 18, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died from complications related to pancreatic cancer. She was 87 years old and was surrounded by loved ones at the time of her death. Thousands attended a vigil outside the Supreme Court building and innumerable additional events took place in her honor throughout the country. Ginsburg was the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court and became known as a feminist icon and a pioneering advocate for women’s rights due to her dissenting opinions in cases like Gonzales v. Carhart, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores. An email I received from Black Lives Matter Global Network the following day concisely encapsulated public sentiment:

“Last night, we lost a champion in the fight for justice and gender equality: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice Ginsburg was a giant in the fight for equality and civil rights — she embodied everything that our movement stands for. We stand on the accomplishments of her life’s work that have continued to amplify the need to protect and expand equal rights for women and underserved communities. And we celebrate women having a voice in the workforce while also having the ability to make decisions for their own health and wellbeing because of the work of Justice Ginsburg.”

In the wake of this national tragedy, Ginsburg’s life and legacy took center stage in political discourse and rampant speculation ensued regarding how this event might influence the nation’s future. Democratic campaign contributions skyrocketed and Republican leaders began calculating and scheming to fill the vacant court seat. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that Ginsburg would be the first woman to lie in repose at the Supreme Court and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that the state would erect a statue in her honor. Politicians and pundits memorialized the fallen titan, who had become a cultural icon known fondly by the moniker “Notorious R.B.G”, while others found inspiration in idiosyncratic elements of Ginsburg’s persona.

As is the case with other beloved American heroes, the national discourse surrounding the death of Ginsburg included every detail imaginable other than her cumulative record in public service. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court tenure of Ruth Bader Ginsburg encompassed more than just pussyhats and rainbows. As with any prominent figure, we must account for the “problematic” aspects of Ginsburg’s legacy as well. These include her disparaging statement regarding Colin Kaepernick’s racial justice efforts, her positive statement regarding former colleague Brett Kavanaugh (who was credibly accused of rape), her designation of flagrant reactionary Antonin Scalia as her “best buddy”, and her final case on SCOTUS, in which she agreed with the decision to fast-track President Trump’s deportations. In terms of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s comprehensive legacy on the Supreme Court, the well-known, progressive dissenting opinions are dwarfed by her extensive résumé of anti-indigenous, anti-worker, pro-cop, and “tough on crime” decisions. (Unless otherwise noted, the following bullet points are quoted or nearly quoted from this Current Affairs article, which I’d recommend reading for more details and context.) For instance:

• In Heien v. North Carolina, the court held that the police may justifiably pull over cars if they believe they are violating the law even if the police are misunderstanding the law, so long as the mistake was reasonable.

• In Taylor v. Barkes, the Court held that the family of a suicidal man who was jailed and then killed himself could not sue the jail for failing to implement anti-suicide measures.

• In Plumhoff v. Rickard, the court held that the family of two men could not sue the police after they had shot and killed them for fleeing a police stop.

• In Samson v. California, the Court decided the issue of whether police could conduct warrantless searches of parolees merely because they were on parole. Instead of joining the liberal dissenters, Ginsburg signed onto Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion in favor of the police.

• In Kansas v. Carr, the Kansas Supreme Court had overturned a pair of death sentences, on the grounds that the defendants’ Eighth Amendment rights had been violated in the instructions given to the jury. SCOTUS informed Kansas that it had made a mistake; nobody’s Eighth Amendment rights had been violated, thus the defendants ought to have continued unimpeded along the path toward execution. The Court’s decision was 8–1, the lone dissenter being Sonia Sotomayor. Ginsburg put her name on Justice Scalia’s majority opinion instead.

• In Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation, the court ruled against the Oneida Tribe over a dispute regarding its territorial claim. Ginsburg’s majority opinion stated, “We hold that the tribe cannot unilaterally revive its ancient sovereignty, in whole or in part, over the parcels at issue.” Ginsburg referenced the Eurocentric, racist, and colonialist “Doctrine of Discovery” in her comments. (Source)

• In Salazar v. Ramah Navajo Chapter, Ginsburg dissented, disagreeing with the ruling that that the United States government, when it enters into a contract with a Native American tribe for services, must pay contracts in full, even if Congress has not appropriated enough money to pay all tribal contractors. (Source)

• In Kiowa Tribe v. Manufacturing Technologies, Ginsburg once again dissented, opposing the ruling, which stated that the Kiowa Tribe was entitled to sovereign immunity from contract lawsuits, whether made on or off reservation, or involving governmental or commercial activities. (Source)

• In Inyo County v. Paiute-Shoshone Indians, the Bishop Paiute Tribe of California asserted that their tribe’s status as a sovereign nation made them immune to state processes under federal law and asserted that the state authorized the seizure of tribal records. Ginsburg joined the majority in dismissing the tribe’s complaint. (Source)

• In Alaska v. Native Village of Venetie Tribal Government, the court unanimously ruled against a tribal council that wanted to collect a tax from non-tribal members doing business on tribal lands. The Court claimed the land (which was owned by the tribe) was not subject to the tribal tax because it was not part of a Native American reservation. (Source)

• In C & L Enterprises, Inc. v. Citizen Band, Potawatomi Indian Tribe of Oklahoma, the court held that the tribe waived its sovereign immunity when it agreed to a contract containing an arbitration agreement. (Source)

• In Navajo Nation v. United States Forest Service, the court ruled against the Navajo Nation, who have consistently protested the encroachment of a ski resort on Navajo territory (San Francisco Peaks). In short, the decision upheld the Ninth Circuit Court’s ruling that the use of recycled sewage water was not a “substantial burden” on the religious freedom of American Indians. (Source)

• In Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk, the court ruled that workers didn’t deserve paid compensation for being required to watch theft security screenings. (Source)

• In Brogan v. United States, the court ruled that the Fifth Amendment does not protect the right of those being questioned by law enforcement officials to deny wrongdoing falsely. (Source)

• In Chadrin Lee Mullenix v. Beatrice Luna, Ginsburg sided with the majority opinion which granted immunity to a police officer who unnecessarily shot and killed a suspect. (Source)

• In Bush v. Gore, the contentious decision that decided the 2000 presidential election, Ginsburg’s draft of her dissent had a footnote alluding to the possible suppression of Black voters in Florida. Justice Scalia purportedly responded to this draft by flying into a rage, telling Ginsburg that she was using “Al Sharpton tactics.” Ginsburg removed the footnote before it saw the light of day.

• In Davis v. Ayala, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote a lengthy concurrence condemning solitary confinement. Most notably, Justice Kennedy made no reference to any particularly vulnerable group, instead suggesting that long-term solitary confinement may be unconstitutional for all. Justice Ginsburg did not join the concurrence.

• Scott v. Harris involved a motorist who was paralyzed after a police officer ran his car off the road during a high-speed chase. Ginsburg concurred with the majority that deadly force was justified. (Source)

• In Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic & Institutional Rights, Inc., Ginsburg approved allowing the government to threaten the withdrawal of funding in order to punish universities that ban discriminatory job recruitment by the military.

The list goes on. Of course, no one is perfect. Everyone has flaws. However, when evaluating any prominent or powerful individual, it seems the proper outlook is to weigh the harm inflicted by their actions against the positive results of their actions. For instance, Abraham Lincoln’s passage of the Emancipation Proclamation helped end the most prominent form of slavery in the U.S. (but not all forms), and because of this, many Americans are willing to forgive his racist views and perceive his overall contributions positively. By this measure, it is dubious at best to suggest that Ginsburg’s full record contains more — simply put — good than bad. That is to say, it seems that her career as a whole caused more harm to vulnerable people than any positive impact her rare instances of dissent may have had.

The simple aforementioned formulation — cumulative good vs. cumulative harm — may be a bit naïve when compared to the manner in which most citizens evaluate public figures and the process by which these figures are often lionized despite their substantial misdeeds. The cult of personality surrounding Ruth Bader Ginsburg is certainly a notable phenomenon that can be explored in sociological and cultural contexts, but the whitewashing of her record is a crucial aspect of this process that is worth analyzing.

This unfettered, liberal adulation of Ginsburg can stem from a conscious attempt to conceal the unsavory aspects of her record, from plain ignorance, or from a third, more insidious place: acquiescence to the brutality that is “baked into” the American political system and our nation’s history more broadly. This is a system founded by white supremacists who enslaved and tortured Africans on stolen, blood-soaked land — a system by and for economic elites. In this sense, Ginsburg’s consistently anti-indigenous voting record might be perceived by liberals as a “necessary evil” — a simple extension of the settler-colonial mentality and the vestiges of “Manifest Destiny.” The same critique applies to her conservative rulings that harmed immigrants, people of color, and the working class in general.

Beyond Neoliberal Feminism

It is usually the case that about half of any large population is comprised of women. When speaking of feminism, we often forget that universal issues are also women’s issues; healthcare, housing, and wages, for instance. Under neoliberalism, exploitation, austerity, vicious imperialism, and state violence are systemic aspects of daily reality. We must remember that this includes the experiences of women, and often to a greater degree. Why don’t we take into account the indigenous women, or the immigrant women, or the women experiencing poverty when discussing Ginsburg’s record or government policy more broadly?

Let’s break this down even further. Recognizing these demographics, is it “feminist” to continue displacing and attacking the sovereignty of native women? Is it “feminist” to rule in favor of employers rather than female employees? Is it “feminist” to deport women back to countries we destroyed with sanctions and military coups? Just as the lofty, foundational American ideals were designed by and for white, property-owning men, this elite notion of feminism only applies to certain groups of women under certain circumstances. This superficial feminism is a far cry from a Marxist feminism that seeks a more holistic approach to liberation and empowerment. As Martha E. Gimenez wrote:

“As long as women’s oppression and other oppressions occupy the center of feminist theory and politics, while class remains at the margins, feminism will unwittingly contribute to keeping class outside the collective consciousness and the boundaries of acceptable political discourse. To become a unifying, rather than a divisive, political and ideological force, twenty-first-century Marxist feminism needs to become an overtly working-class women’s feminism, in solidarity with the working class as a whole, supporting the struggles of all workers, women and men, and gender-variant people of all races, national origins, citizenship statuses, and so on, thus spearheading the process toward working-class organization and the badly needed return to class in U.S. politics.”

American Institutions and Systemic Violence

Deifying political figures like Ginsburg not only whitewashes their crimes against marginalized people — it also further legitimizes a fundamentally elitist, unjust, and undemocratic political system. As political scientist Rob Hunter wrote, “The Supreme Court is a bulwark of reaction. Its brief is to maintain the institutional boundaries drawn by the Constitution, a document conceived out of fear of majoritarian democracy and written by members of a ruling class acting in brazen self-interest.”

A sober analysis of Ginsburg’s rulings clarifies that America has never strayed from its roots as a genocidal, hyper-capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal settler-colonial project with economic elites running the government and blue-clad henchmen violently enforcing this agenda through state-sanctioned terror. Some wonder if it has always been this way. Has it gotten better? Worse? Has slavery just been repackaged? What’s clear is that the advent of neoliberalism has heightened the perilous and precarious conditions of this crumbling society while technology has allowed strangers to share the visceral horrors contained therein.

It is time to stop normalizing this barbarism. Performative identity politics and the ubiquitous brand of white, neoliberal feminism are façades used to conceal the profound violence of a dying empire and to paint the “moderate” wing of capital as somehow more humane and enlightened. A society founded on land theft, on commodifying basic human needs, on exploiting, enslaving, and brutalizing the vulnerable, is a society that should not be celebrated. And it is a society where the realization of true feminism has — thus far — proven to be out of reach. As Thomas Sankara once said, “The status of women will improve only with the elimination of the system that exploits them.”

Understanding the Riots

By Devon Bowers

Given light of the nationwide protests, especially in Minneapolis regarding the death of George Floyd, as well as other victims of police violence, this is a revised and updated version an article I wrote in 2014, defending the Ferguson uprising.

 “Now, let’s get to what the white press has been calling riots. In the first place don’t get confused with the words they use like ‘anti-white,’ ‘hate,’ ‘militant’ and all that nonsense like ‘radical’ and ‘riots.’ What’s happening is rebellions not riots[.]”

- Stokley Carmichael, “Black Power” speech, July 28, 1966

"The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar."

- Karl Marx, "The Civil War in France" (1871)

In light of the uprising in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Washington DC, and other places across the country, many people have come out of the woodwork to condemn violent protesting and the destruction of buildings. However, we have to ask ourselves, what do they mean by violence?

When talking of violence in this context, it is rather strange. What people are condemning is property destruction, not violence. One can’t act in a violent way towards an inanimate object. Burning a building, whether it be a Target or a police precinct, isn’t violence, but in this context is pushback against a system where that has destroyed people for years. The murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor is actual violence. Two people’s lives were abruptly ended due to the maliciousness of the police. Storeowners have insurance, stores can be rebuilt and revived, we can’t revive Floyd, Taylor, or Ahmaud Arbery.

On a deeper level, this is where capitalism and racism intersect. One of capitalism’s main tenets is the dominance of private property and how it must be protected. We can see that this has been transcribed in law, such as with the Stand Your Ground laws. Yet, also within the larger society there is a lack of caring for black life. In any situation, the media and general public regularly engage in victim blaming and look for anything, anything at all to assassinate the character of those who died at the hand of the police.

This can be seen in the recent past, where the media bought up Akai Gurley’s criminal record when discussing his death at the hands of a police officer or when the New York Post published an article discussing Arbery being arrested for shoplifting in 2017. The publication of such information is done with the intent to demonize victims of police and white supremacist violence, allowing supporters of such violence to have an excuse as how the victims ‘deserved it’ and ‘simply got what was coming to them.’

We have also seen that the police will flat out lie to push their narrative. In the case of Breonna Taylor, police argued that her residence “was listed on the search warrant based on police's belief that Glover [Taylor’s boyfriend] had used her apartment to receive mail, keep drugs or stash money.” However, a postal worker noted that the police “did not use his office to verify that a drug suspect was receiving packages at Breonna Taylor's apartment” and that when a different agency asked in January 2020 if Taylor’s home was receiving suspicious packages, the answer was no. The no-knock raid went on unabated and then was justified based on knowingly false information.

With regards to the riots themselves, the larger society is asking why protesters don’t remain peaceful. The answer is two-part: peace has been tried and we are going to be condemned no matter what.

We have to ask this: Why would you think that people would remain peaceful in the face of constant violence? Why would people remain peaceful cases of police violence and police murder continue with no end in sight and usually no punishment for the offending officers?

Black people have tried peace before. We were peaceful in the 1960s when we were peacefully protesting for our civil rights and were met with racist mobs, fire hoses, and dogs, we had crosses burnt on our lawns, lynchings, and a bomb put in a church. During all of that time we remained peaceful even as society enacted massive violence and repression against us. Yetviolenc, violence against the black community continues today.

The situation is currently such where if a black person is killed by the police, people immediately come out and find any way in which they can besmirch or blame the victim. This occurs even when it adds insult to death, as is the case with Floyd where the autopsy noted that his “being restrained by the police, along with his underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in his system, ‘likely contributed to his death.” Such a statement partially puts the blame on Floyd himself for dying rather than entirely at the hands of Derek Chauvin and the other officers who sat there and watched Floyd die.

The conversation drastically changes when oppressed people fight back. Not only is the violence denounced, but then it is used as an excuse to use massive amounts of violence against the oppressed, as we see currently with not only the National Guard being called up to suppress the uprising in Minneapolis, but also active duty military police units from all over the country are being prepped.

When people lash out against one incident, one may be inclined to call that violence, but when violence against your community has been going on for decades and people lash out, that’s no longer violence on the part of the oppressed, that’s called resistance.

When the question is raised of why aren’t there peaceful protests, it is also extremely hypocritical. Many have spoken out in person and on social media condemning the riots, but at the same time they are silent on the constant police brutality that the black community deals with and they are silent on the economic violence done against black communities, pushing them into ghettos where not only is there economic poverty but also a poverty of expectations.

At the heart of this is how society condones state violence, but condemns violence by individuals. This mindset is a serious problem as it only gives more power to the state and consistently puts state forces in the right, with the victims of state violence being forced to prove their innocence, a situation made all the harder due to people already assuming that the victim is in the wrong.

Many have pushed for peace, but peace and safety are not something the black people in America receive, whether we are just looking for help after a car accident, as was the case with Renisha McBride, or we are carrying a toy gun around, as was the case with John Crawford.

This is not the time to ask for peace. This is the time to say “No justice, no peace.”

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 Metamodernism: The Metapolitics of Economic Justice and Racial Equality

By Brent Cooper

I'd been thinking about this idea for a while before a redditor asked the very pointed question: Are there any black metamodernists? I didn't really have a complete answer yet, which is 'yes and no.' It's a complicated question, and it doesn't seem like many are rushing to answer it. Mostly no in the explicit sense like Hanzi , of developing the "metamodern" concept and advancing a program beyond the discourse of the Dutch school . But yes in many other ways, both explicit and implict.

Black to the Future

For starters, there is one obscure but direct source for 'black metamodernism,' in Transatlantic dialogue: contemporary art in and out of Africa , 1999 (limited to a snippet view). Art history professor Moyo Okediji described contemporary African-American art in terms of metamodernism as an "extension of and challenge to modernism and postmodernism." Without access I cannot offer a thorough review, but the point is clear; black metamodernism exists and was another one mostly missed.

The book jacket lists a number of black artists, including Jean-Michel Basquiat. He is considered a type of black metamodernist described as 'returnee artists'; "African-American artists who return from Africa with a new awareness of their identiy that affects their work." (from Monni Adams book review ). This concept could certainly apply to Malcolm X or Dave Chappelle as well, who were forever changed and radicalized by their pilgrimages to Africa. I think metanoia, a fundamental change of mind, plays such a role in metamodern sensibility. All of this seems to align with metamodern critique, art, praxis, and values, and yet we do not hear much about a black metamodernism today.

Martin Luther King has already been accurately characterized as metamodern by Alexandra Dumitrescu, who thinks "he might have been a metamodernist avant la lettre ," and I couldn't agree more. King had a vision so progressive that it is only just being fully realized (actualized) today. The dream was cut short by his assassination, for which the white establishment is necessarily implicated. Even though he's gone and from a different era, his actions and ideas resonate now in a crucial way because they are still not achieved, so it's a battleground issue (conservatives try to co-opt and re-write MLK). And if we are going to mention MLK, perhaps we should also include Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Fred Hampton and countless other black activists ahead of their time, as implicitly metamodern.

Cornel West could be a metamodern thinker, pictured above, but he has never used the term, and this distinction matters, given its history at this point and his ability to wax on postmodernism. As I addressed in Gonzálezean Metamodernism, West is a good candidate to embrace the discourse, not only because he is invoked by González in that context, but because more broadly black theology is at the root of Hispanic liberation theology, and West is a cutting edge philosopher of sorts. Now is as good a time as any to (re-)introduce black metamodernism, as it builds on the turn González proposed for Hispanic Americans. Black people too are metamodern aliens in the postmodern promise land.

In Whose (Meta)modernism?: Metamodernism, Race, and the Politics of Failure (2018), James Brunton asks the right question, but also misses the source material I've mentioned. He draws his theory from Vermeulen and van den Akker, and David James and Urmila Seshagiri (2014), as well as many black poets, but he is yet another scholar 'missing metamodernism' in the broader sense I describe, and Okediji 's black metamodernism specifically.

This is a call to action to implicit black metamodernists, many of whom I discuss here, to cross over, to represent, and join the paradigm shift explicitly; my inspiration for metamodernism has in part already come from many of them. Wolfgenghis_Khan wants you; and so do we. I have written just two other articles about race/ black issues; one about black abstract art (where Basquiat is mentioned), and one about how racism is "abstracted " (made obscure), particularly by white racism against black people in the US. These are facets of my approach to metamodernism, and how abstraction can reveal or obscure the nature of racial politics and discourse. And in those I also have missed much of what I describe in this article, so it is all (re)combining into a broader black metamodernism.

Green Metamodernism

In terms of metamodern theory itself we can consider Nordic or Dutch as varieties of green metamodernism. The are green by being or having moved from the left beyond the liberal status-quo, but also green in the sense of being inexperienced or naive. To be sure, they are brilliant, but green (new, fresh) compared to their metamodern forebearers who have been missed. In the dominant Dutch School (art/ history/ culture) mode, the artist Reggie Watts is considered metamodern for his mind-boggling and heart-warming sincere absurdism. Donald Glover is metamodern too, as described here (2014), and here (2017), not least for his meta-humour in the metamodern show Community. Also, here is very comprehensive site, Metamodernity and Because the Internet , dedicated to the study of Donald Glover/ Childish Gambino and metamodernism. And this is all before his song/video " This is America " (2018) made a profound statement about race. After, we can understand him better through a lens of black metamodernism.

Green metamodernists generally do not theorize race directly or explicitly, although Hanzi has deconstructed the alt-right at some length . The general aversion is probably in part because the importance of the subject is generally implied as metamodernism is ostensibly about synthesizing and transcending both the postmodern critique (which includes the intersectionality of race, gender, class, etc) and its target, modernism. Race just becomes a smaller but still important detail in a broader context of meta-theory, planetary crisis, and metamorphosis (systems-change). But race theory is also peripheral in part because these metamodern epistemic communities are mostly white people who are tacit allies.

On the other hand, 'black metamodern' discourse has not been maintained or linked up with contemporary metamodern discourse. So the problem is two-way. This crossover should happen for two reasons: 1) by metamodernism not addressing it, it appears racialized, ignorant, or biased, and 2) by black discourses not combining with the broader paradigm shift, it remains disempowered and marginalized by the anti-postmodern and white nationalist political climate.

Metamodernism, from its Dutch and Nordic schools of origin, appears to have a eurocentric and white bias, though they have a global orientation and sensibility, as well as tacit understanding and concern about systemic racism. As we've seen in all versions, metamodernism doesn't ignorantly deny the merits of postmodern critique, or abandon social justice that conservatives and centrists have written off, nor does it embrace the full excesses of SJW culture and what has been termed 'grievance studies' literature by some determined IDW-adjacent academic hoaxers - The whole problem there is that they don't realize that all academia/ scholarship has similar problems (even their own fields, which aren't social science), but they are singling out and mocking social justice while social justice isn't being achieved in reality.

But metamodernism hasn't yet provided a clear or viral enough answer for the postmodern impasse. Or at least we've tried, and few have paid attention. Meanwhile, the new centrism of the Intellectual Dark Web has filled the void (or rather spoke over the Other) with anti-postmodern and anti-social justice diatribes that actually inflame systemic racism (which they deny exists). Those on the left who have already united against the IDW would do better to understand their moves as metamodern, and generate greater collective coherence as such.

The IDW would have you believe progressivism is a lost cause, yet they stand in the way, provide no alternative, and tune out the people actually working on those problems. The IDW remain do not engage with actual leftist politics, let alone black sociology. I offered a broad critique of the IDW over a year ago , trying to pre-emptively assuage the culture war, much of which still holds up. The IDW have gotten worse in some respects, have been critiqued harder, and now is quickly crumbing and becoming obsolscent, giving rise to a new emergent discourse.

There is also the odd (right-wing) person who is fond of metamodernism, but interprets it for their own ends without really understanding it. They support Trump. They like Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Haidt. They are against immigration for personal (identity) reasons. They have no interest in the thorough critiques of any of these things. They, of course, have also been missing the metamodernisms as I have described in this series, but also in the contemporary sense that comes from Dutch and Nordic versions, because there's nothing in those sources to inspire right-wing ideology. On the contrary, they demand a much closer read of history, theory, and social consciousness.

In general, metamodernism is post-political, beyond the left-right spectrum, and refers to the era we are in (and so does hypermodernity). But along a particular axis of issues, metamodernism as a movement and sociological theory is uniformly aligned with the leftist movement today, as it is expressed throughout this series (vis-a-vis technology, liberation theology, black socialism), and some of my other writings. This doesn't mean conservatives aren't welcome to participate and contribute - they are - but it means zero tolerance for ignorance about what postmodernism actually means, and regressive dogmas about climate change or social justice. In the Dutch and Nordic versions, metamodernism assumes the viability of a socialist steady state, not surprisingly because they are from successful ones, and are relatively successful in such societies. The idea is to provide that to everyone, and it's not a pipedream.

Metamodernism, by all available standards, reflects a progressive culture towards a cosmopolitan post-capitalist demilitarized vision of society that will mitigate climate risk, not an ethnonationalist hyper-capitalist militarist denialist prophecy of social control that will accelerate and exacerbate collapse. The choice is starkly contrasted, and the latter is called hypermodernism, not metamodernism. With this in mind, I see no right-wing person actually theorizing metamodernity, coherently at least, but there is still a need for a course correction in green metamodernism by black metamodernism.

Back in Black Metamodernism

My role here is not to be an expert on black metamodernism per se, but to defer to the real experts in their fields and to help widen the space of the new discourse. Outstanding black scholars are not in short supply, but are still fighting an uphill battle against a white-privileged status-quo. Many are immensely wise, strong willed, and influential, and yet lack the clout they truly deserve. Their critiques have not reached far enough to affect the needed change. And the lack of convergence through metamodernism has not helped either.

Notable black thinkers/ activists/ leaders include Cornel West, Charles W. Mills , Tressie Mcmillan Cottom, Michelle Alexander, Ta-nehisi Coates, Michael Eric Dyson, Benjamin Dixon, Mansa Keita, Bill Fletcher Jr., Wosny Lambre, Briahna Joy Grey, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Presley, Kwame Anthony Appiah , Patricia Hill Collins , Kimberlé W. Crenshaw , Angela Y. Davis , Henry Louis Gates, Jr. , and many more . Could this be a cross section of black metamodern thought? Many of them have theorized or criticized postmodernism as well, so it would not be a stretch to entertain metamodernism, especially with these added perspectives (Borgmann, González, black, in addition to Dutch and Nordic strands).

This negligence of black metamodernism is part of the wider pattern of Missing Metamodernism  - even amongst black scholars. They could perhaps be forgiven for not dropping everything and devoting themselves to Dutch or Nordic metamodern developments, but they also have a precedent with 'black metamodernism,' so we hope they will learn and develop it with us and speak up. Take up this meta- mantle and converge with metamodernism more broadly, to develop a new paradigm.

Much of the public discourse is not lacking in racial awareness, evidenced by the following TED talks, but it's a broader question of some (white) people's interests and attention spans. And the mainstream media is still deeply filtered and divisive over race issues. My purpose here is just to share some of what's out there, so that it can't be ignored or missed by those interested in metamodernism. And so it can't be denied by the centrists and right-wingers that want to preserve some mythical abstraction of white Western civilization. The point is that black culture was metamodern before some industrious white people rediscovered metamodernism.

In The Dangers of Whitewashing Black History, David Ikard recounts the story of his son in Grade 4, who was taught that Rosa Parks was frail old black women, diminishing her life-long struggle and the story of social justice behind her. David wanted to confront the teacher, but because of his experience with the "white fragility" of some people, he knew that might be a bad idea. So he instructed his son to learn the true history, which he did, and his son gave a speech debunking the myth. The teacher apologized to student, and subsequently retaught the Rosa Parks lecture. This is why Rosa Parks wrote her autobiography, so she could tell her own story, David said, but it still so easily becomes whitewashed. In 1950s, lynching was normal. MLK's house was bombed twice. Rosa parks was not an 'accidental activist.' These facts are often submerged by a more sanitized narrative.

Then there was a book draft David reviewed for his brilliant white professor "Fred" (not his real name) while he was a graduate student. Fred was writing a history of the civil rights movement, David explains, "specifically about a moment that happened to him in North Carolina when this white man shot this black man in cold blood in a wide-open space and was never convicted." David saw a problem in a particular personal story of how Fred talked with his black maid (which already has racial undertones in itself).

1968, MLK had just been assassinated, Fred is 8 years old, and his maid is crying and he asks why. "It'll be okay" he says… "Didn't Jesus die on the cross for our sins?" and 'maybe things will work out.' The maid, despondent as she was, tempered herself and gave little Fred a hug and a cold Pepsi. For Fred, it was proof people could cross racial lines to overcome adversity; that love could conquer all; he did a good thing. David called bullshit. The story wasn't about the maid, it was a selfish story about Fred naively thinking he was helping. The whole episode was clouded by the fact Fred was technically her employer, so she couldn't get mad at him. After being called out, Fred then realized that he misread the moment.

And there is many more TEDx that challenge basic misconceptions and expose systemic racism: Black Self / White World - lessons on internalized racism | Jabari Lyles | TEDxTysonsSalon (2017); White Men: Time to Discover Your Cultural Blind Spots | Michael Welp | TEDxBend (2017); Let's get to the root of racial injustice | Megan Ming Francis (2016). Not to mention the ample books and documentaries out there.

From the Intellectual White Web to Black Lives Matter

The more you know, the less ignorant you are, but some people can't be bothered. From the current smorgasbord of trashy thought leaders, Jordan Peterson is probably the most obtuse white person one can picture. He is tacitly against identity politics and racism, white supremacy, and white nationalism, while not having a clue how they actually operate in the world and through his own discourse. The Peterson paradox is being able to unironically praise MLK in one sentence and condemn his core values (like democratic socialism ) in another without an inkling of cognitive dissonance.

Imagine being so functionally ignorant of systemic racism that you lecture about how 'white privilege is a marxist lie' at Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC (2018), behind a picture of Abe Lincoln, as if that means something in this context. It is scholarly dereliction to be so ignorant about those concepts, to say the very least. And then to cry crocodile tears when Michael Eric Dyson calls you out as a "mean mad white man." And then for your demagogic bile and self-help slop to fuel the xenophobic incel rage of white nationalist shooters. And then to get even angrier that you have incessant critics, as if don't they have something important to explain to you. And then you give a high school book report of The Communist Manifesto to Zizek. But at least you've made over $1M in the past year and are now doing a business scam thing with Kobe Bryant and George W. Bush , and chumming with far right politicians who want to purge humanities teachers. So much for classical liberalism. Fear not mean white man, have a cold Pepsi, we know you're doing your best, just like "Fred" was with his maid.

At the end of the day black metamodernism is not just about the 'black' modifier; it's not self-interested minorities with narrow identitarian priorities, like their white majority racist counterparts. Many black scholars do not dwell on race, they are well rounded, but rather race is forced upon them because of their skin color and place in society. Some become experts by choice, others by circumstance. The dream is for racial equality and economic solidarity, not black supremacy, but white anxiety keeps murdering this dream, keeping the nightmare (whitemare?) alive and well in America.

"Black Lives Matter" (BLM) is actually a proportional response to the criminalization of drugs, profiling of minorities, and being incarcerated or killed by racist or paranoid cops. Whether the cops are overtly racist or subconsciously is beside the point, because they are still racist in effect and consequence. Opponents of BLM generally miss the point, only seeing a black power grab, but that itself is a racist interpretation based on ignorance, fear, and (social) media distortion and polarization. The reality is, as Brunton described it;

"The Black Lives Matter movement argues that we need to recognize precisely the opposite of what the movement's hashtag declares that is, historically, white patriarchy has failed to treat black lives as though they matter. American liberal democracy has failed to provide the rights and privileges of citizenship to a large portion of the citizenry, and the election of a black president has failed to usher in a post-racial society." - Brunton, Whose (Meta)modernism?: Metamodernism, Race, and the Politics of Failure (2018)

Like with MLK, this progressive (black) metamodernism includes the racial struggle, but is about the larger quest for socio-economic and even environmental justice. As such, black metamodernism is not reducible to a shallow form of identity politics. To avoid this caricature, the first task is to consolidate the new subfield as metamodern, as could be done for each path in (ie. Borgmann, González, etc…). The second task is to re-integrate back into a broader more inclusive notion of metamodernism to address the meta-crisis of hyper-capitalism. This series tries to advance both tasks in a small way.

Furthermore, it's all about climate change now, the anthropocene, and (quite certain) global existential risks that humanity are creating. There is this overriding sentiment that if 'we're all going to die' then might as well do the right thing now. And as you can see (below), black metamodernists are already ahead of this curve, which is why we should already be united under one paradigmatic umbrella.

The Black Socialists of America were on the podcast New Models - Episode 12: BLACK SOCIALISTS (Z, Busta, Keller, @LILINTERNET ). They describe how they founded it response to how Cornel West was attacked by "black liberals" for critiquing Ta-nehisi Coates, and realized there wasn't a real platform for Black American socialists, anti-capitalists, leftists, etc. At 7:30, they start to get into it;"I don't want to slam postmodernism too hard here but…" Needless to say, they are beyond postmodernism, and have a thoughtful critique that could be described as metamodern.

The Michael Brooks Show (TMBS) invokes black sociology often (consider the work of the Association of Black Sociologists on twitter too), especially with the frequent guest Bill Fletcher Jr . Brooks is so committed his twitter bio says "Member of the Yacubian Left," a nod to the theory that an ancient 'black scientist' created white people through eugenics. On TMBS 91 " Wonkery Won't Save Us & Green Imperialism ," Brandon Sutton (The Discourse podcast) was recently on to brilliantly break down systemic racism and the neoliberal agenda (May 21, 2019). Sutton is also cautious about cancel culture and performative wokeness that run the risk of undermining their goals. TMBS has been critical of Kanye's politics and black activism (vis-a-vis Trump), from black perspectives. Briahna Joy Gray (former Intercept editor and now Bernie's press secretary) is a regular guest too.

Michael Brooks and guests have been the most incisive critics of the IDW, because they already have this implicit metamodern awareness, as noted in Gonzálezean metamodernism. To be sure, black metamodernists would go after the mostly white Intellectual Dark Web, not join it like Candace Owens, Coleman Hughes, or Thomas Sowell to be instruments for a racist status-quo. See ' Coleman Hughes is bad for the discourse ', and this vid , and James B. Stewart, Thomas Sowell's Quixotic Quest to Denigrate African American Culture (2006). Hughes and Sowell, despite whatever intellectual merits, are truly not grounded in racial reality, and are certainly not metamodernists, but reactionary modernists.

Last Light on Black

There is still so much more to explore in this potential subfield than I have not covered here. I have just scratched the surface of black metamodernism, as with the other articles in Missing Metamodernism. Afrofuturism seems pretty metamodern. The movie Black Panther was a critical and commercial success; perhaps a black metamodern film in a metamodern franchise. A black writer named Germane Marvel has authored a couple Medium posts on metamodernism which seem to offer fresh philosophical musings about it; Meta Something? , followed by Meta Nothing? Research in Black Feminist Science explores how "the intellectual endeavors of marginalized black women have historically represented radical challenges to structures of knowledge and systems of oppression."

Some more artefacts of black metamodernism to consider include Get Out , The Legacy of Black Reconstruction, by Robert Greene II , Bernie's Plan for Racial Justice, by Meagan Day , The Boondocks (TV series) , and Into the Spiderverse . And through the internet over the past couple years I have connected with a few black people in Africa and elsewhere interested in metamodernism, but without having a proper African version of it. I think now it is safe to say there is one, and it can be developed more.

Conclusion

I hope I have established a solid precedent for what I suggest by a broad 'black metamodernism'; a shrewd awakening and reality check for what Charles W. Mills calls 'white ignorance,' among many other things, that metamodernism has not hitherto immunized against. Social justice still demands resolution, despite what the (pseudo-)intellectual posturing against it would tell you. The ample literature on structural racism may seem to shout through the matrix of postmodernism, incomprehensible to the new center, but we are listening. In a time when racial tensions are still high and systemic racism persists around the world, particularly against people of color in the United States, not to mention the scourge of white nationalism and dastardly race/IQ pseudoscience, we cannot make excuses for the absence or negation of a black metamodernism that was always present.

Furthermore, postmodernism and social justice are under constant attack for the wrong reasons, while questionable postmodern (gibberish) scholarship is still being produced, normatively for the right reasons, but at the limits of critique. For many of us in the culture war, this is the whole point of a metamodern intervention; to cut through the bullshit and end the culture war itself (along with actual war), while also reforming the research and education paradigm towards these ends. Who but (black) metamodernists could most aptly advocate for this?

→ Read Part 1: Missing Metamodernism
→ Read Part 2: Borgmannian Metamodernism
→ Read Part 3: Gonzálezean Metamodernism

Brent Cooper is founder and Executive Director at The Abs-Tract Organization , a Canadian think tank.

The Price of Utopia: Abundance & Injustice

By Nick Partya

This is the third part of a multi-part series on "The Value of Utopia."

Part One: The American Tradition of Radical Utopianism

Part Two: The Bosses' Utopia: Dystopia and the American Company Town

On The Value of Utopia

For many centuries persons, peoples, and civilizations, have dreamed about what an ideal society (utopia) would look like, and worried about ways in which society could be much worse (dystopia). Utopian dreams and dystopian worries are powerful tools for thinking about what sorts of changes a society should pursue or avoid, and what underlying dynamics these proposed changes expose. This series examines the tradition of utopian and dystopian thought in western culture, beginning with the ancient Greeks, but continuing on into the modern period. Our focus in this series will be on the important social, political, and economic ideas and issues raised in different utopian stories. When we look into utopian stories, and their historical times, what we'll see reflected in the stories of utopia are the social, political, and economic concerns of the authors, their societies, and or their particular social class.

The meaning of the word 'utopia' comes to us from ancient Greece. In our modern world the word takes its current form because of Thomas More's 1516 book of the same name. Indeed, it is this book from which most of the modern western European utopian tradition takes its origin; or at least, this work inaugurates it most common trope. Where we have in our lexicon one 'utopia', the Greeks had two. The difference, even confusion, between them marks an essential cleavage. For the Greeks, there was both Eu- topia, and Ou-topia. Both are derived in part from the Greek word topos, which means "place", and the suffix 'ia' meaning land. Translated into English, 'Ou-topia' means something like, " No-place land", whereas 'Eu-topia' translates as "good-place land". More succinctly, the difference is between the idea of the best place, and an impossible place. It is the difference between a place which does not exist, because it has not yet been realized, and a place which cannot, and could not, ever exist.

Our modern word is pronounced as the Greeks pronounced 'Eutopia'. However, the meanings of these Greek words were confused by modern writers, who ended up with the spelling 'utopia', from the old English 'Utopie' as opposed to "Eutopia", as meaning "good place". This basic confusion about utopias, between "good place" and "no place", inserts an important ambiguity directly in the center of thinking about utopias. This ambiguity forces one to wonder of utopian writers, Are their visions supposed to be dreams of possible futures meant to incite us to action, or are they impossible dreams meant as reminders that the world is not easily re-shaped by human effort? Is a utopia supposed to be a good place or a no-place, is the author supporting or condemning the practices of the fictional societies they describe?

One qualification must be made right away. A utopia is not a paradise. There is a colloquial usage of 'utopia' and 'utopian' that seem to suggest that it is a paradise. And compared to the societies in which actual humans lives, many of the fictional utopias would have indeed been seen as paradises, relatively speaking. However, we must draw a technical distinction between a paradise or a golden-age, and a utopia. In a paradise or golden-age no work and no effort are required by humans to obtain the things they want and need. Perhaps the most famous golden-age many are familiar with would be the Biblical Garden of Eden. Another well-known paradise is described in the mid-14th century poem The Land of Cockaigne, where fully cooked turkey legs literally fly through the air and into one's mouth. In this place the only effort on need put in is to chew.

The whole idea of a Cockaigne, or a paradise, is that everything one would ever need is abundantly supplied without any effort. The natural world is just so constructed - either at random or by design - that there springs forth automatically an abundance of everything necessary for everyone, all the time, always. In this kind of society, or world, there never arises anything resembling what we - or most societies in the history of our world - a political problem. Everyone has enough of everything. So there is no cause for argument. There is no inequality, because everyone has everything everyone else has. Or at least, everyone has access to just as much of what others have whenever they would like it. In this kind of world what causes could there be for strife, or for civil war? A paradise, or a golden-age, is thus totally non-political, and not terribly interesting.

What this means is that utopias are enough like our own condition, our own world, that we can take inspiration from them. They are enough like the social conditions we know that we can learn lessons for and about ourselves and our societies by examining at them. This is exactly what makes utopias so interesting. As we will see, utopian literature has a long, very long, history with human beings. The enduring appeal of and, interest in utopias testifies to their relevance. This is the reason that we too are looking at utopias. We are all concerned with, or at least we are all effected by, the way our society is organized. By looking at how other ideal societies might be organized we can explore the merits, and demerits of various kinds of social institutions, and of the various ways of structuring those institutions. We are concerned to change our own society, and utopias allow us to think about the direction of that change.

We have a colloquial usage of the word 'utopia' and 'utopian' in contemporary society that works to prohibit much creative thought, and dismisses utopian thought as feckless, and as such, worthless. Part of the aims of this series is to demonstrate the value of this "worthless" endeavor. Dreaming, far from idle, far from impotent, is essential. Without wonder, without questions, the human imagination will atrophy. What is so valuable about thinking about utopias is that it allows us to both critique present societies, but also to articulate a vision of how we'd like our societies to be different. The deeper value of utopian thinking is that it sets us free, free to speculate and more importantly to give expression to our striving, to our desire for a better world. Everything human beings can be must be first be dreamed by human beings. This is the value of utopia and dystopia. Thus, the first pre-requisite for this series is the rejection of this colloquial notion of utopia and the utopian. Dismissed from the start, it will not be a surprise if we fail to learn anything from our utopian traditions.

Introduction

One important value of utopian thinking is that it permits one to think about themselves in relation to society, their place in the social order, to reflect on basic commitments and values of their societies, to consider the proper aims of their society. Few take time to consider the basic structure of the societies they live in, few notice the myriad of inter-connected systems of coordinated behavior, sometimes voluntary sometimes coerced, that create the often seamless appearance of the regularity and orderliness of society. In order for society to reproduce itself, certain kinds of work must be performed, and the more complex the society, the more sophisticated the system of internal coordination required to successfully reproduce the necessary elements of that reproduction. It is the duty of citizens to confront this basic structure, this way that society re-creates itself, and once confronted, one cannot help but adopt a moral attitude toward this basic structure. Utopian thinking allows us to think about our most basic moral orientations toward society and its mode of reproduction.

Ursula Le Guin's short story, The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas, offers an excellent opportunity for such reflection. [1] The main point of describing this utopian society as she does is to pose to the reader the questions, Would you stay or go? The point is to make the reader confront a moral dilemma, and test their moral intuitions, to see what kind of a person the reader is. The analogy to the dominant capitalist world economy is very clear. And the question posed in each case is very stark, How comfortable is one with enjoying a prosperity predicated on the intentional creation of suffering and injustice? This question is a kind of test, wherein one's answer reveals s deeper elements of one's character. In some ways the moral dilemma Le Guin constructs is similar to that in Robert Nozick's famous experience machine thought example. Nozick imagines a virtual reality machine that could be programmed to give you any set of experiences you wanted. You could live your ideal life in a virtual space that is identical to the real world in all sensory respects, one might think of the popular film The Matrix. Every five years or so, you would be woken up, so to speak, and asked if you wished to continue. Nozick asks, would you choose to stay in the machine, or not. If you choose not, the implication is that this must be because you value things other than hedonistic physical pleasures. One's response to this dilemma reveals something about one's underlying character, and in this case, what one values.

The Ones Who Walk Away

When Le Guin first introduces the reader to the town of Omelas an ostensibly important festival is set to begin. And people from a network of communities are making the journey to Omelas to participate in this festival, such is its importance to the community. The town is full of dancing, music, and gaiety. Young and old, everyone is joyful, thankful for the prosperity of the community, and everyone indulges in delicious food, festive music and dancing, as well as amiable conversation with family, friends, and neighbors. The residents are described as amiably conversing with each other, while various processions move through the city towards a field outside of town. In this field a kind of ceremonial horse race is to take place as a key part of the festival being celebrated. Le Guin describes a quaint, well-kept town by a bay, and with bountiful fields stretching out beyond. The general impression of this festival, and of the town celebrating it, is unmistakably one of universal joy and celebration of prosperity and abundance. What comes to mind is the New England, or Pacific Northwest fishing town on the coast. Indeed, 'Omelas' in reverse is 'salem O', and the town of Salem, Oregon is where Le Guin resides. In one's mind, one conjures the image of the kind of bucolic small town, the aesthetic of which many Americans continue to crave and to drape themselves in, and which loom so large in the American cultural imagination. The image conjured here is of the kind of place many Americans would associate with a "simpler" time, with a more virtuous and un-corrupted country both physically and morally.

And indeed, Omelas has many characteristics which have been typical of utopian communities since the time of Thomas More. The reader is given the impression of Omelas as an egalitarian, and democratic community, one that eschews violence, hierarchy, luxury, and avarice. The reader is told that in Omelas there are no police, no military, no wars, no civil conflict, there are only a few simple laws and so there is no need for lawyers, and there is full gender equality. The citizens of Omelas reject significant aspects of the capitalist economy, its structural imperative towards endless growth; its self-destructive pursuit of extreme luxury and decadence; its relentless exhortations to consume; its rationing of access to consumption goods by income. In Omelas, in contrast to the dominant characteristics of capitalist societies, there is no poverty, no homelessness, no one goes hungry, no one lacks medical care, access to education, or to productive employment. Everyone enjoys enough leisure time to be able to cultivate their talents, so that the arts, and other cultural productions, thrive in Omelas. The people of Omelas are rational people, spiritual without being rigidly moralistic, e.g. they seem to be less obsessed with guilt and shame the same way the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic traditions are, or about the same things. The prevalence and acceptability of public nudity, at least during the important festival, is a sign of a less repressive, more enlightened attitude towards body image and sexual morality.

Early on in Republic Glaucon and Adiemantus disagree with Socrates about his initial characterization of the best kind of community. Socrates describes a simple society with few needs, and Spartan sensibilities about décor, utensils, diet, et cetera. This kind of life, where virtuous people subsist on their "honest cakes and loaves" fails to appeal to Socrates' younger interlocutors, who insist on adding important elements to the ideal city, elements necessary for living the best kind of life. Yet, introducing these elements of luxury creates all the social and political problems that the Philosopher-Kings have to be created to solve. So too does Le Guin understand that when it comes to utopia, tastes will differ. Thus, while she offers important details, and creates a vivid impression of the life of the community at Omelas, she leaves much of it open ended, so as to suit individual tastes. She can do this since, what she wants is to get the reader to imagine Omelas in whatever way they need so as to think of it as the ideal kind of life, and the ideal kind of community. If an orgy would be necessary to make Omelas appealing enough to attract some, then add one in is Le Guin's attitude. Prefer less technology, less urban hustle-&-bustle, a more abstemious community, then so it is. Prefer the opposite of these, then that's fine too. For those who like intoxication, Le Guin describes Drooz, a kind of wonder-drug that offers all the appeal of psychotropic substances without being habit-forming or destructive to the body. She is also happy to have beer in Omelas. Omelas is to be the home of all good things, in whatever measure one thinks appropriate.

Yet, Omelas is not the place that many will have imagined it to be thus far. There is a dark side to the prosperity of Omelas. In the basement of one of the buildings in the town there is certain room. It is small, dark, and dank. The room has a bare dirt floor, a small window covered in grime and filth, and a couple of rusted buckets and old mops fouled by rot and mold. This is a room most do not visit, but that everyone in town knows about and thinks about. All things being equal the dilapidated condition, and lack of maintenance for this room would be unremarkable. Yet, all other things are not equal in this case. This is because a child lives in this room behind a locked door, and has lived in this room all its life, and will live the entirety of its life in this squalid little room. Periodically someone comes to empty the buckets filled with the child's excrement, and re-fill the child's water and food bowls. As one might imagine, as any child raised in such conditions, the child in this room in Omelas is malnourished, intellectually stunted, cannot read, write, has no conception of the world beyond that basement room. In short, the child lives a horrible and degrading life, full of deprivation, fear, and isolation. And to top it all off this child is as innocent as any, there are no circumstances that might be adduced to mitigate the sympathy the reader very likely naturally has for the child.

When each citizen of Omelas comes of age, between eight and twelve years old, they are told about the room, some even go to see the room. All are fully aware that there is a causal relationship between the child's suffering and the town's prosperity. Le Guin never specifies what this mechanism is, and does not need to. First, this is a work of utopian fiction, so it is not essential to include this, and second, the point of the story is to pose the reader a moral dilemma, not to describe how this mechanism could work. She is content to leave it to the reader's imagination as to how this causal connection works. Perhaps it is a kind of sacrifice to whatever god exists, or whatever, the details on this point are not essential. Without the suffering imposed on this child the town would not, indeed could not, be the place of joy and abundance that it is.

Some people are unable to live in Omelas, to enjoy its prosperity and abundance, knowing what the true cost of it is. These are the titular 'ones who walk away'. Sometimes the young children who go to see the child do not adapt to the necessity of its suffering, and they leave the town. Other times older adults, as Le Guin tells us, will suddenly become quiet for a couple days and then walk right out of town. All these people could not reconcile the joy and abundance enjoyed by all but one in Omelas, and the suffering of that one, when the latter is the pre-condition of the former. These people leave Omelas, and never return. Where these people go, the citizens of Omelas do not know. Le Guin tells us it is a place that would be even less imaginable for us than Omelas, a place that might not even exist. Are the ones who walk away going to their deaths? Are they going to a place where they can live without imposing suffering? All Le Guin tells us is that those who walk away seem to know where they are going.

An Omelas in the Modern World?

What makes Omelas unique is that everyone who lives there is acutely aware of the price of their prosperity. And each has made a deliberate and conscious choice to stay. Our modern world is very different from Omelas in this regard. Though not secret, the source of and true price of the material prosperity of those in the so-called "first" world, are usually hidden. Few Western consumers see behind the neatly arranged items on the shelves of their local stores, to the often long and sophisticated chains of interconnected operations that unite the production of raw materials and the consumption of finished goods. This is because many people do not care to know, others do not care how much others have to suffer for them to enjoy the things they want, and also because the large firms which produce these goods deliberately try to obscure the morally dubious origins of the ingredients that make their products possible. If we look at only a couple of some basic products that many people consume on a routine basis will expose the immense quantities of suffering that is produced in order to furnish these products to consumers. We can look to the basic cotton t-shirt, the cellular telephone, and the chocolate bar, for ample evidence of the outsized costs of 'simple' luxuries.

Consider the common t-shirt. They appear ready-made on store shelves, but in fact have a complex history. At every step in the production-process of a simple t-shirt involves many kinds of hidden costs, both human and ecological. Ecologically, cotton is a very greedy crop in terms of water requirements. Devoting vast tracts of land to cultivation of cotton can have serious effects on water supplies. In an era of climate change, when large-scale drought is quickly becoming a significant problem, this strain on water resources will become increasingly problematic. As with other kinds of farming, the use of pesticides and other chemicals to increase crop yields causes problems as it leeches into the water supply. Turning picked cotton into fabric involves a series of complex operations, many dispersed by thousands of miles geographically, and linked by the ability to cheaply ship bulk commodities using fossil fuels. Many of these operations are largely automated. The environmental costs of burning fossil fuels, the main source of energy for the machines that produce yarns and fabric, as well as the ships and trucks that transport the semi-finished product as is progresses through the production process, are well known.

The disaster at Rana Plaza in Bangladesh 2013 brought many in the world face to face with some of the most morally troubling aspects of the production of their clothing. The use of young children in sweatshops, the unsafe and unhealthy conditions in most factories, the low wages, long hours, and abuses by supervisors that workers experience were brought to the attention of a public that is all too eager to look away. The sub-contracting relationships that dominate the garment trade, that large retailers use to shed responsibility for the wages and work conditions of the workers who produce their products, enable a culture of don't ask, don't tell on the part of the retailers and the suppliers. These kinds of abuses have been documented over and over again by NGOs, human rights groups, investigative journalists, et cetera, in the third world countries where most of the world's garment production takes place. And despite the high-sounding pledges made by retailers, the kinds of abuses that lead directly to the Rana Plaza disaster, and many other tragically similar incidents, are still routine practices.

Think about your cell phone. It is probably in your pocket or purse right now, or maybe on a table or desk within one's reach. This item has become so ubiquitous in the last few years that we now taken them for granted. The so-called "smart" phone has established itself with the same ubiquity even faster. Yet, some of the basic components that make these devices work have rather problematic histories from a moral perspective. Most people use their cell phones every day, and hardly ever, if at all, think about the Rare Earth Minerals (REMs) that make them work. The production of these essential components causes much ecological and human damage, in both their mining and refining, as well as their recycling. Elements like Neodymium, Terbium, Cerium, Lanthanum, and Yttrium are all essential materials for making the components that make our "smart" phones work. And they all must be dug out of the earth, and processed into a form useable by industry.

Mining, for rare earths, or merely for gold and silver, is an inherently a physically destructive endeavor, and whole landscapes can be, and have been, wiped away in the quest for what lies underneath. In many poorer countries around the world, where the agents of trans-national capital extract much of the raw materials for their products, regulation is lax and corruption high. This combination leads quite naturally to wholesale environmental degradation through unrestrained avarice, as well as often crude technologies. These same conditions lead to large human costs, as mining techniques are both inherently dangerous, carried out with dilapidated and inadequate equipment, with no safety regulation or precaution, miles from medical help, and undertaken by desperate people willing to take risks others would deem unacceptable; in all too many instances mining work is done by slave labor, child labor, or child-slave labor. Mining is, of course, done differently in different places, and yet even in America mining is a dangerous occupation. Moreover, the use of toxic chemicals, especially mercury for gold mining, also contributes to both ecological damage and ill-health in humans. Once mined, these mineral must be transported, the same way cotton had to be, to the locations where they are to undergo the next stage of their transformation into products one will find in a store. This transportation process, as one that relies on burning fossil fuels, adds to the burden being placed on the earth's ecosystem.

Refining rare earth minerals is not only highly energy intensive, but also causes widespread harm to human beings, as the rare earths are toxic, as they are always found in nature next to radioactive elements. Exposure to radiation effects workers in, as well as the communities surrounding refining facilities. Moreover, irresponsible, if not in all cases illegal, dumping of the radioactive waste products of refining rare earths causes a myriad of health effects on the human beings exposed. In one community in Malaysia near a rare earth refining facility run by an Australian company, residents exposed suffered from a range of ill effects ranging from skin disorders, to high rates of miscarriages and birth defects including blindness, severe retardation, and leukemia.

Most rare earths are mined and refined in China and other Asian countries. Most are then sent to other Asian countries to construct sub-components, which are in turn shipped to another production facility, where they are fitted in larger sub-components, and so on, until all the sub-components reach the final assembly facility, from which the final product is shipped again, and not for the last time, on its way to the final destination on the shelves of local retail outlets. The human costs exacted during the assembly of the various sub-components of the myriad of electronic gadgets and gizmos that dominate our lives are appalling, and the rash of worker suicides at Foxconn factories testifies to the draconian nature of the work regime there. The companies, now notorious, response was to place nets around the factory buildings to prevent workers who successfully made it out the window from dying. Workers in China, and other low-wage, low regulation Asian countries are routinely subjected to brutal treatment, long hours, low wages, unsafe and unhealthy conditions, not to mention predatory behavior by the company in the form of mandatory residence in company housing -often cramped, ill maintained, and lacking basic amenities- the rent for which is automatically deducted from workers' pay.

One might think that the troubles involved in mining and refining could be mitigated if only we all recycled more of our electronics. Yet, even recycling has a nasty after-taste, once one looks into. The net flow of new products is into the developed world, but there is also a reverse flow of obsolete products back to the Asian countries, again predominantly China, from which the rare earths originated. The unfortunate reality is that the recycling process of obsolete electronic from the first world is very crude. Most "e-waste" is shipped, again using fossil fuels, to small Chinese villages where elderly people break down the components by hand, often using little but their bare hands, an open flame, and toxic chemicals, especially acids. This is how the people involved in this recycling work are exposed to the chemicals that result in detrimental health effects, including much higher rates of cancer. The link between the recycling work and the cancers is so strong that the places where this work is done have come to be called " cancer villages".

Even the unassuming, seemingly innocent, and above all delicious, chocolate bar has a decidedly bitter side, and a morally problematic history. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the production of chocolate is the apparent pervasiveness of child-slave labor on cocoa plantations in the West African countries where most of the world's cocoa is cultivated. Making the matter worse is that many of the child-slaves on these plantations have been kidnapped or hoodwinked by middle men and trafficked from neighboring countries for exactly this purpose. The world's major chocolate companies are aware of the presence of child-slave labor on these plantations, and continue to buy from wholesalers in these countries. Much like the garment industry, sub-contracting relationships allow the chocolate giants, like Nestle, to evade responsibility for and scrutiny about the nature of the labor practices of the producers.

These three examples are by no means the only products which most Western consumers use on a daily basis, taking entirely for granted, but which have a morally dubious origin and history. The amount of harm caused to both the environment, and to other people during the process of producing the goods we consume is hardly ever considered, let alone factored into the price of those items. From the frozen veggies in our freezers, to the coffee makers and sugar packets on our countertops, to the cleaning agents we use, to the paper products we over-utilize, we find that the production process that ends with our individual usage contains significant abuse of both the environment, and of the human workers at every stage. It is clear now that the modern world is an Omelas of sorts. The prosperity of the developed world is intrinsically linked with the under-development and poverty of the rest of the world, the latter being the pre-condition of the former. Our world has the equivalent of the dank, dark, neglected basement in Omelas. It is the sweatshop, the maquiladora, the Export Processing Zone factory, the illegal mining or logging camp, the plantation, the company town, the cancer village, the ghetto, and the favela.

What Does it Mean to Walk Away?

In Omelas, the ones who stay are able to rationalize the suffering of the child, those who cannot walk away. For the ones who stay, their rationale, as reconstructed by Le Guin, is very similar to the 'There Is No Alternative' (TINA) style argument. Indeed, Le Guin says that the place those who walk away go is almost unimaginable. Those who decide to stay, even if they recognize the child's condition as a bad thing, as deeply regrettable, as morally troubling, seem to eventually accept that there is nothing to be done. To let the child out now would do it no good, so they reason, since it is so stunted and maladjusted it could not possibly live anything like a flourishing life. This child has simply been too abused and neglected, too maligned and degraded, to live a decent life even in more comfortable circumstances. No one individual possess the power to abolish the mechanism linking the child's suffering to the communities' prosperity. So it is that after a period of days, or maybe weeks, those who stay come to reconcile the enjoyment of abundance with the price paid for that abundance. We have here another parallel with our modern capitalist world economy. Many Western consumers feel powerless to change the capitalist-imperialist system that delivers them the necessities and luxuries they require, even if they see this system as morally problematic. They feel that since there is no alternative to capitalist-imperialism, there is no choice but to just accept it.

The ones who walk away from Omelas are not able to reconcile the child's suffering with their own individual prosperity. But, What does it mean to walk away? Le Guin tells us that those who walk away seem to know where they are headed, but is very cryptic about the place they go. Clearly, if those who walk away are not simply going off to die, then wherever they are going it must be a place where the relationship between suffering and prosperity in Omelas no longer obtains. Perhaps the ones who walk away are going nowhere, as they would rather die than live a morally corrupted life. This would of course imply that there is indeed no alternative to the rule linking suffering and prosperity, and that the only real choice individuals have in deciding whether or not to walk away from Omelas is one between life and death. Thus, it seems terribly pertinent to ask, Is there an alternative? If there is another way of life possible, that severs the connection in Omelas, and in capitalist-imperialism, between the suffering of some and the prosperity of others.

The TINA argument that supports the decision of some to stay in Omelas, as well as the decision of people in our world to accept capitalist hegemony, simply does not hold up. One has little reason to think that there is no alternative, or that the only alternative is death. There is another way to live, and because there is an alternative, the choice to stay becomes less a bit of Stoic equipoise, or the British stiff upper lip, and more a self-serving excuse for complicity in imposing suffering. What is this alternative? How can we live, but at the same time, not depend on impoverishment, degradation, and oppression to furnish a standard of living most contemporary Westerners would consider minimally decent? The answer, in short, is socialism. In particular, a non-market participatory socialism centered on a scheme of de-centralized, participatory, democratic economic planning. One such model is called Participatory Economics, or Parecon, and has been developed by Robin Hahnel and Michael Albert.[2]

Many will still wonder whether such an economy is feasible. It is, of course, not possible here to fully describe and defend this model. Let me offer then a few words on feasibility. First, "free" markets are not only not free at all, but are much less efficient than is often supposed. [3] Even the notion of "efficiency" is not what it seems on its surface. The technical meaning of efficiency in a competitive, capitalist economy differs importantly from the colloquial usage most are familiar with. Markets are in fact rather inefficient. Not only are markets inefficient, but the achievements of planned economies have been consistently, and significantly distorted or ignored entirely. Today, the historical example of the former Soviet Union is massively misunderstood in America; the example of Yugoslavia all but forgotten in the wake of the wars of the early 1990s; and the example of Cuba has been so thoroughly ignored, it is as if maintaining the blockade erased its existence for most Americans. If the technical challenges to send human beings safely to, and then return from, the Moon, can be overcome, then constructing a economic system that meets at least the basic subsistence needs of everyone in terms of food, clothing, shelter, education, and healthcare can be overcome.

What may perhaps come as a real surprise to many is how close we are already to a planned economy. The oligopolistic firms which have increasingly dominated, through mergers and "creative destruction", the U.S. economy since the end of the Second World War already engage in large-scale economic planning; mostly it is a product of co-respective behavior, and long-term planning for the management of capital assets in the interest of shareholders. During the period from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the First World War, the U.S. economy was entirely re-made, and in the interests of capital and capitalists. Between the exigencies of fighting two World Wars sandwiched around the greatest economic crisis of the 20th century, forced the government and the private sector to come to terms with each other and cooperate to save liberalism and capitalism. Coming out of the Second World War the stature achieved by these firms was immense, and their ability to control, regulate, and manipulate all markets was unprecedented. Most importantly for today, the data these firms have accumulated over decades, on everything from production rates to consumer habits, et cetera, makes the technical challenges of economic planning much less daunting. Moreover, the kinds of inventory tracking systems that make retailers like Wal-Mart so efficient, are exactly the kinds of systems that will also make the technical challenges associated with production and distribution easier to manage. For now, all this data is propriety information, that is, it is the private property of the various firms themselves.

At present, the economic planning that occurs is planning for the enrichment of capitalists. That is indeed the raison d'être for firms in keeping records, and collecting data on consumers, and engaging in long-term planning. When this data is nationalized, when it all can be collected, the problems that many still see in the idea of a planned economy become far less formidable. Indeed, many of these problems become more issues of calculation rather than issues of conceiving how a solution could even be possible; as was the case in the 1930s, when the original socialist calculations debates took place.

Conclusion

Our world, like Omelas, is a place where prosperity and abundance co-exist with horrific and structural injustice. Indeed, things are much worse in the real world, as injustice here is not confined to a single individual in a single room. Quite the opposite, the majority experience toil and deprivation so that a minority may indulge in opulence. Even in Omelas, where brutal and unjustified suffering is imposed on only one individual, some cannot bear the price of their abundance and must walk away. Now let us revisit the question implied by the story, Would you (the reader) walk away from Omelas? Could you stay and live a utopian life, all the while knowing its true cost? If yes, if the thought of the child in the basement, abused, alone, half starved, and naked, makes you unable to enjoy the cornucopia on offer, then the same moral intuition applies a fortiori in the case of our modern capitalist economy.

The dark basement of contemporary capitalism can be found in the sweatshops, the favelas, and the factories of the so-called "developing" world. Only because the commodity chains, whose final link are the shelves of the local stores of Western consumers, are so internationally dispersed, that they are largely hidden from consumers. The moral imperative felt in the case of Omelas is in fact only more intense in the real world. We face a moral crisis many times the scale of the hypothetical choice in Omelas every single day. Every day one chooses to uncritically accept and consumer the goods on offer from capitalist imperialism, then one too become complicit in abuses far worse than anything described in Le Guin's story.

If yes, if one would walk away from Omelas, What then? Where would you go, and How would you get there? Walking away from Omelas, walking away from capitalism, does not mean choosing death, it does not mean refusing to eat because everything you can buy is tainted by association with the capitalist mode of production. Walking away from capitalism does not mean forsaking technology, or innovation, or even incentive. What is clear already is that the productive forces that nineteenth and early twentieth century socialists worried about not being insufficiently developed, are now quite ripe. The main question is no longer about production, that is, how to make enough, but rather, it is about distribution, or how to make sure everyone has enough. What is also very clear is that markets are a lot less efficient than they are alleged to be, and that the alternatives to markets are much more practicable than is commonly supposed. Given that markets fail in many important respects, and that more democratic alternatives are feasible, the destination of those walking away should be a form of participatory socialism incorporating democratic economic planning. Knowing that there is a place to walk away to, might hopefully give some the courage needed to leave Omelas, to reject capitalism.

Notes

[1] Le Guin, Ursula. "The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas". The Wind's Twelve Quarters. 1975. William Morrow Paperbacks; 2004.

[2] See, Albert, Michael. Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Verso; 2004. Also see, Albert, Michael & Robin Hahnel. The Political-Economy of Participatory Economics. Princeton University Press; 1991.

[3] See Donnaruma, Colin & Nicholas Partyka. "Challenging the Presumption in Favor of Markets". Review of Radical Political Economics. Vol.44 no.1 (2012):40-61.

Retracing Toledo's Radical History

By Derek Ide

It is not difficult to sense the alienation and demoralization that impinges upon so many people as they drive through the streets of Toledo, Ohio. These are streets that were constructed to be driven on and nothing else. Unlike many of the cities in Europe, or even some in the United States, it is not a walkable city. The haphazard urban planning, or lack thereof, and the complete lack of any public transit system, with the exception of TARTA buses and private cabs, combine to make Toledo more than inhospitable to those without their own private vehicle. Those who can afford it have spent the past five decades fleeing to outlying suburbs, and those who cannot remain trapped within the confines of a "Little Detroit" which, after the 1970s, has witnessed the gutting of its manufacturing base. Since 2000, Toledo area poverty has risen faster than any other U.S. city. [1] In 2009, nearly 30% of the population of Toledo lived below the poverty line. Over 11% lived below half the poverty line.[2]

In Toledo, isolation is the rule rather than the anomaly. While the Occupy Wall Street movement rocked the United States in 2011, Toledo's Occupy Wall Street was anemic and enervated. Responses exist but they are individual, small-scale, and incapable of drawing the numbers that such dire conditions warrant. Aside from a few key activists and organizers, most individuals, even those who have lived here their whole lives, have taken the state of things for granted, or at least feel powerless to change them. No mass movement exists, in spite of the abject conditions, that people can plug themselves into. Toledo, as someone recently put it, is "a hard place to love if you didn't grow up here."

This has not always been the case, however. Toledo was once a center for economic activity, a hub of material exchange through which goods and labor moved rapidly. More importantly, however, Toledo has a long and radical history, one that has often been hidden away by the quotidian drudgery and daily grind of life. From the 1934 Auto-Lite Strike to the Black Panther Party headquarters on Door St., the city has not always been bereft of a culture of resistance. This once-proud resistance was not only manifest in one of the few general strikes to every rock a major U.S. city, or in the sheer violence and force brought down against the Panthers, it was also located on the campus of the University itself. From UT's Students for a Democratic Society in the early 1970s to the Black Student Union, which spearheaded the divestment movement from South Africa in the mid-1980s, Toledo students have always been engaged in the struggles of the day. The purpose of this article is to recount these struggles, but more importantly to provide as much space as possible to the voices that engaged in them. It should be noted that while what comes below is not an all-encompassing account of every radical initiative and movement in Toledo's history, plenty of which remain to be written about and exceed the knowledge of the author, this is a brief attempt to retrace as much of Toledo's radical history as possible. It is a history that every Toledo worker, student, and citizen should know.

The 1934 Auto-Lite Strike

By 1934, Toledo was in the midst of the depression. While the crisis was astute on the national scale, in Toledo it was catastrophic. Whereas 25 percent of all workers and 37 of all nonfarm workers were unemployed in 1933,[3] Toledo faced an unemployment rate of over 50% in 1934.[4] As Rebecca E. Zietlow[5] and James Gray Pope explain:

Without an economic safety net, people literally struggled to survive. Toledoans told stories about families eating nothing but apples, and burning their furniture to warm themselves during the harsh upper Midwest winters. These conditions were devastating for those workers without jobs, but they also had a profound impact on employed workers. The managers at industrial plants such as the Auto-Lite plant treated unskilled and semi-skilled workers as fungible and disposable.

Over one-third of Toledo's population lived on meager emergency relief during the depression. Willys-Overland employed 28,000 in 1929, out of a total population in Toledo of 290,000. By 1932, it employed only 3,000 people.[6] As Willys-Overland and other automobile plants shut down or significantly reduced production, so too did auto parts manufacturers, a significant component of Toledo's industrial base.

The Electric Auto-Lite Company, an auto parts manufacturer, was the site of one of the most heroic and historic strikes in not only Toledo, but U.S. history. At Auto-Lite, workers were treated contemptuously, and supervisors exercised arbitrary power over all aspects of their work life. Although Congress had enacted the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in 1933 which, under Section 7(a), provided workers with the right to organize, Roosevelt's insertion of merit clauses "granted employers the right to establish open shops and discriminate against militants." [7] As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward explain:

Early in 1934, demands for union recognition at the Electric Auto-Lite Company and several smaller firms were rejected, and 4,000 workers walked out. The workers returned to the plants after federal officials secured a commitment from the employers to "set up a machinery" for negotiations. But Auto-Lite then refused to negotiate, and a second strike was called on April 11. Only a minority of the workers joined the walkout this time, however, and the company determined to keep its plant open, hiring strikebreakers to reach full production.

Toledo was a stronghold of A. J. Muste's radical Unemployed Leagues, and the Musteites rapidly mobilized large numbers of unemployed workers to reinforce the picket lines. On April 17 the company responded by obtaining a court order limiting picketing and prohibiting league members from picketing altogether. But the Musteites decided to violate the restraining order, and some local Communists joined in with the slogan "Smash the Injunction by Mass Picketing" (Keeran, 168). A handful of militants then began picketing. They were quickly arrested, but upon their release, they returned to the picket lines, their numbers now enlarged by workers emboldened by the militants' example. More arrests and further court injunctions seemed to only galvanize the strikers, and the numbers of people on the picket lines grew larger day by day. Sympathy for the strikers in Toledo was such that the sheriff could not use the local police to protect the strikebreakers and instead deputized special police, paid for by Auto-Lite.

By May 23, the crowd massed outside the plant had grown to some 10,000 people, effectively imprisoning the 1,500 strikebreakers inside the factory. The sheriff then decided to take the initiative, and the deputies attacked. The crowd fought back, several people were seriously wounded, and a contingent of the Ohio National Guard was called in. Armed with machine guns and bayoneted rifles, the Guardsmen marched into the Auto-Lite plant in the quiet of dawn and succeeded in evacuating the strikebreaking workers. But the next day, the crowd gathered again, advanced on the Guardsmen, showering them with bricks and bottles. On the third advance, the Guard fired into the crowd, killing two and wounding many more. The crowd still did not disperse. Four more companies of Guards men were called up, and Auto-Lite agreed to close the plant. Then, with the threat of a general strike in the air, the employers finally agreed to federal mediation which resulted in a 22 percent wage increase and limited recognition for the union. [8]

The AWP skillfully utilized the language of slavery and emancipation to inspire the strikers:

Its banner equated the end of chattel slavery in 1865 with the end of wage slavery through collective action in 1934. AWP flyers produced at the time made this connection more explicit. One leaflet proclaimed, "Toledo workers will not work at the points of bayonets like craven slaves." Another declared, "[T]he workers of Toledo . . . have starved and sweated and cried in their misery while waiting for this hour. Now they have shaken off the chains of their masters." A leaflet produced by the Auto Workers Union Organization Committee agreed, "It now remains the task of completely closing this slave pen of Minniger."[9]

One of the most important elements of the strike was the influence of A.J. Muste, a leader of the American Workers Party, who helped organize the Lucas County Unemployed League.[10] Charles Bogle explains the vital importance of this development:

The strike would have ended… had it not been for the actions of a committee of Auto-Lite workers who asked for assistance from the Unemployed League. The Unemployed League, affiliated with the socialist American Workers Party (AWP), had formed in 1933 to organize mass actions by Toledo unemployed workers to obtain cash relief. More important for the fate of the Auto-Lite striking workers, the League's policy was to unify the employed and unemployed. [11]

This policy of unification was a vital component of the strike, and allowed a limited, plant-based battle to transform into one of the most important industrial city-wide struggles in U.S. history.[12]

The success of the Toledo strike was a significant factor that contributed to the formation of the United Auto Workers, one of the few remaining unions of any significance in the United States. More importantly, it acted as a catalyst for passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935, which codified the legality of trade unions, collective bargaining, elected labor representation, and the right to strike. Although the plant was demolished in 1999, the entrance was left standing, with an inscription that reads: "This stone doorway will stand forever as a symbol of the Toledo Auto-Lite workers' commitment, loyalty, and solidarity, which enabled them to break with the past, and enter a better future." As Zeitlow and Pope maintain, "That future has now receded into the past, and the example of the Auto-Lite strikers affirms to a new generation that with commitment, loyalty, and solidarity, a better future can be won."[13]

National Committee to Combat Fascism (Black Panther Party)

On July 25, 1967, Dorr Street, dubbed "Black Mecca" for the array of black-owned shops, restaurants, and nightclubs, had been the site of a large-scale uprising that came on the heels of an even larger rebellion in Detroit two days prior.[14] One witness to the riots proclaimed "The reasons for the riots, I think, were to achieve some kind of justice - we just didn't have it all the time." [15] Three years later, an organization had arisen to politically direct the energy and frustration manifest in 1967. By 1970, the 1300 block of Dorr Street was home to the Toledo chapter Black Panther Party headquarters. The Toledo Panthers, at this time operating under the name the National Committee to Combat Fascism (NCCF), had organized a nascent Free Clothing program and [16] a Free Breakfast program, in step with other chapters across the country.

Already at this time across the country, Black Panther Party headquarters had been attacked and raided, and the 21-year old martyr Fred Hampton had been pulled out of his bed and shot in the head less than a year before. In the early morning hours of September 18, 1970, a man approached Toledo Police Officer William Miscannon, stationed outside the Party headquarters at Junction and Dorr. The stories differ as to what happened next. One source suggests Miscannon asked the man what was going on, to which the man responded "This is what's going on," before pulling a silver handgun and shooting Miscannon in the head.[17] Yet another source suggests the man approached and shouted "Hey baby, I've got something for you!" before shooting.[18] Either way, Miscannon was killed and the murder was blamed on local Panther John McClellan. Although McClellan was charged, two different trials ended in hung juries, and no new evidence was able to be presented against him.

The Toledo Police, however, took no qualms in using the killing as a pretext for attacking the Panther headquarters. Within hours, some forty officers surrounded the headquarters and "riddled… [the] Panther headquarters with bullets during a five-hour battle," in what Mike Cross, the Panther defense minister in Toledo, called "an unprovoked attack by racist pigs."[19] The guns were apparently procured by John McClellan's brother, Larry, who took "about 20 rifles" from a shooting range at Bowling Green State University, near Toledo. [20] Sixteen year old Troy Montgomery was seriously wounded. When the ambulance arrived, the police refused to allow the black ambulance driver Leroy Hardnett to take the boy to the hospital. Hardnett reported at the time that "They told us to leave him in the streets and die."[21] The boy was eventually taken to Mercy Hospital and survived. The Panthers stockpile of weapons was confiscated by the police. The assault did not end that night, however. One Black Panther article titled "Toledo Piggery Continues" detailed how "Two members of the Toledo N.C.C.F. (brothers Conrad and Kenneth) were kidnapped, while on their way to the office, and illegally held for eight days in the Toledo Pig Pen. The brothers were unable to make a phone call to let anyone know what had happened to them." [22] Although Panther operations were hampered by this attack, this was not the end of the Toledo chapter.

The thugs of the state continued their war on Toledo's Panthers. On November 28, 1970 an article entitled "The Dungeon" appeared in the Black Panther party newspaper exposing the conditions that prisoners faced in Toledo's Lucas Country jail. The report was signed by ten prisoners, five Black and five white, and immediately they faced retaliation for their political commitments to the struggle. This excerpt from the Black Panther detailing the attack deserves to be quoted at length:

The Inmates knew that their lives would be in grave danger because of this, but they felt that getting the truth to the people about what was happening in this fascist pig pen was much more important than their own personal safety. This was clearly shown in the last paragraph of the article which stated "All the men (five Black and five White) incarcerated in this jail's maximum security section have signed this report being well aware of the physical and mental repression that will follow from the jail's administration. They wish the people to know that no matter what happens to them they have stood up and are resisting as men."

Tuesday Dec. 8. 1970, under pretense of conducting a weapons search, more than 25 racist pigs and their bootlicking flunky nigger pigs, launched an unprovoked, brutal attack against the men in the maximum security section of the Lucas County Jail. When the pigs started brutalizing and beating them, the brothers righteously began to defend themselves. Within minutes the rest of the inmates on all three jail floors began to join in the resistance against the pig deputies. For 2 hours the prisoners of the dungeon resisted heavily armed pigs from the Sheriffs Dept. and city Police… 17 prisoners were beaten, stripped of their clothes and sent to the hole (A 10' × 12' windowless room in the basement). Included among them was a sick 73 year old Black man and two members of the N.C.C.F., John and Larry McClellan. All 17 prisoners remained in this room for 2 days and were literally covered with their own wastes. The only food they received was one cup of water and one slice of bread a day per person.

…[On] Thursday Dec. 10, incarcerated N.C.C.F. member John McClellan, accused of offing racist pig Miscannon Sept. 18th, 1970, stopped a pre-trial motion in his defense to expose the conditions that he and 16 other men had been subjected to for over 48 hours in the hole. He refused to participate any further in the court proceedings until the cruel and unusual punishment was immediately ended.

Presiding Judge, Wiley, adjourned the court and visited the jail along with newsmen and attorneys, from 1:30 P.M. to 2:30 P.M. When court was re-convened he ordered that John McClellan released from the hole immediately. This brother again showed that he is a true servant of the people when he said. "The constitutional rights of the other 16 men are also being violated. I will not leave those other men in the hole to die. If we are not all released together, then I will return to the hole with my friends, many, who are sick and will die it not released immediately." Judge Wiley then ordered Sheriff Metzger to release all the men held in the hole. This racist pig Judge had seen with his own eyes, the degradation of 17 naked human beings covered with their own wastes and visibly very sick. Yet, all he could relate to was releasing John McClellan. This brother exposed the true-nature of this pig and backed him up against the wall, where in order not to show his fascist nature, he had to recognize the rights of the other prisoners held in the hole…

Now a prisoner can remain in the hole for only 12 hours at a time and then be released for 6 hours before returning again. Still this rule doesn't stop his said constitutional rights against cruel and unusual punishment from being violated. It just determines how long his rights will be violated.

A prisoner will still he stripped naked, forced to sleep on a concrete floor if its not too crowded, have no toilet facilities or running water and receive bread and water to eat. Actually, nothing has changed regarding the way the prisoners are treated in the hole. only the length of time they are to be kept in there. To end the sham. Pig judge Wiley had the nerve to dink the following statement' "This is an unsatisfactory solution, but I had to balance the necessity for security against a minimum of decency."

The pigs have always put their security and profits before the desires and needs of the people. The crimes being committed daily in the "Dungeon" are comparable to the horrendous war crimes committed by the Nazis against their victims in the concentration camps.

Today, the barbarous ruling class of America far surpasses the Nazis in Germany. They are making and implementing plans for the total extermination of Black people in America, and waging a genocidal war on the rest of the poor and oppressed in the world. We are not going to rid ourselves of the brutality and murder waged daily against the people of the world by the Nixon-Agnew-Mitchell-Hoover fascist clique, unless all people rise up and begin to wage revolutionary armed struggle within every oppressed community of the world. In essence, we must relate to the social and political ideology of inter-communalism so that all people of the world can no longer be manipulated along racial, cultural, and national lines by the fascists of America.

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

THROUGH REVOLUTIONARY INTERCOMMUNAL SOLIDARITY!

Toledo N.C.C.F.

1334 Dorr St.

Toledo, Ohio[23]

In stark contrast, The Byran Times presented the "disturbance" as an "attempt to free two Black Panthers." This revolt was "quelled" by the "authorities."[24] But the Panthers and McClellan were not demonized by the Black community, despite how the press sought to malign them. Indeed, in July of 1972 the Toledo NCCF held a "Community Day of Justice." Some "6,000 people, mostly Black, attended Community Day for Justice to show support for Comrade John McClellan." The John McClellan Free Food Program distributed "1,000 free full bags of groceries (with a chicken in every bag)" and over 1,000 Sickle Cell Anemia tests were given. A "massive number" of people were registered to vote. When the bags of food arrived, "everyone felt as one beautiful, Black sister did: 'Lord knows, those Panthers are really going to do it'." [25]

Campus Activism from the Black Student Union to Students for Justice in Palestine

As the Black Panthers were organizing on Door Street, just a mile or so west students were organizing around a variety of issues on the "Toledo University" (now University of Toledo) campus. Both the Black Student Union as well as the Students for a Democratic Society became politically active at the college. Toledo's SDS, while small, ruffled a lot of feathers on campus and were even the target of extensive FBI surveillance. Recently declassified documents reveal their tactics were extremely dirty. One COINTELPRO operative, Gene Foder, recalled how he "would attend an organization's meeting and wait for speakers to denounce law enforcement, as they often did. Then, with a burst of apparent outrage, he would rise and point out his fellow undercover officers. The groups would kick out those officers and often welcome Mr. Fodor into their ranks, grateful for his watchful eye and unaware that he too was a part of the system they opposed."[26] The BSU, for its part, was also quite militant. At one point it occupied University Hall, the iconic building on campus,[27] in the aftermath of the the Jackson State shooting:

At 6:00 a.m. on Monday May 18, Black students blocked the entrances to University Hall for five hours. A crowd of about 2,000 gathered when they could not get into the building to attend classes, some angry and some supportive of the BSU. Their demands, very similar to those of Black students at San Francisco State College and Cornell, were as follows: "$200,000 for a Black studies programs, manned and directed by Blacks; the hiring of a full time coordinator of Black studies; first priority placed on hiring of Black professors in each department; a Black student enrollment commensurate with the population of Blacks in the City of Toledo; a minimum of three Black graduate students in every department" ("The Declaration," 1970, May 18). These demands arose after the BSU perceived that the UT administration did not respond to the deaths at Jackson State.[28]

The BSU continued this confident, militant approach throughout the 1980s. In 1985, at the age of 43 years old, co-founder of the Black Panther Party Huey P. Newton broke ten years of silence by addressing a crowd at the University of Toledo. He had been invited by the University of Toledo Black Student Union (BSU), which was in the midst of its struggle to get the University of Toledo to divest from its holdings in apartheid South Africa. He told the audience he had "thought BSUs had gone the way of my organization of SNCC," but instead that explained that the BSUs represented a "structure to start to build a national organization freedom." He maintained that students in general, and black students in particular, were becoming politically conscious largely through the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.[29] The BSU also brought former Black Panther, Communist Party leader, and prison scholar Angela Davis to campus. She, like Newton, engaged the issue of the divestment movement on campus: "I hear that there is a pretty strong divestment movement on this campus… Well, I think that you should keep on pushing for full and immediate divestment." [30]

The BSU at UT in the 1980s was at the forefront of radical student politics with leaders like Mansour Bey who not only brought figures like Newton and Davis to Toledo, but militantly challenged the administration on issues like divestment from South Africa, even in the face of intimidation. [31] Throughout 1984 and 1985 the BSU brought anti-apartheid activists and native South Africans to campus to raise awareness and in June 1985 circulated a divestment petition. In October 1985 the BSU organized a march with over 100. Chants like "Long Live the African National Congress!" and signs such as "Apartheid is dead… may it rest in hell" characterized the march. [32] When protests alone did not accomplish their goals, the BSU erected mock shanties in protest, calling for total divestment. As The Blade reported at the time, the student action "placed TU [UT] on the crest of the biggest wave of protests on college campuses since the Vietnam War."[33] The shanty they erected was not removed until Mansour Bey, president of the BSU at the time, had secured a meeting with UT's president James McComas, who explained that UT would make its position on divestment public in three weeks.

Throughout this entire process the university administration harassed and threatened BSU leaders. As one statement explains, on the same day that they finally received a telephone call from the president in July of 1985, another call "came into the Black Student Union to tell us that campus security was investigating the records" of BSU leaders, including president Anthony Muharib and vice-president Mansour Bey. Then, Chief of Campus security Frank Pizzulo confronted Mansour Bey about some "old bench warrants" on the activists, which they claimed may "prove embarrassing if we, as student leaders were to be arrested." The BSU's July 31, 1985 remained defiant, however:

What we are concerned with here today is the double standard that prompted today's press conference [regarding divestment]. On the one hand, James [McComas] establishes a committee to study U.T.'s investments in South Africa, while on the underhand, the U.T. Security Forces launches an investigation and surveillance of those campus activists who have led the campaign to raise the political and moral consciousness of U.T.'s students and faculty… We are also very concerned with the overall implications of these police tactics which remind us of the very oppressive and inhumanitarian policies of the South African government which we are protesting against. Why these police tactics? Are they intended to intimdate all students into backing away from getting involved in controversial and unpopular issues? If so, it is not working! Therefore, we are today calling upon the support of the progressive elements of the Toledo community to stand with the Black Student Union in solidarity for our right as students and citizens of the United States to express our constitutionally guaranteed rights of freedom of speech. And furthermore, that we be permitted to continue our campaign to educate and motivate this campus to speak out on the evils and injust practices of the Botha regime in South Africa. Finally, we demand that the university's campus police forces cease and desist their harassment, investigations, and surveillance of U.T. students.[34]

In the end the University of Toledo convened an ad hoc South African Investments Study Committee that eventually called for divestment from South African apartheid. By August 1989, on the midnight hour of the apartheid regime, UT and two related private organizations completed their divestment from South Africa, totaling some $4.7 million in investments.[35]

Today the BSU is a far cry from the militant organization of the 1980s. Instead, some of the BSU's responses to the rampant murder of young black men has been paltry, acquiescent, and cowardly, not to mention their refusal to challenge US imperialism and militarism. [36] Part of this stems from the social composition of the current Black Student Union. In 2014 the BSU president refused to sign on to a statement linking the #BlackLivesMatter movement with Israel's summer assault on Gaza. The president of the BSU cited that with four of seven of their executive board members serving in armed forces via the University of Toledo's ROTC program, the BSU could not critique US policies. UT itself has recently been "recognized as a top school for military education,"[37] with one of the categories of qualification being "military culture," as can be obscenely witnessed by the disproportionate amount of students roaming the campus in their fatigues and the various training and combat simulation drills that regularly occur on campus grounds.

The BSU is not alone in this transformation from radicalism to acquiescence, however. The Latino Student Union, with radical Mexican-American working class roots, has largely devolved into a social organization that occasionally parrots US propaganda against radical states in Latin America. In 2014, for instance, the LSU become the marionette of a small but influential group of Venezuelan expats at the University of Toledo when they willingly spread vicious lies against the Venezuelan state.[38] The malicious campaign of propaganda continued in 2015, with one prominent Venezuelan student calling for US sanctions against her own country in an effort to oust Nicolas Maduro, the inheritor of Hugo Chavez's legacy, and the radical PSUV.[39] To combat this a collective of students interested in challenging the narrative of the powerful and privileged Venezuelan elites came together to form the University of Toledo Friends of Venezuela Society. Their first public statement called for "Hands off Venezuela, no to sanctions":

Aside from the delusions of wealthy Venezuelan expatriates in Toledo and other U.S. cities, there is nothing the Venezuelan government has done that warrants sanctions. The primary reason they want to apply sanctions is because Chavez, Maduro, and the PSUV have threatened both the cupidity of the ruling class in Venezuela and challenged US hegemony in the region. As scholar George Ciccariello-Maher has argued in Jacobin magazine, "While the Venezuelan opposition in Venezuela is almost as delusional as the Venezuelan self-exiles in Miami [or Toledo], there's one big difference: opposition leaders on the ground have to live with the consequences of their catastrophic decisions… [Thus] while radical right-wingers in Florida [or Ohio] may be celebrating the sanctions, it would be suicidal for the opposition in Venezuela to do the same. They would simply prove what Chavistas already believe: that they are treasonous lapdogs of imperial power."

Indeed, students at UT and people of conscience should not fall for the narrative espoused by "treasonous lapdogs of imperial power." It is imperative, now more than ever, that progressive forces here in the US and around the world stand up and say "No to Sanctions!" and "Hands Off Venezuela!" Within just over a week four million Venezuelans signed a petition condemning sanctions against their country. We ought to listen to the millions of urban workers and campesinos, not the spawn of the elite here at UT.

Perhaps the most important political development on UT's campus in the past few years, however, has been the advent and augmentation of the Palestine solidarity movement. Inspired by the upsurge in Palestine solidarity organizing around the country, a group of students came together to form Toledo's first organization dedicated to Palestinian solidarity in the summer of 2011. After four years of organization, education, and agitation on the issue, UT Students for Justice in Palestine led one of the most high profile divestment campaigns in the country. Calling on UT to divest from corporations that profited from the occupation of Palestine, UTSJP spearheaded an initiative modeled on the BSU's successful anti-apartheid divestment initiative. [40] In September, 2014 UTSJP paired with UT's Student African American Brotherhood to celebrate the resistance to police violence in Ferguson and the resistance to Israeli occupation in Gaza. Furthermore, they called "for the immediate end to police militarization and violence aimed at black communities in the U.S. and an immediate cessation of the $3 billion provided to Israel annually by our government to oppress the Palestinian people."[41]

By early 2015 UTSJP had pushed divestment to the forefront of campus life. In what was called "the craziest stories we've ever reported" by prominent commentator Phillip Weiss, the UT administration and Student Government originally colluded to shut down the UT Divest movement in a kangaroo court that ruled divestment "unconstitutional."[42] After a massive campaign led by a strong coalition of student groups at UT and solidarity organizations from around the country, the Student Government was eventually forced to reverse its position and voted 21 to 4 in favor of divestment on March 3, 2015.[43] Just over a month later, in late April, UT Divest won a major victory in the form of a student-wide referendum in which 57.13% of students voted to divest. Despite all of this, the university has refused to divest against the will of a majority of its students. As UTSJP's post-referendum victory letter explains, however, the struggle continues:

We do not believe divestment is "contentious" or "incredibly difficult." Society's intolerable injustices do not require the search for a full consensus on what perfect justice looks like. We support divestment because we believe in human rights and international law. We believe UT should strive to actually implement its ethical and moral commitments, and adhere to its own mission statement of "improving the human condition." The majority of UT students agree with us. #UTDivest has created a movement on campus, a movement so resilient that it will continue to grow, to learn, to evolve, and to win. We will continue to work with and organize alongside all organizations that support social justice, and will struggle to ensure that UT is a place where human life is more important than profit. Consciousness has been raised, bodies have been moved, hearts and minds have been won. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. #UTDivest will continue to move forward in the struggle for justice. [44]

The 2005 Toledo Rebellion and #BlackLivesMatter

One of the moments Toledo captured national media attention was in 2005 when a small group of neo-Nazis from outside of Toledo came to the city, ostensibly protest "crime." The neo-Nazis successfully utilized the state security apparatus to protect and shield themselves from mass popular resentment, invoking first amendment rights in order to acquire police protection. Hundreds of antiracists forced the city to cancel the attempted march by the neo-Nazi group, called the "National Socialist Movement," through a mostly black neighborhood in North Toledo. Instead, hundreds of residents faced off with 15 Nazis standing in "formation" on the lawn of Woodward High School. After escorting the neo-Nazis away from the anti-racist demonstration, riot police clashed with local residents angry over the neo-Nazi presence and the police protection provided by the city of Toledo. These clashes made national headlines. The city spent over $100,000 protecting the Nazis in 2005. As one local community activist, Washington Muhammad, explained at the time: "Everybody else does without a police escort. The Nazis should have had a banner behind them that said, 'Sponsored by the City of Toledo.'" [45] Anger spilled over into a small uprising, with some shops and local establishments being broken into and looted. Many of the black youth who clashed with police were arrested and sentenced, some for prison terms. In all some 114 protesters were arrested, with charges ranging from "assault, vandalism, failure to obey police, failure to disperse and overnight curfew violations." [46] The neo-Nazis were not only protected by the city of Toledo, they were successful in using the repressive apparatus of the state to arrest and then imprison black youth.

A decade later, on the tenth anniversary of their original visit, the same neo-Nazi organization, this time with a few more members, decided to attempt the same routine as before. This time, however, the city of Toledo confined them to a small section of downtown Toledo, and all of the surrounding blocks were shut down. Hundreds of on-duty, over-time, and volunteer police officers protected the small group of neo-Nazis. A highly militarized riot squad had dozens of police, some armed with assault rifles. These riot police were paired with hundreds of regular police officers. Armored vehicles were present, as well as an elaborate identification system that required facial photographs of any individual entering the area near the neo-Nazis. Although no clashes took place this time, largely due to the efforts of local organizers who held a well-attended Black Lives Matter Day in a separate location, the city of Toledo spent some $76,000 in overtime pay to protect the Nazis.[47]

Thus, the tactics of the neo-Nazi groups who came to Toledo suggest that these small extremist organizations make full use of the resources of the repressive state apparatus. The tentacles of the state not only shield the racists from popular anger, they are also used, as in 2005, to assault targeted populations and further the strategic goals of the neo-Nazis. Thus, as one local organizer proclaimed after the 2015 visit, there were around 300 fascists in Toledo that day; only 25 of them were neo-Nazis.

It is not coincidental that both visits by the Nazis were preceded by events in which the Toledo Police Department were involved in the deaths of black men. In February of 2005 TPD had electrocuted 41-year-old Jeffery Turner to death after shocking him nine times with a taser. His crime had been "loitering" near the Art Museum. Two years later a judge promptly dismissed the lawsuit his family brought against the TPD. [48] In March, 2015 34 year-old Aaron Pope died under police custody. Karen Madden, Pope's mother, explained that the police did not call for an ambulance and used excessive force against Pope. "I want justice. This has gone on too long," she exclaimed, her words not unlike those of the many mothers who have lost their sons to police violence.[49] The TPD is not alone in exercising immense state violence against black bodies. In Ohio alone many high-profile murders of black men and boys have occurred including John Crawford in Beavercreek, 12 year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati, among others. The first two had been holding toy guns, the later was stopped in traffic for not having a front license plate. All were murdered in "unprovoked attack by racist pigs," to harp back to the language of the Toledo Panthers. In the United States a black person is murdered every 28 hours by police. By early June some 500 people had been killed by police in 2015 alone, nearly 30% of them black.[50] In response a collective of Toledo residents and long-standing community activists have formed the Community Solidarity Response Network. CSRN has been on the forefront of challenging police violence against black communities in Toledo.

Conclusion

In summation, then, Toledo is not without its radicalism. Toledo has been the site of social, economic, and political struggle for decades. From the Auto-Lite Strike to #BlackLivesMatter, the Palestine Solidarity movement to the Black Panthers, those of us residing in Toledo have a prodigious amount of inspiration to draw from. Toledo is represents more than just social isolation and neoliberal deindustrialization. Toledo is also the Polish, Hungarian, and Italian immigrant workers who led the Auto-Lite strike, the Black prisoners and "lumpen-proletariat" that formed the Black Panthers and fought back against state repression, the activists who stood alongside their South African counterparts to end apartheid in South Africa, the Palestinian students in the diaspora who fight Israel's occupation. It is them and so much more. As the great Marxist historian and professor at the University of Toledo proclaimed in his final speech at UT: "We have the World to gain, the Earth to recuperate."[51] We in Toledo have always been and must continue to be part of the struggle to recuperate the Earth.

Notes

[1] http://www.toledoblade.com/Economy/2011/11/03/Toledo-area-poverty-rate-worst-in-U-S.html

[2] http://www.city-data.com/poverty/poverty-Toledo-Ohio.html

[3] http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GreatDepression.html

[4] See Zeitlow and Pope, 843.

[5] University of Toledo, College of Law.

[6] http://libcom.org/history/us-industrial-workers-movement

[7] http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/05/tole-m27.html

[8] http://libcom.org/history/us-industrial-workers-movement

[9] See Zeitlow and Pope, 846-7.

[10] On the divide between the Musteites and the Communists, and the role of radical workers in the strike, see Roger Keeren, The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions. https://libcom.org/history/communist-party-socialists-during-1934-toledo-auto-lite-strike

[11] http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/05/tole-m27.html

[12] For more on the Auto-Lite Strike and other struggles during the period, see Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941.

[13] See Zeitlow and Pope, 854.

[14] Patrick Dyer, http://socialistworker.org/2007-2/639/639_10_Detroit.shtml

[15] http://www.toledofreepress.com/2006/08/30/residents-recall-dorr-streets-black-mecca-days/

[16] https://iheartthreadbared.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/body-and-soul/

[17] http://www.toledoblade.com/Police-Fire/2007/02/21/Toledo-police-officer-killed-in-1970-shooting.html

[18] The Times - Sep. 18, 1970, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1665&dat=19700918&id=wxsaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=iCQEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5985,3714699

[19] The Times - Sep. 18, 1970, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1665&dat=19700918&id=wxsaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=iCQEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5985,3714699

[20] The Bryan Times - Dec 9, 1970

[21] The Times - Sep. 18, 1970, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1665&dat=19700918&id=wxsaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=iCQEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5985,3714699

[22] http://www.negroartist.com/writings/BLACK%20PANTHER%20NEWSPAPERS/5%20no%207.htm

[23] http://www.negroartist.com/writings/BLACK%20PANTHER%20NEWSPAPERS/5%20no%2030.htm

[24] The Bryan Times - Dec 9, 1970 - http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=799&dat=19701209&id=nVEwAAAAIBAJ&sjid=TVIDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3745,4165846

[25] http://www.negroartist.com/writings/BLACK%20PANTHER%20NEWSPAPERS/8%20no%2021.htm

[26] http://www.toledoblade.com/Police-Fire/2012/07/15/Surveillance-records-from-60s-70s-found.html#IVhTrVSb05tOu1gs.99

[27] For more on University Hall from one of Toledo's most radical professors, see Peter Linebaugh, http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/16/how-did-we-get-here-university-hall-at-this-point-of-time-the-anthropocene/

[28] For more on unrest at UT in the 1965-72 period, see Matthew J. Deters, Preventing Violent Unrest: Student Protest at the University of Toledo, 1965-1972. MA Thesis, University of Toledo.

[29] Newspaper clipping, "Newton Ends 10-Year Silence With Talk at TU," Canaday Center, University of Toledo.

[30] Newspaper clipping, John Nichols, Toledo Blade, Canaday Center, University of Toledo.

[31] Add in BSU Statement here.

[32] Newspaper clipping, "Over 100 protestors march against apartheid," The Collegian.

[33] Newspaper clipping, Tanber, "TU Students Erect Shanty in Protest of Apartheid, Ask Total Divestitute," The Blade.

[34] Press Statement, Black Student Union, July 31 1985. Canaday Center.

[35] Newspaper clipping, "UT, 2 groups divest holdings in South Africa," The Blade.

[36] It should be noted that this may be shifting in the 2015-6 academic year, as the BSU is under a new leadership that appears more willing to confront this issue head-on.

[37] http://independentcollegian.com/2015/01/28/news/ut-recognized-as-a-top-school-for-military-education/

[38] http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/latino-student-organizations.html#.VcQHJPlVhBc

[39] http://independentcollegian.com/2015/03/25/opinion/letter-venezuela-benefits-from-sanctions/

[40] For a resevior of video, statements, etc. on #UTDivest, see http://utdivest.blogspot.com/

[41] http://independentcollegian.com/2014/09/16/opinion/letter-to-the-editor-solidarity-for-human-rights/

[42] http://mondoweiss.net/2015/02/divestment-officials-federation

[43] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkT2RTndz-c

[44] https://www.facebook.com/UTDivest/posts/866974650049245

[45] http://socialistworker.org/2005-2/562/562_12_Toledo.shtml

[46] http://www.foxnews.com/story/2005/10/16/neo-nazi-march-causes-riots/

[47] http://www.toledonewsnow.com/story/28883577/city-neo-nazi-rally-cost-taxpayers-76767-in-overtime?clienttype=generic

[48] http://www.toledoblade.com/Courts/2012/05/16/Taser-death-suit-dismissed.html

[49] http://www.toledoblade.com/Police-Fire/2015/03/30/Family-of-Toledo-man-who-died-in-police-custody-seek-answers.html#EiPD6bCw4z4b9qHk.99

[50] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/10/the-counted-500-people-killed-by-police-2015

[51] http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/16/how-did-we-get-here-university-hall-at-this-point-of-time-the-anthropocene/