police

Echoes of Resistance: From 1968 to Gaza, the Unyielding Voices of Student Protests

[Pictured: Anti-genocide student protestors face a line of law enforcement during a demonstration at UT-Austin. Credit: Julius Shieh for The Texas Tribune]


By Peter S. Baron


As students continue to gather in protest, standing up for the humanity of Gazans being slaughtered by a maniacally genocidal coalition of ruling elites obsessed with profit and geopolitical maneuvering, it's insightful to reflect on the history of student protests. Understanding the impact of past movements can help gauge the potential of today's collective awakening.

 

A History of Student Resistance

In 1968, the air in France was charged with rebellion. It all started at the University of Nanterre, where students kicked against the strict, outdated rules of their university and the deeper issues of government authoritarianism and the Vietnam War. The authorities shut the university down on May 2, which only pushed the students to take their protests to the Sorbonne in Paris.

The situation escalated quickly.

The police clamped down hard on the protests at the Sorbonne, using force on students. This reaction sparked a massive response not just from other students but from workers across the country. Seeing their own struggles in the students’ fight, France’s major trade unions called a one-day general strike on May 13. What started as a protest became a nationwide shutdown.

The movement exploded. By the end of May, about 10 million workers—that's two-thirds of the French workforce—had stopped working. Factories, universities, and public services ground to a halt. Workers and students gathered in occupied spaces, debating and planning what France should become. They didn’t just want better wages or conditions; they were calling for a whole new way of running the country.

This was too much for President Charles de Gaulle, who saw his control slipping away. In a stunning move, he secretly fled to West Germany to meet with a loyal general, possibly to discuss using the military to regain control. This moment of panic highlighted just how serious things had become.

Despite the revolutionary fervor, the crisis did not culminate in a revolution. De Gaulle returned to France, dissolved the National Assembly, and called for new elections. This move, combined with negotiations that led to substantial wage increases and improved working conditions, caused the momentum of the protests to dissipate. In the June elections, de Gaulle’s party won a significant majority, reflecting a conservative backlash against the upheaval.

The initial response to the student protests in 1968 involved shutting down universities and deploying aggressive police tactics, much like what we're witnessing on college campuses today. These actions were clear attempts by the state to clamp down on dissent and regain control. However, as the movement expanded beyond students and began to mobilize the broader working class, the tactics of the state and capitalist interests evolved. Faced with a growing and powerful movement, they shifted towards strategies of co-optation and superficial reform, aiming to dilute the movement's momentum by seemingly addressing some grievances while preserving the underlying capitalist structure.

The concessions offered by President Charles de Gaulle—wage increases, improved working conditions, and the promise of educational reforms—should be seen as strategic moves to quell dissent. These reforms were significant enough to placate the immediate economic grievances of the working class and to demonstrate a responsiveness by the government, thereby splitting the coalition between students and workers. By integrating demands that did not threaten the core of capitalist structures, de Gaulle's administration managed to dissipate revolutionary momentum, demonstrating that state apparatuses function to reproduce the conditions of production favorable to the capitalist mode.

The resolution of the May 1968 events through electoral politics and limited social reforms highlights the function of the capitalist state as a mediator in class struggle, which subtly shifts societal alignments to favor the elite. This outcome exemplifies the stabilizing mechanisms of capitalist societies, which, through reformist policies, manage to integrate and neutralize opposition without addressing the underlying dynamics of capitalist accumulation and exploitation.

 

Lessons in Solidarity

The broader implication of these events teaches us that reformist policies are primarily implemented to address the immediate, most visible problems of social unrest, with the ultimate goal of maintaining the underlying capitalist structure. This dynamic ensures that while capitalism might appear more humane after reforms, its fundamental drives—primarily the accumulation of capital at the expense of mass labor—are left intact. This approach allows the capitalist framework to persist largely unchanged, as it continues to benefit those in power while giving the appearance of responsiveness and concern for social issues. As evidenced by the aftermath of the 1968 protests, this malicious strategy serves to delay or diffuse the revolutionary potential of mass movements, channeling grievances into reforms that do not alter the basic relations of power and production.

Thus, the 1968 student protests in France not only reveal the power of grassroots movements to enact significant changes but also highlight the complexities and limitations of such changes within the capitalist framework. The episode serves as a reminder of the enduring challenge for revolutionary movements: to navigate the delicate balance between achieving immediate improvements and maintaining the momentum necessary for profound systemic change.

Today, we must remain unyieldingly vigilant as guardians against those forces eager to co-opt the energy and direction of the student movement. We should criticize how figures touted as progressives, such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, have positioned themselves near the forefront, claiming solidarity with the students. Their actions betray their words. A genuine ally would not endorse and actively campaign for Joe Biden, who recently authorized an additional $26 billion in aid to Israel, amid ongoing reports of atrocities. Biden’s and the Democrats’ support of Israeli rulers continues nearly seven months into what can only be described as a genocide, with horrifying discoveries of mass graves that include hundreds of children and medical professionals, identified by their scrubs, executed with their hands bound and bullet wounds in their skulls. This is the same Israeli leadership that vilifies Gazans with dehumanizing rhetoric, labeling them as "human animals" and "monsters." Ask yourself, would a genuine ally funnel $260,000, collected from grassroots progressives, into the coffers of the DNC (as AOC has done)—the very organization backing the continued financial support of these atrocities?

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This supposed alliance comes as nearly 40,000 lives, including those of 15,000 children, have been extinguished. Hospitals, schools, churches, and mosques crumble under bombs, while essential humanitarian aid is obstructed, leaving millions to the brink of dehydration and starvation, with many forced to drink and bathe in dirty water while they eat grass to survive. Amid this barbarity, the cruel decision to cut electricity in Gaza inflicts unspeakable suffering, forcing children, their bodies crushed by the rubble of their own homes, to endure the brutal procedure of amputations without any anesthesia.

These acts of sheer inhumanity lay bare the merciless nature of the assault, exposing the vulnerable to unimaginable pain in their most desperate moments. These are not the acts of allies but of political actors playing their roles in a theater of cruelty and betrayal. We must reject these charades and build our movements away from the shadows of such treacherous alliances.

These so-called progressive politicians masquerade as the vanguards of change, yet their true motive is to herd our collective outrage by transforming it into campaign donations that serve as financial fuel for those who steadfastly maintain the oppressive status quo. The genocide unfolding before our eyes is not a mere clash of ideologies or religions, nor is it simply about backing allies. It's the direct result of a rapacious economic and political system driven by profit at any cost. Our leaders, slaves to their own ambition for power, prostrate themselves before their corporate masters. Their support for Israel isn't just about lobbying dollars from groups like AIPAC; it's fundamentally about the benefits the U.S. capitalist regime derives from Israel's strategic position. Indeed, as Joe Biden once starkly noted, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel.”

The U.S.'s backing of Israel is intricately linked to the military-industrial complex, the control of oil, and the militarization of key global trade routes. This alliance fuels massive arms sales and defense contracts, enriching U.S. corporations and bolstering the military-industrial complex. By aligning with Israel, strategically located near pivotal oil-producing nations, the U.S. ensures its grip on crucial Middle Eastern oil reserves, a vital resource in the global economy. This geopolitical strategy extends to controlling vital trade routes, securing economic and military advantages by keeping these critical channels under Western dominance.

In a system incentivizing the corporate chase for monopolized total control, war becomes a necessity, serving as a means to redistribute and further concentrate the world's resources among the global elite while feeding the insatiable profit motives of the weapons industry. Inevitably, capitalism leaves destruction in its wake, whether it was the Vietnamese in 1968 or the Gazans today, bearing the brutal consequences of capitalism's genocidal tendencies.

 

A New Vision

Despite its shortcomings, the events of May 1968 changed France. They didn’t overthrow the government, but they broke through old barriers, changing laws and attitudes, especially in education and labor. The spirit of those weeks, when it seemed like anything was possible, still lights up the imagination of people fighting for a better world. The 1968 protests showed that when people come together, they can shake the foundations of power, even if they don’t knock them down completely.

Today, we must heed the lessons of 1968. In the spirit of a grassroots revolution, the transformation from student protests into a comprehensive movement built on the principles of disengagement from corrupted institutions and the establishment of mutual aid and free agreement begins with a profound collective realization. This realization is that the existing structures—be they educational, governmental, or corporate—are not only failing to address but are complicit in systemic injustices.

Our emerging movement starts as a series of interconnected local actions, where students and workers come together, recognizing their shared plight and common goals. As they gather, initially stirred by the desire to protest, they begin to form more structured groups—collective councils—comprising representatives from various student organizations, local labor unions, and community advocates. These councils serve as the initial scaffolding for a new kind of governance, one that operates on consensus and inclusivity, eschewing the hierarchical models they aim to dismantle.

Skill-sharing emerges as a fundamental activity within these groups, not just as a means to empower and educate, but as a cornerstone of building self-sufficiency. Workshops on urban agriculture, basic healthcare, community safety, and renewable energy initiatives are organized, utilizing occupied spaces such as unused university buildings or public parks, transforming them into hubs of learning and operation.

As the councils gain more traction, a general strike becomes the first major coordinated action, signaling the movement's seriousness and unity to a broader audience. This strike isn't just a cessation of work; it's a powerful act of reclaiming spaces and redirecting resources towards the newly forming mutual aid systems. These spaces become centers where resources—food, medical supplies, educational materials—are distributed not based on the ability to pay, but on need, a principle central to the philosophy of mutual aid.

Parallel to these practical endeavors, the movement begins to redefine education. It distances itself from traditional curricula that often perpetuate the dominant ideologies of the state and capitalism, and instead fosters a curriculum that includes critical pedagogy, decolonial studies, and practical skills for community and personal development. These classes are open to all, free of charge, and are taught by a rotating group of community members, each sharing their specific knowledge and skills.

Community defense groups also form, not as militias, but as protective bodies to ensure the safety of the spaces and their occupants. These groups practice non-violent tactics and community conflict resolution, embodying the principles of defense without aggression.

As these new systems begin to take root, they do not exist in isolation. The movement actively documents its processes and outcomes, creating detailed guides and resources that are shared widely with other groups nationally and internationally. This documentation is crucial, not just for transparency and learning, but also as a blueprint for others who wish to replicate the model in their own communities.

Networking with other similar movements creates a tapestry of resistance and mutual aid that spans borders, each node learning from and supporting others. Regular assemblies are held where experiences and ideas are exchanged, ensuring the movement remains dynamic and responsive to the needs of its participants.

Through all these phases, the guiding principles remain clear: a steadfast commitment to disengaging from and dismantling corrupted institutions; the establishment of mutual aid as a fundamental economic and social principle; and the adherence to free agreement, ensuring that every participant's voice is heard and valued in the decision-making process.

We must believe in this vision. This movement, guided by the principles of mutual aid and free agreement, will naturally take its own course, shaped by the specific needs and conditions of each community it touches. Our diversity will be our power, enhancing our resilience by fueling our capacity to innovate and effectively tackle challenges across our decentralized network. This is an organic, evolving revolution, grounded not just in the desire to protest, but to create viable, sustainable alternatives to the systems that have failed so many. Through these efforts, what begins as a series of local protests can evolve into a profound transformation of society, embodying the change that was once only dared imagined. As Ursula Le Guin reminded us in her groundbreaking novel The Dispossessed, all we have is solidarity with each other. Fortunately, that is all we need.

 


Peter S. Baron is the author of “If Only We Knew: How Ignorance Creates and Amplifies the Greatest Risks Facing Society” (https://www.ifonlyweknewbook.com) and is currently pursuing a J.D. and M.A. in Philosophy at Georgetown University.

Of Acorns and Martyrs: Reno 911, Police Violence, and the Prospect of Reform

By Owen Symes


Cop shows have been around since TVs first gained popularity in the 1950s. From the 1970s onwards, they’ve weighed heavily upon the popular imagination, making up around 20% of the scripted output of major US television networks even as recently as 2020. From the beginning, shows like Dragnet, Police Story, Law & Order, or SWAT have often advertised their authenticity, claiming to entertain audiences with at least somewhat plausible or realistic stories. But most of these shows are little more than copaganda. Despite the occasional episode involving police misconduct, only a few procedurals have focused on criticizing the police, most notably The Wire in the early 2000s. But as recent news has amply demonstrated, the most realistic cop show isn’t that prestigious HBO drama, but rather an oft-overlooked mockumentary that began airing around the same time: Reno 911.

 

Bad Boys, Good Cops

If you’re not aware, Reno 911 began as a parody of the reality TV show Cops, a pioneer of the genre which presented audiences with half-hour episodes filled with vignettes of officers out on patrol. In the world of Cops, the streets are usually dark, the civilians uncooperative and suspicious, the law enforcers competent, knowledgeable, worldly, sometimes even philosophical. The shaky footage and pitch-black vistas of the show are given meaning by the explanatory narration of the police themselves. Their perspective is the truth.

Reno 911 took the same cinematic techniques employed by Cops but used them to skewer, rather than valorize, the police. Instead of presenting the cops with some baseline of professional competence, as even critical dramas like The Wire typically do, Reno 911 deflates its cops, bringing them down from the mythic cultural pedestal they’ve occupied for nearly a century. In so doing, the show highlights aspects of policing that we rarely see on US television: the stupidity, cupidity, timidity so common in real departments. Nothing illustrates this better than the opening scene of the pilot episode.

While on evening patrol, deputy Garcia hears on the radio that there is an officer down and shots fired. He flares his lights and speeds to the address provided. Arriving on scene, Garcia makes for the entrance and, gun drawn but without backup, lunges into the domicile. He shouts into the darkness, “Sheriff’s department!” The lights come on and we see a wall of cops starting to yell Surprise! It’s clearly a birthday party for Garcia. Already keyed up for action, however, Garcia discharges his weapon and hits an officer. The other cops look at their fallen comrade, then back at Garcia, then begin to scan the room awkwardly as they murmur surprise. The camera zooms in on deputy Jones, who sheepishly radios: “We have an officer down…”

The cops of Reno 911 are fundamentally fearful creatures: afraid of losing respect at least as much as they are of losing their lives. Recent news out of Okaloosa County, FL and Washington, DC has made the reality of this fear abundantly, maddeningly, clear.

 

Acorn Comes Into Frame

As detailed by a recently-released police report on the incident, early on the morning of November 12, 2023, police arrived at a woman’s house in the Florida suburbs responding to a call about a missing car and a threatening boyfriend. Soon after the police arrived at the woman’s house, the boyfriend appeared. He offered no resistance while he was searched. He was then handcuffed and placed inside the vehicle of one deputy Hernandez, a non-combat military veteran who had recently become a cop.

When news arrived that the girlfriend’s car had been found, Hernandez began moving back to his SUV in order to search the boyfriend again. As he later recounted, Hernandez approached his vehicle and heard:

…what I believe would be a suppressed weapon off to the side. Definitely heard this noise. At the same time, I felt an impact on my right side, like upper torso area…Um, so I feel the impact. My legs just give out. Um, I don't know where I'm hit. I think I'm hit.

He then summersaulted away from his vehicle in a desperate attempt to gain some distance from the shooter. Now on his back, Hernandez panicked like a flailing turtle, drew his service pistol, and discharged the entire magazine into his own vehicle.

Nearby, the experienced and long-serving sergeant Roberts saw Hernandez fall, saw his terror-stricken face, and heard him screaming that he had been shot. Without taking any time to understand what was happening around her, Roberts immediately went for her gun. She fumbled the quickdraw, accidentally dislodging her spare magazine from its pouch. As it struck the ground, she began firing haphazardly in the direction she thought the shooter was. Afraid of being struck by friendly fire, Hernandez crawled to cover.

When the smoke cleared, the officers belatedly began to assess the situation. Miraculously, the hapless boyfriend, still handcuffed inside the vehicle as it was being pulverized, survived unscathed. No other civilians (or police) were harmed during the fusillade. Medical staff later confirmed that Hernandez had never suffered a gunshot wound. What had happened?

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During the subsequent investigation, Hernandez gave his statement and was allowed to watch his bodycam footage. Then he was shown a still photograph from that footage. Investigators pointed out a tiny object striking the officer’s vehicle. Gears turned within the deputy, then clicked into place, prompting him to ask a vital clarifying question: “Acorn?”

An Investigator responded with appropriate brevity: “Acorn.”

Amid stutters and pauses, Hernandez tried but failed to articulate a response, eventually admitting that it was possible that an acorn had made the inciting noise. An investigator followed up with a question I’m sure every civil servant dreads: was Hernandez, “…in general…familiar with the sound of acorns striking vehicles?” He answered in the affirmative.

Investigators now offered him a chance to watch the footage again, that he might analyze the evidence anew and judge if the acorn had in fact been the mainspring of his actions. He declined.

Deputy Hernandez resigned from the department before the investigation concluded. Ultimately, the investigators found that Hernandez had acted unreasonably. They also determined, however,  that sergeant Roberts, the other officer who discharged their weapon at the scene, had behaved within reason. The investigating officers concluded that Roberts had acted under the impression that another officer had just been shot, thus justifying the (haphazard and panicked) use of her firearm.

 

Why Don’t FireFighters Carry Guns?

On February 25th, 2024, Air Force member Aaron Bushnell self-immolated outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC in protest against the Gaza Genocide. Having just received a call about potentially “distressing” behavior, uniformed Secret Service officers were already on the scene when Bushnell began his protest. The Secret Service response was captured by Bushnell’s livestream.

The video begins with Bushnell matter-of-factly explaining that he is about to engage in an extreme act of protest. Having done so, he calmly sets his camera down, walks into center frame, douses himself in accelerant, and lights himself on fire, yelling Free Palestine. Off screen, we hear responding officers trying to communicate with him. Once the flames appear, they begin shouting that a man is on fire, that they need fire extinguishers. But we also hear someone repeatedly yelling for the young protester – already aflame – to get on the ground. We hear this over and over: Get on the ground! Get on the ground!

Officers then appear on camera. One rapidly engages his extinguisher, befogging the area. Despite the cloud of extinguishant, Bushnell’s fire still rages. Another officer appears on camera with his service weapon drawn and pointed at the protester. As officers move around Bushnell – and through this Secret Service agent’s field of fire – we hear further pleas for extinguishers. An officer, I think it’s the one who’s been calling for extinguishers the whole time, finally exclaims, “I don’t need guns. I need fire extinguishers!”

When later asked to comment on the officer pointing his weapon at a dying man, the Secret Service told a journalist at Reason: "The armed officer was ensuring the safety of the two Secret Service officers who were working to extinguish the fire and render aid to the individual." Once again, the police had judged their own actions to be reasonable.

“Get some cops to protect our policemen!”

- Intertitle from Buster Keaton’s 1922 short Cops

From their origins in the 19th century up through the 1920s, cops were not respected in the popular imagination. They only achieved a degree of social respect in the 1930s thanks to PR campaigns by the likes of FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and LAPD chief William Parker, with the cooperation of radio and TV producers like Phillips Lord and Jack Webb. Despite this new-found respectability, however, cops could never shake their fear of losing status. As a group, they remain afflicted by a Napoleon Complex, wanting to be treated as professionals on par with doctors and lawyers but fearful that people will cease to honor their authority and expertise. We see this anxiety manifest in the innumerable small indignities and petty punishments meted out at traffic stops and metro turnstiles. Sometimes we see it explode in bouts of comic farce or deadly violence.

In achieving professional credibility, cops have built for themselves another world, one where they are the put-upon sheep dogs defending the ungrateful and ignorant sheep from the wolves of society. So whenever embarrassments or fiascos occur, many cops fall back on the an refrain: we have tough jobs; it’s a dangerous world out there; we’re doing the best we can with the meager resources you give us! Secret Service communications chief Anthony Guglielmi echoed this rhetoric when he defended the February 25th response, claiming: "[T]his situation was unpredictable and occurred rapidly. In that instant, the level of threat to the public and the embassy was unknown, and our officers acted swiftly and professionally." The swiftness of the response is undeniable, but it can only be characterized as professional if we take that to mean, as the police themselves do, that cops have a primary professional duty to defend themselves from any threat, regardless of its actual potential to inflict harm upon them, and regardless of the cost to the public.

Reformers, well-meaning but naive, recognize some of the shortcomings of police and recommend improved training, stricter use-of-force policies, better equipment. These reforms are stillborn, however, because cops don’t take them seriously. They can’t. Simply put, they don’t think that outsiders are qualified to judge police behavior. They’re happy to accept additional funding and resources, and maybe the savvy police executive will tow the reformist line during budget meetings, but once they have a greater share of the budget, cops will invariably do whatever they want. More money for reform simply results in more cops to protect policemen

Right after World War 2, sociologist William A Westley imbedded himself in the department of a mid-sized US city for about a year. The book that resulted, Violence and the Police: A Sociological Study of Law, Custom, and Morality, remains a seminal work in the study of police culture. He identified the police as a society in miniature, with its own customs and its own moral code. Paramount to that code was – and remains – a determination to repel critics and outsiders. Thus, he observed, while most cops did not engage in violence, and a surprising number actively tried to avoid it, the brutes and the thugs that did exist were given a wide berth. Sadism was met with silence, badges deployed as a shield wall against the slings and arrows of ignorant critics.

Westley summarized the world of the cop:

The policeman’s most significant contact is with the law-evading public, which defines him as a malicious and dangerous intruder into their business and acts accordingly. His resolution of this problem includes an insistence on his will and on obtaining respect, by the use of violence, if necessary…He is exposed to public immorality. He becomes cynical. His is a society emphasizing the crooked, the weak, and the unscrupulous. Accordingly, his morality is one of expediency and his self-conception one of a martyr. [Emphasis mine]

Deputy Hernandez, the yet-unnamed Secret Service officer, and all the other members of that copper fraternity are given power, a gun, and a chip on their shoulder, so to go out and do battle with the demons of their own mind and making: with the hiss of acorns and the crackle of a true martyr’s flames. Our stories often bolster this state of affairs. They can do better. Reno 911 showed us how.

The Immovable Black Lumpenproletariat: The Futility of White-Supremacist, State-Sanctioned Indictments of Black Factions and Gangs

By Patrick Jonathan Derilus

“Though I cannot condone it, much of the violence inflicted on my gang rivals and other blacks was an unconscious display of my frustration with poverty, racism, police brutality and other systemic injustices routinely visited upon residents of urban black colonies such as south central Los Angeles. I was frustrated because I felt trapped. I internalized the defeatist rhetoric propagated as street wisdom in my hood that there were only 3 ways out of south central, migration death or incarceration. I located a fourth option: incarcerated death.”

— Stanley Tookie Williams,  Blue Rage, Black Redemption: A Memoir

It should be made clear, if in any case there was no critical observation of the phenomena, that in our (to use ancestor bell hooks’ phrase) ‘imperialist, colonial settler, white supremacist, capitalist, cisheteropatriarchal society,’ Black people (of all ages and gender identities) are under ceaseless exploitation and violence via surveillance, harassment, instigations, and so on. With attention to Black-led organizations, factions, collectives, and in this case particularly, Black gangs, there is unquestionably a white-supremacist outroar from racists (media or otherwise), who deem these communities a threat to the status quo.

Fuck respectability politics and fuck civility; and this is to say that regardless of the objective of a Black collective, be it as revolutionary as the Black Guerilla Family (BGF), a Marxist-Leninist group that originated in San Quentin State Prison and was founded by ancestor George Jackson in 1966 or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) founded by ancestor Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and several other members in 1909, we’re niggas at the end of the day.

While we can present arguments for what this statement means is not the point, but rather, the sociohistorical result of change that is assuredly established when Black people have long struggled for: Black Liberation. Black history is every day. Black history in itself chronicles resistance, togetherness, unfettered joy, solidarity, commonality, righteous insurgence, mutuality, love—humanism, notably the urgency for Black self-defense against the white-supremacist police state.

Let us also highlight that, in spite of these elements, we recognize the settler-fascistic entities that have been responsible for the many deaths, infightings, conspiracies, and consistent destabilizations of Black-led movements, organizations, and to this day, Black gangs. Prior to the Black Panthers — and what many of us know in modern day as Crips and Bloods, were their historical predecessors, The Slausons, The Businessmen, and The Gladiators, Black-led gangs that originated in Los Angeles during the 1940s. The sociopolitical function of these gangs were a direct response against white-supremacist gangs like the Spook Hunters, who regularly terrorized Black people because of the growing Black population at the time— white flight.

In the 1960s and 70s, an example of this is Kwanzaa’s founder, Ron Karenga, who was not only a violent, self-hating misogynist responsible for kidnapping and torturing Black women, but also, an agent of fascist J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO, who exacerbated the infighting between the Black Panthers and the US Organization. Subsequently, this led to the murders of four members of the Black Panthers, whose names went by John Huggins, Sylvester Bell, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Savage.

Around the same time the Black Power movement was building momentum, the Gangster Disciples, founded by Larry Hoover, were a Black-led faction based in Chicago in the 1970s and 80s. In the same way, the Black Disciples, founded by David Barksdale, were another Black faction based in Chicago that was created at the grassroots, organizing projects such as the free breakfast program for the community and marching together with Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1966:

On Aug. 5, 1966, in Marquette Park, where King was planning to lead a march to a realtor’s office to demand properties be sold to everyone regardless of their race, he got swarmed by about 700 white protestors hurling bricks, bottles and rocks. One of those rocks hit King, and his aides rushed to shield him.

Stanley Tookie Williams, who co-founded the Crips alongside Raymond Washington in 1971, established a groundwork in which Black folk would defend themselves and their communities from neighboring adversaries in Los Angeles. Similarly, the Bloods, created by Sylvester Scott, were later created as a direct response in opposition to the Crips. Contrary to this occurrence, the remarkable moments in Black history where Bloods and Crips, despite their incendiary rivalries against each other, have come together in solidarity to protest state-sanctioned police violence against Black people. To echo the sentiment of George Jackson in his book, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson:

Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.

We highlight instances of collective protest in Atlanta, the unity of rival Bloods and Crips gangs taking place after the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1992, unity between Bloods, Crips, and the Nation of Islam in Baltimore, who banned together in honor and righteous vengeance against the state-sanctioned murder of Freddie Gray, Newark, New Jersey and a March For Peace in The Bronx that was led by rival gangs inspired by the wrongful murder of Nipsey Hussle.

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Bringing further attention to the history of white supremacist, State-sanctioned violence toward Black people in the US and across the world, we understand that surveillance and more specifically, indictment, an arbitrary charge or accusation of a crime, is no new concept to us. To be Black itself is a crime in the world. In the article, Black is Crime: Notes on Blaqillegalism, writer Dubian Ade states,

What a crime it is to be Black. To have the police be called on you for sitting in a restaurant, for grilling at a cookout, selling water, going to the pool, taking a nap, standing on the corner; to be Black and to have the presence of one’s very own body break the law and to know at any given moment a police officer can slam you to the ground and cuff you for resisting arrest, which is to say, arrest you for absolutely no reason at all. Blackness carries this implication that a law is or has been broken and is about to be broken in the future. It is the color and sign of criminal activity under white supremacist capitalism used to justify the mass incarceration and extra-judicial murder of Black people by and large. But what are the origins of this strenuous relationship between Blackness and the law? In what ways is Black criminalization constituted under the state? And if Blackness is already criminalized in the eyes of the law, what are the features of already existing Black illegal forms and what might the theoretical contours of Black illegalism (Blaqillegalism) that is principled and above all revolutionary look like?

Ancestor Huey P. Newton has already answered this question of Black criminality:

…existence is violent; I exist, therefore I am violent in that way.

To emphasize, the carceral State spares no Black human being. To name a few, learn about Mutulu Shakur, stepfather of Tupac Amaru Shakur and a member of the Black Liberation Army, who was just released from prison in December of last year after serving 60 years in prison; he was informed he only has a few months to live due to terminal cancer in April. Another is Marshall “Eddie” Conway, an elder of the Black Panther Party, who was sentenced to serving 43 years to life in prison for self-defense. Look to the instance of Tay-K, who was 19 at the time he was indicted and sentenced to 55 years in prison. 23-year old YNW Melly, who was indicted and is facing the death penalty. Look at the wrongful indictments of YSL and Young Thug and GunnaSheff G, Sleepy Hallow, 8 Trey Crips and 9 Ways — Woos and the Choos, the YGz and Drilly indictment and now 19-year old Kay Flock, who was just indicted with the death penalty being listed as a possible charge.

I repeat, the death penalty.

Where else have we heard the inhumane sentencing of young Black and Brown children and teenagers across AmeriKKKa?

Recall the wrongful conviction of 14-year old George Stinney in 1944, who the carceral State put to death by electric chair for allegedly murdering two white girls. The antiBlack State ritualistically likens itself to heroism and yet, their actions remain wickedly ironic because it has always been the State that has not been held accountable for its innumerable human rights violations against Black people. As long as the antiBlack State exists, there is no transformative recourse for Black lives (especially Black children and Black teenagers).

By the same token, it is far too reductive (and victim-blaming) to present cases that serve as counterarguments to the material reality in which Black children and adults are continuously subjected to. With Malcolm X’s truism, by any means necessary in mind, often many Black folk are left with no choice to navigate this colonial-settler, white-supremacist world in the best ways we can as a means of not only defending ourselves and our communities against the white-supremacist power structure, but also surviving under it. Black feminist and scholar, bell hooks, highlights the two-sidededness of this racial, socio-existential dilemma in her text, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity:

In today's world, most upwardly mobile educated black males from privileged class backgrounds share with their poor and underclass counterparts an obsession with money as the marker of successful manhood. They are as easily corrupted as their disenfranchised brothers, if not more so because the monetary stakes, as well as the rewards in their mainstream work world, are higher…assimilated black males who are “white identified” find it easier to submit to fickle arrogant white males (and white female bosses) in the workplace. However, most black males suffer psychologically in the world of work whether they make loads of money or low wages from overt and covert racially based psychological terrorism.

hooks continues,

Young beautiful brilliant black power male militants were the first black leftists to loudly call out the evils of capitalism. And during that call they unmasked wage slavery, naming it for what it was. Yet at the end of the day a black man needed money to live. If he was not going to get it working for the man, it could come from hustling his own people. Black power militants, having learned from Dr. King and Malcolm X how to call out the truth of capitalist-based materialism, identified it as gangsta culture. Patriarchal manhood was the theory and gangsta culture was its ultimate practice. No wonder then that black males of all ages living the protestant work ethic, submitting in the racist white world, envy the lowdown hustlers in the black communities who are not slaves to white power.

I have strong abolitionist sympathies and feel as though a potential alternative to the futility—the inherent uselessness of incarceration—of imprisoning Black children—Black people, is divesting money from state to state and putting the funds toward building transformative rehabilitation centers across the country similar to the Success Stories Program. As stated in their mission and values statement, the primary focus of the Success Stories program is this:

Our mission is to provide an alternative to prisons that builds safer communities by delivering feminist programming to people who have caused harm.​ We envision a world free of prisons and patriarchy as the dominant culture. We build a world where harmful behavior is seen as a symptom of patriarchy to be transformed, in the community, by our program and others like it.

What happens when the State persistently (and wrongfully) indicts Black women, men, queer folk, and children for so-called “crimes” will never resolve anything — it will never curtail anything. We are looking at a generational passing down of Black factions (of the newer generation) that will continue to repeat itself. These factions, which are defined as a group or clique within a larger group, party, government, organization, or the like, typically having different opinions and interests than the larger group, are often born out of an aversion to episodic, economic violence, impoverishment, governmental negligence, fascist police violence, —the white establishment and a yearning—a desperation to belong (commonly by homosocial bonding) to establish camaraderie between one another. In other words, regardless of how many indictments the State puts on Black people, the lumpenproletariat collectives that the State has destabilized will naturally be reborn out of generational factions in our continued struggle against the deathly whims of the US Empire.

From Atlanta to Palestine: Liberation By Any Means Necessary

[Pictured: US and Israeli soldiers conduct joint urban warfare training near Jerusalem. Credit: Tsafrir Abayov/AP]


By Alex Ackerman


On May 31st, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Atlanta Police Department conducted a raid and arrested three Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizers. The activists’ work has supported those arrested for protesting against Cop City, a $90 million police training facility planned to be built in the Weelaunee Forest, known as one of the “four lungs” of Atlanta. In 2021, the Atlanta City Council voted to approve the plan to build Cop City, despite overwhelming popular opposition. In an eerie echo of history, on June 5th of this year, the council voted to approve the funding of Cop City, culminating in $67 million of taxpayers’ money. Hundreds of Atlanta residents spoke for more than 17 hours in opposition, yet the City Council aligned with the ruling class and the forces of capital. 

The “Stop Cop City” movement opposes the construction of this facility due to the combination of environmental harm it stands to inflict and the heightened threat of police violence against the surrounding neighborhoods, whose residents are primarily Black. The imminent destruction of 381 acres of forest to build a mock city for police training epitomizes the United States’ settler-colonial legacy of theft of indigenous life and land. Cop City would strengthen police tactics and expand resources for urban warfare, which law enforcement currently utilize across the country, particularly against Black people. The raid against the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, carried out by a heavily armed SWAT team, marks an escalation of state-sanctioned violence, as those in power work to maintain the hegemony of the capitalist state at any cost.

The recent raid against bail fund organizers highlights the encroaching presence of fascism and the broader militarization of police. In the United States, police violence serves as a continuation of settler violence waged against internally colonized populations, particularly Black and indigenous communities. In January of this year, queer and indigenous forest defender and “Stop Cop City” organizer Tortuguita was shot 57 times by Georgia state troopers, who were carrying out a similar militarized raid of the protestors’ encampment in the forest that is slated for destruction. This execution exemplifies the necessity of resisting Cop City, as such indiscriminate executions will only continue and be systematized with the completion of the facility. On a national level, this escalation of police violence is evidenced by the fact that police killed more people in 2022 than in any other year on record, with 1,241 people murdered, 97 percent of whom were killed in police shootings. Originating from slave patrols, police in their modern context function as an extension of the state to terrorize captive populations, preventing any potential disruption of the capitalist status quo. When any threats to this domination arise, the ruling class will expend all available resources to quell the opposition. For example, 42 protestors face domestic terrorism charges after Atlanta police stormed a music festival held by activists in the Weelaunee Forest. Additionally, three organizers face felony charges, with the potential of serving 20 years in prison, for the simple act of placing flyers that identified Tortuguita’s killer on mailboxes. These tactics of repression reflect a concerted effort to crush the growing dissent of the Stop Cop City movement. In this manner, the police raids in Atlanta, the murder of Tortuguita, and the charges of domestic terrorism demonstrate the lengths to which the capitalist class will go to preserve their hegemony, weaponizing the police as a cudgel against the masses. 

The United States is not the only settler-colonial, imperialist force heightening state-sanctioned violence. Across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have carried out mass raids, indiscriminately arresting Palestinians and wreaking havoc through destruction, injury, and death in the dead of night. Specifically, occupation forces murdered two-year-old Mohammed Al-Tamimi, who succumbed to his wounds after being shot in the head. Furthermore, on Wednesday, June 7th, the IOF detained university student and ex-political prisoner Layan Kayed after ransacking her family home at dawn. The state-sanctioned inhumanity against the Palestinian people serves as a means of tormenting Palestinians, enforcing their subjugation by the Zionist entity with the aim of humiliation and demoralization. In essence, the cruelty is the point. These nightly raids comprise a fraction of the extensive violence enacted by the Israeli state and settlers, which are co-constitutive, whose goal is the complete eradication of Palestinians from the land. 

In addition to the raids, just this past week, Zionist occupation forces have assaulted Palestinians at apartheid checkpoints, uprooted more than 100 olive trees, demolished at least five family homes in East Jerusalem, and bombed a house in Ramallah. The IOF intentionally targeted and shot Palestinian journalists Mo’men Samreen and Rabie al-Munir, who were wearing their press uniforms, during a Ramallah raid. This attack is reminiscent of the deliberate and cold-blooded murder of Shireen Abu Akleh, another Palestinian journalist. These campaigns elucidate the reality of settler colonialism as an ongoing process of dispossession. Just as the United States arose as a European settler colony, so, too, does “Israel” share such colonial origins. In the monograph Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, Fayez A. Sayegh illustrates the alliance between British imperialism and Zionist colonialism:

“On the one hand, Britain, by utilizing Zionist influence in the United States and in France, would avert international rule in Palestine, on the pretext that a British-sponsored program of Zionist colonization required British rule in Palestine. On the other hand, by playing a catalytic role in bringing about the designation of Britain as the ruling Power in Palestine, Zionism would at last be able to embark upon the long-awaited program of large-scale colonization in the coveted territory under the auspices and protection of a Great power…For the Zionist settler-state, to be is to prepare and strive for territorial expansion.”

Though alliances have shifted with the emergence of the United States as the dominant imperialist power following the second World War, the primary contradiction of settler-colonialism persists. The existence of the Zionist state presupposes the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and the military aid supplied by the United States equips them with the resources to materially realize the decimation of Palestinian life and land. 

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From Atlanta to Palestine, the resistance against occupational forces is directly enmeshed in the material struggle for the land. As Frantz Fanon elucidates, “For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” The struggles against Cop City and for the liberation of Palestine are mutually imbricated, as they both demonstrate state-sanctioned, settler-colonial violence by imperialist powers. Furthermore, the collaboration between the US and the Zionist state is the result of the impetus to further entrench their domination over colonized and working class people. 

Situated in the very site of the Stop Cop City movement, the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) illustrates this connection between the settler-colonial, imperialist powers. This joint project between Georgia State University and Georgia law enforcement facilitates international exchanges, subsidized by the Department of Justice, wherein the IOF and American police participate in cooperative training sessions. Not only do these settler-colonial states exchange tactics of warfare, but each also manufactures models of surveillance that the other can exploit against its own population. Specifically, the Atlanta Police Department created the Video Integration Center, a network of over 5,300 public and private cameras, after former Chief of Police George Turner visited “Israel” and observed the command and control center in Jerusalem. Such collaboration highlights the boomerang effect of colonialism, in which Palestine is used as a laboratory to develop technologies of surveillance and brutality that are imported into the imperial core and deployed against colonized and working class people. 

This boomerang effect remains far-reaching and reveals the interconnected nature of monopoly capitalism, imperialism, and settler-colonialism. Imperialist states and transnational corporations cooperate in a manner that serves their common interests: the perpetuation of their hegemony. Microsoft, for example, funded the startup Anyvision to produce technology utilizing thousands of cameras and facial recognition software to monitor hundreds of thousands of Palestinians across the West Bank and Jerusalem. Employed by Zionist occupation forces, this project directly infringes on Palestinians’ liberties and right to self-determination, especially when even a Facebook post criticizing “Israel” marks a Palestinian as a target. Anyvision’s executives stated themselves that Palestine was a “testing ground” for this technology. In an effort to dodge the backlash sparked by the revelation of Palestinian surveillance, Anyvision rebranded to Oosto. This technology now extends its reach internationally, utilized by both private companies, such as casinos and sporting stadiums, and the American government, specifically the Department of Homeland Security and Border Patrol. More recently, the emergence of Artificial Intelligence has engendered new ways by which surveillance technology can be wrought against the colonized. The Zionist entity has installed remote-controlled guns that use AI tracking systems to target Palestinians, with one gun located in the Aida refugee camp. Before long, such weaponry will also be used to target marginalized people and political organizers in the United States, such as those in Atlanta. 

The nature of monopoly capitalism is such that the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie entails cooperation between state governments and transnational corporations. Moreover, the alliance between the United States and “Israel” further speaks to their interdependence, characterized by their common weaponization of state-sanctioned violence. The United States funds the Zionist forces by appropriating $3.8 billion annually, the majority of which consists of military assistance. In return,  the Zionist entity functions as an extension of American imperial interests in the Middle East. Kwame Ture aptly describes the relationship between the US and the Zionist state in that “[t]he United States is the greatest dehumanizer in the world, and Israel is nothing but a finger of the United States of America.” In this manner, the shared tactics of state repression unite these settler-colonial, imperialist projects with the goal of solidifying their domination. The struggles in Atlanta and across Palestine, therefore, must be understood in the context of the international movement for decolonization and liberation from imperialism. 

Confronting the garish violence deployed by the capitalist state and settlers alike, resistance remains steadfast, despite the immense power and resources at the disposal of the settler imperialist empire. Organizers have engaged in a wide variety of actions in opposition to Cop City, including protests, juridical avenues, sabotage of police equipment and surveillance technology, and occupation of the forest through community encampments, which have been continuous targets of police raids. In a groundbreaking moment of direct action, forest defenders overtook a police outpost at the proposed building site, setting ablaze multiple vehicles, construction infrastructure, and a mobile surveillance tower. Pursuing avenues for political expression outside of bourgeois-controlled channels signals a shift in class consciousness and a growing understanding of the power of collective, organized action. 

Palestinians resist the occupation on a daily basis, incurring the wrath of Israeli forces yet prevailing nonetheless. The summer of 2021 saw the widespread mobilization of Palestinians across occupied territories, known as the Unity Intifada, resulting in global rallying cries for Palestinian liberation. This mass uprising evinced the revolutionary spirit of Palestinian people in their ongoing struggle for liberation. In September of the same year, six Palestinian political prisoners dug their way to freedom in an historic prison break, using six spoons as their only tools. Militant resistance continues to manifest across Palestine, illustrated by the Lion’s Den, an organization that gained momentum in 2022 after responding to heightened Zionist settler violence. These manifestations of popular revolt against state-sanctioned displacement and death explicate the will of the colonized in that no amount of brute military force can dissipate the steadfast conviction in the cause for liberation. 

To bring an end to settler-colonialism, imperialism, and all oppressive systems necessitates resistance by any means necessary. In an effort to maintain their illegitimate power, both settler-colonial entities criminalize this resistance with the aim of intimidating opposing forces into silence. The three Atlanta forest defenders arrested for flyering were detained in solitary confinement for multiple days, a purposefully torturous warning to every activist who dares defy the construction of Cop City. That these organizers faced legal retribution designates them as political prisoners subjected to persecution by the settler capitalist state. This form of state repression is rampant in Palestine, where over 1,000 political prisoners are incarcerated without charge or trial. In the face of this policy of administrative detention, detainees remain at the forefront of the struggle by organizing hunger strikes for their freedom. The deployment of this tactic across Atlanta and Palestine has only further intensified in recent years in response to growing resistance movements. 

The interconnected nature of these struggles highlights that resistance to imperialism requires solidarity across borders. The United States finances the Zionist occupation of Palestine, wherein weapons and technology are tested and subsequently imported back into the imperial core. Make no mistake: this fascist violence will not be contained only to Atlanta. If Cop City is built, the implications will reverberate not only across the country but also around the world. 

This escalation of state-sanctioned violence represents the fear of popular support and proliferating solidarity. Walter Rodney connects people’s political consciousness to their material conditions, explaining that “[s]o long as there is political power, so long as a people can be mobilized to use weapons, and so long as a society has the opportunity to define its own ideology and culture, then the people of that society have some control over their own destinies…” (255). If people take their destinies into their own hands, if people imagine a future free from capitalist and imperialist domination, these hegemons will crumble before our very eyes. Every martyr who has sacrificed their lives for the sake of this common cause against settler-colonialism and imperialism is not just a number, and they have not died in vain. The people with whom they shared a uniting goal uphold their memory by resisting every day until they achieve victory.  

State Repression Targets the "Stop Cop City" Movement

[Pictured: Kamau Franklin of Community Movement Builders and other organizers announce a ballot referendum effort at a June 7 press conference in Atlanta.] (Photo: Twitter @Micahinatl)

By Margaret Kimberley

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

Cop City is an effort to ensure that state violence will bring the most draconian methods to bear against Black people. State violence is also being used proactively, in an effort to end opposition to this creation of Atlanta's white ruling class and their errand boys and girls who ostensibly control a fake mecca for Black people.

“The politicians don’t care about the people. They don’t work for the people. They work for corporations, the developers, and the police. The Atlanta City Council ignored the largest mass mobilization ever because the corporate-funded Atlanta Police Foundation controls them.”

Kamau Franklin, Community Movement Builders

Atlanta, Georgia is no mecca. The idea that it is a “good for Black people” city is a lie. Atlanta is little more than a glorified plantation where powerful white people give directions to the Black people they choose to be overseers. The power of the latter group is severely limited of course. They can always be counted on to act on behalf of the white power structure they serve.

No one should be shocked that members of the Atlanta City Council listened to hours of impassioned testimony from their constituents opposing what they call a Public Safety Training Center yet still voted to approve an initial $31 million expenditure by a vote of 11 to 4. The center is commonly and more accurately known as Cop City and thousands of people have mobilized to keep it from being built.

In the days before the vote the degree of official perfidy was revealed when the public were informed that the estimated cost for the center was more than double what they had been told. The cost to the city is $67 million , and not the $30 million figure that has been stated ever since the project was announced.

The state of Georgia and their Atlanta lackeys swung into action after the budgetary fraud was exposed and arrested three organizers of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund , a bail fund used to support protesters who have been arrested. The city and state had already mobilized brute force, killing one protester, Manuel Paez Teran, with 57 bullet wounds and charging others with terrorism. Before the bail fund arrests, three other organizers were charged with felony intimidation of an officer when they shared already public information which identified the killer police.

Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizers were arrested by a SWAT team and charged with charity fraud and money laundering because they reimbursed themselves for expenses. Judge James Altman released the three on $15,000 bond each. “Paying for camping supplies and the like? I don’t find it very impressive. There’s not a lot of meat on the bones of the allegations that thousands of dollars are going to fund illegal activities.”

But the city of Atlanta and the state of Georgia are not alone in their acts of repression. The federal Department of Homeland Security has also weighed in calling protesters “militants” who they say comprise a “violent far-left occupation.” When the DHS report was made public, online access was suddenly removed.

Cop City would be more than a police training center. The 85-acre site would be a mock city, used to train police in “crowd control,” methods. It would be a militarized policing center training law enforcement from around the country. Cop City is a response to the 2020 protests which sprang up across the country after the police killing of George Floyd and the protests in Atlanta which took place after the killing of Rayshard Brooks. The reaction against the new movement was swift and Atlanta’s local oligarchs demanded that their Black figureheads do something to ensure that any further protests be met with the harshest measures possible.

Yet the people of Atlanta weren’t fooled, and they lined up for hours to give testimony before their so-called representatives who don’t really want to hear from them. Atlanta resident Robell Awake spoke for many when he said, “I cannot believe I am standing here, pleading with you not to spend the tax dollars of a Black city, to tear down a forest in a Black neighborhood, to increase the policing and caging of more Black people. All this in a city with Black leadership. It breaks my heart.”

As we have said many times at Black Agenda Report, we don’t have Black political leadership in this country. We have misleadership, a corrupt buffer class who do the bidding of Black people’s enemies while pretending to be our representatives.

The next step in stopping the Cop City scam is to put a referendum on the ballot. Organizers must secure 75,000 signatures from registered voters within the next two months in order to give voters a voice in the process. Direct democracy is the tool, but the same people who use SWAT teams to arrest organizers won’t stop either.

Cities, states, and the federal government will all work together at the behest of the ruling class whenever the people choose to act in favor of their own interests. They will bring terrorism charges, kill protesters, and buy off politicians in order to get what they want. As always, the question is how the masses will respond. Atlantans are ready and they are showing the way.

Margaret Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents. You can support her work on Patreon  and also find it on the Twitter  and Telegram  platforms. She can be reached via email at margaret.kimberley(at)blackagendareport.com.

Housing is Determined By Class Power and Profit, Not "Supply and Demand"

By Shi Sanyazi

There is a widely accepted belief among the journalists, think tanks, and politicians who animate the housing discourse that a lack of housing supply is the source of tenants’ present conditions (ever-rising rents, primarily). It follows that these thinkers advocate for a variety of policies which will, in their eyes, allow the market to “self-correct.” Once the supply of housing has met the demand, they argue that rents should go down (just like in the graphs we drew in high-school economics class!).

We shouldn’t deny that the idea has a comforting appeal. It offers a neat, ostensibly “common-sense” solution that all sides — developers, landlords, tenants — can theoretically get behind. It’s very easy to say: “match supply and demand and rents will go down — that’s just how markets work.” It’s more difficult to admit the inconvenient truth. 

The truth is that — especially in the era of algorithmic price-setting and increasingly financialized, corporate ownership of rental housing — our conditions as tenants are determined by the balance of class power, not the balance of supply and demand. 

Landlords, developers and their financiers are classes with class interests — namely, making the fattest profits possible. They are highly organized and have historically been willing to wage war on anyone who challenges their bottom line. Real estate capital’s return-on-investment depends on their capacity to out-organize and overpower tenants. 

Tenants' class interests — community control over our housing and the basic need for shelter — are, by definition, the opposite of real estate capital’s class interests.

The “supply crisis” narrative is deficient because it makes no attempt to reckon with the class relationships which define the housing market. The assumptions this narrative makes about the behavior of the housing market hinge on ignoring the structural imbalance of power between tenants and landlords, developers and their financiers. 

Landlord’s profit margins are determined by their level of organization (aided nowadays by political corruption, algorithmic financialization and consolidation of the rental housing stock) and the state’s ability to enable their exploitation with neglect, violence, and the threat of violence. Developers similarly ensure their profits by working in tandem with local governments and the police to forcibly remake neighborhoods to their liking, displacing working-class Black and brown communities. Lurking in the shadows, backing the landlords and developers, is the ruthlessly efficient and sophisticated arm of finance capital.

If we understand real estate capital as an organized class pursuing its class interests, and if we take the “pro-housing” argument at face value (i.e; increased supply will decrease rents), then we would expect real-estate interests (whose profits would be cut into if rents decreased) to oppose their policy prescriptions.

It’s quite curious then that the real-estate lobby and their political bedfellows openly support “pro-housing” non-profits and propagate their political lines. Powerful lobbying groups like the Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY) and the National Multifamily Housing Council revel in parroting “pro-housing” talking points. From REBNY’s 2022 testimony on Mayor Adams’ housing plan: 

New York is facing a housing crisis. A key driver of this crisis is the lack of housing production and inadequate supply to meet the needs of our growing and diverse city.

They go on to — shocker! — recommend the city and state remove regulatory barriers to development and continue to subsidize their lucrative construction projects. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that NYC Mayor, Eric Adams, agrees: he’s pledged to administrate a “city of yes,” arguing bluntly in The Economist that “although many factors contribute to the problem, at its core we have a housing crisis because we are not building enough housing.” NY Governor Kathy Hochul’s housing proposals echo the same logic. For what it's worth, Adams and Hochul have both been consistently showered with real-estate donations.

So, despite the promise that building more housing will bring down rents, the real-estate lobby embraces the prospect of building more housing! Why? Because the “supply crisis” narrative is an idea working in defense of their class interests.

Do we really believe that landlords and developers will actively support a reduction in their profits? Do we think they’re going to resign themselves with a deep sigh and a “well, that’s just the way the cookie crumbles?” How naïve can we possibly be? As James Baldwin once wrote of capitalism, to imagine these leeches ceding power and profits willingly demands “yet more faith and infinitely more in schizophrenia than the concept of the Virgin Birth.” 

Landlords and developers have no interest in solving the housing crisis because the permanence of that crisis is the condition of their wealth and power. This understanding has serious practical implications. 

In other words, if we understand our conditions to be a result of class struggle (rather than a market imbalance), it becomes quite clear that our conditions will be determined by our level of organization as tenants and our ability to wage struggle against the force that commodifies our need for shelter: real-estate capital.

The magic lies in our hands and our hands alone

This conclusion is the same as that at the core of all consciousness-raising movements, indeed at the core of all anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-patriarchal movements (see, for example, the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa; the Combahee River Collective; or the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil). It's the same conclusion which the legendary anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon came to:

[Political education] means driving home to the masses that everything depends on them, that if we stagnate the fault is theirs, and that if we progress, they too are responsible, that there is no demiurge, no illustrious man taking responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people and the magic lies in their hands and their hands alone.

The magic lies in our hands and our hands alone.

When we get organized, we have the capacity to transform our conditions. Will we win collective control over our cities? Will the threadbare protections we have left be rolled back? Will we stagnate? It’s up to us! 

Through militant organization, tenants wield — and historically have wielded! — a tremendous amount of power. Every concession from the landowning class; thus, every victory for tenants, has been won through this organization. 

The first rent control laws in New York City were passed due to pressure created by waves and waves of militant rent strikes (not to mention the fears of a Bolshevik-style revolution that these strikes helped inspire). Great Depression-era tenant activism — which included the successful efforts by the Communist Party to reverse evictions of working class tenants — was the impetus for New York City’s first public housing projects (FDR himself said that the concessions of the New Deal were driven by a desire to “save our system, the capitalist system…”). Mass agitation by Black organizers led to the passage of Fair Housing laws (while the real estate lobby was organizing against them). The COVID-19 eviction moratorium in New York was fought for and repeatedly extended due to pressure from organized tenant unions.

These are all tenuous and often contradictory reforms (public housing in the US, for instance, often deepened racial segregation), class truces which politicians negotiated in exchange for relative peace and quiet. The goal is not to aspire to reform, but to highlight that these reforms were not enacted because of our participation at the ballot box, nor passed by a benevolent state, nor advocated for by benevolent landlords and developers — they were fought for, collectively, in the streets and hallways and lobbies of our neighborhoods. 

Tenants are and always have been the protagonists of the struggle for control over our buildings, neighborhoods, and cities. 

OK. With that in mind, we can move on to addressing the core claim — that the “housing crisis” is caused by a supply deficit — in detail. Through this, we can highlight that the “housing crisis” is not “fixable” with “policy.” Our conditions as tenants are determined by our level of organization and effectiveness at waging class struggle.

The “supply crisis”

An imbalance between supply and demand is not the source of tenants’ present conditions. The real source — as has been the case since capitalism violently imposed its will on the world four centuries ago — are the private property relations which enable the exploitation of working people by the landowning class. Present-day gentrification is just one chapter in the centuries-long story of displacement, enclosure and imperialism which has marked the penetration of capital into indigenous and working class communities. So long as these relations remain intact, our struggle will persist. 

This is not to say that we should never build housing. There’s no doubt that under the collective governance of the working class (god-willing), the supply of housing would be responsive to migration and other fluctuations in demand. The disagreement stems from a core question: who is building housing and for whom are they building housing?

The alternative to the current arrangement, wherein tenants have next to zero democratic control over their communities, is to organize towards a world where tenants themselves collectively control and direct the development of safe, beautiful, ecological housing. 

That’s the polemic response — let’s dive a little deeper. As we work through the details, let’s keep the argument in mind:

Tenants’ conditions are determined by the balance of class power, not “supply and demand.”

This section is divided into a few parts to make it a bit more digestible. 

Mind the rent gap!

We can start by exploring the process of gentrification, where we can very clearly observe how real estate capital wields its class power to mold cities to its liking. Notably, its class organization has become increasingly sophisticated in recent years, as the rental housing stock has been consolidated in fewer and fewer hands. It can be quite challenging nowadays to figure out who your landlord actually is, as they usually hide behind a maze of shell companies, LLCs and Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). An army of supers and management companies further distance landlords from tenants, acting as convenient buffers for the corporate owners and private equity firms pulling the strings.

As a result of this consolidation, private equity firms, mega-developers and corporate landlords execute rent hikes, serve evictions, illegally (and legally) deregulate apartments and in sum, cause displacement, in an increasingly coordinated manner. 

In our organizing, more often than not, we work with tenants in buildings owned by a landlord with hundreds to thousands of units in their portfolio. (The average apartment in New York City is part of an 893 unit portfolio.) When we visit other buildings in that portfolio, we’ll usually find the same issues, whether disrepair, harassment, skyrocketing rents, and (illegal and legal) deregulation. 

(If you are interested in researching the owner of your building in NYC and kick-starting a tenants association in your building, JustFix is an incredible asset.)

To streamline gentrification, mega-developers, corporate landlords, and private equity firms utilize sophisticated algorithms to identify “rent gaps.” A rent gap is the difference between the rent currently being paid by tenants and the rent that could be potentially charged in the same location if the current tenants were evicted through legal or illegal means. PropTech companies like Skyline AI and RealPage are accomplices in this plunder. Their business is that of identifying apartments which are “‘inefficient’ in the rental market in relation to their total cost, before teaming up with the largest property investment companies to make an offer.” 

These advanced techniques (enabled by troves of data collected by big tech firms) allow investors to target optimal neighborhoods for gentrification with pinpoint accuracy. It shouldn’t surprise us that at a neighborhood level, there is a direct correlation between concentrated corporate ownership and gentrification. 

Naturally, real estate capital’s drive to extract as much profit out of our cities as possible does not care much for pesky renter protections like rent-stabilization and public housing. In fact, the relatively low rents in rent-stabilized apartments and public housing (as compared to market-rate) make them even more appealing, in the sense that they present even larger rent gaps to “close.” 

From a private equity firm’s perspective: Imagine a rent-stabilized building which rents for an average of $800/mo per unit, in a neighborhood where rents are averaging $1500/mo per unit (and climbing!), or are where rents are primed to increase to that price (in accordance to the precise calculations of algorithms from RealPage and Skyline AI). To a private equity firm, the building represents an opportunity for superprofits. To the building’s working class, usually Black and brown tenants, the building is not an investment opportunity — it’s home, a small pocket of resistance to the waves of real estate capital engulfing their communities. But if the private equity firm can evict the current residents, destabilize the building, and slap on a gentrification mask — then they can charge many times as much in rent and make a fat profit. All in a day's work for the vampires sucking our cities dry. 

Real estate capital also pushes this class agenda through legal action. For instance, New York City landlords are currently suing to wipe out rent regulations which protect around 1 million tenants from naked exposure to the “free market.” This case will go to the revanchist Supreme Court, who will likely rule in favor of the landlords. Once again, we can plainly observe that our class enemies are organized and aggressive!

It’s not an accident that in our organizing we encounter and experience consistent patterns of harassment, disrepair, and neglect in rent-regulated buildings. In New York City, deregulation is most commonly allowed upon vacancy, so it follows that landlords and speculators doggedly pursue vacancy via eviction. Some of their choice strategies include: buyouts, fake eviction notices, illegal refusal to renew leases, intimidation, neglect, intentional disrepair, cutting off heat, electricity and water, calling the police on tenants, and direct harassment. There are technically legal protections against strong-arming tenants out of regulated apartments, but they’re rarely enforced. Like other tenant’s rights (or, for that matter, any right “granted” by the state), protection from harassment is generally only realized when enforced by organized tenants. 

It’s also not an accident that the real-estate lobby and their politician friends have intentionally neglected to fund the upkeep of New York City’s remaining public housing stock. After all, NYCHA’s repair backlog (many tens of billions dollars) makes for a very convenient political device. When it came time to justify the “Preservation Trust” — nothing more than a scheme to privatize and commodify that remaining bastion of working class affordability — NYCHA’s repair backlog was cynically presented as evidence that public funding is no longer feasible. When challenged by outraged NYCHA tenants, conservative and “socialist” politicians alike argued that we have no option but to turn to the private sector to save NYCHA. As Holden Taylor writes

The line of reasoning put forth by the policy wonks and “socialists” advocating for the trust is, as usual, one of pragmatism and practicality. The Trust is the only way to get money for repairs, they say. This boils down, to butcher Rosa Luxemburg’s aphorism, a framework of “Privatization or Barbarism,” as these experts claim that the only alternative to the Trust is the status quo and the ever more crumbling infrastructure and dire quality of life that define it. Again, this is a failure of imagination. It is the socialist’s responsibility to push past the status quo, to fight for socialism, not merely a different form of marketization.

These observations about de-regulation and the privatization of public housing also help us to understand why the minority of left YIMBYs — who argue we should pair market solutions with an increase in social housing and tenant protections — are so woefully misguided. There is no way to guarantee that any housing we build will stay affordable when landlords, developers and finance capital have demonstrated they will wield their class power to commodify every inch of the city they can get their grubby hands on. Even our supposedly “socialist” elected officials are liable to bend to the will of real-estate capital without an organized mass movement to back them. The sober reality is: the remaining sources of off-market housing are being eroded because we are not sufficiently organized to protect them. The only way to protect those apartments and reverse the trend is through organized struggle. 

For instance, in 2020, organized community groups resisted the illegal eviction of tenants at 1214 Dean St. in Crown Heights. By occupying the stoop and physically resisting the eviction, the tenants eventually forced the city to buy the apartments and convert them into publicly-funded, affordable housing.

Build, baby, build! What could go wrong?

It doesn’t matter how “market optimistic” you are (as one reporter recently described the “pro-housing” non-profit Open New York) — when we let developers build freely, they will always be incentivized to build market-rate housing because those are the developments with the juiciest profit margins (and often the juiciest subsidies). This is not a neutral outcome. Building housing which people in surrounding neighborhoods cannot afford is the one of the first steps in the process of gentrification. 

In response to residents’ concerns about displacement, politicians will often promise that developments will meet the needs of communities because they contain 10% or 20% affordable units. This logic is premised on the idea that flooding a working class neighborhood which desperately needs cheap housing with, for instance, 900 market-rate units and 100 “affordable” units (which, due to the way affordability is measured, are often not actually affordable to those who most desperately need them), will produce anything but an influx of wealthier people who will displace the current residents. Just the announcement of permits for new market-rate developments can set off a frenzy of speculation, as investors look to sink their grimy fingernails into the imminently gentrifying neighborhood. 

The rise in the median income of an area (which inevitably accompanies market-rate development in working class neighborhoods) is often the impetus for steep hikes in the median rent. Which is to say: when people have more money, landlords generally raise rents (and rents usually rise faster than income — a few studies to reference: here, here and here.) Income inequality ensures that rising median rents disproportionately displaces working class tenants, as Francesca Manning explains:

While some people’s income is increasing at a rate to keep pace with rising rents, a large group of people’s wages are stagnating, falling, or rising far too slow to keep them housed … households that live in high-income [areas], whether or not they are themselves high income, end up paying a higher and higher percentage of their wages in rents.

In locales where market-rate development is not profitable, developers will not develop unless subsidized. This is a prominent form of “organized abandonment,” the movement of capital and social services away from populations and geographies deemed surplus and/or no longer profitable. Working class Black and brown communities are the first victims of this abandonment. These communities are faced with either: investment and gentrification; or disinvestment and abandonment. It’s russian roulette, except all of the chambers are loaded. Flint’s working-class Black population is one such example of a community which has been systematically abandoned by capital and the state.

Even with an understanding that developers will always build for profit, some will maintain that new housing supply at the top-end creates downward pressure on the market and “filters” units down to working class tenants. This is not an effective strategy, especially with the urgency that present conditions demand. Even when a filtering effect can be observed over decades, it is usually outweighed by the more immediate effects — sharply increased rent burdens and displacement  — that market-rate development set in motion. It’s important to understand that the “housing market” is not a single, unified market, but rather a series of income-level based sub-markets. Increased supply at the top end of the market can simultaneously stabilize rents for high-income tenants and increase rents for low-income tenants.

The “filtering” theory makes more than a few dubious presumptions. Three more are:

  1. that new apartments will be occupied by warm-blooded humans;

  2. that tenants are able to move constantly to and from apartments in the name of market equilibrium; 

  3. that landlords who were recently collecting rent from a wealthier tenant will suddenly have a change of heart and lower their rent to accommodate the new, lower-income tenant who is moving into the “filtered” apartments.

1) ignores the reality, which is that many of these apartments are destined to be bought for investment purposes. At least a hundred thousand units in New York City are investment properties and second homes for the ultra-rich. As Raquel Rolnik writes, luxury real estate in places like New York City has increasingly become a “safe-deposit box for the transnational wealthy elite,” rendering many new apartments un-filterable.

2) and 3) are even further divorced from reality. I’m not quite sure where the filtering theory nerds are finding landlords willing to grant day-to-day leases to allow for this kind of flexibility — nor where they find landlords willing to sacrifice their bottom line for the sake of market equilibrium. 

To this point (that supply and rents are not necessarily, or even likely to be correlated), we can briefly look at two of the metropolitan areas which produced the most housing in the last decade (2010-2019): Raleigh, NC and Austin, TX. Both of these cities maintained a ratio of 1-2 jobs per new housing unit, which mainstream economists consider to be “healthy.”

In Raleigh, housing construction kept pace with population growth from 2010-2019. Did rents stabilize or go down in accordance with the magic supply and demand graph? No! They rose 53%, miraculously spurning the ironclad economic law of supply and demand.

In Austin, between 2010 and 2020, new housing production actually outpaced population growth (25.5% to 21.7%). According to the “supply crisis” narrative, rents should have gone down or at least stabilized, right? You’ll be shocked to learn that between 2010 and 2020, rents in Austin increased by 93%. Historically Black enclaves like East Austin have rapidly gentrified in spite of the growth in housing construction. The supposedly common sense relationship between housing supply and median rents is, uh, not so apparent to the average tenant in Austin.

The shock troops of real-estate capital

Class power requires enforcers, and real-estate capital’s war on working-class tenants is no different. The police are intimately involved in the process of displacement. 

The police are, after all, the most visible manifestation of the violence which undergirds private property relations. When you don’t (or can’t) pay your rent, you come face to face with the enforcers of the private-property relation: the court sending a Marshall to serve you with an eviction notice, and the police forcefully and violently executing that eviction if you resist. Landlords rely on the police to backstop evictions, which is the most fundamental mechanism for the reproduction of privately-owned housing. Without the threat of eviction, the landlord's power would evaporate, as we experienced during the COVID-19 eviction moratoriums. The state’s power is also felt implicitly: even if a tenant association is interested in taking a radical action like resisting a fellow tenant’s eviction, they understand that the state will almost certainly intervene on the side of the landlord, and can therefore be discouraged from acting. 

The process of eviction is nothing less than the state using their monopoly on legal violence to privilege the landlord’s right to exploit us over our human need to have a roof over your head. 

Gentrification relies on the same violence to function. In its infancy, gentrification is marked by the violent projections of private property relations onto working class communities, which solidify in physical form as the police. Cops consistently step up broken windows policing in neighborhoods which are gentrifying, further exposing working class Black and brown communities to the carceral state. Broken windows policing is the proverbial stick to the carrot of tax abatements, rezoning and developer incentives which open the floodgates for real estate capital. 

In the process of gentrification, homeless tenants (homeless people are tenants in that they do not control their housing; the struggles of housed tenants and homeless tenants exist along the same spectrum of precarity) are brutalized and disappeared. Eric Adams’ assault on homeless tenants which we have resisted over the past year is inseparably part of this same project. He is not uniquely evil either; his predecessors De Blasio and Bloomberg similarly utilized the NYPD to terrorize homeless tenants and remake the city to the real estate lobby’s liking. Connecting the struggles of homeless tenants to housed tenants — not just in solidarity, but as a movement united in opposition to the same forces of real estate capital — is a crucial task.

As many have compellingly argued, including her own family, Breonna Taylor was, at least in part, a victim of state-sanctioned gentrification. Breonna was murdered in the Russell neighborhood, which was being explicitly targeted for gentrification by the city of Louisville. Before and after her murder at the hands of the state, there was an observable “sharp increase in public nuisance cases, with 84% of those cases occurring in Louisville’s predominantly Black western half, which includes the Russell neighborhood.” As the Root Causes Research Center explains:

… the forces of property and police converged in Russell to acquire the remaining property for the redevelopment of Elliott Ave through the collaboration of the Louisville Metro Develop Louisville Office and the Louisville Metro Police Department’s Placed Based Investigations Squad (PBI). Increased pressure from the Louisville Mayor's Office to acquire these properties led directly to the rapid employment of PBI. The PBI Squad, then, employed a concept they were barely familiar with, to create the false evidence needed for the "No-Knock Warrant" that led to the murder of Breonna Taylor.

Gentrification is a process which travels along the existing contours of racial capitalism. Working-class Black communities (including homeless tenants) are the first to encounter — and the first to resist — the rusty knife edge of displacement. 

In sum: Gentrification is initiated by speculative, algorithmically-backed, financialized development and landlord harassment; enabled by racist police violence, tax abatements, developer incentives and capitalist urban planning; and resulting in displacement and harm (sometimes death) for the working class Black and brown communities who stand in its way. Gentrification is, in other words, not a natural phenomenon, not an unavoidable but necessary process, but rather one front in real estate capital’s organized class war on working class tenants.

Does this evidence point to a solution which gives more freedom to developers and landlords? No. Gentrification can only be stopped by collective control of our buildings, neighborhoods and cities. After all, it's highly unlikely that communities would displace themselves if and when they win control over their space.

One glimmer of hope we can look to for inspiration: In Los Angeles, after being confronted with rent increases of up to 200%, the tenants of Hillside Villa organized, militantly — in Spanish, Cantonese and English, no less. In 2022, their organizing paid off: they successfully pressured the city to buy their building on their behalf, thwarting their landlord's attempt to fatten his profit margins and placing their housing under some level of community control.

Ransom, manipulation, collusion

Organized real-estate capital demonstrates every day that it will protect its profits by any means necessary — regardless of “market equilibrium.” Outside of the strategies we’ve already covered, some of their choice tactics include market manipulation, legal action and collusion.

For instance: CHIP — a New York landlord advocacy group — is currently keeping 20,000 rent-stabilized units vacant (an act that is particularly malicious considering that over a hundred thousand New Yorkers are homeless, including thirty thousand children). In total, over 60,000 rent stabilized units are currently vacant across the city. Why? As a threat! A show of force! An act of organized class war! CHIP has openly stated that they won’t put these apartments back on the market until the state legislature repeals the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protections Act, which limits their ability to jack up rents after making necessary renovations. It’s a “ransom!”

As Karl Marx himself pointed out (and others have more recently argued), the tendency of the landowning class to withhold their land from the market, and to threaten to withhold land from the market, is intrinsic to capitalism. Holding land off the market is not an irrational action for landlords — it is a rational, profit-maximizing strategy that is employed everyday by landowners across the world. This tendency is why, seemingly paradoxically, increases in vacancy rates do not always correspond with reduced rents.

This tendency explains why property owners will always fight vigorously against any regulation which would restrict their ability to keep units vacant. For example, in response to a newly passed vacancy tax which would fine landlords for failing to rent empty apartments, organized San Francisco landlords (through lobbying groups representing thousands of property owners) are suing the city, arguing they have “constitutional and statutory rights to keep their units vacant if they so choose.” Constitutionally speaking, they’re correct — the Supreme Court will always protect property owners “right to exclude” — but that’s only because the Supreme Court is designed to codify and protect private property relations.

According to the most recent statistics (from 2021), there are around 250,000 (officially) vacant units in New York City. Importantly, the vacancy rate does not include the hotel rooms which sit empty while homeless tenants beg for change just outside their doors, nor unreported warehoused market-rate apartments, nor the hundred thousand or so units which are kept as investment properties and second homes for the ultra-rich.

While in any context, there will be some vacancies, to really understand this number we have to understand which apartments are vacant. Low-cost apartments are at near-zero vacancy levels while the vacancy rates  in high-cost apartments remain extraordinarily high. Tracy Rosenthal of the LA Tenants Union sums up this disparity bluntly: “There is no shortage of housing except for poor and working people, which the market has never and will never provide.” 

In their 2022 report, the Community Service Society of New York echoes Rosenthal, writing that many of New York’s vacancies can be attributed to “long-term overproduction of luxury condos/co-ops as investment vehicles.” They sum up their findings neatly:

There is very little available housing at low rents, but a lot available at rents most New Yorkers couldn’t possibly pay. At the same time, more and more apartments are going unused, not because nobody wants them – clearly there’s plenty of demand for housing – but because their owners are keeping them as pieds-a-terre, Airbnbs, investment properties, or warehoused rentals.

One example of this phenomenon, from Madden and Marcuse:

On January 16, 2015, a limited liability corporation named P89-90 bought a single penthouse apartment in Midtown Manhattan for $100,471,452.77 … the luxury tower that it tops, branded as One57, is not likely to be a particularly sociable environment. Chances are that none of the building’s ninety-two condominium units will be their owner’s sole residence. In fact, many of the apartments in One57 will remain empty. They will be held as investments or as vanity homes for people who do not lack for places to live. One57 is not high-rise housing so much as global wealth congealed into tower form.”

In recent years, the rental housing stock has become increasingly concentrated in larger and larger portfolios controlled by private equity firms and corporate landlords. In New York City, around 9 in 10 apartments are owned by corporate landlords. 

One important implication of this trend: the more organized and concentrated ownership is, the easier it is for landlords to collude and fix prices — a task made significantly easier due to the rise of algorithmically-informed price-setting. Services like the now infamous RealPage — which uses advanced data to help landlords charge the highest possible rents for their units — openly boast about their role in driving the staggering rent hikes of recent years. A ProPublica investigation revealed RealPage has “recommended that landlords in some cases accept a lower occupancy rate in order to raise rents and make more money.” RealPage and other similar services are a potent tool for cartel style market collusion, a fact which has not escaped the ire of the Department of Justice's antitrust lawyers. 

A common “pro-housing” argument is that increased supply gives renters more options, thus allowing us to play landlords off of eachother and secure lower rents. Again, this line of thinking ignores the sordid reality, which is that landlords will flex their class muscle to keep rents high — and that without organization, tenants have no power to contest their ever-worsening conditions. What good is a market equilibrium if the landlords are almost certain to collude, warehouse apartments and keep rents high regardless?

Landlord’s profit-maximizing behavior plainly highlights the irrationality endemic to capitalism. Well, let's amend that: it's quite rational for those who own the property. For the rest of us (the vast majority) — not so much. A system which distributes (and chooses not to distribute!) housing based on the profits that will accrue to its owners is a system which is incapable of ending the precarity which defines our lives as tenants. 

The “housing crisis” is not so much a crisis as a permanent feature of urban capitalism, an unavoidable consequence of developing and distributing housing as a commodity to line the pockets of the few, rather than organizing housing around the social need for shelter. Framing our experience as a “crisis” insinuates that it is an aberration from the norm, an aberration which can be “solved” with policy fixes, new legal protections and, most insidiously, the market. The system is not in crisis; the crisis is the system!

It's all about class power? Always has been.

What we’re observing here is the all too familiar dissonance between capitalism’s economic theories and its economic realities. Despite what free-market proselytizers and “market optimists” alike want us to believe (as if there’s any functional difference between the two), capitalism is a system whose outcomes are ultimately determined by the balance of class power. Landlords, developers and financiers, who are single-mindedly driven by a desire to extract as much profit as possible out of tenants, do not submit meekly to the “laws” of supply and demand. 

To imagine that rent prices hinge on supply and demand rather than class power is completely ahistorical. Time and time again, capitalism has demonstrated an inherent tendency towards monopoly, cynical market manipulation and organized class warfare. 

Understanding the balance of class power as the condition of our exploitation is simultaneously key to grasping that our exploitation can only be limited and abolished through the exercise of our own class power as tenants. We’re engaged in a class war which only one side is consciously fighting. Our choice as tenants is whether or not we want to fight back.

If the future came on a platter…

The common sense which commands our collective reflexes does not permit us to think of revolution. After all, “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

So it’s natural that we’re derided as unrealistic for striving towards the abolition of the landlord class, and by extension the abolition of capitalism — but are we the unrealistic ones?

Our critics (liberals!) — on all issues, not just housing; think climate change, for instance — position themselves as “realistic” for arguing that handing the reins to organized capital will alleviate the conditions of the working class. Don’t we have hundreds of years of experience telling us that the exact opposite will happen? We can look to our cities as they are right now to understand that control of our buildings and neighborhoods by profit-motivated landlords, financiers and developers is a disastrous arrangement.

There’s nothing realistic about giving capital the freedom to roam where it wants and praying that it will magically change course and defy its five hundred year history of ravaging indigenous and working class communities for profit.

It's nonsense. Don’t listen to these people — they are the ones being unrealistic. 

And yes, to organize towards community control of our buildings and neighborhoods is a tremendous, daunting task. But let’s remember that we don’t organize simply because we believe in a political program. To struggle, to think — to really think! — to learn, is nothing less than the process of being alive. To not be in the struggle is a much more demoralizing proposition.

So let's get to it! Landlords and developers, and the financiers that back them, are tremendously well organized. To beat them, we have to turn to the only method by which we have historically won: that is, through our militant organization. If history has taught us anything, it's that we can only win by out-organizing our class enemies. 

Check out the Autonomous Tenants Union Network to see if there’s an existing organization in your area. In New York City: the Crown Heights Tenant Union, the Ridgewood Tenants Union, Brooklyn Eviction Defense and Tenant Union Flatbush; nationwide, the aforementioned Los Angeles Tenants Union; Tenants and Neighborhood Council (TANC) in the Bay Area; Stomp Out Slumlords in DC; and many more are doing incredible, principled work. 

You can find some resources and thoughtful reflections on tenant organizing here, here, here, here, here and here.

I like to think of this essay as a small contribution to uncovering the shape of the conjuncture, as Stuart Hall would call it. There is, of course, much more to be uncovered (and much more that has already been uncovered!), such as: the relation of tenants in the imperial core to the global anti-imperialist movement; how the tenant movement can resist settler-colonialism and aid the struggle for indigenous sovereignty; feminism and the tenant movement; the homeless industrial complex; and the ideology of homeownership, to name a few.

None of this work is easy. But, as Eduardo Galeano reminds us: “If the future came on a platter, it would not be of this world.”

More than Mercenaries: Police as the Crucible of Fascism in the U.S.

By Comrade Dremel

Republished from The Red Clarion.

Fascism is ascendant in the imperial core. The U.S. and its junior partners are waging an increasingly bloody war on all fronts, in an attempt to bolster the decaying husk of capital. The foot soldiers in this war are the police. Armed to the teeth and trained to kill, police are positioned as an occupying force in every locale across the empire. The violence perpetrated by police increases in magnitude with each passing year, with the targets of this violence being overwhelmingly the poor, Black, Indigenous, immigrant, queer, and disabled populations most despised by the empire. Even a cursory glance through the history of law enforcement in the U.S. exposes its role as the assault engine of white supremacy and capitalist hegemony.

Even before the settler-republic declared independence, slave patrols were organized to deal with the ever-growing population of enslaved African labor and the threat of rebellion. Hired guns would patrol the property, investigating and brutally punishing dissent, the possession of weapons, and attempted escapes. As far back as 1643, the English colonies were organizing themselves into confederations, pledging to enforce each others’ “right” to the return of fugitive slaves and indentured servants:

It is also agreed that if any servant run away from his master into any other of these confederated Jurisdictions, that in such case, upon the certificate of one magistrate in the Jurisdiction out of which the said servant fled, or upon other due proof; the said servant shall be delivered, either to his master, or any other that pursues and brings such certificate or proof.

Following the establishment of the United States, plantation owners quickly began entreating state legislatures to form standing patrols, as well as laws that explicitly targeted all Black people — regardless of their legal status. These fugitive slave laws and the patrollers enforcing them curtailed Black freedom of movement and assembly, subjected them to constant questioning, and inflicted unspeakably violent punishments. These practices spread throughout the colonies, and the institution of policing as a means of oppressing Black and Indigenous populations went from ad hoc posses to state machinery.

Following the U.S. civil war, despite the legal end of slavery, slave patrols prowled the countryside. Anti-Black violence, once perpetrated by pre-war slave-catching squads, took on the same form as anti-Indigenous violence: it shifted to the domain of terror groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. These vigilante terror organizations were, in many cases, composed of the elite of Southern and Western U.S. society: plantation owners, former Confederate officers, and ex-slave-catchers. Not only were these men enlisted by the secretive, semi-legal terror societies, but they also joined the rush of explicitly authorized “Indian fighters” – U.S. soldiers and cavalrymen, hired guns, and bounty hunters that poured into the Indigenous lands still left west of the Appalachian chain that the young settler-republic had determined must belong to white men.

To support this new drive, laws were carefully rewritten to empower police to enforce the political and economic repression of non-white people. This fundamental principle of U.S. settler law laid the foundation for the white-supremacist laws of today. The disproportionate impact of law enforcement on racialized populations has been thoroughly examined and excoriated for decades. The verdict is clear: law enforcement is systematically constructed to perpetuate white supremacy.

Since the creation of municipal and regional police in the 19th century, they have not only targeted Black and Indigenous persons. The police were not merely the enforcement arm of the theft of Native land and the suppression of Black labor; they have been the armed fist of capital, serving to break strikes, attack unions, and halt the labor movement in its tracks. Capitalists have consistently called upon police, private security, and the military to break strikes, often with deadly force. Under the guise of “peacekeeping,” cops respond to mass demonstrations by cracking skulls. Since the cold war, the intelligence wing of law enforcement has used the specter of communism to harry and infiltrate militant labor movements. With the blood of thousands of workers on their hands, the presence of police “unions” in labor federations like AFL-CIO is a grotesque mockery. The police are not workers: they are our most violent oppressors.

Cops are not simply hapless mercenaries, selling their labor as cogs in a repressive machine. They are not blameless workers caught up in a Kafkaesque machinery beyond their capacity to change. They are active participants in murder, genocide, labor suppression, and all the heinous acts for which they were created. They are the active agents of colonial and imperialist oppression. Indeed, the nature of policing as a tool of enforcing white supremacy and capital hegemony makes it especially appealing to a particular class of ideological actors. Police forces are staffed by the most motivated white supremacists. Fascist militias are largely populated by cops (active and retired), military veterans, and small business owners, as well as those with aspirations to law enforcement. They dedicate huge amounts of time, money, and labor to organizations designed to enforce white supremacy – all while comfortably employed in service of an empire built on those ideals. Many such groups paint themselves as “anti-government,” because they believe the U.S. government is holding them back from their fascist aims. That is, they resent the fact that the state has itself attempted to regulate white supremacist violence into a form it can control; they long for the early settler-republic, when any white man could wreak his will with a riding crop, a fist, or a Colt and no one would gainsay him.

State-sanctioned violence and extrajudicial fascist terrorism cannot be so identified as pointing out a badge.  In a recent database leak, exposing membership lists of the fascist Oathkeepers, numerous high ranking officers and sheriffs were identified among the hundreds of law enforcement officers on the books. One such lieutenant — who signed up for the Oathkeepers with the promise to use his position to recruit for the organization — was transferred to administrative duties upon knowledge of his involvement. Months later, he was back to his normal duties, as if nothing had happened. The police are police whether they wear their badges or not.

Law enforcement often dedicates some labor toward monitoring white supremacist extremism, although this is vastly overshadowed by its investment in tracking and attempting to entrap leftist organizations. Undercover agents and confidential informants insinuated into fascist groups often fail to report vital information, use their position to testify in defense of these groups, or are simply ignored by their handlers. The FBI, generally tasked with handling these investigations, are simply uninterested in the incrimination of fascists, instead instructing their informants to gather intelligence on the opponents of fascism. Law enforcement is deeply invested in the project of maintaining a white supremacist status quo. It has a long history of surveilling and violently repressing those who seek liberation, while giving unending leeway to those who attempt to heighten that oppression.

The overlap between fascist groups and law enforcement is sporadically reported on by bourgeois institutions, including media exposes, academic reviews, and even intelligence reports. Like all liberal exposes, however, these serve a dual purpose; by presenting the information, they defang it. The framework of these reports usually presents the presence of “bad apples” and promises that the issue merely needs some pressing reform. Thus, these liberal bourgeois reports disguise the fundamental nature of the white supremacist violence that pervades settler society. Through the lens of liberal “analysis,” all social ills are the result of scoundrels sullying otherwise valorous institutions. However, this misunderstands not just the material base out of which these very institutions were crafted in the first place, but also the insidious ways in which they get continuously reproduced, refined, and made more suitable to their primary purpose: maintaining the particular property relations of capitalism.

Policing presents its semi-legitimate face as “protecting the people,” originally with an explicitly racialized definition of “the people,” then retreating into implications and dog whistles. To bolster the white supremacist mythos that paints racialized populations as the source of civil strife, the ruling class has spent centuries pumping money into bad studies and employing racist professors to espouse the theory that certain populations are inherently “criminal.” Every new measure passed to empower the police has come with corresponding narratives stoking the fascist flames: “superpredators,” “crack epidemic,” “migrant caravans”. This has served to simultaneously drive recruitment and political support for the police from among the beneficiaries of white supremacy. The attractiveness of law enforcement to today’s fascists is unsurprising, given this historical context.

Law enforcement itself serves as a crucible of fascism, concentrating the most destructive aspects of the ideology into a superheated core. Its role as the violent arm of the state provides fertile soil for recruiting, training, and organizing nascent white supremacists into capable, radicalized cadres, indoctrinated with fascist ideology and inoculated against empathy. Combined with the tendencies of groups toward polarization (a meta-analysis of which can be found here), the overtly oppressive role of law enforcement creates an environment that drags its members toward fascist radicalization. This radicalization happens in much the same way that all institutions (fascist or not) mature into hegemonic forms, through the mutually-reinforcing processes of selection and intensification.

Selection is the process of sorting masses of individuals based on their demonstrated values and selecting the “best” — i.e. most well-suited to the group’s aims — for promotion, deeper into the institution. Although this can be a rigidly-defined process, as in the case of deliberately constructed organizations (such as workplaces), selection also takes place constantly throughout social life. Friend groups, community associations, activist circles, and more are constantly going through a loose process of selection; those who best fit in with the group and its purpose tend to find themselves more deeply involved in it, encouraged by those already integrated within it. The values being selected for vary from group to group, and can cover an immense range of criteria: specific skillsets, existing social ties, resources, even fashion sense or humor. The most common value being heuristically screened for, across all social structures, is how well an individual “clicks” with the existing group: like selects like. “Promotion,” of course, can also be a spectrum: anywhere from simply spending more time with like-minded individuals to actively being given more responsibilities and privileges within an organized structure. As specific traits get selected for, the individuals exhibiting those traits become better positioned to do the selecting, bringing in other individuals who share those same traits that brought them through the process themselves.

Intensification is the deepening of existing values, making individuals that move through an institution become more suited to the institution’s purpose. Again, this process can be explicit or informal, depending on the specific context. Individuals can be formally trained in specific skills, subjected to exercises designed to impart values and lessons through experience, go through rituals to promote group cohesion, or simply be subtly influenced by existing members of the group in a passive process of socialization. The more formally-organized a group is, the more explicit the programs of intensification that tend to be employed, but the social aspect is always present, and is often of the most relevance. As social creatures, humans are primed to modify our own behaviors and ideals to best integrate into our particular social environments. Over time, whether through passive or active means, groups tend to engender in their members deeper commitment and competence. Whether as education, radicalization, or collegiality, intensification works to define the character of both a group and the individuals within it.

These two processes act in concert, at all levels of institutions, playing into each other to best adapt a group to its niche. Selection elevates those individuals best adapted to modulate the intensification of others: the most charismatic speakers, the most skilled leaders, the most committed to the cause, inevitably find themselves brought up into a position to bring up their like-minded compatriots. Intensification serves as an indicator for selection, with those for whom the process yields the most favorable results increasingly demonstrating their fitness. Those who fail or refuse are seen as poorly-suited to the group and become ever-more estranged, if not outright ejected from the group. As an institution takes shape, these processes can cause it to calcify and regiment its process. Selection becomes increasingly based on set criteria, with explicitly delineated measures of promotion. Intensification practices become standardized trainings and rituals aimed at achieving specific results. But even in the absence of formal protocols, the social structure itself continues to set the pace of its own development, through the placement and shaping of its members.

Nowhere is this more typified than in the crucible of fascism. A new recruit on the force has already gone through several steps of selection and intensification that are adapted to the niche fascism aims to occupy. To even want to join, an individual must already believe in the myth of police as “peacekeepers.” They must ignore the blatant violent excesses of the institution. They already have an instinct toward protecting capitalist, white supremacy hegemony — whether they fully realize it or not. In other words, the police recruitment process itself has already selected for people who tend toward violence, chauvinism, ego, and myopia in service of capital (even if these traits are not always fully-formed in the novice). These traits are intensified during training, where recruits are taught laws, practice with firearms and other weapons, learn interrogation tactics, go through drills on handling “hostiles,” and more. Every step of the training serves to viscerally engrain in these recruits that they are the last line of defense for society against a violent, degenerate, implacable enemy, that their fellow brethren are comrades-in-arms, that the mission of the police is pure and righteous, worth laying down their very lives. They are taught that violent confrontation is not only inevitable, but righteous. In short, by the time they even become a full member of the force, people who were already filtered for traits suitable to fascism have already begun being radicalized into an ideological resentment toward the communities they police.

And then the process really gets started.

When that recruit walks into headquarters, he is entering a building absolutely packed with people who were just like him when they were recruits. Some were simply idealistic and justice-minded, without much regard for the obvious systemic horrors of the institution. Some were white supremacists from the beginning, and saw those horrors as noble. All of them went through a refinement process, and all have been modified by it in some way. They may have nervously laughed off bigoted comments, or they may have made some themselves to fit in. They may have seen squadmates commit acts of brutality, and thought to submit an official complaint — provoking the ire of their compatriots — or they may have eagerly joined in. They have spent every working day being exposed to propaganda, both informal and officially-sanctioned, about crime rates and the dangers of their profession and the fundamental threat posed by “certain communities.” They are promoted officially based on their arrests, tickets, experience, and the approval of higher ranking officers. They are promoted socially based on their cohesiveness within a group that has gone through these same radicalizing processes.

Those who couldn’t cut it — those who were too turned off by the systemic abuse, casual chauvinism, and blatant lies — are not in the room when that recruit walks in. Those who have best embraced that regressive atmosphere are introduced to him as mentors. In a radicalizing environment, the least radical have the least influence and the most radical dominate. In the case of police specifically, fascists find themselves easily making friends, enforcing “law and order,” and rising through the ranks, both institutionally and socially. They find themselves in positions of influence, and continue to shape the process that helped shape them. This attracts more of their ilk to the force, further impacting its development — and theirs. The state gains ever-more violent and rabid enforcers, while the fascists gain ever-more combat experience, fresh recruits, and institutional backing.

Whatever the particular proclivities of that recruit, he will find himself either becoming more immersed in the fascist milieu, more aligned with their ideals, tactics, and even extrajudicial organizations — or he will find himself ostracized, friendless, demoted, fired. The more the members of fascist militias integrate themselves into the (already fascistic) institution, the less common that latter outcome occurs. The initial selection process becomes implicitly more discerning, with potential recruits needing to meet a higher and higher threshold for what level of brutality they think is justified. The training and propaganda become more intense, directed as they are by those already selected for fascist allegiance. The distinction between state-sanctioned violence and paramilitary formations becomes more and more irrelevant.

This is the real reason all cops are bastards: all cops are subjected to a potent, omnipresent bastardization apparatus. They are recruited by fascists, trained by fascists, mentored by fascists, promoted by fascists. If they happen to join another fascist organization, that’s simply them branching out. And when they do, they bring with them tactical training, weapons proficiency, social prestige, state support, and an intensified clarity of purpose. The enemy of the working class is an active army: well-armed, well-resourced, well-organized, and highly motivated. They can be met with nothing less.

Comrade Dremel is a member of the Unity-Struggle-Unity Staff, an experienced educator, organizer, and scientist based in Maryland. Their organizing work has largely centered around labor agitation and fostering scientific literacy, with an emphasis on climate change and pandemic preparedness.

Police Departments Spend Vast Sums of Money Creating “Copaganda”

[PICTURED: Officers from the Norfolk Police Department in Virginia danced to Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars’s “Uptown Funk” as part of a lip-sync challenge created by police departments nationwide. - via Norfolk Police Department]

By Alec Karakatsanis

Republished from Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

In May of this year, I testified at a hearing in San Francisco where city leaders questioned the police department’s funding and use of public relations professionals. That funding was heavier than you might expect.

According to police department documents provided to the County Board of Supervisors, budget items included a nine-person full-time team managed by a director of strategic communications who alone costs the city $289,423; an undisclosed number of cops paid part-time to do PR work on social media; a Community Engagement Unit tracking public opinion; officers who intervene with the families of victims of police violence and who are dispatched to the scenes of police violence to control initial media reaction; and a full-time videographer making PR videos about cops.

San Francisco is not unique. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department has forty-two employees doing PR work in what it calls, in Orwellian fashion, its “Information Bureau.” The Los Angeles Police Department has another twenty-five employees devoted to formal PR work.

Why do police invest so much in manipulating our perceptions of what they do? I call this phenomenon “copaganda”: creating a gap between what police actually do and what people think they do.

Copaganda does three main things. First, it narrows our understanding of safety. Police get us to focus on crimes committed by the poorest, most vulnerable people in our society and not on bigger threats to our safety caused by people with wealth and power.

For example, wage theft by employers dwarfs all other property crime combined — from burglaries, to retail theft, to robberies — costing some $50 billion every year. Tax evasion steals about $1 trillion each year. There are hundreds of thousands of Clean Water Act violations each year, causing cancer, kidney failure, rotting teeth, and damage to the nervous system. Over 100,000 people in the United States die every year from air pollution, five times the number of all homicides.

But through the stories cops feed reporters, the public is encouraged to measure a city’s safety by whether it saw an annual increase or decrease of three homicides or fourteen robberies — rather than by how many people died from lack of access to health care, how many children suffered lead poisoning, how many families were rendered homeless by illegal eviction or foreclosure, or how many thousands of illegal assaults police committed.

The second function of copaganda is to manufacture crises or “crime surges.” For example, if you watch the news, you’ve probably been bombarded with stories about the rise of retail theft. Yet the actual data shows there has been no significant increase. Instead, corporate retailers, police, and PR firms fabricated talking points and fed them to the media. The same is true of what the FBI categorizes as “violent crime.” All told, major “index crimes” tracked by the FBI are at nearly forty-year lows.

The third and most pernicious function of copaganda is to manipulate our understanding of what solutions actually work to make us safer. A primary goal of copaganda is to convince the public to spend even more money on police and prisons. If safety is defined by street crime, and street crime is dangerously high, then funding the carceral state leaps out to many people as a natural solution.

The budgets of modern police departments are staggeringly high and ever increasing, with no parallel in history, producing incarceration rates unseen around the world. Police and their right-wing unions (which have their own PR budgets) want bigger budgets, more military-grade gear, more surveillance technology, and more overtime cash. Multibillion-dollar businesses have privatized nearly every element of these bureaucracies for profit, from the tasers and AI software sold to cops to the snacks sold at huge markups to supplement inadequate jail food. To obtain this level of spending, they need us to think that police and prisons make us safer.

The evidence shows otherwise. If police and prisons made us safe, we would have the safest society in world history — but the opposite is true. There is no link between more cops and decreased crime, even of the type that the police report. Instead, addressing the root causes of interpersonal harm like safe housing, health care, treatment, nutrition, pollution, and early-childhood education is the most effective way to enhance public safety. And addressing root causes of violence also prevents the other harms that flow from inequality, including millions of avoidable deaths.

The insistence that increased policing is the key to public safety is like climate science denial. Just like the oil companies, the police are running an expensive operation of mass communication to convince people of things that aren’t true. Thus, we are left with a great irony: even if what you most care about are the types of crimes reported by police, those crimes would be better reduced by making our society more equal than by spending on police and prisons.

Powerful actors in policing and media both manufacture crime waves and respond to them in ways that increase inequality and consolidate social control, even as they do little to actually stop crime. Copaganda not only diverts people from existential threats like imminent ecological collapse and rising fascism, but also boosts surveillance and repression that is used against social movements trying to solve those problems by creating more sustainable and equal social arrangements.

Hearings like the one I testified at in San Francisco are needed across the country. Local councilmembers should scrutinize the secretive world of police PR budgets, because the public deserves to know how police are spreading misinformation. It is possible to achieve real safety in our communities, but only if we end the copaganda standing in its way.

 

Alec Karakatsanis is a civil rights lawyer and the founder of Civil Rights Corps. He is also the author of the book Usual Cruelty and a weekly newsletter called Alec’s Copaganda Newsletter.

Two Years Since George Floyd’s Death, Has Anything Changed in the U.S.?

By Natalia Marques

Republished from People’s Dispatch.

Police officer Derek Chauvin killed George Floyd on May 25, 2020, shocking the consciousness of the entire United States. On May 25 of this year, President Joe Biden announced that he will instate an executive order which is a watered-down version of a police reform proposal that previously failed to pass in the Senate. The failed proposal would have altered “qualified immunity”, a doctrine that makes it difficult to sue government officials, including police. The proposal would have kept the doctrine intact for individual officers, but made it easier for police brutality victims to sue officers or municipalities. 

This new executive order would merely create a national registry of officers fired for misconduct, in addition to directing federal agencies to revise use-of-force policies, encouraging state and local police to tighten restrictions on chokeholds and no-knock warrants, restrict the transfer of most military equipment to law enforcement agencies, as reported by the New York Times

The real concern for activists and those who are targeted by police is primarily the police who are still on the job, and may have several complaints against them for violence already. This was the case with Chauvin, who had used excessive force in six previous arrests. Even of the officers who are fired for misconduct, of which there are few compared to the massive number of victims killed by police, nearly 25% are reinstated because of police union-mandated appeals. 

Government officials are not responding with the seriousness compared to the intensity of the crisis of police violence that plagues the United States. This is especially true in light of the radical demands generated by the mass movement which followed the death of George Floyd. Some of the most popular were: end police brutality, jail killer cops, and defund the police. This movement shifted the mainstream language on police violence, which had originally placed the blame on individual cops or “bad apples”, to include more discussion of systemic, institutionalized racism. 

“Even though you had the largest social uprising that had ever hit the country, in terms of numbers of people actually hitting the streets, you’ve seen no substantive reforms to address the issues, even in a small way regarding racism and bias in policing,” socialist organizer and journalist Eugene Puryear told Peoples Dispatch, speaking of the 2020 anti-racist uprising. Polls estimate that between 15 and 26 million were out on the streets, making these uprisings the largest protests in US history.

Movement demands

The movement shouted “Jail killer cops!” and “End police brutality!” in the streets, but the state has fallen short on delivering these demands. 

There was no reduction in police killings in the US from 2020 to 2021, according to data compiled by the website Mapping Police Violence. Police killed 1,145 people in 2021, 12 more than in 2020, and 16 more Black people specifically. 

2021 was marked by landmark trials that broke the paradigm of convictions for vigilante and police killings of Black people. The most notable example is Derek Chauvin’s guilty-on-all-counts verdict, for which he was sentenced to a historic 22.5 years. 

However, there was also no notable spike in the number of convictions and sentencing in general of police officers, although there is some evidence that public outrage does generate results. Of the 1,145 police killings in 2021, only two have resulted in convictions thus far. One of them is the trial of Kim Potter, whose murder of Daunte Wright made headlines when she gunned down the 20-year-old Black father 10 miles from where Chauvin was standing trial at the time.

A notable setback, however, was the not-guilty verdict for the killer of Breonna Taylor, Brett Hankinson, who, alongside other officers, killed Breonna by firing 16 rounds into Taylor’s apartment during a raid while she was sleeping. Hankinson was never even on trial for the killing of Taylor. In fact, the officers responsible have faced no criminal charges at all for her death. Hankinson was on trial for “wanton reckless endangerment” for firing ten shots through a wall into Taylor’s neighbor’s apartment. Even for this, he was found not-guilty on May 3 of this year. “Thank you Jesus!” tweeted John Mattingly, another officer involved in Taylor’s murder.

Were the police ever defunded?

“One of the things that was the most notable in the context of the George Floyd uprising, and the rise of the slogan ‘defund the police’, it went beyond simply the issue of police brutality,” Puryear told Peoples Dispatch. “It was connecting at a deeper level, the reality of white supremacy in causing oppression for Black Americans across almost every single social sphere that exists, policing being one of the most egregious examples of this racism and this discrimination and the xenophobia that’s directed towards Black Americans.”

“Defund the police” was indeed a radical slogan in a country in which police budgets as a share of general city expenditures have only increased since the 1970s. These budgets followed the trend of the rise in incarceration, both of which were part of the “war on crime” era of racist policing and incarceration that served to suppress 1960s and 70s Black rebellion. 

As a result, police budgets in the United States are some of the largest in the world, especially compared to underfunded schools and social services. According to a study, schools in the US are short of funding by nearly $150 billion every year. Meanwhile, in a city like New York, the annual police budget is over $10 billion. If the New York Police Department (NYPD) were a military, it would be one of the world’s most well-funded. 

Did city governments ever respond to demands and defund the police? Generally, the answer is no. While the 50 largest cities reduced their police budgets by 5.2% in aggregate, police spending as a share of general spending rose slightly from 13.6% to 13.7%. Many of the budget reductions that did occur were a result of larger pandemic cuts, in which other parts of the city budgets were also reduced. 26 out of 50 major cities actually increased their police budgets.

These numbers are the material reality, but in the full swing of the uprisings, city governments were making lofty promises to their people, who were marching outraged in the streets. In June of 2020, a veto-proof majority of city council members in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, promised to dismantle the police entirely. But when it came time to deliver on these demands, city council members backtracked, claiming that the pledge was “in spirit” or “up to interpretation”. In the end, the city did not dismantle their police force. However, they did end up reducing the police department’s ability to spend overtime and began sending mental health and medical professionals instead of police to respond to emergencies. Activists also won a $8 million cut from the city’s police budget. 

Some city officials resorted to blatant deception, making it seem as if activists won demands when in reality, little had changed. In New York, for example, the mayor pledged to move $1 billion out of the massive NYPD budget. But even at the time of this pledge, activists and progressives were calling out the mayor for “just moving money around”. “Defunding police means defunding police,” said Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “It does not mean budget tricks or funny math.” As described by a report authored by Andrea J. Ritchie and published by Interrupting Criminalization, the mayor claimed to have cut $300 million from the NYPD budget by moving police officers stations in schools out of the NYPD budget and into the Department of Education Budget. This was never a demand of the movement against police brutality, which has always agitated for “police free schools”. In the end, however, this $300 million was never even cut from the NYPD budget, while the Department of Education budget was actually defunded by over $780 million.

Were there any victories?

Although the post-2020 realities are disappointing for many, there were some notable victories. Some cities did in fact make major cuts, such as Austin, which cut a third of its police budget. And the uprisings did in fact halt the trend of ever-increasing police budgets that had existed since the “war on crime” began. Budgets did decrease across major cities, however minimally. 

According to Ritchie’s report, organizers shifted $840 million countrywide away from police forces, and secured $160 million for community services. Activists moved police out of schools, where they often generate more violence than they prevent. 25 cities canceled contracts with police departments operating in schools, saving a total of $35 million. Activists have also begun to demilitarize the highly militarized US police forces, winning bans on chemical/military-grade weapons in 6 cities and facial recognition in 4 cities.

But the key victory of 2020, argues Puryear, was the changing of mass consciousness. “The very fact that you could have a situation where a majority of people are recognizing the fact that there is racism, the fact that there is tremendous discrimination against black people in policing, in prisons and in the criminal legal system, and not have any change whatsoever, shows how intrinsic racism is to capitalism in the US context,” Puryear said. 

He continued, “[Those in power] actually cannot afford to eliminate these clear and obvious biases that exist. It’s essential to the social control of the black community, as a part of the broader efforts to super exploit black people, as it has been since the first slaves arrived here as a central pillar of the capitalist system. 

“It exposed once again the deep relationship between capitalism and racism, and the inability to overcome racism without overcoming capitalism. Because it isn’t just incidental, it isn’t a few bad apples, it isn’t just the attitudes of certain people, but it’s structural and it’s systemic in a way that can’t be changed by good intentions.”

From the Trenches, This is How We Heal: A Discussion Between Frontline Protestors in Portland, Oregon

By Susan Anglada Bartley and Lexy Kahn

Note from the authors: This collaboratively written article by two Portland protest community members, Susan Anglada Bartley and Lexy Kahn, is the result of conversations we had after participating in protests, both as frontline protestors and as movement-side writers and journalists. Throughout the article, we switch font colors (Lexy in Red, Susan in Black) when we switch voices, offering two perspectives on healing and resistance. We hope that the processing we offer here can be a catalyst for our comrades here in Portland and for comrades worldwide who need to come together to do the work of sorting through it all to figure out how to heal and walk forward. Throughout the process of writing this article, we were both working 40 hours per week, parenting, and working on our own healing, while also continuing our resistance work. Thank you for expecting and accepting our imperfections. Thank you for noticing our strengths. Thank you for the blood you shed. Thank you for still being willing to walk forward and heal with us after you have already given so much. Thank you for the words you will have to add to this narrative. Thank you for the errors you see, the ways you disagree.


CONTEXT

[Lexy] Out of that storm of apocalyptic uncertainty and a slew of deeply traumatic collective traumas, back to back to back, one on top of the other, with no time to process any of it between, it was in the context, of that tense and highly turbulent climate with death and disease all around us, when somehow a sliver of light broke through. And with it a small shred of hope that we could finally tackle these issues of systemic racism and police brutality/accountability that have been so deadly and devastating to Black America and all other marginalized groups in this country for so long. Not just in our lifetime, but since it’s very conception.  

That tiny shred of hope, inside that sliver of light, shining through the pressure cracks of this outdated inequitable system, was enough to send ten million racial justice activists, abolitionists and lost souls, sprinting hard for those cracks of light to try and breakthrough the obstacles that kept them trapped all their lives. Obstacles and defenses that their oppressors had laid out for them, that they could now sense were in a weakened state, not as formidable as they once had been. Just that one shred of a possibility that we had a chance to disrupt the brutal and corrupt status quo of policing in America was enough to make us All go, All in. 

And now nearly two years later, with a long list of accomplishments juxtaposed by a long list of errors and setbacks, this movement stands at a whole new crossroads. Flustered and fragmented, but still standing...and still all in. Still, all that trauma changes a person, and this group in particular has been hit with a great deal of intensive trauma in a short period of time. And in this climate where just existing within the current state of the world is traumatic in itself, we may have to look back and resolve some of the traumas of our past and these last two years, to be able to move forward and forge ahead in building the more equitable world for our children and future generations. 

[Susan] It was that tiny shred of hope that drove us out of our homes, but for many a mass reckoning around white privilege was also a motivating factor. The geographic, social, and economic demographics of Portland, a city deemed 'The Whitest City in America', a city located in a state that was originally founded as a white supremacist utopia, a city also known for both Anarchist underpinnings and quirky white liberal Portlandia finickyness, was the only place where this could have happened exactly as it did. Portland was already known for massive protests. The history of protest in Portland in the past twenty years must be acknowledged as part of understanding how we got here. This historical recounting will not be perfect. It is non-academic. It is written in the cracks between work and mothering and street level protest. It is missing pieces that I hope others will fill in. Yet, it is written by a person who was right there involved in it and who saw it happen and also took part in those happenings. So take from it what is helpful and add to it what is missing.

Many of the protests of the early 2000s were active rejections of U.S. imperialism and furious responses to Bush agenda colonialism in the Middle East. Climate justice and its relationship to all of the above also drove people to the streets in those early years at the start of the century. By 2011, the Occupy Portland movement straddled adjacent two city parks in front of the Justice Center, which by no coincidence would become the heart center of the Black Lives Matter and Antifascist Movement of 2020/2021.

Human Rights organization Don't Shoot Portland must be credited with doing the work to shift the gaze inward toward white racism within the city of Portland through their ongoing activism and support of artistic production around police violence and murder of Black people, hyperpolicing of Black youth, and the history of racism in the state of Oregon and the city of Portland. Of course, dozens of Human Rights activists from many organizations spoke and protested prior to the rise of Don't Shoot as a trusted and reliable source of information, but we acknowledge the work of Don't Shoot due to their clear focus on exposing racism within Portland in the decades prior to the uprising of 2020 and 2021. This does not mean they were the organizer. As we say on the streets, Britney Spears is the organizer. We acknowledge the work of Don't Shoot PDX in order to highlight the consciousness and political energy-raising factors that preceeded the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing public response.

Likewise, the Occupy Ice Movement, supported by multiple antifascist  groups, Direct Action Alliance, several Antifa and mutual aid groups, and Portland DSA, in 2018, helped to focus the gaze of Portland protest community lenses around the intersection between colonialism, institutional oppression, race, and class. Occupy Ice was an immigrants rights movement, but also an indigenous rights movement, an anti-colonial movement, an anti-federal power movement, and an anarchist movement. One could enter from any of those invisible doors. Once inside, the rhetoric sparked discussions and even deep divides around race, class, gender, sexuality, protest, and organizing that bled right into the protests of 2020/21 through the veins of those of us who were involved in both. 

Decentralized leadership was operant in Occupy Ice (relevant becuase Occupy Ice was the largest, most recent anti-colonial and anti-racist movement in Portland prior to 2020/21). Some of the same expectations (not naming organizers, protecting Black and Indigenous voices) were the norm (or attempted norm) in 2020/21; however, in the 2020/21 movement, voices of Black women who wanted a movement that was truly intersectional (meaning centering Black women including trans women if you are really using Dr. Crenshaw's definition of intersectionality) were sometimes drowned out by the decentralized approach, and often they were still arrested, harassed, and targeted anyway. There were internal power struggles and ideological divisions among members of decentralized leadership that caused splintering. Within this reality, there was also the reality of thousands of high school students, most but not all who were white, with a lot of spare time on their hands and who were ready to roar. In identifying the youth protestors as majority white, it must be acknowledged that Black, Indigenous, Asian, and youth of multiple backgrounds, sometimes in leadership roles, did in fact hit the streets.. Bands of young people began to Bloc up for Black Lives Matter. Instagram handles told which park to meet at, how to Bloc up, how to make a shield, what to do if you were arrested.

Portland has a history of anarchist organizing. Reed College is purportedly an Anarchist institution (though that didn't seem the case when they kicked me off the grounds of Ren Faire just because I wasn't a student in 2001). As a non-Reed student who spent time with Anarchist Reedies at the turn of the century, I can tell you that this looked like a whole lot of dumpster diving, food sharing, zine-making, reading Anarchist literature, and punk rock music played in damp Portland basements. 

But Anarchism also lived outside of the academic nest that is Reed college. On Division street in the early 2000s, the Red & Black Cafe was a worker-owned coffee shop that was a center of Marxist and Anarchist thinking and activity. Pockets of Anarchism and anti-authoritarianism dwelled in little puddles around the city, often in the shape of young artists collectively renting buildings or houses to create underground galleries, hold metal shows basements, and hide in that space before big developer gentrification when housing was still cheap and working class artists could afford to hold paint brushes rather than shields.

That the throngs of white youth who showed up in 2020 were dubbed white Anarchist youth, however, was in part a mistake. As I’ve already established, the people who came out for the Portland Antifascist and BLM protests were not all white youth. The narrative that the protestors were all young white Anarchists is absurd. Many ethnic backgrounds and people who identify in many and multiple racial identities took part in all actions. There were and are many Black, Indigenous, and Asian people who are Anarchists or interested in Anarchist and Marxist philosophy living in Portland. Throughout the movement, local media created a divisive narrative in which they juxtaposed, “White Anarchists” with, “Black Lives Matter Protestors”. In doing so, they both erased the presence of Black, Indigenous, and Asian Anarchists, and inflated the lie that white or white appearing people on the streets were fighting for Anarchism, but not for Black Lives Matter.

That said, a hell of a lot of white youth who had not previously been politically engaged did, in fact, come out for the first time in 2020 and many came out under the banner, or shall we say umbrella, of Anarchism. Some had knowledge of the political philosophy due to the availability of antifascist and even Anarchist literature and ideologies in their own Portland homes (maybe some of their parents were once the Anarchist 20-somethings of the 90s and early 2000s). That knowledge likely grew through communication and pamphlets available at movement activities, but there were also white kids who had no knowledge of Anarchism other than how to tag the A and just wanted the chance to fuck shut up. And did.

Since decentralized leadership also meant that no single group or individual held the power, the rhetoric coming from megaphones and mics (which people just grabbed on a fairly regular basis) also ranged the full gamut of political underpinnings, from tacitly pledging allegiance to state power to Anarchistic direct action. City Council candidates who received donations from the PPB spoke at BLM children's marches on the same weekend that Black voices holding the megaphone at street-level protests shouted "Every city, every town, Burn the precinct to the ground," while marching through the night, surrounded by eager white youth. But I cannot speak on this as if I were an outsider listening in. Like many fellow protesters of a great variety of backgrounds, I was right there chanting too, motivated by the sincere belief that the police, criminal "justice" system, and the system of mass incarceration are indeed corrupt institutions that perpetuate racism, genocide, and harm to humanity.

Within the movement, there were common threads and hashtags. #wearenotamonolith became a commonly repeated explanation for serious ideological discrepancies in the movement used to normalize Black people not all having to share the same perspective because they are Black.

Another common thread was a constantly combusting discussion about the deeper meaning of Black Lives Matter and the need for whites to repair historic and ongoing wrongs. Fellow activists often questioned whether the very urgent and immediate daily focus on hitting individual Venmos or Cash Apps was in fact distracting the movement from the needed focus on demanding reparations for all Black and Indigenous Oregonians, through money and land that they deserve. This perspective did not intend to suggest that the aspects of the Revolution that operated through Venmo and Cash App were all the way wrong; the needs in the movement were and are real and these and other apps and mutual aid actions helped to address immediate needs and keep people housed and supported. The economic and personal needs that emerged in movement circles were also byproducts of apocalyptic capitalism and racism, and many needed urgent support so that organizers and protesters could keep doing the work or simply keep living, but this can be true while it could also be true that the movement can and will win more for those who are most impacted by demanding reparations from the city of Portland, the state of Oregon, and the Federal government.

A third common thread was respect for both decentralized leadership and diversity of tactics. Protest policing was widely eschewed, meaning it was not cool to tell anyone else how to protest, whether they were lighting a fire or silently meditating. Above all, it was essential to keep showing up. White people had the responsibility to listen, to front line if able, and to continue to disrupt white supremacy, especially in spaces where they (we) had privileged access due to race.  

Not far from the start, these demands were made by multiple members of decentralized leadership:

  • Defund and Abolish the Police

  • Fund the community

  • Make reparations for historic and ongoing racism in Oregon

Organization Unite Oregon followed up these demands with a detailed set of budget suggestions and actions for City Council and the Mayor (Fuck Ted Wheeler) to adopt. 

Some people marched with knowledge of what was on the table. Others marched for other reasons. Communication was imperfect. But in that chaotic context, the movement continued to multiply and subdivide. It continued to attract both sincere protestors and grifters. It's messages were both reproduced, surveilled, and tainted by fear or polluted by ego. We experienced infiltration by those with corporate protest agendas (groups who came down with the intention of soliciting votes or supporting particular agendas), politicians hoping to gain capital in every way they could through the opportunity to speak to large numbers, the FBI, and the Portland and Oregon State police.

Trusted voices emerged in the depths of street protest. Trusted voices emerged far away from stages, in parks, on street corners, behind umbrellas, faces hidden. Brief but historic conversations happened outside of precincts. There were moments where no microphone was present, but the truth was told.

Trusted political actors also emerged–people who were intentionally silent, unseen, acting on behalf of the movement. Firecrackers, yes, but also actions never to be heard, seen, or mentioned again. 

The movement felt scattered like gas canisters on the street after a Portland protest, yet furious, chaotic, unpredictable, and still on fire. 

[Lexy] After decades of dancing in denial over racist policies within the US justice system, it only ended up taking those three fateful words to expose nearly every closet racist in this entire country. Outside of the system and within, all the way up to the potus. After gaslighting Black America and our most marginalized communities for decades with false narratives that wealth inequality and poverty is based only on their own lack of merit, rather than lack of available resources or systemic racism, the racial justice protests of 2020/21 and the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement forced many white Americans to see and acknowledge the thinly veiled layers of white supremacy that permeate every aspect of this nation’s power structure, to finally face their own complacence and privilege within those frameworks. It did not take long for the bigots to come crawling out from the ideological muck and sludge like slugs after a fresh rain to tell Black America that they weren't allowed to say that their lives mattered. And when that same racist version of white America realized they could not control or suffocate this civil rights movement with their hate speech alone, it led to visible collective rage and a volatile response that reverberated through the far right and manifested itself in many episodes of right wing, neo nazi hate groups from out of state, invading the city, leading to frequent clashes with Homegrown Antifascists, who were forced into defending themselves and their homes. As writer Mark Bray reminds us, “Militant anti-fascism is inherently self-defense because of the historically documented violence that fascists pose, especially to marginalized people”.

Those of us on the ground in Portland that year were probably much less surprised and shocked than the rest of the nation when the events of the January 6th Capitol Riot transpired. The white American cis male bigot for far too long has been enabled and placated by the powers that be and they panicked and flailed and clung to their prejudiced ideoligies in a perverted carnival freakshow-like display of childish tantrum combined with the very real and extreme dangers of mob mentality, so its not a wonder that they literally trampled some of each other to death in the process. 

Meanwhile the organizers of mass protests on the far-left were diligent in creating measures for de-escalation, and touting chants like ‘we keep us safe’ or ‘we take care of us’, as a way of instilling safety measures into the minds and routines of the participants. Always keeping intersections blocked and barricaded from motorists who would use their cars as weapons against us during marches or demonstrations. Helping to ensure medics were in attendance at large rallies as well as ASL translators for accessibility. Food and water were always made accessible and provided for free, fueled by donations of supporters of the movement and dispersed by the efforts and labor of the community (shouts out to Riot Ribs in those early days). So much emphasis was placed on keeping our marches as safe as possible because we knew if we were going up against a violent system of injustice that imposes what’s seen as ‘law and order’ it was going to be dangerous and there would be disorder as a natural result and in the process people were going to get hurt. Seeing as police brutality was the very reason for this uprising in the first place, we inherently know how violent US policing is as an institution and if we stood firm against it, that violence was going to follow and some of our people were going to take wounds from the punches delivered by the violent right arm of the system we were all in to abolish or at the very least, bring a much stronger measure of accountability to. Nothing else would do and we could settle for nothing less, and so some windows would have to break, some precincts would have to burn, and worst of all some of our people would have to bleed before the needle could even start to move. But credit where credit is due, this community worked extremely hard to keep each other alive or from being seriously disfigured even in the most chaotic and lawless of circumstances. In the aftermath of clashes with neo nazis or 12, you’d always see comrades tend to each other’s wounds, carry each other to the closest available medic or wash the bear mace from each other’s eyes with saline. Assigning groups to walk injured comrades to safe houses or to take them to the hospital when it was necessary which wasn’t often with all the support we had from our heroic protest medics on the street level.

Work

[Susan] And yet we were workers. 

We were workers who held children on our hips. We were workers who did what we had to for tips. We were workers who loaded boxes at the supermarket in the middle of the night. We were Grub Hub, Burgerville, and food cart workers. We were librarians, social workers, and public school teachers. We were childcare workers, EMTs, artists, cannabis clerks. We were bus drivers, nurses, herbalists, students, and professors. We were retail workers, sex workers, and we were also great masses of unemployed workers. 

We were exhausted by day, fighting by night. We were willing to meet anytime anywhere to stand for what we knew was right. We changed out of uniforms, shook off the 8 hour shift. We arranged for childcare, some took turns with partners, so we could Bloc up and fight.

We met in the park at the place where race, class, gender, and human power flexed into a muscle that was The Revolution. For some of us, it was the Revolution we had seen up ahead and organized toward for years. For others, it would be the first time tasting the gas. 

We were both leaderless and guided by voices. We were both marching in the impeccable solidarity of the heart, and each needing to express that sacred rage that kept our feet marching when our souls were tired.

It was both always all for George Floyd (fly in power) and also for those shattered parts of each of us, dominated our whole lives by racist, classist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic authoritarianism that decided upon his death to scream our truths. It was always about Black Lives Matter, and it was also our biggest mistake to fail to admit that we were also doing it for ourselves. 

Here enters our trauma. Here our lies. Here our unspeakable truths. Here our addictions. Here our imprisonment. Here our egos. Here our fear. Here our fury. Here our failures. Here our demise.

The Battle of 1312 and the attempted federal occupation of an ‘Anarchist Jurisdiction’

[Lexy] And as we were clashing with each others egos in a constant battle of ideological motives that sometimes devolved into power struggles based on popularity contests or scene politics, what was most enlightening in all of that was the way all of that drama and toxicity and venom we were directing at each other would suddenly melt away and evaporate into the void the second the police came pushing down on us in their riot gear. And once again for the brief clash against the foot soldiers of our real oppressor, we all would be united as one against a common enemy we all could agree was one of the most glaring problems in our community looking right back at us, with eyes hungry for violence from behind those shielded helmets. Dressed in body armor, boots and state issued gas masks, the so called ‘peacekeepers’ were back to restore law and order from the ‘unruly mob’ who kept insisting that Black Lives Did in fact matter and had to be beaten, gassed, tazed, shot at and maced for saying so. 

But even if the police were itching to bash some heads, there was not a single night that the police truly wanted to be out there. On the flip side of that you better believe that those of us within the group they came to try and disperse wanted to be out there… Needed to be out there, if only to challenge the brutality of a state that desperately needed to be challenged, with the lives of our own community members hanging in the balance, especially BIPOC and those from marginalized communities. Endangered by the same police thug element we were fighting and those state issued .45 caliber handguns that they were always so quick to draw from out of the holster that hung on their hip. And in those moments, even with one of our leading mantras being ‘no gods, no masters’ we were almost always as close to one unified faction as we ever were and you would’ve had no idea that just five minutes earlier multiple people in that same group were at each other’s throats, about to come to blows over differences of opinion or petty squabbles. Such is the anger and hatred for the police and their masters to so many of us in the working class majority. 

The Battle of the Portland Police Association, June 30th, 2020

[Susan] Could there be a Love that was strong enough to win?

We met at Peninsula Park just before dusk. The rule “no whites on the microphone” in full effect, I remember playing the role of cleaning the mic for each speaker, one of whom was my partner, whose words illustrated the relationship between colonialism, racism, and police violence as the sky turned from grey to a shade of indigo above us. Numerous speakers took the mic before it was time to move as a collective to the precinct where we would stand outside and demonstrate our unified rejection of police violence toward Black and Indigenous people in this society. As we arrived at the precinct, we knew to expect police photographers to snap pictures of all of the speakers from the park. At this point, we knew they were always trying to surveil us, especially targeting Black and Indigenous people who had the courage to speak their minds at the microphone. For this reason, we had to be increasingly careful to avoid any actions other than expressing our right to Free Speech.

There was no “violence” that night, other than the violence of the police themselves. Just minutes after our march arrived (no fires, no broken windows, just people marching into the night speaking their minds and hearts) a blockade of heavily armed and shielded police marched toward us, their automated, authoritarian white male voice declaring our mobilization a riot and demanding we disperse. I heard only the voice of a Black woman--one of the women who was the first to the Justice Center upon the death of George Floyd, shouting, "Hold the Line!" into her megaphone right behind my head. 

My partner and I were that line right in front of her. Due to my racial privilege and ability, I knew I better not turn the fuck back now. 

In front of me was one thin line that included a bike activist who was holding their bike as a shield. Next to him was a deeply-committed but frail man I knew had a significant leg injury. To my left was my partner, a Puerto Rican man who I knew was also not turning back. 

"Hold the Fucking Line! We've got us!" she screamed again.

As the riot-gear clad police charged with their clubs out, I saw the bike get grabbed away, the frail man was lifted up and pushed back into us like a doll. I kept pushing forward until I felt myself choking on the gas. I felt my partner disappear into the front line battle with the police.

Choking, I felt a spray of pellets on my shins. People were running away behind me. There I was floating in the smoke, trying to regain my focus as I saw cops pinning people on the ground up ahead. I was fucking alone, about to get pinned, trying to locate my partner, who had run forward trying to get the fuming gas canisters away from the protestors. I struggled to see through my clouded goggles, stumbling, trying to walk, not run. 

In that moment in the smoky, dark of night, a woman I vaguely knew from Occupy Ice grabbed my arm, linked me, stabilized my path, and saved my ass. Never in my life have I believed more in Love. Never in my life have I found a greater sisterhood. She walked arm-in-arm with me in the smoke until my partner retreated from the front line and found us. As the police charged, we ran down a side street where everyone was dispersing. Running behind him, I saw that the police had shot him right toward the balls with green glow-in-the-dark paint. As we neared a dark corner near a dumpster, a blonde white male comrade who we had never met said to my partner, pulling out a pair of black Adidas running pants, "Dude, you're hit. Take these. Put them on over so they can't see you!"

My partner went behind the dumpster and quickly put them on.

Out on the residential side street where neighbors watched from their porches and driveways, we saw comrades strewn about like broken dolls, choking on the gas. Near our vehicle, which was fortunately on that street, a 6'2" blonde, early-20-something white man lay on the grass patch between the street and sidewalk crying and choking because he had been maced directly in the face by the police. We got water from our car and my partner helped him flush his face (milk was not available in that moment). His close comrades soon came to find him, help him up, and hobble him away.

We departed, needing to return for the babysitter. It wasn't until we got home that I saw the blood and the open wound beneath my partner's pants. It wasn't until the next day that we found out they were intentionally shooting Black and Indigenous men toward the balls. It wasn't until the next day that I realized my partner had helped a white man while he himself was injured and bleeding, but he was glad he did it, and in those moments and into forever, you better believe we learned what it means to be a comrade.

But this isn't intended to make a happy spectacle of our wounds. This is meant to offer a glimpse into one moment of police-induced trauma, to illustrate the pressure we were under throughout this protest period. 

Go home and kiss your child. Hug 'em tight. Get up and go to work. Black Lives Matter. The bruises will go away. End White Supremacy. Where does the pain go? Black Lives Matter. What is that noise in the night? What does it do to a person, facing police and military violence in bike helmets and science class goggles, homemade shields, and combat boots?

There are ways in which it made us way fucking stronger. Firstly, one of the greatest victories of the movement was won that night…and in the years that followed. Human Rights organization Don’t Shoot PDX proved that the munitions used on protestors were in fact illegal munitions. The lawsuit, which they won on behalf of our Free Speech, both documented exactly what happened, affirmed our right to Free Speech, and created a strong boundary to protect future protestors from illegal munitions like those that were used on us that night. We as a protest family thank Don’t Shoot for standing with all of us who were impacted by the munitions that night and every night. There is no way we could ever forget.

There are bonds created in those battles that can and never will die, but there are also ways in which the constant and continuous assault from the Portland Police and Federal Government systemically broke people and the movement the fuck down. And we cannot tie that up in ribbons and bows. We have to uncuff it, recognize the trauma, realize how it impacted us individually and as a collective, and move forward with both the wounds and the recognition that we are welded together by our sacrifices and our pain.

White Supremacy is Trauma

[Lexy] There were times things got a little out of control and times where it got downright out of hand. Just thinking back on some of it takes some pretty severe inner fortitude. Even though the police were always the instigators of actual violence against non violent demonstrators, there was a louder outcry from white Portlanders over the graffiti and boarded up windows, than they had ever shouted with, over the issue of police brutality. Whether it was a police killing of a BIPOC high school student or the beating of non violent protester, white liberal Portland never screamed or shouted about any of it with as much dismay as they did over statues of white racist colonizers getting knocked down on October 2020’s Indigenous day of rage (which the Oregonian intentionally mislabeled as simply the ‘Day of Rage’, leaving Indigenous out of the title completely in an obvious attempt to discredit the work done that night as wanton property damage and the work of white anarchists). Or the way they howled out their grief over the boarded-up windows and graffiti in the Pearl and other downtown shopping districts. And even though all that property damage was a symptom of the police brutality and systemic racism of the city’s failed power structure, it was still somehow the demonstrators who took the brunt of the criticism from liberal white Portland and the local media, who constantly portrayed us as the more militant side rather than as a resistance to militant policing. This city isn’t suddenly falling apart as the result of these protests. It’s coming apart from failed leadership, mismanagement of resources and the ongoing severity of the opiate epidemic and houseless crisis. The continued protests and unrest in this city are all secondary bi-products and consequences of militaristic, hyper-aggressive policing, inhumane rent increases, and heedless gentrification. The 2020/21 protests and unrest only applied the pressure and provided the clarity needed to magnify how badly this city’s leadership had failed their constituency. But someone had to be scapegoated for the city's own failures, to answer for all that graffiti and scattered glass on the streets. And to understand how to move forward from here we still have to dive deeper into our collective trauma to further understand how and why we got here, and why those windows had to break. Why and how those panes of glass that had once filled the windows of the banks, department stores, and office plazas of downtown Portland were being shattered as quickly as our country's own faith in itself.       

Where to even start with the list of all these combined traumas? They came back to back to back in a steady rapid stream. Compounded one on top of the other with little to zero time between to process any of it before the next disaster or crisis hit. A global pandemic and a state by state lockdown already had the world shaken and upside down. A Black Liberation and anti police brutality movement like we had never seen had swept the globe and racial justice activists took to the streets in huge numbers all across the US after the death of George Floyd, and as we’ve been discussing at length, our non-violent demonstrations were once again met with force and excessive brutality by police. The very bizarre political climate, and unrest in the streets prompted the Trump White House in conjunction with the federal government and department of homeland security to invade one of its own cities, Portland, OR which had become a kind of unofficial protest hub, and the atrocities piled up as a result, all seemingly for the agenda driven purposes of Trump admin optics leading up to a contentious election. And when the feds touched down and started snatching people up in unmarked cars, a couple hundred protesters suddenly turned into five thousand, igniting the spirit of the revolution into a group of people who were feeling less powerless by the second, riding high off of their collective civil disobedience, suddenly ready to stand up to the authoritarian abuses they had turned away from their whole lives but were now seeing on a terrifyingly heightened level.

The more they brutalized us it seemed the more people turned against the cops and the state, and the stronger we became as a group. More and more people would rally to our cause or put their support behind what they saw a glimmer of light and hope in us, while the world was growing darker and more unpredictable around them. Many of us had waited our whole lives for this moment and were more than ready to take up the call and throw our everything into it, but the sacrifices along the way were very real and some of our best and brightest were lost. 

Those of us who are still here were left with wounds that will take a lifetime to heal. From nightly clashes with the police and being subjected to their unhinged violence just for speaking up and standing firm in opposing their violence in the first place. From at least weekly clashes with armed white nationalists and/or neo nazis who were allied with the bureau. From the assassination of one of our comrades, which was openly plotted by the white house and carried out by US Marshalls according to the callous boasts of then president, donald trump himself. From the rampant nightly use of chemical warfare, LRAD and heavy crowd control munitions by police and DHS agents against non violent protesters, press, and bystanders alike. All the wildness that swirled around the eviction blockade/neighborhood occupation of our triumph over the Portland Police Bureau and wheeler admin at Red House (a Black and Indigenous family was scheduled to be evicted and their home taken, so comrades established a blockade and this became another central organizing site for the movement). The explosion of gun violence citywide and the continued police killings of unarmed houseless Portlanders on mental health calls. And the work, all the while, included always remaining aware of and confronting the continued violence and killings by the PPB and other bureaus in the nation against Black Americans and against our own houseless community. The list of internal and external traumas goes on and on and as we have already acknowledged, such traumas take a toll. 

[Susan] As fellow frontline protestors, we acknowledge the ways in which the trauma caused by interactions with the police like those described above injured comrades, both physically and emotionally. We also illustrate how the sheer pressure of the nightly uprisings against state and police power had many of us living in a frantic state of exhaustion. In this section, we also acknowledge the role that white supremacist thinking that walked into the movement inside of fellow white protestors corroded the movement like an invisible poison. We will identify and break down the ways that we saw elements of white supremacist thinking enter into Movement spaces and relationships to cause both disillusionment and the breakdown of important relationships between comrades. The processes identified below also caused the breaking off of many Movement visitors who were in fact not comrades, but individuals who eventually returned to their passive stance and did not continue the work of Movement building, Abolition, or deconstructing White Supremacy in society. Through examining these factors, we also identify aspects of the movement that were helpful and effective. We ask for understanding that these passages may not be comprehensive or complete. They are an attempt to expose what we understand some of what we know now to the light so that we can heal and further dialogue, and so that others can heal, converse, and add to the discussion in their own safe spaces.

Over time, it became clear that one common response to being traumatized by police, facing authority, and being under surveillance was to develop an attitude of paranoia toward fellow protesters, thereby redistributing police-induced trauma back into the movement. The movement clearly needs ways for participants to identify one another as comrades and to prevent infiltration by law enforcement. Unfortunately, police-induced trauma caused deep paranoia that impacted relationships between people who were in fact trustworthy, which helps police to achieve their goals and causes our Movement to falter. Cop Shit--shifting the focus from combating systems of oppression to surveillance attitudes toward comrades, is op shit. Op shit means those doing this paranoid trauma-induced work are in fact operating on behalf of the police and systems of oppression, not on behalf of the comrades. Cop shit & Op shit harmed the movement by planting distrust, and establishing feelings of distrust without clear systems to identify true commitment. In the worst form, this hyper-paranoia combined with people’s genuine anger or jealousy ( human emotions that regularly exist in groups if there are not means to process them) caused people to falsely claim that others were ops with the goal of destroying their platform or position. We acknowledge the role of capitalism and white supremacy in pre-teaching people to be competitive. We now see the import of exposing these factors, both for fellow whites and for any comrade who wants to examine the destructive role of white supremacy and perhaps to examine how these factors can show up as internalized racism as well.

It is also clearly known that a massive number of fellow white women came out for the movement in 2021. As a person who has been involved in Movement organizing for more than two decades, I noticed a phenomenon of clout and recognition seeking, features that literally came with white women who came out for the Movement with the best intentions. I do not exempt myself from seeking or receiving recognition nor self-promoting throughout my years in Movement. What differs is that facing my own racism led me to understand my recognition-seeking and develop systems of accountability in my own life and in Movement over decades. And guess what? I still have to look at that aspect of myself. I do not blame any person, raised in a white supremacist capitalist society, who enters all spaces seeking recognition or clout. That is what we are taught and the media, social media, capitalism constantly reinforce it. But the movement requires that a good part of our work is done anonymously. This anonymity is the deeper value of the very concept of Bloc. Bloc means we give up aspects of our identity for the Movement. Good Bloc--the total negation of personal identifiers--is rewarding because through it we achieve a deeper solidarity. The Movement doesn't and should not offer badges for Anarchist work. The tendency to try to re-create the girl scouts, to implement a system of hierarchy and rewards, was harmful to the movement because it caused people to chase the wrong results--selfish results, not movement results, name and social media recognition, even financial profits, not recognition for movement goals, media, not substantive messages.

Throughout the movement, we saw new "organizations" and non-profit organizations try to pop up. Suddenly, a person who literally just started protesting was the CEO of a new protest non-profit. For Movement veterans, this was hilarious and sad, an obvious admission of not being part of the movement at all. In Movement, we seek to deconstruct hierarchical structures. We view hierarchy as how white supremacy operates in society. When people attempt to establish hierarchies within Movement, they are reproducing white supremacy instead. Are we suggesting a deepening of annoying self-critical attitudes that can also be the demise of people’s attempts to experience their own power as people, organize, and create viable systems? Yikes. Overly critical attitudes are another dangerous part of the Portland Protest culture. Perhaps we can’t offer an answer here, but a question: How can we move forward with an awareness of hierarchy, competition, and recognition of aspects of white supremacist culture while also avoiding the harsh critical attitudes that mirror white paternalism?

As a member of a program of Recovery, I often wished that just one norm from Recovery, We Do Not Gossip, could become pervasive in the Movement. This part of the article does not pertain to any concerns regarding abuse, but to straight up gossip between people in the movement, unrelated to abuse or claims of abuse. Gossip is another way in which white supremacist ideology invaded the movement with a destructive outcome. Gossip was sometimes incited by paranoia, but it was also likely to walk right in with people claiming to be comrades. It wasn't just white women by any means...but it is an example of internalized white supremacy. Even when multiple people repeatedly tried to set boundaries with others in private conversations, many people simply do not see a difference between gossip and processing. Yet others used gossip intentionally to harm others and move forward their own agendas, thereby betraying the collective. Don’t get me wrong, processing is necessary and healthy! But hateful, vile comments, jealous remarks, and straight up lies invaded and destroyed crucial relationships. These behaviors caused harm and have no place in movement. From all of this we can identify the need to have stronger systems in place that keep us focused on collective Movement goals, expose and illustrate negative coping mechanisms that perpetuate white supremacy, while providing safe processing models for comrades.

The intention of this article, though, is not to become hypercritical of the Movement in a similarly damaging way. The point is to demonstrate the practice of self-analysis and to promote the idea that collective self-reflection and basic communication between comrades must be operant in order for us to win. While factors came in that damaged the Movement and impeded progress, there were also beautiful wins, effective strategies,  and triumphant moments of coming together.

Specifically, the use of public parks as meeting spaces, throughout the entire movement, was one of the most successful organizing strategies. For the most part, the people of Portland know our public parks better than the police who don't live here. Normalizing the practice of meeting at parks was one of the most enduring and powerful organizing strategies. In many cases, a microphone or space was opened for anyone who needed to communicate. The downside of meeting in the dark at parks in bloc was that it is easy for outsiders to infiltrate. The upsides are the creative use of public space, the use of indigenous land to organize against state domination (especially when Indigenous voices were centered), the availability of hiding spaces, the safety of open air venues, and the space for open communication between comrades.

The deepening of Mutual Aid systems is another beautiful aspect that emerged throughout this time period. Dozens of gardeners, medicine makers, food sourcers, shield makers, and medics came together to both protest and provide supports for comrades at parks prior to marching and at the street level. At one point, comrades had an actual ambulance that was painted and re-purposed as a movement-side ambulance. It was parked near the protests and staffed with actual movement-side medical professionals. Networks of mutual aid (including UMAN (United Mutual Aid Network) which we co-operate with comrades, still continue to operate today. Mutual Aid networks, even if they seem to only focus on one very specific aspect (like food, or herbs, or shields) are essential to long-term sustainability of the movement as a whole because they are also places where we can move information, step up and step back, yet stay connected and continue to organize for the battles to come.

[Lexy] Jail support was an example of one of the thriving support networks that was set up and operated by community members and has been one of the most essential resources and support services to activists on the ground throughout the timeline of this uprising as well. In some ways it was one of the glues that held us together. Organizers and community members would roam the crowds at any given protest shouting “jail support” and writing the phone number on the bodies of any activists who wanted it in ball point pen (since the police would confiscate your phone and belongings, the number had to be penned somewhere on your skin), for a direct link to bail funds or lawyers. In almost any case any activist that was taken in for a targeted arrest during a protest, you could call that number for ‘jail support’ written on the back of your hand or sideways on your arm and get your bail posted as soon as you were eligible. It was a great support to the racial justice activists on the ground but still those trips in and out of jail left lasting scars on many of us, as well. 

Our best shields and protectors on the front line were as fearless as they were relentless, and as a result of some of their selfless heroics they took the heaviest burden of those targeted beatings and arrests at the hands of hyper-aggressive, heavily armed and armored riot police. As being caged up and treated like a stray animal will make just about anyone feel dehumanized or less than, it was also the resulting court cases, probation and legal fallout from those arrests that became consuming enough to make many frontliners have to walk away. And then there was the deceptive deputization of Portland and state police as federal agents as an extra protest deterrent. So even if the charges were dropped by local and state authorities, they would most often get picked up again and revisited by the feds, making for an already tedious and exhaustive process of getting your name cleared at least twice as long. But many never wavered no matter how many times they got hauled in, beaten or arrested. Some as many as a dozen times over the course of the unrest so far. I remember one of my frontline comrades and I laughing together about how everyone who worked nights at Inverness, in Multnomah County Jail booking knew their info by face and name on sight from so many recent repeat visits.

So while there has been property damage, rioting and lawlessness on certain occasions, more often than not our resistance was organized, non violent, and more mindfully structured than many (including myself) would’ve ever believed possible in such a decentralized movement. That sustainability is attributed to the intensive amount of labor, effort and shared resources put in by our organizers, BIPOC leadership and our community members. 

This happened with protest communities across the country as well, as they banded themselves together to create mutual aid networks and support systems for the movement, to provide for themselves and their communities what the state was not. Without this, our ongoing collective resistance to these police killings would’ve fallen apart and unraveled quickly and never grown to be the largest, most mobilized civil rights movement in the history of this country.

And in the process of attempting and succeeding on most levels to create order in the midst of disorder, we proved that we can replace everything the system and its institutions have ever given us, from medical attention, to public safety, food and even shelter, all by our own means without the support of the state or from corporate institutions. And we also proved, the powers that be are helpless against our organized resistance, when we are unified and working together, towards a specific goal or purpose. We were successful in swiftly chasing the feds out of town. We placed constant pressure on the Portland police bureau, which continues to splinter under the weight of a mass exodus of sudden retirees and resignations. And there is the victory of our defensive stand and neighborhood occupation at Red House keeping it in the Kinney family's possession, even against all the city's forces trying to push them out. These are some of the most glaring examples of that collective power over the span of 2020/21 uprising. Now it’s time to finish the job. 

And as we find ourselves transitioning out of one chaotic and tumultuous year and into the unpredictability of what 2022 will bring, we find ourselves at this busy unmarked intersection of inbetweens and uncertainties, bumbling through haphazardly. On top of the trauma we’ve endured in the movement, we’ve also lost so many people in the last year and a half. Not just from this virus directly but also from the illnesses that went untreated because of it. The thousands of addicts who overdosed or lost their housing and stability due to relapse when the support groups and resources they relied on for their recovery evaporated in a puff of smoke, as the whole world shut down. The upsurge in white nationalist terrorism. The explosion of violent crime rates and gun violence as a result of  unemployment, desperation and overall instability. We’ve lost so many in such a short amount of time. Just existing in this present reality is utterly exhausting. And we still have to contend with going back to work or school to pretend as if everything is business as usual, even as the world and system we’ve lived within is burning down all around us.   

Existing within this climate is fraying our nerves and those who haven’t completely totally lost their shit are displaying an immense amount of inner strength and resilience. I’m not sure how to find the balance between self care and the relentless mindfulness it takes to keep our sanity through this gauntlet. All I do know is that acknowledging your vulnerabilities and addressing your own fears, anxieties and insecurities is more courageous than charging through it while pretending nothing is wrong and projecting a false image of strength. As our comrades are constantly reminding each other... hyper-independence is also its own trauma response. 

[Susan] As I meditate on how to close this process of reflection, I am on the mend from a three week take-down by Covid. I am glad to be alive, but also grateful that I will not fail to exhale the virus into this article. For while we fought, we also experienced the pressure to risk our lives in order to operate capitalism. While we fought, some comrades needed soup and zinc while others needed pain balm to take away the sting of pepper bullets and bruises of police batons. We know that Latin American, Indigenous, Pacific Islander, and Black comrades and family members faced illness and losses at the highest rates. Covid did not level the playing field or end racism, but it did enlighten millions of workers to the deeper reality of our own exploitation. The spiritual, psychological, emotional, economic, and geo-political outcomes of this endless layer of pain and suffering that impacts comrades globally cannot yet be predicted. But we do know that people are quitting their jobs in record numbers. We do know that a great reckoning with capitalism and its multi-layered systems of oppression is part of how we heal. 

To suggest that we have all of the answers, or even any specific answers for healing the nuanced individual pain of others, is ludicris. To suggest that maybe, our process of using our relationship as comrades, as well as our creativity, to do the ongoing work of discussing and healing our trauma is a form of mutual aid that could benefit the movement long term, feels true.

It is true that access to counselors, addiction recovery resources, and medicines (all of which also need to be examined for and healed of white supremacist, capitalist culture) will be needed to heal the damage caused by the carceral state, the police, and the capitalist system that pays white supremacy. Yet, it can also be true that some needed answers will not be found under the rubric of professional mental health services. If we are talking about Revolution, we need to have the courage to look beyond the healing modalities offered up by the system. 

For the Movement to fully realize our potential, priority must be placed on creating safe access to healing. This doesn't mean accepting the deeply colonial medical "care" system as it is. It means utilizing perspectives on healing that include, at their inception and in the way they function, the common goal of overthrowing systems of oppression. Witchcraft, Brujeria, Santoria, Espiritismo, Anti-racist pre-colonial Celtic spiritual practices, and Indigenous healing traditions are excellent directions to look in, but we must simultaneously learn about and work on our own healing, yet avoid appropriation and look back in the direction of our own heritages rather than invading spaces that do not belong to us. Creating music, art, literature, and rituals that help us to process our losses as individuals and micro-societies will be essential to understand and transmute our pain. To build a movement that heals, we must work beyond the physical realm while seeking healing in our emotional and spiritual selves. The harm is everywhere. The answers differ for each of us, but if we can walk forward accepting that holding one another through our withdrawals, through our revelations, through our betrayals, and through our small wins is as important as linking arms and holding space against the tear gas, we have a fighting chance.

[Lexy] So how do we continue the work in the meantime and cope? At our own pace. With our own coping skills and knowledge of self. By monitoring our inner dialogue and respecting our self care practices. Through self love and acceptance. But first through acknowledging the depth of our experiences and how they've impacted us. And it’s important to note that while this is the story of our collective trauma, all of us on the ground still have our own individual sets of physical and psychological trauma we endured throughout the course of these events that we will all have to heal from in our own ways, time and through our own processes. 

We have to stay in lockstep with each other more than ever with the current upsurge in recruiting and organization of white nationalist hate groups and far right militias. With the system unraveling in front of our eyes more everyday, the lines have been drawn and the side that is more pacifist will likely be the losing side. The police and the state have nothing to gain from defeating white supremacy, their power is predicated on it, after all. We are the only real shield against the rising tide of fascism and white nationalists in this country. And we’re all going through this as one, even while so many forces are trying to divide us. Those who care about others have to stick together like never before right now. Speak kindly and gently to yourself and if you catch your demons poisoning your inner monologue, check that bitch. You deserve all the credit in the world for standing up and keeping it together when so many others are content and complacent to look the other way and function only out of their own self interest. Hold your loved ones closely and focus on building community. With No gods and No masters, we gotta stay together and we gotta stay tight.