We Need More: On Police Brutality, Reformism, and '8 Can't Wait'

By Justin Yuan

Republished from Michigan Specter.

“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.” — Angela Davis

At this point, I’m sure everyone reading this is well aware of the uprisings that took place across the country and around the world following the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. I’m sure you’ve all seen your social media feeds filled with a slew of heartfelt proclamations that Black Lives Matter, personal stories of discrimination and loss, as well as ways to move forward from these tragedies, enact change, and achieve some measure of justice for those murdered by police. Chief among the many campaigns that have been circulating is 8 Can’t Wait, a project by Campaign Zero.

Since COVID-19 threw a wrench in my summer plans, I spent break commiserating with friends and comrades, watching police beat and arrest protesters, and endlessly doomscrolling through Twitter. But in the weeks and months after the grisly video of cops slowly killing George Floyd was released, I noticed more and more posts across social media from friends, family, and strangers alike all repeating the same phrase: “8 Can’t Wait.” Tentatively hopeful, I dug in.

Was an abolitionist project finally breaking through to the wider public? Was Angela Davis involved? These were my initial thoughts, but as I dug further and learned more about this social media phenomenon, my hopes shattered replaced only with the same numbness I felt freshman year when my roommate told me, without a hint of irony, that if every police officer were made to watch the Green Book — starring Mahershala Ali and Viggo Mortensen — police violence would plummet. Now I hope I shatter your hopes as well.

8 Can’t Wait was launched in early June in response to the killing of George Floyd and quickly gained steam on social media and in the news. Fawning think pieces and op-eds everywhere from Vox to Rolling Stone to GQ to Variety accompanied glowing endorsements from high-profile political and cultural figures such as Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, Ariana Grande, and others, lauding the project’s “succinct and clear message” and potential to save lives. At the core of the effort are eight “data-driven” reforms that Campaign Zero claims would decrease police killings by an almost unimaginable 72%. At first glance, the reforms look promising:

• Ban Chokeholds and Strangleholds

• Require De-escalation

• Require Warning before Shooting

• Exhaust all other means before Shooting

• Duty to Intervene

• Ban Shooting at Moving Vehicles

• Require Use of Force Continuum

• Require Comprehensive Reporting

Think of all the deadly encounters that could be avoided if police were required to de-escalate. Or the lives that could be saved if chokeholds and strangleholds were banned across the country. However, the assertion that widespread implementation of these eight policies would result in anything close to a 72% drop in police killings is misleading at best. Countless cities, townships, and states across the country have already enacted many of the reforms 8 Can’t Wait prescribes. Many large cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia already have at least half of them. In fact, Campaign Zero confirmed both Tucson and San Francisco have all eight policies in place. While claiming to reduce police killings by 72% certainly grabs attention, in reality, many cities would only see a fraction of that reduction, and that’s assuming that 8 Can’t Wait’s analysis of the data is reliable. Chicago, a hotbed of police brutality, witnessed 76 police killings over the past 7 years, 56 of them black. The city also already has seven of the eight reforms listed by 8 Can’t Wait, so the people of Chicago will have to look elsewhere for jaw-dropping reductions of police killings.

Unfortunately, Campaign Zero’s supposedly “data-driven” policies aren’t exactly as clear-cut as they claim. In their own study, they allege that the average police department, out of the 91 that they analyzed, already had three of their eight recommended reforms. Right off the bat, that finding throws their fantastical 72% reduction of police killings out the window for the majority of cities, and those with only one or two policies aren’t guaranteed anything close to a three-quarter reduction in police killings. The aforementioned 2016 study that Campaign Zero conducted and based 8 Can’t Wait on contains methodological issues that seriously undermine the bold claims that it’s being used to support. It compiles data from just 91 police departments over only an 18-month period.

It’s well documented that police departments and officers get away with heinous violations of human rights and civil liberties all the damn time. As things currently stand, police, as individuals and as an institution, enjoy nearly limitless legal protections.

For example, in July 2016, police officers brutally attacked and arrested Shase Howse, who was looking for his keys in front of his home, after he replied “Yes, what the fuck?” when asked if he lived in the building. Ludicrously charged with multiple felony counts, Howse lawyered up and the charges were dropped.

If, like me, you wondered how Howse’s attackers got away with physically assaulting an innocent man then lying about what happened, it’ll probably make you as angry as I was to learn that police lying not only in their post-incident paperwork but in court and in affidavits is so common that cops themselves have a word for it — “testilying.” In fact, it’s so ridiculously bad that even the quintessential conservative (and fucking creepy-ass weirdo) himself, Alan Dershowitz, has said that “Almost all police lie about whether they violated the Constitution in order to convict guilty defendants” and that “All prosecutors, defense lawyers, and judges are aware of [that].” As bad as all that sounds, don’t worry. It gets worse.

Justifiably upset at what happened to him, Howse tried to sue the officers in federal court for excessive force. He lost. As it turned out, those officers are protected by qualified immunity, a legal doctrine affirmed by the Supreme Court that protects government officials from civil liability unless they violate a “clearly established” right. In essence, Howse, along with every other individual in the country, has no clearly established right to not be assaulted on his porch. Qualified immunity is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the astronomical number of “get out of jail free” cards that cops have. So you can rest easy knowing that cops can do basically whatever they want, especially if you’re poor and a minority, and get off either scot-free or with a slap on the wrist.

The issue that liberals like those behind 8 Can’t Wait are either unable or unwilling to grasp — and that abolitionists have been calling attention to for decades — is that police brutality is a matter of power. So long as police are empowered to impose their will violently on the very people they claim to protect, injustice and suffering will continue, and no amount of pinky swears or promises will curtail that power. While projects like 8 Can’t Wait appear well-meaning in their focus on police killings and how to reduce them, the oppression of poor and marginalized communities does not begin or end with a single statistic. 8 Can’t Wait is hampered by statistics that lack geographic, political, and historical nuance and, instead, tries to simplify the systemic issue of policing down to specific, personal, lethal encounters.

Any successful attempt at beating back the tide of police killings must reckon with the whole of the issue, which means recognizing and challenging police militarization, the prison-industrial complex, and our cruel, predatory criminal (in)justice system. In other words, abolition is the only sustainable, truly effective way forward. Applied to the realm of police killing, the abolitionist theory of change demonstrates that the only way to permanently end the violence at the hands of police is to dismantle the entire rotten system such that police officers and departments don’t have the tools or ability to deal out death and suffering. The tepid reforms Campaign Zero puts forth with 8 Can’t Wait do nothing to shift power away from police, and their failure to address the near-complete lack of accountability and oversight that police departments across the country enjoy seriously compromises the potential effectiveness of the already-limited policies that 8 Can’t Wait is pushing.

The frustrating thing about incrementalist reform projects like 8 Can’t Wait is that there’s no need to wave around in the darkness searching desperately for any way forward. The abolitionist movement has been around for decades, created and led by black scholars and activists, such as the black queer women of the Combahee River Collective. From the modern carceral state to American policing’s origins in slave patrols and explicitly discriminatory night watches, abolitionists such as Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor have spent years illuminating the fundamental cruelty of police and prisons as an institution and, more importantly, blazing a path toward an alternative future where our response to crime is not to incarcerate and punish but to rehabilitate, strive for restitution, and address the underlying causes of crime, such as poverty and a lack of social welfare programs.

While there is no single, concrete path to abolition, there are clear next-steps that abolitionists have emphasized for years — ones that would actually challenge the power of police, shrink the carceral system, and put an end to state-sanctioned violence, incarceration, and suffering. In fact, as a result of the infuriatingly shallow demands of 8 Can’t Wait, abolitionists from across the country have come together to form 8 to Abolition, a campaign focused on prison and police abolition that eschews the nitpicking incrementalism of 8 Can’t Wait, calling the project “dangerous and irresponsible” for “offering a slate of reforms that have already been tried and failed, that mislead a public newly invigorated to the possibilities of police and prison abolition, and that do not reflect the needs of criminalized communities.” Their demands are:

• Defund police

• Demilitarize communities

• Remove police from schools

• Free people from jails and prisons

• Repeal laws that criminalize survival

• Invest in community self-governance

• Provide safe housing for everyone

• Invest in care, not cops

A commitment to abolition in line with the demands set forth by the activists behind 8 to Abolition is absolutely imperative. The ultimate, guiding vision of the resurgent socialist Left must be one of abolition. The moral gravity of having a system of unaccountable arbiters of death and violence, enforcing a racist legal code of class oppression, throwing people in pens to be the slave labor of the modern capitalist economy makes the cause of abolition a necessary one. The fascist Right sees the role that the police and carceral state play in the perpetuation of white supremacy and bourgeois class domination. They think it’s great. The liberal Right throws its hands up in exaggerated shock, tosses a pack of Band-Aids to the dead and dying, and calls it a day. It is up to the working-class movement of the Left to fight like hell because, until all of us are free, none of us are.

How the Poor Continue to Die

By Kevin Van Meter

Republished from The Institute for Anarchist Studies.

Humanity has entered a period “where every day people are dying among strangers.”[1]  

Daily life itself has become “strange” and isolating as social distancing and quarantine measures are being lifted, then reenacted.  Federal troops operating as secret police in an attempt to occupy American cities, are repelled by protestors and the populace.  News cycles shriek and squall with nearly every pontification from the political class as they continue to carry out their “sacred mission,” which in recent memory is accompanied by squealing ineptitude in regard to improving the actual conditions of life.  Or, maybe they are not inept.  Months ago, at the onset of the pandemic, pundits and politicians had already declared that testing, treatments, and vaccines would not be offered to everyone.    

A pervasive level of violence, of frivolous intrusions into the routine behaviors of people of color, of a cruel disgust directed toward unhoused and poor peoples, of an impulsive need to regulate the expressions of those outside the gender binary, of a paranoid animosity toward immigrants and “antifa” and the “other” is being expressed by a particular sector of the population.  This sector – overwhelmingly good Christians, white, and middle-class – have been expressing this violence to such an extent that everyday life has been saturated by it.  For us “others” it is omnipresent, for many “others” it has been this way for five hundred years.  Yet, the poor continue to die, often “among strangers.”                      

In 1929 George Orwell was down and out in Paris and witness to the goings-on at a hospital that served the poor.  Seventeen years later he drew on his initial observations along with scribbled notes to complete the article “How the Poor Die.”  These words, published during the aftermath of the second World War, deserve our full attention in this moment: “However great the kindness and the efficiency, in every hospital death there will be some cruel, squalid detail, something perhaps too small to be told but leaving terribly painful memories behind, arising out of the haste, the crowding, the impersonality of a place where every day people are dying among strangers.”[2]  Then, as now, the gallant efforts of medical personnel, front-line and essential workers are often performed with kindness and efficiency, and with haste.  Nonetheless, the poor died in 1929 and 1946 in the ways they have continued to die, have always died.  In hospitals amongst strangers and in the streets, shanty towns and derelict apartments, in asylums and prisons, reservations and Bantustans. And if at all possible, in these same places, amongst relations, chosen as well as blood.    

Currently the cruelty of COVID-19 is compounded not just by social isolation but the realization that those who will die from this disease will do so among strangers.  On ventilators, in isolation units, in nursing homes, without the comfort of loved ones or human touch.  If the projections are correct, even with the recommended medical and social interventions, the dead will overwhelm the living.  It is likely that you, the humble reader, will be called upon to bury the departed, deceased, dead.        

As the dead overwhelm the living, dead labor will attempt to overcome living labor. “Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour,” Karl Marx notoriously quipped, “and lives the more, and more labour it sucks.”[3]  What has become clear to large swaths of the populace, not just devotees to hundred and fifty year old texts, is that value and wealth in a capitalist society (the portion consumed in production and reproduction is dead labor) are produced only through the efforts and expended capacities of the working-class (which is living labor).  As Marx offered, “We mean by labour-power, or labour-capacity, the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being, capabilities which [they] set in motion whenever [they produce] a use-value of any kind.”[4]  And the great promise of Marx, of all revolutionaries, is that we will produce ‘goods and services’ useful to human beings in accordance with their needs and all of our abilities collectively.   

An economic system hell bent on endless growth has seemingly been replaced, possibly only temporarily, by shortsighted kleptocracy.  Extending well beyond the current administration, bourgeois society has embraced law breaking for themselves and harsh, hard-hearted punishment of the poor for minor property and drug “crimes.”  While this has always been, the contemporary American political class now flaunts its wrongdoings in full view.  With the endless accumulation of capital cast aside for the immediate acquisition of wealth, the imposition of work has become more malicious.  Front-line and essential workers and those in the service industry are being forced back to work at the threat of being destitute, with mass evictions looming.  The tiny deaths of exhaustion and daily injury have been replaced by the alternating certainty of death by starvation or death by pandemic.  Major retailers call them “heroes” as they take away their hazard pay.  And even school children, the sacrificial but essential workers of the future, are being sent back to their desks as home instruction and homework has not been sufficiently disciplinary.  All of this is evident with the return of a slogan, a capitalist maxim: Arbeit macht frei, or work will set you free. 

Pandemic and poverty is becoming plague and privation; those who are penniless will soon face famine. Without work there are no wages, without wages there are few ways to obtain the means of survival, the means of reproducing life itself.  Nevertheless, social reproduction is essential, and the work required – often unwaged, racialized, and gendered – is indispensable.  Since workers expending labor-power in the production process is how capitalism produces value, social reproduction is central to the capitalist mode of production.  As a result, the worksite where this is produced has become of key interest to the bourgeoisie.  Feminist scholar Silvia Federici noted this in the historical record: “The body, then, came to the foreground of social policies because it appeared not only as a beast inert to the stimuli of work, but also as the container of labor-power, a means of production, the primary work-machine.”[5]  The body as machine has been a central metaphor of our capitalist society, now the cogs are being discarded willy-nilly with automation and information computational processes that require fewer and fewer workers.  

Of the numerous realities the pandemic has uncovered, few are as stark as how front-line, essential, service industry workers are not just seen as replaceable but as expendable.  And many are out of work.  When a member of the working-class is without wages and the paltry handouts from the government vanish, reproduction of one’s biological functions and faculties are still required.  Working in front-line, essential, service industries is work as is seeking to obtain work in such sectors.  Working to reproduce one’s own capacities is work as is working without a wage to reproduce waged workers along with the “nonwaged, underwaged, not-yet waged, and no-longer waged,” to quote a contemporary feminist scholar.[6]  Hence, all of life has become work, with its simultaneous, and seemingly contradictory absence and total permeation.  Returning to Marx again:      

“the working day contains the full 24 hours, with the deduction of the few hours of rest without which labour-power is absolutely incapable of renewing it services.  Hence it is self-evident that the worker is nothing other than labour-power for the duration of [their] whole life, and that therefore all [their] disposable time is by nature and by right labour-time, to be devoted to the self-valorization of capital.”[7]  

Our whole lives have been subsumed by capitalism, and now, for far too many of our fellow human beings, death has become just as alienating.  

* * *

In collective, common, liberatory moments of ‘great kindness and efficiency,’ ‘amongst relations, chosen as well as blood,’ we are given a glimpse of “a paradise of unbroken solidarities.”[8]  However, the means of communication, mutual aid, and social relations required to build such a paradise are often destabilize by the very forces that should be constructing them.  

Another underling reality exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic is final confirmation that the Left in the United States has been historically defeated, the working-class decomposed.  Although generalized austerity, violent repression, mass incarceration, direct attacks on unions and community-based organizations, restructuring of everyday life toward neoliberal and individualistic ends, culture wars, drug wars, endless wars against the populace are partially to blame.  But the Left must take responsibility for its internal operational failures, nonsensical squabbles, unprincipled and self-servingly middle-class politics.  This has left working-class and poor people to their own defenses, with limited material resources, against the pandemic and unfolding crises.  In effect, the poor continue to die in part due to this ineptitude, purity politics, and too often defenses of middle-class ideals and irrelevant academic ideas.  

To define such a sector of the body politic would take many more words than can be allotted here.  Simply put, this includes those who are “practically minded” members of the Democratic Party establishment all the way leftward to include some of the newly articulated Democratic Socialist alternatives, along with much of organized labor, the non-profit sector, as well as do-gooders and providers of social services.  Where the formal Left begins and the bureaucrats, bourgeoisie, social workers, and middle managers of our misery end is unclear, as they are often indistinguishable and hence what that follows is imprecise.  Beyond the established Left there are ongoing mutual aid efforts, wildcat and rent strikes, and uprisings amongst everyday people, often led by young Black insurgents.  These radical, revolutionary, and daring, spontaneous but still organized, abolitionists, anti-capitalists, and commoners are outside of the formal body politic.

Defensive and self-serving reactions in the guise of “What about small landlords?” and “What about family owned businesses?” have erupted on the Left in response to calls for rent strikes, paid sick leave, hazard differentials, and a little workplace democracy with the same veracity as “What about good cops?” and “Don’t all lives matter?” on the right.  Universal demands for income, healthcare, and housing seemingly require an addendum that first we must distinguish between who are the deserving and who are the undeserving poor.  Then, typed into the social media fields of too many who know better: “I support unions but just not at my business or workplace,” “I support tenants’ rights but just not my tenants,” “I support Bernie but what about these horrible ‘__________.’”  While I am paraphrasing, we will get to those who fill these blanks shortly.  Since we have addressed how the middle-class Left and the bourgeoisie defends itself against the rabble informally, we must look at their formal practices.                 

Saving “establishments,” from restaurant chains to retail stores, “public infrastructure” from universities to the library and post office, “private associations” from business improvement districts and landlord lobbying groups to social service non-profits, as well as the facades of representative democracy and private property, are being managed by grinning neoliberal “little Eichmann’s.”  Or, possibly worse, those who wish they were.  Deep austerity measures have been instituted by and throughout these establishments, infrastructures, and associations while money flowing into them has been accumulated by bureaucracies impervious to worker or citizen demands.  

All of life has become work, and to manage this all of life has been infected by bureaucracy.  What is bureaucracy and why is it so pervasive?  Member of the French group Socialisme ou Barbarie, Claude Lefort, has an answer: “one overlooks the fact that in one and the same movement the bureaucracy establishes itself at the heart of social life and presents itself as an end, that it responds to a technical need and subordinates it to the imperative of power.”[9] Bureaucracies, even progressive and liberal ones, have sought to silence working-class voices: in social services they sought to silence those of unemployed people and welfare recipients, in trade unions expressions of working-class self-activity, political parties those of the masses, universities those of faculty and student shared governance, corporations those of workers initiatives and demands, healthcare those of the ill and infirm, landlords those of their tenants, the legal system and prisons those of prisoners, and then there are others.  At the moment you can hear bureaucrats mumbling out of the side of their mouths, a proverb: “we have effectively silenced them in life, how dare they not be silent in death.”              

Moreover, the desperate need to feel “right” and “moral” is cover for those who ignore structural inequalities and stark differentials of power that exist and are now amplified in our society.  Far worse, after five hundred years of struggle against capitalism and the state most of the Left is willfully ignorant how social change occurs.  Nearly immeasurable personal choices and consumerist acts – such as voting, buying local, eating vegan or organic, riding bikes, being sustainable or peaceful or mindful or, which is by far the worst, conscious – are held as the apex of political action.  Or, maybe by appealing to the “better natures” of bosses and landlords, billionaires and politicians or “speaking truth to power,” things will progress, improve, change.  Worst still, if our arguments are right and true, clear and concise, we will win in the free marketplace of ideas.  And finally, as a great comedic mind once offered, “rights are the last resort of a [person] with no argument” and the Left’s call for “rights” ignore how often they are suspended in times of crisis or have never existed for large swaths of the planet’s populace.  This should be absolutely apparent to anyone who has been on the streets of a supposedly liberal Pacific Northwest city over the past few weeks, or has simply been observing.  Now, that we have considered how the Left views how the actual lives and deaths of working-class and poor peoples as externalities in formal ways, the maliciousness of their informal practices should be noted too.  

A self-serving and moralistic politics has dominated the Left as of late, where faux outrage meant to condemn the personal lifestyles and decisions of the target while holding one’s own personal lifestyles and decisions as morally superior.  Meaning, the illusion of choice and free will results in a working-class bartender being scolded by their middle-class customer, who is in the midst of guzzling down another twenty-dollar cocktail, for taking a cheaper Uber / Lyft home after a twelve hour shift rather than the more expensive local cab company.  Notions of self-care, GoFundMe campaigns for medical bills, Buzzfeed articles and similar lists given as commandments – “20 Books You Must Read this Year,” “6 ways to be antiracist, because being ‘not racist’ isn’t enough” – are individual solutions, often impossible ones, to what are social problems.  These developments are often coupled with a crises of representation and measure along with the disappearance of class as an operating category.  ‘Interlocking oppressions’ and ‘identity’ were to augment and complement class as “new measures of oppression and inequality,” to use the apt words of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, rather than replace it.[10]  Or, in fact, it is the middle-class assumptions of the contemporary Left and radical forces that have placed various issues outside of, above, and primary to class because it allows the middle-class to claim legitimacy within a fundamentally unjust and undemocratic system at the expense of working-class and poor peoples.  It is as if the Left has forgotten that, “Immigrant issues, gender issues and antiracisms are working-class issues.”[11]  Nevertheless there are issues neighboring these too.              

Behind call outs, privilege politics, and reinvigorated essentialisms, one can hear the tired slogans: “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is gonna win!” and “Fight the People!”  According to various factions that splintered the Students for a Democratic Society in 1969, of which the Weather Underground is the most pernicious, the American war in Vietnam was bad, so the Vietcong was good; politically conscious radicals were good, white working-class people were bad.  Purges, purity tests, self-criticism, or better off self-flagellation, immediately followed such recitations.  

Not then, and certainty not now, have such measures resulted in strong liberatory movements much less substantive, material or otherwise, gains for oppressed and working-class people.  Nor have movements themselves found transformative ways to address internalized oppression and behaviors, even with the gallant efforts led by women and trans people of color.  After fifty-years of such politics, one would think with the clearly observable historic defeat of Left and radical forces with the rise of incipient fascism other avenues would be explored, other ideas rediscovered and developed, other strategies and tactics deployed.  

In the streets many revolutionaries now call forth “fire from heaven,” not out of revenge or resentment but for our very survival.  Emile Zola was not so forgiving in Germinal: “There he stood with arms raised like an inspired prophet of old, calling down the wrath of God upon the murderers, foretelling the age of justice and the coming extermination of the bourgeoisie by fire from heaven, since it has committed the foulest crime of all and caused the workers and the penniless of the world to be slain.”[12]  Though, what is to be done when those who “caused the workers and the penniless of the world to be slain” are not just the political class, the bourgeoisie, Republican governors and liberal mayors but our fellow citizens?  Fellow citizens refusing to wear masks, coughing in the faces of essential workers and spitting on cashiers, setting up roadblocks to harass those fleeing wildfires, driving through crowds of protestors and arming themselves against their neighbors.  And, with particular vitriol, calling for and in some cases actively exterminating Black and Indigenous people of color, trans women of color, immigrant children, the elderly and infirm.  

As I have claimed herein, the Left not only lacks a concept of social change, it is entirely unprincipled.  But even without principles the Left is being educated nightly as it is struck over the head by police batons.  And the radical and revolutionary movements are discovering its principles and power in concert with thousands of others who have set the fires from heaven upon police stations. Banks, bosses, landlords will burn too.  

Where does one find prospects and possibilities within this plague?  Now, as always, in the new struggles that are emerging, and new social antagonisms being expressed.  As I sat down to write this it is the multitudinous mutual aid projects growing in barren landscapes, then those standing “with arms raised.”

For those of us who are radicals and revolutionaries, we will be called to do immoral things in this crisis. Immoral by the standards of the Left and progressive moralists and possibly immoral by our own standards.  It is clear that the Democratic Party establishment and Left which aligns itself with it has made peaceful revolution impossible.  Whereas the Left is more interested in its own self-preservation and defense of its position in the capitalist, white supremacist, heteronormative, settler colonial, property owning systems then a substantive redistribution of wealth, land, power.  Whereas much of the radical Left would rather confront each other over perceived slights than directly confront power and construct counterpowers.  Currently the streets of Portland, Chicago, New York along with the streets of rural towns are all bursting with protestors. They are refusing to delegate responsibility for their futures to agencies outside of themselves, to representatives and non-profits, to the so-called official organizations of the working-class.  However, now, rather than dying amongst strangers, thousands of unhoused, poor, women, trans and gender non-conforming people, people of color, Indigenous, immigrant, imprisoned, “others,” and militant accomplices who accompany them have chosen the possibility of death rather than certain death so that they may live. So that we all may live.     

An organizer, autonomist, and author, Kevin Van Meter is the author of Guerrillas of Desire: Notes on Everyday Resistance and Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible (IAS/AK Press, 2017), co-editor of Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents (AK Press, 2010), and is currently writing his next book Reading Struggles: Autonomist Marxism from Detroit to Turin and Back Again (Forthcoming, AK Press, 2021-2022).  Van Meter can be reached via his website: www.readingstruggles.info.   

Notes

[1] George Orwell, “How the Poor Die” in In Front of Your Nose, 1945-1950: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds. (Boston: David R. Goodine, 2000), 232.

[2] Ibid. 

[3] Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Ben Fowkes, trans. (London and New York: Pengiun Books, 1990), 342. 

[4] Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 270. 

[5] Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004), 137-138. 

[6] Kathi Weeks, The Problem With Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham and London” Duke University Press, 2011), 121.  

[7] Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 375. 

[8] Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Build in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 3. 

[9] Claude Lefort, “What is Bureaucracy?” in The Political Forms of Modern Society: Bureaucracy, Democracy, Totalitarianism, John B. Thompson, ed. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986), 119-120.

[10] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (ed.), How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), 4.

[11] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 216.

[12] Emile Zola, Germinal (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1988), 413. 

The Long Shadow of Racial Fascism

By Alberto Toscano

Republished from Boston Review.

In the wake of the 2016 election, public intellectuals latched onto the new administration’s organic and ideological links with the alt- and far right. But a mass civic insurgency against racial terror—and the federal government’s authoritarian response—has pushed hitherto cloistered academic debates about fascism into the mainstream, with Peter E. Gordon, Samuel Moyn, and Sarah Churchwell taking to the pages of the New York Review of Books to hash out whether it is historically apt or politically useful to call Trump a fascist. The F-word has also been making unusual forays into CNN, the New York Times, and mainstream discourse. The increasing prospect that any transfer of power will be fraught—Trump has hinted he will not accept the results if he loses—has further intensified the stakes, with even the dependable neoliberal cheerleader Thomas Friedman conjuring up specters of civil war.

Notwithstanding the changing terrain, talk of fascism has generally stuck to the same groove, namely asking whether present phenomena are analogous to those familiar from interwar European dictatorships. Sceptics of comparison underscore the way in which the analogy of fascism can either treat the present moment as exceptional, papering over the history of distinctly American forms of authoritarianism, or, alternatively, be so broad as to fail to define what is unique about our current predicament. Analogy’s advocates point to the need to detect family resemblances with past despotisms before it’s too late, often making their case by advancing some ideal-typical checklist, whether in terms of the elements of or the steps toward fascism. But what if our talk of fascism were not dominated by the question of analogy?

Attending to the long history of Black radical thinking about fascism and anti-fascist resistance—to what Cedric Robinson called a “Black construction of fascism” alternative to the “historical manufacture of fascism as a negation of Western Geist”—could serve to dislodge the debate about fascism from the deadlock of analogy, providing the resources to confront our volatile interregnum.

Long before Nazi violence came to be conceived of as beyond analogy, Black radical thinkers sought to expand the historical and political imagination of an anti-fascist left. They detailed how what could seem, from a European or white vantage point, to be a radically new form of ideology and violence was, in fact, continuous with the history of colonial dispossession and racial slavery.

Pan-Africanist George Padmore, breaking with the Communist International over its failure to see the likenesses between “democratic” imperialism and fascism, would write in How Britain Rules Africa (1936) of settler-colonial racism as “the breeding-ground for the type of fascist mentality which is being let loose in Europe today.” He would go on to see in South Africa “the world’s classic Fascist state,” grounded on the “unity of race as against class.” Padmore’s “Colonial Fascism” thus anticipated Aimé Césaire’s memorable description of fascism as the boomerang effect of European imperialist violence.

African American anti-fascists shared the anti-colonial analysis that the Atlantic world’s history of racial violence belied the novelty of intra-European fascism. Speaking in Paris at the Second International Writers Congress in 1937, Langston Hughes declared: “We Negroes in America do not have to be told what fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.” It was an insight that certainly would not have surprised any reader of W. E. B. Du Bois’s monumental reckoning with the history of U.S. racial capitalism, Black Reconstruction in America (1935). As Amiri Baraka would suggest much later, building on Du Bois’s passing mentions of fascism, the overthrow of Reconstruction enacted a “racial fascism” that long predated Hitlerism in its use of racial terror, conscription of poor whites, and manipulation of (to quote the famous definition of fascism by Georgi Dimitrov) “the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist sector of finance capital.”

In this view, a U.S. racial fascism could go unremarked because it operated on the other side of the color line, just as colonial fascism took place far from the imperial metropole. As Bill V. Mullen and Christopher Vials have suggested in their vital The US Antifascism Reader (2020):

For people of color at various historical moments, the experience of racialization within a liberal democracy could have the valence of fascism. That is to say, while a fascist state and a white supremacist democracy have very different mechanisms of power, the experience of racialized rightlessness within a liberal democracy can make the distinction between it and fascism murky at the level of lived experience. For those racially cast aside outside of liberal democracy’s system of rights, the word ‘fascism’ does not always conjure up a distant and alien social order.

Or, as French writer Jean Genet observed on May 1, 1970, at a rally in New Haven for the liberation of Black Panther Party chairman Bobby Seale: “Another thing worries me: fascism. We often hear the Black Panther Party speak of fascism, and whites have difficulty accepting the word. That’s because whites have to make a great effort of imagination to understand that blacks live under an oppressive fascist regime.”

It was largely thanks to the Panthers that the term “fascism” returned to the forefront of radical discourse and activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The United Front Against Fascism conference held in Oakland in 1969 brought together a wide swathe of the Old and New Lefts, as well as Asian American, Chicano, Puerto Rican (Young Lords), and white Appalachian (Young Patriots Organization) activists who had developed their own perspectives on U.S. fascism—for instance, by foregrounding the experience of Japanese internment during World War II. In a striking indication of the peculiarities and continuities of U.S. anti-fascist traditions, among the chief planks of the conference was the notionally reformist demand for community or decentralized policing—to remove racist white officers from Black neighborhoods and exert local checks on law enforcement.

Political prisoners close to the Panthers theorized specifically about what we could call “late fascism” (by analogy with “late capitalism”) in the United States. At the same time that debates about “new fascisms” were polarizing radical debate across Europe, the writing and correspondence of Angela Y. Davis and George Jackson generated a theory of fascism from the lived experience of the violent nexus between the carceral state and racial capitalism. Davis, the Black Marxist and feminist scholar, needs little introduction, her 1970 imprisonment on trumped-up conspiracy charges having rocketed her to the status of household name in the United States and an icon of solidarity worldwide. Fewer remember that the conspiracy charge against Davis arose from an armed courtroom attack by her seventeen-year-old bodyguard, Jonathan Jackson, with the goal of forcing the release of the Soledad Brothers, three African American prisoners facing the death penalty for the killing of a white prison guard. Among them was Jonathan’s older brother, the incarcerated Black revolutionary George Jackson, with whom Davis corresponded extensively. Jackson was killed by a prison sniper during an escape attempt on August, 21, 1971, a few days before the Soledad Brothers were to be tried.

In one of his prison letters on fascism, posthumously collected in Blood in My Eye (1972), Jackson offered the following reflection:

When I am being interviewed by a member of the old guard and point to the concrete and steel, the tiny electronic listening device concealed in the vent, the phalanx of goons peeping in at us, his barely functional plastic tape-recorder that cost him a week’s labor, and point out that these are all manifestations of fascism, he will invariably attempt to refute me by defining fascism simply as an economic geo-political affair where only one party is allowed to exist aboveground and no opposition political activity is allowed.

Jackson encourages us to consider what happens to our conceptions of fascism if we take our bearings not from analogies with the European interwar scene, but instead from the materiality of the prison-industrial complex, from the “concrete and steel,” from the devices and personnel of surveillance and repression.

In their writing and correspondence, marked by interpretive differences alongside profound comradeship, Davis and Jackson identify the U.S. state as the site for a recombinant or even consummate form of fascism. Much of their writing is threaded through Marxist debates on the nature of monopoly capitalism, imperialism and capitalist crises, as well as, in Jackson’s case, an effort to revisit the classical historiography on fascism. On these grounds, Jackson and Davis stress the disanalogies between present forms of domination and European exemplars, but both assert the privileged vantage point provided by the view from within a prison-judicial system that could accurately be described as a racial state of terror.

This both echoes and departs from the Black radical theories of fascism, such as Padmore’s or Césaire’s, which emerged from the experience of the colonized. The new, U.S. fascism that Jackson and Davis strive to delineate is not an unwanted return from the “other scene” of colonial violence, but originates from liberal democracy itself. Indeed, it was a sense of the disavowed bonds between liberal and fascist forms of the state which, for Davis, was one of the great lessons passed on by Herbert Marcuse, whose grasp of this nexus in 1930s Germany allowed him to discern the fascist tendencies in the United States of his exile.

Both Davis and Jackson also stress the necessity to grasp fascism not as a static form but as a process, inflected by its political and economic contexts and conjunctures. Checklists, analogies, or ideal-types cannot do justice to the concrete history of fascism. Jackson writes of “the defects of trying to analyze a movement outside of its process and its sequential relationships. You gain only a discolored glimpse of a dead past.” He remarks that fascism “developed from nation to nation out of differing levels of traditionalist capitalism’s dilapidation.”

Where Jackson and Davis echo their European counterparts is in the idea that “new” fascisms cannot be understood without seeing them as responses to the insurgencies of the 1960s and early 1970s. For Jackson, fascism is fundamentally a counterrevolutionary form, as evidenced by the violence with which it represses any consequential threat to the state. But fascism does not react immediately against an ascendant revolutionary force; it is a kind of delayed counterrevolution, parasitic on the weakness or defeat of the anti-capitalist left, “the result of a revolutionary thrust that was weak and miscarried—a consciousness that was compromised.” Jackson argues that U.S.-style fascism is a kind of perfected form—all the more insidiously hegemonic because of the marriage of monopoly capital with the (racialized) trappings of liberal democracy. As he declared:

Fascism has established itself in a most disguised and efficient manner in this country. It feels so secure that the leaders allow us the luxury of a faint protest. Take protest too far, however, and they will show their other face. Doors will be kicked down in the night and machine-gun fire and buckshot will become the medium of exchange.

In Davis’s concurrent theorizing, the carceral, liberationist perspective on fascism has a different inflection. For Davis, fascism in the United States takes a preventive and incipient form. The terminology is adapted from Marcuse, who remarked, in an interview from 1970, “In the last ten to twenty years we’ve experienced a preventative counterrevolution to defend us against a feared revolution, which, however, has not taken place and doesn’t stand on the agenda at the moment.” Some of the elements of Marcuse’s analysis still resonate (particularly poignant, in the wake of Breonna Taylor’s murder by police, is his mention of no-knock warrants):

The question is whether fascism is taking over in the United States. If by that we understand the gradual or rapid abolition of the remnants of the constitutional state, the organization of paramilitary troops such as the Minutemen, and granting the police extraordinary legal powers such as the notorious no-knock law which does away with the inviolability of the home; if one looks at the court decisions of recent years; if one knows that special troops—so-called counterinsurgency corps—are being trained in the United States for possible civil war; if one looks at the almost direct censorship of the press, television and radio: then, as far as I’m concerned, one can speak with complete justification of an incipient fascism. . . . American fascism will probably be the first which comes to power by democratic means and with democratic support.

Davis was drawn to Marcuse’s contention that “fascism is the preventive counter-revolution to the socialist transformation of society” because of how it resonated with racialized communities and activists. In the experience of many Black radicals, the aspect of their revolutionary politics that most threatened the state was not the endorsement of armed struggle, but rather the “survival programs,” those enclaves of autonomous social reproduction facilitated by the Panthers and more broadly practiced by Black movements. While nominally mobilized against the threat of armed insurrection, the ultimate target of counterinsurgency were these experiments with social life outside and against the racial state—especially when they edged toward what Huey P. Newton named “revolutionary intercommunalism.”

What can be gleaned from Davis’s account is the way that fascism and democracy can be experienced very differently by different segments of the population. In this regard, Davis is attuned to the ways in which race and gender, alongside class, can determine how fascist the country seems to any given individual. As Davis puts it, fascism is “primarily restricted to the use of the law-enforcement-judicial-penal apparatus to arrest the overt and latent revolutionary trends among nationally oppressed people, tomorrow it may attack the working class en masse and eventually even moderate democrats.” But the latter are unlikely to fully perceive this phenomenon because of the manufactured invisibility of the site of the state’s maximally fascist presentation, namely, prisons with their “totalitarian aspirations.”

The kind of fascism diagnosed by Davis is a “protracted social process,” whose “growth and development are cancerous in nature.” We thus have the correlation in Davis’s analysis between, on the one hand, the prison as a racialized enclave or laboratory and, on the other, the fascist strategy of counterrevolution, which flow through society at large but are not experienced equally by everyone everywhere. As Davis has written more recently:

The dangerous and indeed fascistic trend toward progressively greater numbers of hidden, incarcerated human populations is itself rendered invisible. All that matters is the elimination of crime—and you get rid of crime by getting rid of people who, according to the prevailing racial common sense, are the most likely people to whom criminal acts will be attributed.

The lived experience of state violence by Black political prisoners such as Davis and Jackson grounded a theory of U.S. fascism and racial capitalism that interrupted what Robinson called the “euphonious recital of fascism” in mainstream political thought. It can still serve as an antidote to the lures and limits of the analogies that increasingly circulate in mainstream debate.

As the Black Lives Matter movement has made clear, the threat is not of a “return of the 1930s” but the ongoing fact of racialized state terror. This is the ever-present danger that animates present-day anti-fascist energies in the United States—and it cannot be boiled down to the necessary but insufficient task of confronting only those who self-identify as fascists.

Stuart Hall once castigated the British left for its passionate attachment to the frame of anti-fascism, for gravitating to the seemingly transparent battle against organized fascism while ignoring new modalities of authoritarianism. There were indeed fascists (the National Front), but Thatcherism was not a fascism. Conversely, Davis and Jackson glimpsed a fascist process that didn’t need fascists. Fascists without fascism, or fascism without fascists—do we have to choose?

To bridge this antinomy, we need to reflect on the connection between the features of “incipient fascism”—in the U.S. case, the normalization of forms of racial terror and oppression—and the emergence of explicitly fascist movements and ideologies. We need to think about the links between the often extreme levels of classed and racialized violence that accompany actually-existing liberal democracies (think, for instance, of the anti-migrant militarization of the U.S. and E.U. borders) and the emergence of movements that espouse a host of extreme positions that invert this reality: these include the belief that the state and culture have been occupied by the “radical” left (by “Cultural Marxism,” by critical race theory), that racism is now meted out against formerly dominant ethnic majorities, and that deracinated elites have conspired with the wretched of the earth to destroy properly “national” populations that can only be rescued by a revanchist politics of security and protectionism.

Our “late” fascism is an ideology of crisis and decline. It depends, in the words of abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, on enlisting supporters on the basis of “the idea and enactment of winning, of explicit domination set against the local reality of decreasing family wealth, fear of unemployment, threat of homelessness, and increased likelihood of early, painful death from capitalism’s many toxicities.” Its psychological wages and racial dividends do considerable political economic work, perpetuating a brutally unequal regime of accumulation by enlisting bodies and psyches into endless culture wars.

But what is this late fascism trying to prevent? Here is where the superstructure sometimes seems to overwhelm the base, as though forces and fantasies once functional to the reproduction of a dominant class and racial order have now attained a kind of autonomy. No imminent threat to the reproduction of capitalism is on the horizon (at least no external one), so that contemporary fascist trends manifest the strange spectacle of what, in a variation on Davis and Marcuse, we could call a preventive counterreform. This politics is parasitic, among other things, on resuscitating the racialized anti-communism of a previous era, now weaponizing it against improbable targets such as Kamala Harris, while treating any mildly progressive policy as the harbinger of the imminent abolition of all things American, not least the suburbs.

But, drawing on the archive of Black radical theories of fascism, we can also start to see the present in a much longer historical arc, one marked by the periodic recurrence of racial fascism as the mode of reaction to any instance of what Du Bois once called “abolition democracy,” whether against the First Reconstruction, the Second Reconstruction, or what some have begun, hopefully, to identify as the Third.

Hitler Is Not Dead: On Bourgeois Electoralism, Liberalism as the Left Wing of Fascism, and the Politics of Exceptionalizing Donald Trump

By Joshua Briond

“At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. at the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.”

—Aimé Césaire, Discourses on Colonialism

We are in a sociopolitical moment where it is arguably more crucial than ever to challenge widespread, and often deliberate, misapprehensions regarding historical precedents, to avoid remaking past mistakes and repeating history when so much is at stake. Fascism is a socio-economic and political project and system of governing that began the moment Europeans first made contact with West African shores. The process continued when the Euro-American bourgeoisie further invaded Indigenous territory in conquest for expanding markets and sources of capital, and marked the creation of what we know today as America—the most powerful and technologically advanced hyper-militarized carceral-police state and exporter of capitalist, imperialist, and colonial violence and domination that the world has ever seen. The consequential violence and contradictions that have been exposed the last four years, which by many have been attributed solely to Donald Trump and co., are simply the demands and material consequences of capital and white supremacy (which go hand-in-hand, and are essentially inseparable). The exceptionalizing of Trump or his administration is short-sighted and dangerous. In reality, any US president would be tasked with such a role and responsibility.

Yet, what the liberal media apparatus and ruling class has spent the last four years doing to Trump—much like the West has historically done to Hitler—making him out to be an ‘exceptional’ evil, unlike anything we’ve ever seen before, as a means of separating themselves from (what is largely described as exclusively Trumpian or Hitlerian) political crimes, represents an incredibly grotesque and ahistorical deliberation on the part of the elite. In other words, Hitler was not the first Hitler and Trump is not the first Trump. And they certainly won’t be the last. Trump, just as Hitler was, is not the exception but the rule of what white-supremacist-patriarchal capitalism is capable of, and what this system is willing to do (or produce) to maintain its naturalized order and rule. And if we allow them to continue to exceptionalize what Trump is doing, or has done up until this point—even if he’s doing it in unorthodox ways—we will be bamboozled yet again as yet another, more effective, less blatant Trump will inevitably rise.

What Hitler did, and what Trump is currently doing—as in their (racialized) political, economic, and war crimes—are not exclusive or unique to either of them as individuals, despite what Western (revisionist) history and the professional liberal media class would like to have us believe. But instead, racial terror, violence, and genocide, is and always has been the point of the Western (and American) project. It is built into the fabric of the of the West—it is all Euro-American’s have ever known, culturally and politically. And they will, as we have seen, continue their terror and violence because the political economy is sustained on such; until the entire project is brought to a halt. The global capitalist political economy is predicated on and sustained through racialized violence, and cannot be attributed solely to any one individual leader or figurehead. When I say that Hitler, or Trump in this case, are not exceptional evils, despite both being individually evil and worthy of our condemnation: it is to say that every western leader—namely in the context of US presidents—has blood on their hands. And all have, both individually and collectively, terrorized and massacred countless people, as their policies and upholding of US hegemony, by means of imperialism, [neo]colonialism, and global capitalism, has directly and indirectly led to such deadly consequences.

“When I switch on my radio and hear that black men are being lynched in America, I say that they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead. When I switch on my radio and hear that Jews are being insulted, persecuted, and massacred, I say that they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead. And finally when I switch on my radio and hear that in Africa forced labor has been introduced and legalized, I say that truly they have lied to us: Hitler isn’t dead.”

— Aime Cesaire

I would like to preface the rest of this by stating that when I speak of Hitler, it is not just in the context of the individual—but an idea, as Aimé Césaire would describe it, both abstract and material, that is innate to western civilization and the maintenance of the regime which has global implications. Hitler was, quite literally on record, inspired by the United States’ treatment of Black and Indigenous people in America. But, the US, and the West at-large, has exceptionalized him, as if they are morally and politically above his crimes. How is what Hitler, and now Trump, did and are actively doing so unspeakable to the professional liberal apparatus, when such crimes have always been committed against racialized people on a global scale? How can we take seriously the largely performative outrage and condemnation that the Hitlers or Trumps of our world have incited in liberals when similar crimes have been enacted on racialized persons on a global scale by political leaders such as Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama, all of whom they admire? What is Hitler to the African, whose enslavement, rape, theft, dispossession, and exploitation served as a template for what would be exported to other colonized nations and peoples for the purposes and demands of Western capital? What is Hitler to the Palestinian whose terror and ongoing genocide is being supported and funded by the US (and every single one of our politicians)? What is Hitler to the Iranian, Korean, or Chinese whose subjugated positionality is that of the result of US imperialism and global capitalism? What is Hitler to any racialized, imperialized, or colonized nation or peoples who have reaped the consequences of Euro-American capital and rule?

“During the Second World War the country became incensed against the Japanese—not against the Germans. The Germans were never incarcerated, the Japanese were. And now the Iranians and other people like that. Europe had nothing against Hitler and neither did [America] until he turned his guns against them.”

— James Baldwin

Fascism is not something that can be simply born or defeated via electoralism—in countries that are capitalist, colonialist, and/or imperialist from their inception, as was such in the case of the US and Germany. An able and willing fascist participant can absolutely run for office, uphold such an order, and maybe even advance it in a wide variety of ways. But there has not been a case in which fascism begins or ends with said individual or political act of simply voting. So while yes, the ruling class technically “allows” its subjects the illusive option to vote for and “elect” (with conditions, of course) whomever will be the upholder of said system, it is the system itself — that makes way for the empowerment and upholding of individuals, ideologies, and violence—that needs undoing, not just the figurehead representing it. Which, again, is what makes it ncessary to expose the liberal exceptionalizing of Trump’s regime of violence—because the capitalist ruling class will easily relieve Trump of his duties of upholding the white-supremacist fascist order and replace him with someone who will effectively maintain the white power structure with grace and class, just as liberals like it, in a way that is socially acceptable to the vast majority of American people (and the West at large). Because the vast majority of Americans are simply unaware of the extent to which political violence is exported globally. And the amount of violence, terror, and death that elected leaders—from the self-proclaimed progressives to the unabashed neo-conservatives—are directly responsible for.

To reiterate, the inevitable ascension into the fascist order began when Europeans set foot on the shores of West Africa—not the 2016 general election in the US. Germany, for example, alongside the Euro-Americas, enslaved and massacred Africans with impunity centuries prior to the unfortunate birth of Hitler, the individual, and yet we are to believe fascism began with Hitler? Or, in the American sense, with Trump in 2016? Despite the incessant crimes of capital, which as we know, as Marx taught us, “[came] dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt” throughout history, including such crimes that birthed the bastard child of Europe now known as America? If it took multi-country war and an immeasurable amount of bloodshed led by the USSR to defeat the fascist beast in Germany—never mind the reluctance on the part of the US to get involved until Germany threatened US hegemony with its prospects of expanding its rule on a global scale—how are we supposed to believe that fascism is something to be defeated by merely checking off a box?

America was born as a nation, as an ideological extension of a European bourgeois political, cultural, and libidinal desire to expand new markets to generate more capital—even if it meant resorting to the utmost diabolical means. Hitler is not dead. As the US's values, institutions, global legitimacy, and grip on the world—namely the colonized world—is in decay, there is far too much evidence of just this fact. And everything we are seeing that the professional liberal class has duplicitously yet meticulously attributed solely to Trump and his ilk, whether in reference to the political repression happening across the country on the part of the carceral police state, the neglect of millions of citizens in a midst of a global pandemic and economic turmoil, or the hypervisibility of armed white militia groups, is simply a product of white-supremacist capitalism and its reaction to, and delaying, its inevitable demise.

The state at-large, and its upholders—whether in the form of the institutionalized agents or vigilantes—is reacting to the desires and needs of capital and whiteness. And regardless of who is president, these contradictions will continue to rise in these times because the needs of capital and whiteness largely come at the expense of the non-white and super-exploited, rendering it unsustainable and almost always in a constant state of flux and turmoil, and constantly in need of protection and adaptation. Hitler is not dead.

“We must resign ourselves to the inevitable and say to ourselves, once and for all, that the bourgeoisie is condemned to become every day more snarling, more openly ferocious, more shameless, more summarily barbarous; that it is an implacable law that every decadent class finds itself turned into a receptacle into which there flow all the dirty waters of history; that it is a universal law that before it disappears every class must first disgrace itself completely, on all fronts, and that it is with their heads buried in the dunghill that dying societies utter their swan songs.”

— Aimé Césaire, discourses on colonialism

Fascism—as well as the personification of such in the form of Hitler and Trump—is the inevitable outcome of a global capitalist system whose entire economy is predicated on constant racialized war, terror, and violence, and unsustainably expanding and creating new markets to achieve such a feat. Hitler is not dead. Fascism is simply “capitalism in decay.” If we want to end, or even remotely challenge fascism, we must work to eradicate capitalism.

The misunderstanding of fascism begins with the deliberate political positing of [neo]liberalism as in-opposition or an alternative to the fascist order. When in actuality, history has shown us that it is in cahoots with, if not, an actual strand of fascism in and of itself. Liberal democrats often spout rhetorical devices such as, “there is no middle ground; pick a side.” Such statements are not to emphasize the crucial sociopolitical moment we find ourselves in, which necessitates that we choose between fascism or socialism—in the face of pending climate doom and deteriorating material conditions—but to guilt us into voting for Democrats over Republicans.

It has never been more apparent that liberal democrats are the stabilizers and upkeepers of fascist rule—who exist to provide an illusion of “opposition” to the material actualities and consequences of liberal democracy, western capital(ism), and the white power structure at-large—while actively upholding the neoliberal fascist order and inhibiting even the slightest possibilities of progress. Left radicals, or anyone who has divested from bourgeois electoralism, are constantly punched down on and condescended to for daring to demand more than mild concessions (“reforms” that’ll just be poked, prodded, weakened and rendered obsolete the moment the next Republican gets into office) and milquetoast, uninspiring, career-imperialist Democrat candidates. There have been constant claims on the part of liberal democrats—and those sympathetic to their politics—of radicals being “child-like” and expecting “purity” for wanting a world without constant racialized violence, demanding political representatives that aren’t subservient to capital but to our material interests, and refusing to engage in lesser of two evils every election cycle. It is quite clear that liberal establishment democrats—and the opportunists who serve their rule—are categorically irrelevant to the dispossessed, colonized, racialized, super-exploited, and wretched of our world, beyond their attempts to postpone and/or flat-out hinder our drive to build a better world, and redirecting our aims back into the arms of the establishment.

Liberal democrats obediently assume their role as the “left-wing” of fascism—the “good cops” to the Republican “bad cops.” The covert fascists versus overt fascists. But at the detriment to us all, the fact still remains that they are both still cops and they are both still driving a fascist system to its inevitable conclusion. Democrats represent the only publicly legitimized and acknowledged political “left” party despite being overwhelmingly ideologically right wing. They allow and endorse mild concessions that will help keep the racialized, colonized, dispossessed, and super-exploited slightly comfortable enough—at the expense of one another and persons in the Global South and Third World—to remain complicit in their subjugation. They will even give impassioned monologues on social media, or in front of the cameras, yell at Republicans’ blatant political violence—while doing nothing materially to actually offer resistance or represent an opposition to said violence beyond rhetorical moral grandstanding. While Republicans don’t even pretend to care about providing subjects of their rule crumbs through these concessions. They don’t pretend to care about whether or not you vote because they accept and relish in their bad cop role. But ultimately, both parties truly cannot exist and flourish without one another. They are both incredibly useful, in their own way, as agents of capital, to the sustainment and growth of fascism.

I’d argue “centrism,” “conservatism,” and “republicanism” are not even economic ideologies—in fact, their ideology largely rests on the premise that they have none—beyond the rule of capital. So why else—beyond the aforementioned reasons—would you need two parties? Both parties are one in the same—just differ in tactics and approaches—but are united under the banner of upholding economic [neo]liberalism, i.e., capitalism. Which is why the rhetoric of “we have a choice between neoliberalism or fascism”—which has been an ostensible liberal talking point—as if, again, neoliberalism is, or could ever be, an alternative, reprieve, or in-opposition to fascism. How could something that has historically worked in cahoots with fascism be an alternative to its rule?

The fact that so much state-sanctioned violence, political repression, mishandling and neglect of the most marginalized—especially incarcerated, immigrant, and houseless populations—in the face of COVID-19, an ongoing housing crisis, unemployment, and economic turmoil, is happening in “liberal” cities and cities led by Democrats nationwide, should very much inform our understanding of the situation at hand. The fascist order will remain intact regardless of who is elected into office on November 3rd—despite the hand-wringing and finger-pointing over which party is more at fault for white-supremacist capitalism’s ills being exposed. The public perception and liberal media coverage of certain events and political violence will adjust accordingly. What we are seeing now, and have been seeing for the last four years is simply a declining empire doing anything and everything it can to maintain its tight (but loosening) grip on its own people—as well as the rest of the world. As evidenced by not just the uprisings and rebellions happening across the country and the world at-large, but the failed coup d’etat attempts—namely in Venezuela and Bolivia—which the professional liberals condemned, not from an anti-imperialist stance but because of Trump’s inability to do imperialism effectively.

If Trump is Hitler, what is Obama to people of Libya? Or Syria? Or Pakistan? What is George W. Bush Jr. to Iraqis? What is Bill Clinton to the people of Sudan? Yuglosavia? What are any and all of them to migrants who have been caged and deported, or Black people who have been executed by police in the streets on a daily basis, or workers who have been left without means to sustain basic life, or tens of millions who are surveilled each and every day? These things occurred long before Trump and will continue to escalate long after Trump.

The empire lives. For now. And Hitler is not dead.

The FBI's War on the Left: A Short History of COINTELPRO

By Alex Zambito

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

Throughout its history the United States has billed itself as an open society upholding the free exchange of ideas. We are told that, unlike people in less-enlightened countries, Americans do not have to worry about being persecuted for their political beliefs. Of course, this has never been true. From its very inception, the US government has been restricting free-speech through legislation such as the Alien and Sedition Act of 1798- not to mention the restriction on expression for the enslaved. Americans usually consider this a thing of the past, but political repression continued throughout the 20th century to this day, but in more covert forms. In this essay, I will explore the historical development of the US government’s system of covert domestic political repression, its consolidation, and its culmination in the FBI’s COINTELPRO program.

The FBI has its origins in the General Intelligence Division which was created in 1919 by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer to collect information on radical organizations. J. Edgar Hoover, who would remain in power for the next several decades, was appointed as its head.[1] The GID was immediately used in the infamous Palmer Raids- a series of mass arrests and deportations targeting “alien” members of radical movements. The raids began on November 7, 1919 when GID agents raided offices of the United Russian Workers across the country arresting 650 people and deporting at least 43 without due process.  The crescendo of the raids came on January 2, 1920 when GID agents descended on radical groups in over 30 cities across the country, arresting at least 3,000 people.[2] Much of this repression was directed at the Communist Party USA, with Secretary of Labor William B. Wilson announcing on January 19th that membership in the CPUSA was enough to warrant deportation of immigrants.[3] The raids were finally ended by a court ruling in June 1920, but by then the damage had already been done. Left-wing organizations were effectively decimated with Communist Party membership dropping from over 27,000 in 1919 to just over 8,000 the next year.[4]

Along with the Palmer raids, the Bureau utilized numerous other methods to harass radical groups. In 1919, Hoover targeted Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. The Bureau employed several infiltrators in the UNIA to uncover information which could be used in trumped up criminal charges against Garvey. After numerous charges of criminal activity failed to stick, the Bureau managed to obtain a conviction against Garvey on mail fraud in 1925. He was deported to Jamaica in 1927.[5]

By the mid-1920s, Hoover was able to renounce the FBI’s past political operations. Aside from participating in repression of major strikes, the Bureau would be true to its word for the next decade. But as the Communist Party began to regain relevance- reaching 66,000 members by 1939- Hoover gained approval from President Roosevelt to resume repression of “subversive activities”. Although Roosevelt later altered this directive as the Soviet Union became a key ally in the fight against Nazi Germany, it would not prevent Hoover from using it as justification for later counter-intelligence activities.[6]

After World War II ended and the Cold War began, Communism became enemy #1 with the CP becoming a natural target. In coordination with the CIA, the FBI began a program of intercepting and inspecting the international communications of US citizens. This was particularly focused on the mail and cables between the US and Soviet Union.[7] Additionally, the Bureau would frequently use other forms of information gathering such as “surreptitious entry” and “bugging” CP offices.[8] The FBI also cooperated with the IRS to gather information on targeted groups and single them out for harassment from the IRS.[9]

Additionally, the FBI would perfect the divide and conquer techniques it would later use to great effect in official COINTELPRO programs against the CP. The Bureau used infiltrators to exploit internal divisions within the party, such as over Khrushchev’s denunciations of Stalin.[10] The Bureau also used “anonymous mailings” in various ways to disrupt party activities. Agents would send letters to party members warning about the treacherous activities of others in the party, hoping to stir up factional disputes.[11] This was also a common ploy in the FBI’s “snitch jacketing” technique to portray loyal party members as informants. This was also frequently accomplished by informants within the party spreading rumors, forged informant reports, or “interviews” where agents would publicly speak with a target to create the impression the party member was an informant.[12]

Anonymous letters and interviews would also be used to impact the personal lives of party members or disrupt alliances the party would make with other groups. Agents would contact the employers or landlords of party members in efforts to get them fired or evicted. Additionally, if the CP were seeking to cooperate with other organizations, agents would send derogatory information to these organizations to prevent an alliance.[13]

These were the FBI’s covert methods in the battle against domestic communism, but it also played a direct role in the overt repression. The FBI played an active role in the rise of McCarthyism by cultivating “friendly media” outlets which would be used to disseminate derogatory information about the CP. Further, the Bureau aided anti-Communist private organizations such as the American Legion and anti-Communist congressmen, with FBI agents even writing their speeches.[14]

These activities would create a general context for the US government’s legal attacks against the CP leadership. FBI agents would use selective law enforcement to harass the party and its members. Party members were frequently arrested for minor or spurious causes. For example, a secretary of the Alabama branch of the CP was arrested and convicted of possessing “seditious literature” for carrying copies of The Nation and The New Republic. He was sentenced to 100 days hard labor and fined $100.[15] This culminated in the government’s use of the Smith Act to prosecute Communist Party members. The Smith Act was passed in 1940 and created criminal penalties for advocating the forcible overthrow of the US government and required all adult non-citizen residents to register with the federal government. It would be used to prosecute eleven top Communist Party members in 1949. All eleven were convicted with ten being sentenced to five to ten years and one- a World War II veteran- sentenced to three.[16] Similar cases would occur across the country, with frequent FBI interference in the judicial process.[17]

The official COINTELPRO program would not begin until 1956, although this was just a formalization of already existing FBI practices. Even though the Communist Party had already been decimated by the mid-1950s, the majority of COINTELPRO operations were carried out against the party. However, the most impactful COINTELPRO activities in this period were against other left-wing and civil rights movements. Some of the groups targeted were called “Black Extremist” groups. The Nation of Islam was an early target of this program, with the FBI maintaining massive files on just Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X. The FBI would go on to play a role in driving a wedge between the two.[18]

As would become a habit for the FBI, the parameters for which groups qualified as “Black Extremists” was expansive. Organizations that would eventually come under the COINTELPRO purview included the NAACP, SCLC, and SNCC.[19] The FBI infamously wiretapped Martin Luther King Jr. and sent him anonymous letters encouraging him to commit suicide.[20]
COINTELPRO would reach its zenith in the late 60ss and early 70s with the inauguration of COINTELPRO-Black Panther and COINTELPRO-New Left. As with its counterintelligence activities against the CP, the Bureau’s tactics ranged from the petty to the outright murderous. Bureau infiltrators of New Left student organizations were instructed to uncover evidence of members’ “depravity” to be publicized.[21] Agents would even contact targets’ parents to inform them of their child’s subversive activities. The FBI also sought to prevent these groups from exercising their first amendment rights by preventing speaking events and public demonstrations. Further, given that many of these groups were popular on college campuses, the Bureau targeted academics friendly to radical groups, seeking to get them disciplined or fired.[22]
The Bureau also attempted to instigate violence between target groups and violence-prone rival political organizations or criminal organizations. In 1968, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a memorandum to FBI field offices instructing them to devise plans to exploit the conflict between the Black Panther Party and Ron Karenga’s Black Nationalist “US” organization.[23]

This was accomplished through infiltrators, anonymous mailings, and forged propaganda. For instance, the Los Angeles field office responded to Hoover’s call for proposals reporting:[24]

​“The Los Angeles Office is currently preparing an anonymous letter for Bureau approval which will be sent to the Los Angeles Black Panther Party supposedly from a member of the ‘US’ organization in which it will be stated the youth group of the ‘US’ organization is aware of the [Black Panther Party] ‘contract’ to kill RON KARENGA, leader of ‘US’, and they, ‘Us’ members, in retaliation have made plans to ambush leaders of the [Party] in Los Angeles. It is hoped this counterintelligence measure will result in an ‘US’ and [Black Panther Party] vendetta.”

Agents also distributed forged propaganda meant to increase tensions between the BPP and US, such as this cartoon attributed to US:[25]

This strategy would bear fruits as hostilities between the two groups spilled over into violent confrontations resulting in the deaths of four BPP members, including prominent members John Huggins and Bunchy Carter. Despite Bureau protestations that it never intended to encourage violence, the FBI continued to encourage hostility between the two groups even after these killings. This is illustrated by a 1970 report from the FBI’s Los Angeles office:[26]

​“Information received from local sources indicate that, in general, the membership of the Los Angeles BPP is physically afraid of US members and take premeditated precautions to avoid confrontations.

In view of their anxieties, it is not presently felt that the Los Angeles BPP can be prompted into what could result in an internecine struggle between the two organizations…

The Los Angeles Division is aware of the mutually hostile feelings harbored between the organizations and the first opportunity to capitalize on the situation will be maximized. It is intended that US Inc. will be appropriately and discreetly advised of the time and location of BPP activities in order that the two organizations might be brought together and thus grant nature the opportunity to take her due course.”

The Bureau used a similar technique with Operation Hoodwink, where the Bureau attempted to spark conflict between the Communist Party and the criminal organization La Cosa Nostra, as well as criminal elements within reaction unions such as the Teamsters. Fortunately, this attempt did not lead to any reported physical conflicts.[27] [28]

Additionally, the FBI liked to use a specific form of infiltrator known as “Agents Provocateurs” who would encourage members to commit violent or criminal acts. For example, a member of the Weather Underground arrested for a conspiracy to bomb Detroit police facilities was actually an FBI informant, Larry Grathwohl. Grathwohl reportedly instructed members on how to build bombs and participated in the group’s bombing of a Cincinnati public school.[29] One of the most famous provocateurs was “Tommy the Travler” Tongyai who traveled around college campuses in the northeast encouraging students to bomb military research facilities.[30]

As they did with the CP, the Bureau cooperated with local law enforcement to harass targeted groups and their members. Officials sought to stop targets frequently, hoping to arrest and convict them on minor charges. They would also attempt to frame targets for crimes they did not commit. This is exemplified by the case of Geronimo Pratt- a prominent member of the Los Angeles branch of the BPP. After numerous attempts to convict Pratt on trumped up charges failed, Pratt was accused of the 1968 “Tennis Court Murder”. On December 18, 1968, a white couple, Caroline and Kenneth Olsen, were robbed and shot by two black men on a tennis court in Santa Monica, California. Caroline Olsen would die a week later. In August 1969, an anonymous letter was delivered to the Los Angeles Police Department claiming Pratt had committed the murder and had been bragging about it. Pratt was also positively identified by Kenneth Olsen, leading to Pratt’s arrest and eventual conviction in 1972. Of course, the FBI was heavily involved in the trial. The anonymous letter turns out to have been written by Julius Butler, an FBI infiltrator, who would become a key prosecution witness. Additionally, the Bureau had at least one infiltrator in Pratt’s defense team keeping the Bureau informed on defense strategy. And the prosecution concealed the fact that Kenneth Olsen had initially identified another man, Ronald Perkins, as his wife’s killer and that police had purposefully influenced his identification. Pratt would remain in jail for a crime he did not commit until 1997 when his case was invalidated due to the prosecution’s suppression of evidence.[31]

But the worst of COINTELPRO was the Bureau’s use of violent raids and political assassinations. On April 6, 1968 a group of Panthers were confronted by police officers in west Oakland. Gunfire was exchanged and the police cordoned off the block. After an hour and a half, the Panthers attempted to surrender, but when unarmed ‘Lil Bobby Hutton emerged from a nearby basement, he was shot dead by police officers.[32] In a more overt case, Chicago police officers, with the assistance of the FBI, assassinated Fred Hampton in 1969. They were assisted by an FBI infiltrator, William O’Neal, who provided detailed floor plans of Hampton’s apartment.[33]

This is far from an exhaustive exploration of the FBI’s counterintelligence programs. The FBI targeted numerous groups such as the Socialist Workers’ Party, American Indian Movement, etc. that I was unable to cover here. While COINTELPRO was brought to light by the Church Committee in the 1970s and, subsequently, formally ended, the FBI has definitely continued its counterintelligence activities. In recent years, it has been revealed that the FBI maintains a list of “Black Identity Extremists”.[34] With this in mind, I think it is incredibly important for leftists to learn the history of COINTELPRO. With this knowledge we can more thoroughly safeguard our organizations against the inevitability of government subversion 

​Citations

[1]Churchill, W., & Vander Wall, J. (2001). COINTELPRO Papers. Retrieved 2020, from https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/Black%20Liberation%20Disk/Black%20Power!/SugahData/Government/COINTELPRO.S.pdf, 297

[2] Admin. (2020, July 24). AG Palmer Promises "War on Reds," Delivers Palmer Raids. Retrieved October 03, 2020, from https://todayinclh.com/?event=ag-palmer-promises-war-on-reds-delivers-palmer-raids 

[3]Churchill, W., & Vander Wall, J. (2001). COINTELPRO Papers, Retrieved 2020, from https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/Black%20Liberation%20Disk/Black%20Power!/SugahData/Government/COINTELPRO.S.pdf, 299

[4]“Communist Party Membership by Districts 1922-1950.” Accessed October 3, 2020. https://depts.washington.edu/moves/CP_map-members.shtml.

[5] Marcus Garvey.” FBI File on Marcus Garvey, Part4, document no. 190-1781-6, 10 Aug. 1922. The FBI: Federal Bureau of Investigation, US Department of Justice, https://vault.fbi.gov/marcus-garvey/marcus-garvey-part-04-of-12/view

[6] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. II. Washington: U.S. Govt. https://www.transformation.dk/www.raven1.net/cointeldocs/churchfinalreportIIb.htm Accessed: 2020

[7] Ibid

[8] Ibid

[9] Ibid

[10] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. III. Washington: U.S. Govt. http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_1_COINTELPRO.pdf Accessed:2020, 45

[11] Ibid, Pgs. 33-49.

[12] Ibid

[13] Ibid

[14] O'Reilly, Kenneth. "The FBI and the Origins of McCarthyism." The Historian 45, no. 3 (1983): 372-93. Accessed October 4, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24445173.

[15] Churchill, W., & Vander Wall, J. (2001). COINTELPRO Papers. P. 318, Retrieved 2020, from https://www.freedomarchives.org/Documents/Finder/Black%20Liberation%20Disk/Black%20Power!/SugahData/Government/COINTELPRO.S.pdf 

[16] McElroy, Wendy. “Smith Act Tyranny Against Communists.” The Future of Freedom Foundation, March 5, 2018. https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/smith-act-tyranny-communists/.

[17] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. III. Washington: U.S. Govt. http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_1_COINTELPRO.pdf Accessed:2020, 57

[18] Chicago. Bureau of Investigation. Chicago Letters. Chicago: Bureau of Investigation, 1969. http://docs.noi.org/fbi_january_22_1969.pdf

[19] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. III. Washington: U.S. Govt. http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_1_COINTELPRO.pdf Accessed:2020, 5

[20] Gage, Beverly. “What an Uncensored Letter to M.L.K. Reveals.” The New York Times. The New York Times, November 11, 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/magazine/what-an-uncensored-letter-to-mlk-reveals.html.

[21]  Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. III. Washington: U.S. Govt. http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_1_COINTELPRO.pdf Accessed:2020, 24 

[22] Ibid, Pg. 56

[23] “Federal Bureau of Investigation – Initial Memo on Fomenting Violence Against Black Panther Party.” Genius. Accessed October 4, 2020. https://genius.com/Federal-bureau-of-investigation-initial-memo-on-fomenting-violence-against-black-panther-party-annotated.

[24] Bloom, Joshua, and Waldo E. Martin. Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016, 218

[25] Los Angeles. Bureau of Investigation. Things to do Today. Los Angeles: Bureau of Investigations, 1969. http://collection-politicalgraphics.org/detail.php?type=browse&id=1&term=Black+Panther+Party&page=3&kv=54716&record=141&module=objects

[26] Final Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, United States Senate: Together with Additional, Supplemental, and Separate Views. Vol. III, Washington: U.S. Govt. https://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book3/pdf/ChurchB3_3_BlackPanthers.pdf Accessed: 2020, 24 

[27] “Hoodwink.” FBI Files for Operation Hoodwink, part 1, document no. 100-159407, 29 Nov. 1967. The FBI: Federal Bureau of Investigation, US Department of Justice, https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/hoodwink/cointel-pro-hoodwink-part-01-of-01/view

[28] “Hoodwink.” FBI Files for Operation Hoodwink, par1, document no. 100-49252, 25 Jan. 1968. The FBI: Federal Bureau of Investigation, US Department of Justice, https://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/hoodwink/cointel-pro-hoodwink-part-01-of-01/view

[29] Newton, Michael. The FBI Encyclopedia. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2012, 133

[30] Churchill, Ward, and Jim VanderWall. Agents of Repression: the FBI's Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Cambridge, MA: South End Pr., 2008, 48.

[31] Ibid, 77-94

[32]  Bloom, Joshua, and Waldo E. Martin. Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016, 118-120.

[33] Churchill, Ward, and Jim VanderWall. Agents of Repression: the FBI's Secret Wars against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Cambridge, MA: South End Pr., 2008, 64-77.

[34] Speri, Alice. “The Strange Tale of the FBI's Fictional ‘Black Identity Extremism’ Movement.” The Intercept, March 23, 2019. https://theintercept.com/2019/03/23/black-identity-extremist-fbi-domestic-terrorism/.

As Usual, Most Of Us Miss The Point on Ice Cube and His "Platinum Plan"

By Ahjamu Umi

Republished from Hood Communist.

Rapper/actor/entertainer Ice Cube has worn many hats throughout his professional career.  He started as a so-called gangsta rapper with the impactful group NWA in the late 80s.  Then, he joined forces with Dr. Khalid Abdul Muhammad and the Nation of Islam to become a hardcore Black nationalist rapper in the early 90s.  That phase devolved into him making several high profile records with Mac 10 and WC as the “Westside Connection.”  Records that were part gangsta, part party animal.  Finally, he moved into mainstream motion pictures.

Most recently, he rotated back into the struggle for African self-determination with many public statements supporting protests against police terrorism.  And, in the last several days, its been exposed that he worked, at least on some level, with the administration of the current empire president to help create and/or support the regime’s so-called “Platinum Plan.”  The alleged purpose of this plan is to supposedly uplift the African community within the U.S. with more promises of capitalist advancement for the African masses. 

Most Africans are attacking Ice Cube for working with Trump’s people, but this is an understandable yet extremely subjective and superficial analysis of the real issues here.  What most Africans, and everyone else, will refuse to do is actually study this so-called Platinum Plan.  Most of us will instead rely on sound bites from the capitalist media and celebrity culture.  Most of us will never actually read and assess the plan itself. 

And, studying this plan, and any plan that is supposed to improve the conditions of the African masses, at the very least, requires us to study it in great detail so that’s exactly what we will do here because whether its Ice Cube or Mickey Mouse, our people have to develop increased political sophistication so that we can read through the lines and properly understand what’s being beamed at us.  This is particularly important when you are talking about the Democratic or Republican Parties, both of whom Malcolm X beautifully exposed for us over 50 years ago, although most of us will never study his analysis as well.

You all need to study this so-called plan.  The basis of it is promises to provide three million new jobs for African people.  To create 500,000 African owned businesses by increasing capital in African communities.  A promise of $500 billion in capital.  Higher policing standards (whatever that is supposed to mean).  A Second Step program which is supposed to address criminal justice system reform “while ensuring our communities and streets are safe.”  There are other statements about support for African churches, immigration policies that protect U.S. jobs, and healthcare.

Let’s break down each element here. 

Three million new jobs:  You have the last four years to provide ample evidence for how this regime, (and all the other ones to – we are neither Democrats, nor Republicans, nor Americans) manipulates employment data.  For them, millions of new jobs that pay minimum wage, offer no benefits, and have no job protections is a bragging right.  The truth is there is no where in this country where quality jobs defined as livable wages, affordable healthcare, and safe work conditions are increasing.  What is increasing are service jobs with low wages, no healthcare, and no stability.  These types of jobs serve the economic interests of the bourgeoisie like Trump and he and those in his class have a history of creating these types of low level jobs.  Anyone with even a cursory perspective on this question would understand clearly that the jobs these people are talking about creating will do nothing to improve the collective conditions of African people.

500,000 new African businesses and $500 billion in capital: Whenever a plausible suggestion for providing healthcare for people or rehabilitation efforts, eliminating houselessness, etc., there is immediately an outcry from reactionaries demanding to know “where the money will come from?”  Yet, some of you believe that this level of capital will be invested in African communities to permit us to independently develop.  A quick study of history will reveal to us that this concept, and all these bogus concepts in this so-called plan, are not new.  In the 1960s, in response to hundreds of urban rebellions, the Nixon administration with the support of McGeorge Bundy and the Chevron Foundation, wrote the script for Affirmative Action as a vehicle to create an African petti bourgeoisie that would have class interests that led it to protect the capitalist system.  This was accomplished.  And with that accomplishment its important to recognize that the goal of Nixon, Bundy, Rockefeller and all those folks 50+ years ago was never to uplift the African masses, although that’s the same rhetoric they used then.  It was to do exactly what they did, create an overseer class of Africans.  Today, even if you believe the numbers they are committing to, this is still their objective.  Whether we recognize it or not, the level of mass protests always rock the capitalist ruling classes to their knees.  They will always do whatever possible to control and mitigate that militancy.  Expanding the African petti bourgeoisie is again their answer.  The question you have to ask yourself is if after 50 years ago, there is no clear pathway for the masses of our people to advance through this model, why would you believe this go around will be any different?

Criminal Justice Reform, etc.:  By reform if you mean reducing the systemic inequities in this racist system (and if reform doesn’t mean that then what’s the point), you are living in a fantasy world if you actually believe this plan is going to make that happen.  This mass incarceration system is based on the same exploitative model that built capitalism.  Releasing a handful of people is great because they all need to be released, but as long as there is a capitalist system, there will be people incarcerated on a mass scale and the overwhelming majority of those people are going to be African and Indigenous.  Also, this talk about protecting and keeping jobs in the U.S. is laughable.  These people want you to believe that poor immigrants are the reason jobs are not available.  The truth is corporations have benefitted from the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and other trade tariff agreements to move their operations overseas because its more profitable for them to do that.  The capitalist assault against organized labor along with the refusal of unions to embrace actual political education, has weakened unions and made them revenue motivated entities.  This has done more to create conditions where jobs can leave this economy than anything else and the crafters of this so-called plan are 100% in favor of gutting unions which leaves no voice and protection for workers.

We can go on and on, but the point is this issue is so much bigger than Ice Cube.  This is a question of our lack of political sophistication and our weakness in accepting any random capitalist approved celebrity as our mouthpiece for advancing our people.  When we do this we continue to demonstrate how easily we are willing to be chumped by this system.  Some of us want these things to happen because we are really just concerned about our individual ability to get ahold of some of those dollars that could potentially be invested so that we can build upon our personal business, etc., desires.  These people should be viewed as parasites on our people no different than pimps, drug dealers, etc.  For those of us concerned about the masses of our people, we know that no capitalist plan is ever going to be the solution.  If that was true, it would have happened a long time ago.  Stop looking to celebrities and everyone else to be our voice.  That has simply never worked for us.  Until you see this as your responsibility to get involved and get serious about understanding these issues on deeper levels than the superficial basis we are talking about them now, we will continue to be political chump footballs for everybody who has access to the glitter and lights this system provides to them at your expense.

We're All Living in a Future Created by Slavery

[Art by Alex Williamson]

By Ameer Hasan Loggins

This article is part of Abolition for the People, a series brought to you by a partnership between Kaepernick Publishing and LEVEL, a Medium publication for and about the lives of Black and Brown men. The series, composed of 30 essays and conversations over four weeks, points to the crucial conclusion that policing and prisons are not solutions for the issues and people the state deems social problems — and calls for a future that puts justice and the needs of the community first.

When I was 19 years old, I was arrested.

Instead of a dungeon, I was held in an overcrowded holding cell. Instead of being shackled and transported across the ocean on a floating prison, I was handcuffed, sitting shoulder to shoulder with another young Black male being hauled across the county on a prison bus.

During intake, I was stripped of my clothes, forced to stand naked as officers stripped me of both my pride and my dignity. I tried to cover my genitals. It was my last grasp at holding onto my humanity. I was commanded by officers to remove my hands. They had guns. I had nothing. I complied. The officer barked, “Lift up your nut sack.” I had no choice. I was ordered to “squat down and cough.” When I was finally handed a pair of state-issued boxer shorts, I was so desperate to have on anything to cover my exposed body that I did not give a damn that the underwear had been passed down, circulated among others who had been stripped naked before me.

Author and scholar Saidiya Hartman once wrote, “I, too, live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it. It is the ongoing crisis of citizenship.” I echo her pain as I think about — and live through — the ongoing crisis of carcerality and those affected most by its existence.

I think about the African diaspora. I think about my family. I think about myself.

In the summer of 2017, I visited the continent of Africa. While there, I basked in the beauty of the lively Ramadan nights in Morocco. I stood in the searing sun of Egypt. I took pictures with the great pyramids as my backdrop, mimicking Malcolm X during his visit in 1964. When I made it to Ghana, I visited the final resting place of Kwame Nkrumah. While standing at his tomb, I thought about Nkrumah writing, “All people of African descent whether they live in North or South America, the Caribbean or in any other part of the world are Africans and belong to the African Nation.” I stood there thinking about the divide between being identified as African and being of African descent. I was in the homeland of my ancestors, and yet I knew none of their names or faces.

But I did know why they were forced to leave. I had reached a point where I could not return home to the United States without experiencing the carceral castles on Ghana’s Gold Coast.

My feet were firmly planted, affixed to the weather-beaten ground of the Castle of St. George in Elmina. I stood in front of a cell, designated for incarcerated Ashanti, Mandinka, Hausa, Wolof, Fula, and Susu from various kingdoms who had been deemed as deserving of death because they fought to live in freedom. I stood there in front of a thick black wooden door hauntingly marked by a human skull and a set of crossbones carved into stone.

Behind that door was a darkness I never experienced.

In the 7x10 prison cell, there was a total absence of light. There was also an abject emotional darkness that came with knowing folks, wrapped in the same skin that I’m in, were left there to starve and rot in death.

The captives imprisoned at the Castle of St. George were a part of what I call the carceral class. I am a member of this class.

The carceral class is made up of persons of African descent who are systematically stigmatized as unfit for freedom and deserving of the dehumanization that comes with being incarcerated. It is essential to the idea of Black people being framed as the locus of crime and Blackness as being synonymous with criminality. As a classification, the carceral class denotes that, at any given time, your freedom can be ripped from underneath your feet. That you can be torn away from the people you love and the places you love to be.

Although he didn’t name it, Malcolm X knew about the carceral class too.

The carceral class is made up of persons of African descent. It denotes that, at any given time, your freedom can be systemically ripped from underneath your feet. That you can be torn away from the people you love and the places you love to be.

In Malcolm X’s blistering 1963 speech, “Message to the Grassroots,” he spoke of the systemic condemnation of Black folks in the United States. He lasered in on the uncomfortable common bond of being Black in America. Malcolm made it plain and uncompromising. “We are all Black people, so-called Negroes, second-class citizens, ex-slaves,” he said. “You are nothing but a ex-slave. You don’t like to be told that. But what else are you? You are ex-slaves. You didn’t come here on the Mayflower. You came here on a slave ship — in chains, like a horse, or a cow, or a chicken.”

I wrestle with what Brother Malcolm said. Not because I disagree with the troublesome truths that he spoke, but because I feel his analysis can be built upon.

His words still ring in my mind on a loop.

“You are nothing but a ex-slave.”

You are nothing but a slave.

You are nothing.

You are a thing.

Malcom’s speech takes me back to Achille Mbembe’s On the Postcolony. In it, Mbembe lays bare his views on what it means to be branded, burned with the mark of being a slave. He viewed slave as the “forename” one must “give to a man or woman whose body can be degraded, whose life can be mutilated, and whose work and resources can be squandered — with impunity.”

I think about a time before enslavement. Before Africans were ensnared in the wretchedness of having both their labor and their lives exploited from can’t see in the morning to can’t see in the evening, they were prisoners of a particular kind.

Those who were captured and eventually enslaved were regular folks: commoners, farmers, wage workers, domestic servants, and artisans who worked with their hands. Two-thirds of those held captive were young African men. As Marcus Rediker recounts in The Slave Ship: A Human History, slave raiders targeted “‘the roughest and most hardy,’ and avoided the privileged ‘smooth negroes.’” The class-based vulnerability of the common folks figured centrally in their capture and confinement. Rediker continues:

Second to war as a source of slaves were the judicial processes in and through which African societies convicted people of crimes ranging from murder to theft, adultery, witchcraft, and debt; condemned them to slavery; and sold them to African traders or directly to the slave-ship captains… Many Africans and (abolitionist) Europeans felt that judicial processes in West Africa had been corrupted and that thousands had been falsely accused and convicted in order to produce as many tradeworthy bodies as possible.

A judicial system of injustice had waged war on African commoners, criminalizing them into a world of carcerality.

Malcolm’s raspy tone echoes again in my mind. I hear him saying, “You didn’t come here on the Mayflower. You came here on a slave ship — in chains, like a horse, or a cow, or a chicken.”

And again, Brother Malcolm was correct.

We did not willingly travel to the Americas on the Mayflower. We were forced here on the White Lion and the Clotilda. It is not hyperbole to suggest that the slave ship was an aquatic prison. Its European captain was the warden. Its European crew were the prison guards. And in handcuffs and leg shackles were the formerly free Africans, eaten alive, buried in the belly of vessels of mass incarceration.

The largest wave of forced African diasporic movement was anchored to punishment and carcerality. Everywhere the descendants of the Middle Passage were forced to find footing, carceral-class status and the struggle for liberation followed.

Malcolm knew the global connectedness of Black folks’ oppression. He knew that in the West, the African diaspora’s carceral-class status is still branded to our being.

Forty percent of the 10 million incarcerated Africans brought to the Americas and sold into chattel slavery ended up in Brazil. Today, it is estimated that 75% of Brazil’s prison population are Brazilians of African descent. In the country’s capital Brasília, Afro-Brazilians make up 82% of those incarcerated. Although only 11% of the country’s total population is between eight and 24 years of age, this age group represents approximately one-third of those imprisoned.

In the United States, Black adults are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated than white adults. As of 2001, one out of every three Black boys born in that year could expect to go to prison in his lifetime. While 14% of all youth under 18 in the United States are Black, 42% of boys and 35% of girls in juvenile detention facilities are Black. Among Black trans folks, 47% have been incarcerated at some point in their lives.

The criminalization of Black folks in the United States is both a pathologizing and totalizing practice. No group is spared. No group is left unvictimized. These are progeny of the commoners, prisoners of war, and freedom fighters who made up the original carceral class.

Malcolm also knew that as a Muslim, “There is nothing in our book, the Quran, that teaches us to suffer peacefully.”

On Christmas Day in 1522, 20 enslaved Muslims, wielding machetes, attacked their Christian masters on the island of Hispaniola. It was the first recorded enslaved African revolt in the Western Hemisphere.

It is not hyperbole to suggest that the slave ship was an aquatic prison. Its European captain was the warden. Its European crew were the prison guards. And in handcuffs and leg shackles were the formerly free Africans, eaten alive, buried in the belly of vessels of mass incarceration.

Four years later, enslaved African Muslims rebelled against the Spanish on the coast of present-day South Carolina. It was the first rebellion by enslaved folks in the history of North America.

In 1729, Granny Nanny, a self-liberated African Muslim leader and warrior, led her army of Maroons in Jamaica into the battle with the British — and crushed them in combat. On August 14, 1791, an enslaved African Muslim named Dutty Boukman led other enslaved folks in an uprising against the French. This rebellion and the death of Boukman are marked as being one of the sparks that lead to the Haitian Revolution. On the 27th night of Ramadan in January 1835, a group of enslaved African Muslims in Salvador of Bahía, Brazil, organized one of the largest slave rebellions in the history of the Americas. After being forced aboard on June 28, 1839, Sengbe Pieh, an enslaved African Muslim, led the aquatic revolt on the Amistad.

For members of the carceral class, resistance is in our blood. Resistance is a binding component of our collective experience. Resistance is in our history. This is the history of Black folks like Safiya Bukhari, Iya Fulani Sunni-Ali, Kamau Sadiki, Jamil Al-Amin, Mutulu Shakur, and Russell “Maroon” Shoatz.

This is why we resist to this day.

In the end, I return to where I started, thinking about Saidiya Hartman’s words. We live in a time created by the original mass incarceration — the transatlantic slave trade. The “peculiar institution” that is rooted in carcerality. Malcolm X knew this. Political prisoners in the United States today, who need to be freed, know this. I, too, know this. There has not been a point in my life where I have not been intimately impacted by the carceral state. We know this because we have all been subject to and subjugated by the carceral state. It is this experience of knowing that informs my fight to abolish the carceral state.

Their Violence and Ours

By Nathaniel Flakin

Republished from Left Voice.

Capitalist politicians of all stripes are condemning “violence.” But they never mean the daily violence committed by the police. They are condemning resistance against state violence.

Bourgeois society has a very funny way of talking about violence. In the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd, as thousands poured into the streets to demonstrate their anger and demand justice, the bourgeois press was publishing articles with headlines like this: “Violence erupts in Minneapolis following black man’s death in police custody.”

What a strange formulation! Not only does the headline conceal how this “death” happened. Apparently it is not “violence” if a state functionary chokes a restrained man to death. No, “violence” only began after that. 

This bias underscores the way that bourgeois society operates. A Black man being murdered by the state is just a normal day; but people taking things from a Target store without paying is a catastrophe. People are expendable; but property is sacred. 

Indeed, capitalist society treats all kinds of systemic violence as so completely natural that it does not even deserve the term. A police murder in broad daylight might, if there are sufficient protests, be condemned as “excessive force.” But what about when police do follow all rules and regulations? When they evict a family from their home, for example — is that not violence? What about a store preventing hungry people from getting food? What about a government allowing 100,000 people to die of a pandemic? Is that not violence?

The German communist poet Bertolt Brecht put it succinctly: “There are many ways to kill. They can stab a knife in your guts, take away your bread, decide not to cure you from an illness, put you in a miserable house, torture you to death with work, take you to war, etc. Only a few of these are forbidden in our state.”

In response to the protests, bourgeois politicians are speaking out against violence. But of course they do not mean the daily violence committed by the police. They are not referring to the massacres committed by the U.S. military or the economic havoc wreaked by American corporations. No, their main concern, almost inevitably, is property damage.

The U.S. Representative from Minneapolis, the progressive Democrat Ilhan Omar, for example tweeted out on Thursday: “We should and must protest peacefully. But let us end the cycle of violence now.” Atlanta’s Democratic Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said: “This is not in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.”

But what was the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.? He was not a socialist, but he understood that oppressed people must stand up to their oppression. For this, he was condemned by the powers that be for his supposed “violence.” On April 12, 1963, a group of eight clergymen called on King to cancel planned demonstrations for civil rights in Alabama. They called demonstrations “unwise and untimely” because they  “incite to hatred and violence, however technically peaceful those actions may be.” They denounced the mobilizations as “extreme measures” and proposed that Black people should “peacefully obey” while relying on courts.

King, of course, did not follow this advice. He defended riots as “the language of the unheard” and went on to denounce the U.S. government’s horrific violence in Vietnam. It was only after his murder that King was transformed into a harmless icon — an angelic figure who supposedly preached nothing but passive resistance

Progressive Democrats like Omar are not calling for peace — they are calling on people to peacefully obey the system that is murdering them. Omar wants the U.S. federal government to investigate police murders. Yet decades of police “reforms” have only shown that this institution cannot be reformed. The Minneapolis Police Department is headed by a Black cop who once sued the department over its racist practices. And yet: the capitalist police, even with the most enlightened leadership, can have no other function than protecting capitalist property. This means oppressing the poorest sectors of the working class, especially Black people.

As socialists, we do condemn violence — we condemn the violence that the capitalist system commits against billions of people every day. We do not condemn it when working-class and poor people begin to defend themselves against the system’s violence.

A riot serves to get the attention of the ruling class. It might even force them to make concessions. But a riot cannot end the system of oppression and exploitation. For that, we need to combine the rage on the streets of Minneapolis with socialist organization. Democratic Party politicians (even the ones that call themselves “socialists”) will always call on people to accept the institutions that oppress them. Real socialists, in contrast, want to build up organizations that are independent of the ruling class, their state, and all their parties.

A tiny minority of capitalists exploits the labor of the huge majority of people. In order to maintain their rule, they maintain an enormous repressive apparatus, including police, jails, armies, judges, etc. — that is their state. The capitalists are driving our entire civilization to a catastrophe. But they will never relinquish power voluntarily. Throughout history, no ruling class has ever given up without being toppled. As Karl Marx wrote, “Violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.” This is why the working class needs to confront the capitalists’ bodies of armed men.

When working people set fire to a police station, the capitalists’ media will call this “violence” — but it is nothing more than self-defense against the daily violence perpetrated by capitalism. We must get rid of the capitalists’ state, and replace it with a society run by working people themselves. That is the essence of socialist revolution. And the fires on the streets of Minneapolis show that the deepening crisis of capitalism is pushing U.S. society just a little bit closer to that end.

On the Anti-Racist Economy

By Joshua Briond

In the aftermath of the state-sanctioned executions of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, we have witnessed arguably the largest and most sustained mobilization of protests and political demonstrations across the country in the movement for Black lives. In the midst of an era of drastically increased performative and opportunistic "activism," where "spreading awareness" is prioritized over human lives and dignity—which was helped ushered in by the Shaun King’s of the world—where capital(ism) does what it has done to everything: commodify, celebritize, and corporatize any and everything, by any means necessary. Such has been done for “social justice" rhetoric and activism. We have seen, in real time, Black Lives Matter be co-opted, commodified, watered down, and flat-out defanged in the face of capital, as the simple passivity of the hashtag and movement demands—if you can call it such—has become socially acceptable in the mainstream arena, specifically so in the post-Kaepernick era.

With increasing pressure for bourgeois public figures to “speak out” and “spread awareness” from fans, the sociopolitical moment has forced historically apolitical figures and brands alike to momentarily step outside their bubble of privilege, power, and wealth to release uninspired and bland political statements vaguely condemning violence and pledging their rhetorical support for the Black lives matter movement. Such acts are met with comment sections filled with bleak and dystopian undue and unjust adulation for bare minimum performances of intellectually insulting public political theater—that is yet typical for the celebrity worship present here in the US. As the limits of neoliberal political imagination have once again depicted, in this crucial sociopolitical climate, the best the professional liberal class could offer as a solution to the prevalence of racialized state violence—was not the political interrogation of the white power structure we live under and its constant terror and antagonization to non-white life—but to vote for uninspired Democratic candidates, donate to NGOs and non-profits with zero ties to communities most largely affected by said violence, and read “ally” self-help books, written largely but not exclusively by and for white people.

One of the books in question is Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. Published the summer of 2018, it went viral during the rise of the protests (stated to have sold at least a million copies in the matter of a few months). Others have grappled with the glaring contradictions and violence inherent to the act of a white person raking in millions under the guise of “anti-racism” and “anti-bias training”—that has been largely proven ineffective; while also charging anywhere from $30,000 to $45,000 on public speaking gigs for corporate conglomerates like Bill Gates and Amazon. So I’m not here to speak on that. Yet, DiAngelo’s public persona and prominence is arguably the perfect depiction of the co-optation of the politics of “anti-racism” into its own industry for corporate diversity initiatives without addressing structural root causes. The issue with books, panels, infographics, and the discourse surrounding race that centers and targets “allies” is that so many of them still fundamentally misunderstand rac[e/ism], whiteness, and anti-Blackness as just a matter of individual feelings, ignorance, and morality—instead of what it is: a structural organizing tool that the US political economy—built on and inseparable from slavery and genocide—necessitates.

“We who were not black before we got here, who were defined as black by the slave trade—have paid for the crisis of leadership in the white community for a long time & have resoundingly, even when we face the worst about our­selves, survived & triumphed over it."

—James Baldwin

How can one be an anti-racist if the historical precedence of race and racialization as a colonial society organizing device and regime isn’t widely understood amongst those who proclaimed to identify or align with anti-racist values? And when the vast majority of this country’s population—including self-proclaimed anti-racists’ understanding of race is wrongly and harmfully understood as that of a biological marking, rather than a sociopolitical tool meticulously and conveniently constructed and manipulated through legislation? As W.E.B. Du Bois, amongst other historians and critical race thinkers have noted: Whiteness, as stated since its historicized legislation, marks power and dominance. Blackness marks the powerless, slave, and dispossessed.

The United States of America, as we know of it, cannot function or exist without the racial regime: whiteness and anti-blackness. The entire economy, politically and otherwise—going all the way back to the cotton industry; which introduced the world to the US as a global imperial-capitalist project—is predicated & sustained through racial violence. The subjugation of imperialized nations and peoples, the dispossessed, and the enslaved, is how America and therefore the American knows that they are free. The coloniality of American freedom and the subjugation of those racialized and colonized nations and peoples cannot be divorced from one another. The entire concept of freedom and democracy—as espoused as principle by the American project—is predicated on the denial of such, of the Other(s).

“Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not helpless, but licensed & powerful; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfillment of destiny.”

—Toni Morrison

I want to say that when I speak of the “America(n),” I am referring to that of the white. America(n) means white. I would like to also infer that the American, and white identity, ideology, and structure, is founded upon not just the systemic exploitation of the Other, namely the Black or otherwise the slave, the native, the dispossessed, and the colonized—and the moral and political justification of it—but also defined entirely by said positionality of the subjugated. As Toni Morrison has written, “Black slavery enriched the country’s [creative] possibilities. for in that construction of blackness and enslavement could be found not only the not-free but also, with the dramatic polarity created by skin color, the projection of the not—me. The result was a playground for the imagination. What rose up out of collective needs to allay internal fears and to rationalize extemal exploitation was an American Africanism—a fabricated brew of darkness, otherness, alarm, and desire that is uniquely American."

The liberal anti-racist economy is fundamentally unwilling and ill-equipped to grapple with this and racial[ized] contradictions of capital(ism)—the likes of which Black radicals of the Black radical tradition have theorized and highlighted on for decades now. Racism is not just a matter of individual ignorance or feelings that can be changed or eradicated via “understanding,” “diversity and anti-bias training,” “tough conversations,” or a quick fix in morality and finally seeing subjects of its violence as human; as so many prominent “anti-racists” would like to have us believe. The ‘antiracist’ economy, lucrative as may be, is incapable of birthing white ‘anti-racists’ because it refuses to grapple with the inherent racism of the project, or rather regime of race, racialization, capital(ism), and whiteness-as-power, in and of itself. You cannot manufacture solidarity—which a radical anti-racist movement necessitates—on the simple passivity of moral posturing. Solidarity must be built on, not just through shared struggle or basic figurations of empathy, but also on recognizing the humanity of those in which it has been historically denied to and ultimately coming to an understanding and agreement that we are worth fighting for.

“As long as you think you are white, there is no hope for you.” —James Baldwin

To teach white people to be ‘antiracist’ is to teach white people to betray everything that they have ever known about their very existence, the world order, and life itself; it is to quite literally antagonize everything that they are and sense empowerment from. Therefore, you cannot ‘teach’ white people to be ‘antiracist’ through moral and virtue signaling—especially when whiteness itself, as politically constructed, is, has always been, and will always be, immoral. It is why becoming an anti-racist is, or at least should be, a choice one makes through rigorous study of the history of race, racialization, whiteness, and liberation movements, etc. White people cannot be guilted into antiracism—this is why the “spreading awareness” tactic—deployed by Shaun King and his ilk—that bombards people with pornographic visualizations of black terror and death have been largely ineffective but on the contrary quite in fact, historically libidinal—a source of entertainment and collective joy. The politics of moralism has proven futile. You cannot moralize oppression—especially when the source and basis of said oppression is that of capital and whiteness—both of which are categorically immoral.

In a sociopolitical moment where we have seen Donald Trump’s violence exceptionalized; making it out to be unlike anything we have ever seen before—despite his political crimes largely (and simply) being an extension of the order and requirements of the US presidency—by the liberal media apparatus; terroristic political legacies resuscitated, war criminals, regime changers, and COINTELPRO state agents become faces of resistance. All of which depict a moment in which the standard for “good doers,” “morality,” and human rights and social justice advocate is deeper in the gutter than ever before. I’m afraid that the anti-racist economy, the ally industrial complex—as a result of commodification of social justice has ushered in an “anti-racism” and a human right advocacy that is inseparable from the social, political, and economic capital that it often leads to.

I’m afraid the anti-racist economy has, ironically enough, failed to create any substantial “allies” or “anti-racists.” But instead created a culture of unadulterated and uncontested political performativity, groomed more benevolent self-aggrandizing white people—who are smarter, more clever than their forebears at disguising such racism; to avoid backlash, consequences, or even the mildest forms of confrontation; just enough to navigate situations with and around subjects of racial oppression without exposing the psychopathy and immorality of structural and ideological whiteness—but not enough to materially and substantially dedicate themselves to and sacrifice their own power and capital towards an anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist struggle.

I’m afraid that there has been little to no progress, remorse or lessons learned—on the part of individual whites or the white power structure at-large as evidenced by the continuation of the legacy of colonialism, slavery and historicized violence—as the tactics and acts wielded against the initial racially marked and subjugated would serve as a template of what would occur in the centuries to follow—being exported to other racialized and colonized people domestically and across the globe; while still being enacted on the initially marked, i.e., African, Black, and Indigenous subjects.

I’m afraid with the consequences of slavery, which is that of whiteness-as-power, the racial regime and racism that is inherent to it depict white remorselessness on the part of the perpetuators and continued beneficiaries of the historicized economic industry; to paraphrase one of my favorite James Baldwin quotes from 1970: the very sight of black people in white chains and cages—both proverbial or otherwise—houseless, neglected, and structurally subjugated, and terrorized; would struck such anger, such intolerable rage, in the eyes, minds, and bodies of the American people, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But instead, as we know of it all too well, the existence of said chains, cages, and racial subjugation, is how the American measures their own safety and sense of comfort. It is how they know they are free.

Under Capitalism Black Lives Are Adrift and Vulnerable

By W. T. Whitney, Jr.

Originally published at Monthly Review.

It’s true. Too often, in too many circumstances, for too long, the lives of Black people in the United States don’t matter. Black people fill prisons; their children fill terrible schools; many are poverty-stricken. But at issue here are the killings and people being left to die.

Post-Civil War arrangements by which the victorious North settled with the defeated slavocracy ensured that many Black people would not matter much and that some would die. A thousand or so were murdered in the South in 1866, reports W.E. B Du Bois. Over 2000 more would be lynched during the Reconstruction years, as documented recently by the Equal Justice Initiative. [1] That organization had already documented and memorialized thousands of lynching deaths occurring between 1877 and 1950.

The police killings of Black people prompted the formation of Black Lives Matter. But they die unnecessarily in others ways. Life expectancy is far shorter and infant mortality far greater for U.S. Blacks, for example, than for white people.

According to journalist Adam Serwer, writing in the Atlantic,

The lives of disproportionately black and brown workers are being sacrificed to fuel the engine of a faltering economy.” Specifically, “workers at the front lines of the [COVID-19] pandemic—such as meatpackers, transportation workers, and grocery clerks—have been deemed so worthless that legislators want to immunize their employers from liability.

Significantly, even white people viewed as worthless may be in trouble. Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick, commenting on the Covid 19 pandemic, told a reporter that “there are more important things than living. And that’s saving this country.” Representative Hollingsworth of Indiana identified Coronavirus deaths as “the lesser of these two evils,” the other being economic collapse.

That white people die because they don’t matter is revealing.  They too may be disposable—if they are unnecessary, in the way, or far off. The victims of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden are remembered, as are indigenous peoples decimated by settlers and invaders, and civilians and combatants dying in U.S. wars. The political powers seem to be at ease presently with the probability that millions will be dying soon due to climate change.

Dan Glazebrook, writing for Counterpunch, is a witness. He asserts that, “one product has defined capitalism above all else: human waste.” Criticizing Britain’s management of the COVID-19 crisis, he notes that,

Superfluous people, not necessary for production, not able to participate in the market, and an ever-present threat to the stability of the system [are] the main output of the bourgeois epoch.…. [S]urplus Europeans were exiled…to the colonies…to continue the process of exterminating surplus non-Europeans.

Glazebrook cites urban theoretician and historian Mike Davis’s observation that up to 3 billion informal workers constitute “the fastest-growing and most novel social class on the planet.” But this “is not a labor reserve army in the nineteenth-century sense: a backlog of strikebreakers. [It’s] a mass of humanity structurally and biologically redundant to global accumulation and the corporate matrix.”

Marxist scholar Andy Merrifield identifies some people as “residues.”

They’re minorities who are far and away a global majority. They’re people who feel the periphery inside them, who identify with the periphery, even if sometimes they’re located in the core. Residues are workers without regularity, workers without any real stake in the future of work…. A lot of these residues know that now work is contingent [and] life itself is contingent.

George Floyd’s life was contingent. The lives of U.S. Black people who don’t matter are residues.

Under capitalism, human beings are valued for their use. Enslaved, Black workers were useful, even essential. Then their agrarian society merged with the larger one embarked upon industrial production and territorial expansion. They acquired a distant master that, like the old one, measured the worth of workers with an economic yardstick.

Black agricultural workers, bereft of education, their ancestors stolen from Africa, didn’t fit the capitalist mold. European immigrants ready to work in factories or to occupy land being opened up by the railroads amply fulfilled capitalist objectives.  From Reconstruction on, Black people were marginalized in a country where social needs are neglected and public attention distracted. Violent thugs threatening them have had free rein.

Du Bois in his Black Reconstruction in America (1935) offers an explanation for how the failure of Reconstruction led to limited political rights for Black people and exclusion from real participation in the larger society. Initially,

the reconstructed states were in the power of the rebels and…they were using their power to put the Negro back into slavery.” But the North “united its force with that of the workers to uproot the still vast economic power of the planters. It hoped…to induce the planter to surrender his economic power peacefully, in return for complete political amnesty.

The northern business class was insecure: “the Republican party which represented it was a minority party.” But “united with abolition-democracy [with its] tremendous moral power and popularity,” the party hoped to “buttress the threatened fortress of the new industry.” Giving Blacks the vote “would save the day.” The Republicans sought to nullify apportionment based on non-voting slaves, as provided for in the Constitution. Southerners had relied on that device to inflate their representation in Washington.

But poor whites in the South regarded Blacks as wage competitors. Landowners proceeded to “draw the color line and convince the native-born white voter that his interests were with the planter class.” Poor whites “thought of emancipation as giving them a better chance to become rich planters, landowners, and employers of Negro labor.” They wanted “to check the demands of the Negroes by any means” and were willing “to do the dirty work of the revolution that was coming, with its blood and crass cruelties.”

In the North, “Abolitionists failed to see that…the nation did not want Negroes to have civil rights and that national industry could get its way easier by alliance with Southern landholders than by sustaining Southern workers.” And so, “labor control passed into the hands of white southerners, who combined with white labor to oust northern capitalists” and themselves manage a southern-style capitalist economy.

What resulted remained for decades. Wages for Black people, initially non-existent or very low, stayed depressed. Aspiring Black landowners met resistance, eventually at the hands even of New Deal officials. Because the methods of exploitation available to southern overlords, sharecropping and the convict-leasing system, were less profitable than those available to northern capitalists, the material value of southern Blacks stayed low.

Most Black people were barred from occupying a sustainable niche in the productive apparatus of the U.S. economy. They’ve verged on the irrelevant, remaining as a “residue,” at risk of being disposed of.

Nevertheless, the U.S. political system has been open enough to allow many Black people to find remunerative work, elevate their social-class status, and be safe. Even Black workers defied expectations: in 1950, 43% of Black men in Michigan were working in the auto industry. [2]

The argument here has centered on social-class difference. But racism, which operates as a means for imposing differentiation among humans, also had a part. The notion of racism elaborated by political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. is relevant. Reed explains that racism showed up historically as a tool devised by oppressors for dealing with social conflict. He claims that white settlers and other exploiters configured differences among humans—physical, cultural, and religious plus others fashioned out of upper-class snobbery—into an all-embracing concept of race. They thus gained the ability to weaponize inequalities within human society, the better to enforce oppression.

One example: southern elites, from Reconstruction on, arranged for Blacks and the white underclass to be at each other’s throats. Their northern counterparts did likewise, leaving it so that Blacks and whites don’t easily unite in common struggle.

Racism serves as an adjunct to classed-based oppression. Causing pain, it works for maintaining social-class boundaries. The combination of the two has resulted in Black people being left with a generally precarious role within U.S. society and with vulnerability to lethal violence.

Some basic ideas, no less true for being platitudinous, may suffice to conclude this effort. One, an injury to one is an injury to all. Two, ruling class prerogatives and oppression travel in the same lane. Three, dedication to equality, radical or otherwise, does matter.

Anti-colonialist intellectual and activist Franz Fanon has the last word: “For my part, the deeper I enter into the cultures and the political circles the surer I am that the great danger that threatens Africa is the absence of ideology.” You need to replace “Africa” with “USA.”

W. T. Whitney Jr. is a political journalist whose focus is on Latin America, health care, and anti-racism. A Cuba solidarity activist, he formerly worked as a pediatrician.

Notes

[1] “Reconstruction in America–Racial Violence After the Civil War, 1865–1876,” Equal Justice Initiative, Montgomery, Alabama, pp. 118.

[2] Victor Perlo, People vs. Profits, (International Publishers, NY, 2003), p. 181.