Building a Socialist Alternative: An Interview with Eljeer Hawkins

By Bryant William Sculos

(A shorter, edited-down version of this interview was first published with Truthout under the title "Inspiring a Socialist Alternative: An Interview with Eljeer Hawkins," published Feb. 24, 2018. The full version of the interview is reprinted here with permission.)

(The following is an interview conducted via email between Nov. 30, 2017 and Dec. 30, 2017, slightly edited for style)

Bryant Sculos: Can you say a bit about how you became an activist and what your early experiences were like?

Eljeer Hawkins: I was born and raised in East Harlem, New York City. It began for me at the age of 18 years old. I discovered the speeches of Malcolm X to the chagrin of my mother who was a child of the 1950s and 60s. My mom was 14 years old when Malcolm X was murdered; she wasn't very enthused to find her oldest listening to old Nation of Islam tapes with brother minister Malcolm X calling the "white man the devil." (laugh)

I never had a black history course until college. I was accepted to Howard University, but didn't have the resources to attend early classes that were in 1992. My dream was to attend Howard; I went to John Jay College for Criminal Justice, I wanted to be a defense attorney. My uncle, Wayne, my mom's brother, became instrumental in my early development as he helped me navigate US history, black history, art, and music particularly the black aesthetic. I will always be indebted to him and what he taught me.

So Brother Malcolm X was a natural starting point. My father wasn't in my life, so Malcolm X and Uncle Wayne were the men and examples I looked to growing up politically and culturally. The first bookstore I visited was Liberation bookstore in Harlem and bought my early black nationalist, cultural nationalist, and socialist books. In college, I joined the Organization of Black Students-became very active on campus-to the determent of my school work. My life changed forever when my mother died at the age of 43 from a massive heart attack. At this time I was engaged in solidarity work with a group in the Congo-formerly called Zaire under the brutal dictatorship of Mobutu. I also was on the periphery of the Workers World organization but never joined.

My mother's death destroyed me; I lost focus and left school after two years. I wanted to dedicate my life to the project of revolutionary ideas and action.

BS: Did you consider yourself a socialist from the beginning or did that develop later?

EH: I was a black revolutionary nationalist until one winter night after a protest in 1995. A sister activist asked me what society after the revolution was I aiming to build. I had ignorantly dismissed revolutionary Marxism as a white man's ideology. February of 1995 I attended a gathering of dissent Congolese organizations with various political and economic leanings. I worked with Serge Mukendi and the Workers and Peasants Movement of the Congo (POP). Brother Serge and the POP declared themselves to be Marxists; he played a foundational role in my political development and hunger to understand the world. Well we attended this meeting of the minds, and we stayed with a member of Labor Militant in Boston, Massachusetts (now Socialist Alternative). I began to look at the brother's bookshelf and was spellbound. I wasn't a member of any socialist organization at the time. So the comrade gave me the contact information of Labor Militant members in New York City. From February to about the early summer of 1995, I attended meetings and discussions. The organization was tiny at the time. After genuinely studying and reading the program, I decided to join and commit my life to the project of building socialism and workers' democracy internationally. I joined at a time following the fall of Stalinism, the triumphalism of capitalism, and decline of the workers' movement. So I participated in a dark moment for socialist ideas, and frankly, it steeled me in every way to march forward armed with a program, analysis, and history. So all the things I've learned and continue to learn have guided me, 23 years later in the international class struggle for socialism. Today, we are witnessing a resurgence of socialist thought and action. I'm humbled to be here for this moment.

BS: What is your take on the current state of the US left-as well as the left globally?

EH: We are at an embryonic stage of socialist ideas. The crisis of capitalism and decline of the institutions of capitalism like their two parties (Democratic and Republican) has led a whole generation to question what the hell is going on and what I can do to change things. Occupy Wall Street was the first shot across the bow, followed by vital social and political explosions and banners like Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, #MeToo, and Arab Spring revolutions, etc. This is also a time for debate and discussion on how the socialist left globally can make gains and what is the best strategy and tactics to take the struggle forward. We need a level of patience, because this is a new and young milieu of activists and organizers who are feeling their way through this period of reform or revolution-battles for self-determination like in Catalonia, an environmental crisis like in California, Puerto Rico, and the Caribbean, and increased racial and sexual oppression. I think as this new left continues to engage in the struggle they will be forced to draw conclusions and rethink what they thought initially. We are truly living in a period of revolution and counter-revolution. We must prepare ourselves through an intense engagement in history, social struggle, and political analysis because of this uncharted territory moment.

BS: Given the unique path you've taken to become a socialist, now with decades of activist experience, I think people would be interested in hearing what your worst experience as a socialist activist has been? Best?

EH: The worst has always been debates to the point of losing sight of the centrality of the working class and their potential revolutionary agency to change the world. Now, please do not get me wrong, a debate organized and focused can provide clarity and a general roadmap on how to proceed in the struggle. The Bolshevik Party is a brilliant example of debate and discussion in the workers' movement-interconnected with political perspectives, action, and the program always centering the international working class and peasantry in the worldwide socialist revolution.

The best experience is winning a debate (laugh), just kidding. I would say witnessing how consciousness is transformed by events and interconnected developments that lead people to draw various conclusions. Consciousness can leap forward or backward based on events, how a situation is given a contextual explanation like an electoral win or defeat, and importantly who and what explains this process like an individual or organization in the struggle. I think of Erica Garner, the daughter of Eric Garner and her political awakening. After the death of her father, she immersed herself in telling the truth and keeping his spirit alive in organizing daily for a full year to decry law enforcement violence. That is powerful to me as an activist and grassroots historian. Mamie Till, the mother of Emmitt Till, said it best when events shape one's consciousness, "Two months ago I had a nice apartment in Chicago. I had a good job. I had a son. When something happened to the Negroes in the South, I said, `That's their business, not mine.' Now I know how wrong. I was. The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all."

Socialism is longer a dirty word, the gains like the fifteen dollar minimum wage spearheaded by low-wage workers, electoral victories and organizing of Socialist Alternative and socialist city councilor Kshama Sawant in Seattle, Washington, and a strong showing of Ginger Jentzen in the city council race in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The growth of independent working-class politics is on the agenda. The best moments are witnessing or participating in grassroots struggles that win, raising the morale, confidence, and fighting capacity of working people, the poor, and the most oppressed to change their conditions.

BS: In early November 2017 when you came to speak at a Socialist Alternative event in Worcester, MA, you said that you were a perpetual optimist. Given the state of the world today, the increasingly frequent and devastating crises of capitalism, structural racism, rampant unrepentant sexism and misogyny, and continued ecological degradation, how you can maintain your optimism?

EH: James Baldwin stated, "I cannot be a pessimist because I am alive. To be a pessimist means you have agreed that human life is an academic matter, so I am forced to be an optimist. I am forced to believe that we can survive whatever we must survive."

That optimism comes from a study of history and examples of people fighting back to form a union, stopping an abusive boss, people organizing together for a common goal. Now, we need as Dr. King correctly stated, an urgency of NOW! And we need some action to go along with that urgency. Yes, we have dark days and nights ahead of us, particularly in this era of Trumpism and the economic terrorism of capitalism. That's why we must engage in struggle and critical political study to fortify our resolve. History teaches us when people become fed-up and can't take it anymore, people begin to move. What is crucial for the radical socialist left globally is to be prepared for that moment building organization, program, and leadership in these battles are essential as victory or defeat hangs in the balance.

BS: Building on that question, do you think there is possibly a strategic role for a kind of hopeful pessimism -a kind of expectation, given the forces rallied against the left (as well as the left's self-inflicted failures) that, at least in the short-term, things probably aren't going to turn out well, but that is precisely why we need to struggle and remain hopeful that they can, in the future, turn out well? The strategic idea being that if left activists (especially those who are new to socialism or activism in general) become too optimistic about the possibilities of short-term victories, they will become disillusioned and demobilized when faced with failure. Do you think there is anything to this perspective?

EH: You can't have a blind optimism or a cheerleader's mentality that is not rooted in the reality of class struggle-its ups and downs. The 90s were difficult, but I would not trade it in because I learned during a period of defeat. I was politically developed as a member of the Committee for a Workers' International (CWI) that has a sober approach that follows in the best traditions of genuine Bolshevism. The CWI draws out global political perspectives to explain the events and developments we are living through, even more, critically elaborating on an action program to present to workers and youth in the class struggle rooted in their lived experience under this system.

It is true the left has made mistakes, and there is an uneven history when it comes analysis, strategy, and tactics. With that said, we can't throw out the baby with the bathwater either. The building of the left or revolutionary party, even more so, Socialism, is a project that will demand the full participation and activity of the working class, youth, poor, and oppressed on a daily basis. I firmly believe we need more than smart prose, intellectual verbiage that a tiny minority in the activist world can understand, and commentary that is divorced from the concrete struggle and lives of working people. I wonder what that term "hopeful pessimism" means to someone who has been on the left for years, who carries scares and tears, or a new person discovering these ideas and their voice in the struggle. That "hopeful pessimism" seems abstract and divorces oneself to standing on the sidelines and waiting. I would prefer to engage and test out my ideas in the living breathing struggle and allow the movement to judge me if I am right or wrong.

BS: Given that, and the importance that you (and Marxists in general) place on history, what historical models, regarding movements and organizations, do you think offer the best inspiration (both regarding principles and strategy/tactics) for the contemporary left?

EH: The debate and discussion that is in the air is reform or revolution. This past November marked the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, and many are questioning the Bolshevik Revolution and party itself. I would say the Bolshevik Revolution would be instructive to study, but I would recommend all activists especially the new generation of activists to explore all the significant revolutionary movements of the past. Particularly after the Russian Revolution in 1917, like the German Revolution of 1918, Chinese Revolution (1925-27), Spain between 1931 and1937, etc. And counterpose it to the revolutions after WWII in the aftermath of the strengthening of Stalinism and Social Democracy, like China in 1949, Cuba in 1959, and anti-colonial revolutions in the so-called "third world." In my mind, this is vital because I think this generation needs a sense of historical memory and clarity of what a revolution is and how it comes to life under particular conditions and social forces. As you engage in this study, I think the Bolsheviks will stand out as a unique force that made a successful socialist revolution and fought to keep the flame alive in the face of imperial attack, third world social conditions, civil war, and isolation.

BS: You and I are both members of Socialist Alternative (SA), so obviously we have a shared vision of principles and strategy, but what is your perspective on the uptick in popularity and paper membership of the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA)? How should SA orient itself toward DSA, both locally and nationally? What are your experiences in working with DSA?

EH: This version of DSA is not your momma or daddy's DSA. DSA is a different organization from its original foundations in the 1960s under the leadership of Michael Harrington; I think this past summer's convention proved that to be true. I am interested to see how it will continue to develop with 30,000 members and several DSA members taking office on a city and statewide basis nationally. The Occupy banner, Bernie Sanders phenomenon, and the capitalist crisis have led us to this moment where socialism is being examined seriously for the first time in a generation or two. This generation will be worse off than their parents; they are living through a new gilded age of the super-rich reaping profits beyond imagination, and their lives are precarious in every way from income inequality to the climate crisis.

SA has worked with DSA members and chapters nationwide and would love to do so moving forward around the critical issues facing working people, poor, and the most oppressed around issues such as healthcare, jobs, education, housing, and ending law enforcement violence. We also want to engage in comradely discussion and debate around strategy and tactics for the left and related movements. We are aware of the meaningful conversations taking place inside DSA around the role of Democratic Party, building a sustainable fight back against corporate power, and countless other issues. SA wants to build a multi-racial mass movement of the working class with socialist forces as its backbone. I think the 40,000 strong rally and march against the forces of hate and reaction in Boston, MA (Aug. 2017) was a brilliant example of genuine united front work. And campaigning to show the potential power and organizing capacity of the working class and left that overshadowed and dwarfed the racist and neo-Nazi forces made the national and international news. This will be a period of clarification around ideas, history, and movement building strategy. SA is looking forward to engaging this new generation of activists and organizers because we are on the clock with no time to waste.

BS: Lastly, what do you see as the greatest obstacle to achieving progress towards socialism over the next, say, 5-10 years?

EH: We are up against an empire and global capitalism. There is no final blow against this system of oppression, war, hate, and environmental destruction. It has weapons of mass distraction and destruction at its disposal. We must be clear about what we are up against. As the Russian Revolution of 1917 and many other social movements against tyranny and corporate power have shown us, as the great Fannie Lou Hamer taught us, when people become sick and tired-the winds of change begin to swirl-what seemed impossible becomes possible. We have to prepare, which means we have to rebuild the fighting capacity of the working class, poor, and most oppressed, organizing in our workplaces, schools, and communities in a systematic and daily manner that encompasses defensive struggle to maintain what we have won and offensive battles to fight for what we want and need right now. One of the immediate tasks in front of us is reigniting the early stages of the resistance against Trump and the Republican Party as they advance the corporate agenda just like at this tax bill its naked class warfare. We must forge a mass movement that is not episodic but is sustaining and always pushing forward. Living that famous civil rights anthem to the fullest "Ain't Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around."

Trump can be defeated, but we must have the will, strategy, analysis, approach, and program that centers the lives of working people and seeks to unite the working class in a common struggle against the ruling 0.1%. That's why I am incredibly excited and interested in the Poor People's Campaign this year and its possibilities in forging that movement. I may not see socialism in my lifetime, but I have been proud to be part of the struggle for socialism. To stand with the millions around the world as we say enough is enough! We will build a new world with our bare hands rooted in love for humanity, a socialist society is possible.

--

Eljeer Hawkins is a community, labor and anti-war activist, born and raised in Harlem, New York, and member of Socialist Alternative/CWI for 23 years. Eljeer is a former shop steward with Teamsters local 851 and former member of SEIU 1199, currently is a non-union healthcare worker in New York City. He contributes regularly to Socialist Alternative Newspaper, socialistworld.net , and The Hampton Institute on race, criminal justice, Black Lives Matter, and the historic black freedom movement. Eljeer is a member of the editorial board of Socialist Alternative newspaper. He has also lectured at countless venues including Harvard University, Hunter College, Oberlin College, and University of Toronto.

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral fellow at The Amherst Program in Critical Theory, adjunct professor at Florida International University, contributing writer for The Hampton Institute, and Politics of Culture section editor for Class, Race and Corporate Power . His recent work has been published with Constellations , New Political Science , Class, Race and Corporate Power , Public Seminar , New Politics , and in the edited volumes The Political Economy of Robots (Palgrave, 2017) and Marcuse in the Twenty-First Century (Routledge, December 2017). He is also a member of Socialist Alternative/CWI.

The Endless American Horror: Lynching and Police

By Devon Bowers

This article was originally published on AHTribune.com.

Please note that this article contains graphic descriptions of lynchings. Discretion is advised.

In 1918 Brook County, Georgia, a local plantation owner was killed by Sidney Johnson, a black man who had been leased out to the plantation via the convict lease system, in a dispute over unpaid wages. Upon hearing this, the white community went on a rampage and lynched not only Johnson, but anyone they thought to even be remotely involved in Johnson's decision. One of these men was Hayes Turner. Not only was he lynched, but also castrated.

Turner's wife, Mary, who was eight months pregnant at the time, began to speak out against her husband's lynching; unfortunately, she too, became a victim. A white mob "hanged her by her feet, set her on fire, sliced her stomach open, and pulled out her baby, which was still alive." They stomped on the child's head, killing it. Then the mob "[took] the time to sew two cats in Mrs. Turner's stomach and making bets as to which one would climb out first."[1]

This can be described as nothing short of demonic. In many ways, even that fails to fully encompass the horror and pure wickedness of this event. Though, the only thing more horrid is that in a way, lynchings continue in the form of police murder.

Before delving into the connections between the aforementioned violence, it is imperative to first understand lynching. The origins of lynching truly lie in slavery where "there were numerous public punishments of slaves, none of which were preceded by trials or any other semblance of civil or judicial processes. Justice depended solely upon the slaveholder." [2] Punishment ranged from lashings to family separation to mutilation and branding. The overall idea behind these actions were that black people were not human beings, in a way, they weren't even property, they were just things, lesser than both humans and animals. This mindset continued in the post chattel slavery era, where slavery took on the form of both the convict leasing and sharecropping systems respectively. Yet, it also took place in the form of mob violence against blacks.

There have been many explorations as to the reasoning behind lynching. E.M. Beck, a professor of sociology at the University of Georgia, posited the argument that lynching was linked to the cotton markets. He argued that lynchings "[increased] during times of sparse cotton revenues, and declining with increasing cotton profits." The lack of profit from cotton led unemployed whites to want to replace black workers and that "Mob violence was a form of intimidation to facilitate this labor substitution." [3] While further studies have shown that fluctuations in cotton pricing don't explain lynching [4], it should be noted that white elites would have an interest in fueling white angst into hatred against blacks, effectively utilizing poor whites as foot soldiers in their mission to maintain the current racial and economic hierarchy.

The cause of lynching was first and foremost the culture of white supremacy that had existed for the past two centuries or so. Blacks became scapegoats for many of the problems that were going on and thus a subculture of violence that had arguably already taken root in the days of slavery, took on new form. "The existence of a subculture presupposes a complex pattern of norms, attitudes and actions" which "reflects 'a potent theme of violence current in the cluster of values that make up the life-style, the socialization process, [and] the interpersonal relationships of individuals living in similar conditions." [5] Effectively, violence becomes normalized and is used as a tool of to socialize and condition people as to how the society operates.

This normalization and conditioning can be seen in the form of the lynching. Lynchings were very much a community affair in which legal authorities seldom if ever got involved as "the judge, prosecutor, jurors and witnesses-all white-were usually in sympathy with the lynchers" and "local police and sheriffs rarely did anything to defend Negro citizens and often supported lynchings." [6] Newspapers as well were extremely biased in covering lynchings. "Southern editors often used sympathetic language in describing lynch mobs while reserving callous damnation for lynch victims. The southern press was extremely creative when it came to providing moral, if not legal, justification for the action of lynch mobs."[7]

We can see the affect that journalists had on the public's view of lynching in the case of the murder of the Hodges family in Statesboro, Georgia.

Henry and Claudia Hodges lived on a remote farm, near a black community, some of whom were the employees of the Hodges. Late on the night of July 28, 1904, two men saw the Hodges home aflame. They went to investigate and found the mutilated, charred remains of the entire family. The suspected motive was robbery as it was known that Hodges was better off than most farmers and it was even rumored that he possibly had several hundred dollars stashed away on his property.

The following morning, Bulloch County sheriff John Kendrick formed a group to hunt down the killers. After discovering strands of hair, a knife, a shoe, and tracks of mud, they were led to a small shack occupied by Paul Reed, a black laborer. While Paul denied involvement, he, along with his wife Harriet, were arrested and taken to jail. When being interrogated, Harriet broke down and revealed that her husband and another black man, Paul Cato, had planned to rob the Hodges. The shoe matched the one found on the Hodges farm and blood stains on his clothing seemed to seal the deal with regards to Paul Reed's guilt, however, no money was found. The sheriff also arrested thirteen other blacks who lived in the general vicinity.

Despite the lack of hard evidence in the form of money, newspapers assumed Reed's guilt. The Macon Telegraph wrote "The wholesale butchery . . . of the Hodges family near Statesboro by dehumanized brutes adds another to the long list of horrors perpetrated in this state since the emancipation of the African slaves in 1865" and noted that "the people of [Statesboro] ... displayed great moral courage and forbearance in permitting the perpetrators to escape summary punishment without the forms of law,"[8] a statement clearly hinting that lynching was on the table as an option. Others went even further in their demonization of the alleged perpetrators, such as the editor of Statesboro News who penned "Good farmers awoke to the fact that they are living in constant danger, and that human vampires live in their midst, only awaiting the opportunity to blot out their lives." [9] Language such as this only served to heighten white anxiety and fears that a black uprising had occurred in response to white mistreatment, something that had been the in the backs of their minds since the institution of slavery began.

The media actively went and pushed erroneous and misleading evidence, such as was with Morning News which stated that Reed had made a 'partial confession' to the murders, despite there being a lack of legal evidence to support the assertion. The Statesboro News continued to utilize inflammatory language, publishing an article which said in part "Their guilt has been established beyond a doubt - every chain has been traced and all lead to their door." [10] Additional stories argued that the rape of both Mrs. Hodges and their daughter Katy, where the real motives for the motive for the murders, again without the slightest shred of evidence.

Newspapers also noted that Reeds and Cato belonged to a distinct subset of blacks who were lazy and shiftless. This contrasts with the blacks who 'know their place' in society and often work on white farms. The only reason this was even discussed was because there were rumors floating around that the Hodges family may have been killed due to Mr. Hodges being too friendly with blacks, something that only aided to reinforce the region's racial caste system and conjure images of murderous black people who would attack whites were they to let their guard down.

An Atlanta News editorial minced few words in its character analysis: "It is true that the negroes in the turpentine campus of south Georgia are in the main a lot of irresponsible and half-savage vagabonds, apparently hopeless to the redeeming efforts of civilization, and that their presence makes a continual menace and threat to the peace and safety of the people."[11]

On August 15, the court case finally got underway. Superior Court Judge Alexander Daley was forbidden by Georgia law to request a change in court venue, despite his wanting to as to possibly give people time to 'cool off.' This was actually dangerous in some ways as such changes were often used by mobs as an excuse to lynch blacks on the grounds that they may have a chance to 'escape justice.'

When the trial began, the press continued to present rumor as fact. The Statesboro News reported that Reed had admitted to being part of a gang of blacks who were roaming the Bulloch County countryside, robbing, raping, and killing whites. Once again this increased the amount of fear in whites and put them more dead-set on lynching. It didn't help that throngs of whites were milling about outside the courthouse.

The actual trial was incredibly brief, lasting less than a day and a half, with Reed's and Cato's respective defenses lasting barely eight minutes, both men plead innocent. Still, the court sentenced them to hanging. As soon as this was done, the white mobs that had been surrounding the courthouse burst in and took both men, making no effort to hide their identities, despite the fact that soldiers (without any ammunition) had been dispatched to protect the men. Both men were beaten and eventually doused in kerosene and set ablaze and dead by 3:30 pm.

Many newspapers actively defended the lynching. The Forest Blade published an editorial which argued "While we will not say we are in favor of lynching principles, there are crimes - and this is one of them - that fully justified the act," similarly another editorial in the Sparta Ishmelite wrote "What society does not do for them [Georgia's whites], efficiently, they do for themselves." [12] The press played a major role in increasing tensions and outright encouraging lynchings, a serious act which helped to normalize the very act itself.

The normalization of lynching was rampant in Southern society. In 1893 in Paris, Texas, a black man by the name of Henry Smith was lynched for allegedly killing and raping the sheriff's daughter. Smith's lynching was in that a spectacle was made of it. It was the first "blatantly public, actively promoted lynching of a southern Black by a large crowd of southern whites with features such as 'the specially chartered excursion train, the publicly sold photographs, and the wide circulated, unabashed retelling of the event by one of the lynchers.'" [13] It should be examined in detail that there were a number of "event-like themes, such as a float, carnival, and parade" all of which indicates "that within the act of justice, the structures of entertainment were organized. […] In addition, the souvenir scrambling for burnt remains as well as promotional materials for acquisition or purchase provides a similar semblance to paraphernalia purchased at modern-day sporting events." [14]

Thus, what we see is within the context of lynching, there was also an aspect of entertainment and even revelry, as if it was something to be celebrated and loved. The squabbling over Smith's remains reinforces the unbroken idea from slavery that black people aren't human beings, but rather just things, in this case a trophy.

The situation went even further in the case of Jesse Washington, a 17 year old mentally disabled boy who was accused of murdering a white woman and subject to a kangaroo court. Children were even bought to view his horrific lynching:

Fifteen thousand men, women and children packed the square. They climbed up poles and onto the tops of cars. . . . Children were lifted up by their parents in the air. Washington was castrated, and his ears were cut off. A tree supported the iron chain that lifted him above the fire of boxes and sticks. Wailing, the boy attempted to climb the skillet hot chain. For this the men cut off his fingers. The executioners repeatedly lowered the boy into the flames and hoisted him out again. With each repetition, a mighty shout [from the crowd] was raised. [15]

It is in acts such as this, with the involvement of children and, as with Smith's lynching, the selling of Washington's remains as if they were memorabilia, that the murder of black people becomes normalized and something beyond a source of maintaining racial hierarchy, something akin to a form of entertainment. Among this murderfest, though, there were those who fought back such as Ida B. Wells.

Wells was a black woman who was mainly focused on battling racial discrimination and penning articles. This changed in 1892, "when a close childhood friend of hers, Thomas Moss, was lynched" in Memphis [16] Wells was of the mindset that lynching was an overreaction by whites against rapists, however, her views quickly changed given the fact that Moss was lynched for defending his grocery store from armed whites and being lynched for the simple act of self-defense. On top of this, Memphis law enforcement didn't even bother to lift a finger to arrest the lynchers, who were publicly known.

Wells took a bit of an academic-esque approach to the situation, thinking that if lynching were exposed as the incarnation of racial hatred it was, it would no longer be socially acceptable. For three months, she traveled around the South investigating lynchings and interviewing witnesses. She found that not only were Black men lynched for having consensual relationships with white women, but also virtually all lynchings became about rape after the lynching went public. She took her information and published a pamphlet entitled Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. Eventually due to threats on her life, she fled Memphis and moved to Chicago, where she continued to write and speak out against lynching. Still, there were others who took a more hands on, self-defense approach to lynching as took place in Decatur, IL.

On June 3, 1893, in Decatur, IL, a black day labor by the name of Samuel L. Bush who had been accused of rape, was taken from the Macon County jail and lynched by a white mob after they had went on a rampage searching for him from March 31 to June 2. During this time, rather than meet with members of the black community to discuss Bush's situation, "State's Attorney Isaac R. Mills, Decatur Mayor David Moffett, Deputy Sheriff Harry Midkiff, and Decatur Marshal William Mason were meeting with Charles B. Britton and Charles M. Fletcher, the leaders of the vigilantes." They attempted to appease the leaders, with Mills stating that if Bush wasn't sentenced to death, "it would then be time to resort to extreme measures." [17]

Despite days of lynching rumors floating around, the authorities allowed for nearly one thousand people to gather across from the jail where Bush was being held and made no effort to move or in any way ensure Bush's safety. Just before 2 AM, "a mob composed of some of the county's leading citizens broke Sam Bush out of jail and lynched him." [18]

In response to the lynching, Wilson B. Woodford, the only black lawyer in town that Bush had hired, published an open letter to blacks living in Decatur, urging them to attend a mass meeting where a strategy for dealing with the lynching would be formed. At the meeting, Woodford advocated taking the legal route, pushing the state attorney, the same one who had been complicit in Bush's lynching, to take action. Some, such as Edward Jacobs, rejected it and pushed for armed blacks to go themselves and arrest Bush's murderers. The resolutions committee backed Woodford's strategy and messages were sent to both the governor and state attorney.

Woodford and Jacobs were coming from two separate worlds. Woodford, having a legal background, "was predisposed to distinguish between the law and enforcers of the law. Woodford, like other liberal race men and women, believed that racial prejudice and contempt for law and order were the twin causes of lynching" whereas Jacobs questioned this method of thinking. Jacobs acknowledged the cozy relationship between lynchers and the police and knew that "knew the authorities had mobilized the vigilantes to help them in capturing Bush but had rejected African-American support either to protect Bush or to arrest his murderers." [19]

Interestingly enough, the two strategies would merge as both Woodford and Jacobs were members of the National Afro-American League, an organization that push for black development and fight against white responses to said development. NAAL "combined the pre-eminent philosophy of self-help and racial solidarity with the protest tactics of legalism, direct action, and violent self-help."[20]

A year later, James Jackson, a black male porter, was accused of raping a white woman under questionable circumstances. The father of the woman was pushing for Jackson's lynching and stated that help was coming from Mt. Zion. This situation would turn out rather differently than Bush's.

Blacks controlled the streets surrounding the jail. They could be seen in doorways, under stair wells and behind wagons, armed and ready for action. Other African-Americans patrolled the streets scrutinizing whites who happened to be out at that late hour. And unlike at the protest meeting, at least two black women participated. [21]

They continued to patrol the streets around the courthouse, the police didn't attempt to intervene, and there were no attempts to lynch Jackson.

As the case with Bush shows, the police themselves were many times the very ones who were, at best, complicit (not that that truly matters), and at worst, active participants in lynchings. This shouldn't be surprising as not only were the police entrenched in the same racial mindset as the lynchers, but also the purpose of the police was (and is) a tool of social control, especially against black people.

The police themselves came out of slavery as "slave patrols and night watches, which later became modern police departments, were both designed to control the behaviors of minorities." [22] In fact, in 1871 Congress passed the Ku Klux Klan Act, "which prohibited state actors from violating the Civil Rights of all citizens in part because of law enforcements' involvement with the infamous group. "[23] (emphasis added) The police themselves oftentimes were directly involved in lynchings such as with the case of Austin Callaway, a sixteen year old boy.

Callaway was shot and killed in LaGrange, Georgia on September 8, 1940, having just a day earlier been accused of assaulting a white woman. He was arrested and taken to the local jail. Later that night, six men, one of them armed, went into the jail, forced the jailer to open the door, and murdered Callaway.[24] Though the killers were never found, it is known that the police were personally involved. It was noted in 2017 by LaGrange's police chief, Louis M. Dekmar, in an apology regarding Callaway's murder. Specifically, Dekmar said "I sincerely regret and denounce the role our Police Department played in Austin's lynching, both through our action and our inaction." [25] Callaway's story is just one in many[26] where police were directly or indirectly involved in lynchings. It is this historical backdrop in which police actively murder black people that today's police murders continue.

With lynchings, the body would hang for days as both a reminder to other blacks to 'stay in their place' but also a part of the aforementioned spectacle. This spectacle continues as can be seen with "the fact that Michael Brown's body was left on the street for hours after he was killed by police officer Darren Wilson," something "that points to just how little has changed in American race relations since the days of Jim Crow." [27] Leaving Brown's body out to languish was an illustration of the lack of concern and decency the Ferguson police department had for him and is reminiscent of leaving a lynch victim's body out for all to see, to remind everyone where black people stood on the racial hierarchy: the bottom.

The media, too, plays a role in police killings as they did during lynchings. Once again, the Michael Brown case puts this in stark view. Darren Wilson, the police officer who killed Brown, described him in disproportionate and even inhuman terms.

"When I grabbed him, the only way I can describe it is I felt like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan," Wilson, who is 6′ 4″ and 210 lbs., said of Brown, who was 6′ 4″ and 292 lbs. at the time of his death. […]He said Brown tried to get his fingers inside the trigger. "And then after he did that, he looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that's how angry he looked." [28]

Not only are black people described in nonhuman terms, but there is a constant implication that
they deserve to be shot due to past transgressions. In the case of Akai Gurley, "The New York Daily News ran a headline, Akai Gurley had criminal record, innocent when shot by cop, which they later switched out for ' Protesters call for arrest of rookie cop who shot Akai Gurley as victim's sister says he didn't deserve to die . '"[29] There is also guilt by association. When twelve year old Tamir Rice was killed by the police, the media bought up the fact that the family's lawyer had "also defended the boy's mother in a drug trafficking case" [30] and that Rice's father had a history of domestic violence. [31] Regularly, the media brings up information that has nothing to do with the actual incident in question, but actively works to defame and sully the victim's name.

Where there once were slave owners and slave catchers, the KKK, and lynch mobs, they have all now "become largely replaced by state agencies such as the criminal justice system, and local and federal police." [32] In August 2016, the United Nations Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent went on a mission to the United States. In their conclusion on their findings, they wrote: "Contemporary police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching. Impunity for State violence has resulted in the current human rights crisis and must be addressed as a matter of urgency." [33]

This assessment is quite correct, especially within the ideas of the spectacle and normalization. While there may not be a sports theme to current police murders, there is a spectacle in and of itself in the near constant sharing of videos of black people dying at the hands of police and the footage being played again and again on the nightly news. While one shouldn't discount that videos are being shared to raise awareness and may very well get people involved in activism, at the same time by the videos being shared and viewed over and over, it can very well create a situation where it the death of black people is normalized and an immunity of sorts built up to it. As writer Feliks Garcia notes

To witness the final moments of someone's life is not supposed to be a regular experience, yet it feels like every week, we're presented with a new video of a different unarmed black man-or child-killed by police.

With the reach of social media, each of these videos is viewed ad nauseum, and you have to ask what purpose this serves. Who needs to see these videos at this point?[34]

Due to the constant viewing of black people dying at the hands of the police, coupled with the media's twisted narratives, seeing black people die becomes a normal occurrence.

The ongoing police murders of black people draw strong parallels to lynchings: from the involvement of the police to the utter dearth of justice to the larger social implications. It is both a tragedy and a nightmare, an endless horror.

Notes

[1] This American Life, Suitable For Children, https://www.thisamericanlife.org/627/transcript

[2] Robert L. Zangrando, About Lynching, http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/g_l/lynching/lynching.htm

[3] E. M. Beck, "The Killing Fields of the Deep South: The Market For Cotton and the Lynching of Blacks, 1882-1930," American Sociological Review 55:4 (August 1990), pg 526

[4] James W. Clarke, "Without Fear or Shame: Lynching, Capital Punishment and the Subculture of Violence in the American South," British Journal of Political Science 28:2 (April 1998), pg 272

[5] Clarke, pg 275

[6] Robert A. Gibson, The Negro Holocaust: Lynching and Race Riots in the United States, 1880-1950 , Yale-New Haven Teacher's Institute, http://teachersinstitute.yale.edu/curriculum/units/1979/2/79.02.04.x.html

[7] Richard M. Perloff, "The Press and Lynchings of African Americans," Journal of Black Studies 30:3 (January 2000), pg 320

[8] Reed W. Smith, "Southern Journalists and Lynching: The Statesboro Case Study," Journalism and Communication Monographs 7:2 (2005), pg 63

[9] Ibid

[10] Ibid, pg 64

[11] Ibid, pg 65

[12] Ibid, pg 70

[13] Rasul A. Mowatt, "Lynching as Leisure: Broadening Notions of a Field," American Behavioral Scientist 56:10 (August 2012), pg 1371

[14] Ibid

[15] Ibid, pg 1376

[16] Amii Larkin Barnard, "The Application of Critical Race Feminism to the Anti-Lynching Movement: Black Women's Fight against Race and Gender Ideology, 1892-1920," UCLA Women's Law Journal 3:1 (January 1993), pg 15

[17] Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, "A Warlike Demonstration,' Legalism, Armed Resistance, and Black Political Mobilization in Decatur, Illinois, 1894-1898," The Journal of Negro History 83:1 (Winter 1998), pg 54

[18] Ibid

[19] Cha-Jua, pg 57

[20] Ibid

[21] Cha-Jua, pg 59

[22] Victor E. Kappeler, A Brief History of Slavery and the Origins of American Policing , http://plsonline.eku.edu/insidelook/brief-history-slavery-and-origins-american-policing

[23] Ibid

[24] Northeastern University Law School, Austin Callaway, http://nuweb9.neu.edu/civilrights/georgia/austincallaway/

[25] Alan Binder, Richard Fausset, "Nearly 8 Decades Later, an Apology for a Lynching in Georgia," New York Times, January 26, 2017 ( https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/us/lagrange-georgia-lynching-apology.html )

[26] State Sanctioned, Police and State Involvement with Lynching, https://statesanctioned.com/police-and-state-involvement-with-lynching/

[27] David G. Embrick, "Two Nations, Revisited: The Lynching of Black and Brown Bodies, Police Brutality, and Racial Control in 'Post-Racial' Amerikkka," Critical Sociology 41:6 (June 2015), pg 837

[28] Josh Sanburn, "All The Ways Darren Wilson Described Being Afraid of Michael Brown," Time, November 25, 2014 ( http://time.com/3605346/darren-wilson-michael-brown-demon/ )

[29] Simple Justice, The Outrage of the Victim's Rap Sheet Must End, http://blog.simplejustice.us/2014/11/23/the-outrage-of-the-victims-rap-sheet-must-end/ (November 23, 2014)

[30] Brandon Blackwell, "Lawyer representing Tamir Rice's family defended boy's mom in drug trafficking case," Cleveland, November 24, 2014 ( http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/11/lawyer_representing_tamir_rice.html )

[31] Brandon Blackwell, "Tamir Rice's father has history of domestic violence," Cleveland, November 26, 2014 ( http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2014/11/tamir_rices_father_has_history.html )

[32] Embrick, pg 838

[33] United Nations General Assembly, Report on the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent on its mission to the United States of America , https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G16/183/30/PDF/G1618330.pdf?OpenElement (August 18, 2016)

[34] Feliks Garcia, "Police brutality is modern lynching- and you may be a part of it," Daily Dot, April 20, 2015 ( https://www.dailydot.com/via/black-men-police-violence-lynching-internet/ )

Science in The House (of Representatives)!

By Charles Wofford

According to The Huffington Post, more scientists than ever are running for office in 2018. [1] This includes roughly 60 PhD scientists running for federal offices, some 200 people of STEM backgrounds running for various state level seats, and the political action group 314 Action ("members of the STEM community, grassroots supporters, and political activists who believe in science") is apparently pressing upwards of 500 other scientists to run for office at various levels. Why is this happening? The obvious answer is that scientists across the board are alarmed at the failure of our legislature to do anything about climate change. So, there is an effort to get a strong scientific presence in government in order to influence policy on energy and climate change. This is likely a very good thing.

However, we ought to be critical in our embrace of the scientific community's political efforts. I have written recently about the efforts of the right to gut education of its political content. [2] The emphasis on "vocational education" on the part of the Right is part of a larger effort to discourage would-be students from studying "useless" topics like history, philosophy, literature, or others that tend to lead to politicization (the Republican phrase for "politicization of students" is "learning to hate America"). If successful, this effort would create a whole generation of Americans educated in "vocational" fields and who tend to simply "do their job" without questioning the political motives behind their jobs.

Unfortunately, many scientists in the United States are politically naïve. This lends itself to similar thinking about education in "useless" topics like history, philosophy, literature, etc. Observe Stephen Hawking's solemn declaration that "philosophy is dead" from his book The Grand Design. Or Steven Pinker's obnoxious preaching about how "the truth can't be sexist" or how "political correctness" is ruining America. [3] Similar comments may be found on biologist and University of Chicago professor Jerry Coyne's popular blog, Why Evolution is True. Neuroscientist and popular science advocate, Sam Harris, disdains to do meaningful research into any number of historical and political topics on which he comments (see his encounter with Noam Chomsky, where, in response to Chomsky's thorough citations refuting his claims, Harris accuses Chomsky of "running into the weeds"). Observe also the pathetic attempts of others to "debunk" gender studies because it threatens their sense of manhood. [4] Many of these people are major, popular scientists who, when discussing topics related to the humanities, sound like creationists trying to talk about science. Chomsky himself blasted this narrowness of political thought among intellectuals in the 1960s. [5] He is worth mentioning, as he is one of the only major scientists to be politically knowledgeable; usually one must look toward historians like Howard Zinn and Michael Parenti (a political scientist by trade), philosophers and revolutionaries like Angela Davis and Cornel West, or literature professors like Edward Said.

Will the presence of scientists in government help us combat climate change? The obvious answer is yes. However, there may be ways that the political ignorance of many scientists could be used against them. For example, a hypothetical bill that apparently seems to help combat climate change can easily be given at the expense of some technicality buried within its language. The result would be that the bill, ostensibly aimed toward providing climate change relief, would in fact further hamper the powers of the government to do just that. This hypothetical issue has been born out in practice: for example, the fall of apartheid in South Africa was done on the condition that the economy be almost totally privatized. Today, much of the South African economy is held by those who benefited from apartheid. [6] The result is that while apartheid is formally gone, the government was unable to do much to help the real conditions of people, and apartheid lives on today in the South African economy. [7] Similarly, a bill aimed toward, say "combating the effects of climate change," might be misleadingly named. There is no reason to think that scientists, merely by virtue of their scientific expertise, would be less vulnerable to those kinds of tricks. To think otherwise is to fall into the liberal trap that we live in an ideal, perfect political system, and the only problem is that the wrong people somehow got a hold of it. Anyone who knows about the history of the United States (not the idealized history taught in many schools, but the real history) and the explicit intentions of the founding fathers in framing the constitution knows that this is simply not true. [8] There is a class element to our political structures that must be dealt with, and if it is not, then the inclusion of a scientific content to the neoliberal governmental structure will result in even more destruction.

Furthermore, we ought to recognize the many political spaces scientists occupy in the United States. True, the religious Right despises science and has a worrisome amount of political power. However, in other senses, American society fetishizes science. Neil deGrasse Tyson and Carl Sagan are cultural giants (Sagan's admiration of Trotsky is rarely brought up). Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Steven Pinker, and Noam Chomsky are loved and supported by millions. With the possible exception of Chomsky and the long-deceased Sagan, these people are more likely to be sympathetic toward, rather than critical of, an ideology that promotes "innovation" in a "free marketplace of ideas." Isn't innovation, in a sense, what science is all about? And the peer-reviewed scientific process is one of ruthless competition. Daniel Dennett, a major philosopher of mind and cognitive scientist, has emphasized the need for science to be competitive. What a convenient opinion for one who happens to be a well-respected and well-paid figure. One wonders why science cannot be cooperative, especially since more and more of it is; most major studies published these days are done by teams of experts working together: theoretical and particle physicists working with mathematicians, etc. The point here is that much of the American scientistic ideology correlates with the intentions of the Right in gutting political education. And the celebrity status of scientists can be manipulated for political ends in much the same way as the celebrity status of anyone else. There is no reason to think that scientists would be above that sort of flattering attention. Indeed, judging by the arrogance of many a popular scientist, they seem ripe for the picking.

We ought to be wary of the scientist in power. Like all political forms, a scientocracy must be held to the glaring light of criticism by an organized and agitated populace that does not trust its leaders, no matter who they are. Scientocracy is not democracy, but another form of oligarchy based on the fallacy of merit, and as Michael Parenti put it, "democracy is not about trust...it's about accountability." Scientists often speak a big game about competition, but they despise criticism directed toward them that does not jump through their particular hoops, sometimes going so far as to attempt to totally discredit those critics by means of hoax publications. It is incumbent on us not to engage only in the kind of competition and challenge that the scientific community insists is legitimate.

It would be good to have more scientists in government. It would also be good to have more writers, philosophers, artists, musicians, librarians, plumbers, cashiers, janitors, more of the unemployed, more of the disabled, more of those who are homeless, and more of the spectrum of life in general in government. The only special space for scientists is the scientific arena - not the political one.

Charles Wofford is a socialist activist in Boulder, CO

Sources

[1] Alexander C. Kaufman, "The Largest Number of Scientists in Modern U.S. History are Running for Office in 2018," Washington Post, 2/3/2018.

[2] Charles Wofford, "Presidential nonsense and Warmongering," Boulder Daily Camera, 2/1/2018.

[3] Steven Pinker, "Steven Pinker at Davos: Excessive Political Correctness Feeds Radical Ideas," Big Think, 1/31/2018.

[4] James McWilliams, "The Hoax that Backfired: How an Attempt to Discredit Gender Studies will Only Strengthen it," Pacific Standard, 5/31/2017.

[5] Noam Chomsky, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals," New York review of Books, 2/23/1967.

[6] Rachel L. Swarns, "Rarity of Black-Run Businesses Worries South Africa's Leaders," New York Times, 11/13/2002.

[7] Haydn Cornish-Jenkins, "Despite 1994 Political Victory Against Apartheid, its Economic Legacy Persists," South African History Online, 6/15/2015.

[8] James Madison, "Federalist Paper No. 10," 11/23/1787.

Is It Nation Time?: The Black Nationalism of Black Panther

By Sean Posey

In the fall of 1992, a unique moment in American cinema captured the attention of the nation. Auteur Spike Lee released his magnum opus, Malcolm X, to wide critical acclaim. But more than that, for the first time, a biopic of one of the central characters in the history of Black Nationalism reached an audience around the country and the world. Hats with the 'X' logo appeared on the heads of black youth everywhere, and the film itself inspired introspection and dialogue among not just black intellectuals but also among African Americans from all walks of life. The film's ending credits merged scenes of Malcolm throughout his life and connected Harlem to Soweto and America to Africa.

A similar moment seems to be upon us with the recent release of Black Panther, a comic book film about an African king/superhero and the fictional nation of Wakanda. Symbols and themes from Black Nationalism and Pan-African history are laced throughout the film, which manages to elevate the comic book genre flick to a visual textbook for not just inspiring black pride, but also for reflecting important elements of the black past and possible future.

Black Nationalism is a complicated concept, one with roots stretching back to the nineteenth century and beyond. The reality of chattel slavery in the West led to the call for the birth of a black nation from men such as Martin Delany, often called the "grandfather of Black Nationalism," and Robert Alexander Young, author of the 1829 Ethiopian Manifesto, which postulated a universal connection between all black peoples.

Young was writing about an old idea - Pan-Africanism. Envisioning a future nation for blacks in North America and beyond (Black Nationalism) - and building connections between African peoples around the world (Pan-Africanism) - are concepts that pulse throughout Black Panther. During the early nineteenth century, Paul Cuffee, a black businessman and abolitionist in America, began bringing African Americans to Sierra Leone. The English had already begun to bring freed slaves to the area after the Revolutionary War to a place called Granville Town, also known as the "Province of Freedom." Cuffee hoped the region could be a future homeland for blacks looking to flee oppression in America.

In the twentieth century, Marcus Garvey, perhaps the most famous of the Black Nationalists and Pan-Africanists, envisioned Liberia as a future homeland for blacks looking to flee violence and discrimination in America. He hoped that such a place would become an advanced country where blacks could prosper and build a power the equal of any in Europe. The Garveyites and other such Black Nationalists saw themselves as indelibly linked to Africa.

In Black Panther, a modern and technologically advanced black nation in Africa has already been realized. The nation of Wakanda masquerades before the world as an underdeveloped state, but hidden behind an elaborate façade is the most advanced country on Earth, powered by a fictional metal known as vibranium. Mined from a sacred mound, the substance powers nearly everything in the country.

In this technologically advanced nation, what Patricia Hill Collins calls the "main ideas" of Black Nationalism - self-determination (political), self-definition (cultural), and self- reliance (economic) - are all fully realized.[1]

Maglev trains, Talon fighters, and vehicles designed to mimic flying animals are among the more wonderful aspects of Wakandan technology that we see in the film. Unlike Western countries, Wakanda incorporates technology that both mimics and exists in harmony with the natural world. Afrofuturistic cities mingle with gorgeous vistas of waterfalls and trees. There are skyscrapers sporting thatched roofs, grass sidewalks, sophisticated public transportation systems, and no visible cars.

There is nary a white face in sight as black vendors sell their wares in the street, and a black king, T'Challa, rules over a country that has never known colonization. According to Carvell Wallace, director Ryan Coogler loosely modeled his idea of Wakanda after the Kingdom of Lesotho, a landlocked country surrounded by South Africa. But Black Panther's kingdom is a futuristic polity beyond the wildest dreams of even Marcus Garvey.

From as far back as the nineteenth century, women such as Maria W. Stewart, a servant turned public figure, espoused the ideas of Black Nationalism on the national stage in America. However, in North America and throughout the African Diaspora, patriarchal structures relegated black women to largely supporting roles in the struggle for black liberation. Such gendered systems of power are absent in Wakanda.

It is easy to see the inspiration of historical figures such as Amy Jacques Garvey and Henrietta Vinton Davis in the characters of Nakia (played by Lupita Nyong'o) and Okoye (played by Danai Gurira).

Okoye is head of the fearsome Dora Milaje, an all-female bodyguard that protects Black Panther and the royal family. They might be thought of as a cross between the "Amazonian Guard" that protected the late Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya and the Nation of Islam's Vanguard or "Warrior Class" of the Muslim Girls Training and General Civilization Class. The Dora Milaje bring to mind the term "an army of Amazons to lead the race," used to describe women in the United Negro Improvement Association. [2] Indeed, the Dora Milaje have been compared to the all-female African army of the Dahomey Amazons, who once fought the French in what is now the Republic of Benin.

Unlike Okoye, Nakia is a spy, a member of the secretive "War Dog" squad, which operates in a capacity similar to the C.I.A., minus the overthrowing of foreign governments. During the course of the film, she attempts to convince T'Challa of Wakanda's responsibility to help other embattled Africans across the continent. However, it has long been the tradition in Wakanda to avoid any entanglements with the outside world that might draw attention to the country's true power.

The tension between Wakanda's wealth and the impoverishment and agony among black populations throughout the world is symbolized in the character of Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan). Killmonger is the son of a murdered Wakandan spy and prince, N'Jobu. While working undercover in Oakland, California, during the 1990s, N'Jobu witnesses the poverty and racial oppression facing blacks in America. He comes to believe that Wakanda should use its technology to aid the suffering of fellow blacks, wherever they may be.

N'Jobu comes to work with hated arms dealer Ulysses Klaue to in order to smuggle vibranium of out of Wakanda in order to facilitate an uprising among African Americans. When T'Chaka, who is both N'Jobu's brother and also T'Challa's father, confronts him, N'Jobu refuses to come back to Wakanda to stand trial and is killed by T'Chaka.

N'Jobu's son, the young Killmonger, is left behind in America. He grows to become a member of a black-ops unit, training for the day when he might return to Wakanda and seize the throne. There is more than a bit of Malcolm X in Killmonger, who wishes to arm the black people of the world for a final battle against white supremacy. But unlike X, Killmonger descends into violent acts against his own people (especially women) in his quest for power.

When he ultimately does return to Wakanda to confront T'Challa, it is easy to hear the words of Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, a Black Nationalist and Pan-Africanist, who spoke of the plight of blacks in the United States during the twentieth century: "How long shall we have to wait for something to be done for the black people's of this country?" [3]

T'Challa, the Martin Luther King to Killmonger's Malcolm X, rejects the idea of a global war. But he remains torn over Wakanda's policy of isolation from the rest of the world, particularly the black world outside of his country's borders. By the end of the film, T'Challa decides to open outreach centers throughout the United States, bringing Wakanda's technology to those in the African Diaspora - a true act of Pan-Africanism.

The chant of the Black Power movement during the 1960s and 1970s (Is it nation time?) is symbolically answered in Black Panther. For although Wakanda is a fictional African country, its importance extends throughout the diaspora.

The concept of Black Nationalism in modern times goes beyond the idea of creating a physical polity. According to Kate Dossett, "Black Nationalism in the United States has always been closely linked to Pan-Africanism, and can be better understood through an imagined community notion of nationalism rather than a euro-centric state model." [4]

Wakanda's example is one that reaches out beyond Africa to the masses of people of African descent. It is an imagined nation for an imagined community throughout the world.

Black Panther has the potential to help engage audiences with these concepts and with the history of Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism. The beauty of the costumes, characters and the fictional world of Wakanda can do much more than entertain. They could mark the beginning of a new cultural and political awakening in a century where the key questions of black self-determination, self-definition, and self-reliance continue to be part of a needed dialogue.

Notes

[1] Patricia Hill Collins, From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, Nationalism and Feminism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), 75.

[2] Kate Dossett, Bridging Race Divides: Black Nationalism, Feminism, and Integration in the United States, 1896-1935 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2009), 157.

[3] Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 181.

[4] Doessett, 6.

Are Bourgeois Feminism and the Women’s March Leading Us into the Arms of the Democrats?

By Amir Khafagy

Last month, thousands of protesters marched through the streets of Manhattan to commemorate the first anniversary of last year's Woman's March on Washington. It was an unpresented and incredible march that amounted to the largest single day of protest in American history. Progressive minded people from around the country took part in day of outrage against the misogynistic and racist symbolism of what Trump represents. The protest was not only contained to the streets of Washington but occurred simultaneously in cities across the globe. It was indeed a remarkable achievement in mass political mobilization and organization. Yet, for all its admirable achievements, this year's woman march, like last years, will probably end up at best, selling us a bag full of hollow symbolism and at worst selling us out to the Democratic Party. Last year, as I watched the demonstrators march in New York I wondered out loud to a friend that if Clinton would have won would we be seeing a Woman's March? Some activists left the march feeling disillusioned by the fact that even though hundreds of thousands of people took part in a single day of mass action, there was little in the way in providing concrete demands or even long-term coordinated action.

This year, the organizers were prepared to change that. According to the Woman's March organizers, this year's march was designed to build momentum for its "Power to the Polls" campaign. The campaign will officially launch on January 21st in Las Vegas with the specific goal of initiating a national voter registration drive. As stated on their website, organizers are aiming to "target swing states to register new voters, engage impacted communities, harness our collective energy to advocate for policies and candidates that reflect our values, and collaborate with our partners to elect more women and progressive's candidates to office".

The leaders of the Woman's March are obviously trying to use their brand to influence the upcoming midterm elections. Linda Sarsour, a co-chair the Women's March, was quoted as saying on their website, "This campaign will mobilize a new group of activists to create accessible power to our voting polls." The power that they seem to be describing is vague and symbolic. Actually, it's downright passive and inapt. Voting within itself is one of the passive political acts in itself, especially if you are voting within the context of the two-party system.

Nowhere on their website do they mention any criticism of the role of the two-party system in maintaining a capitalist economic and political system that thrives from oppression and exploitation. You won't find any mention of the devastating effects that neoliberalism has caused for millions of working-class women throughout this country as well as in the global south, despite the fact that both parties have jointly endorsed and enacted these policies happily, arm in arm. Nor is there any mention of protesting militarization or imperialism. Or are those not important issues for women? And the most important piece missing from their entire platform is the central roles that class and race play in the oppression and exploitation of working-class women. In fact, the entire notion of class is invisible to Woman's March organizers, while the centrality of race is at best watered down.

Organizers claim that it is their "moral imperative to dismantle the gender and racial inequities within the criminal justice system" without thinking twice about the fact the entire criminal justice system is racist to its core. Race isn't just another social justice issue that can be lumped in with other issues. Without examining the centrality of racial oppression in supporting American capitalism, specifically against black people, we will never be able to abolish racial inequality. Furthermore, we can't begin to talk about race without talking about class. Class-based politics apparently have no place in a movement they claim is committed to "providing intersectional education" or in their mission to "harness the political power of diverse women and their communities to create transformative social change." How exactly they plan to harness that "power" to create "transformative change" is the most revealing aspect of their ideology.

Essentially, the March's ideology snugly fits into the ideology of neoliberalism. They seemingly have no intention of challenging the neoliberal ideology that dominates our society. Instead, their game plan to fight for a more "inclusive" neoliberalism. You can call it intersectional neoliberalism. Ideologically, they believe that if they "channel their supporters' energy and enthusiasm to the ballot box next November" they will somehow achieve lasting "transformative change." In translation, this means that transformative change will come from all-hands-on-deck support for the Democratic Party, the same that was responsible for rigging the democratic primary against Bernie Sanders. It was the same party that nominated neoliberal war monger Clinton for presidency. It was Democrat Obama who was responsible for cementing the Wall Street bailouts, continuing Bush-era policies of domestic surveillance, the deportation of more people then every previous presidency combined, and the massive increase of military conflicts around the world. Yes, this is the same party that the Woman's March wants us to support.

According to the organizers, our ultimate power is derived from our ability to vote. However, by continuing to vote for Democrats, we are complicit is supporting the same unequal system that we should be trying to fight against. This is not to say that voting within itself is completely powerless. It can be an effective revolutionary tool if radical and progressive-minded people were to unite and form a revolutionary peoples' party or even just back third parties that already exist. Working-class people can't be expected to share the same party with the likes of Wall Street. Our interests are fundamentally in conflict and should be in opposition to Wall Street's interests. Marxist writer and thinker, Joe G Kaye, elaborates on this: "the two-party system is a SYSTEM, that the parties operate in tandem, that the role of the Democratic Party to be the lesser-of-the-two evils, to move to the left when the masses begin to become radicalized so as to prevent the formation of a true people's party. In that sense, the theory of the lesser-of-the-two evils is the greatest evil."

Despite the need for structural change, the Woman's March is mute when it comes to supporting the formation of a third party. They haven't even backed a third-party progressive like Jill Stein, who also happens to be a woman. Instead we are told that the best way to change the system is to continue to support it and lend credibility to it. Maybe if we play identity politics and elect candidates who look like us and share our "values," we are told, then we will be on the road to progress. The problems and limitations with identity politics is that it makes identity, not class, the central defining feature of one's politics. It was not Obama's racial identity that is responsible for leaving the system of mass incarceration intact, it was his class, and the class that he ultimately served, that shaped his political identity. It was tantamount to what writer Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has dubbed, "Black Faces in High Places." Taylor writes that "we have more black elected officials in the United States than at any point in American history. Yet for the vast majority of black people, life has changed very little. Black elected officials have largely governed in the same way as their white counterparts, reflecting all of the racism, corruption, and policies favoring the wealthy seen throughout mainstream politics."

This highlights the various limitations of voting solely based on a shared identity. Just because they might look like us doesn't mean they will be responsive to our working-class interests. In that regard, the Woman's March offers nothing new in terms of fundamentally changing our political or economic system. Historically, social movements have constantly put their fate in the hands of the Democratic Party only to watch as their movements wither away. Have we learned nothing from the aftermath of Jessie Jackson's failed presidential campaign and his Rainbow Push Coalition? This coalition led by Jackson firmly believed they could change the party from the inside. However, over the course of Bill Clinton's administration, poor and working-class people, especially for blacks, were faced with insurmountable, manufactured crises like the end of welfare and the expansion of mass incarceration. Writers Arun Gupta and Steve Horn have called the Democratic Party "the graveyard of social movements." Thus, if the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results, supporting the strategy of the Woman's March is insane. They have become essentially (perhaps they were always) an extension of the Democratic Party. It's the same old lousy gift, this time wrapped in pink.

Thankfully, progressive voices have emerged to critique the structure, leadership, and direction of the Woman's March organization. In Los Angeles, the Palestinian American Women's Association pulled out of Women's March L.A in protest over the inclusion of actress Scarlett Johansson as a featured speaker. The star has made public her support of illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, leading Palestinian activist Sana Ibrahim to say that the March's call for human rights "does not extend to Palestinian human rights." In Philadelphia, some black and brown women activists have called for other activists to boycott the march over the concerns that March organizers are collaborating with police. Community leader Megan Malachi from Philly REAL Justice, a coalition of local activist groups, has stated that "The Philadelphia Women's March has once again demonstrated their disconnect from the concerns of working-class black women and their families/communities." She went on to say that by coordinating with police, the Woman's March organizers "are ignoring local struggles against police terrorism and choosing to center the bourgeoisie aspirations of white feminism. Another tone deaf, epic fail."

Writer and activist Jamilah Lemieux echoed many of those same sentiments when last year she wrote "I don't know that I serve my own mental health needs by putting my body on the line to feign solidarity with women who by and large didn't have my back prior to November." It goes to show that even if the Woman's March is on its surface an all-encompassing, inclusive, woman-led movement, there is still serious debate about its direction among its own ranks. Not all women are equal, nor do they all share a common struggle. Let's not forget that 53 percent of white women voters cast their ballot for Trump. Many so-called "progressive" white women might not even be marching in the streets if Clinton were their president.

We can't continue to depend on the Democratic Party to protect us from the evils of the Republicans unless we want to be used as pawns in the two -party game. Poor and working-class people of all sexes and genders will never be liberated if we keep joining coalitions and parties with the very people who have vested interests in maintaining our oppression. It's

time to wake up and see that we are being herded into the trap that has kept us poor and exploited in the first place. It's time to say 'times up' to the Democratic Party and 'times up' for the two-party system.

A Political Philosophy of Self-Defense

By Chad Kautzer

Editor's Note: This essay is an adapted excerpt from Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense (ed. scott crow).

In his 1964 speech "Communication and Reality," Malcolm X said: "I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don't call it violence when it's self-defense, I call it intelligence." Earlier that year, he made a similar point in his Harlem speech introducing the newly founded Organization of Afro-American Unity: "It's hard for anyone intelligent to be nonviolent."

To portray self-defensive violence as natural, in no need of justification, or as so commonsensical that it could barely be called violence has a depoliticizing effect. Since the goal of Malcolm X's speeches was to undermine critiques of armed black resistance, this effect was intentional. For good reasons, he was attempting to normalize black people defending themselves against the violence of white rule. When Malcolm X did speak of self-defense as a form of violence, he emphasized that it was lawful and an individual right. In his most famous speech, "The Ballot or the Bullet" (1964), he explicitly stated: "We don't do anything illegal." This was also, of course, how the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense justified its armed shadowing of police in Oakland in the late 1960s: it was the members' Second Amendment right to bear arms and their right under California law to openly carry them.

To develop a critical theory of community defense, however, we need to move beyond the rhetoric of rights or the idea that all self-defensive violence is quasi-natural or nonpolitical. The self-defense I discuss in this essay is political because the self being defended is political, and as such it requires both normative and strategic considerations. This project seeks to articulate the dynamics of power at work in self-defense and the constitution of the self through its social relations and conflicts.

Because communities of color defend themselves as much against a culture of white supremacy as they do against bodily harm, their self-defense undermines existing social hierarchies, ideologies, and identities. If we were to limit ourselves to the language of individual rights, these interconnections would remain concealed. Violence against women (but not only women), for example, has a gendering function, enforcing norms of feminine subordination and vulnerability. Resistance to such violence not only defends the body but also undermines gender and sexual norms, subverting hetero-masculine dominance and the notions of femininity or queerness it perpetuates. Since the social structures and identities of race, gender, class, and ability intersect in our lives, practices of self-defense can and often must challenge structures of oppression on multiple fronts simultaneously.

In the following, I do not focus on the question of whether self-defensive violence is justifiable, but rather on why it is political; how it can transform self-understandings and community relations; in what contexts it can be insurrectionary; and why it must be understood against a background of structural violence. It is necessary to clarify these dimensions of self-defense for two reasons in particular. First, arguments advocating armed community defense too often discuss the use of violence and the preparations for it as somehow external to political subjectivity, as if taking up arms, training, or exercising self-defensive violence do not transform subjects and their social relations. The influence of Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1961) on the early Black Panthers, Steve Biko, and others derives precisely from Fanon's understanding of the transformative effects of resistance in the decolonizing of consciousness. "At the individual level," Fanon writes, "violence is a cleansing force. It rids the colonized of their inferiority complex, of their passive and despairing attitude."

The second reason for clarification is to distinguish the strategies, ways of theorizing, and forms of social relations of liberatory movements from those of reactionary movements. There is an increasingly influential understanding of self-defense today that reinforces a particular notion of the self-a "sovereign subject"-that is corrosive to horizontal social relations and can only be sustained vis-à-vis state power. This notion of the self runs counter to the goals of non-statist movements and self-reliant communities. To be aware of these possibilities and pitfalls allows us to avoid them, a goal to which the following sketch of a critical theory of community self-defense seeks to contribute.

Resistance and Structural Violence

At the National Negro Convention in 1843, Reverend Henry Highland Garnet issued a rare public call for large-scale resistance to slavery: "Let your motto be resistance! resistance! resistance! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance. What kind of resistance you had better make, you must decide by the circumstances that surround you, and according to the suggestion of expediency." I describe resistance as opposition to the existing social order from within, and, as Garnet suggested, it can take different forms, such as self-defense, insurrection, or revolution. We can think of an insurrection as a limited armed revolt or rebellion against an authority, such as a state government, occupying power, or even slave owner. It is a form of illegal resistance, often with localized objectives, as in Shays' Rebellion (1786), Nat Turner's Rebellion (1831), the insurrections on the Amistad (1839) and Creole (1841), the coal miner Battle of Blair Mountain (1921), Watts (1965), Stonewall (1969), and Attica (1971).

Distinguishing between defensive and insurrectionary violence can be complicated. In the Amistad case, for example, white officials initially described it as a rebellion and thus a violation of the law, but later reclassified it as self-defense when the original enslavement was found to be unlawful. In a rare reversal, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the captives on the Amistad as having selves worthy of defense. That was never in question among those rebelling, of course, but it does indicate the political nature of the self and our assessments of resistance. "Since the Other was reluctant to recognize me," writes Fanon, "there was only one answer: to make myself known." On the Amistad, rebellion was the only way for the enslaved to make their selves known, meaning that their actions were simultaneously a defense of their lives and a political claim to recognition.

A sustained insurrection can become revolutionary when it threatens to fundamentally transform or destroy the dominant political, social, or economic institutions, as with the rise of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation in Mexico in 1994 and the recent wave of Arab uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, including most significantly Rojava or Syrian Kurdistan. The armed rebellion led by John Brown in 1859, which seized the United States arsenal at Harpers Ferry, was intended to instigate a revolution against the institution of slavery. Although the insurrection was quickly put down, it inspired abolitionists around the country and contributed to the onset of the U.S. Civil War.

Brown's rebellion was not a slave revolt (and thus not an act of self-defense), but it did highlight the nature of structural violence. Henry David Thoreau, the inspiration for Gandhi's nonviolent civil disobedience and, in turn, that of Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote the most insightful analysis of this violence at the time. In his essay "A Plea for Captain John Brown," Thoreau defends Brown's armed resistance and identifies the daily state violence of white rule against which the insurrection took place:

We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman's billy and handcuffs! Look at the jail! Look at the gallows! Look at the chaplain of the regiment! We are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army. So we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and maintain slavery. . . . I think that for once the Sharps rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause [i.e., Brown's insurrection].

In this passage Thoreau highlights how the so-called security of one community was achieved by oppressing another and making it insecure. To properly understand the insurrection, he therefore argues, one must view it as a response to illegitimate structural violence. He enumerates the commonplace mechanisms of this rule, which, for whites, fades into the background of their everyday lives: law and order upheld by a neutral police force, enforced by an objective legal system and carceral institutions, and defended by an army supported by the Constitution and blessed by religious authorities. The violence of white supremacy becomes naturalized and its beneficiaries see no need for its justification; it is nearly invisible to them, though not, of course, to those it oppresses. "The existence of violence is at the very heart of a racist system," writes Robert Williams in Negroes with Guns (1962). "The Afro-American militant is a 'militant' because he defends himself, his family, his home and his dignity. He does not introduce violence into a racist social system-the violence is already there and has always been there. It is precisely this unchallenged violence that allows a racist social system to perpetuate itself."

We all exist within hierarchical social structures and the meaning and function of violence, self-defensive or otherwise, will be determined by our position vis-à-vis others in these structures. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, for example, described the self-defensive practices of the Black Panther Party as "the greatest threat to the internal security of the country" and thus insurrectionary, if not revolutionary. Surely his assessment had more to do with the threat self-reliant black communities posed to white domination in the country than with the security of government institutions. "When people say that they are opposed to Negroes 'resorting to violence,'" writes Williams, "what they really mean is that they are opposed to Negroes defending themselves and challenging the exclusive monopoly of violence practiced by white racists." These structures of domination and monopolies of violence are forms of rule that operate in the family, the city, and the colony, and resistance to their violence, both dramatic and mundane, "makes known" the selves of the subjugated.

A satisfactory notion of self-defense is not obvious when we view self-defensive acts within the context of structural violence and understand the self as both embodied and social. Writing specifically of armed self-defense, Akinyele Omowale Umoja defines it as "the protection of life, persons, and property from aggressive assault through the application of force necessary to thwart or neutralize attack." While this is appropriate in many contexts, the primary association of self-defense with protection does not capture how it can also reproduce or undermine existing social norms and relations, depending on the social location of the self being defended. Describing the effects of his defense against a slaveholder, Frederick Douglass, for example, wrote that he "was a changed being after that fight," for "repelling the unjust and cruel aggressions of a tyrant" had an emancipatory effect "on my spirit." This act of self-defense, he asserts, "was the end of the brutification to which slavery had subjected me." Our understanding of self-defense must, therefore, account for the transformativepower of self-defense for oppressed groups as well as the stabilizing effect of self-defense for oppressor groups.

Social Hierarchies and Subject Formation

To see how self-defense can have several effects and why a critical theory of self-defense must, therefore, always account for relations of domination, we need to understand in what way the self is both embodied and social. By embodied I mean that it is through the body that we experience and come to know the world and ourselves, rather than through an abstract or disembodied mind. The body orients our perspective, and is socially visible, vulnerable, and limited. Much of our knowledge about the social and physical world is exercised by the body. Our bodies are sexed, raced, and gendered, not only "externally" by how others view us or how institutions order us-as, for example, feminine, masculine, queer, disabled, white, and black-but also "internally" by how we self-identify and perform these social identities in our conscious behavior and bodily habits. By the time we are able to challenge our identities, we have already been habituated within social hierarchies, so resistance involves unlearning our habits in thought and practice as well as transforming social institutions. As David Graeber writes, "forms of social domination come to be experienced in the most intimate possible ways-in physical habits, instincts of desire or revulsion-that often seem essential to our very sense of being in the world."

Since our location within social hierarchies in part determines our social identities, the self that develops is social and political from the start. This does not mean that we are "stuck" or doomed to a certain social identity or location, nor that we can simply decide to identify ourselves elsewhere within social hierarchies or somehow just exit them. To be sure, we have great leeway in terms of self-identification, but self-identification does not itself change institutional relations or degrees of agency, respect, risk, opportunity, or access to resources. These kinds of changes can only be achieved through social and political struggles. Our embodied identities are sites of conflict, formed and reformed through our practical routines and relations as well as through social struggle. Since the actions and perceptions of others are integral to the development of our own, including our self-understanding, we say that the self is mediated, or is formed through our relations with others in systems of production, consumption, education, law, and so forth.

In The Souls of Black Folks (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois theorized black life in a white supremacist society as experiencing one's self as split in two, a kind of internalization of a social division that produced what he called "double-consciousness," or "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." Although one may view oneself as capable, beautiful, intelligent, and worthy of respect, the social institutions one inhabits can express the opposite view. Part of the experience of oppression is to live this otheringform of categorization in everyday social life. Even when one consciously strives to resist denigration and to hold fast to a positive self-relation, the social hierarchy insinuates itself into one's self-understanding. In the most intimate moments of introspection, a unified self-consciousness escapes us because our self-understanding can never completely break from the social relations and ideologies that engender it. Social conflict is internalized, and it takes great strength just to hold oneself together; to live as a subjectwhen others view and treat you as little more than an object, and when you are denied the freedoms, security, and resources enjoyed by others. Ultimately, only by undermining the social conditions of oppression through collective resistance can the double-consciousness Du Bois describes become one.

Racism produces race and not the other way around. Racial categories emerge from practical relations of domination, unlike ethnic groups, which are cultural forms of collective life that do not need to define themselves in opposition to others. Racial categories are neither abstract nor biological, but are social constructions initially imposed from without but soon after reconfigured from within through social struggles. As with all relations of domination, the original shared meanings attributed to one group are contrary to the shared meanings attributed to other groups and, thus, often exist as general dichotomies. This oppositional relation in meaning mirrors the hierarchical opposition of the groups in practical life-a fact that is neither natural nor contingent.

Masculinity and femininity, for example, are not natural categories: they are social roles within a social order and thus have a history just as racial groups do. Yet, like those of race, the social and symbolic relations of gender are not contingent. Indeed, masculinity and femininity exhibit a certain kind of logic that we find in every institutionalized form of social domination. Because gender is a way of hierarchically ordering human relations, the characteristics associated with the dominant group function to justify their domination. Group members are said to be, for example, stronger, more intelligent, and more moral and rational. Nearly every aspect of social life will reflect this, from the division of labor to the forms of entertainment.

In reality, the dominant group does not dominate because it is more virtuous or rational-indeed, the depth of its viciousness is limitless-but due to its dominance it can propagate the idea that it is more virtuous, rational, or civilized. "The colonial 'civilizing mission,'" writes María Lugones, "was the euphemistic mask of brutal access to people's bodies through unimaginable exploitation, violent sexual violation, control of reproduction, and systematic terror."

The fundamental dependency of the oppressor on the oppressed is concealed in all ideologies of social domination. Although the very existence of the colonist, capitalist, white supremacist, and patriarch relies on the continuous exploitation of others, they propagate the idea of an inverted world in which they are free from all dependencies. This is the camera obscura of ideology that Karl Marx discusses in The German Ideology (1845-46). The supposedly natural lack of autonomy of the subordinated groups is, we are told, the reason for social hierarchy. Workers depend on capitalists to employ and pay them, women need men to support and protect them, people of color require whites to control and decide for them, and so forth.

Resistance to domination reveals the deception of this inverted world, destabilizing the practical operations of hierarchy and undermining its myths, for example of masculine sovereignty, white superiority, compulsory heterosexuality, and capital's self-creation of value. Violence and various forms of coercion support these myths, but such violence would be ineffective if some groups were not socially, politically, and legally structured to be vulnerable to it.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines racism as "the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death." Indeed, to be vulnerable to violence, exploitation, discrimination, and toxic environments is never the choice of the individual. Any radical liberatory agenda must therefore include among its aims the reduction of such group-differentiated vulnerabilities, which would strike a blow to many forms of social domination, including by not limited to race. This is not to say that vulnerability can be completely overcome. The social nature of our selves guarantees that the conditions that enable or disable us can never be completely under our control, and those very same conditions render us vulnerable to both symbolic and physical harm.

Turning specifically to consider self-defensive practices, while they cannot therefore eliminate vulnerability, they can reduce it for particular groups and undermine it at a structuring principle of oppression. Training in self-defense, writes Martha McCaughey in Real Knockouts (1997), "makes possible the identification of not only some of the mechanisms that create and sustain gender inequality but also a means to subvert them."

The Politics of Self-Defense

If we accept a social, historical, and materialist account of group and subject formation, and understand that groups are reproduced with the help of violence, both mundane and spectacular, then we can see why self-defense functions as more than protection from bodily harm. It will also be clear why self-defense is not external to questions of our political subjectivity. If we acknowledge that we are hierarchically organized in groups-by race, gender, and class, for example-which makes some groups the beneficiaries of structural violence and others disabled, harmed, or killed by it, we see how self-defense can either stabilize or undermine domination and exploitation.

Self-defense as resistance from below is a fundamental violation of the most prevalent social and political norms, as well as our bodily habits. As McCaughey writes: "The feminine demeanor that comes so 'naturally' to women, a collection of specific habits that otherwise may not seem problematic, is precisely what makes us terrible fighters. Suddenly we see how these habits that make us vulnerable and that aestheticize that vulnerability are encouraged in us by a sexist culture." Organized examples of resistance to this structured vulnerability include the Gulabi or Pink Sari Gang in Uttar Pradesh, India; Edith Garrud's Bodyguard suffragettes, who trained in jujitsu; as well as numerous queer and feminist street patrol groups, including the Pink Panthers. McCaughey calls these self-defensive practices "feminism in the flesh," because they are simultaneously resisting the violence of patriarchy, while reconfiguring and empowering one's body and self-understanding. We could similarly think of the self-defensive practices of the Black Panthers, Young Lords, Deacons for Defense and Justice, Brown Berets, and the American Indian Movement as anti-racist, as decolonization in the flesh.

Although self-defense is not sufficient to transform institutionalized relations of domination, unequal distributions of resources and risk, or the experience of double-consciousness, it is a form of decolonization and necessary for other kinds of mobilizations. The praxis of resistance is also an important form of self-education about the nature of power, the operations of oppression, and the practice of autonomy. When conditions are so oppressive that one's self is not recognized at all, self-defense is de facto insurrection, a necessary making oneself known through resistance. While the most common form of self-defense is individual and uncoordinated, this does not make it any less political or any less important to the struggle, and this is true regardless of the mind-set or intentions of those exercising resistance.

We must, however, also be attentive to how resistance, and even preparations for it, can instrumentalize and reinforce problematic gender and race norms, political strategies, or sovereign politics. A critical theory of community self-defense should reveal these potentially problematic effects and identify how to counter them. There is, for example, an influential pamphlet, The Catechism of the Revolutionist (1869), written by Sergey Nechayev and republished by the Black Panthers, which describes the revolutionist as having "no personal interests, no business affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property, and no name." This nameless, yet masculine, figure "has broken all the bonds which tie him to the civil order." But who provides for the revolutionist and who labors to reproduce the material conditions of his revolutionary life? Upon whom, in short, does the supposed independence of the revolutionist depend?

Although the machismo and narcissism here is extreme to the point of being mythical-George Jackson said it was "too cold, very much like the fascist psychology"-it does speak to a twofold danger in practices of resistance. The first danger is that self-defensive practices are part of a division of labor that falls along the traditional fault lines of social hierarchies within groups. Men have, for instance, too often taken up the task of community defense in all contexts of resistance, which has the effect of reproducing traditional gender hierarchies and myths of masculine sovereignty. Considerations of self-defense must therefore be intersectionalist and aware of the transformative power and embodied nature of resistance, as discussed above. The group INCITE!, for example, seeks to defend women, gender nonconforming, and trans people of color from "violence directed against communities (i.e., police brutality, prisons, racism, economic exploitation, etc.)" as well as from "violence within communities (sexual/domestic violence)."

The second danger is a commitment to the notion of a sovereign subject, which is the centerpiece of authoritarian political ideologies and motivates so many reactionary movements. The growing number of white militias, the sovereign citizen movement, as well as major shifts in interpretations of the Second Amendment and natural rights, are contributing to an increasingly influential politics of self-defense with a sovereign subject at its core. For this sovereign subject-whose freedom can only be actualized through domination-the absolute identification with abstract individual rights always reflects an implicit dependency on state violence, much the way Nechayev's revolutionist implicitly relies on a community he refuses to acknowledge. The sovereign subject's disavowal of the social conditions of its own possibility produces an authoritarian concept of the self, whose so-called independence always has the effect of undermining the conditions of freedom for others.

Although one objective of self-defense is protection from bodily harm, the social and political nature of the self being defended makes such resistance political as well. Self-defense can help dismantle oppressive identities, lessen group vulnerability, and destabilize social hierarchies supported by structural violence. The notion of a sovereign subject conceals these empowering dimensions of self-defense and inhibits the creation of self-reliant communities in which the autonomy of each is enabled by nonhierarchical (and non-sovereign) social relations being afforded to all.

This excerpt was originally published at Boston Review .

The US-Saudi Coalition Against Yemen: A Primer

By Valerie Reynoso

The ongoing crisis in Yemen continues to devolve into further calamity and chaos. Understanding the existing conditions of the region, however, means examining and grappling with the historical forces underpinning the current civil war. Most importantly, United States-backed actors, particularly the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, have vied for control of Yemen by any means necessary. Whether the incessant bombings of civilian infrastructure, or the targeting of innocent people themselves, the US-Saudi coalition has stopped at nothing to establish dominance. Through the billions of dollars of funding provided by the US, Saudi Arabia has inflicted wanton destruction on the Yemeni people with impunity.

From a national scope, the key actors in the conflict are the Houthis, Yemeni government forces, and al-Qaeda. The fall and subsequent breakup of the Ottoman Empire in 1922 resulted in the formation of two Yemeni states, leading to conflict between southern nationalist groups and the Yemeni government, with both sides suffering numerous casualties. The Ottoman Empire lasted for over 600 years and by 1849, it had dominated significant territory in northern Yemen, including Sana'a, which further satisfied its interests in Mecca and Medina. Following the decline of the Ottoman Empire, a Zaidi Shia Imamate called the Mutawakaliat Kingdom governed the northern kingdom of Yemen and southern Yemen was still divided and governed by several local sultanates. Sultanate rule in southern Yemen came to an end as a result of British colonial rule, through which British colonizers founded their own southern, settler state named the Federation of South Arabia. The Republic of North Yemen was formed in 1962 and in 1967, the People's Republic of South Yemen was founded after British colonial rule ended. The People's Republic of South Yemen was a Marxist republic which was significantly reliant on support from the Soviet Union. The decline of the Soviet Union in 1990 had a grave impact on South Yemen. In addition to this, in 1989, the president of North Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, and the president of South Yemen, Ali Salim el-Beidh, met up and Saleh and the General People's Congress passed a key proposal to form a federation. Yemen was officially unified in 1990 with Sana'a as its capital; however, the newly-formed state was not equipped for an actual government nor means of distribution of power between the north and the south. El-Beidh believed that southern Yemen was being oppressed and he announced the new southern state, the Democratic Republic of Yemen. Despite this, Saleh defeated the southern rebellion in May 1994.

Although the rebellion failed, tensions remained high. Just under two decades later, in 2011 the Yemeni Arab Spring occurred, which consisted of protests by Yemenis demanding improved socioeconomic and political conditions as well as the resignation of President Saleh, due to his inefficiency in handling corruption and poverty. This was the same year that President Saleh signed a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) measure that gave him dispensation, and he shifted power to his former Vice President Hadi-an action that was also supported by the US, European Union, and the United Nations. In December 2011, the Houthis and the southern nationalist movement called the Hirak organized a Life March from Ta'iz to Sana'a in opposition to the GCC measure. Hadi officially became president in February 2012 through an election in which he was the only candidate. Subsequently, he granted immunity to 500 of Saleh's assistants. After making the unpopular decision of lifting fuel subsidies in July 2014, Hadi began to significantly lose support as a result of his attempt to appeal to the International Monetary Fund. The Houthis were outraged and demanded new subsidies and a new government, so in September 2014 they seized Sana'a, disintegrated parliament by January 2015, and sought to seize power in all of Yemen-resulting in Hadi fleeing to Saudi Arabia.

In March 2015, a Saudi-led regional coalition initiated Operation Decisive Storm with the goal of recapturing Houthi-dominated areas and restoring the Hadi administration. The justification for this operation was that Gulf States believed that the Houthis were backed fiscally, militarily and ideologically by Iran. Saudi Arabia's chief ally, the US, also continued its "counterterrorist operations" in the region and had lines of intelligence to the Houthis. In February 2015, the Houthis created a new Revolutionary Committee and released a Constitutional Declaration; in these, they stated that the Committee would lead the government, that rights would be protected by it and that National Dialogue Conference protocols would be put in place by a transitional government within two years, before submitting the draft of the constitution for a referendum. Afterwards, the Houthis initiated what they considered revenge murders throughout Yemen, and they had Ta'iz by the end of February. To this day, the Houthis are still fighting pro-Hadi, Saudi-backed coalitions.

In regards to casualties and other demographics concerning the well-being and migrations of the Yemeni population, thousands have died in Saudi and US drone strikes, are starving, and have diseases due to poor conditions as a result of the war. As of 2018, at least 10,000 Yemenis have been killed in the conflict and 7 million urgently need food assistance. The Geneva SAM Organization for Rights and Liberties stated that at least 716 human rights violations were committed against Yemenis in November 2017; said violations include murders, batteries, assault, unjust detentions, forced displacement, torture, and press censorship. Over 20 million people need immediate humanitarian assistance, with 11 million of these people being children. Over 400,000 Yemeni children suffer from life-threatening malnutrition. Furthermore, the UN Human Rights Office reported that of the Yemenis murdered, at least 1,184 of the victims were children, 3,233 of the total Yemenis killed were murdered by coalition forces, and an additional 8,749 people were injured. Each day, 130 Yemeni children die from severe hunger and disease. To put it another way, one child dies every 18 minutes. The International Committee of the Red Cross also reported that there could be at least a million cholera cases registered by the end of the year as a result of excessive force and bombings of civilian infrastructure. It is suspected that there are currently 913,000 cholera cases in Yemen, and at least 2,119 Yemenis have died due to the disease, as it spreads from lack of access to clean water and health facilities. Only 45% of the 3,500 health facilities are properly working in Yemen and at least 14.8 million Yemenis do not have healthcare. Moreover, two million Yemenis are displaced within the country and 188,000 have sought refuge in other countries nearby.

From a regional standpoint, Saudi Arabia is the key actor. Saudi Arabia has allied primarily with other pro-US Gulf states, pro-US Arab League states, and al-Qaeda to repress the Houthis, protect regional interests in Yemen and attempt to restore Hadi. Conversely, Iran allegedly supports the Houthis and opposes the pro-US Gulf states. Saudi blockades of Yemeni ports such as Hodeida, from which 80% of Yemen's food supply is imported, is the main cause of the famine and lack of medicine in the country. In addition to this, Saudi bombings of Yemeni water and sanitation infrastructure has led to the Yemeni cholera epidemic. Since the beginning of Saudi military intervention in Yemen in 2015, over 250 fishing boats were damaged or destroyed, as well as 152 fishermen murdered by coalition warships and helicopters in the Red Sea. According to emeritus professor Martha Mundy at the London School of Economics, there was significant proof that Saudi coalition strategy had the goal of destroying food production and distribution in Yemen, within the first 17 months of Saudi military invasion. Likewise, in 2015, Saudi expenditure increased by 13% to $260 billion with $5.3 billion of that amount being dedicated to military and security, particularly in regards to the current war on Yemen. Saudi Arabia spent around $175 million per month in efforts to restore former Yemeni president Hadi and repress the Houthis. Despite Saudi Arabia's claims that the motive behind intervention in Yemen is related to political restoration alone, one can readily see their interest in Yemen as a bridge and access point for numerous continents, as well as its many natural resources, fertile lands, water, and entry point to the Red Sea. Yemen is also geopolitically vital to the Bab-el-Mandeb oil route, and could serve as a substitute to the Strait of Hormuz with the building of an oil pipeline in the eastern region of Hadramawt-which would threaten Iranian hegemony and oil security, could block Iran from having access to the oil route, and could allow Saudi Arabia to possess a monopoly over it as a result of its geographic location. Given all this, it is clear that Saudi Arabia aspires to dominate Yemen in order to gain access to and ownership over its vast resources and strategic location.

Among Saudi Arabia's regional allies in the war on Yemen are the United Arab Emirates (UAE), al-Qaeda, Israel, Qatar, and Sudan. The Houthi forces who were in the Yemeni port of Mocha were ejected by UAE-backed Yemeni fighters in February 2017; the UAE is part of the Saudi-led coalition to defeat the Houthis. Given the conflicts between the Houthis and Saudi-backed coalitions, al-Qaeda jihadists used the issue to their advantage by seizing southern Yemeni land and enacting fatal attacks, particularly in Aden. A leaked US diplomatic cable from December 30 th, 2009, from former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, reveals that Saudi Arabia is the main funder of Sunni terrorist groups globally and that private donors in Saudi Arabia and other pro-US Gulf states are the prime financiers of al-Qaeda. Furthermore, Saudi colonialism in Yemen empowers al-Qaeda, seeing that al-Qaeda uses US drone strikes in the region to provide a replacement for justice and to galvanize recruits. In 2014, anti-Hadi rebel alliance member Colonel Aziz Rashid stated that he believed that Israel fought with the Saudi-led coalition in order to bring Hadi back to power, and that Israel had initiated strikes against the rebel fighters. Israel has a military base in the Dahlak archipelago of Eritrea and Massawa, which is within the range of the Yemeni rebels' missiles as well as nearby the Iranian military installation in Assab, Eritrea. Additionally, although Saudi Arabia does not recognize Israel as a state, they have fought together in a US-led campaign against Iran. Likewise, in 2015 approximately 1,000 Qatari Armed Forces soldiers were stationed in Yemen in alliance with the Saudi-led coalition against the Houthis. That same year, Saudi Arabia obtained an allegiance from the Sudan Armed Forces to help fight the Houthis in Yemen. Sudan committed to Saudi Arabia in its coalition because of its weakened economy at the time as a result of US sanctions on the Sudanese central bank that have been imposed since 1997; these sanctions made it more difficult for Sudan to access global financial markets and hard currency. Sudan also lost a third of its land and most of its oil with the secession of South Sudan in 2011, resulting in the decline of oil prices. Due to this, Sudan sought financial assistance from its Gulf Arab allies and is paying for this aid by joining the Saudi-led invasion of Yemen. Sudan used to have a close relationship with Iran for several years, e.g. in 2008 when Sudanese and Iranian officials signed a military cooperation agreement, or in 2013 when Iran increased construction of naval and logistical bases in Port Sudan. In 2014, this changed, as Sudanese authorities shut down Iranian cultural centers throughout the country with the justification that Iran was supposedly trying to spread Shiism in Sudan; however, Sudan was also becoming more aligned with Saudi Arabia during this time.

Regional powers and their pro-US Gulf state allies receive support from global powers primarily in the West, including the US, United Kingdom, and France. The Obama administration provided Saudi Arabia with over $115 billion in weapons, military equipment and training, much more than any other US administration in the history of the 71 year US-Saudi alliance has given. The military aid was made in 42 distinct deals, and most of the equipment has yet to be delivered. The arms offers to Saudi Arabia under former US President Obama consists of assets such as small arms, ammunition, tanks, attack helicopters, air-to-ground missiles, missile defense ships, warships, and sustenance and training of Saudi security forces. In November 2017, the US House of Representatives passed a resolution which recognized the role of the US in the Yemeni civil war, such as mid-air refueling of Saudi-led coalition planes and target selection; however, the resolution was a compromise and has not been authorized by Congress yet.

The US is also involved in a network of 18 documented secret prisons based throughout primarily southern Yemeni territory, which are managed by the UAE and dominated by Saudi officials, in which tortures have allegedly taken place. Over 2,000 Yemeni men have reportedly disappeared in the prisons, and survivors have claimed that they experienced torture and sexual assault while imprisoned. In June 2017, US involvement in the secret prisons was confirmed by US military officials, but they denied taking part in the torture of prisoners. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, as of September 2017, US airstrikes in Yemen have more than doubled under the Trump administration, in comparison to the end of the Obama presidency, with 93 airstrikes compared to 40 the previous year. The US carries out at least one airstrike every two days. On May 21 st, 2017, Trump voiced support for action against the Houthis in Yemen, and accused Iran of supporting "terrorists" in Yemen as well as in other nations. The US also still has "counterterrorist operations" and some lines of intelligence to the Houthis, which the US refers to as "anti al-Qaeda."

The UK has also backed US operations in Yemen, such as providing intelligence and operational support for drone strikes, and on-ground British assistance in choosing targets and managing drone strikes. In early 2017, Tory MP Tobias Ellwood stated that the UK is involved in the US targeted killing program and that UK intelligence agencies work closely with that of the US. In the first half of 2017, UK sales of military equipment to Saudi Arabia reached £1.1 billion, according to figures from the Department for International Trade-which also showed that the UK sold £836 million of arms and military hardware to Saudi Arabia between April and June. British forces were also part of a presentation of the firestorm targeting systems utilized by the Saudi-led Gulf coalition forces in Yemen. The Yemen Data Project shows that 356 airstrikes have targeted farms, 174 targeted market places, and 61 targeted food storage places between March 2015 and September 2017. The UK also provided over £4.6 billion worth of fighter jets and arms sales to Saudi Arabia since 2015. UK military officers trained the Royal Saudi Airforce in the aforementioned targeted attacks. Aside from the UK, French President Emmanuel Macron admitted that France has formed relationships with all the Gulf states. In addition to this, Saudi Arabia is one of the prime clients of the French arms industry, which is evident given that François Hollande allowed the sale of arms worth 455 million euros to Saudi Arabia, the majority of which would be used in the war on Yemen. While US imperialism is the primary reactionary force in the Middle East, the legacy of French and British imperialism in the region lives on, 100 years after the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

In terms of conflict resolution, the UN Human Rights Council, the UN Security Council, and Human Rights Watch, have all made efforts to provide what they consider to be assistance to war-torn Yemen. The UN Human Rights Council conducted a report where they recorded the human rights violations of international humanitarian laws taken place in Yemen as of September 2014. They also have recorded civilian casualties due to coalition airstrikes. The Human Rights Council has advocated international investigation of what they consider to be a man-made catastrophe in Yemen. According to the deputy global director of Human Rights Watch, Philippe Bolopion, nations that arm Saudi Arabia have denied evidence that shows that the Saudi-led coalition is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Yemeni civilians and that nations that fund the coalition are complicit in these human rights violations. In September 2017, the Netherlands revised a resolution proposal to the UN Human Rights Council with the goal of gaining Saudi agreement to a UN investigation into alleged war crimes in Yemen. Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein, UN human rights chief, has requested that the 47 member nations of the council start an independent investigation into the war on Yemen. Saudi Arabia insists that the coalition forces are fighting terrorists, but Zeid countered that the majority of casualties are in fact Yemeni noncombatants.

The UN Security Council drafted a political strategy for Yemen. Unfortunately, such measures internationally legitimized the Saudi-backed military operations, mainly due to diplomatic exertions by the ambassadors of the GCC and the Jordanian government, which was represented by its delegate, Dina Kawar. Abdallah al-Mouallimi, the Saudi ambassador to the UN, guided the compromises and stated that Resolution 2216 is notable for having founded the idea that if Arab countries adopt a unified position, the decision would be internationally recognized. With the exception of Russia, 14 states supported the resolution. The resolution was issued under Chapter VII, which obligates enforcement and would require the Houthis to disarm themselves of weapons they obtained from military institutions and to retreat from Sana'a. In Resolution 2216, the UN Security Council stated that all countries should carry out urgent measures to prevent the export of weapons to all Yemeni parties. The Security Council also emphasized that all Yemeni parties and factions should resolve their issues nonviolently. Despite its rhetoric calling for peace, the resolution has served to further empower the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, making it easier for them to seize territories and ports in the nation. Most glaringly, the resolution has failed to ensure that issues among Yemeni parties and groups are dealt with nonviolently, especially given the murder of Saleh by the Houthis in December 2017.

No signs point to any of the UN-led measures having a tangible impact. Tensions have increased in the country following the Houthi-led murder of Saleh. US funding of Saudi coalitions in Yemen has increased under the Trump administration. President Trump proposed $110 billion-worth of arms to Saudi Arabia in June 2017. Said arms proposal would include seven THAAD missile defense batteries, 104,000 air-to-ground munitions, four new aircrafts, and much more. An increase in military aid to Saudi Arabia would result in more casualties, famine, bombings of infrastructure, and seizure of land and ports in Yemen; this proposal could also result in more violent backlash from the Houthis and its supporters. The International Red Cross stated that the fighting between the Houthis and Saleh's forces has resulted in at least 125 civilian deaths within five days of Saleh's murder. Saleh's abrupt death may further enrage Saudi Arabia because of the possibility of an increase of Iranian influence in the region, which would further increase their bombing of Yemen in an attempt to repress Houthis.

In all of this horrific war, the Yemeni people's voices remain silenced. The only chance the country has of seeing peace is for the complete withdrawal of all coalition forces, from the Saudi Arabia to other GCC members. It goes without saying that this includes any and all US presence. While the UN has made clarion calls for peace, its actions have proved impotent at best, and disastrous at worse. Sanctions issued against Yemen have engendered further famine, death, and destruction. Thus, much as coalition forces must withdraw, so too must sanctions come to a close. If, and only if, these two actions come to fruition, then the Yemeni people might have a chance to bring about peace, on their terms. Anything short of this will lead to the existing cycle repeating itself in one form or another. The only hope for Yemen lies with the Yemeni people, without the encroachment of the West or its GCC puppets.

References

The World Factbook: Yemen. Central Intelligence Agency, 12 Dec. 2017.

Ahmed, Bilal Zenab. The Yemen Primer: A History of Violence for Anti-Violence. Viewpoint Magazine, 25 July 2017.

Yemen: The North-South Divide. Al Jazeera, 8 Dec. 2017.

Hundreds of Rights Violations Documented in Yemen. Al Jazeera, 20 Nov. 2017.

Yemen Crisis: Who Is Fighting Whom? BBC News, 2 Dec. 2017.

Yemen An "Entirely Man-Made Catastrophe"-UN Human Rights Report Urges International Investigation. United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, 5 Sept. 2017.

Red Cross: 1 Million Cholera Cases Likely In Yemen By Years End. Mint Press News, 29 Sept. 2017.

Weisbrot, Mark. Mass Starvation and an Unconstitutional War: US/Saudi Crimes in Yemen. Counterpunch, 22 Nov. 2017.

Craig, Iona. Bombed into Famine: How Saudi Air Campaign Targets Yemen's Food Supplies. The Guardian, 12 Dec. 2017.

Yemen War Caused Saudi $5.3bn: Minister. Press TV, 29 Dec. 2015.

Shakdam, Catherine. Saudi Arabia's Slaughter of Yemen Fueled by Oil Interests Not Democracy. Mint Press News, 30 Mar. 2016.

Spillius, Alex. Wikileaks: 'Saudis Chief Funders of Al-Qaeda'. The Telegraph, 5 Dec. 2010.

Friedersdorf, Conor. How America's Drone War in Yemen Strengthens Al-Qaeda. The Atlantic, 28 Sept. 2015.

O'Connor, Tom. Israel Military Bases within Range of Missiles, Yemen Rebels Warn. Newsweek, 29 Sept. 2017.

Qatar Deploys 1,000 Ground Troops to Fight in Yemen. Al Jazeera, 7 Sept. 2015.

Cafiero, Giorgio. Sudan Gets $2.2B for Joining Saudi Arabia, Qatar in Yemen War. Al- Monitor, 23 Nov. 2015.

Saul, Jonathan. Exclusive: Iran Steps up Support for Houthis in Yemen's War. Reuters, 21 Mar. 2017.

Bayoumy, Yara. Obama Administration Arms Sales Offers to Saudi Top $115 Billion: Report. Reuters, 7 Sept. 2016.

Webb, Whitney. US Troop Deployment To Yemen Has Little To Do With Al-Qaeda. Mint Press News , 8 Aug. 2017.

Flirting with Liberals: A Critical Examination of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)

By Andrew Dobbs

Should revolutionary Leftists join Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)? The group has added tens of thousands of members and become one of the fastest growing political organizations in the country since Bernie Sanders' historic campaign. Lenin said that we must go where the "millions" are, following the masses. Does that mean Leftists should join DSA?

No, we should not. Any such move is premature at best and doomed at worst, and all of the Left maneuvering in its midst amounts to opportunism, a choice that will lead to political compromise and ultimately either irrelevance or betrayal of our cause and class. The purpose of this essay is to dispel the confusion leading US revolutionaries to miss these clear facts.

DSA's Strategy and Left Idealism

DSA's politics are a material thing, and they are rooted in the shared pursuits of the organization's vanguard. DSA held its largest ever national convention in Chicago in August of 2017, open to any members that wished to attend. No one suggests that there was a large number of members that wanted to go but couldn't and whose votes would have changed the convention's outcomes. This convention represents the voice of DSA's most committed and influential leaders, its vanguard.

By an overwhelming margin--roughly three-to-one--this convention decided to focus on a national campaign for Medicare for All, to be won by electing pro-single payer Democrats to Congress, the White House, and other offices. DSA's vanguard chose a path that commits them to working within a bourgeois, imperialist political party.

This is no accident; it reflects DSA's class character. R.L. Stephens has said that 89% of DSA members are white , and in an colonialist country this indicates that DSA membership is either predominantly drawn from classes other than the proletariat or appealing disproportionately to white proletarians. Whether middle class or unconsciously white supremacist, it does not represent the politics of the US proletariat, and mere argument or good example will not shift that.

On the contrary, social democrats throughout history have, as a result of similar class politics, been quick to collaborate with the bourgeoisie on programs destructive to the lowest productive class, the proletariat. Harold Wilson deployed troops to Northern Ireland; Mitterrand took up an "austerity turn;" SYRIZA immediately capitulated to the central bankers; Ebert and the SPD helped the Freikorps kill Luxemburg and Liebknecht. The examples could, tragically, go for days.

Communists like those in DSA Refoundation or the DSA Communist Caucus--who may be consolidating at some point--should not ignore this history. DSA entry advocates should instead explain whether they believe DSA has a proletarian class character, and if so where the break with historical social democracy has occurred, particularly in light of their commitment to the Democratic Party. If they accept that it is not proletarian they should answer how they expect to overturn its class basis without destroying the organization altogether.

This impossible idealist task is precisely what social democrats claim to be able to do with the bourgeois state. If they are mistaken in that task, then how are the DSA Left factions possibly correct?

The Praxis of Actually Existing DSA

DSA supporters, nonetheless, are quick to point to the Serve the People-style programs they have undertaken in low income working class communities and communities of color, most famously their brake light campaigns. In actual practice DSA is far more diverse in its tactics than its formal goals and strategies would suggest, they argue. These efforts are then openings into which proletarian politics can enter the organization.

These efforts are indeed creative and worth commending, but as long as they are attempting to win proletarian workers over to a social democratic program they are doomed to failure, either by failing to attract any dispossessed workers to the program or by capturing some element of this class and then neutralizing them for an actual proletarian politics. This is the repeated history of social democracy around the world.

Also, how will DSA relate to these projects when election season comes and their stated strategic priorities are on the line? Will they co-opt these projects for their effort to elect pro-single payer Democrats? If so, then the Left factionalists that have joined on those grounds will find themselves campaigning for a bourgeois, imperialist political party--collaborating with the class enemies of the working class.

This question is even more urgent for "base-building" elements such as DSA Refoundation. They put forward excellent proposals around organizing worker centers, solidarity networks, and tenants unions. When elections come and DSA needs all hands on deck to elect Democrats for the sake of their broadly agreed-to and popular strategic goals do these projects become appendages of the Democratic Party or do they undermine DSA's strategy? They will become the enemies either of their class or their organization.

And make no mistake, withholding resources from the Democrat electoral push will be nearly impossible for DSA's rank-and-file to tolerate. The organization's vanguard, the vast majority of its membership, and its mass base will be focused on an electoral push. Do Left faction leaders hope that the organization's leading elements don't need those resources in taking on the entire US corporate establishment?

The only thing that would prevent the Democrat majority from going over the Left's heads and appropriating the resources for themselves would be their goodwill. The factions entering DSA right now will end up either shilling for Democrats or forced out of their own campaigns.

To the extent that these projects are good uses of revolutionaries' time, it seems that most DSA chapters are happy to bring in coalition partners from independent Left organizations, and such engagement seems to have all the benefits of working within DSA with none of the risks outlined above. When they bail to elect a Democrat to the White House we can keep projects alive and maintain a much stronger position from which to resist co-optation.

Four Basic Permutations of DSA's Future

Such a position of independence and tactical cooperation seems to be the best strategy in general when one considers the likely outcomes of DSA's project at hand. The Democratic Party is both out of power and largely hostile to DSA's politics at this time. To succeed at its project, DSA must gain a position of leading influence within the Democratic Party and the Democrats must take power in a way that lets them enact this vision.

The four basic permutations for DSA's future are therefore: they take power within the Democratic Party and the Democrats win, they take this power and the Democrats lose, they are kept marginal in the party and the Democrats win, or they are marginal in the party and the Democrats lose.

By "take power" in the party we have to acknowledge, of course, that the Democratic Party is liable to remain a very eclectic and diverse institution, but in this instance we mean that the party publicly campaigns on DSA's agenda--at least the Medicare for All piece--and actually makes plans to pursue it as policy. Knowing this, what are the likely outcome for DSA's historic undertaking?

Taking Power in the Party and Losing Anyways

One of these permutations has actually happened in the past--social democrats taking control of the party and then losing to a hated Republican reactionary criminal. In 1972 elements of the New Left won over the Democratic Party, nominating Left liberal George McGovern for president (McGovern went on to coin the phrase "Medicare for everyone") and even in a brief moment of levity entertaining Mao Tse-Tung as the nominee for Vice President.

Immediately following this takeover the party's key electoral elements--labor unions and big city political machines--sabotaged the campaign, deciding that even four more years (ultimately it was only about two-and-a-half) of the hated Richard Nixon would be better than giving the Left a foothold in the party. For 45 years since then McGovern's name has been a shorthand among Democrats reminding them that if they let themselves get too progressive they'll get embarrassed.

DSA and its allies are miles short of where the New Left was at that time, but even Bernie's upstart, not-that-radical campaign with all its approval of imperialism and disapproval of its global critics prompted concerted Democrat sabotage. Whether this costs them a future election or they overcome it and fuck things up anyways an electoral loss to the GOP will make their politics anathema for a generation or more. DSA's mass membership will flee, and whatever work is being done to try and capture this "fastest growing" Left formation right now will have been a waste.

Taking Over the Empire

But what if DSA members and Bernie Sanders supporters take over the Democratic Party and then win the Presidency? This is the claim that Bernie-ites have made since last November: if we were on the ballot, we'd win. If they did, however, DSA and its candidate and party will be forced to ask themselves: what do they do with the US empire?

The most likely answer is that they will go along to get along and betray all the working people of the world repressed by the US death machine. Their official Priorities Resolution had no mention of US foreign policy whatsoever. This is perfectly in keeping with social democracy's historic experience, and US social democrats have little choice, as the resources they need to pay for their proposed welfare state can only be generated through accumulation of super profits extracted from the Third World.

If, however, Left factions were able to convince DSA--now ascendant in the Democratic Party and in actual elected power--to reject US imperialism and to use that position to secure liberation for those under the yoke of North American repression, then all of the Left would need to rally to their side and THAT would be the precise time for revolutionaries to potentially join up with DSA. The deep state and their monopoly capitalist base will have knives out for the socialists at that point, and we will need to defend them by any means necessary.

But that actually recommends working to build political support and a mass base outside of DSA at this time. The regime will need capacity over and on top of what it took to take power. We will be able to do more good with organizations distinct from DSA built up between now and then than we would liquidating into a movement incredibly unlikely to take this course anyways.

When the Democrats Don't Need You

The next possible permutation is by far the most likely -- that the Democratic nominee owes little or nothing to DSA, disdains their values, and wins anyways. Should DSA then support the nominee as a "lesser evil" or because of some half-assed lip service to Medicare for All, or do they refuse to go along with a class enemy of the socialist movement?

In either case the left liberal petit bourgeois elements in the group are likely to shift their primary loyalty from DSA to the Democrats and the nominee themselves. This is precisely what these elements did with Barack Obama, and they were in fact one of the pillars of his campaign and governing coalition. This nominee will represent their class interests far more faithfully than DSA. The more effective the Left revolutionary tendencies in DSA are in the meantime, the more likely this abandonment will be then.

If DSA decides instead to play the "lesser evil" game it is hard to imagine many of the earnest young workers drawn to them today sticking around for very long. They may help beat Trump, but whether DSA quietly pushes irrelevant policies or begs pathetically for things they know they'll never get from a president and Congress that doesn't like them these young workers will have little reason to stick around. Whatever work Leftists are doing in DSA now will have been wasted as DSA returns to being a tiny faction for weak-tea labor aristocrat radicals.

Yet if DSA does decide to fight against the Democrat they will have the chance to form a substantial Left pole of opposition to the ruling administration and perhaps even a useful foundation for a Left party. The young workers--at least their most advanced and conscientious numbers--will have a good reason to stick around.

Revolutionaries should be preparing to reinforce whatever truly progressive forces come to bear in the future, and such a formation may amount to that. This would be a point to consider joining forces with DSA more formally, and again bringing our independent bases to bear at a moment when they will be sorely needed. As we will see, though, it may not be as revolutionary as we have been led to believe after all.

DSA as Double Losers

The final permutation is an extension of the status quo: DSA is kept out of power within the Democratic Party and the Democrats lose. If DSA's failure is by way of active suppression by party leaders (as badly as they treated Bernie or worse), then DSA will have a strong argument that the Democrats' failure was caused by the suppression, and will have a real shot at catapulting ahead of existing liberal leadership. At that point--again--the reinforcements from the revolutionary wing of the Left will be especially valuable and powerful if it makes sense to join.

It's also very possible that Leftists look at the fact that this outcome was able to happen at least twice as a sign that DSA and social democracy are incapable of overcoming this fate and unfit for the political needs of the moment, thus wiping out whatever work revolutionaries do in their midst until then.

If instead they are given a fair and square shot--at least arguably so--and they are simply rejected by a majority of the Democrat base, then they will be a marginal faction of a losing party. This is the definition of political irrelevance and whatever "explosive growth" they have experienced in the Bernie aftermath will likely evaporate. Yet again any Left efforts within the organization will have been wasted.

What Should We Do Instead?

After all of this there are three scenarios in which work within DSA will not have been wasted or profoundly compromised: if they take over the Democratic Party, win, and begin to dismantle US imperialism; if they don't take power within the party, the party wins, but they buck the Democrats and become an independent Left force contesting the administration; or if they are suppressed within the Democratic Party and the Democrats lose, and they stand and fight in the aftermath.

Each of the three would benefit from well-developed independent Left forces that can arrive as backup to support their efforts when those crucial moments are attained. But if we are being honest with ourselves we will have to acknowledge the present US revolutionary Left's total failure to build these very sorts of forces. Unless we have an answer to the failure we have nothing to lose in following the factions into DSA.

We will not solve this failure on paper. We will come to the solution through practice, but we can examine extant experiments and practices in the light of scientific socialist analysis to gain some ideas on where to start. In particular, we should consider practices outside of DSA's politics and perspective, opportunities we will miss if we all fall into their lines.

The Proletarian Subject and the Workers' Party Error

First things first, if their politics are wrong because of their class character, then we should instead seek out the politics of the proletariat. The problem with this is that in the United States the proletariat has no politics at this point, which should make it pretty easy to determine the revolutionary task at hand: building proletarian subjectivity.

The revolutionary Left errs on this question -- and thus ends up tailing DSA or other non-revolutionary elements -- because it believes that developing proletarian subjectivity is synonymous with founding a "workers party" or an even less specific "Left" alternative party. DSA Refoundation does this explicitly, calling their proposed network of organizations "the skeleton of a Workers Party." Some of the more left-wing veterans of the Bernie Sanders' campaign organized under the banner of the Movement for a People's Party announced in late January that they are now working in solidarity with DSA Refoundation.

Together they reflect a predominant idea in contemporary left politics, that a new leftist party is what we really need, despite the global failure of such parties to even so much as slow capitalism's advance in the last half century at least.

This yearning for a workers' party reflects an awareness of the need for a revolutionary subject that can confront capitalism, but it makes two important mistakes. First, it conflates the proletariat with the working class. In the United States in particular, however, capitalism and its historic expressions in settler colonialism and imperialism have created a productive class with widely varying levels of social and material assets, many of which distort their interests and political positions.

Engels observed this same phenomenon in England as far back as 1858, "The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable." White US workers' role in exploiting this country's internal colonies only amplifies this effect.

It is true still that over time "society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other - Bourgeoisie and Proletariat." It is for this very reason that the proletariat--the dialectical synthesis between absolute dispossession and absolute productivity--can represent the entire working class, as their emancipation will require the liberation of all workers and humanity at large. But rooting a political subject in any other fraction of the broader working class--those privileged by race or nationality or various sources of social capital, etc.--will ultimately favor maintaining those privileges at the expense of those exploited to produce them. In short, it will favor the pursuit of a merely gentler or more "progressive" class society, not the abolition of all class distinctions, the basic necessity of the proletariat and the essence of communist politics.

The second error giving rise to the "workers' party" hypothesis is the assumption that the subject here must necessarily take the party form. What we know is that the initial formations embodying proletarian subjectivity are likely to be too small and too narrowly focused to take on the tasks and responsibilities of a party, and so determining today that they must ultimately become that party is to supplant our judgment--divorced from real conditions--for the assessments of the organized proletariat themselves. This is another idealist error, and it may be the key error of Left organizing in this country, period.

The Mass Line and Its Obstacles

We will develop such proletarian subjectivity with skillful application of the mass line, and so the basic task at hand is to train and educate a core communist cadre that can then undertake mass line investigation, developing programs that proletarians can adopt as their own. It really is as simple as this, but there is a major obstacle standing between our existing small group Left and this seemingly simple outcome: we too are predominantly non-proletarian in our class character.

The proletariat in this country may not have a subjective program, but to survive each proletarian -- particularly the very advanced elements that will form the vanguard of any subject drawn from this class -- knows explicitly not to trust the classes and categories from which the typical US Leftist hails. These Leftists are well-versed in proletarian political analysis arrived at through sound scientific reasoning, but dropping into these dispossessed, colonized, disenfranchised, and exploited communities and waving the correct ideas for their liberation is guaranteed to fail.

Unfortunately many US Leftists have stopped there, unsure of where to move forward. They double down on that ideological development, forming study groups, or they form political groups and boutique parties with random, ineffective practices. DSA Refoundation's base-building document includes an uncanny description of this very sort of sectarian "vanguardism."

It is no wonder they see DSA's growth, strategic confidence, and creativity as very attractive compared to this -- indeed, it is probably better to join DSA than almost any other present US Left revolutionary formation. The question is whether their opportunism is better than struggling for something more difficult, but truly new.

Connecting to Social Movements

The resolution to this contradiction between existing revolutionaries and the revolutionary class-to-be can be found, I would argue, in the Third World. It is here that social democrats like those in DSA are unlikely to turn, but we should presume that proletarian revolution is unlikely to arise among the beneficiaries of global imperialism. When we look to the more advanced Left revolutionary forces around the world--in the Philippines, in Venezuela and the other Latin American Left experiments, formerly in Haiti under Fanmi Lavalas, in Morocco's Rif uprising and in South Africa -- we see that Left parties and revolutionary subjects have arisen amidst larger social movements.

We would be wise to follow that model, bringing our capacity to social movements working in proletarian communities in the US and engaging in a deliberate and patient mass line investigation there. The obstacle here is that the deepest reaches of the US proletariat have few authentic social movements engaging them, instead they are beset by parasitic or patronizing NGOs. NGOism captures social movements, drawing them into the foundation-driven, professionally-directed non-profit industrial complex. DSA Refoundation in particular calls this out, but then suggests that they will carry out a praxis guaranteed to draw them into these very orbits. How we should instead avoid these class enemies while engaging our potential allies is another key question for our work.

And it is here that we reach the boundaries of present knowledge; moving beyond which will require further social practice. Still, we can answer the question of what we should be doing instead of joining DSA: identifying social movements and material struggles in our communities with authentic entry points into the proletariat, serving them as we can and using the mass line to investigate unspoken demands that we can develop into real proletarian political programs.

Cases of Possible Success

This is an incredibly complicated task, but some apparently correct examples have already been undertaken. Philly Socialists have built one of the largest, most resilient non-DSA socialist organizations in the country, with roots first in Serve the People programs widely respected among some of the lowest-income, most dispossessed elements of that city -- especially their free ESL classes. They also established a Tenant's Union that has confronted landlords and forced eviction reforms at City Hall that should materially slow gentrification and displacement.

Regarding housing struggles, New York City's Maoist Communist Group (MCG) has demonstrated an entirely different set of tactics, eschewing any "policy" work. They have established some initial roots in low income housing complexes in Brooklyn where they have developed a theory and strategy they summarize in the slogan "Struggle Committees Everywhere!"

These committees arose out of their efforts to fight displacement in aggressively gentrifying neighborhoods, and are a pre-party vehicle for proletarian subjectivity that could be adopted elsewhere. Every Left group hoping to build towards revolution in this country must engage with their theoretical documents and summations .

In Austin, our work as Austin Socialist Collective has been much more uneven, and we are not yet prepared to sum up these experiences. We have, however, seen that shop-to-shop outreach done initially through the Fight for 15 campaign has been a quick way to immediately touch our local proletariat. Some specific direct actions confronting wage thief management have impressed these workers and very effectively demonstrated the class struggle for everybody on the shop floor. How we deploy these tactics and to what ends in the future remains to be seen.

Conclusion

Regardless of the firm judgments here, none of this should be read as calling for unnecessary hostility or animosity towards DSA. There are a number of earnest potential revolutionaries there that will either be strong allies in the unlikely event we need to rush in or strong recruits when they join the much more likely exodus to come. In the meantime we should sincerely explore all opportunities for effective united front work with DSA in our communities.

If all our best Left elements have liquidated into the organization we can't add to their capacity, and if they do fail we will be starting out from scratch at that point, even worse off than we are today. The notion that whatever work is being done under its auspices now can be carried forward unchanged even if DSA changes for the worse is an idealist mistake. As an institution it will act upon and move the people and organizations working within it, and it will move them in a direction away from proletarian politics.

Honest Leftists must, nonetheless, acknowledge that accomplishing our tasks is a far less clear path than DSA factional entryism, and we are probably no more likely to succeed than DSA is. The best way to guarantee our failure, however, is to fail to act at all, defaulting instead to the less threatening path offered by social democracy. If we do that we will get what the Left around the world has had for decades at least--a politics that claims a great deal and delivers only ruin.

In the short run, we can build outside of DSA to catch our comrades when they fall out from it, or perhaps to rush in when they really need our help. In either case we must build outside its boundaries. Their future is uncertain at best, and the opportunities too many are hastily seeking really are opportunistic. The true revolutionary path is one of patience; a lonely one in comparison for sure, but our true friends can only be found among those too low for opportunists to wait upon. Let's find one another in their midst.

Against Trumpeachment: The Case for a Strategic Alternative

By Bryant William Sculos

Given the recent plea deal accepted by retired General and former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for lying to FBI investigators regarding his contact with agents of the Russian government during the 2016-2017 transition prior to Trump's inauguration, the question of how the left should situate itself with respect to the potential impeachment of President Trump has gained increased significance.

Should the American left actively work towards the pervasively justified impeachment of Donald J. Trump? Not only is this question one that plagues the Democratic Party as well as those on the left, it is likely being debated seriously at the highest levels of the GOP. Sadly, and exclusively for strategic reasons, the left and those in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, in whatever state it exists, should not waste time struggling for the impeachment of Donald Trump.

The Case for Trumpeachment

Before answering the big question being posed here, we must ask the obvious question (with an equally obviously answer), are there legal justifications for impeaching Donald Trump? While impeachment is always a political mechanism for the removal of a President, it is also always rooted in at least a discourse of legality. That said, there are literally countless legal reasons for the successful impeachment and guilty verdict in the impending trial of the forty-fifth President of the United States. Trump is an admitted sex criminal , with any number of open complaints against him that he hasn't yet admitted to (or bragged about) on tape. He has repeatedly worked to violate the civil rights of transgender soldiers , foreign-born permanent residents, and legal immigrants (to say nothing for the human rights of undocumented persons ). Donald Trump continues to profit from dealings with foreign governments, an apparently too overt of a violation of the emoluments clause of the US Constitution to matter to, I don't know, anyone. Then, on what we might find out to be in two or three dozen cases, Donald Trump and his immediate staff have committed various forms of obstruction of justice and/or perjury, including, though certainly not exclusively, the firing of controversial former FBI Director James Comey for his pursuit of the then fledgling Russia election interference/Trump campaign investigation.

All, or nearly all, Presidents break US law. All, at least contemporary, US Presidents are categorizable as unconvicted war criminals, including the darling drone king, Barack Obama . This reality is not new to Trump. What is new or novel about Trump is the openness with which he has and continues to violate US law, nearly with impunity-except for the US federal courts preventing Trump's Muslim ban and transgender purge of the US military. Given the degree of publicly available documentation regarding Trump's crimes, why would I suggest not impeaching him?

Who Benefits from Trumpeachment

First, I'm not actually suggesting that Trump should not be impeached - and I don't really think anyone on the left is either. At most, those on the left who have criticized the possibility of impeaching Trump seem to fear Mike Pence becoming President and then all of a sudden all Handmaid's Tale becomes a documentary. That fear aside-a fear that is a only a bit exaggerated because Trump's campaign and White House have already emboldened white and Christian supremacists and given presidential approval for sexual harassment and statutory rape (if not outright pedophilia) , and Pence has already gotten his Supreme Court pick and the reinstatement of the global gap rule -it is hard to see the value of the left spending significant time working towards that as some kind of major political victory. While there is certainly evidence that the Democratic Party would enjoy running against Trump as evinced by their recent collaboration with the GOP in voting against articles of impeachment , their steadfast support for the Russia election meddling probes evince a narrow-minded belief that eventually damning evidence against Trump himself will be revealed. Their plan seems to be one of certain patience. All the while they continue to meet with Trump to work out compromises within the wider revanchist agenda of Trump and the Republican Party.

Special Prosecutor Mueller is still conducting what seems, by undemocratic American political standards, a pretty decent investigation with few leaks nor any of the hallmarks of a witch hunt. While there is no evidence yet that Trump had any direct contact with top officials in the Russian government regarding Moscow's election tampering, given the tenacity and professionalism of the investigation so far, it seems unlikely Mueller's team wouldn't be able to find evidence for any collusion that did occur, if it did occur. While there is certainly the possibility that Trump, as mentioned above, is guilty of more obstruction of justice than is already known, if there exists the kind of smoking gun regarding collusion that would be of the degree needed to dethrone Trump, especially in the polarized climate of "fake news" and "alternative facts," it certainly won't be hindered because the Democratic Party wasn't prepared enough to take advantage of it. In fact, given the low opinion that most of the country has of the Democratic Party, it is possible that the less prepared they seem when any such smoking gun emerges, the more legitimate the smoking gun might be by treated by the general public.

Again, without suggesting for even a moment that the country and the world would not be better off without Trump in office nor that he isn't guilty of any number of crimes that would justify impeachment and conviction on criminal charges, we should think about who the impeachment of Donald Trump would benefit, given the likely political context that such a process would occur within. Mike Pence? The Democratic Party? The Republican Party? The answer very well may be yes to all of those answers.

The impeachment (or even a pre-impeachment resignation) of Trump would vindicate the hard center of the Democratic Party that has set their entire political existence on the tenuously provable accusation of genuine "collusion" between Donald Trump (and his 2016 presidential campaign staff) and the Russian interference in the election, including hacking and the legal purchasing of polarizing advertisements online. Mike Pence, however delegitimized and short-lived his presidency would be, would become President. And although he has gotten much of what he would have attempted to accomplish as President as Vice President, including the arch-conservative jurist Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court and the reinstatement of the global gag rule, he would still probably prefer to end his career as President rather than Vice President.

The Democratic Party would win a superficial victory of course because they have been saying since they co-founded "the Resistance" that Donald Trump purloined the Presidency from its rightful inhabitant Hillary Clinton. They would be vindicated, but without a serious alternative progressive agenda to offer the American people, their victory would undoubtedly be short-lived. Given the current GOP control over both houses of Congress, and the likelihood that they will continue to hold at least one of the houses after the 2018 midterm elections, any successful impeachment would likely need to involve cooperation between the Democrats and Republicans - undermining the Democrats ability to run an effective campaign in 2020 tying the GOP to Trump.

If the benefits of a Trump impeachment are either too complex to really figure out in advance, with little to no guarantee of anything other than the veneer of civility covering up the typical presidential crimes and cruelties, why bother struggling for it? Aren't there better things that the left could focus on in the lead up to 2018 and 2020?

Presenting a Positive Progressive Agenda

There is an alternative, and it is one that would certainly allow for the possibility of the impeachment of the forty-fifth President should a smoking gun emerge or the political climate otherwise shifts even further against Trump. Thinking about what an alternative strategic approach might entail, it is worth thinking back to the 2016 Democratic Presidential primary. A self-described democratic socialist Bernie Sanders fell just shy of being able to overcome the nearly universally predicted and expected victory of establishment darling Hillary Clinton. As a critical Sanders supporter myself, and through my many conversations with other Sanders supporters, though there was a lot of mixed dislike of Clinton and her agenda, it was much more the latter that drove support for Sanders, in addition to the alternative program for the United States that he represented. The Sanders phenomena was a response to Clinton's agenda first and foremost, not her as a person. This is the lesson that both the left and the Democratic Party needs to heed.

It was the belief in the importance of a social democrat, in the Scandinavian welfare-state tradition, running for President of the United States on practicable platform of social, political, and economic justice for all and with a campaign that refused to take corporate money. This is what the left, both within and well-beyond the Democratic Party should be focusing on. What do the people who need American politics to change the most want from our politicians? What do the young people who will inherit this increasingly warm, wet, and economically unstable world want and need from American politics?

First and foremost, they want an actually functioning democracy, including within their limited choices of the legally-instantiated two-party system. This means the Democratic Party needs to be transparent about their internal corruption, purge themselves of those involved, openly reform the policies that led the scale-tipping to happen in the first place, and then they need to trust that if they present a platform and candidates to the American people who are worth supporting and voting for, that the American people will be there with both their votes and their wallets (of course, supporting public financing of elections would be a better option for everyone-but let's not get too too crazy with our demands or expectations of a corrupt political party).

And if we're all genuinely concerned about election tampering, which is the ostensible purpose of all the investigations into the Trump campaign and administration, wouldn't it be more worthy of our time to focus on the election tampering that the GOP is already promoting here at home, without any foreign assistance? Republicans have foisted voter ID laws on the poor and people of color in a number of states, and they have gerrymandered the districts , to such a degree they would literally have had to help elect a President as seemingly unhinged and unqualified as Trump before they'd be in danger of losing their stranglehold on the House of Representatives. The GOP has supported the continued disenfranchisement of convicted felons , which disproportionately affects people of color. They have cut funding to voter outreach programs and reduced (including failing to increase) the number of voting stations in populated areas . Yes, of course we should have an election system that prevents foreign hacking and manipulation, but to think that the greatest threats to any semblance of democracy in America are foreign is the height of naiveté.

Donald Trump isn't a Teflon president; he is a garbage magnet president. There is so much trash in and surrounding the forty-fifth President of the United States that impeaching him would be like finding the smelliest, most rotted piece of trash in a landfill and thinking that if you just remove that, the landfill will stop smelling so badly. Much of the #dumpsterfire that is Trump's presidency is self-caused, but let us not immunize his collaborators, which include much of the Republican Party (and since the election, many Democrats, including the leadership).

The left should let Trump stink up everyone that allows themselves to be touched by him and his hateful, regressive agenda (though we really can't assume that everyone who is touched by Trump does so consensually). It is worth remembering, as political theorist Corey Robin ( The Reactionary Mind, Oxford, 2017) and award-winning journalist and author Naomi Klein (No is Not Enough, Haymarket Books, 2017) have each shown, Trump's agenda (tax cuts for the wealthy, the privatization of education, gutting the EPA, massive increases in military spending, anti-abortion, anti-LGBTQA+, etc.), with few exceptions, is the GOP policy wish list from the past 30 years.

Let that agenda get completely covered by Trump's defecated reputation. Let the Republicans and any Democrats that want to pick-and-choose their favorite injustices to support from that agenda get ensconced in an unredeemable stench. At that point the whole country will have a better chance of knowing which politicians are trash in need of taking out and which are genuinely interested in a more just future.

If the GOP wants Trump gone, let them do it (and right now, they are the only ones who can). They won't though, not unless Trump becomes such a problem that their agenda is completely sidelined-sidelined more than it already has been. For the most part, Trump's agenda, insofar as he has any coherent agenda, is the GOP agenda. And furthermore, it is nearly completely impossible for an impeachment of Trump to take down all of the people who have supported him and/or the agenda he currently represents.

With that said, letting Trump and his toilet bowl of allies and occasional collaborators stink up DC is not the same as letting them have unchecked, unprotested reign over the country. There are too many lives at stake for that. The left must resist more in both quantity and quality, never forgetting that Trump is a mere wart on the ass of a too slowly decaying political charade. Strategizing in such a way that makes the broader systemic problems related to Trump increasingly apparent will be central to any effective resistance. Impeachment targeted specifically at Trump the man is unlikely to aid that cause. This alternative strategy to impeachment has the clear benefit of not letting anyone off the hook, neither the GOP nor the corporate, collaborationist Democratic Party for their respective roles in the emergence of Trump and whatever political success his agenda attains.

The left must continue to resist, protest, and organize for the near and long-term future of the US and the world, but dedicating serious time to impeaching Trump is not an effective way to show the world just how many more American politicians are Trump-like than they appear. The left must oppose Trump, the GOP, and the collaborating Democrats.

If Trump resigns or gets impeached in the process, great, but the crucial point is to impeach the agenda and indeed the system that created him and his program of policy cruelty-one that is too similar to what has been the modus operandi of mainstream American politics for far too long.

Dr. Bryant William Sculos holds a PhD in political theory and international relations. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at The Amherst Program in Critical Theory, adjunct professor at Florida International University, contributing writer for the Hampton Institute, and Politics of Culture section editor for Class, Race and Corporate Power. His published work has also appeared in Constellations, New Politics, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, Political Studies Review, Public Seminar, and New Political Science.

How Liberals Depoliticize White Supremacy

By Amir Khafagy

It could be argued that this past year was the year that the term "white supremacy" has gone mainstream. Everybody and their mother is talking about fighting or resisting white supremacy. White leftists are usually the ones who are seemingly throwing themselves on the front lines. They also come across as the most eager to smash white supremacy, ultimately overshadowing the ones who are directly oppressed by it. Since the arrival of Trump, liberals have joined the fray, focusing much of their anger on the man himself.

So, let me be real about this and come out and say that it bothers me. For the longest time I couldn't really articulate it but in my gut something just didn't feel right. The term "white supremacy" has never been a popular colloquial term, nor has it ever been even truly acknowledged by white America as a very real reality for most black Americans. If white supremacy was ever discussed, it was generally talked about in its isolated fringe form and relegated to annals of day-time talk shows.

Throughout the 90s I would remember the times I stayed home from school and watched sensationalist shows such as Jerry Springer or Geraldo Rivera when they would bring on neo-Nazis and Klan members to generate easy ratings. Geraldo even got his nose broken during one episode, when a Klan member threw a chair at his face. For the majority of white liberal Americans of the post-civil rights era, white supremacy has been viewed in the context as a mere relic of history only maintained by isolated, fringe, far-right groups. White supremacy was viewed as a part of history, not as existing in the present or lingering into the future.

Only with the rise of Trump have we begun to have mainstream discussions about the role white supremacy plays in our society. And that's great! We need to be having that discussion. Yet what has been lacking from that conversation is the systematic nature of white supremacy and how it's directly tied to capitalism. Liberals who claim to be part of the "resistance" are acting as if Trump has opened a long, dormant Pandora's Box of hatred, xenophobia, and white supremacy. The "resistance" accuses the current head of the American empire of being a white supremacist fascist, without ever questioning whether or not the American empire is inherently white supremacist in nature.

Much of the focus coming from liberal camps has been on the symbolism of what Trump the individual represents, and not on the material reality of what America represents. With this approach, the horror of white supremacy is ultimately stripped of its historical and current roll in supporting capitalism and empire. It becomes diluted when liberals only see white supremacy through the prism of individualistic, interpersonal relations.

Privilege politics is a manifestation of individualizing white supremacy. If "radical" means "grasping things at the root," like Angela Davis once said, then this myopic approach taken under the banner of privilege politics is the opposite of radical. It is superficial. Rather than recognizing and struggling against the structural forces that create white privilege in the first place, we are instead expected to politely ask that white people somehow give up their privileges; or, at very least, recognize that they have privilege.

It should be obvious to anyone that this approach makes little sense because it forces us to depend on white people to enact symbolic change while we surrender what little power we have in the first place to make fundamental change. Privilege politics also assumes that white supremacy in our society is result of individualistic patterns and behaviors - that is an outlier, not a norm. In reality, people's patterns and behaviors reflect the political and economic conditions of society. Systems don't change because people change, people change because systems change. All of this amounts to the depoliticizing of white supremacy, and it's preventing us from fully understanding that America's foreign, domestic, and economic policy is essentially white supremacy in action, and always has been.

For an example of what the depoliticization of white supremacy looks like, we can assess the reaction to the recent debate between Dr. Cornel West and writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. In an article he penned for the Guardian, Dr. West put it bluntly and accused Coates of being "the neoliberal face of the black freedom struggle." West went on to say that "any analysis or vision of our world that omits the centrality of Wall Street power, US military policies, and the complex dynamics of class, gender, and sexuality in black America is too narrow and dangerously misleading." He then adds his most powerful indictment by saying "In short, Coates fetishizes white supremacy. He makes it almighty, magical, and unremovable."

In looking past the controversy and fanfare sparked from his article, we can see that West's words and message are crucial. He accurately theorizes that any discussion which removes structural white supremacy from its central role in upholding America's capitalist empire will inadvertently end up reinforcing white supremacy. However, instead of seeing West's critique of Coates as a valid insight on the state of the black liberation struggle, most folks chose to frame the debate as some sort of personal beef between the two most prominent black intellectuals in the country, resembling some sort of Hip-Hop celebrity feud.

Detractors of West, such as Dr. Michael Eric Dyson, have even gone on accusing West of "throwing shade" because he's somehow jealous of Coates' success, echoing the same responses given to West's vital critiques of Obama. As if West's criticisms were based on piety narcissism rather than grounded in a legitimate concern for the fate of black America. It's just plain dismissive to reject what West has to say without fully analyzing the points he was trying to make. Borrowing West's own logic, the reactions are indicative of a neoliberal culture that is insistent on removing all traces of critical thinking which challenge the orthodoxy of privilege politics.

Critics of West have completely ignored his points, choosing instead to denounce him as a "washed-up, bitter, old man." An important message has been lost in the winds of this drama. West was trying to make us understand that white supremacy is embedded into every fabric of American life and society. It is not relegated to fringe groups or individuals like Trump, and it is not some mystic force that is indestructible. He wants us to understand that the responsibility to make change is not held by those who have privilege. It's not for them to kindly give up their privilege or come to terms with it; rather, it is our responsibility to struggle against this unjust system that creates such unearned privileges.

Only when we are able to see that the fights against white supremacy and capitalism are interconnected struggles (two sides of the same oppressive coin) is when we will finally be able to make real progress towards liberation. The gatekeepers of neoliberalism come in many forms. West was handing us a key.

Amir Khafagy is a self-described "Arab-Rican" New Yorker. He is well known as a political activist, journalist, writer, performer, and spoken word artist. Amir is currently pursuing a Master's degree in Urban Affairs at Queens College. He can be reached at amirkhafagy@gmail.com