Do Recent Escalations with Iran Stress the Urgency of a Sanders Presidency?

By Jonas Ecke

The recent US assassination of Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s top military commander, was a reminder, if any was needed, of the dangers of US militarism. It also raises the question: Who, in the US, could offer a realistic alternative to this country’s ingrained militaristic path-dependency?

At first sight, Bernie Sanders seems to be the ideal candidate. Whenever Sanders talks international politics on the Democratic primary campaign trail, he urges the US to take on a global role not based on militarism, but on multilateral efforts to address challenges that transcend nation-states, for example persistent extreme poverty and impending planetary extinction.

Of course, we know that speeches on war and peace held by politicians who do not command much political or military might should be taken with more than a grain of salt. This caveat is certainly true for politicians from the Democratic Party, who are more willing to provide rhetorical support for global human rights initiatives, peaceful conflict resolutions, and multilateralism compared to their Republican peers, yet seem unwilling or unable to deliver on these values once in office.

Let us consider the last three Democratic Presidents: Before President Carter armed the Mujahidin in Afghanistan and provided arms for horrendous human rights abuses in East Timor, El Salvador, and elsewhere in the late 1970s and early 80s, candidate Carter promised a new kind of foreign policy centered on unalienable human right norms. Ushered into the White House with promises of a “peace dividend” after the conclusion of the Cold War, President Clinton would deliver weapons into the hands of abusers in Turkey, Indonesia, Columbia, and Israel. These policies were pursued even though the world had become more peaceful as a whole.

And then, of course, there was Obama: An erstwhile critic of the Iraq war and skillful orator whose speeches peaceniks could project their political dreams, President Obama would go on to support proxy fighters in Yemen, Somalia, and Syria, increase the drone strike program tenfold, and join France and other nations in toppling Gadhafi in Libya, contributing to the kind of instability that he decried on the campaign trail. In Obama’s last year in office alone, the US dropped 26,171 bombs.

In early stages of their careers, all of these politicians tried to resonate with vast segments of the US population who want a foreign policy not dictated by weapon merchants and a foreign policy elite that is disconnected from the real costs of war. Once in office, however, every one of them fell short of expectations and/or fell in line with US imperialistic endeavors.

Is there reason to believe that Sanders is any different, that he would somehow escape the dangerous ideation that Realpolitik necessitates destructive militarism, if he were given the chance to enter the Oval Office? It’s a question of high relevance as the US might enter into another war in the Middle East.

Sanders’s Track Record on Foreign Policy

Sanders’s political record and election platform, which are explicitly centered around a more peaceful US foreign policy (if this is possible), show a commitment that makes him more likely to abstain from the militarism of his Republican and Democratic predecessors. Not just his words, but his actions – from his time as a protestor of the Vietnam War via his opposition to Reagan’s brutal Nicaraguan proxy war and the 2003 Iraq invasion, to his recent senate resolution to stop US military support for Saudi Arabia’s devastating air campaign in Yemen – give hope that he would steer the path.

Sanders’s famed authenticity and passion do not only shine through when he talks about today’s frivolous levels of economic inequality, but also when it comes to foreign policy. Particularly in his debates with Hillary Clinton in 2016, Sanders delivered lessons on the long history of tragic blowbacks from interventionism and regime change for a younger generation. Referring to Henry Kissinger’s role as a mentor to Hillary Clinton in a debate in Milwaukee, Sanders stated, “I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger.” He then recounted how a military campaign and coup masterminded by Kissinger contributed to the genocide in Cambodia.

All of this is not to say that Sanders is without fault. After all, he is a career senator for an imperialistic state. As such, he has occasionally compromised on foreign policy issues in his long senate career, for example when he approved General James “Mad Dog” Mattis – who directed the bloody campaign against the Iraqi city of Fallujah – in the senate in 2017.  Sanders has also not categorically ruled out the continued use of drones, and moments of pandering to America’s war culture have broken through from time to time. Overall, though, it is safe to assert that Sanders has allowed the courage of his conviction to dictate his foreign policy choices far more often than most others.

If Sanders becomes the 46th president of the United States, his constituents would have to become more educated about foreign affairs and consistently hold him accountable. Herein lies another advantage of Sanders: He is not a politician who seeks to become a technocrat who implements reforms within circles of initiated “experts,” and without much public input. Sanders is spearheading a movement of predominantly, but not only, young US citizens, who have soberly reflected on the many failures of the post-9/11 militarism they have experienced in their lifespan and are committed to continuously engage with the political system. As Noam Chomsky points out, this quality represents an unforgivable sin among the powers that be.

Will It Matter?

Contrary to what his Democrat party detractors – who seem to believe that access to D.C. think tanks, halls of power, and universities equals foreign policy expertise – claim, Sanders has for the most part instinctively arrived at the right decisions on various foreign policy crises from Yemen to Nicaragua. His track record stems from his ability to avoid, in his own words, the “old Washington mindset that judges ‘seriousness’ according to the willingness to use force.” Rather than engaging in futile and immoral military adventures abroad, Sanders promises to finally adequately fund foreign aid programs. These programs only cost a fraction of what’s spent on the military, but could offer shelter, protection, and perhaps even opportunities to the millions who have been displaced by conflicts. As the “severe global funding shortages” for UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, epitomize, the displaced have been all but abandoned by an international community that cannot resolve the conflicts that cause the displacement.

If the past few months are prologue, the world will be an even more dangerous place by the time Sanders might take office. In the Middle East, global powers such as the EU, Russia, and the US, as well as regional actors such as the Gulf Council states, Iran, and Turkey, will continue their disastrous strategy of funding violent proxies, both offensive and defensive, as they have already done in Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. The whole region might be pushed to the brink by the dangerous escalations of Trump and the US “military–industrial–media complex” on Iran.

Recent history suggests that it may not matter who occupies the Oval Office, as the US war machine, its financial benefactors, and its complicit media seem to churn on out of systemic necessity. The nation’s economy has become largely dependent on the arms industry, as weapons remain one of the most exported products from the US. Thus, the only way to keep this market stimulated is by using and recycling munitions, as well as providing weaponry to foreign states. If Sanders attempts to undermine this process, there could be a heavy price to pay. However, if enough Americans back a Sanders presidency by holding its proverbial feet to the fire, a different path may begin to be carved out. At the end of the day, someone must (and will) occupy the office. The most realistic prospect for an urgently necessary de-escalation and the rebuilding of whole societies and bilateral relationships will be having Bernie Sanders at the helm.

From Stolen Land to Riches: US Neo-Colonialism in South Korea

By Riley Bove

The history behind the division of Korea into the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) and the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea) is a complicated matter that crosses many spheres. The history between the US and Korea dates back to the Joseon Dynasty when American missionaries introduced Christianity to the peninsula through mission trips and the building of orphanages. When the Japanese colonized the Korean peninsula at the turn of the 20th century, it led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, the enslavement of Korean people, as well as the violent suppression of culture, language, and national sovereignty. After World War II and the defeat of Japanese colonialism, and the liberation of Korea, the US enacted both military and governmental control in the southern half of the peninsula. The Korean War was one of many conflicts during which US imperialism acted through proxies to contest the global struggle for socialism and national liberation through the US’s “containment policy.”

The point of this article is to explore the ways in which the US has enacted imperialism and neocolonialism on the Korean Peninsula since its division in the post-WWII era and into the present day. While much attention is paid to the devastation the US caused--and continues to cause--in the DPRK, this article focuses more on the divisive and exploitative role its played in the ROK.

The history of the exploitation of the Korean peninsula dates back to the colonization of Korea by Japan in 1910. By the 20th century, the Korean peninsula had already come under the Japanese sphere of influence and under the militarized gaze of the Meiji government. By 1910, Korea was fully under Japanese colonial rule. American missionaries had already been in contact with the Korean peninsula, starting the 1880s, spreading the evangelical faith throughout and beginning the connection between Korea and the West.  Japan had set its imperialist sights on conquering the rest of the Pacific by 1940. From 1910 to 1945, Korea was subjected to a brutal 35-year-long colonization by the Japanese. For example, Korean women experienced sexual subjugation under Japanese rule. In her essay, “The Korean “Comfort Women’: Movement For Redress,” Sarah Soh Chunghee states that, “Japan began drafting Korean women in full force from around 1937 when its army invaded China and the soldiers raped and murdered tens of thousands of Chinese women in Nanjing” (1228). While occupying Korea, Japan forced women into sexual slavery and men, women, and children were murdered by the Japanese as they moved to fight the indigenous resistance  movements that emerged.

By the end of WWII, the liberation of Korea was underway as revolutionaries swept the Japanese imperialists from the peninsula. Both the Soviet Union and the US consolidated to rebuild the peninsula after the liberation movement. The Soviets helped the north establish a workers-led state and reclaim the land previously owned by landlords. There were preparations to have a “People’s Republic” in Korea that was of, by, and for Koreans. However, this never came to fruition. Anna Louise Strong, in her report for the CIA, writes that: “When the Americans landed in Korea, the Koreans had already a de facto government. A "People's Republic" had been declared a day earlier by a congress of Koreans themselves. General John R. Hodge, commander of the U. S. armed forces, dissolved this "People's Republic," and drove most of its members underground.”  Strong details how, between the liberation of Korea and the creation of the state of South Korea, a people’s democracy was already established in the south. However, the American forces overthrew the de facto government and established a US-backed puppet military dictatorship. The north established their own government without any assistance from foreign powers, while in the south, the Americans maintained their iron grip which has continued into the present day.

After the American “intervention” and toppling of the de facto “People’s Republic of Korea” government, the American imperialists  implanted a pro-US ally, Syngman Rhee, in order to govern the southern half of the peninsula. Rhee was a Western educated Korean who had anti-Japanese credentials but was fully in the pocket of Washington and Wall Street. Once Syngman Rhee was in power, he imposed his oppressive crackdown of all dissidence. In their essay, “Organizing Dissent against Authoritarianism,” Park Mi states that, “Even a moderate dissident became equated as a procommunist and pro-North Korean activity that was deemed to be prosecuted under the National Security Law” (263). The National Security Act (NSA) became the justification for repressive actions of the Rhee regime, including massacres that totaled in the hundreds of thousands. Park also details that, “Military confrontation with North Korea was used as an excuse to justify violations of human rights and the suppression of political dissidents” (263). The geopolitical landscape of a divided Korea was used by the South Korean-US government as a justification for the suppression of the people’s right to self-determination. At the same time in the United States, during the 1950s, McCarthyism reigned over the political landscape of post-war America. McCarthyism was defined as a “Second Red Scare”, a time of anti-communist setiment and political repression, in which the entire organized left was almost incapacited, with its leaders jailed or driven underground, and anyone who had any pro-communist or even pro-peace sentiments “blacklisted.” In the ROK, the Rhee regime enacted its own McCarthyism era under the NSA in order to snuff out and executed thousands of suspected communists.

After the Rhee administration was overthrown in the 1961 coup d’etat, Park Chung-hee rose to power and declared martial law under the Yushin Constitution, which allowed Park to openly violate civil liberties and assume total control of the government. Under his regime, worker unions and other types of mass organizing were suppressed and thousands of union members and organizers were brutally murdered. They faced sexual assault and rape as well as other forms of police violence. Student organizers, as well as organizations deemed to be Marxist oriented, were brutally suppressed under the Park regime.

Park was assassinated in 1979 and another pro-US dictator, Chun Doo-hwan, took power. Political and civil tension culminated in the Gwangju Massacre in 1980 in which 2,000 people, including student-led activist groups and anti-government demonstrators, were murdered by the military and governmental forces. Chun remained in power until 1988. Leading up to the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, the Chun government attempted to make the city more “presentable”. Park Mi writes that, “the Chun government introduced a ‘beautification of the environment’ bill, which was designed to eliminate slums and unregistered street vendors” (278). The Chun government had attempted to gentrify the city, leaving the poor and working class citizens in poverty and forced many into homelessness. All while this was happening, the US government, from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, actively supported and endorsed the brutal regimes. In the 1980s, the US sent a massive influx of capital to South Korea, and it was only during this time that the GDP of the South overtook that of the North.

At the end of WWII, the country had been transformed into one of the poorest countries in the world. The Korean War, which spanned from 1950 to 1953, economically devastated the entirety of the Korean peninsula. The US military and other allied forces fire-bombed and destroyed 22 of the 24 cities in the northern half. Thousands of people died in the war and hundreds of thousands of children become orphaned and displaced during and after the war. While the US fought under the flag of the UN, this was nothing more than a fig leaf for US imperialism. In one of the most infamous massacres to happen during the Korean war, a US cavalry regiment had opened fire on a crowd of South Korean refugees, murdering 150-300 of them. It would be known as the No Gun Ri massacre. Many years after, the US military attempted to whitewash the massacre and it still hasn’t been held accountable in its role of murdering civilians.

In her book, “From Orphan to Adoptee,” Soo-jin Pate critically analyzes the rise of militarized humanitarianism and the birth of transnational adoptions of Korean children after the Korean War. Pate writes that, “However, its location—its close proximity to the Soviet Union—made Korea extremely important to the United States” (24). Pate describes that even though the mountainous landscape of the Korean peninsula did not offer any crucial resources to the United States that they couldn’t get elsewhere, the close proximity to the Soviet Union made the Korean peninsula an important geopolitical area. This is true, but it is also important to acknowledge that Korea was and is targeted because the DPRK’s social and economic system remains antithetical to capitalism and imperialism.

Pate also writes about the conditions of post-war South Korea for orphans: “In addition, 100,000 children were left without homes and separated from their families so that by the end of the war, over 40,000 orphans resided in orphanages” (30). The devastation of the Korean war left children without parents and the orphanages that already existed were overfilled. Missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, along with American NGOs or non-governmental organizations, built more orphanages and provided materials for food and other necessities. Under the backdrop of the US military occupation and the Korean War, this type of humanitarianism became militarized. Pate also echoes this sentiment: “Militarism and humanitarianism became conflated through programs such as Armed Forces Assistance to Korea and Korean Civil Assistance Command, which produced what I call militarized humanitarianism” (34). Also under this backdrop of militarized humanitarianism, NGOs such as Holt International became frontrunners in the transnational adoptions of Korean orphans. With this, American families flocked to adopt children under the guise of “saving”. This type of savior complex often drove the NGOs like Holt International to be one of the most profitable companies in adoption of children. By contrast, orphans in the DPRK remained in the country, and the government provided them with excellent shelter, education, health care, and other resources. In the DPRK, war orphans were something like national heroes.

Images of “cold, hungry, and threadbare” children filling their stomachs with food donated by American and other Western countries inflated the image of the US military and others as saviors to war-torn children. A lot of these Korean orphans were exploited by public relations in the military in order to further conflate this trope. Images of children smiling and interacting with American servicemen became the poster for militarized humanitarianism. American media campaigns started to funnel money and editorials, describing the orphans as “victims of communism.”

With this mass campaign, American NGOs and other organizations donated immense resources. The influx of media attention and campaigns became the driving force of Korean adoptions. Pate describes the conditions of adoptions as follows: “The geopolitics of the Cold War and the discourse of Cold War Orientalism created a particular set of conditions that made the bodies of Korean children highly desirable” (87). She also writes that, “These children were highly desirable because they were perceived as exotic and cute and because they were perhaps the least threatening group of Asians that the United States had ever encountered” (87). Because of the anti-communist sentiment that plagued American society and Cold War politics, this made Korean children highly sought after for international adoption

 Korean children were seen as non-threatening because many of them were extremely young—infants and toddlers—so assimilation into American society would be easier than it would be with older children. Orientalism also played a part in the tropes of Korean children being more submissive towards assimilation tactics and being perceived as non-enemies. The fetishization of Korean girls had to do with similar orientalist tropes of East Asian women as docile and hyper-feminized. Pate describes the phenomenon this way: “the Oriental doll connotes femininity, exoticness, delicateness, silence, and docility, these very descriptions become assigned to the Korean female orphan” (94). This commodification of Korean women, in other words, relied on the racist, misogynistic, and imperialist view of Korean women as “doll-like”. As Pate writes, the interaction of Korean women with US military servicemen was used as a bargaining chip and to help maintain friendly relations between the US and South Korea.

Korean women and young female orphans were often forcibly recruited into sex work for the US military. These types of “camptowns” became a hotbed of sexual assault and rape. This form of exploitation towards Korean women echoes the brutal sexual violence that was forced upon Korean women by Japanese imperialists during the colonization of Korea and WWII. Soojin Pate wrote that, “the United States adopted a ‘boys will be boys’ policy toward camptown prostitution in South Korea. They were able to justify this policy by linking military prostitution to issues of national security. Citing a 1965 study on troop–community relations conducted by the Eighth U.S. Army” (58). The US military, as Pate argues, adopted a more “turning a blind eye” policy toward camptown and military prostitution. Sexual exploitation as US imperialism had evolved into the misogynistic sex industry.

Park Chung-hee had encouraged this sort of sexual exploitation as it fueled the South Korean economy. The Cold War era had turned South Korea into a neoliberal and capitalist hotspot. Even after the partial revitalization of the South Korean economy in the 1960s, political and inequitable economic woes dominated the geopolitical landscape of South Korea for decades. With the birth of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, South Korea’s economy was boosted by technological companies, such as Samsung and Hyundai, primarily trading with its neo-colonial ally, the United States. Social issues such as high rates of suicide have been a consequence of the overbearing demands of production with little to no compensation for the workers themselves. As J. Sul wrote in an article for Anti-Imperialism.org, “I cannot state all the suicidal cases here, but note well that the suicide rate in South Korea is in the top among the OECD nations” (Sul). Toward the beginning of the 2000s, anti-American sentiment began in full swing in South Korea as two events, the 2002 Yangju highway incident where two Korean schoolgirls were fatally killed by a US military vehicle and the murder of Yun Geum-i in 1992 where a bartender was murdered by a US military private. These two events brought up the question of the USFK’s (United States Forces Korea) continued presence in Korea.

These are just some of the ways that US imperialism and neocolonialism manifest on the Korean Peninsula, and why the US’s presence in South Korea is detrimental and has only led to the division and exploitation of the ROK. However, the puppet regimes had also committed violence and murder with the full support of its neo-colonial ally. The US military occupation of South Korea remains the primary obstacle to peace and reunification of our homeland.  The United States needs to end its military occupation in South Korea and dismantle all of its military bases and facilities, paying reparations to all the peoples of Korea.

“For a colonized people: the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.”

― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1960)

Riley Bove (Seungyoon Park) is a student at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and an organizer with the ANSWER Coalition in Indianapolis.

References

Fanon, Franz. Les damnés de la terre. A verba futuroruM, 2016

Soh, Chunghee Sarah. “The Korean ‘Comfort Women’: Movement for Redress.” Asian Survey, vol. 36, no. 12, 1996, pp. 1226–1240., www.jstor.org/stable/2645577.

Moon, Katharine H. S. “South Korea-U.S. Relations.” Asian Perspective, vol. 28, no. 4, 2004, pp. 39–61. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42704478.   

Pate, SooJin. From Orphan to Adoptee: US Empire and Genealogies of Korean Adoption. U of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Strong, Anna Louise. In North Korea: First Eye-Witness Report. Prism Key Press, 2011.

Sul, J. “Neoliberalism in South Korea: Financial Crisis, Fascism, and the Rise of Precarious Work.” Anti-Imperialism.org, 1 July 2015, https://anti-imperialism.org/2015/01/12/neoliberalism-in-south-korea-financial-crisis-fascism-and-the-rise-of-precarious-work/.

Mi, P. (2005). Organizing dissent against authoritarianism: The South Korean student movement in the 1980s. Korea Journal. 45. 261-288.

The Importance of Political Education and Class Analysis in the Struggle for Black Liberation

By Erica Caines

This piece was originally published at Hood Communist.

What does organizing look like when Black radicals are being pushed out of spaces for ‘progressiveness’ that makes uncontested room for the centrist, right-wing and fascist narratives driving most platforms?  When examining the conflicts between those fighting oppression under capitalism and the capitalist state’s ruling class alongside those who subscribe to “success” and riches obtained at the expense of the oppressed, few things strike me as obvious disconnects and contradictions.

I am often asked about my relationship with the analytical science of Marxism-Leninism as it pertains to my studies, teachings, and praxis because it’s somehow shocking that a Black woman would align herself with a political ideology that’s been presented as predominantly white and male. I once used these moments as opportunities to flex my knowledge on the historical relationship between socialism/ communism and Black people (particularly Black women) as if I were a fact sheet. While it is important to highlight how many of those we’ve come to know as simply “civil rights activists” were politically and ideologically aligned with socialism/communism, what does that mean? Furthermore, why is that important? 

“Knowledge is power” is a familiar mantra. The Marxist Theory of Knowledge describes knowledge, or the idea of it, as socially constructed. Karl Marx details “power” (economic, intellectual and political) as something that stems from the ownership of the means of production. Simply put, a lot of what we *know* is predicated on the interests of the ruling class. It is in this country’s best interest to keep us ignorant. 

One way we combat ignorance is through active study and dialogue. One of the more frustrating things is the way reading is discussed as a pastime of the elite. That, in itself, highlights how comfortably ahistorical we’ve all become. We discuss accessibility and ability to study —-and by extension, obtain knowledge—- in bad faith. We fail to admit to our own intellectual laziness. It also highlights a misunderstanding of how knowledge and education should be used. 

Marx’s Dialectics of Theory and Practice assumes that none of us are “all-knowing”, but the practice of becoming politically educated, both understanding theories and using them in praxis to better conditions, ultimately improve and transform our conditions. One of the more famous examples of having done this can be found by studying members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. 

The BPP implemented collective actions that not only included providing much-needed resources but, more importantly, a political education. They believed in active study and debate and with that belief, went on to educate others enough to advocate for themselves. 

When communities advocate for themselves through breakfast programs, liberation schools and providing healthcare (the more prominent examples of the BPP’s work), ‘the group’ is prioritized over the individual. These small actions that result in transforming realities (material conditions) are what the practice and principle of collectivism are rooted in.

This differs from individualism, which is dependent solely on the best interest of the individual. Black people, in mass, seem to be engulfed in a state of individualism. Many have actively disconnected from our history of collectivism (and other tenets of socialism/ communism). This is made obvious with ‘celebrity culture’, the fixation on Black Capitalism as liberation and blatant misrepresentations of our “ancestors wildest dreams”. 

The lack of implementing class analysis (recognizing the significance of class) to understand our material conditions are major factors of the collective distortion of our material realities. I am not speaking on the problematic and dangerous ways white leftists ignore “whiteness” as a class issue to generically state “race and class” and ignore their innate racial prejudices. I am speaking on how our confrontations with racism, as Black people, have disallowed us to interrogate the Black people that exist within different class statuses. 

We live in a white supremacist capitalist imperialist patriarchy so Black people are, undoubtedly, confronted with how oppressions manifest, particularly racism. Unfortunately, we do not leave room to have any introspection on how oppressions manifest through class. All Black people may experience racism, but not all Black people experience poverty. When overwhelming many experience poverty, combatting racism, solely, causes us to turn a blind eye to capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.That “blind eye” results in a failure to [not want to] understand or implement a class analysis.

The purpose of class analysis is to clarify the agendas between classes. When we discuss the class structure of capitalism in Marxist theory, the capitalist stage of production consists of two main classes: the bourgeoisie (the capitalists who own the means of production) and the proletariat ( the working class who must sell their own labor power). If we are applying class analysis to our material conditions we are acknowledging how these class groups work and function within our realities. When applying it to our communities it is evident that the [almost non-existent] middle class would much rather align with the bourgeoisie (the rich) than the working class. This presents huge contradictions. Not just in organizing, but the way that we view liberation. 

In order for the bourgeois class to thrive, there must be an oppressed working class to exploit. If there are Black people who would much rather align with the rich, what does that mean for the Black people under the thumb of economic oppression? How does that manifest when we are talking about Black political power? 

Capitalist state ruling classes resist change. They disguise their arbitrary privileges and power behind lies, dogma, half-truths, and fallacies. This is most evident through the use of celebrity-driven and identity reductionist activism that uses “socialist” rhetoric to push neoliberal agendas that don’t seek to transform realities but make them easier to digest and not disrupt the status quo. 

In a society plagued by communities of individualists, how can we approach collectivism in substantial ways? We must have a principled commitment to political education, cooperation, and concern for the welfare of each other. 

Workers Unite. 

Passing Judgement: A History of Credit Rating Agencies

By Devon Bowers

Credit rating agencies can be useful institutions as ideally they allow lenders to know the likelihood of a borrower repaying loans or if they should even be loaned to at all. In the current era, though, such agencies now have global power and can affect economies the world over, most notably with the 2007 financial crisis where bundled mortgages that were junk received AAA ratings.[1] Given that, it would be prudent to understand their history, how they operate, and the effects that they have had historically and currently, especially as a new financial crisis may be looming.[2]

Credit scores began to form somewhat in the 1800s due to the risks of borne by creditors. This led to several attempts to standardize creditworthiness. One of the most successful experiments occurred in 1841 with the formation of the Mercantile Agency, founded by Lewis Tappan. Tappan wanted to “systematize the rumors regarding debtors’ character and assets,”[3] utilizing correspondents from around the nation to acquire information, report back, and then organize and disseminate that information to paying members. Yet, this was done in response to the Panic of 1837, an economic calamity that would have wide-reaching effects not only for Tappan, but the nation as a whole.

The Bank of the United States

Before delving into the Panic of 1837, there needs to be an examination of The Bank of the United States [BUS], as it set in motion events that would create the Panic.

Alexander Hamilton was the Treasury Secretary under President Washington at the time the idea of a national bank was being floated, with a report being done on the matter in 1790. He supported the creation of a government bank on the grounds that it would allow for the US to ascend economically and therefore politically on the international stage.[4] This didn’t come out of thin air, however, there was some precedent regarding such a bank, found in the Bank of North America, established in Philadelphia in 1781.

Hamilton was primarily concerned with the fact that the Bank of North America “had made money for its investors and [had] operated under a charter granted by the Continental Congress, whose funds had made its establishment possible,”[5] yet, there were severe issues with the bank that would be a foreshadowing of the problems to come decades later, mainly regarding speculation. While the bank enjoyed support from businessmen, farmers were staunchly opposed to it as not only were they forced to deal with high interest rates on loans, which could range from 16 to as high as 96 percent annually, but there was also criticism of the bank being rather flagrant in loaning out money for land speculation.  

In Congress, debates began over the question of creating a national bank. James Madison, representing Virginia’s 15th district, argued that the entire idea was unconstitutional as he couldn’t find anywhere in the Constitution which allowed Congress to grant charters or borrow money. Strangely enough, he had previously proposed an amendment to the Article of Confederation which explicitly noted implied powers. His amendment read:

A general and implied power is vested in the United States in Congress assembled to enforce and carry into effect all the articles of the said Confederation against any of the States which shall refuse or neglect to abide by such determinations.[6] (emphasis added)

This was a rather serious about-face on the issue for Madison.

Massachusetts Congressman Fisher Ames countered those who were against the bank by echoing the findings of Hamilton’s report, “that the bank would improve commerce and industry, [insure] the government's credit, [and aid] in collecting taxes.” He “saw no purpose in the power of Congress to borrow if the agency of borrowing was not available and if the power to establish such an agency was not implied.”[7]

Opposition to the bill proved in vain and it passed Congress and was signed by President Washington, being approved for a 20-year charter, until 1811.

During its initial run, the bank’s purpose was to “make loans to the federal government and [hold] government revenue.”[8] (This was all in the context of a gold and silver-backed currency system.) When state banks were presented with notes or checks from BUS, state banks would exchange the amount noted in gold and silver, something rather unpopular due to making it more difficult for state-based banks to issue loans.

Many in the business community supported the BUS on the grounds that it kept state banks in check by preventing them from making too many loans “and helping them in bad times by not insisting on prompt redemption of notes and checks.”[9] New businesses would finance themselves by borrowing money from the BUS and when economic hardships occurred, the businesses would have some breathing room as the government didn’t demand repayment on scheduled times.

After the bank’s charter expired in 1811, the push to create another bank would be caught up with the War of 1812 and the financial circumstances that it had placed the country in.

In the first year of the War of 1812, the US saw $7 million of foreign investment leave and about a 161% increase in the amount of bank note circulation (from $28.1 to $45.5 million) due to the increase in state banks (from 88 to nearly 200).[10] The US was seeing large amounts of inflation in a war that had just begun.

Businesses were generally concerned about the amount of inflation and lack of a stable currency to the point that some began to become intimately involved with arguing for a renewal of the BUS, among them David Parish, Stephen Girard, John Jacob Astor, and Jacob Barker. There was also the politician John C. Calhoun, the Congressional Representative of South Carolina’s sixth district, who would become involved with creating a second national bank.

In addition to financiers and politicians, there was Alexander James Dallas, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and friends with Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin. Dallas had help to coordinate a meeting in April 1813 between Parish, Astor, Girard, and Gallatin which resulted in them closing out a deal in which the financiers formed a syndicate and purchased $9,111,800 of government bonds at $88 a share, which allowed the government to obtain the $16 million it needed to continue funding the war.[11] Still, many businessmen were concerned about the general economic situation of the country so heartily pushed for the creation of a second BUS.

Initially, there was a bit of stumbling about. In January 1814, Calhoun proposed a poorly received scheme in which the bank would be set up in Washington D.C. and that each state would be able to buy into it voluntarily, with the number of bond subscriptions corresponding with each state’s respective representation in the House, as a way of getting around those who saw the BUS as unconstitutional.

Seeing Calhoun’s failed attempt only made Barker push harder for the establishment of a national bank, arguing such in the National Intelligencer, a daily newspaper read by many in the nation’s capital. This pushed Astor, Parish, and Girard to discuss the situation in greater detail via correspondence and, after writing up an outline, they began to quietly disseminate it among other capitalists and urging Congressional representatives to take up the cause.

In April 1814, the Madison Administration, realizing that the impossibility of raising $25 million for the war effort, reluctantly gave in to the creation of a second BUS, with the House passing a motion with a 76 to 69 vote..[12] Shortly after this was announced, Parish and Astor corresponded with one another, with Parish noting that the time to increase the pressure on politicians was ripe.

Both men followed through, but kept their contacts quiet until they knew that the administration was all in. Parish contacted Dallas who offered his services as to defend the constitutionality of the Bank, doing so in the form of writing letters to Senators as well as  Acting Treasury Secretary William Jones, who had become such after Gallatin went to help aid in establishing a peace treaty with the British.

Dallas, in part, wrote that the constitutionality of the bank was disputed “only by a few raving printers and rival banks”[13] and that it should be established. However, within one week of the aforementioned House motion, rumors began to circulate that Britain was looking to negotiate an end to the war. This provided an opening for Madison, who only passively supported the implementation of the Bank, the opportunity to withdraw his support, as did the House promptly afterward.

In February 1813, Acting Treasury Secretary William Jones, working on behalf of the President, offered Dallas the full position of Treasury Secretary, which he declined on the basis of it being too much of a financial sacrifice to do so. The situation changed however in 1814, as with knowledge of Astor’s plan to base the new bank’s capital in real estate, Dallas contacted Secretary of War James Monroe to say that he was now interested in the position, if it were still available and in letters with Jones pushed heavily for the creation of a national bank to predict and collect revenue.

While this conversation was going on, Jones “predicted that the government would have a deficit of almost $14,000,000 by the end of 1814, declared that $5,000,000 more revenue must be provided if the war were to continue through 1815, but made no recommendation as to sources of additional revenue.”[14] This was quickly followed by his resignation. Realizing that Dallas was one of the few people who were on good terms with both his administration and the business community, Madison submitted Dallas’ name for Treasury Secretary on October 5, 1814, with Congress ratifying his nomination the following day.

Immediately after Dallas got into the position, he began to plan for the creation of a national bank that was similar to its predecessor, but with some significant differences: it would be chartered for 30 years, operate out of Philadelphia, and it’s capital would be $50 million of which $20 million would be owned by the government with the rest being up for grabs. In addition, the government would choose only 5 of the banks 15 directors, the remainder being chosen by those private individuals holding government stocks.

When presented before the House Ways and Means Committee, though, there were some minor changes made to accommodate the financial and political realities, with the proposal that the bank be charted for 20 years, $6 million of the bank’s capital being in coins, and that the bank would immediately loan the government $30 million. Dallas moved to garner support not only with the House Committee, but also talking to a special Senate committee on the matter of the bank along with Parish and Girard going to Congress to lobby in favor of it.

Strangely enough, one of the bank’s biggest opponents was Congressman John C. Calhoun, who devised his own plan that he thought would unite both sides.

The Calhoun plan called for the creation of a national bank with a capital base of $50 million, one-tenth of which was to be paid in specie and the remainder in new treasury notes. […] To satisfy the Calhoun supporters, the bank would have to pay in specie at all times, and would not be required to make loans to the government. To gain the support of the Federalists, the government was prohibited from participating in the direction of the bank, and there was to be no provision that subscriptions be made only in stock that was issued during the war.[15]

It would seem that the situation had come to an impasse, yet Dallas had a trump card: maturing Treasury bonds. He announced to Congress “that the government would have $5,526,000 due in Treasury notes on January 1, 1815, with at most $3,772,000, including unavailable bank deposits to meet them.”[16] This convinced the Senate to pass the bill, but it failed in the House due to the anti-bank elements, led by New Hampshire Congressman Daniel Webster, pushed back heartily against the bill and killed it.

On February 13, 1815, news reached Washington that the US and Britain had signed a peace treaty at Ghent, Belgium the past December. The ending of the war allowed the differences between Treasury Secretary Dallas and Congressman Calhoun to thaw as there was now not a need to try to unite everyone, but rather push forward with the bank. The two men got together and hammered out an outline and plan for the bank, which soon passed in Congress and was signed into law on April 10, 1816, with the bank being chartered for 20 years.

The Death of the Second Bank

The bank was set to expire in 1836. Yet it was when the Bank was nearing the end of its life, did a struggle occur over its renewal, led by Andrew Jackson.

In his earlier years, Jackson had a business situation involving paper currency go south, leaving him with a bad taste in his mouth. In 1795, Jackson sold 68,000 acres to a man named David Allison in hopes of establishing a trading post, taking his promissory notes as payment and then using the notes as collateral to buy supplies for the trading post. When Allison went bankrupt, Jackson was left with the debt of the supplies.[17] It would take him fifteen years to finally return to a stable financial situation.

There were also deeper reasons for his anti-bank stance than personal animosity. Jackson was among those people who thought that banking

was a means by which a relatively small number of persons enjoyed the privilege of creating money to be lent, for the money obtained by borrowers at banks was in the form of the banks' own notes. The fruits of the abuse were obvious: notes were over-issued, their redemption was evaded, they lost their value, and the innocent husbandman and mechanic who were paid in them were cheated.[18]

This mistrust of banks would put him in a direct, confrontational path with the BUS and its president, Nicholas Biddle.

Nicholas Biddle was a former Pennsylvania state legislator who became President of the BUS in 1823. Considered a good steward of the bank, he ensured that it “met its fiscal obligations to the government, provided the country with sound and uniform currency, facilitated transactions in domestic and foreign exchange, and regulated the supply of credit so as to stimulate economic growth without inflationary excess.”[19] However, he was also undemocratic as he “not only suppressed all internal dissent but insisted flatly that the Bank was not accountable to the government or the people."[20] Actions such as these simply reinforced Jackson’s disdain for the institution.

Jackson became vehemently anti-Bank in 1829 when Biddle, attempting to gain Jackson’s friendship, proposed a quid pro quo deal. The Bank would purchase the remaining national debt, thus eliminating it, something Jackson greatly wanted done and in exchange, the bank would be re-charted years earlier than expected. An early re-charting would allow for stocks to grow and thus provide a major increase in the dividends of the shareholders.[21] Instead of seeing this as an olive branch though, Jackson viewed it as the institution attempting to utilize bribery and corruption to ensure its continued existence, turning Jackson wholly against the Bank.

It was in 1832 where both these individuals would come to a head over the continued existence of a federal bank.

The National Republicans, a group that split off from the Democratic Party due to anti-Jackson sentiment, nominated a Kentucky Senator by the name of Henry Clay as their presidential candidate in 1831. Convinced that he could utilize the issue of the Bank to beat Jackson, Clay convinced Biddle to seek renewal of the Bank’s charter in 1832 rather than 1836.

Clay did have some backing as the House’ and Senate’s respective financial committees issued reports in 1830 “finding the Bank constitutional and praising its operations[.It should be noted that] Biddle himself had drafted the Senate report[and the] Bank paid to distribute the reports throughout the country.”[22] Clay supporters and allies pushed a bill through in both the House and Senate which would reauthorize the bank, but on July 10, 1832, Jackson vetoed the bill, with the Senate failing in an attempted override.

The Bank was now no more, but what of the Treasury surplus?

After the re-chartering of the Bank of the United States was successfully vetoed, Jackson decided to take the Treasury surplus and split it up among certain favored banks, ‘pet banks’ as they came to be known. However, such a term isn’t fully accurate as while funds did go primarily to banks that were friendly to the administration, “six of the first seven depositories were controlled by Jacksonian Democrats,”[23] there were also banks that whose officers were anti-Jackson that received funds such as in South Carolina and Mississippi.

This divvying up of the Treasury’s surplus funds would set the stage for the Panic of 1837.

Panic of 1837

Due to the massive cash influx, people began to set up their own banks, hoping to get a slice of the government pie. From 1829-1837, the number of banks increased by 56%, from 329 to 798. Many of these new banks were wretched, being “organized purely for speculative purposes [with] comparatively little of the capital required by law [actually being paid and] many of the loans [being] protected by collateral of fictitious or doubtful value[.]”[24]

This led to a fight between banks for deposits and meant that large amounts of money was going all over the country, with no regard for if those funds were being put in places with viable markets and stable economies, where the money could be lent out with confidence that it would be invested and repaid.

With the debt being paid off in January 1835, a surplus created due to rising cotton prices, and an increase in public land sells,[25] and newly collected tax money being sent to banks, it created a situation where these banks were effectively getting an interest free loan which they could make money off of by lending at interest.

Such lending practices would have major repercussions in the western US. Due to the Indian Removal Act of 1830, huge swaths of land were opened up to settlers to come and claim, but it was also open to speculators. These individuals would go westward and purchase large amounts of land to sell to new coming settlers at massively marked up rates. They found themselves empowered by the banks as due to the Treasury giving funds to state banks, banks loosened their lending policies, thus giving speculators the access to credit needed to buy up much of the land. So much had the west become infested by speculation that one Englishman went so far as to say “The people of the West became dealers in land, rather than its cultivators.”[26]

There also existed the problem of professional land agents who worked for capitalists in the East. These agents would go out west, charging some type of fee, whether it be a share of the transactions to take place or a flat five percent fee, and purchase land for their employers, in some cases not even physically seeing the land and basing it off of books. This land would then be rented out and in the meanwhile, further money would be made by loaning funds to frontiersmen at rates ranging from 20 to 60 percent.

This real estate bubble was heavily impacting the nation’s currency. The recognized currencies were gold and silver coin, known as specie. Seeing as how there wasn’t enough of such coinage to go around, paper money supplemented the money supply, which was technically redeemable for specie. Effectively, the US dollar was backed by gold and silver.[27] Due to the moving of money from the US Treasury to state banks which in turn loaned it to western speculators, there was a major increase in the paper money supply to the point that it there wasn’t enough specie to back it and created inflationary concerns, thus prompting the Specie Act of 1836 in an attempt to curtail the problem.

To this end, the Specie Circular of 1836 was introduced which  “required that only gold or silver be accepted from purchasers of land, except actual settlers who were permitted to use bank notes for the remainder of the year.”[28] The entire structure, which was based on paper currency and credit, came tumbling down, with land speculation halting almost immediately.

The credit collapse caused a run on the banks as the citizenry, “alarmed by the money stringency, by the numerous failures in the great commercial centers, by reports that the country was being drained of its specie by the English, and convinced by the Specie Circular that the paper money which they held would soon become worthless,”[29] led people to go to banks and redeem their paper money for specie. Due to so many people wanting specie, banks didn’t have enough to meet demand and suspended all such payments.

All of this caused the Panic of 1837 to come about which shattered credit markets as the nation fell into a painful recession, primarily due to the aforementioned lending policies where literally anyone could get a line of credit given to them.

It was in the aftermath that led to the creation of some of the first credit reporting agencies.

Credit Reporting

Early 19th merchants relied mainly on personal ties to decide with whom to conduct business as many of them would travel from the west and south to eastern coastal cities and purchase goods from the same people again and again. As trade and the economy increased, merchants began to want to give lines of credit to people they didn’t know and in order to get some information on the creditworthiness of these individuals, they “would turn to traveling salesmen to appraise those asking for loans, however, this proved to be a problem as the salesmen, wanting to increase his sales, would paint bad creditors as good, thus allowing for loans to be given.”[30] This led some businesses to, in searching for less biased reports, seek out information from agents whose only job was credit reporting. Baring Brothers was the first to do this in 1829 and were followed by another international banking house, Brown Brothers, both of whom developed systematic credit reports.[31]

The first person to start up an agency where the only objective was credit reporting was Lewis Tappan, “an evangelical Christian and noted abolitionist who ran a silk wholesaling business in New York City with his brother Arthur.”[32] Coming out of the Panic of 1837 almost bankrupt, Tappan decided to launch the Mercantile Agency in 1841 in order to create a national system of credit checking, which utilized both residents and credit agents to judge a person or company’s creditworthiness.

Tappan began the work of his agency by sending a circular to lawyers and others in faraway locations, inviting them to become his correspondents with the hope of  ”[securing] sufficient data regarding the standing of traders in other cities, towns, country hamlets, and trading posts to enable New York City wholesalers to determine what amount of credit, if any, could safely be accorded."[33]

There were credit problems for New York wholesalers. They would generally give a line of credit to local distributors to distribute their product(s) in a given area. Rather than asking for cash payment for the goods, wholesalers gave distributors a discount price and the wholesaler would be reimbursed with the money made from the difference of the discounted and regular pricing, which included an interest rate and covered the wholesaler for risk.

In order to get the risk correct, wholesalers relied on agents reports to their employers about the financial trustworthiness of local borrowers, but they could be deceived as the agent could be falsify information regarding the employer or both the agent and shop could conspire against the creditor.

Tappan’s Mercantile Agency gave a slight fix to these problems in the form of being a de facto surveillance system on borrowers by being an independent source of information from which creditors could gauge the reliability of borrowers. Correspondents would send bi-annual reports to the Tappan’s New York office in early August and February, ahead of the spring and fall trading seasons, which were then copied into large ledgers. Those who subscribed to the ledgers would call the Mercantile Agency’s office to inquire of a current or potential recipient, where the clerk would read the report aloud.[34]

While this helped, there were major weaknesses in the system as the “correspondents [many of them part-time] relied on their general, personal knowledge of businessmen and conditions in the town or area of their responsibility,”[35] which was subject to being influenced by gossip and rumor. During the 1860s changes were made which increased professionalism by bringing on paid, full-time reporters and by the 1870s most major cities had full-time reporters. Methods also changed and was based on direct interviews and financial statements that were signed by borrowers, the latter improving greatly in the 1880s after the courts ruled that such individuals could be charged with fraud if they knowingly provided false information to credit reporters.

The industry would evolve with the ushering in of the 20th century, which would see the origins of the current three major ratings agencies: Moody’s, Standard and Poor’s, and Fitch Group.

Notes

[1] Matt Krantz, “2008 crisis still hangs over credit-rating firms,” USA Today, September 13, 2013 (https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/09/13/credit-rating-agencies-2008-financial-crisis-lehman/2759025/)

[2] Larry Elliot, “World economy is sleepwalking into a new financial crisis, warns Mervyn King,” The Guardian, October 20, 2019 (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/oct/20/world-sleepwalking-to-another-financial-crisis-says-mervyn-king)

[3] Sean Trainor, “The Long, Twisted History of Your Credit Score,” Time, July 22, 2015 (https://time.com/3961676/history-credit-scores/)

[4] H. Wayne Morgan, “The Origins and Establishment of the First Bank of the United States,” The Business History Review 30:4 (December 1956), pg 479

[5] Ibid, pg 476

[6] Sheldon Richman, TGIF: James Madison: Father of the Implied-Powers Doctrine, https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/tgif-james-madison-father-of-the-implied-powers-doctrine/ (July 26, 2013)

[7] Morgan, pg 485

[8] Jean Caldwell, Tawni Hunt Ferrarini, Mark C. Schug, Focus: Understanding Economics in U.S. History (New York, New York: National Council on Economic Education, 2006), pg 187

[9] Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, A History of Central Banking in the United States, https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about/more-about-the-fed/history-of-the-fed/history-of-central-banking

[10] Raymond Walters Jr., “The Origins of the Second Bank of the United States,” Journal of Political Economy 53:2 (June 1945), pg 117

[11] Walters Jr., pg 118

[12] Walters Jr., pg 119

[13] Ibid

[14] Walters Jr., pg 122

[15] Edward S. Kaplan, The Bank of the United States and the American Economy (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999) pg 50

[16] Walters Jr., pgs 125-126

[17] The Leherman Institute, Andrew Jackson, Banks, and the Panic of 1837, https://lehrmaninstitute.org/history/Andrew-Jackson-1837.html

[18] Bray Hammond, “Jackson, Biddle, and the Bank of the United States,” The Journal of Economic History 7:1 (May 1947), pgs 5-6

[19] https://lehrmaninstitute.org/history/Andrew-Jackson-1837.html

[20] Ibid

[21] Daniel Feller, “King Andrew and the Bank,” Humanities 29:1 (January/February 2008), pg 30

[22] John Yoo, “Andrew Jackson and Presidential Power,” Charleston Law Review 2 (2007), pg 545

[23] Harry N. Scheiber, “The Pet Banks in Jacksonian Politics and Finance, 1833–1841,” The Journal of Economic History 23:2 (June 1963), pg 197

[24] Vincent Michael Conway, The Panic of 1837, Loyola University, https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1469&context=luc_theses (February 1939), pg 21

[25] https://lehrmaninstitute.org/history/Andrew-Jackson-1837.html

[26] Paul Wallace Gates, “The Role of the Land Speculator in Western Development,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 6:3 (July 1942), pg 316

[27] Robert Samuelson, “Andrew Jackson Hated Paper Money As Is,” RealClearMarkets, April 27, 2016 (https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2016/04/27/andrew_jackson_hated_paper_money_as_is_102137.html)

[28] Gates, pg 324

[29]Conway), pg 22

[30] James H. Madison, “The Evolution of Commercial Credit Reporting Agencies in Nineteenth-Century America,” Business History Review 48:2 (Summer 1974), pg 165

[31] Madison, pg 166

[32] Josh Lauer, “From Rumor to Written Record: Credit Reporting and the Invention of Financial Identity in Nineteenth-Century America,” Technology and Culture 49:2 (April 2008), pg 302

[33] Lewis E. Atherton, “The Problem of Credit Rating in the Ante-Bellum South,” The Journal of Southern History 12:4 (1946), pg 540

[34] Madison, pg 167

[35] Madison, pg 171

The Miseducation of the US Left: Bernie Sanders, Social Democracy, and Left Chauvinism

By Joshua Briond

I first learned about socialism in 2015. To this day I remember exactly how it happened: I was tweeting about the prospects of the presidential election and a mutual asked me, “have you heard about Bernie Sanders?” At the time, I hadn’t. Shocked when she heard this, she told me that “his principles remind me a lot of yours, I think you’d like him.” Then, another mutual of mine cut in on our conversation and said the exact words: “ew, he’s a socialist.” At the time I didn’t know what the word “socialism” meant, so I decided to do some research in order not to respond ignorantly. What I found in my quick Google search was the following definition: “A political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.” Alongside that basic premise is, from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This sort of language resonated with me immediately. I couldn’t understand how anyone could possibly be against an ideological framework that empowers and centers working-class people. 

From a five-minute Google search Bernie Sanders had earned my vote. Everything I read about him just made me like him more. He was everything. Consistent. Progressive. Genuine. He even marched with the late great Martin Luther King Jr. Inspiring! At that time, Bernie seemed to represent an alternative to the bourgeois (wealthy, privileged) establishment politics that I had always resented, even when I lacked the language to sufficiently articulate my distaste for it. After this point, I became fascinated with the tendencies and ideology of socialism, but also angered by the fact I had only just learned of it. Why did we not learn this in school? I continued reading and studying—specifically from Black and brown revolutionaries and theorists—and as a result, became more radicalized. My reading pushed me to the point where I found myself imagining a world and movement beyond the coercive nature of Western electoral politics and the stifling ideology of the ‘lesser of two evils.’ Such an ideology, that is so historically prevalent in the United States, in which we’ve seen in the past century or two have not achieved many, if any, gains for marginalized people. It was during this intensive period of reading and study that I began to connect the dots to what we’re seeing happening in our modern socio-political moment to historical events of the past.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but rather individuals and classes repeat history. Especially when subjects (disguised as “citizens”) of historical violence are ignorant of historical precedents, wilfully or unknowingly, which take the form of tactics cyclically used by our subjectors. I believe we’re in one of those moments where everything we’re seeing has quite literally happened before, and if we’re not careful—if we’re not meticulous and militant in our approach to addressing our material actualities, we will be bamboozled into accepting less than not only what we deserve, but less than what we NEED for survival; and all in the name of short term “progress.”

The socio-political moment we find ourselves in reminds me a lot of what I have studied about the Great Depression of the 1930s and its aftermath in which the rejection of capitalism had become increasingly common, socially acceptable, and a threat to the American social, political, and economic order. Much like the 1930s, capitalism’s contradictions and racialized violence have once again become too blatant to disguise. During that era, membership in socialist and communist parties in the US soared; however, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (commonly known as FDR) appeals to the left barred attempts at achieving a sustainable third party or revolutionary left-wing ideological movement. FDR was incredibly skilled at (mis)appropriating radical language in order to deliberately co-opt the rhetoric and demands of radical left-wing oppositional organizations, parties, and individuals who fought for greater freedom and self-determination of working peoples.

Similar to what occurred with FDR and the New Deal coalition during the 1930s, the likes of Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are attempting to inaugurate a renewed movement of “progressive” Democrats. While this is championed by many as something worthy of celebration—as “progress,” what we are seeing in real time is the liberalization and hollowing out of terms like “abolition,” “resistance,” and “revolution,” amongst others. What this amounts to is a deliberate means of (mis)appropriating and ultimately watering down radical language and movements. Sanders et al, have mastered this sleight of hand in a way not seen in decades. Lamentably, this has successfully fooled many Americans into thinking he, and others, are in fact, radicals and/or socialists.

“Progressive” politicians wield words, slogans, and even ideologies, widely associated with the radical tradition—especially the Black radical tradition, when in actuality all they want is what has already been achieved by most wealthy “developed” countries; a gentleman's reformation of the inherently oppressive institutions that they claim to be against. Given that, exactly how radical can what they are proposing be?

Millions of Americans prefer social democracy, but of course, this really just means welfare state policies to improve material conditions, such as: universal healthcare, cheap and/or free education, etc—without much of an understanding of where the money will come from to fund these domestic advances, beyond simply through “taxes.” Sanders often draws comparisons between the type of political economy he and many of his supporters want with Nordic countries. But rarely is it mentioned that Bernie’s beloved Nordic countries, that he seeks to mimic, not only have a wide ranging Nazi movements on the rise, eerily similar to the US, but their ostensibly nice mix of capitalism and socialism, as its commonly and erroneously described, is becoming increasingly more traditionally capitalist, by the hour; as well as the fact that this welfare state model is sustained through colonial legacies and imperialist endeavours of oppressing, destabilizing, pillaging, and bombing people in oppressed, third-world, and global-south countries. Why are all the nations that Bernie Sanders seeks to imitate in the US majority white and imperialist when there are nations, such as Cuba and China, who’ve statistically achieved equal, and even greater material gains—especially for their most marginalized populations—without the pillaging of non-white countries?

Social democracy and western conception(s) of democratic socialism, like all forms of liberalism, seek to preserve capitalism under the guise of “lessening” or “reforming” its structural violences, are truly just materializations of anti-communism, with a perpetuation of cold-war tactics in which the task is to further prevent radical upheaval from subjects of colonial, imperialist, and capitalist rule. 

Even the new wing of Democratic Party progressives’ advocation of the Green New Deal legislation that aims to “address climate change” was stolen from the Green Party and stripped of its anti-imperialist and anti-militarization elements. It also still seeks to prioritize profit and markets—despite the ecological demand for radical change pending human induced climate extinction—in typical white supremacist, capitalist, and imperialist Democrat Party fashion—which more than anything should tell us all we need to know about the modern green movements in the West, those of which do not prioritized the eradication of capitalism, neo-colonialism, and imperialism. All western economies are sustained through immense financial and technological surplus amassed through serial racialized exploitation, as evidenced by the most recent military coup d’état in socialist Bolivia, ousting the socialist administration, disguised as being “pro-democracy”—which is really just a materialization of modern colonialism and further indigenous genocide. It’s no secret that Bolivia’s lithium reserves, a chemical element that’ll be used to propel the United States’  “green capitalism” pipe dreams and idealizations, and President Evo Morales’ intention to industrialize and nationalize this valuable commodity, led to his unjust militaristic political demise at the hands of the US—which Bernie, amongst other “progressive” democrats only rhetorically and seemingly reluctantly condemned. 

Though he was violently anti-Semitic and ideologically fascistic in multiple ways, FDR is almost universally recognized as the United States’ most left-wing president; which says more of the inherently right-wing nature of the American political stratosphere, historically and presently, than any political ideology FDR aligned himself with. Bernie Sanders, to me, is the modern Franklin D. Roosevelt, or at least they represent the same thing, historically, in the face of capitalist contradictions being on full display. Though far better on race than FDR, Bernie’s continued failures on the issues of race and foreign policy/imperialism cannot be denied or ignored. Whether if it’s in regard to addressing Black people and the question of reparations, being an unapologetic liberal Zionist, or calling democratically-elected indigenous socialist leader(s) and governments, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and Nicolás Maduro, “dictator(ships)” and “authoritarian,” both of which are heavily racialized terms with imperialist connotations and are only ever used to describe non-white countries and leaders who do not subscribe to Western notions of “democracy” or bow down to the demands of the West. It’s no secret that Bernie Sanders, or any “liberal” or “progressive” politician, wouldn’t dare call the United States of America a “dictator(ship)” and/or “authoritarian,” despite it being one. So how does the US manage to maintain its legitimacy as a “democracy” and “beacon of hope and freedom,” when it terrorizes, imprisons, and kills its political dissidents—both domestically and abroad—incarcerates more people than entire countries combined, and is by far the greatest violator of human rights the world has ever seen?

It’s very easy to be ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ on most domestic social issues, as the modern progressive movement has shown. Where a person starts exposing their self and their true ideologies is when they express how they truly feel about non-western and non-white leaders and countries who’ve been deemed ‘enemy’ states by the US ruling class, as a means of warmongering. This has been demonstrated clearly by Bernie Sanders, Ilhan Omar, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who’ve directly contributed to the demonization of non-white and non-western countries under imperialist attack, as a means of separating themselves from the Other, as well as these countries’ conceptions and materializations of socialism (authentic economic democracy)—as well as pledging their loyalty to the American hegemony. The level of western chauvinism that has remained unchecked, as a result of Sanders’ rise and role in the miseducation of the left, clearly displays the reality in which democratic socialism—which is largely misunderstood in the west as an extension of social democracy and “welfare statism.” The miseducation of the left has, by no mistake, led to a “left-wing” movement that is motivated and intrigued by the prospects of maintaining the settler-colonial and imperialist project that is the United States and its colonies, while granting its citizens healthcare, education, and greenifying consumption, with its blood dollars that are attained off the backs of colonized and oppressed people in the global South. 

One of the more common materializations of left-wing chauvinism is when it comes to issues of war and imperialism. Bernie Sanders and his supporters, as a result of his mass influence, take the form of their reinforcing imperialist narratives regarding oppressed countries and leaders, under the guise of “nuance.” However, this materializes as inaction and complacency from those in the imperial core in the face of imperialist, settler-colonial, and capitalist violence—which ultimately leads to an acceptance of western intervention in oppressed countries. And then, for the sake of maintaining legitimacy as self-proclaimed “radicals” and/or “leftists,” left-wing chauvinists argue, contradictorily, that in spite of their ideological alignment to these imperialist narratives—used to justify the racialized terrorizing and destabilization of these countries—intervention should somehow still be opposed. We’ve witnessed this in regard to the dominant rhetoric surrounding the DPRK and Kim Jong Un, China and the CPC/Xi Jinping, Syria and Bashar al-Assad, Venezuela and Presidents Chavez and Maduro, or more recently, Bolivia and President Morales, etc. 

It is interesting that Sanders supporters are capable of recognizing mainstream media’s biases and contemptuousness toward Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Ilhan Omar, and other new “left-wing” and “progressive” Democrats—which is fueled by Cold War and McCarthyist tactics and hysteria—even though, ideologically, they are not actual socialists. But will look to and reference these same mainstream media outlets for their information on non-white, non-western leaders and countries—countries who actually have socialist leaders, governments, and economies and/or are subject to US imperialist aggression. The connection and contradiction that should easily be recognized is this: if the US media is going this far to delegitimize politicians, who are at best liberal reformists and/or social democrats and basically of the same fundamental political alignment as the US ruling class, imagine how far it will go to demonize and delegitimize actual socialist leaders and countries who represent a legitimate threat to global capitalism, western imperialism and hegemony.

What has become increasingly evident to me over the last few years, specifically, is how much Bernie Sanders’ rise and the modern popularity of social democracy masking itself as [democratic] socialism—though effective in moving millions of people away from centrism and establishment politics and rule—has created a moment of opportunism, careerism, and political punditry masking itself as radical organizing and activism. A moment whose primary role is not just funnelling people back into the arms of the Democratic Party; but also miseducating the masses regarding what socialism actually entails, beyond welfare-state policies and electoralism. There’s been so much talk about the “mainstreaming of socialism” while the whitewashing and watering down of the ideals inherent within a socialist politic remains deliberate as a means of delegitimizing and co-opting the actualities of what building socialism would actually entail. Socialism is not something that can be implemented through policy or mixed in with capitalism. Bernie knows this—especially in countries where every four to eight years another regressive and backward Republican or Democrat will arise and strip away all the “gains” and reforms, as per usual. That route will always fail because the two theoretical frameworks and ideologies of socialism + capitalism/imperialism are in direct and intrinsic contradiction with one another, as we are seeing within Northern Europe. 

I have pondered on the question—especially considering the outcome of the 2016 election, in which Clinton’s emails were leaked and it was proven the DNC and Hillary Clinton collaborated on the rigging of the election against him—“why won’t Sanders just run as an independent?” But I’ve come to the realization that it's because he’s not an independent. He’s a Democrat, and he’s very much interested in maintaining the interests of the imperialist and capitalist Democratic Party—regardless of how violent they continue to be—but also, maintaining the Democratic Party’s (and the two-party system’s) illegitimate and unjust rule. FDR, too, wanted to transfer the Democratic Party into an ideologically progressive party and sought the help of socialist and communist parties—much like Sanders has done with organizations like DSA. They recognized that radical organizations and individuals needed to feel a part of his political entourage in order to preserve the interests of American capitalism through the Democratic Party. 

FDR succeeded in his role of delegitimizing and co-opting the revolutionary left-wing movement of his time, during arguably the most quintessential and crucial socio-political moment since World War I.  The result of this co-optation: Communist Parties saw a drastic decline in support during the 1940 elections. And after getting elected, FDR explicitly ignored the struggles and concerns from the groups and constituencies that were instrumental in getting him [re]elected, and instead collaborated with the conservative wing of the capitalist ruling class. Consequently, the US emerged from the Great Depression as the most anti-socialist and criminally capitalist country in the world.

Undeniably, Bernie Sanders has been targeted with red-scare tactics by elements of the US ruling class and its media. In 2019, we’re still seeing these same tactics being used against him—with the liberal, ruling-class media as the culprit—that were used in the 2016 election. Democrats are going to do everything in their power to prevent even the slightest glimpse of “progressivism” in their party, even if it means sliding further into fascism—which is an indictment of the mediocrity and ineptitude of their party leadership, as the self-proclaimed party of the people. FDR noticed in the 1930s the best route to preserving capitalism is providing citizens in the imperialist core (US) with crumbs of loot gained through colonial and capitalist exploitation and rule throughout the world, as a means of keeping them complicit in their subjugation—making their material conditions comfortable enough to prevent social upheaval, or in other words: revolution.

Regardless of who you’re voting for in the 2020 presidential election, your vote will inevitably be casted for the next global terrorist-in-chief. The next president—whether domestically “progressive” or not—like all presidents, both past and present, is going to cast racialized terror on oppressed and colonized people everywhere. But my goal here isn’t to discourage individuals from voting. I’m simply uninterested in that. My job is to provide the facts and highlight the historical precedence as it relates to the critical socio-political moment we find ourselves in. The progressives, often white, who peddle harmfully held sentiments such as “we just need to elect Bernie, because he’s the best we’ve got and revolution isn’t possible right now” are no different than the white moderates who told us to “wait our turn” in the 1960s – those who Martin Luther King, Jr. and James Baldwin warned us about. 

Much like FDR, whether deliberately or not, Bernie Sanders’ movement, or “political revolution,” as he describes it, is here to preserve capitalism and imperialism, by any means necessary.

The Ballot and the Bullet: Building Socialism in ‘America’s Backyard’

By Matthew Dolezal

When faced with momentous external challenges — be they Spanish colonialism, American imperialism, or devastating hurricanes — the Cuban people have consistently risen to the occasion. In response to ongoing internal challenges, the popular new Cuban constitution (which took effect in April) entrenches the solid Marxist-Leninist foundation of the island’s socialist state while updating the 1976 constitution to better reflect the modern post-Cold War period.

Under the new constitution, each presidential term is five years, with a limit of two consecutive terms in office for those who serve. In addition, the role of Head of State is divided between the president and the newly established office of prime minister.

Other new rights and policies include the presumption of innocence in criminal cases, the right to legal counsel, and the (heavily regulated) use of private property and foreign investment to stimulate the economy (particularly to offset the revenue lost as a result of the continued U.S. blockade).

Despite the many exciting modernizations articulated by this fresh new document, much remains the same. Cuba’s Communist Party is still in only political party legally allowed to operate, and the state continues to control the land and means of production. The news media cannot be privatized, and, according to the new Magna Carta, Cuba will never return to the exploitative, pre-revolutionary capitalist system.

Bourgeois historians and pundits often glibly frame successful socialist governments as “authoritarian.” But from a materialist perspective, the vanguard party serves to protect the achievements of the proletarian revolution — including universal healthcare, education, housing, subsidized food, and land reform — from reactionary and imperialist threats (such as the CIA-backed coup Ernesto “Che” Guevara witnessed in Guatemala prior to the Cuban Revolution). In addition to the Communist Party’s general success, apologists for Western capitalism now have to grapple with the fact that significant democratic processes are occurring within Cuba’s one-party system.

The process to draft a new constitution began in August of 2018 and included the input of millions of Cuban citizens. Assemblies throughout the island were established, and thousands of “standard proposals” were debated for three months. In all, the old constitution faced 760 modifications. The proposed constitution was then featured in a referendum that took place on February 24, 2019. With massive voter turnout, the new constitution was easily passed when more than 85% voted “yes.”

Based on the long-standing solidarity between Cuba and its Latin American ally Venezuela, this recent constitutional process undertaken by the Caribbean nation may have been inspired by Venezuela’s ongoing Bolivarian Revolution. After the 1998 election of the popular Venezuelan revolutionary Hugo Chávez, the formerly discarded masses were not only lifted out of poverty, but politically empowered through a nation-wide upsurge in grassroots democracy.

As historian Greg Grandin wrote in 2013,

“Chávez’s social base was diverse and heterodox, what social scientists in the 1990s began to celebrate as ‘new social movements,’ distinct from established trade unions and peasant organizations vertically linked to — and subordinated to — political parties or populist leaders: neighborhood councils; urban and rural homesteaders, feminists, gay and lesbian rights organizations, economic justice activists, environmental coalitions; breakaway unions and the like. It’s these organizations, in Venezuela and elsewhere throughout the region, that have over the last few decades done heroic work in democratizing society, in giving citizens venues to survive the extremes of neoliberalism and to fight against further depredations, turning Latin America into one of the last global bastion of the Enlightenment left.”

Shortly after Chávez was inaugurated, Venezuelan citizens voted to replace their 1961 constitution with a new document that “expanded the rights of all Venezuelans, formally recognized the rights and privileges of historically marginalized groups, reorganized government institutions and powers, and highlighted the government’s responsibility in working towards participatory democracy and social justice.” This Bolivarian constitution includes mechanisms by which the document can be revised by the people through nation-wide participatory democracy. In 2007, for example, a series of constitutional reforms were debated for 47 days at more than 9,000 public events before a referendum finally took place.

At the height of the American civil rights movement, charismatic black liberation leader Malcolm X issued a powerful ultimatum — “the ballot or the bullet” — in his famous 1964 speech. The metaphor of the proverbial “ballot” and “bullet” can be useful in recognizing both the political and the physical dimensions of socialist struggle. A historical example of these two seemingly disparate themes merging was the short-lived alliance between Chile (“the ballot”) and Cuba (“the bullet”) in the early 1970s, iconically symbolized when revolutionary leader Fidel Castro gifted a personalized AK-47 to democratically-elected socialist president Salvador Allende.

But movements do not have to choose between these two options exclusively. Broadly speaking, Venezuela’s revolution emerged through the ballot box and was later protected through armed defense, whereas Cuba’s revolution was itself an armed struggle that would later evolve through ballot initiatives and grassroots democracy.

The ongoing Cuban and Venezuelan revolutions are impressive enough by themselves, but the material conditions they arose from and the hardships they have endured make them utterly awe-inspiring. Unfortunately, socialism doesn’t develop in a vacuum. It doesn’t grow in a petri dish. Building international socialism brings with it the baggage of constant imperialist assaults aimed at exploiting labor and extracting resources on behalf of global capital.

Now a spectre is haunting Washington — the spectre of the Monroe Doctrine. In its belligerent re-imagining of the 19th century foreign policy staple, the Trump administration has demonized and attacked the sovereignty of both Cuba and Venezuela. In conjunction with a new round of economic sanctions against the so-called “troika of tyranny”, former National Security Advisor and Bush-era war criminal John Bolton claimed last April that the “Monroe Doctrine is alive and well.”

Bolton also announced that the U.S. would reintroduce the Helms-Burton Act — a 1996 law that allows American citizens to file claims related to properties that were nationalized after the Cuban Revolution. However, as Dr. Arturo Lopez-Levy opined, “It is not the United States government’s responsibility or place to force the […] Cuban government to prioritize compensating Cuban right-wing exiles over demands for other reparations, such as for slavery or any of the many other abuses committed in Cuban history before or after 1959.” Furthermore, as author Saul Landau observed, “By 1991, […] the Castro government had settled claims with most of the nations whose properties it had confiscated and offered terms to U.S. companies as well.”

In addition, the Trump administration began restricting U.S. travel to the island in June and revived the half-century-long economic blockade that was briefly loosened under the Obama administration. These Cold War-inspired policies are certainly draconian, but it seems the American regime’s primary target is Cuba’s oil-rich ally across the Caribbean Sea. As John Bolton himself admitted, “It will make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in Venezuela.”

After winning the Venezuelan presidential election in May of 2018, Nicolás Maduro was sworn in on January 10, 2019 to begin his second term in office. Then, on January 22, Juan Guaidó — a man whom 81% of Venezuelans had never heard of — suddenly declared himself “interim president.” Although Guaidó did not run in any presidential election, American politicians and pundits quickly praised this brazen U.S.-backed coup attempt, some even insisting “this is our backyard!” Washington’s latest regime-change effort in the Bolivarian Republic has thus far failed, but the Trump administration’s brutal economic sanctions have killed an estimated 40,000 Venezuelans in just one year.

Despite this rampant imperialism, there have been notable solidarity efforts — both between Cuba and Venezuela as well as internationally. However, in its overall capacity for both relevant material analysis and tangible solidarity, the American Left has gone astray. Steve Stiffler contends that the U.S. Left’s failure to properly frame Chavismo allowed right-wing propaganda to gain control of the narrative. This defeat in the realm of discourse led not only to the empowerment of far-right forces on the ground in Venezuela, but to a diminishment of the socialist support from within the empire that was once reliable.

An indispensable historical model we should look to for guidance is the Venceremos Brigade. In 1969, a group of young American radicals volunteered their manual labor to assist with Cuba’s sugar harvest in the wake of the crippling U.S. embargo. This primary delegation to the island included 216 brigadistas who helped cut sugar cane for six weeks. Since then, the Venceremos (“we shall overcome”) Brigade spearheaded solidarity efforts between Americans and Cubans, bringing in more than 10,000 people to engage in agricultural work, construction, and other projects. Former brigadista Diana Block recently recounted, “I had traveled to Cuba with the Venceremos Brigade in 1977. At that time many radical U.S. political organizations looked to Cuba, and other global anti-colonial struggles, for inspiration and direction. Following Cuba’s lead, international solidarity was recognized as a key organizing principle.”

During my brief trip to Havana last summer I toured Museo de la Revolución, which was still a work in progress. A sizable mural of Fidel speaking to a crowd rested against a banister as workers on scaffolds renovated the neighboring room. After examining the intriguing exhibits, I browsed the items in the gift shop and came across a concise booklet entitled Notes on Che Guevara’s Ideas on Pedagogy by Linda Martí, Ph.D. In it, Martí emphasized the role of a humanistic philosophy in socialist society:

“Is humanism present in every daily decision made by every citizen of our country? Is this concept of a humanist conscience the basis of every analysis made of services, production, or education? Collectivism, as a new personality trait and an expression of humanism in interpersonal relations, was the object of study, inquiry, and experimentation of Che’s theory and praxis.”

Humanism — in an internationalist sense — can motivate the more privileged Western leftists among us to stand in solidarity with independent socialist projects of the Global South and denounce the neo-colonialist tendencies of the ruling classes. Our struggle, after all, is global. Whether utilizing the ballot, the bullet, or both, we should work toward the liberation of all people and consign Eurocentric rubbish like the Monroe Doctrine to the dustbin of history.

The War on Poverty in Austin, Texas

By Camille Euritt

Austin, Texas recently undertook a policy change, the reversal of bans on behaviors which affected the homeless population, that has great potential for ending the costly cycle of incarcerating and disenfranchising the homeless with tickets for living in public places. Unfortunately, the individuals opposing the change focus on their aversion towards poverty rather than on any benefits for the homeless under their “decriminalization.” The recommendation of this brief if for the calculation of an exact estimate on affordable housing which would end Austin’s homeless problem, the utilization of outreach workers as first responders, and the formation of a task force in city government on ending homelessness.  

The War on Poverty in Austin, Texas

Despite the stigma of undeservingness towards the visibly homeless, no one wants the abject poverty of an unsheltered existence for themselves or loved ones. Yet, city codes on public spaces effectively criminalize the indigent for their socioeconomic status. Considering homelessness a choice is unreasonable, because homelessness results in lowered life expectancy, increases the risk of criminal victimization, and contributes to worsened symptoms of mental illness (Henwood et al., 2015). Unfortunately, the rising cost of living, stagnating wages, and the disappearance of affordable housing for low-income people all contribute to the financial instability positioning many individuals on the verge of losing their housing (Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, 2019). In addition to economic conditions, family violence, mental illness, and job loss are all evidenced as reasons for loss of permanent housing (Henry et al., 2018). The reality is that the criminalization of homelessness does not increase the welfare of men and women in need, but further disenfranchises individuals whose circumstances leave them with no choice but violating municipal law. 

Policy Landscape

The decriminalization of homelessness in Austin, Texas in 2019 made the welfare of the community members in extreme poverty more visible which is uncomfortable and fearful for many people. Concerns about homelessness’ adverse effects on business and tourism are the impetus for those opposing the reversal of the city’s ban on sitting, lying down, and camping in public (Goard, 2019). Ortiz, Dick and Rankin (2015) also posit that a fear of responsibility for the welfare of others when the obvious nature of their need is so visible undergirds the laws on public spaces and marginalized groups. Furthermore, a social innovator employed by the city of Austin noted that the backlash toward the repeal is a result of the offense many people feel when sensing homelessness as a violation of the norms on public space (D. Cullota, personal communication, October 22, 2019). Additionally, Homes Not Handcuff’s lead organizer, the advocacy group which campaigned for decriminalization, Chris Harris, spoke about how widespread public disapproval influenced policing behaviors to an even greater degree than the new policy (Goard, 2019; personal communication, October 19, 2019). Accordingly, the actions and inactions of police exacerbated the backlash against the city’s new position on homelessness. For example, Harris described how police now neglect enforcing even legitimate sanctions against the homeless like public urination and intoxication, often responding to concerned citizens to the tune of “blame it on the city council.” 

These attitudes at the local level are analogous with a statement from President Trump on homelessness in West Coast cities: “We have people living in our best highways, our best streets, our best entrances to buildings, where people in those buildings pay tremendous taxes” (Bittle, 2019). Subsequently, Texas’ governor proposed a “sweep” of homeless camps in Austin dependent upon what action the city takes in responding to complaints. Both the attitude of the elected officials and incensed locals in Austin indicate the desire for the removal of the homeless, because homelessness affronts the status quo and housed people do not consider the homeless equal members of the community.    

Political scientist Stone (2011) presents a framework on policy that contrasts the different political ideologies in conflict on any issue as fundamentally different perspectives about the means of reaching the five major goals of all policy: equitability, efficiency, public security, liberty, and welfare. One’s position is either underscored by an approach that every person’s opportunity is equal in a free market and therefore civic intervention is unnecessary for public welfare or that there are social determinants of quality of life that necessitate intentionally providing opportunities for the disenfranchised. Opponents of the city’s “No sit, lie, and camp” ban reversal have claimed that homelessness is a choice which justifies the existence of the criminalization laws, because homeless individuals had the freedom of choosing from alternatives, but preferred the transient lifestyle (D. Cullota, personal communication, October 22, 2019). Analysis of Stone’s framework on political thinking is useful in this case, because the “equal opportunity” ideology underscores this emphasis on “choice” while the recognition of systemic causes of homelessness like poverty and mental illness lend support for treating the issue as a common problem concerning all in the community.     

Policy Implementation

The Supreme Court once ruled that homeless criminalization’s first predecessor, Vagrancy Laws or prohibitions on transient behaviors during the colonial period, violated peoples’ rights to freedom from “cruel and unusual punishment,” because sanctioning a homeless person’s public existence is the same as punishing individuals for their socioeconomic status, a complex circumstance not totally in personal control. Furthermore, the justices ruled that these laws gave policing authorities too much discretion in enforcement to the point where citizens could not realistically comply thereby delimiting the right to “due process” (Ortiz, Dick, & Rankin, 2015). The modern form of Vagrancy Laws, which criminalize the homeless, have become more specific which has generally distanced regulation further from the obvious unconstitutionality of the preceding era while maintaining the same discriminatory effects. However, a recent ruling in the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the constitutional rights of homeless men and women in Western states and negated many of the criminalization ordinances in city codes influencing the policy making in Austin (D. Cullota, personal communication, October 22, 2019; Egelko & Fagan, 2018).          

Recommendation

The city should determine the exact amount of affordable housing needed to end homelessness in Austin. Studies have shown that the cost of housing is less to taxpayers than the cost of the emergency services and incarceration of the chronically homeless (Chalmers McLaughlin, 2011). Besides, definitive city action may mitigate the public’s strong feelings of outrage. Secondly, outreach workers rather than police are the first responders to all matters of the homeless. These workers will have the benefit of crisis intervention training as well as expertise in directing individuals towards services. Also, utilizing an alternative to police helps diversion from the criminal justice system. Finally, Austin should create a task force to end homelessness. Currently, there is only one position on homelessness with the city and a task force is a best practice of problem-solving in city governments (D. Cullota, personal communication, October 22, 2019). 

Conclusion

The fact of the matter is that neither visible homelessness nor displacement under criminalization is the best solution for society. Regardless of a homeless individual’s complicity in their status as a displaced person, there is a shortage of more than 800 beds in Austin’s emergency shelters which leaves this many without even the option of a nonpublic setting. Besides, ticketing the homeless creates criminal records preventing an exit from homelessness further exacerbating the issue (Herrera, 2018). Clearly, the unfortunate fate of the many visible homeless necessitates a greater tolerance as well the legal protection providing a better outcome for society’s most vulnerable. 

Recommended Resources

Bauman, T., Rosen, J., Tars, E., Foscarinis, M., & Fernandea, J. (2014). No safe place: the criminalization of homelessness in US cities. National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.

Henry, M., Mahathey, A., Morrill, T., Robinson, A., Shivji, A., & Watt, R. (2018). The 2018 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress, part 1: Point-in-time estimates of homelessness. Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Herrera, N. A. (2018). Homes not handcuffs: How Austin criminalizes homelessness. Austin, TX: Grassroots Leadership. 

Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. (2019). The state of the nation’s housing: 2019. Retrieved from https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Harvard_JCHS_State_of_the_Nations_Housing_2019.pdf

National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. (2018, July). Scoring points: How ending the criminalization of homelessness can increase HUD funding in your community. Washington, DC: Author. 

National Low Income Housing Coalition. (2019). Out of reach. Washington, DC: Author

References

Bauman, T., Rosen, J., Tars, E., Foscarinis, M., & Fernandea, J. (2014). No safe place: the criminalization of homelessness in US cities. National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.

Bittle, J. (2019, September 18). Trump’s plan to solve homelessness is horrifying. The Nation. Retrieved from http://www.thenation.com

Chalmers McLaughlin, T. (2011). Using common themes: Cost-effectiveness of permanent supported housing for people with mental illness. Research on Social Work Practice, 21(4), 404-411.

Egelko, B. & Fagan, F. (2018, September 5). Homelessness ruling: Sleeping on streets can’t be a crime when on shelters are available. Governing. Retrieved from http://www.governing.com 

Goard, A. (2019, July 1). Starting Monday, homeless people will be able to sleep on city sidewalks. KXAN. Retrieved from http://www.kxan.com

Henry, M., Mahathey, A., Morrill, T., Robinson, A., Shivji, A., & Watt, R. (2018). The 2018 Annual Homeless Assessment Report (AHAR) to Congress, part 1: Point-in-time estimates of homelessness. Washington, DC: US Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Henwood, B.F., Wenzel, S.L., Mangano, P.F., Hombs, M.,Padgett, D.K., Byrne, B., Rice, E., & Uretsky, M.C. (January 2015). The Challenge of Ending Homelessness. Grand Challenges for Social Work Initiative, Working Paper No. 9, 1-22, American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare.

Herrera, N. A. (2018). Homes not handcuffs: How Austin criminalizes homelessness. Austin, TX: Grassroots Leadership. 

Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. (2019). The state of the nation’s housing: 2019. Retrieved from https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Harvard_JCHS_State_of_the_Nations_Housing_2019.pdf

Lurie, K., Schuster, B., & Rankin, S. (2015). Discrimination at the Margins: The Intersectionality of Homelessness & Other Marginalized Groups. Available at SSRN 2602532. 

Ortiz, J., Dick, M., & Rankin, S. (2015). The Wrong Side of History: A Comparison of Modern and Historical Criminalization Laws. Available at SSRN 2602533.

Stone, D. (2011). Policy Paradox: The Art of Political Decision Making. (3rd ed.). New York: Norton.

How Quebec’s Nationalist Movement Became the Spearhead of Racist Militancy

By Andre-Philippe Dore

Once at the vanguard of social justice struggles in Québec, the nationalist tendency is now one of the strongest components of the racist right-wing in the province. It has almost completely abandoned the fight for political and economic emancipation to concentrate on cultural politics, fighting against immigration, liberty of religion and other topics also cherished by the fascist right. While some would easily condemn nationalism in itself, going back into the history of Québec's fight for independence seems necessary to understand how Québec's liberation movement transformed itself into the reactionary force it is today.

Québec's independence struggle goes back to an old tradition of anti-British revolts like the Patriotes' rebellion of 1837-1838 or pamphleteers' writings from the early 1900s. Its golden age was situated in the 60s and 70s when groups of many horizons - from conservatives to communists - led the struggle up to a referendum in 1980 - which wasn't victorious.

The large array of pro-sovereignty groups was definitely left-leaning : at the far-left was the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ), which had a complicated and utterly action-packed history. With ties to the Black Panthers, Algerian revolutionaries and Palestinian freedom fighters, the FLQ relied on guerrilla tactics - robbing banks, kidnapping government members and blowing up many symbols of British imperialism. Also in the left hemisphere was the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale which sometimes quoted Ho Chi Minh, used the term "socialist" without shame and fought side-by-side with unions against the Anglo-Canadian bourgeoisie. Less well-known were other left-wing groups like the Action socialiste pour l'indépendance du Québec, Québec's Socialist Party or Andrée Ferretti's Front de libération populaire, all influenced by Marxist writers such as Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi.

However, there where other groups that did not want to be associated with the left-wing of the movement, for example the Alliance Laurentienne - a catholic party of intellectuals - or Gilles Grégoire's Ralliement national - a populist party formed by proponents of the social credit theory and dissidents of the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale who did not want to be involved with a party ran by an agnostic, leftist homosexual. TheRalliement national would finally merge with the Mouvement souveraineté-association - a newly formed group with René Lévesque as its leader. Lévesque - a young rising star in left reformist politics - had just left the Liberal Party because its establishment refused to back Québec's plea for independence. He then went on to create the Parti Québécois (PQ) in 1968.

This new party would be the main vehicle for the official and electoral struggle for Québec's sovereignty. Even though Lévesque's point of view on the national question was pretty moderate as he favored the negotiation of a new deal with Canada's government instead of seceding right away - many members of the radical left joined the Parti Québécois. Formerly living in clandestinity because of its involvement with the FLQ, Pierre Vallières publicly joined the side of Lévesque's legal struggle, as Pierre Bourgault - leader of the Rassemblement pour l'indépendance nationale - already did, enjoining the 14 000 members of his party to do the same. For many intellectuals and activists, the Crise d'octobre - which saw the Canadian army invade the streets of Québec and jail almost anyone who actively supported Québec's independence- was a traumatic event, leading them to abandon radical militancy and join social-democrat struggles. Groups who advocated armed struggle for national liberation began to disappear as their members joined either anti-secession Maoist groups like En lutte! - led by the former FLQ member Charles Gagnon - or reformist parties and unions.

The PQ went from a marginal party - as he won only 7 seats during the election of 1970 - to forming the government in 1976. This electoral victory led to a referendum in 1980 which resulted in a win for the federalists since 59% of the voters chose the No option. The referendum question illustrated well the moderate turn of nationalist politics, as it was a nuanced and hesitating text. Against the left-leaning wing of the party, led by Jacques Parizeau - who had been throughout his life both sympathizer of a communist party and banker - opposed it, Lévesque and his party asked the following :

''Le Gouvernement du Québec a fait connaître sa proposition d'en arriver, avec le reste du Canada, à une nouvelle entente fondée sur le principe de l'égalité des peuples ; cette entente permettrait au Québec d'acquérir le pouvoir exclusif de faire ses lois, de percevoir ses impôts et d'établir ses relations extérieures, ce qui est la souveraineté, et, en même temps, de maintenir avec le Canada une association économique comportant l'utilisation de la même monnaie ; aucun changement de statut politique résultant de ces négociations ne sera réalisé sans l'accord de la population lors d'un autre référendum ; en conséquence, accordez-vous au Gouvernement du Québec le mandat de négocier l'entente proposée entre le Québec et le Canada ?"

Although the main voice for the nationalist camp in Québec's media was the PQ's , many initiatives were carried by other supporters of the Yes option. The referendum campaign saw the implication of members of the Communist Party of Québec, of the Combat socialiste's Trotskyists and other far-left activists. Another part of the left opposed that option however, for example the Nouveau Parti démocratique du Québec - a marginal social-democrat party who supported the unity of Canada.

After the defeat of the Yes option, René Lévesque and Claude Morin, an informant for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, proposed what they named « Beau risque ». This would lead the PQ to support the Canadian Progressive Conservative Party - who proposed a mix of free market and conservatism - since its leader Brian Mulroney promised to amend the Canadian constitution to give Québec a special status in it. Québec as a matter of fact never signed the Canadian constitution since it was forced upon the province by an agreement between all the other provinces' premiers, the Canadian premier Pierre-Elliot Trudeau, the British House of Commons and the Queen of England. Many members of the PQ - including progressive MPs like Jacques Parizeau, Camille Laurin and Louise Harel - left the party. The void created by this exodus gave the right wing of the party a more prominent role. Overtly capitalist and anti-union individuals like Lucien Bouchard came to be public figures of the nationalist struggle, leading to the creation of the Bloc Québécois which participated in federal elections as the main representative of the nationalist forces. While advocating left-leaning ideas from time to time to allure their remaining left-leaning base, the Bloc's staff was mostly composed of right-wing activists that were formerly members of the Canadian Liberal Party and the Progressive Conservative Party.

With an even more moderate Lévesque apace with the right-wing Bouchard, the nationalist side never went to propose a deal to the federal government that would satisfy Québec's population and the other provinces'. Instead, the PQ went on to rule as a candid provincial government, even importing capitalist repression tactics usually withheld as the party was said to have a « préjugé favorable envers les travailleurs » (a favorable bias toward workingmen). As 1982 began, Lévesque's government cut in social programs, tried to lower the salaries of the state employees and went at war with unions, as it voted laws to forbid certain strikes that were supported by a large part of the population. Lévesque would retire in 1985 to see Jacques Parizeau make his comeback and take his place 2 years later. The new leadership of the PQ then refocused the party around its raison d'être : to liberate Québec from the colonialist state of Canada.

Parizeau worked with his new ally, Lucien Bouchard, until the 1995 referendum, which resulted in a victory for the No option with 50,58% of the vote. Parizeau - as promised - retired after this defeat and left the gate open for Bouchard to take the leadership of the PQ. Bouchard, as he became the new Premier of Québec, shamelessly favored right-wing policies by imposing austerity measures : he took stances against unions, reduced the growth of the minimum wage and allowed his friend Paul Desmarais to concentrate even more the media outlets of the province. Nowadays, Bouchard is still a zealot of capitalism. He often accused the Quebecers of not working enough while he - since 2011 - had been a lobbyist for an oil consortium, an advisor for the highest paid physicians in the province and a negotiator for a paper company on behalf of the government (he was paid half a million for this last job).

As he went on with his plan to put Québec's independence on the back burner and concentrate on reducing the state spending by 10%, left-wing nationalists, socialists, feminists and alter-globalization militants formed groups that would later merge to create Québec solidaire - a left electoral party who supports Québec's emancipation from Canada. The PQ's change of reign in the 2000s would not rehabilitate the party for these numerous activists who disliked the politics of Lucien Bouchard just as much as those of his successor Bernard Landry - a bourgeois par excellence who became Premier in 2001. Leftists fled the party throughout the decade, while those staying in the organization claimed that other parties were only there to ruin the cause of Québec's liberation since they divided the nationalist vote.

It took up until 2012 for the PQ to be reelected with 31.95% of the popular vote. The student strike which lasted well over 100 days earlier that year permitted Pauline Marois to become Premier, as she supported the student cause and promised to cancel the tuition fees hike that caused the strike in the forst place. However, when she betrayed her electorate by indexing the tuition fees, kneeling before the mining industry and selling the Anticosti Island to a gas company, Marois' support diminished drastically. Bernard Drainville - her minister of « Democratic Institutions and Active Citizenship » - found the inspiration to wave the false flag of an Islamic menace, reminiscing the 2008 rise of the populist right-wing formation, the Action démocratique du Québec, who then almost won its election with this precise tactic. These straw man politics were to allow the PQ a gain of support from a right electorate normally voting for federalist parties while the young citizens turned toward the inclusive Québec solidaire.

Drainville proposed a « Charter of Québec Values » or, in other words, a law that regulates where and when people - especially Muslims - can wear religious symbols or pieces of clothing that cover the head (with the exception of small Christian crosses). Many supporters of this law - that never passed - would later be members of neo-fascist or anti-immigration groups like La Meute,Storm Alliance or the Fédération des Québécois de souche. Among those was also the young Alexandre Bissonnette, a right-wing supporter of Drainville who would kill 7 people at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Québec City in 2017. Despite that draft law which secured them numerous racist allies, the PQ lost 24 seats in the 2014 elections since it had lost the support of non-bureaucratic unions, students, radical nationalists, POCs, Indigenous people, ecologists and feminists. On an obvious decline, the PQ continued to try to appeal to an afraid population by using a xenophobic rhetoric carried by Jean-François Lisée - a then-communist now-chauvinist who would become leader of the PQ in 2016.

During that Charter episode, most of Québec's media (possessed mainly by two companies) went on to unofficially, but conspicuously, endorse an anti-Islam line. The student strike being over, columnists like Richard Martineau, Lise Ravary or Christian Rioux had to find another scapegoat. An already marginalized population like the Muslims was an easy target for racist groups fueled by media propaganda. Pig heads were dropped in front of mosques and hidjab-wearing women were harassed, but many media defended these hate crimes by repeatedly claiming they were only bad taste jokes. Indeed, the hate crimes against the Black and Muslim population in Québec rose from 2014 and onwards according to Statistics Canada.

Having dropped the idea of Québec's independence to prioritize its populist anti-immigration turn, the PQ lost its members to a more openly xenophobic and capitalistic formation: the Coalition avenir Québec (CAQ) - a party formed by conservatives with the ex-PQ minister François Legault as its head. In 2018, the CAQ formed a majority government and imposed Bill 21 on June 14 2019, which forbids teachers and many other state employees to wear religious symbols.

Still relying on its racist discourse, the PQ is nowadays the only opposition party that supports this law - regardless of the fact that their popularity is radically going down since they began to employ this approach. Now with only 9 seats, making it the fourth party in importance, the PQ is on his deathbed. Instead of defending nationalism by working to build the country of Québec, it has aligned with far-right groups' political narrative. For them, the State must defend the population against ethnic diversity and Islam. However, because of the many disguises the xenophobic movements have put on these discriminatory practices - invoking laicity, Québec values and other ideological euphemisms - it took years for antifascist and antiracist groups to gain some legitimacy in the struggle against discriminatory law projects.

Instead, it was mostly moderate humanist groups that fought against these laws, leaving to the radicals the fight against overtly fascist organizations like Atalante Québec. These days, however, groups from a large spectrum of the left are allying to resist against Bill 21 and the Legault government. They are less and less afraid to point out mainstream right-wingers as racists. As the years go by, it is more and more difficult for ethnic nationalists to legitimate their movement since Quebecers have been fed their « we're not racists, but… » rhetoric to a point it cannot ingest more without taking a stance toward either chauvinism or internationalism.

Québec's situation is not bright with the CAQ in power and neo-fascist groups growing influence in the streets, but now there are counter-movements organizing. On June 19, Montreal activists proclaimed the beginning of a hunger strike to protest Bill 21. In Québec City, an anti-Bill 21 coalition was formed on the initiative of muslim women, students and other feminists. Against the media-fueled xenophobia put forward by the government, a small but significative spectrum of the population is now determined to pinpoint the fact that the nationalist movement in the province is no more a progressive-looking and liberty monger set of forces, but a proper conservative anti-immigration movement.

Pacifying the Moral Economies of Poverty in an Era of Mass Supervision: An Interview with Brendan McQuade

By Nick Walrath

Dr. Brendan McQuade is an Assistant Professor of Criminology at the University of Southern Maine. His work centers on the study of police power, abolitionist politics, pacification, and the critique of security. McQuade's first book Pacifying the Homeland - Intelligence and Mass Supervision, released through UC Press, provides an in-depth look into the secretive, often poorly-understood world of intelligence fusion via a radical critique of the discourse that informs and guides the culture and ideology of security-what he terms the "prose of pacification." McQuade's overarching point is that pacification as both process and theory involves not only instances of brute force including tear gas and the bludgeon of the police baton on the one hand and softer tactics such as "negotiated management" of protest on the other, but also draws upon a specialized discourse of depoliticizing language. This terminology -including security advice such as "If you see something, say something," "Report suspicious activity," "We are all on duty," and "Be vigilant"- seeks the consent and participation of the pacified in the own subjugation as well as in the hunting of the enemies of capital. I thank Dr. McQuade for his thorough responses to my questions regarding the contemporary landscape of political policing, mass incarceration, the politics and ideology of security, and the logic that guides and informs its never-ending police-wars of accumulation.

What is the critique of security and what are the key concepts of this discourse?

The critique of security is an effort to understand and write about security without being subsumed by security. We often talk about security as if it was an unassailable good. Who doesn't want to be secure? How could anyone possible have a problem with security? But the problem isn't so much what "security" promises but how it packages that problem. If we buy into the premise of "security," then we accept the idea that the world is dangerous … that crime and terrorism are real threats. It's then a logical step to say we need some entity-the state-to protect us by providing this magical entity called "security."

When we talk about security, we often to forget to ask why people are driven to the violence we call crime or terrorism. Rather than accepting these assumptions, my goal was to examine how a particular security practices emerged and with what effects. Rather than assuming that security is good and asking how it can be more effective or more sensitive to the limits of law, I sought to examine what "threats" are being targeted and whose "security" they preserve. While security discourses rest on assumption of risk and mutual hostility (a war of one against all, waged among both individuals and nations), the critique of security invites to us consider what relations produce these conflicts and how they have been managed.

Here, I build on the work a group of scholars, the anti-security collective organized by Mark Neocleous and George Rigakos. One the key concepts we use is pacification. The basic idea here is that capitalism is an order of insecurity-"all that is solid melts to air"-that demands a politics of security. Instead of talking about security as transcendental good, we view it as an ideological claim articulated within particular types of societies, capitalist societies. To avoid the trap of security, we talk about pacification. The turbulence and conflict created by capitalism must be pacified. This isn't just the work of repressing rebellions and resistance of those on the losing end of capitalist society polarizations of wealth and power. It's more subtle work of continually reproducing capitalist social relations. In other words, the work pacification entails consent and participation as much as it connotes coercion and repression.

One the key mechanisms of pacification is policing. We usually think of policing as the police, the uniformed men that enforce law and order. However, the actual history of the police idea is something different. Policing was a pre-disciplinary discourse that united English liberals and Continental philosophers in a shared discussion about how to build strong states and wealthy societies. It was one of the most important concerns of political theory and philosophy in the early modern period, the time between the Renaissance and the French Revolution. At this time, policing meant a comprehensive science of social order that tried to cover all of life, from the minutiae of personal behavior to the loftiest affairs of state. By end of the 19th century, however, the meaning of "police" contracted to the police, the uniformed officers "enforcing the law." This narrowed meaning reflected the growing influence of liberalism, in which the individual and the market supplanted the sovereign and the state as the theoretical wellspring of social order. These philosophical shifts masked capital's reliance on the state to fabricate social relations, but it did not end the structural necessity of such work. In this context, police science gave way to criminology, public health, urban planning, and various other administrative discourses, which sought to regulate different domains of life in a manner consonant with the class biases of the old "police science." In this sense, the different genres of social policy are also and always police discourses.

Many Marxists have made similar points, though they have not connected it all back to to the deeper history of policing. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis in Schooling in Capitalist America, for example, detail what they call the "correspondence principle" where the nature of social interaction and individual rewards in public schools mirror the workplace. Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, in Regulating the Poor likewise, conclude that social welfare policy regulates the labor market. Public benefits expand during economic crisis to dampen working class militancy and contract during times of economic expansion to cheapen the cost of labor. Howard Waitzkin in The Second Sickness analyzes healthcare from the same perspective. He shows access to healthcare expands and contracts with the ebb and flow of popular unrest, creates capitalist markets through public subsidies, and depoliticizes politics of health with an individual approach to health and reductionist biomedical paradigm. In other words, your teacher is cop. Your social worker is a cop. Your doctor is a cop.

For this reason, I use the term the prose of pacification. As I mentioned earlier, pacification isn't just about physical violence. It's also about popular participation in the politics of security. This is what the prose of pacification is all about. We're constantly told every day to participate in the politics of security. It's not just ham-fisted campaigns like "if you see something, say something." It's also the buying into that idea of security. It's the culture and ideology of security: the belief that the world is dangerous and the state is here to protect us from ourselves and others. This idea totally pervades popular culture and political discourse so that it can be hard to even acknowledge it, let alone think past it. The prose of pacification is my attempt to name this aspect of the problem. There's a huge body of ideas that constitute security cultures. It's the rituals of bureaucratic compliance: the documents created to administer us from cradle to grave. It's the lyrical exaltation of security in popular culture and political discourse. It's the internalization of the politics of fear that cause many of us to greet each other with fear and distrust or lend our energies to the police wars against our official enemies: so-called criminals, terrorists, illegals, delinquent youth, and whatever else.

You studied two fusion centers for this book -New Jersey's Regional Operations Intelligence Center (ROIC) and the New York State Intelligence Center (NYSIC). How has the prose of pacification been essential in guiding their mission, but first, what exactly are fusion centers? What work do they -or do they not- perform and how have they shaped the criminal legal system including policing?

As a general concept, fusion centers are interagency intelligence hubs. Intelligence analysts at fusion centers "fuse" together disparate pieces of information in order to provide useful analysis for state managers. Much of the data comes from government records, chiefly data from the criminal legal system but also from other entities like the DMV or social service agencies. This information will be supplemented by the records of private data brokers, social media, and other forms of "open source intelligence." New technologies like automated license plate readers, and facial recognition also create new forms of data that are often accessible to or managed by fusion center staff.

Fusion center analysts will analyze and combine this data in all sorts of ways. Often times, it can be simple case support, analysts will perform basic searches for police investigators who call into the fusion center to get more information about suspect: address, criminal histories, known family members and friends. This is fusion centers as Google for cops. Sometimes, case support is more technical. With specialized software, analysts can take wiretap data-unintelligible and interminably long lists of phone calls-and turn it into a pattern of use, and, from there, a social network analysis. They can transform cumbersome masses of data, such as geospatial data drawn from police files, the census, and other public records, into useful information like "predictive" heat maps to anticipate where the next shooting is likely to occur. Sometimes analysts will work with police teams for weeks and months as part of longer term investigation. For these projects, fusion center analysts will complete multiple rounds of data analysis and may even get deeply involved in intelligence collection. I'm not just talking about trolling social media platforms or working on wiretaps either. Some fusion center personnel are involved the collection of what's called "human intelligence" or the information that's obtained by working with informants or interrogating persons of interest. This is fusion centers as an outsourced intelligence division, a little CIA or NSA on call for the cops.

At the same time, it's important not to overhype fusion centers. They bring together all this data but how it is all used? No doubt, all of it isn't used. Fusion center analysts complained to me that their police supervisors didn't make full use of their capabilities. A lot people on receiving end of fusion center products claim that a lot the intelligence produced isn't that useful. "Intelligence spam" is term that I heard from quite a few interviewees. There's also a lot of liberal hand wringing about data retention, concerns that fusion centers are holding on too much information for too long.

At the end of the day, understanding what a given fusion center is an empirical question that requires investigation. Each fusion center has their own mission, which orients their work. The term "fusion center" is associated with what's called "the National Network of Fusion Centers" recognized by DHS. There are 79 of these fusion centers. The first were set up for counterterrorism, although their mission quickly broadened out to an "all crimes, all threats, all hazards orientation." These fusion centers will do counterterrorism analysis and all hazards preparedness in addition to criminal intelligence work. There's another set of fusion centers created in the 1990s for the drug war-the 32 investigative support centers set up under the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Program. There's even older interagency intelligence centers like the DEA's El Paso Intelligence Center and the six multistate Regional Intelligence Sharing Centers administered by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, which date back to the 1970s. All of these fusion centers sit in their own little political space of interagency coordination and conflict. There's a phrase in the fusion center community: "if you've seen a fusion center, you've seen a fusion center." Each one has their own dynamics. Some might be doing very aggressive criminal intelligence work, supercharging the drug war with high tech surveillance and intelligence analysis. Others might be spamming state and local officials with counterterrorism intelligence of limited value.

How have fusion centers changed the criminal legal system? The first important point to know is that fusion centers aren't just a story about DHS and the war on terror. What we can retroactively call the institutionalization of intelligence fusion is part of much longer larger story of change in policing, the criminal legal system, and political economy. Fusion centers are part of the same general punitive turn in the criminal legal system that we associate with the war on drugs and mass incarceration. Scholars like Reuben Miller have started to talk about "mass supervision," as a complementary set of legal, policing, and administrative arrangements that developed alongside mass incarceration and manages "problem populations"-the poor, racial, religious, and sexual minorities, formerly incarcerated and otherwise criminalized people-outside of the prison. I argue that intelligence fusion is now the center of gravity of mass supervision. The varied fusion centers pull policing, community supervision, and the courts together in shared project to pacify criminalized surplus populations. Mass supervision has become more important in the recent period bookended by the Dot Com Crash of 2001 and the Great Recession of 2008. Meanwhile, mass incarceration is now viewed as too expensive. Prison populations are contracting, but we're not getting a return to any rehabilitative ethos of punishment. Instead, we get more massive supervision, a police - and surveillance - intensive form of control turns disinvested communities into open air prisons. The change is not just limited to how the state manages surplus populations.

The rise of intelligence fusion is also part of new pattern of administration. Intelligence fusion subjects police agencies to a new form of workplace discipline, the same systems of statistical management and algorithmic decision making that increasingly manage labor across sectors. Rank and file cops are now chasing numbers and trying to meet quotas. Investigators are increasingly the human link in automated networks of surveillance and data analysis. It's the era of "big data policing." Things have changed in some real and significant ways. Still, these changes are institutionally and politically mediated. We're not living in 1984 ¸ even though we now have the technical capacities to make Big Brother look quaint. To understand exactly how these changes institutionally and politically mediated, I consider the institutionalization of intelligence fusion in relation on-going processes of state formation and related shifts in political economy.

I see fusion centers as part of what the Greek Marxist Nicos Poulantzas called authoritarian statism. By this he means new type of state and practice of administration that curtails formal liberties, expands the executive, and creates special bodies that make the decisions outside of democratic channels. Fusion centers are part of this trend in the general sense that they're a product of this post-9/11 security surge that restricts the freedoms that ostensibly provide liberal democracies their legitimacy. In so doing, they also expand the powers of executive bodies like the police departments. Fusion centers are also an example of authoritarian statism in the sense that they take political power away from popular control. Fusion centers are a product of a distinct era of public policy formation, where efficiency is considered to be more important than the standardization. The key policies that shape fusion centers are not binding regulations written by legislators or agency heads. They were drafted as "recommendations" and "baseline capabilities" in large working groups of "stakeholders," including the police professional associations.

These changes in the state are, of course, grounded in wider shifts in political economy. Here, the basic argument is that globalization and financialization have decisively shifted power to global capital at the expense not just of the working class, but also at the expense of the state itself and other segments of capital. In this hyper competitive economy, where money moves quickly and everyone competes in a global economy, it's hard to have a welfare state, the type of strong state that can both protect less competitive sectors of capital and provide a good bargain with workers. Instead, the hegemonic compact shifts toward coercion and more disciplinary aspects of security take over. Under authoritarian statism, we get more prisons and cops and less "social security" measures like investments in welfare, public health, and education. Pacifying the Homeland situates the institutionalization of intelligence fusion in relation to these trends. From the 1970s to the 2000s, authoritarian statism consolidated, in large part, through the punitive turn in criminal justice that produced what we now call mass incarceration. One of my claims -the balance of police strategies to administer population has shifted away from incarceration and more toward surveillance and intelligence-led policing- I'd like to think this passing development, a morbid stage as authoritarian statism withers and dies and we build a new type of economy and society. Whether it's the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning, however, is a matter of politics.

The recourse to privacy is a common argument and familiar appeal within liberal discourse to not only ostensibly combat the ramifications of surveillance technologies' tendency to mission creep beyond their stated intent and purpose, but to reign in the way these objects and practices strengthen the edifice of authoritarian statism. However, the parameters of the private sphere have always been shifted and made malleable to the requirements of capital [as well as police]. In your book, Pacifying the Homeland, you make very clear the point that, as part of liberal ideology, privacy functions as pacification. Would you elaborate upon this critique?

Privacy is an insufficient response to concerns about surveillance and police power. Scholars of surveillance often focus narrowly on the implementation of privacy policies and their inadequacy. Civil libertarians assert privacy as a universal right that can be defend against the encroachment of outside parties. They position "the right to privacy" or "the state" as independent entities that stand apart from the social relations and political processes that, historically, created them and still imbue them with meaning.

This way of thinking turns historically specific social relations and the ideas that animate them into abstract "things." "Privacy" is not a natural condition that is always and already in opposition to "the public." Instead, "privacy" is a particular claim made within a particular context: 16th century liberal theory. A concession that the consolidating administrative state made to "the public," privacy has no essential essence. Instead, its boundaries set and reset by the state.

Rather than a basis of resistance, privacy is a tool of regulation: privacy as pacification. In a social world already governed by the commodity form and wage relation, privacy reinforces the very divisions between people that make capital accumulation and its security regimes possible. Privacy promises a life of individuals who live apart and choose to do so. Since we lack access to the means to any autonomous means of subsistence, we're coerced into selling our labor and buying our lives back at price that we don't set. Ideas of like privacy are part of a liberal ideology that tell us this is a natural and desirable state of affairs.

For this reason, privacy, as sole or even primary means of defense against surveillance and police power, is a politically counterproductive. Consider the stance of the premier civil liberties organization, the ACLU, toward fusion centers. In 2008, they identified a series of problems with fusion centers-ambiguous lines of authority, private sector and military participation, and wholesale datamining and excessive secrecy. They recommended that US Congress and state legislatures work to increase oversight of fusion centers, regulate the flow of information between fusion centers and the private sector, clarify "how and when" military personnel can collect intelligence for law enforcement purposes, and strengthen open records laws. The ACLU did not demand an end to these problematic practices. Instead, they sought to regulate and, thus, codify them. Challenging intelligence fusion on these terms will, at best, produce limited public oversight (an ACLU representative on the fusion center's executive board) and some modest restrictions on intelligence gathering (three month retention periods for certain kinds of data), which would only be contravened in exceptional circumstances (an emergency warrant or administrative subpoena).

Getting back to intelligence fusion. In what manner has it shaped a key ritual of the police power, the power of the manhunt in capturing, documenting, and dominating the enemies of capital? Who are these enemies, or "terror identities," that garner the most attention from intelligence analysts?

The order of capital is predicated on the imposition of the necessity of a particular kind of work, work for the wage. In a capitalist economy, you're not offered a great job. Instead, you're denied access to the means of subsistence and forced to find some way to survive. The first proletarians resisted the imposition of work. They clung to the last vestiges of the feudal economy or tried to find some way to survive beyond submitting to new regime of labor. For their refusal to work, they were criminalized as vagabonds and forced to labor through by a series of state interventions that Marx famously described as "grotesquely terroristic laws" that imposed "the discipline necessary for the system of wage-labour."

In other words, capital was formed through a manhunt for pliant laborers and it was the police powers of the state that organized this hunt. It's not just manhunts against vagabonds in this early moment. It's the witch hunts in both Europe and Americas that Silva Federici wrote about, the slave trade (and the attempts to re-capture runaways and destroy maroon societies) and the lynch mobs and pogroms that historically have kept marginalized groups at the bottom of different societies. It's the perpetual police-war against "the criminal element." Today, the newest enemies are so-called terrorist, migrants, and refugees.

In many ways, intelligence fusion just puts a high-tech gloss over this old conflict. The main target of fusion centers are poor people, just like the main target of policing remains poor people. Plain and simple. Intelligence fusion is not about fighting terrorism, whatever that even means, and it's only about combating drugs insofar as the so-called "war on drugs" is just the contemporary manifestation of capital's police-war against labor. As a project of police power, intelligence fusion is about terrorizing the population into accepting the conditions of wage labor. This is the main claim of Pacifying the Homeland. The book details the particulars of today's intelligence-led manhunts: compliance checks, warrants weeps, chronic offender initiatives, and saturation patrols. All of these are police operations that begin with intelligence analysis and end with teams of police hunting the population that lives of the borders of the formal and informal economies and bounces back and forth between sites of imprisonment and disinvested, hyper-policed communities.

The poor may be the main subject of intelligence fusion but they're not the only ones. Fusion centers are mixed up in political policing but not in the way that many people imagine. Fusion centers aren't the center of a new COINTELPRO, an aggressive and centrally coordinated crackdown on dissent. The attack on dissent in the US today is no were near what happened in the 1960s and 1970s and it's not possible for someone to step in and play the role of a 21st century J. Edgar Hoover.

Of course, there is political policing happening the US today. The book traces the evolution of political policing. It starts with this new concern with "terrorism" that first became salient not after 9/11 but in the 1980s. The opening act was the FBI's creation of the Joint Terrorist Task Forces to go after the ultra-left splinters of the mass movements of the long 1960s, the urban guerilla movements like May 19th communist organization. Also immediately, the JTTFs targeted non-violent movements like the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, Witness for Peace, and AIDs Coalition to Unleash Power. In the 1990s, the big concern was eco-terrorists. In the last two decades, more "terror identities" have proliferated: anarchist extremists, black identity extremists and the like.

Most of what's happening is surveillance and reporting. There haven't been too many examples of active counter-subversion, where infiltrators sow discord and do everything they can to destroy movements and organizations. There have dramatic confrontations like the crackdown on Occupy and the showdown at Standing Rock, but even these are organized through different means. Rather than J. Edgar Hoover's centrally directed countersubversion campaign, we have a complicated patchwork. Political policing operates through overlapping interagency intelligence networks, including the DHS-recognized National Network of Fusion Centers. This decentralized model is more permeable to local political pressures. Indeed, private interests-not politicians or government officials-appear to have been the leading actors during the crackdown on Occupy and the showdown over the Dakota Access Pipeline. In many other cases, secrecy and organizational complexity complicate a clear parsing of events and actors. This decentralized system produces diverse outcomes. It is also harder to expose and redress than the highly centralized COINTELPRO program and, as a more supple system, may be a more effective means to pacify class struggle.

In any case, what we often talk about as "political policing" only targets the self-conscious mobilization of a class-for-itself, the efforts of organized movements. Intelligence fusion-and police power in general-also attends to less explicit manifestations of class struggle: the ill-understood and often illegible survival strategies of disarticulated segments of the working class. These practices are usually dismissed as the moral failings of the "criminal element." The varied genres of the prose of pacification code it as "crime" or "the street economy." Sometimes, it explodes as a "riot." Here, we find the surplus populations who are not (fully) incorporated within capitalist social relations, the structurally excluded people whose needs and desires cannot be (fully) satisfied within the constraints of capitalist social relations. This social space is privileged domain of police power, where the state's role in producing and maintaining the most basic social relations that define capitalism are laid bare. I think this is one of central contradiction of capitalist civilization and I try to discuss and develop in terms a dialectic between police power and moral economies of poverty.

Would you elaborate upon this central contradiction of capital that exists between the police power and the moral economies of poverty it targets under the aegis of the war on drugs? What is the moral economy of poverty and what does this tension illustrate about not only state formation, but the state's active engagement in the (re)production of the working class?

I use the concept of moral economy to try to understand "crime" without reproducing the class biases of security. I ended up here to make sense of the war on drugs. From the outside and from a certain class position, the drug trade might looks like pathological violence that is so harmful to poor communities. Today, the illegal trade in drugs is huge business that provides real incomes for a lot people. This means there are entire communities where the drug trade is tacitly accommodated because it's understood as some of the best work available. The book opens with the example of Camden, NJ, a city where a third of population lives below the poverty line and, at one point, there was one open air drug market for every 440 residents. The violence of drug trade, paradoxically, produces a particular kind of social order, it's a moral economy of poverty. A lot of Camden residents don't like but many still recognize that the drug trade helps keep the city afloat.

The moral economies are dialectically related to police power. The prose of pacification codes the unauthorized violence of moral economies as pathological violence-"bad neighborhoods filled with bad people"-and invites a security response. As always, the politics of security erases the history that produced problem. Scholars have long established that segregation and discrimination first and later the uneven impacts of deindustrialization and welfare state retrenchment produced the de-facto apartheid boundaries of American city but we ignore all that and reduce it down to a simple problem for the cops and courts to manage. The police can't resolve these social problems but that's not the point. Instead, the current police-war against them provides legitimacy to police-"they're protecting us from violent drug traffickers"-and organizes how the state administers the working class.

The war on drugs is a mechanism to regulate and tax criminalized labor in an era where inequality is increasing and huge swaths of population participate in informal economies. Asset forfeiture laws allow police to tax these illicit economies. Money and property seized in criminal investigations can be expropriated by police agencies. For example, police in New York State, from 1990 to 2010, seized nearly $244 million in cash alone and distributed over $88 million of these assets to police agencies. In some jurisdictions, the conflict of interest generated by this for-profit policing is blatant. In New York's Nassau County, the intelligence center, the Lead Development Center (LDC), sits under the Asset Forfeiture and Intelligence Unit of the Nassau County Police. The LDC operates at no budgetary cost for the department. It is funded exclusively through asset seizures and grants. This is an extreme example but it underscores the role drug operations play in regulating a criminalized market that cannot be suppressed.

The deeper issue here, however, is a structural one: the administration of particular form of the working class. The war on drugs isn't about stopping drugs. It's about regulating criminalized labor. We have all these people who are involved in the accumulation of capital and circulation of goods but it's happening outside of legal channels. When the police arrest people for drugs they impose legal forms of subjectivity on surplus populations that are weakly connected to formal labor markets. Historically, the recognition of organized labor pacified the working class by incorporating them within capitalist states. This administrative subsumption of labor is one the primary ways state administration continually (re)produces capitalist social relations. Policing accomplishes this same process for the criminalized workers of the drug economy. Instead of subsuming legal labor within the confines of "labor law," it envelopes criminalized labor within the "drug war." Police surveillance and intelligence gathering track the drug trade and identify its key players. Arrest and prosecution imposes legal subjectivities on both individual and collective actors: people involved in the drug economy and the "criminal conspiracies" they create. The prohibition of drugs creates a caste of criminalized labor that policing regulates and taxes. Cumulatively, these efforts pacify class struggle by dividing the working class into a profaned "criminal element" and "decent" people.

Returning to your comments on the extent of contemporary political policing -or lack thereof- through intelligence fusion, can you speak to any scenarios where fusion center staff took a noninterventionist, hands-off approach toward a political movement and/or protest in conflict with local law enforcement?

During Occupy, some fusion centers did want anything to do with monitoring the protest. They viewed it as political speech and steered clear. During fight over Dakota Access Pipeline, some local law enforcement agencies wouldn't arrest people for trespassing, which bothered the private sector company that had been hired to crush the protests. The reasons for these incidents, and several others which the book also details, is a shift in the nature of political policing.

After the exposure of COINTELPRO and Watergate, there were investigations and some reforms. The investigations paradoxically re-legitimized security agencies by demonstrating their apparent accountability, while simultaneously allowing controversial practices to continue by covering them with a patina of legality. The result was a seemingly limited version of human rights compliant political policing, a strategy that endeavors to protect political rights and facilitate peaceful protest, while still combating "extremism."

As I mentioned earlier, we don't see the aggressive infiltration and active countersubversion that characterized COINTELPRO. However, we do see wholesale surveillance and intelligence gathering, including the use of informants (who often work to entrap people in manufactured terrorism plots). I fear all of this may be more subtle and effective mode of political policing. Instead heavy headed repression-the whip of the counterrevolution that polarizes and escalates the struggle-we have a more subtle repression-accommodation dialectic. A certain amount of protest is allowed and even encouraged. The police are here to help you exercise your rights and weed out the troublemakers who may be planning more militant action that can be criminalized as terrorism or violence.

Just by way of an anecdote: In 2017, Los Angeles Police Department was revealed to have spied on the anti-Trump group Refuse Fascism with an informant attending meetings ostensibly to gather intelligence that would tip authorities off to any upcoming freeway shutdowns. No violent, far-right groups were spied on by LAPD during this time. Granted, we know little to the extent of fusion center involvement in this particular instance, but it wouldn't surprise me given the numerous cases of law enforcement collaborating with neo-Nazis and white nationalist types.

Have fusion centers taken the threat of far-right violence seriously (given that the FBI seems more predisposed to spy on Black Lives Matter, "Black Identity Extremists," anarchists and other leftist persuasions than neo-Nazis)? How aware and/or vigilant are they of this threat in the age of Trump and a resurgent white nationalism?

This is a difficult question to answer because events are still unfolding and information is spotty. I think there is an important political struggle happening within the security apparatus over the status of white supremacists and other extreme right formations. My sense is that the liberal reformers-the professionalizers, people who want "better" policing-are losing power to fascists or proto-fascists-the people who to hunt for enemies.

Before we get into the specifics of any example, however, it should go without saying that the police are the police. They're the physical embodiment of the state's monopoly on violence. As an institution, there's a baseline conservativism that's ingrained in the police. In more conventional sociological terms, they're a hierarchy-reinforcing institution. We should never expect the police to be anything but enemies of the project revolutionary social transformation. It should never surprise us when the individual police officers or whole departments become surveillance and disrupt social movements. It should never surprise us when individual officers or departments conspire with individuals or groups on the extreme right. These are expected.

At the same time, the specificities of how these dynamics occur matter tremendously. We can't just string together the crimes of the state and assume that it all means that it's a seamless machinery of oppression and that is ready to squelch all political challenges. We're talking about many headed administrative apparatus that's often beset by organizational pathologies and riven by internal conflicts. How the state really operates and this more specific question about the position of the security apparatus toward the extreme right is tremendously very important because it gets at two important points: a theoretical one about the nature of state apparatus and political one about the strategic alignment of power. What's at stake is our understanding of social power and change and how assess the political opportunities of the moment. That said, there are two dynamics that explain much of what we're seeing: the constraints of human rights compliant political policing, and the internal struggle within state around the far right and their efforts to infiltrate the security apparatus.

First, human right's compliant political policing. This what liberals and politics of privacy and legality gets you. If we look at policing in relation to the rest of security apparatus and not just prisons, then, we see that the period of mass incarceration is also this post-Watergate, post-Vietnam period, where liberal professionalizes sought to legitimate the security apparatus through reform. This reform current extended into policing with measures like the Handschu guidelines, which constrained political policing in New York City. Later, it became generalized as response to police brutality in the 1990s, when the DOJ began taking over police departments and overseeing reforms to eliminate racial profiling and police brutality. It continues with calls for procedural reforms and technocratic solutions like body cameras. A lot of the people involved may be earnest and some of these policy changes may blunt some of the sharper edges of oppression but they're structural effect is to reaffirm the legitimacy of the state security and preserve its power and discretion.

So let's get into specifics, human rights compliant political policing, as a general rule, treats all political activity the same, regardless of its content. White supremacists advocating genocide and an ethnostate have the same rights to freedom of speech and assembly as leftist calling for a borderless world and a transition to socialism. This ethos is entrenched in police agencies. It was even put forward as official policy, when I observed a Fusion Liaison Officer training conducted by one of the senior managers at New Jersey's fusion center. The section of the training on civil liberties demonstrated showed a high degree of self-awareness. The officer explained many of the concerns with fusion centers, citing the 2007 ACLU report on the subject. He then discussed how the fusion center dealt with large protest actions. He referenced their monitoring of Occupy to show how limited reporting for situational awareness and officer safety was appropriate but anything more would have violated constitutional rights and ROIC's privacy policy. He also brought up a 2011 Neo-Nazi rally in Trenton as an example. While the trooper presented Occupy in a neutral tone, he described Neo-Nazis as "scum" and "the worst people you can possibly imagine." However, he noted that their protest was permitted and, even though the rally was advocating odious positions, the fusion center could only take the same limited measures they took toward Occupy. With both examples, the intended point was that investigation required a "nexus" to crime or terrorism.

This dynamic provides perspective on recent clashes between Antifascists and far right groups. When left counter-protesters disrupt a white supremacist rally, this registers as an attack on white supremacists right of assembly. After all, the title of the controversial intelligence report on "anarchist extremists" released days before the infamous Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville was "Domestic Terrorist Violence at Lawfully Permitted White Supremacists Rallies Likely to Continue." In short, humans compliant political policing is real. It's a different form of CONTELPRO-era countersubversion and it can help explain why police tolerated both Occupy encampments and Neo-Nazi rallies.

At the same time, there is also a political struggle within the state around the far-right. Throughout the Obama Administration, the status of far-right movements as domestic terrorists was point of bitter controversy. In April 2009, DHS predicted an increase in far-right violence and identified four causes: prolonged economic downturn, the election of a Black president, renewed debates over gun control and the return of military veterans to civilian life. The report was leaked to the press and right-wing media had a field day. Eventually, then-DHS secretary Janet Napolitano shut down the unit that produced the report, leaving DHS with no analysts focusing on the far-right. Primary author of report eventually went public. Some Congressional Representatives pressured the Obama Administration to do more and they threw some money at counter-radicalization but did not re-commit DHS to reporting on the far right. As expected, the Trump Administration quickly rolled back this half measure.

That said, DHS-the federal agency-has no or at least very few analysts reporting on the far right but the fusion centers, which are run by state and local law enforcement, still are reporting on neo-Nazis, White Supremacists and other far right groups. The FBI is also still actively investigating the far right. There's lots of documents that journalist have obtained through FIOA that show this and the book gets into some of these examples and finer detail.

What these episodes underscore, however, is that there is a real battle happening within the state over the meaning of "domestic terrorism." There's plenty of people in law enforcement who want and are going after the far right but there's probably just as many or even more that sympathize with the far right. In 2006, the FBI produced an internal intelligence assessment document concerning the far-right's attempts to infiltrate police agencies and influence officers. While almost nothing is known about the FBI's efforts to address this issue, it is apparently a cause of some concern.

The limitations of human rights compliant political policing and efforts of the far-right to infiltrate law enforcement cast an ominous shadow over the violence in Charlottesville and similar clashes. Although there is no evidence that white supremacist infiltrated the Charlottesville Police or the Virginia State Police, the lead agency at the Virginia Fusion Center, an independent review of the response to the Unite the Right Rally by a former federal attorney shows that police downplayed the white supremacist threat. The report documents several intelligence analyses received by the Charlottesville Police that predicted violence from far-right militants. It also provides some anecdotes of individual law enforcement officers downplaying the threat from the far-right and positioning left counter-protestors as more problematic.

These battles are important because help us understand the political dynamics of our moment. To return to an earlier point, the implication for our understanding of the state is that the state is arena of this struggle but it's not the agent of the struggle in any direct and simple way. The institutional condensation of political power. It's continually reshaped by struggles within and outside the state apparatus to define policy and distribute resources. It's also shaped by larger forces, as I tried to explain in my comments on authoritarian statism and globalization. In short, the state is neither a thing to be seized nor smashed. It's an institutional condensation of power to approached, politically, at the level of strategy. This returns me to my other point about the strategic alignment of power. These battles of over status of white supremacists within the security apparatus and related questions of police collaboration with far-right groups speaks to wider political process. The balance of social forces since the 1970s-call it neoliberalism, the carceral state, whatever-is clearly unraveling. There's a three-way fight going on right now between the collapsing neoliberal center, the fascist right and the nascent left. We need to think about the security apparatus, we confront hard questions. The left position isn't to demand the police go after the fascists. Both the police and the fascists need to be defeated politically.

To conclude, one overarching imperative I noticed while reading your book -one the key struggles abolitionists must surmount- is to abolish not only the police, but the police power. How might we challenge a purposefully vague, capillary, patriarchal power that occupies nearly every nook and cranny of the state and that permeates the broader society down to the level of individual subjectivity?

To come up with solutions, it necessary to understand the specific nature of the problem and Pacifying the Homeland is my effort to name some the very particular problems of our times. You're right that one of the main problems the book names is police power. It's not just the police, the bodies of armed men in squad cars and frisking black and brown people on street corners. It's the way the police powers of the state administer our lives in ways to the benefit of capital. I think taking this expanded concept of police power expands the horizon of abolitionist politics.

Consider the divest-reinvest strategy toward abolition that came out The Vision for Black Lives policy report and was endorsed by the Democratic Socialist of America. Divesting from the police and the military and reinvesting in education and social services sounds great but I think it could be easily co-opted. Reinvest into what exactly? Social services as they currently exist? Shrink the armed uniformed police and expand soft social police? While such efforts certainly would make a meaningful difference in the lives of those most victimized by police, it would hardly challenge the rule of capital and the modern state. Instead, abolishing police power requires rethinking "social services" on terms that explicitly challenge the basic social relations that police power, in its myriad forms, maintains: private property, the commodity form, and the wage relation. In other words, the positive project of abolition would require a "reinvestment" in care and reconstruction the commons.

From this perspective, Medicare for All should be advanced as an abolitionist demand. By de-commodifying healthcare and transforming into a universal public good it could be part of reinvigorated social democratic commons Left organizations could organize political power to redirect resources from police, prisons, and the security apparatus and reinvestment in a series of socialist programs, a "common" decency that should afforded to all by virtue of their inalienable humanity: universal right to cradle-to-grave care (universal healthcare, free education, etc.), and basic right to life (housing, a job or basic income guarantee).

The horizons of what we could call "abolition socialism" could also help confront other difficult questions that historically have plagued socialist movements. The reconstitution of the commons would also require requires a reckoning with histories of colonial violence and dispossession. Capital emerged through the disproportionate destruction of particular cultures. It created hierarchy of peoples. The modern capitalist world-system created through various the projects of policing and pacification is also and always racial capitalism. In other words, a meaningfully abolishing police power and recreating the commons would also require addressing historic injustices that divided the global working class into mutually antagonistic nations and races. In this way, reparations for slavery, for colonial dispossession, and for unequal North-South relations can be thought of as necessary part of both the transition to socialism and abolition of police power.

Guns Don’t Kill People, Settlers Do: The Second Amendment and the Myth of Defense

By Oliver Baker

"Our nation was built and civilized by men and women who used guns in self-defense and in pursuit of peace." - Ronald Reagan

"If you are coming to the idea of resistance as a resolute no to the Empire, then armed self-defense is as much a yes to liberated life as the yes of community gardens." - Ashanti Alson

Many of the households where I grew up in rural Missouri have at least one good hunting rifle in their collections of firearms. Every November, most families here-usually the father and son, but sometimes the father and daughter-will go deer hunting, not only for sport but also for the meat it provides households. They will often say hunting is the reason they own firearms.

Several years ago, I was invited to go target shooting at the property of a long-time acquaintance. He was proud of his expansive and comfortable set-up: he owned several dozen acres of land in the country with a nice three-bed, two-bath home and a stable income to support it all. His property, in other words, allowed him to be a gracious host for friends, neighbors, and acquaintances looking to shoot guns, improve their marksmanship, and build community and comradery.

When I arrived, there were 15-20 men armed to the teeth, strutting around with ARs slung tightly around their chests and handguns of various calibers holstered on their belts. Their wives were inside preparing food and tending the kids. As the men-some dressed in army surplus gear, others still wearing their work clothes-blasted away at various targets, the property owner began talking to me about why he loved his home(stead) so much. It was, in his words, "out in the sticks, good and far away from all of that inner-city mayhem." After showing me a sample of his extensive gun collection, spread out before everyone on the tailgate of his truck, he continued his white-to-white conservation with me:

"Yeah, I have all this firepower because I gotta protect my property and family when, you know, shit hits the fan, and all them inner-city people dependent on government hand-outs are left high and dry and start coming out here where the pavement meets gravel looking to loot food and other things."

It was clear he wanted me to understand that he had guns to defend against, in his eyes, Black people coming to loot his home in the event of a "societal collapse," and that he'd be ready with an arsenal of firepower to repel them. That is, gun ownership for him was about using violence to defend his property-as-whiteness from racialized populations whom he recognized were deliberately excluded from the formal economy and corralled in inner-city ghettos. His guns were the lynchpin for maintaining this line between the "good guys" like himself-the productive worker, the property holder, the respectable law-abiding citizen-and a zombified surplus population marked for death. This metaphor is telling: of all the firearms he showed me that day, he was most proud of some recently purchased specialty ammunition with the tagline: "Supply yourself for the Zombie Apocalypse." Guns and zombie rounds animated the fantasy of defending whiteness by mowing down a racialized surplus humanity on the gravel roads of rural Missouri.

I heard this fantasy many times growing up in such hyper-masculine spaces, in which it is taught that the man of the house has to be prepared to defend his home(stead) from perceived criminal (racial) threats and maintain order in his home . True men are providers and protectors; anything less, and you're an emasculated loser. In this way, the property holder was simply being a good patriot and male leader by preparing for the moment when, in his eyes, he would use guns in self-defense against the racialized poor. From this perspective, all the patriots out there that day sharpening their firearm skills claimed to be doing so for reasons of self-defense. Each saw himself as a Josey Wales , John Wayne, or Dirty Harry, or (more recently) anAmerican Sniper or Rick Grimes, neutralizing racialized criminal threats encountered on the Indian frontier or spilling out from the Black ghetto.

People will often say hunting is the reason they own firearms, but the underlying structural reason, whether acknowledged or not, has more to do with white settler fears of racial rebellion. Indeed, the NRA-the most politically influential gun organization-isn't powerful because it has a lot money to spend, but rather because it markets gun ownership as a means of reinforcing white settler sovereignty. Gun ownership is about staving off the loss of the white settler's power, honor, and privilege, which the global economy no longer respects and the state, it is believed, tramples in its accommodating of the marginalized. Despite the rhetoric, gun ownership has never been about hunting or defending democracy against authoritarianism, which white settlers are ready to embrace if it maintains their power.

In other words, the fear of the dispossessed challenging their subjugation drives gun ownership and gun culture among white settlers in the United States-not hunting, a tyrannical government, or, as I argue, reasons of self-defense. American gun ownership has its structural roots in the desire to uphold and reproduce colonial and racial hierarchies and to maintain the power and benefits received from such hierarchies, putting guns in the hands of white settlers with fantasies of nostalgic redemption through violence. Make America Great Again, indeed.

At its core, then, gun ownership for white settlers is about using tools of violence to defend the political category of white settler sovereignty, which is to say, using guns to harm, kill, or terrorize colonized and racialized people in order to keep them unfree-as their freedom means the dissolution of these categories of power and honor. Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's recent book Loaded (2018) argues that the history of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms was fundamentally the state-granted right of settlers to arm their households and form voluntary militias in order to seize Native land and/or police enslaved Black people. Gun ownership today maintains what Dunbar-Ortiz contends was the founding vision of the settler state to distribute its monopoly of violence to its settler-citizens in order to carry out campaigns of dispossession and secure white property against threats of rebellion:

"Settler-militias and armed households were institutionalized for the destruction and control of Native peoples, communities, and nations. With the expansion of plantation agriculture, by the late 1600s they were also used as 'slave patrols,' forming the basis of the U.S. police culture after enslaving people was illegalized."

In fact, joining a militia was less of a right than a requirement of settlers; in some cases, particularly at the state level in the South preceding the Constitution, service in the militia or arming one's household was required by law. Dunbar-Ortiz explains this history:

"European settlers were required by law to own and carry firearms, and all adult male settlers were required to serve in the militia. Militias were also used to prevent indentured European servants from fleeing before their contracts expired, in which case they were designated 'debtors.' [. . .]. In 1727, the Virginia colony enacted a law requiring militias to create slave patrols, imposing stiff fines on white people who refused to serve."

These state laws fed into the Second Amendment to enshrine the imperative of gun ownership at the federal level. Requiring participation in counterrevolutionary violence was thus written into the law directly. Today this duty to defend settler dominance continues not through state laws requiring militia membership but through informal gun ownership. The Second Amendment deputized settlers to use violence to steal land and people-in short, to expand empire.

Building on Dunbar-Ortiz's analysis of the Second Amendment, I want to suggest that we understand gun ownership as a material practice through which white settlers engage directly in the work of counterrevolutionary violence that consolidates and maintains U.S. liberal democracy. It is a way of strengthening settler democracy that promises empowerment and redemption. Firearms are the tools and symbols of a larger counterrevolutionary policing that binds settlers together despite contradictions of class in their mutual support of upholding colonial and racial hierarchies. Through gun ownership of today-what was, earlier, participation in militias-the white settler defends the state that in turn ensures his sovereignty and superiority.

In this way, the settler state depends on deputizing its settler-citizens to be the police of dispossessed populations, just as the settler relies on the state upholding his rights of property, or his "pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness." This is why gun ownership is seen as fundamental to liberal freedoms. The Second Amendment is upstream from the other amendments precisely because counterrevolutionary policing maintains the public order of civil society in which liberal freedoms can flourish.

There are three conclusions, then, I would like to discuss that follow from the claim that Second Amendment-sponsored gun ownership in the United States is counterrevolutionary violence harmonizing intra-settler relations. The first is that self-defense belongs to the oppressed and never to the oppressor. From a structural prespective, there is no such thing as white settler self-defense. The second is that gun culture from the 1960s onward serves as an important site at which settlers organize politically across class and gender lines to protect whiteness in response to marginalized peoples' demand for freedom and neoliberalism's attack on labor. The third is that the practice of community self-defense among those targeted by colonial violence radically undermines the ideology of white victimization through which counterrevolutionary violence is legitimated.

Guns and White Victimization

Perhaps the best example of how counterrevolutionary violence is coded as white settler self-defense is the now iconic Gadsden Flag. From its inception during the American Revolutionary War to its revival and proliferation in right-wing gun culture in the years following 9/11, the Gadsden Flag, with its image of a rattlesnake and phrase "Don't Tread on Me," illustrates how the effort to maintain white settler power in the face of marginalized peoples' demand for freedom is branded as self-defense. The coiled rattler signifies a defensive and victimized position, but one that is deadly if provoked. The Gadsden Flag serves as an important symbol for those identifying as patriots, law-abiding gun-owners, and defenders of the Constitution because it supports a larger ideology that holds that white America is under attack by minorities (and the federal government taken over by minorities in the post-Civil Rights era) whose commitments to equality have turned into the discrimination against, exclusion of, and attacks on whiteness.

Some of the earliest versions of the Gadsden flag, as many patriots will mention, is Benjamin Franklin's drawing of the colonies as a snake divided into sections underwritten by the ultimatum of "join, or die." Yet the tyranny the colonies were fighting against wasn't simply taxation without representation, but more broadly the right to expand its own empire rather than remain merely another exploited colony-to form a state strong enough to defend the colonists' pursuit of wealth from Native and Black rebellion. Indeed, Jefferson makes this clear in the Declaration of Independence when he argues that the Crown had prevented the colonies from clearing the lands west of the Appalachian Mountains of "merciless Indian savages" and encouraged slave insurrection in the colonies.

The rattlesnake represents a white settler body politic that feels continuously threatened and anxious about defending its power over conquered and subjugated populations. It claims to take up a position of self-defense when this position is actually one of stopping the efforts of marginalized people to free themselves from structures of violence. The fetish of Franklin's coiled rattler as the iconography of settlers coming together through counterrevolution suggests there is unity and strength precisely through this position of shared white victimization. If disjointed by cleavages such as class or gender, they will be overrun by the dispossessed, but if unified in their mutual opposition to the dispossessed, white settlers will flourish despite such intra-settler contradictions.

This fear of insurgency-from-below justifying the use of counterrevolutionary violence helps explain the emergence and proliferation of right-wing gun culture in the years following the 1960s to the present. As theorist Sylvia Wynter has argued, the global anti-colonial rebellions of the mid-20th century that empowered and inspired national liberation struggles in the United States sent shocks throughout the white-settler body politic. These rebellions ended in the settler state granting concessions to colonized and racialized groups in the form of civil rights legislation, the dismantling of legal forms of racial apartheid, and the overall turn away from overt, codified forms of white supremacy to new forms of colorblind racism. Black, Brown, and Native militancy terrified settlers, compelling concessions as a means to pacify their militant struggle.

It was these attempts of federal government to conditionally include marginalized groups that led white America, using a zero-sum logic, to feel betrayed and abandoned. As a result, white middle- and working-class settlers gave up defending the welfare state as long as it was also going to include nonwhites. In this moment when the state seems to accommodate nonwhites-an act that failed to respect, in the eyes of white America, the colonial and racial divisions binding together settlers-gun ownership became much more meaningful for white settlers looking to hold the line of these divisions where the state had, it was believed, given up doing so.

During Obama's presidency, this fear that the state had abandoned white settlers by catering to marginalized people had a resurgence. Gun purchases were at an all-time high and patriot community-building became widespread, which is to say, gun ownership and patriot communities were seen as necessary measures for saving the original and founding vision of a white settler republic from a federal government that was believed to have sided with the very people whose demands for equality would unravel the sovereignty and power of white settlers.

Militias such as the Oathkeepers and Three Percenters emerged during these years and embodied the view that it is the job of "true patriots" (white male settlers) to save white America from a state that has gone rogue in its perceived embrace of "open-borders" multiculturalism. The Constitution and the Second Amendment are sacred for such groups because they authorize freedom-loving citizens to form militias to restore the founding colonialist vision of the United States.

For all the wrong reasons of preserving their power, such groups actually have a perceptive understanding of the Second Amendment as a law authorizing counterrevolutionary violence. For them, guns are not about hunting or even self-defense, but about the right to ensure colonial and racial rebellion is controlled and that state power is recaptured in ways that it abandons neoliberal multiculturalism for more direct forms of settler-colonial white-nationalist capitalism. Indeed, it is not surprising that Oathkeepers and Three Percenters show up to police Black rebellions or put down antifascist counterdemonstrations. They see themselves as an extension of the police, the National Guard, and border patrol. Like the KKK of yore, these militias, filled with current and former police and military, believe they fulfill the original function of the state-under the Obama years seen as liberal and weak-in putting down racial rebellions. Gun culture, then, serves as a symbolic yet very material compensation for the state's support of neoliberal multiculturalism and the dismantling of welfare capitalism. Just as credit is offered in place of decreased wages, gun culture supplies compensatory ammunition to bolster the value of whiteness in the face of deindustrialization, increased intra-settler inequality, and globalization's attack on U.S. nationalism.

Arming the Police, Arming White Supremacy

It is important not to forget that support for counterrevolutionary violence extends far beyond patriots and right-wing gun culture. Liberals who call for gun regulation but fully support the police and military and their work of upholding mass incarceration at home and imperial violence abroad support the same structures of violence celebrated by the gun-nuts such liberals love to disparage and against whom they define their commitments to nonviolence. The difference is a choice between a monopoly of state violence in repressive state apparatuses or the distribution of state violence among individual settlers and citizen militias. In other words, patriots believe the violence should be democratized and liberals believe it should be concentrated in the hands of state institutions. While one wants to stand alongside the police and military, the other wants the bloody work to be accomplished without getting their hands dirty. Avowed and disavowed to varying degrees, both support counterrevolutionary violence to protect settler democracy. In this way, liberals, despite their pacifist posturing, are not any less supportive of colonial violence than their gun-nut counterparts because they call for a strengthening of the settler state and a disarming of the populace, which will only make marginalized people more vulnerable to killings and incarceration.

This is a view that has the audacity and class privilege of asking marginalized people targeted by state violence, and its extended forms of vigilante violence, to appeal to the same state for protection. While patriots take up actual weapons to target marginalized people, liberals weaponize gun control policy to the same ends of putting people of color in body bags or cages. The only gun control that would reduce gun violence would be disarming the police, the military, domestic abusers, and anyone with ties to white nationalist and misogynist political groups, along with demilitarizing schools and campuses. Whether they are appealing to the Second Amendment or asking people to trust the authority of the police and military, white settlers on the Left or Right demonstrate that the violence they commit, fantasize about committing, or have no problem with the police and military committing for their protection is necessary for their redemptive vision of liberal democracy. It matters not if this vision is a return to when liberal democracy more forcefully upheld colonial and racial hierarchies, or some future point at which this violence and policing ensures genuine equality of opportunity for people believed to be formerly colonized and enslaved.

Community Self-Defense

While it may be easy to oppose right-wing white victimization and liberal support for state violence, it's still very hard for many to accept the premise that marginalized peoples, those targeted by such violence, have the right to use any means necessary to defend themselves and their communities. Yet we have to see, as Malcolm X made very clear, that the only people who have the moral authority to lay claim to the use of force as a means of self-defense are the people targeted by colonial violence in first place. The struggle to get free, gain control over one's life, and have a say in the governing of one's community is always a struggle of self-defense rather than aggression or provocation. The meanings of self-defense in settler society are purposely inverted to legitimate counterrevolutionary violence and to discredit the self-defense actions of communities struggling to get free.

Robert Williams emphasized this point over and over again while organizing armed community self-defense to protect the Black community against KKK violence in Monroe, South Carolina in the 1960s. In Negroes with Guns , Williams explains:

"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. When people say that they are opposed to Negroes 'resorting to violence' what they really mean is that they are opposed to Negroes defending themselves and challenging the exclusive monopoly of violence practiced by white racists."

When a relationship between people is asymmetrical, meaning it is structurally impossible to rectify or reconcile, the violence that defends this power imbalance appears legitimate while anything that would take power away from the oppressor or build power for the oppressed registers as illegitimate and irrational violence.

With the same force, then, that we can acknowledge the illegitimacy of the notion of white settler self-defense, we should recognize the legitimacy of marginalized peoples' right to self-defense. As theorist Chad Kautzer argues, "our understanding of self-defense must, therefore, account for the transformative power of self-defense for oppressed groups as well as the stabilizing effect of self-defense for oppressor groups." What this looks like is, on the one hand, disempowering, delegitimizing, and disarming institutions of white settler violence such as the police, patriot, and other white-nationalist gun culture groups, and on the other, using a diversity of tactics to create and maintain community self-defense networks among marginalized communities. Community self-defense, as a theory and praxis, can help produce identities, relationships, and habits necessary not only to deter and prevent violence and build/protect power, but also to delegitimize the ideology of white victimization so crucial to white settlers' use of violence to defend their power. This framework reveals who is fighting a war of counterrevolution and who is fighting a war of liberation, whose fight is legitimate and whose is illegitimate.

In this way, community self-defense helps clears the way for matters of seeing where allegiances lie in a war that has been ongoing for over 500 years. For those picking up a gun to defend property that sits on stolen land and that has value through an economy built by and through stolen people, it becomes clear they are arming themselves to kill and die for colonialism and anti-Blackness. For those calling for peace between the oppressor and oppressed, community self-defense forces their hand, exposing where their allegiances actually lie: in support of colonial and racial violence. For those told that their struggle to exist, to be free, to control their own lands and bodies is irrational and illegitimate, they prove through community self-defense that it is irrational, let alone careless, to think that the structures of violence holding them captive or targeting them for elimination will be destroyed through peaceful negotiation and compromise.

This was originally published at Pyriscence .

Oliver Baker is an Assistant Professor at Penn State University.