"We Are Entering a New Totalitarian Era": An Interview with Ajamu Baraka

By Ann Garrison

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

In this interview for Pacifica Radio’s series on “Covid, Race, and Democracy,” Ajamu Baraka warns of a new era of totalitarian neoliberalism.

Ann Garrison: On January 20, we saw Joe Biden carry on about “unity” behind seven-foot fences topped with razor wire and 25,000 plus National Guard troops deployed . One friend of mine said that this pointed to an irony deficiency. Is there anything you'd like to say about it? 

Ajamu Baraka: Well, I think it is ironic, but it's quite understandable that the kinds of activities that the US has been involved in promoting and supporting globally—undermining democracies, subverting states, undermining and destroying any semblance of the rule of law—have basically come back to haunt them. You have a militant movement in the US partially inspired by the inability of the state and the system to address their material interests and to look at their concerns regarding their own understanding of democracy and its deficiencies. They feel like they lack space to articulate those views, and they’ve decided to engage in militant actions to make sure that their voices are heard, and they believe that they are upholding democracy.

And their experience with the state made them feel justified in advancing their concerns about democracy in violent forms. The state has demonstrated to them that the way you defend democracy is through state violence. So they were taking their defense into their own hands and bringing it right back to the center of empire. Some of us call that blowback. 

AG: For the past four years, liberals on the coasts have excoriated the white working class in the middle of the country, whom they perceive to be deplorable Trump supporters. Do you think that this is helpful? 

AB: No. Not only is it not helpful, it is inaccurate and it has helped to create the narrative that many of these forces have embraced; that is the centerpiece of their grievances. They believe that liberals and the liberal order have not addressed their needs, their interests. They believe that the economic elites are only out for themselves and that therefore they needed to rally behind Trump, a billionaire who claimed that he understood their interests and would fight for them because nobody else was.

So this characterization of them as deplorables, and as either Nazis or Nazi-like, is not only not helpful but also contradictory in the sense that those folks who level those charges still have not been able to explain why the Trump presidency happened.

For example, some nine million people who voted for Trump in 2016 had voted for Barack Obama in 2012. Liberals can't explain why, after four years of constant anti-Trump rhetoric, the Trump forces expanded their ranks by another 11 million voters. So this is something in play that's a little bit more sophisticated than these people just being deplorables or Nazis. And that something has to be interrogated. It has to be extracted. It has to be understood if you're going to have a politics to counter it. And right now the liberals have not understood where these elements are coming from because they have basically painted those 75 million people as a monolith of deplorables.

The neoliberals have constructed a politics that is going to result in a continuation of the same conditions, politically and economically, that created what they pretend to be most opposed to—the Trump movement. So this is the failure of imagination, the failure of critical analysis, the embracing of illusions that has characterized much of the politics in the US for a couple of decades now. And we see the consequences of that with us every day. 

AG: In the 48 hours after Biden became president, Israel bombed Syria, killing a family of four, a US convoy of trucks crossed into Syria to steal oil yet again, a double suicide bombing in Baghdad killed 32 people and Foreign Affairs, the journal of the US Council on Foreign Relations, published a piece with the headline “Th e  M yth of a  R esponsible  W ithdrawal from Afghanistan ,” which said, “the Biden administration should accept that there is no feasible middle way for a responsible withdrawal.” What do you think is next? 

AB: The continuation of policies that have resulted in the US being bogged down in Afghanistan for two decades, policies that will ensure that the wars that the US is involved in will continue. There will be a continuation of the commitment to US global full-spectrum dominance. In other words, violence is still at the center of the neoliberal project. And they intend to reintroduce that instrument under the Biden administration.

There were reports leading up to the election that Democratic Party-associated elements were secretly suggesting to the Afghan authorities that they would not have to worry about a peace process being executed once Joe Biden came to power. And they made the argument using some of the same terms and framework that we saw in that article in Foreign Affairs, that the US had a responsibility to remain in Afghanistan. And so they will fully prepare to undermine whatever progress was made for extracting US forces from that territory.

So we're not surprised to see the kind of elements that Biden has brought to his administration. These people were part of the Obama Administration, and they are committed to the US national security strategy, which is attempting to maintain US global hegemony using the instrument that they believe they are dependent on now, which is in fact global violence. 

AG: Yesterday, I signed a petition to Twitter to restore @real Donald Trump , the Twitter account of the 45th president of the United States. I didn't share the petition on my social media pages because I didn't want to have to fend off a lot of cancel culture, but I had enough faith in Pacifica to think I wouldn't get kicked off the air for sharing it in the broadcast version of this conversation. What do you think of Twitter’s suspension of Trump and 70,000  more accounts that they said were linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory? 

AB: I think it was quite troubling. I understand the disgust, the revulsion people have to Donald Trump. We know who Donald Trump is. He's a sociopath, he's a white supremacist. He’s despicable, but Donald Trump is, in fact, America. Donald Trump represents the kind of attitude and the kinds of values that made the US settler state what it is today.

So, this notion on the part of the liberals that he is some kind of aberration is completely ridiculous. In fact, it's ahistorical, but because of the disgust and because of the very serious legitimation crisis the US is facing, and the concern that neoliberal politicians have with the possibility of a return of Donald Trump, they have used the incident on January 6th as their opportunity to not only target Donald Trump as a person, but to target his “movement,” to undermine an above ground, legal political tendency, a tendency that generated 75 million votes.

If they can move against Donald Trump and make a connection between his speech and what occurred on January 6 in order to justify a permanent ban on someone who was the President of the United States with 88 million followers, then arbitrarily take down these other accounts that they say are “conspiratorial,” and if people then cheer because they hate Donald Trump, we are seeing a monumental mistake being made by liberals who think that this state is their friend, and that this state will get rid of Donald Trump, but somehow be able to maintain a commitment to civil liberties.

No, they are in fact conditioning the public to accept the constraints of civil liberties, or to have faith in private capitalist entities to determine what is acceptable speech and information that can be disseminated.

I believe they are, in essence, setting up the kind of dystopia that we see in science fiction movies, where you have corporate interests that have a complete and total control over every aspect of our lives. And of course, complete and total control over the ideals that are disseminated in those kinds of totalitarian society.

So, this is a quite troubling and even more troubling because so many people don't recognize that it’s dangerous. But it's quite slick because, like you said, you don't want to share your petition because you know people would go crazy if you said in public that you believe that Donald Trump's rights have been violated. So, this is a quite dangerous moment because what we see, in my opinion, is the hegemony of irrationality.

AG: Neoliberal militarists are comparing the Capital Riot to 9/11 and using it to justify the further militarization of Washington DC and Biden's domestic terrorism bill . At the same time, he has appointed infamous militarist Susan Rice to a new position, Director of Domestic Policy. Who do you think will become domestic targets during the Biden-Harris years? 

AB: Anyone who is involved in oppositional politics, including those elements that are part of the Black Lives Matter movement, and anyone else who questions US colonial policies. Anyone who will advance sharp analysis of the capitalist state, who will question some of its dominant ideals, who might even suggest that police forces should be withdrawn from certain neighborhoods. And anyone who would advocate better relations with the so-called adversaries of the US, like the Chinese and the Russians.

There’s no telling what is going to be seen as acceptable speech and political practice because we are entering a new totalitarian era. So I think anybody who is in opposition to the hegemony of the neoliberal project is at some point over the next few years going to experience the heavy hand of the state.

Let me just say this about the state that we've been talking about. People say that these Big Tech entities—Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube, etcetera—are private corporations, and that therefore they have no obligation to protect free speech rights: We need to make a correction. These entities are of course private, but the essence of neoliberalism is the spinning off of elements of the state that are public to private entities. So what we have with these Big Tech companies is, in fact, the spinning off of the function of speech monitoring and massive surveillance to these private companies.

These companies are in fact, from my point of view, part of the ideological state apparatus. They are part of the state, just like the private corporate media is part of the state. So we have to expand our understanding of what we refer to as the state. 

AG: A lot of people are frightened, particularly Black, Brown, and Jewish people, and most likely Asians now given all the bipartisan China-bashing underway. People, especially in these communities, have good reason to be frightened. And a lot of people are using the word fascist as they have for the past four years. But you've warned that neoliberal fascism will also get worse. Could you tell us what you mean by neoliberal fascism? 

AB: Well, first let me say that it's quite understandable, and we should be quite concerned about some of the more hardcore elements that we associate with the traditional right, who are quite capable and seem to be committed to using various methods to advance their political project. We saw some of those elements in the Capitol on January 6. So it's understandable that we be concerned with that, but I've been warning people also that we should be more concerned with the neoliberal elements that control the state and did even during the time that Donald Trump was occupying the executive branch. We have to remind ourselves, or at least come to the understanding, that neoliberalism is a right-wing ideology. It is a right-wing set of policies, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, so-called free trade, austerity, and reductions in government spending, all to empower the private sector and diminish the public sector. Neoliberalism has to be connected to its essence, which is neoliberal capitalism.

The turn to neoliberalism was born out of an act of violence. A neoliberal capitalist project was imposed on the people of Chile after the assault and the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973. So this is a right-wing, violent phenomenon. Okay? Now it's been able to dress itself up in the garb of state respectability, but it is a rightist tendency. And so that right-wing, neoliberal, totalitarian element is the element that is now constricting the range of acceptable political activity. They are the ones that re-introduced McCarthyism, McCarthyism 2.0. They are the ones that are now moving to smash this political opposition in the form of the Trump movement. They are the  ones that have allowed the FBI to create first, the Black identity extremist category to target us and to modify that with another term but the same objective—to target and undermine Black radical political opposition. So I've been making the argument that while we have been watching the theatrics of Donald Trump, the neoliberal state has been systematically conditioning the people to accept a new kind of totalitarianism. We've always had totalitarianism, but this is a new kind that will, they believe, ensure the continuation of their dominance. 

And I'm suggesting to people that, even though we hate Donald Trump and the traditional right, we are in a position now where we have to defend their traditional bourgeois rights as well as our own, and not allow the acceptable space of political, ideological opposition to be reduced.

We know that the state will reconcile with the right. Their real opposition and the basis for a potential cross class united front is opposition to socialists and communists, those of us on the left. And we on the left we are the real targets of this settler political state. So we've been trying to warn people to be vigilant and not allow themselves to be manipulated by these very powerful forces. And it's very difficult because they control all of the major means of communications and thought dissemination. But we've got to, to the extent that we can, present an alternative perspective so that we can build the kind of opposition we have to build if we're going to survive this critical period. 

AG: So it sounds like you think there's more we can do than duck and cover. 

AB: We have to. Those of us who have been part of the Black Liberation Movement, we have survived because we have resisted, and we also have survived because we know that we have been through the worst. You see, this thing referred to as fascism is nothing new for us, a colonized people, people who have been enslaved. It has typically been called fascism only when white people do certain things to other white people.

When the Nazis were studying, how they were going to construct laws in Germany, they were studying the apartheid system in the US. The Germans practiced building concentration camps in their murderous assault on the territory today referred to as Namibia. So it's when these policies of brutality, of systematic violence, of rape, when they are moved from the periphery, from the colonial periphery to the Global North, that's when they become Hitlerist, the ultimate expression of violence. 

King Leopold II in the Congo? That’s written off. It's not something that’s important, even though 10 million African people lost their lives. And we don't quantify the level of irrational violence, but we do say that we have an experience with this kind of irrational violence. And so we know we have to resist. And so we know that Donald Trump is not the worst US president. We know that things can in fact get worse. And what we do and have done is to prepare our forces, to resist, and to try to provide leadership to other resistors. Because we know even though it will get more difficult, we know that we are still on the right side of history. And there are enough people of conscience in this country who believe that we can build a new, better world. We believe that once we can organize ourselves, even though it may be difficult for a while, we have a real possibility of not only surviving, but also transforming this backward society.

Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC). He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch. He was recently awarded the US Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shim award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize  for promoting peace through her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes Region. Please help support her work on Patreo n . She can be reached on Twitter @AnnGarrison  and at ann(at)anngarrison(dot)com.

We Have To Stop Valorizing Black Cops

By Mary Retta

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

The purpose of policing—to jail and kill Black folks—remains the same regardless of the officers’ race. 

Policing in America is facing a PR crisis. Following the May 25th murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, the term “defund the police” has become a rallying cry for thousands across the country. Six months later, however, America has not defunded its police force––and in fact, has in some cases taken steps to give police departments even more money. Instead, police forces across America have taken an insidious approach: painting their departments in blackface.

After the January 6th Trump riot at the Capitol building , Yoganda Pittman, a Black woman, was named the new Chief of Capitol Police. Her appointment followed the resignation of former Chief Steven Sund and the arrest and firing of several white police officers who were found to be in attendance at the MAGA riot. Pittman’s appointment appeased many liberals who falsely believe that allowing Black folks to infiltrate or run law enforcement agencies will lead to higher levels of safety for Black Americans. The termination of several officers  who took part in the riot has convinced many that we are one step closer to “reforming” the police by weeding out the racist, bad apples within the department. 

This is a nice narrative, but a false one; in order to understand why, we must look at the history of policing in this country. Modern policing in America was originally created as a replacement for America’s slave patrol system wherein squadrons made up of white volunteers were empowered to use vigilante tactics to enforce laws related to slavery. These “enforcers” were in charge of locating and returning enslaved people who had escaped, crushing uprisings led by enslaved people, and punishing enslaved workers who were found or believed to have violated plantation rules. After slavery was legally abolished in 1865, America created its modern police force to do the exact thing under a different name: maintain the white supremacist hierarchy that is necessary under racial capitalism. The purpose of policing––to jail and kill Black folks––remains the same regardless of the officers’ race. 

Liberal media has also contributed to the recent valorization of Black cops. In the days after the January 6th riot, many news outlets aggressively pushed a story about Eugene Goodman, a Black capitol police officer who led several rioters away from the Congress people’s hiding places while being chased by a white supremacist mob. Several news outlets published testimonials of Black police officers disclosing instances of racism within the department. A January 14th article in ProPublica  notes that over 250 Black cops have sued the department for racism since 2001: some Black cops have alleged that white officers used racial slurs or hung nooses in Black officer’s lockers, and one Black cop even claimed he heard a white officer say, “Obama monkey, go back to Africa.” 

These white officers’ racism is unsurprising, and I am not denying any of these claims. But focusing on these singular, isolated moments of racism wherein white cops are painted as cruel and Black cops are the sympathetic victims grossly oversimplifies the narrative of structural racism that modern American policing was built upon. After hearing these slurs that they were allegedly so disgusted by, these Black cops still intentionally chose to put on their badge, don their guns, and work alongside these white police officers who insulted and demeaned them, laboring under a violent system with the sole purpose of harming and terrorizing Black and low-income communities. Similarly, while Goodman’s actions most likely saved many lives during the riot, we cannot allow one moment of decency to erase centuries of racist violence. 

The great Zora Neale Hurston once said: “All my skinfolk ain’t kinfolk.” Her words ring ever true today, and these Black police officers are an excellent example of why. It’s tempting to believe that putting Black folks on the force will solve racial violence, but this is a liberal myth we must break free of. Allowing Black people into inherently racist systems does not make those systems better, safer, or more equitable: a quick look at many Black folks in power today, such as Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Lori Lightfoot, and Keisha Lance Bottoms immediately prove this to be the case. Everyone supporting racial capitalism must be scrutinized and held accountable, regardless of their identity. We cannot on the one hand say that ‘all cops are bastards’ and then suddenly feel sympathy when those cops are not white. If we want to defund and abolish the police, we must resist the narrative that Black cops have anything to offer us.

GameStop and Revolution

By Peter Fousek

It seems that nearly everyone, from major media outlets and economic analysts to folks hopping on Twitter while bored at home or work, has something to say about the recent market activity surrounding a surprising selection of stocks. The securities in question, namely GameStop ($GME), AMC Theatres ($AMC), and BlackBerry ($BB), are unlikely candidates for financial news headlines at a point in time where their respective products and markets have been all but outmoded. Nonetheless, and in fact on account of their perceived antiquation, these companies (and other similarly “obsolete” brands) have become the focus of widespread popular attention.

And yet, only a marginal few of the countless commentaries currently filling up our newsfeeds make note of the most remarkable conclusions to be drawn from these events. This is not to say that the present analyses and examinations are anything short of illuminating: he reaction of regulatory leaders and financial institutions, while largely predictable, are very important for the public to see and process. As in 1987, 2002, 2008, 2020, and any number of other instances of financial distress, we see the powers that be scrambling for means of self-protection while the system that they have constructed for their own benefit temporarily runs the risk of transforming them into its victims.

Of course, market volatility and the resultant risk of financial devastation is an inherent attribute of capitalist economics. But, when the fundamentalist free market works as it is designed, the brunt of that necessary burden is borne almost entirely by the working masses. Whether through exploitative, unjust labor practices during even the best of times, or through the funneling of massive federal funding in the form of bailouts and subsidies to the wealthy while the already minimal safety nets for the workers are further cut during periods of turmoil, we are not hard pressed to find examples of the inequity of capitalism. For proof of the intentional, systemic nature of this injustice, we need only to notice which class it is that takes the risks resulting in frequent crises: the beneficiaries of the system are simultaneously its guarantors, and from their position of power they are able to keep themselves all but invincible to their own carelessness and greed.

While that inherent impenetrability of the capitalist class has not come close to being displaced by the recent events in the market, it has certainly been shaken. Stock market speculators, betting on the failure of a business and doing everything in their power to see it to that end (without concern for the 50,000+ employees who would resultantly lose their jobs) were forced, if only for a moment, to face financial consequences for their profit-seeking irresponsibility. And they were forced to do so not by competitors, peers among the elite, but by members of the working class.

The sad but almost certain outcome of this moment of resistance to the norms of market trends will be the propping up of the hedge funds at risk, and perhaps increased regulation preventing such unprecedented collective action from readily occurring again. We’ve already seen the popular trading platform (ironically named Robinhood) prohibit its users from buying any more of the securities in question—an effort intended to pressure them into selling before the hedge funder’s short positions expire and the elite are forced to pay their dues. And while there is talk of a class action lawsuit against the platform, with reports that Citadel reloaded their short position before instructing Robinhood to block the relevant trades, we cannot expect real justice from a system designed to protect and perpetuate the existing order.

Despite these obstacles, despite these odds, and despite the unfortunate likelihood of an unsatisfactory short-term outcome, these events that we are currently witnessing should be a major cause for hope. One prevalent stance on social media right now is the position that the working-class day traders should sell. On one hand, doing so would benefit the hedge funds that shorted the stocks, as they would be given the chance to buy back at a lower price than when their contract fulfilment deadlines expire. On another, many of the people who have taken part in this mass movement run the risk of losing their money in a world that has refused them any safety net. The greatest cause for optimism comes from a common response to this stance, paraphrased here has it has been stated by many of the working-class day traders in question: we will not sell, because we have nothing to lose.

Many of us who have bought into this moment of collective action against the status quo have done so with the full knowledge that we might not win. Nonetheless, we have taken our position and chosen to hold it, to demonstrate our dissatisfaction with a system designed to subjugate us while empowering and enriching its elite. Because the system is designed as such, we are not afraid to make sacrifices to challenge the present order. The possibility of change is easily worth the risk of losing what we have, because what we have now is worth very little. But the power of our collective action is valuable beyond belief.

The calamity of the COVID crisis has made it blatantly clear that the capitalist class is more than happy to grow its wealth at the direct expense of our most basic rights and safety. The recognition of this flawed reality is reflected, in its early stages, in the collective action taken against those hedge funds who got too sloppy for their own good. This day trader rebellion is not some singular event, and it will certainly not break the current system. What makes it such an incredible historical moment is that it demonstrates the initial awakening of working-class consciousness. The willingness to sacrifice for the sake of a greater good requires us to recognize the injustice of the present order; the events of the past few days have demonstrated that we are beginning to adopt a mindset of that recognition.

To effectively challenge the status quo in a substantial way (such as that achieved by a general strike) the people cannot act out of short-term self-interest. Therefore, successful collective action and resultant progressive change is only possible once our reality under the status quo is so blatantly insufferable that we become willing to sacrifice it for the sake of disrupting the extant order. This is only possible once we realize that the existing system is exploiting us unequivocally, and therefore that we have essentially no chance of “making it” within said system. That realization then compels us to take the only other option: of trying to make it without. The popular resistance demonstrated by the GameStop situation should inspire us to action because in it, we’re witnessing the working-class organically arrive at a trade-unionist consciousness. This indicates that the historical conditions of the present moment are becoming ripe for the working class to achieve class consciousness, from which systemic change can come.

Questioning Violence in the Wake of the Right-Wing Mob Attack in Washington, D.C.

By James Dugan

“The way the oppressor tries to stop the oppressed from using violence as a means to attain liberation is to raise ethical or moral questions about violence. . . . [V]iolence in any society is neither moral nor is it ethical. It is neither right nor is it wrong. It is just simply a question of who has the power to legalize violence.”

–Kwame Ture, 1969.

We won’t soon forget January 6, 2021—the day in which the nationalistic, xenophobic, and vitriol spewing conspiracy theorist, President Donald Trump, incited a violent far-right mob to descend upon and occupy the U.S. Capitol. The riot, all but ushered in by Capitol Police, resulted in 5 deaths, the evacuation of lawmakers, and the disruption of what is typically a ceremonial session to certify the Presidential election results. Elected officials quickly took to Twitter to denounce the siege and criticize violence from both sides of the political spectrum. Senator Ted Cruz tweeted, “The Constitution protects peaceful protest, but violence—from Left or Right— is ALWAYS wrong.” Presiding over the resumption of the Joint Session of the Congress, Vice President Mike Pence echoed the sentiments of many Twitter handles, stating, “To those who wreaked havoc in our Capitol today, You did not win. Violence never wins. Freedom wins.” In short, condemnations of violence carried the day. Yet, as we continue to unravel and examine these extraordinary events, we might detour to ask why politicians were so quick to equate and denounce violence from both sides when the violence on January 6th came from only one: the extreme end of the far-right.

As a jumping off point, we might first question the assertion that violence is “ALWAYS wrong” by asking whether it has ever been true in our country. In what way is the claim that “violence never wins” accurate? Does not the State, from the Pentagon to the local police precinct engage in violence to enforce policy every single day? Is our country’s origin not rooted in and upheld by violence? These questions in mind, an initial attempt at interpreting the real meaning of the unified denouncement of violence by elected officials on January 6th might read, “Violence on both sides is wrong because violence has been monopolized by the State. Violence is only right when the State engages in it.”

While this definition is certainly more instructive, two lines of questioning should be raised before we accept its legitimacy. First, at what point in this country’s history has violence from the left and violence from the right ever been treated equally by the State? Isn’t our history littered with examples of white vigilante violence that the State either openly allied itself with or swept under the rug? From the civilian militias that assisted the State in quelling slave revolts in the 1800s, to the campaigns of terrorism deployed by the KKK throughout the 20th Century, to the police departments that align themselves with white supremacist organizations at protests today (E.g., Kenosha, Wisconsin), violence coming from the far-right has not only evaded punishment, it has been effectively endorsed by the State.

The second line of questioning that should be pursued relates to the position of the State itself. When the State is engaging in violence, is it doing so as some neutral enforcer of justice? Upon the political spectrum, does the State sit objectively in the middle between right and left? To answer this, we might first say that the function of the State is to maintain the structural integrity and stability of Society. At first blush, that sounds neutral enough. But, if our society is inherently unequal—if it is steeped in racial and economic inequality—if it is built upon a foundation of colonization, slavery, and imperialism—is the State which upholds it truly an unbiased authority? Or does it sit far to the right of the political spectrum as an entity that maintains systems of oppression on behalf of those who benefit from economic exploitation and white supremacy? Asked in simpler terms, if the status quo is unequal, and the State exists to maintain the status quo, to which side of the political spectrum does the State’s existence benefit? Understood in these terms, the State exists not as an impartial mediator between left and right, but—as put by Lenin—the “creation of ‘order’, which legalizes and perpetuates [] oppression.” The State thereby exists to deprive “the oppressed classes of definite means and methods of struggle to overthrow the oppressors.” As such, the position of the State is indistinguishable from the position of those who seek to maintain this country’s unequal conditions—i.e., the conservative right.

Why is the State willing to denounce violence from “both sides” if the State effectively exists to serve the right? Well, it should first be noted that this hasn’t always been the case. At times when the State has been unable to quell liberation struggles and social justice movements on its own, it has called upon reactionary civilians to assist in “maintaining order.” By way of example, we can point to the militias that assisted the U.S. Army in protecting settlers as they invaded unceded indigenous land and the militias that assisted the State in massacring coal miners who went on strike to improve working and living conditions. We can point as well to the Fugitive Slave Act—whereby civilians were required to enforce and return fugitive slaves on behalf of the State and wealthy plantation owners. That the street-level fascists—who, as an aside, were so anti-mask that they chose not to wear them while committing crimes in one of the most heavily surveilled buildings in the world—will certainly be made examples of and serve prison time for their federal offenses doesn’t change this reality. It is merely an example of what Benjamin L. McKean calls the “dance between the far right and the electoral right.” As stated in his recent take on the events for Jacobin Magazine, “Right-wing political parties can deplore right-wing street violence while using the disorder caused by reactionary mobs as another occasion for extending power.”

That aside, the State is comfortable in denouncing violence from “both sides” because, when push comes to shove, the State will act on its own behalf to violently suppress any movement that threatens the established order.  In an era in which the Defense budget is to the tune of $740 billion and nearly every local police department is militarized to the point of mimicking a Regiment in the U.S. Marine Corps, the State doesn’t need far-right extremists because the State has the ability to use violence whenever necessary. By monopolizing the use of violence, the State masquerades as a neutral body that proffers to only use force when absolutely justified. But, in practice, the left is typically the only side in which the use of force is ever necessary. The State need not use violence against the far-right because they exist on each other’s behalf—i.e., they are on the same team. The far-right doesn’t threaten the current order, which as we established above, is one of domination and inequality. Thus, in effect, we have finally reached an understanding of what the trope in question actually translates to: “Violence from the left—i.e., violence from the side of the oppressed—is always wrong.” This is the language that has been and will continue to be weaponized against pro-justice movements that yearn for a less oppressive existence. We should be unsurprised when the aforementioned tweets from January 6th resurface in the future to justify the brutal repression of efforts from the left to change the racist and exploitative status quo.

So, let’s return once more to the premise that violence is “ALWAYS wrong.” How can this be true? We have shown that the State has engaged in violence for centuries. We have also shown that the right has done the same without reprimand. Finally, we have established that the current order of our society is one of inherent inequality; an immoral condition of antagonism between—as Malcolm X once put—“those who want freedom, justice and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation.” At this juncture, Paulo Freire’s words are instructive: “With the establishment of a relationship of oppression, violence has already begun. Never in history has violence been initiated by the oppressed. How could they be the initiators, if they themselves are the result of violence?”

What do we do with the apparent paradox that Freire raises? Perhaps it is the initiation of violence, rather than violence itself, which is always wrong. Is violence always wrong, or is violence only wrong when it is used to oppress and exploit; to subjugate and tyrannize? Maybe the more important conclusion to reach here is that self-defense, whether violent or not, is not wrong. Malcolm X had one of the most percipient understandings of the nuances between violence and self-defense. To quote his words once more, “I don’t believe in violence—that’s why I want to stop it. And you can’t stop it with love. So, we only mean vigorous action in self-defense and that vigorous action we feel we’re justified in initiating by any means necessary.”

Alternatively, the paradox could be resolved even if we come to agree with establishment politicians and reactionary conservatives in saying that violence is always wrong. Taking Freire’s words as true, this is merely an admission that the current conditions in this country—the current relationship of oppression—is violent and wrong. If such is true, then perhaps we narrow the definition of “violence” so that it doesn’t include self-defense. Nonetheless, whether only the initiation of violence is wrong, or whether violence is inherently wrong but is defined in such a way as to exclude acts of self-defense, the result is the same: the oppressed are justified in striving for freedom by any means necessary.

With this analysis in mind, we can test the veracity of the Mike Pence/Ted Cruz assertion by raising a few historical questions:

Was Toussaint Louverture wrong to lead the Haitian revolution?

Was Nat Turner wrong to initiate the Southampton insurrection?

Was John Brown wrong to raid Harpers Ferry?

As we ruminate on these final inquiries, we might keep the wisdom of Assata Shakur and Kwame Ture in mind. The former informed us, “Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.” The latter concisely stated, “In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.” 

Reclaiming Hope in a Neoliberal Age

[Photo credit: Joe Brusky]

By Yanis Iqbal

In the second declaration of Havana - delivered on February 4, 1962 - Fidel Castro said, “It is the duty of every revolutionary to make the revolution.” Piercingly clear and searingly sharp - this statement demystifies our coldly scholastic and meek attitude toward socialism. In a world where leftists submissively mold themselves to the contingencies of history, Castro invites us to collectively dare for a firmly definite objective: overthrowing the bourgeoisie state. Such lucidity and precision - apart from organically integrating the ultimate goal of socialism into the planning of concrete action - foregrounds the little explored territory of hope - hope that love and solidarity will survive in the face of barefaced barbarism; hope that the masses will indignantly demand what is theirs; hope that the spirit of revolution will seep through the cracks of hunger and poverty.

Hope

The globalization of capital, the move toward post-Fordist economic arrangements of flexible specialization, and the consolidation of hyper-individualized culture has resulted in a shift from a politics of hope to one of despair. The drastic weakening of the Left has heralded a new age of defeatist literature, absolutely incapable of battling with shifting conjunctural equations. In sum, a historically informed understanding of capitalism and the immense power possessed by the wretched of the earth has given way to theoretical abstractions devoid of any sense of class struggle. What is urgently needed, therefore, is a re-affirmation of the potentialities for liberation and the crystallization of hope as an important element in the entire panorama of endless efforts.

In his book Pedagogy of Freedom, the great Brazilian educator Paulo Freire noted, “our being in the world is far more than just “being.” It is a “presence”…that can reflect upon itself, that knows itself as presence, that can intervene, can transform, can speak of what it does, but that can also take stock of, compare, evaluate, give value to, decide, break with, and dream.” Insofar that we constitute a living “presence”, we are capable of understanding structural conditionedness in depth, in its essence, detaching it from its contingent factuality, from its sheer concrete “being there”.

As human beings, we are conditioned by social relations, not determined by them; the past influences us and our actions, but does not determine those actions or what the future will bring. As soon as we grasp this fact and emerge out of our submersion in reality, we start to treat obstacles as problems rather than as givens and thus, gain the ability to act to change them as well as reflect on the consequences of that action. When we reclaim human agency, our day-to-day interaction with the existential universe acquires an element of hope: since the future is open-ended rather than closed, what we want to create always exists as a true possibility within the womb of our present society. The tomorrow which we want to see has yet to be fashioned by the transformation of today, the present reality. It is something not yet here but a potential, something beyond the barriers we face now, which must be created by us beyond the limits we discover.

Hope acts as the bond between the utopia we desire and the obscenely harsh reality we live in. It is a response to an existential reality that pushes a person forward in anger, indignation and just rage, forcing him/her to negate the ugliness of everyday life. Without hope, there is no possibility for resistance, dissent, and dialogue. It is the prerequisite for all forms of critical agency which aim to radically reconstitute our society. Hope expands the space of the possible, and becomes a way of recognizing and naming the incomplete nature of the present while providing the foundation for informed action. While despair is passive - we are the objects, closed in on by time in a way that we see as inevitable, hope is active - we exercise agency, piercing through time by seeing the alternatives, the possibilities available to us in moving beyond a particular obstruction.  

In Pedagogy of Hope, Freire says, “We need critical hope the way a fish needs unpolluted water… After all, without hope there is little we can do. It will be hard to struggle on, and when we fight as hopeless or despairing persons, our struggle will be suicidal. We shall be beside ourselves, drop our weapons, and throw ourselves into sheer hand-to-hand, purely vindictive, combat.”

Hope can never be divorced from practice and action. It is effective only when undergirded by struggle. Freire writes: “Hope, as an ontological need, demands an anchoring in practice. As an ontological need, hope needs practice in order to become historical concreteness. That is why there is no hope in sheer hopefulness. The hoped-for is not attained by dint of raw hoping. Just to hope is to hope in vain.” Thus, hope, rigorous and intellectual, requires struggle and action. It is not naïve optimism; it is critical and reflective action.

Hope must be concrete, a spark that not only reaches out beyond the surrounding emptiness of capitalist relations, anticipating a better world in the future, but a spark that also speaks to us in the world we live in by presenting tasks based on the challenges of the present time. In The Utopian Function of Art and Literature, the German philosopher Ernst Bloch argues that hope cannot be removed from the world. Hope is not “something like nonsense or absolute fancy; rather it is not yet in the sense of a possibility; that it could be there if we could only do something for it.”

The inseparability of hope from concrete struggle necessitates that it always be social in nature, rather than individual. Hope is not about individual aims, desires, or ambitions; it is beyond simply dreaming of a better day and into consciously thinking about how to work toward a collective vision. Hoping is not tied to having hope-for something, a state of mind that is closer to desire. Hope is concerned with a collective act of hope-in something, rather than with an individual future. It must be capable of producing people willing and able to expand and deepen their sense of themselves, to think of their socio-economic environment critically, to imagine something beyond their own self interest and well-being, to serve the public good, and struggle for an egalitarian future.

Utopia

Without hope, humans would despair in the face of their unfinishedness and would become immobilized. It is hope that helps in leading the incessant pursuit of the oppressed towards humanization. It is hope, in other words, that drives us ever onwards as travelers, wayfarers, seekers, in pursuit of completeness. In this pursuit of completeness, in this hope-driven search for fully realized humanity, education is extremely important. For Bloch, hope left to itself is undisciplined and “easily led astray”, taking the form of wishful, magical “meaningless hope” or, when manipulated by the bourgeoisie, a domesticated, privatized and “fraudulent hope”.

Hope may also manifest itself as passive patience while on the other it may take the form of an unfocused rebelliousness. Since such impatient hope is at risk of turning into defeatism, it needs to be bolstered by careful attention to and analysis of material data. A reckless false hope, an over-zealous hope fails to consider counter-acting forces and ends up in a welter of immobilizing frustration.

Education is, therefore, required in order to provide “contact with the real forward tendency into what is better”. By means of utopian images, hope can be educated, taught, “trained unerringly, usefully, on what is right”. Freire, too, argued that undisciplined, naïve, spontaneous hope needed education in order to connect it tightly to the project of humanization - to sharpen, clarify and illuminate its objective. The need for utopian, humanizing education is rendered all the more important because of the continual operation of dehumanizing forces. As the dominators “have nothing to announce but the preservation of the status quo”, they invariably try to cage the future and make of it “a repetition of the present”. In this context, “the struggle for the restoration of utopia [is] all the more necessary. Educational practice itself, as an experience in humanization, must be impregnated with this ideal”.

In The Politics of Education, Freire outlined what such a utopia can look like: “Revolutionary utopia tends to be dynamic rather than static; tends to life rather than death; to the future as a challenge to man's creativity rather than as a repetition of the present; to love as liberation of subjects rather than as pathological possessiveness; to the emotion of life rather than as cold abstractions; to living together in harmony rather than mere gregariousness; to dialogue rather than silence; to praxis rather than ‘law and order’; to men who organize themselves reflectively for action rather than men who are organized for passivity; to creative and communicative language rather than empty verbosity; to reflective challenges rather than enslaving slogans; and values which can be lived rather than to myths which are imposed.”

Informed by utopia, the language of hope becomes a medium of struggle of those who refuse to lose their grip on reality. This is the language of sound and sober hope, an educated hope grounded in a careful study of material conditions. Educated hope demands that the fact in which it believes be abandoned the moment concrete experience is against it. This method requires continual alertness to indicators that call hope into question and entail a change in praxis.

Faith in Class Struggle

In his book Beyond US Hegemony: Assessing the Prospects for a Multipolar World, Samir Amin states: “There are no ‘laws of capitalist expansion’ that assert themselves as a quasi-supernatural force. There is no historical determinism prior to history itself. Tendencies inherent in the logic of capital encounter the resistance of forces that do not accept its effects. Real history is therefore the outcome of this conflict between the logic of capitalist expansion and other logics stemming from the resistance of social forces that suffer the effects of such expansion.”

As is evident from the quotation, capitalism is not an essentially closed and immutable phase of history, standing above the vagaries of class struggle. Rather, it is a hegemonic arena of constant push-and-pull, open to the possibility of hope. When that hope is recognized by socialists, there emerges a “weak teleological force of open possibilities” - the belief that the collective struggle of the masses will steer the undecidedness of the world process toward a better future. Today, we need to reclaim hope so that we can navigate through the indeterminacy of history and prepare the working class for a revolutionary upheaval.

Yanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at yanisiqbal@gmail.com

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Socialist Within

By Stephen Joseph Scott

To date, the image and memory of Martin Luther King Jr., social justice warrior, peace activist and civil rights icon in the United States, and around the world, has been manipulated, watered-down or diminished of meaning to serve the very forces of capitalist power and domination that the man spent his life in opposition to. In school textbooks in the U.S. for example, young people are taught about King the moderate man of peace, but not the radical King who, criticized by other civil-rights-leaders for speaking out against the Vietnam war, proclaimed, on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City, the U.S. to be, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” By sanitizing the image of the man, they, corporate and governmental powers, not only control the narrative, but they dumb-down and oversimplify the message by lobotomizing the historical record. As W.E.B. Du Bois, American intellectual, asserted: “The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example: it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.” What Du Bois was saying is that by stripping, containing and distorting historical narratives the learner is robbed of the substance, nuance and otherness that history should provide. Each year in January as King is honored in the eyes of the public, there is little mention of the demands of the man and his mission: his fight for economic justice in a society that was built on inequality from the very start, “We can’t have a system where some of the people live in superfluous, inordinate wealth while others live in abject, deadening poverty.” King the radical has been passed-over and neutralized in order to make a moderate image of the man more digestible, not only to whitewash the general public and students alike, but to also pacify the capitalist and white supremacist power structures that he so fiercely opposed.

In an early and intimate correspondence, written in 1952, to his then jeune amour Coretta Scott, King declared “I am more socialistic in my economic theory than capitalistic.” When addressing a book sent to him by Coretta: Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000-1887, King expressed: “On the negative side ... Bellamy falls victim to the same error that most writers of Utopian societies fall victim ... idealism not tempered with realism.” King was a pragmatist who understood fully the cause and effect of a capitalist system that pushed aside the needs of its populous in the name of profit, “So today capitalism has outlived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes. So I think Bellamy is right in seeing the gradual decline of capitalism.” This letter reveals that King was an admitted Socialist and firm in his agreement with Bellamy’s prediction of the inevitable degeneration of capitalism.

Reflecting upon his longtime hero and mentor, Norman Thomas, King espoused the 1932 Socialist Presidential nominee’s views as an inspiration to his own antiwar stance concerning Vietnam in an article published in Pageant magazine in June 1965, “Thomas, a Presbyterian minister, found his interest in socialism stimulated by the antiwar declaration of the Socialist Party in 1917.” It was to President Franklin Roosevelt’s acclaim, that he, once in office, took on much of Thomas’ socialist platform when putting together his well-known New Deal program: “Old-age pensions for men and women 60 years old; Abolition of child labor; The six-hour day, five-day week with no wage reductions; Health insurance and maternity insurance; and, Adequate minimum wage laws.” King inspired by Thomas’ unorthodox socialist approach to the issues of his day, steadfastly admired his principled stand calling him “The Bravest Man I’ve Ever Met,” and embodied Thomas’ following sentiments in words and deeds, “The hope for the future lies in a new social and economic order which demands the abolition of the capitalist system.” The seeds were planted; the capitalist opponent and unyielding guardian of socialist values stood evident throughout King’s ministry.

January 10, 1957 marked the birthday of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia, founded by Martin Luther King Jr. and his father, to fight for civil rights and economic fairness. Increasingly throughout the 1960s, King became more anticorporate; and, more explicitly judgmental of capitalism as a system of innate inequality. In May 1967, while speaking at a SCLC staff meeting, King pushed radical against the injustices baked into the fundamental structure of capitalism, as well as the corrupt and unethical political system that allowed it to ride roughshod over its own population, “We must recognize that we can’t solve our problem now until there is a radical redistribution of economic and political power.” Meaning, the movement had to demand a radical-paradigm-shift in the administrative and monetary structures that undergirded the American system of capitalism, “We must see now that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together you cant [sic] really get rid of one without getting rid of the others the whole structure of American life must be changed.” Again, in August 1967, at a SCLC annual conference, King asked, “Why are there forty million poor people in America? ... When you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth ... you begin to question the capitalistic economy.” King was insistent that the resistance to an unjust system of inequality had to arise. In fact, in that same speech, in defense of workers’ rights, King invoked Walter Reuther, leader of organized labor, founder of the United Auto Workers of America and civil rights activist, “Walter defined power one day. He said, power is the ability of a labor union like UAW to make the most powerful corporation in the world, General Motors, say ‘Yes’ when it wants to say ‘No.’ That’s power.” King, the supporter of cooperative ethics, denoted unions and the ability of workers to bargain collectively against corporate supremacy as an essential tool in checkmating capital and its abuses.

As explained by historian Thomas Jackson, in his work From Civil Rights to Human Rights: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Struggle for Economic Justice, King was definitive as to where public policy in the U.S. needed to go, “Policy must ‘reduce the gap’ between the poor and the majority by making the poverty line a percentage of median income." King argued, raising the poverty line, which was inordinately low in 1964, would bring a response to millions of working poor that President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty overlooked. In King’s estimation, the inadequacy of the government’s solution to the War on Poverty coupled with the war in Vietnam equaled a travesty that disproportionately punished the disenfranchised:

[T]he war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons ... to die.... So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools ... I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

The war in Southeast Asia, in King’s view, was not only a brutal attack on a distant and poor “third-world” country half way around the globe, but a direct assault on America’s poor and working class populace. Again, what King was asserting was that race, war and economics were inextricably woven within the fabric of the U.S. political economy.

A New York Times editorial, dated April 7, 1967, published just three days after King’s powerful antiwar declaration above, encapsulated the prevailing counter assessment of the time. By ignoring class altogether, the conservative view of the day was camouflaged by “temperance,” insisting that the war in Vietnam and racial injustice in the United States had nothing to do with each other, “The moral issues in Vietnam are less clear-cut than he suggests; the political strategy of uniting the peace movement and the civil rights movement could very well be disastrous for both causes.” The point this editorial avoided was the enormous sums of public funds spent on the war, and their violent social and economic impact domestically, which King defined as wasteful and destructive, “I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money.” In place of King’s economic mandate, the editorial used an erroneous conflation designed to convince the reader that melding the anti-war movement with civil rights was more about coupling the issues of race and militarism rather than King’s actual emphasis, economic justice.

King first announced his Poor People's Campaign (a multiracial non-violent crusade focused on jobs and dignity for the poor) at a staff retreat for the SCLC in November 1967. After having crisscrossed America building an alliance for his PPC, gathering support through a coalition of Blacks, farm workers, Native Americans and poor Whites, King delivered a speech, on March 10, 1968, in NYC (just a month prior to his assassination), entitled “The Other America.” King sermonized before a union, Local 1199, mostly comprised of African Americans, “If all of labor were to follow your example of mobilizing ... our nation would be much closer to a swift settlement of that immoral, unjust, and ill-considered war.” It was this kind of tutelage, this kind of unifying, enlisting and organizing of King’s multiracial army of the poor and working class, that threatened the establishment, i.e., government officials, corporate elites and mainstream media. Furthermore, in that same speech, King challenged not just the establishment and its propaganda, but also those among his ranks that doubted the efficacy of his mission to end the war:

I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war.

King, the theologian, in defense of his anti-war stance, harkened back to the teachings of the social gospel as his grounding – itself, a radical pacifist document; and, a passionate plea for the rights and dignity of the poor.

On a prior date, April 14, 1967, at Stanford University, King had given a different version of the same speech, one in which he invoked Frederick Douglass, abolitionist, author and former slave. King publicly attacked the United States and its long vicious history of elite control, systematic racism and unjust class bigotry:

This is why Frederick Douglas [sic] could say that emancipation for the Negro was freedom to hunger ... freedom without roofs to cover their heads. He went on to say that it was freedom without bread to eat, freedom without land to cultivate. It was freedom and famine at the same time.

King’s acknowledgement of Douglass helps to clarify his radical view of the long and inhumane historical narrative, which defined America. He was telling his audience that in a system founded on greed, white supremacy and inequality, freedom was not “freedom” if one was Black or poor. Written from his cell years earlier, in 1963, in his now celebrated Letter From a Birmingham Jail, King penned, “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” In a top-down system of cascading violence King, the shepherd, attempted to give voice to the voiceless and consciousness to the beleaguered masses.

When matching the inequities of the American economic system against other systems, in May 1965, while speaking before the Negro American Labor Council, King lauded the Scandinavian modus of democratic socialism and demanded a fair and just redistribution of America’s affluence: “Call it democracy, or call it democratic socialism, but there must be a better distribution of wealth within this country for all God’s children.” Again, years earlier, from his jail cell in Birmingham, King, the radical humanist, had elegiacally weaved together the socialist values of the collective within faith, race and socioeconomic condition, “I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states ... We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Additionally, public statements like, “I think black people and poor people must organize themselves ... we must mobilize our political and economic power,” congealed King’s position as a “Communist,” as well as a dangerous man whose every move needed to be tracked. Even if one publicly condemned communism as King certainly did, as far back as his Atlanta sermon, given on September 8, 1953, asserting, “Let us begin by stating that communism and Christianity are at the bottom incompatible. One cannot be a true Christian and a true Communist simultaneously.” A open denunciation of communism of this sort mattered little to the foundations of power that were bitterly opposed to the rights and unification of Blacks, the poor and the working class, “Perhaps the quintessential example of a target of state surveillance was Martin Luther King Jr. The surveillance of King was carried out with great intensity by the FBI, in concert with local police forces.” The powers of the State were now solidified and King was the target of that solidification, “[King was] subject to increasing scrutiny and harassment from the FBI, which had wiretapped his phones since 1963,” however, it did not begin under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations; it began much earlier, as early as the first freedom marches in Montgomery Alabama in the mid-1950s.

The FBI directive, dated January 4, 1956, is proof positive that the U.S. government was purposefully investing manpower and resources into tracking King as early as 1955: “On 7 December [1955], the FBI’s Mobile Office began forwarding information on the bus boycott to FBI director J Edgar Hoover.” The document, although redacted, reveals that the FBI’s Special Agent in Charge was working closely with a Montgomery Police Officer gathering, with intent, as much defamatory evidence as possible against King in order to take him and his non-violent call for social-justice down.

The security state not only tracked King’s every movement, but it also harassed him for years using an array of methods from penetrating surveillance to psychological coercion. The foundations of power were deeply distressed by King’s radical decrees, and, his non-violent movement of civil disobedience, “The FBI was so concerned about King’s radicalism and potential for inciting a black revolution that it deemed his activities a threat to national security.” In fact, the FBI sadistically mocked, taunted and provoked King to commit suicide in an anonymous letter sent to him November 21, 1964 - just nineteen-days prior to his acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway:

You are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that ... like all frauds your end is approaching ... your Nobel Prize (what a grim farce) and other awards will not save you ... It is all there on the record, your sexual orgies ... you are done ...  there is only one thing for you to do ... and you know what it is.

This FBI missive proves that the forces within government were willing to stop at nothing to end, what they considered, an imminent threat to the status quo. In fact, by April 3, 1968, after returning to Memphis (one day prior to his assassination), King’s hostility toward the U.S. political economy and its endemic inequalities grew into an overt attack on corporate America, “We are asking you tonight ... to go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola in Memphis ... Tell them not to buy–what is the other bread? Wonder Bread.” This direct challenge to the pecuniary interests of American business only intensified the image of King as a menace.

Governmental forces so loathed King the man and what he stood for, that they pursued the diminution of his persona for years after his murder in Memphis, Tennessee, “While the FBI did intensely track King through his death, it actually continued to besmirch his name even after he was assassinated,” but what authoritarian forces working on behalf of capitalist interests could not completely eviscerate they inevitably subsumed. During his speech on the creation of a national holiday for King - November 2, 1983, some fifteen-years after King’s brutal assassination, Ronald Reagan was one of the first conservatives to publically confiscate, misappropriate and alter King’s image to that of the “extraordinary” American, “In the fifties and sixties, one of the important crises we faced was racial discrimination. The man whose words and deeds in that crisis stirred our nation to the very depths of its soul was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” In spite of the fact that Reagan, and most reactionaries in the U.S., long considered King a traitor, a communist subversive, and, an adversary to corporate and state power, Reagan used King’s words not only to support conservative ideals and policies, but also for his own political gain. Facing re-election in 1984 and waning poll numbers, “[Reagan and] his political advisers hoped for some positive effect among black and moderate white voters.” Reagan, in what can be considered a public-relations-coup, exalted King’s words through a histrionic burst of American exceptionalism, "All of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning ... land where my fathers died ... from every mountainside, let freedom ring," which, as preformed before the nation, deliberately sanitized, ignored and diminished the purpose of King’s mission which stood in direct opposition to the destructive forces of corporate greed.

Finally, what this conservative, and later neo-liberal, approach to King’s views conveniently overlooked, whether in political-thought or school textbooks, is King’s class oriented fight for justice. Throughout his brief life, King affirmed, in private and in public, his socialist beliefs – from his stance on race, war and poverty, to his evaluation of the global political economy. What the foundations of power have attempted to subvert, at all costs, was King’s clarion-call for the unification of the poor, “There is amazing power in unity. Where there is true unity, every effort to disunite only serves to strengthen the unity.” Again, Martin Luther King Jr. was a Socialist and radical humanist at his core, a resolute teacher of the social gospel, a committed supporter of cooperative principles and a firm champion of collectivist values. As a result of his commitment to those ethics, principles and values - he, not only fell victim to the pernicious and menacing powers of the capitalist state, but he also steadfastly and resolutely sacrificed his own life.

Stephen Joseph Scott is  a singer/songwriter, humanist/activist, record producer and actor – a self-taught musician, writer and performer; now living in Philadelphia.  As a musician, He uses American Roots Music, a blend of influences including Country, Soul, Rock, Rhythm and Blues, Bluegrass and Folk to illustrate the current American social and political landscape.  In the tradition of Woody Guthrie, Steve explores the inward and outward fragility of the human condition within a decimated working class – to which far too many fall victim. Emanating from his own humble origins, Steve expresses what he calls the “wrenching torment” of common folk: abuse, neglect, regret, struggle, sacrifice and loss! His latest video: "We Know They Lied" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4_oSycHBCM

"Defund The Police" is Not Abolition

By Greg Hampton

The demand to defund the police has become a central narrative responding to the graphic killing of Black people. Black organizers must now discuss if this strategy can move us closer to community control of public safety and unpoliced Black neighborhoods.

The defund demand has a number of important branches but at its root it is a call to mobilize community energy towards winning votes at local budget hearings. This effort is not just about the vote but reflects a firm belief in U.S. democracy, which at this exact moment may be the most mistaken political stance possible. During the Jan. 6th meeting at the U.S. Capitol we witnessed a show of strength that could not have happened without deep police collaboration. Misleadingly called an insurrection, this was a public service announcement of the vertical integration of the police from the various classes of the right wing grassroots to the very top of the U.S. government. The police are now part of the formal or informal leadership of both political parties. We very well may have witnessed the last presidency of the united states of america because there are guns pointed at the gears of the U.S. political system. So to get significant Black support, defund the police campaigns will have to explain why we should fight for votes in a country that does not have a democracy.  

What Jan. 6th brings into view is a foundational principle of Black abolition, rooted in the philosophy of George Jackson, which defines the U.S. political system as already fascist especially in regards to Black people. In fact George Jackson argued that "...fascism-corporativism did indeed emerge, develop and consolidate itself into its most advanced form here in Amerika." So when defunders define abolition as mobilizing people to win budget votes they are in opposition to the tradition shaped by George Jackson as they march us back into the burning house Martin Luther King Jr. lamented. 

The myth of U.S. democracy is even more pronounced at the local and state level, where defund must win if they are to set the stage for abolition. How the strongest defund efforts fare in places where they should have a number of progressive allies and resources, is revealing. In Minneapolis the death of George Floyd led to a precinct burning down. Then advocates mobilized the community to win a budget fight. They won the vote to defund the police in order to "dismantle" the department. This was an incredible victory that was quickly rolled back by an unelected city commission. To mask the complete lack of democracy the elected leaders of the city then placated defunders with an $8 million police cut, while adding $11 million in future hires. This cut moved already civilian staff to other departments and the main budget cut really came from police overtime. Minneapolis police surpass their overtime budget and just this summer received 37 times their overtime budget when they repressed the mobilizing from George Floyd's death. If this is evidence of things to come the entire defund the police movement may find even maintaining current police levels as a victory. 

In Los Angeles, Peoples Budget LA, a defund campaign led by BLM Los Angeles managed to cut 8% or $150 million from the LAPD budget. Maintaining this pace every year would completely defund the infamous LAPD in a little over 12 years. Except that the $150 M cut may not actually come out of the LAPD budget. And the $97 Million that is supposedly directly cut from the police budget actually comes from overtime spending, which the LAPD can still get in the event of an emergency. Given the current state of the country, emergencies are inevitable. The defund cut itself simply replaced a planned LAPD budget increase of the same size. 

In some cities the system is so undemocratic and corrupt the police don't bother to hide how they use intimidation to directly control politics. When Baltimore residents pushed a defund the police effort along with Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle they were faced with liberal Black leadership. You can clearly see how that even a campaign this strong is frustrated on all sides by the police union and the undemocratic municipal procedures and committees. They detail that John Hopkins University alone has the ability and desire to maintain their own police force. In some cities this dynamic has collapsed into political theatre. So again and again the strongest defund the police coalitions are faced with undemocratic, untransparent, complicated political systems that regional power players manipulate with ease. This is why Black abolition is a divestment from U.S. democracy and an investment into Black sovereignty. A key difference between abolition for Black liberation and the defund demand, is that defund asks for permission and abolition does not. 

The defund argument also assumes that public support for the police is rational. But the support for police is non-rational. We know this because police funding increases even when crime goes down. The US has always been willing to fund the police even as the rest of the public infrastructure crumbles. This means if all defunders have is data and well researched talking points it wont be enough. Police are supported whether it makes budget sense or not because Black people must be watched, and Black revolt must be kept down. This fundamental role of US police is independent of any budget. You can defeat it but you can not defund it. 

Now in community spaces and corporate media, the call to defund the police rests on a core contradiction. On the one hand defund is presented as a demand housing a set of mandatory budget votes leading up to abolition then at the same time defund the police is the same thing as abolition. Critical Resistance and some of the most well thought out defund campaigns argue that while, "a lot of people are trying to say there's a difference between police reform, defunding the police and abolition. And the call to defund the police is abolitionist. It's a step towards abolition. It is not a separate, moderate or watered-down thing." But this contradiction is what allows reforms and reformists to then present themselves as abolitionists. So if defund the police was the same thing as abolition there would be no need to add it to the original call to abolish the police. And by redefining abolition as winning votes at budget hearings then that means defunders like Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley are also abolitionists fighting to place the public safety of Black neighborhoods under the community control of Black people with no police.

They are not. 

Defund democrats are pro-police and gave Trump record-breaking support for the U.S. global police forces that represss Black uprisings around the world. This support for defund comes from a belief, that it actually would never lead to community control of public safety and unpoliced Black neighborhoods. Besides on the federal level, defunders like the squad may have already defeated the aspirational budget goals of local defund the police efforts. Because by getting behind tax cuts, the CARES ACT and the federal COVID-19 response  they have put together a record breaking transfer of wealth to the same class whose property the police guard.

Right now, U.S. state and local governments spend roughly $115 Billion on local and state police. If defund campaigns completely won and cut 100% of police funding tomorrow, Jeff Bezos alone could cover the loss and still be one of the richest men in the world. The 1% also has direct investment in the killings we see on the news. Starting as a slave market, Wall Street now makes money whenever police kill someone. This is dangerous because even though private funding for local law enforcement is low, if cities were forced to cut the police's public money stream, municipal governments could use any number of private financing mechanisms to refill their coffers. 

While wholesale financing of local police through private funds may still be a bridge too far, the police simply have a wealth of resources at the local level to quietly frustrate defund budget votes. Perhaps the most common feature of U.S. democracy is that laws supported by most people do not pass because of the money defund democrats pass to elites. Even within the current funding guidelines, police foundations can buy time by forcing campaigns to wade through sophisticated budget manipulations, sapping movement energy. The 1% already directly support the army who protect their property through a complicated international network of police associations, drug running operations, unions, foundations, government agencies, and right wing formations. This is the police network that was made even stronger with record level tax cuts and the CARES ACT's huge wealth transfer. The police can also adjust for losses in man power by continuing the expansion of  fusion centers, a national surveillance system that merges local and federal law enforcement. After decades of extorting cities the 1% have developed plenty of local financial instruments to help the police cover losses, play number games, and frustrate defunders with fake victories until they finally figure out how to defeat those campaigns.

But this summer we saw a shift in national consciousness after decades of mobilizing around Troy Davis, the state led horror of Hurricane Katrina, the theft of water in Flint and many other communities, the killing of Miriam Carey and countless more. For a brief moment this summer most U.S. citizens supported the burning of a police precinct. So in light of this history of fascism and our current climate, the belief that the police answer to the votes of city officials is a faith statement only non-Black believers in U.S. democracy can really afford. The only way police will leave Black neighborhoods is because Black people took community control of public safety and opposed police presence. 

Ultimately, what sets the stage for Black liberation isnt policy campaigns but the grassroots organizing that lives in every Black neighborhood. But defund the police paints a linear process for us to follow. This approach starts with protests that force a vote, then the police are defunded. And it makes perfect sense why defunders believe that by "reducing police budgets, communities are able to make autonomous decisions about how to use resources that would otherwise go to surveilling, arresting, and incarcerating them." But whenever a critical mass of people are agitating and taking action, this is the long reform process that is placed in front of the goal of abolition without any explanation of why this detour into the U.S. political system is mandatory or even necessary. In this vein, Working Families Party argues that "the only way to stop police violence is to defund the police and instead create, uplift and fund the community services that keep Black people safe, healthy and free." 

The vote is not the road to Black liberation. That debate has been repeated and is settled just by the fact it still needs to be held. To unpolice our neighborhoods Black people will need to work with each other through families and neighborhood networks. Now when defund gained mainstream prominence most of the people who mobilized on the street and in media were non-Black people. This created a discussion between politicians and non Black groups that may cloud how we currently understand defund the police. So as always its important to bring discussions back to the material conditions of your particular community. Now since Black liberation must be community driven you may assess that defund the police is a useful tool to begin community discussions about abolition. Or you may decide defund the police is a good way to reveal US fascism and the absence of democracy. If that is the case defund presents key questions for Black organizers.

Black abolition views U.S. democracy as a myth, and U.S. fascism as already present. How do you negotiate a call to defund the police that keeps Black politics within the U.S. political system when Black abolition calls Black people to leave that behind? You will also have to determine how you can divest from the police and invest into social services that other Black liberation efforts are working to abolish. As you build, discuss what the role of defund's rational budget campaign when public support for the police is non-rational. Black organizers will also need to discuss the contradiction in the popular stance that defund is the same thing as abolition and also the road to it. After this you will have to navigate anti-abolition defunders who actually oppose putting public safety in organized Black hands. 

Now since Black abolition holds that fascism is already here and that the vote is too small of a room for Black politics, where do Black politics live? While the current defund conversation may currently be between non-Black people and the state, Black abolition requires faith in organized Black communities. Whatever your level of participation and reflection, if you move in that spirit you will be able to find political demands rooted in that practice. Campaigns focused on abstract policy will only connect to Black people as characters they write about, history they theorize or clients their non-profit and contract work services. Black abolition organizers must put into practice tangible outlines of how you and your family can be abolitionists amidst the real violence you face. We see this immediately in community conversations, because Black people routinely shoot down any abstract discussion of unpoliced neighborhoods. Its not enough to just describe the problem of violence, prisons and police. We will have to be disciplined and repeatedly explain abolition in clear creative ways. 

Black politics lives within and among Black people in your neighborhoods, associations, cultural spaces, and families. You wouldn't be here if you didn't come from something, and you do not come from an incompetent people. We are entering a war over the terms and conditions of the next era. "At this stage, how can anyone question the existence of a fascist arrangement?" What happened at the U.S. capitol was only the beginning of what is coming. Even with a democracy, the U.S. has no problem maintaining, "simultaneously a dictatorship over black Americans." Look within your immediate family friends and social circles. You will be surprised at the wisdom you will find there along with first hand accounts of similar times. Trust the work of your elders and the previous movements that hidden within arms reach are all the resources you need to create the cultural practices and institutions that will nurture and sustain a new Black liberation movement. Tap into the best of your ancestral traditions and hone a sharp analysis of the current conditions. Get your team together and get to work. The only way we can establish Black community control of public safety is by making community wide moves and building the bricks and mortar of whatever we need to make abolition a reality on our terms.

From Neoliberalism to Nowhere

By Thomas McLamb

From 1932-1945, FDR responded to the Great Depression by way of the New Deal to temporarily put a bandage on the crises of capital. This creation of the American Welfare State served as the response to the occasional short-term downturns of capitalist expansion. From FDR’s term until the Oil Crisis in the early 70s, the United States capitalist system enjoyed a period of steady growth and a stable rate of profit, whose occasional declines were solved by way of a variety of government programs that sent one clear message; the government existed to serve the people.

When Nixon took office, the processes of persistent economic inflation became apparent, indicating that this long period of economic expansion and stability was changing. That said, Marxist analyses of economic patterns of expansion, contraction, and long-term growth should stray away from the use of inflation as an economic pattern. Inflation is merely the process by which bourgeois economists summarize the degeneration of working-class buying power and strengthening of capitalist class buying power. In one short phrase – the dollar is fundamentally worth less to the worker than it is to the capitalist. While the capitalist is able to purchase more money with less, an exponential process depending on how much capital has been accumulated, the worker is dependent on purchasing essential life commodities, healthcare, food, housing, etc. with their dollar; the worker does not enjoy the luxury of purchasing more money with less, a process that inevitably leads to the phenomenon neoclassical economists refer to as inflation. Regardless of the actual relationship of inflation and the working-class, the aforementioned cycle of profits and growth from the post-war periods came to an end with the ’73-75 recession. The long wave of capitalist expansion had begun to wane, signaling the forthcoming period of long-term stagnation of working-class wages still underway today.

The end of the doctrine of the Welfare State led directly into a new doctrine of economic policy. The dominant economists of the period suggested that government welfare was wasteful and inefficient, that the occasional patterns of economic recession could be solved by allowing the markets to regulate themselves. The general assumption of these economists, i.e. Friedman et. al., was that government welfare resulted in an exponential process of inflation that could be remedied by a revival of liberal economics. This renascent adoration of laissez-faire capitalism came to serve as the genesis and framework of neoliberalism – the doctrine of cutting government expenses by any means necessary. Following the birth of neoliberalism, austerity quickly set in. The government responded to crises by allowing the bottom to hit the bottom, and externalizing and outsourcing previously domestic forms of labor that had now suffered from a declining rate of profit.

Alongside the externalization and outsourcing of labor from the United States, a process that signaled the shift of the U.S. to a strictly service and information economy, came a renascent nationalism and patriotism within the United States. This renascent nationalism served as the popular justification for the endless oil wars in the middle east, the incessant and undemocratic CIA-backed military coups in Latin America, and the continuous starving acts of tariffs and embargoes against foreign governments who refused to kneel to the imperialist war cry of neoliberalism. In industries where the rate of profit waned in the United States, the government merely cut popular welfare programs to fund the imperialist war machine to appropriate resources, governments, and economies of foreign governments, continuing the accumulation of capital and comfortable seat of influence of America.

Away from the wars, coups, and starvation acts outside of American borders, American workers waded through an ever-changing industry of employment in the United States. The neoliberal response to the discovery of ‘inflation,’ better understood as another symptom of the declining rate of profit, resulted in the same outcome the neoliberal economists and politicians believed they would be avoiding – a period of long-term stagnation of working-class wages and the devaluation of the buying-power of the working-class by large-scale privatization and imperialist efforts to sustain the total economic growth of the U.S. economy. Of course, these solutions worked to create more wealth than ever and higher profitability that ever before in the United States, but the measure of the total economy and its exponential growth ignores the continuous struggle of the non-propertied class. Marx’s theories of surplus value provide us with the truth that all profit is derived solely from labor. With that understood, wherever labor costs can be reduced, they will be, and profits will increase. Additionally, the buying-power of those wages themselves have been structurally diminished long-term by the neoliberal doctrine. This process of the stagnation of working-class buying power can be observed in the history of wages since the beginning of the neoliberal period. Real per capita wealth in the U.S. has more than doubled since 1964 while average real wages have barely increased. From 1964 to 2018, the buying power of the average worker in the United States increased by only 11.7% while the actual average wages themselves have increased by 806%. This mass rate of inflation is not an aberration of capitalist market economies – it is precisely a function of the long and short waves of capitalist development; all of which is accelerated and exaggerated by neoliberal austerity.

Over the past 50 years, over 90% of all growth in income has gone directly to the top 5% of households in the United States. Just short of 3% of total economic growth went to the bottom 20% of households, while more than half went to the wealthiest 20%. Wealth inequality from the late sixties throughout the development of the neoliberal period can be described in one sentence – the rich got richer and the poor get poorer.

The bottom 95% of families have experienced within themselves disproportionate rates of economic growth relative to productivity. While workers are producing more than ever for their bosses, hikes in productivity in the neoliberal period haven’t resulted in higher wages at all. Drew DeSilver has pointed out in his work through the Pew Research Center that while productivity amongst workers has increased by 80% over the past 30 years, the data will show that the buying power of the wages those workers earned has moved up barely a percent and a half.  Despite this near doubling in productivity, neoliberal austerity and market purism have made more money than ever for those at the top, and stolen more than ever from those at the bottom. The general tendency of money to move upwards on the capitalist market has resulted in exponential gains for the ultra-rich, which as mentioned before, creates an exponential increase in the buying-power of the rich and a stagnating or decreasing buying-power of the poor.

Alongside the hikes in productivity and slow growth of wages, nearly 80:1 from 1987-2017, there has been a drastic shift in employment by major industry sector amongst the total workforce. From 1948-1975, the total employees in the United States increased by 65.67%, around 2.43% annually. From 1975-2017, total employees increased by 79.23%, or 1.89% annually. Even though productivity and total wealth increased exponentially over the neoliberal period, employment decreased in growth year after year.

Amongst the general change in total employment, specific industries saw drastic changes during the neoliberal period compared to the period of government intervention policy stemming from the FDR era. Manufacturing jobs have disappeared in mass numbers since the beginning of the neoliberal era. Manufacturing has been pushed abroad to keep up with the ‘cutting costs’ doctrine of neoliberalism, while more workers than ever are forced into low-paying service and information jobs, since these are the only jobs that exist anymore. Retail positions have increased proportionally with total employment, but many of these positions are occupied by formerly well-employed manufacturing jobs. The shift in employment by major industry sector can be observed as a primary vehicle for the slow-growth of working-class buying power, as well as an expression of ever-disappearing manufacturing jobs.

In terms of buying power of the working-class, the numbers represent a similar transformation of shares of economic expansion, though the buying-power can illuminate a more concrete examination that accounts for the bourgeois notion of inflation and market behaviors.

From 1967 to 2017, the buying power of the lowest 80% of families grew at a similar rate to the actual dollar amount in the previous data set. From a sliding scale of the least to most wealthy in terms of economic expansion, the buying-power of the poor increased by around half compared to their dollar-amount wages while the buying-power of the wealthiest percentile classes increased by around 2.1 times. Though these numbers from the census do adjust buying power to examine the market behaviors and adjust the wages to paint a more accurate picture using consumer price indexes, these numbers are not adjusted to account for factors that only affect growth amongst the ultra-rich, i.e., debt, investments, property, etc. Furthermore, the tendency of capital upwards results in exponential increases in the buying-power of those at the top, but commodities can only grow so expensive before those at the bottom can no longer pay for them, thus the tendency of the rate of profit to fall despite exponential levels of expansion for the most-high spheres of capital.

Of course, the most wealth 5% of households in the United States have enjoyed economic expansion that dwarfs that of those at the bottom, a near 60-40 split. This is largely due to the existing ownership of the means of production and investment spheres by the ultra-rich maintaining their positions through one of the largest hikes in productivity in the history of capital itself.  The bureau of labor statistics provides us with a catalogued measure of productivity increases by major industry sector, though some catalogs only go back as far as 1987. Despite this, the numbers are still useful to examine the production and profitability levels of economic industry relative to real wage increases.

There are data series on productivity in the manufacturing sector using the same measuring scale as the data set above, though the historical series only date back to 1987, presenting several problems, but the data itself is still very useful. The data is included in the above chart, though 1967-1986 are omitted for mentioned reasons.

Referring to the real average household incomes of the same time-set discussed above, we can build a relationship by percentile class of the wage-productivity increase from 1967-2017. Listed below are both the data from 1967-2017 as well as a smaller section from 1987-2017 to include manufacturing data relative to the other major industry sectors.

Regardless of year and industry, there is a general tendency both within the latent capitalist mode of production as well as the neoliberal tendency for exponentially disproportionate ratios of growth to productivity depending on income class. Since 1987, there has been a harsh stagnation of wages especially amongst the poorest 20% of households in the United States that was not shared in years prior. Following the tendency of the income-productivity relationship upwards can illuminate the fact that the neoliberal period has resulted in the richest few in the United States have received the overwhelming majority of money and buying-power from the bottom. The philosophy of trickle-down economics combined with the furthering development of the capitalist tendency towards class-monopoly has resulted in both the longest period of wage stagnation in the history of American capitalism as well as the largest wealth inequality in the history of this country. Hikes in productivity are useful for examining the rate at which working-class wages are outpaced by economic growth, but these productivity measures also help illuminate the mass-level of accumulation and theft that the billionaire class has taken part in over the past 50 some-odd years.

In all industries, sans manufacturing, the highest 20% of household incomes have reaped the rewards of the increased productivity of the bottom 80%. The outsourcing and evisceration of American manufacturing deals primarily with the need for a higher profitability from labor by those who own the manufacturing means, as well as the systemic decline in union membership and labor solidarity from Reagan to present. Furthermore, the top 5% of families have almost exclusively reaped the rewards of hikes in productivity, being the only percentile class in the country that has achieved a level of economic growth that is even barely comparable to the growth of productivity. Again, this wage-productivity relationship only grows more dramatic and exponential as you examine those higher and higher up on the wealth ladder. For those at the very top, their economic growth makes that of those of the bottom 99% seem like raindrops in the vast open ocean.

In the period of FDR, there were three solutions to the crisis of capitalism across the world – Bolshevism, fascism, and social-democratic government policy. If the policy of FDRs social-democratic platform was to sustain the rate of profit through bailing out the worker through mass government programs, the policy of neoliberalism was to simply allow the economy to bottom out, so that the rate of profit could be restored organically in the market. The neoliberal period which proceeded from the welfare state allowed for mass accumulation of capital by the ultra-rich at exponential levels. In the early 20th century, bailing out the ultra-rich would not allow for an organic recovery of the rate of profit since the raw inequality between the rich and poor paled in comparison to that of the 21st century. However, in 2020, the capitalist system has been able to sustain its profits by doing precisely what couldn’t be done 100 years ago – bailing out the 1% of the 1% time after time. The capital that has been accumulated in disproportionate amounts over the past 100 years has facilitated this very process of the reintroduction of mass government programs that serve the market, only this time, they serve those at the top instead of those at the bottom. The program of neoliberalism is the death knell of capital, whose only defense is to consume its very mechanism of its own creation and sustenance.

The rate of profit is in decline. There are two paths forward from neoliberalism. The first path is the possibility that capital can save itself through the false-promises of several decades of social-democratic reform, recreating the conditions that led to the development of neoliberalism. The second path is the dissolution of capital by its own hand. Capitalism has dug its own grave through the doctrine of neoliberalism, resulting in the greatest wealth inequality in the history of capital and the ever-growing contradictions of labor and productivity. The path forward from the death knells of capital cannot be understood as some sort of communist eventuality. Capital will certainly die, but what takes is place is certainly indeterminate.

Neoliberalism has wreaked havoc on the worker for half a century now. Corporate tax cuts, the starvation of the worker, and the greatest wealth inequality the country has ever seen – these are the legacies of neoliberalism. Its doctrine has been nothing but the largest heist in the history of capitalism, with the ultra-rich stealing more every day from the pockets of the worker. The path forward must address these concerns, lest we allow the economy to bottom out, and leave authoritarianism and failed bourgeois economics to dominate the world as it has for the past century.

Thomas McLamb is a Lebanese-American Marxist writer, historian, and graduate student residing in the so-called United States. Thomas has spent the last few years researching historic wages, economic expansion, recession, and the currents of capitalism both in the so-called United States as well as internationally.

Militant Anti-Imperialism and Liberal Anti-Imperialism: A Demarcation

By Will Griffin

The term “anti-imperialist” gets thrown around so much today that the very definition of it is muddled up. Does opposing the wars abroad make you anti-imperialist? What about the wars here at home? Are there different kinds of anti-imperialists? Can we oppose military/political interventions while supporting economic interventions? How would they be different and how can we draw lines of demarcation between these differences?

First, let’s make clear what demarcation means. J. Moufawad-Paul describes drawing clear and decisive lines of demarcation as a militant philosophical approach to distinguish between competing interpretations within “the zones of praxis through which it cuts (Demarcation and Demystification, 2019).” In a nutshell, to be as precise as possible in our understanding of our own praxis and theory, it behooves of us to draw clear and distinct lines of differences between particular strategies and interpretations. 

In the book, Philosophy of Antifascism: Punching Nazis and Fighting White Supremacy (2020), Devin Zane Shaw draws a clear line of demarcation of militant antifascism and liberal antifascism. This book provided a clear framework for me to apply the same to the anti-imperialist movement. 

The term “militant” is another word which has been thrown around a lot. Today, it often gets associated with some kind of unnecessary violence, an incorrect usage of the term due to liberal propaganda. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. practiced militant nonviolence. We can confidently say that a militant is someone who is willing to face antagonistic contradictions head on. Whether a militant uses the tactic of nonviolence or armed struggle to face an antagonistic enemy is not the question as both are militant. A labor strike can be militant. A sit-down protest can be militant. Anything can be militant as long as they are willing to face their oppressors. 

In order to understand anti-imperialism more clearly, we must demarcate a split within anti-imperialism itself. The two main trends within any anti-imperialist movement are militant anti-imperialism and liberal anti-imperialism. Both types of anti-imperialisms stand against imperialism, undoubtedly. Yes, I believe liberal anti-imperialists genuinely want to end imperialism; it is just their framework of understanding imperialism is incorrect and therefore their strategy to end imperialism is most certainly wonky. This wonky framework and strategy used by the liberal anti-imperialist could potentially lead down the road of capitulation to the imperialists, which is one reason we need to draw a distinct line of demarcation between liberal and militant anti-imperialism. Wherever liberal anti-imperialists fail, militant anti-imperialists can pick up the ball and continue pushing forward. 

Liberal anti-imperialism tends to funnel resistance back towards the institutions which are practicing imperialism, mainly the capitalist State. Essentially, they believe this State is neutral and can be won over to an anti-imperialist line. For those of us familiar with Marxist history, especially V.I. Lenin’s work in State and Revolution, understand the capitalism-imperialist state can never be won over as it is ultimately tied by a thousand threads to the capitalists and imperialists. So, liberal anti-imperialists are essentially begging a body of parasites to stop being parasitic. This is akin to requesting a human to stop drinking water or for the Earth to stop revolving around the Sun. 

The liberal anti-imperialists tend to denounce nearly all militant forms of resistance to imperialism, such as People's Wars in the Global South, when black and brown people destroy property or march with weapons or anything that they construe as "too far" or "too militant.". In the end, liberal anti-imperialists adhere to a faith in the institutions of government. Much of their faith relies on voting imperialism out of existence. The typical pattern for them is to not only denounce imperialism, but also stigmatize the militant anti-imperialists. How can one say no to the oppressor but also say no to the oppressed? Anyone who opposes liberal ways must be opposed against themselves; this is the liberal mentality.

A fundamental and detrimental mistake made by liberal anti-imperialist is taking the tactic of nonviolence and upholding it as a principle. This is the reason why liberals sit on the sideline as people are murdered in the street and bombed by drones from the sky. Kwame Ture taught us a valuable lesson in a speech where he said, 

“We must not confuse tactics with principles. This is an error that Dr. MLK made, and it also helps to confound the error. Dr. King took nonviolence, which is a tactic, and made it a principle. Being an honest man he came to compound his error because being an honest man he couldn’t compromise this principle, so he was forced to say ‘at all times, under all conditions, we must use nonviolence’. Malcolm X was correct. Malcolm said ‘nonviolence can only be a principle in a nonviolent world’, as MLK’s death came to prove.” (Kwame Ture speech at Florida International University, 1992)

Militant anti-imperialism uses direct action and does not rely on the capitalist State for any kind of policy change. We support movements who practice revolutionary militancy. We understand the necessity of fighting back physically in order to defend oneself from the horrors of imperialism. Militant anti-imperialists tend to realize that imperialism cannot be voted out of existence, it must be stepped on, forced out and overthrown. Militant anti-imperialists place their faith in the people, not the imperialist state; a huge fundamental difference from liberal anti-imperialists. 

The purpose of demarcation here is to force open the terrain of a radical, even revolutionary, militant left that goes beyond a parliamentary struggle. Also in doing so, we can mark the terrain for effective movement building. Despite having some gains in exposing the brutality of imperialism, liberal anti-imperialism will ultimately fail. When it does fail, a militant anti-imperialist movement will offer a new option for people to compete against this failure. 

We should not transform this non-antagonistic relationship between militant anti-imperialist and liberal anti-imperialists into an antagonistic contradiction. Many of the liberal anti-imperialists can, and should, be won over. We must oppose dogmatically applying this demarcation but hold true to it. Liberal anti-imperialists, at least some of them, can be shown the failures of their framework and strategy eventually winning them over to supporting militant anti-imperialist struggles. After all, were any of us born a militant anti-imperialist? No, we had to work our way up to this level of consciousness. 

I want to stress the importance in one of the differences in these trends. Liberal anti-imperialists deny the existence of militant struggles against imperialism, here and abroad. This fundamental outlook leads to the whitewashing of history and current movements around the world. It explains the limitations and failures of the mainstream “anti-imperialist” movement. They disconnect from the militant struggles and, therefore, are demarcating themselves from actual and effective anti-imperialist movements. In my experience, it’s often the pacifists who are the first to censure, and even condemn, movements which choose to pick up the gun, burn a facility down or even dress up in military fatigues. This is intrinsically tied to the idea of holding nonviolence as a principle. 

Is it really anti-imperialist? Anti-imperialism is just as much about opposing the Coca-Cola factory in Iraq as it is in opposing the bombs being dropped. Economic intervention is just as important as a military/political intervention. Imperialism is primarily an economic system, where the more powerful nations exploit, or super-exploit, the less powerful nations. Often, it is about stealing resources but also other reasons like geopolitics. Nonetheless, imperialism maintains an unequal economic, cultural and territorial relationships between nations and capitalist enterprises, often in the form of empire, based on domination and subordination. 

In our universities, the bourgeois academics develop the ideology for the imperialists. One method involves disassociating politics from economics. To understand more precisely and in a more holistic manner of our world, we require the more accurate term, political economy. Politics and economics are intrinsically tied to each other. The military intervention invades in order to protect the economic system of exploitation and super-exploitation. In our era, the Global North exploits the Global South for its resources and to play on the grand chessboard of hegemony. This is only made possible with a powerful capitalist state. 

Liberal anti-imperialists lack a clear idea of imperialism by limiting it to military/political interventions only, leaving out the possibility of economic interventions. When transnational corporations intervene in a poor and oppressed nation in order to plunder its resources, is this not a form of imperialism? The military/political intervention is dependent upon the economic intervention. In fact, the State intervenes in order to protect the economic interests of the ruthless and exploitative corporations. This fractured framework of the liberal anti-imperialists weakened their resolve in opposing imperialism. The clarity around the nature of imperialism can only strengthen the anti-imperialist movement. Drawing this line can help to offer clarity on where each one of us may stand. It helps us to develop a more effective strategy in order to defeat imperialism. Militant anti-imperialists hold true to the power of the people, to combat imperialism in an assertive yet principled manner, and to overcome the weaknesses in our strategies and tactics. 

Will Griffin is a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who is now an anti-imperialist and a content creator at The Peace Report, a militant anti-imperialist media collective. 

Enabling a Fascist Putsch and Empowering a Big Lie

[PHOTO CREDIT: KENT NISHIMURA/LOS ANGELES TIMES/POLARIS]

By Werner Lange

January 6, like December 7 eighty years earlier, will forever live in history as a day of infamy. Yet unlike the foreign military attack on the US base in Pearl Harbor in 1941, the domestic terrorist attack upon the US Capitol in 2021 enjoyed the objective support of nearly one-third of the US Congress and vast sections of the US population. “Stop the Steal”, the rallying cry of the violent mob which invaded and ransacked the US Capitol was officially echoed by 147 members of Congress, all Republicans, later on that infamous day and trumpeted loudly throughout the land for months by none other than the President of the United States and his regime. Fascism in America reared its ugly head simultaneously at the top and bottom of the power hierarchy on January 6, 2021. And its decapitation is nowhere in sight.

There was, of course, no realistic possibility that this dramatic and diabolical last ditch effort would succeed. Over 50 failed lawsuits and negative rulings by some 80 different judges have secured the legitimacy and integrity of the November election results in the eyes of the law, but not in the polluted minds of Trump’s enablers in Congress and his rabid followers in the public. In fact, with each successive filed and failed lawsuit, the conviction of a stolen, not lost, election took greater hold of greater numbers of those 70 million citizens who voted for Trump. According to a nationwide survey conducted just prior to the November election, about 65% of the registered voters (whether Republican, Democrat or Independent) all agreed that they trusted the US election system. By late December that trust had risen to 80% among Democrats, but plummeted to 45% and 30% among Independents and Republicans, respectively. Similarly, by year’s end, 90% of Democrats said the 2020 presidential election was free and fair, while only 28% of Republicans agreed. In mid-November 27% of Republican voters said Trump should never concede, whereas by late December 36% held that position. In other words, there is a direct positive correlation between the number of lawsuits filed challenging the election results and the number of Americans, primarily Republicans, who firmly believe that the election was stolen.

So. what was the real purpose of this bizarre parade of DOA lawsuits? It was not to overturn the election results. It was to convince increasing number of Trump supporters to embrace the Big Lie that the election was stolen and that a Biden presidency is illegitimate. The manifest function of these frivolous lawsuits was an abysmal failure, but their latent and real function proved to be a resounding success.

And therein lies the ongoing and growing danger.

At his “Save America” rally in front of the White House, Trump not only openly incited the violence that followed at the US Capitol that fateful day, but more ominously he declared that “today is not the end, it’s only the beginning” and that “for our movement…the best is yet to come”. That movement is a fascist one. He and his enablers in the suites of Congress and his cult followers in the streets of America are hell-bent on creating a fascist America in the future.

The effort and tactic are not without historical precedent. One of the Big Lies effectively used by fascist forces and assorted masters of deceit in Weimar Germany was that of the “dolchstoss”, the “stab-in-the-back” that unpatriotic liberals and a corrupt ruling elite supposedly inflicted upon the German people causing a great nation to lose WWI. Those alternative facts launched by an effective propaganda enterprise helped pave the path toward the Third Reich. That Big Lie then, like the stolen election lie now, resonated among vast sections of an angry and frustrated populace. Stable governments rest upon the secure foundation of the consent of the governed, something that the Biden Administration lacks in the minds of tens of millions of Americans who are absolutely convinced his presidency is illegitimate, and that they were, in effect, stabbed in the back by a rigged election controlled by liberals and traitors. Those behind the “Stop the Steal” effort have officially, as of January 6, lost the battle; but they are more determined than ever to win the ongoing domestic war.

In his antifascist satirical play, “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui”, Bertolt Brecht poignantly portrays the criminal actions of a ruthless Chicago mobster (representative of Hitler) to gain control of the “cauliflower trust” (representative of Prussian landlords) and through crime and deceit expand his protection racket to engulf the whole region, which ultimately fails. This 1941 play ends with the Ui actor dropping his character and earnestly addressing the audience directly with a dire warning: “Let’s not drop our guard too quickly; for the womb from which this barbarism crawled is fertile still”. Now, 80 years later, that warning must be heeded like never before in America, or we are doomed.