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.

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.

Voting Doesn't Beat the Far Right

Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta

By Ezra Brain

Republished from Left Voice.

The Far Right, emboldened and egged on by Donald Trump, stormed the U.S. Capitol Building yesterday with little resistance from the police. Their occupation of the Capitol — which came while Congress was in session ratifying the electoral college vote — is a far cry from the tear gas, rubber bullets, and mass arrests which took place during the Black Lives Matter movement last summer. But, this isn’t too surprising: we’ve always known that the cops will treat the Right with kid gloves and even aid and abet them, just like we saw during last year’s anti-lockdown protests and in Charlottesville. What these mobilizations reveal is, once again, that voting and elections won’t defeat the Far Right — especially not when the alternative is the Democratic Party, a capitalist party that helped fuel its rise. 

During the 2020 presidential election, figures from Barack Obama to Noam Chomsky to Angela Davis were telling everyone who would listen that voting for Joe Biden was necessary because it would defeat the Far Right forces that Trump has been stoking for more than four years. Many members of the Left bought into this argument and voted for Biden against their better judgement because they wanted to put a stop to Trump’s authoritarian and right-wing tendencies. In some sense, this is understandable — after all, if Trump is the one emboldening this right-wing movement, why wouldn’t getting rid of him help kill it? The events that transpired over the last few days clearly show that this is mistaken thinking. Whether in the White House or out of it, Donald Trump and his far right-wing base will continue to mobilize and play a role on the political stage. In fact, a staggering 75 percent of Republicans believe that the elections were rigged, highlighting the widespread influence of Trumpism. It is naïve to believe that these folks will just go home on January 20th.

Further, the idea that elections can defeat Trumpism misses  that politicians can’t create movements in a vacuum — they tap into existing sentiments and give political expression to them. The global rise in right-wing extremism is a response to the dire conditions created by the economic crisis. The current spike is a more direct result of the decline in living conditions for ordinary Americans over the past few decades, culminating in the 2008 financial crisis, which the capitalists resolved by implementing devastating austerity that robbed millions of social services, education, job opportunities, and health care. This created a deep polarization which had left- and right-wing populist expressions. 

In this context, right-wing extremism emerged because it spoke to the despair of (typically) white men. By tapping into the racism that capitalism is built on, right-wing extremism channels anger at the establishment and converts material struggles into xenophobia, racism, and neo-fascism. And Donald Trump was the political expression of this right-wing polarization, strengthening, giving voice to it, and, now, mobilizing it on a larger scale. This movement rallied around Trump because it believed that he represented a challenge to the established order and, now that he has been defeated by yet another neoliberal, it is mobilizing to defend him. 

But we should be clear: this rise in right-wing radicalization is a product of the Obama years as well as the escalation in the Trump years. Given this, it is not only incorrect but deeply dangerous to think that Biden’s warmed-over neoliberalism in the midst of a devastating economic crisis will do anything but escalate the problem.

Indeed, the escalations from the right that we saw on Wednesday come less than 24 hours after the Democrats won both senate elections in Georgia and took control of Congress. Trump was defeated at the ballot box in November and then again in January, but the social base of Trumpism is emboldened, not diminished. With Trump out of office, it provides him with a bigger platform to speak to this right-wing base, not smaller, because he will no longer be held back by having to work within the established structures. The “adults in the room” are gone, and full-fledged right-wing populism can reign at Trump rallies, on Trump’s Twitter feed, and the vast network of right-wing media outlets. 

So if the solution to defeating the Right isn’t voting for the Democrats, what is? 

The way to defeat the organized Right is with an organized Left independent of all capitalist parties. There are no shortcuts, no substitutes for the organizing we need to do. We need to build powerful and militant worker organizations in our workplaces and in the streets that can resist the Far Right, all the politicians who cater to them, and the neoliberal austerity that creates them. This resistance will involve both openly confronting the Far Right in the streets but also using our power as workers to resist them. For example, workers in DC could go on strike to protest the Far Right occupation of the Capitol building, forcing the government to evict them from the streets.

Strong Left organizations are also important because they can fight back the ideological advance of the Right. Many young people are drawn to the Far Right because they believe that it offers solutions to their struggles. If there were Left organizations that were putting forward a strong message against both the Far Right and neoliberalism, it could help to prevent some of these people from being drawn into right-wing extremism, thus preventing these movements from growing. It is vital in the fight to defeat the Right that we provide a real and meaningful alternative. And for people who become fascists, we agree with Trotsky when he said, “If you cannot convince a Fascist, acquaint his head with the pavement.”

In this, the failure of leftist leaders like Chomsky and Davis becomes clear: not only were they wrong that defeating Trump at the polls would defeat the Far Right, but they also sewed false illusions in Biden. Chomsky and the other leftist leaders who asked us to support Biden told us that he could keep us safe from the Far Right. He can’t — and he won’t. By funneling the energy of the Black Lives Matter movement into support for Biden, these leaders intentionally or not worked to undermine what could have been the foundations of the type of mass social movement we need to protect against the Far Right. Voting for Biden got us further away from defeating the Right, not closer.

History is littered with examples of this. From Franco in Spain to Hitler in Germany, the liberals always choose to side with the fascists over the socialists because fascism is less of a threat to the capitalist order than socialism is. So we can’t be fooled when liberal politicians wring their hands about the rise of the Far Right — they aren’t on our side, and we cannot support them in their elections, even when they are running against a representative of the Far Right. Liberal victories at the voting booth will not defeat the Right — but class struggle and worker organizing will. And given the right-wing mobilization yesterday, it’s clear that we need independent organizing in the current moment. 

Fascism, and How to Fight It

[PHOTO CREDIT: John Minchillo/AP]

By Peter Fousek

Both the name and the ideology of fascism originated in Italy in the early 20th century, where it arose as a spontaneous mass movement. It relied on a combination of large-scale, militant mobilization of working-class and middle-class people, with organization and financing provided by a wealthy elite. Its leader Benito Mussolini, having learned the power of popular discontent during his socialist days, was elevated to ruling status without any government background, in a time and place where such ascendancy was all but unheard-of.

The present Trumpist movement in the United States is analogous to this origin story of fascism. It is a movement relying on mass support, on a populist appeal to working and middle-class people who are terrified of losing an undue sense of social superiority, itself the product of longstanding practices of systemic racism and discrimination against marginalized minorities. Such practices of bigoted repression serve, more than anything else, to provide that angry and exploited demographic with an enemy based on racial sectarianism, such that they are convinced to direct their anger at the alien other designated thereby, rather than at their true exploiters and oppressors.

Those angry, white, working-class masses are the fuel of the fascist fire. They are not the directors but rather the foundation of the movement; the members of the society convinced that they stand to gain the most from the preservation of the present order. They are privileged by the longstanding system, kept complacent in the belief that they are not an exploited proletariat, but rather members of the ruling class. They are convinced of such a blatant lie (that is, their status as rulers, rather than their systemic privilege, which itself is quite real) only in being elevated above the marginalized minorities who they are told, quite falsely, are the enemy at fault for their own sufferings and shortcomings. In Italy, these masses of the privileged-oppressed were the landed peasantry and the petty-bourgeoisie. It does not take much imagination to locate them in the United States today.

In drawing this parallel, it is important to consider the underlying social and economic currents that lead to the rise of fascism, which provide its appeal as a popular movement. Broadly, fascism becomes possible only when the standard resources of an existing government prove unable to maintain the equilibrium of society. In such times, under such conditions, it is easy for a small contingent of the elite, acting as the agent of fascism, to inflame a group of people already in the throes of desperation on account of economic hardship and poverty within a world where they have been told over and over that their success, or lack thereof, is entirely up to them. When this proves false, when an elite few grow richer while they become more and more destitute, these masses need someone to blame. It is antithetical to the worldview that they have been taught, to consider their suffering a necessary byproduct of market fundamentalism, and it would be suicidal for them to consider it a personal failure.

As Hannah Arendt writes, “men in the midst of social disintegration and atomization will do anything to belong” (Origins of Totalitarianism). Due to their worldview of individualism, the belief that hard work alone necessarily begets success, the financial hardship they experience in times of economic instability (instability and hardship both necessary products of the “free market”) forces them to question their own value as they have come to understand it. Here we must remember that, however obvious it might seem that the exploitative economic system is at fault for their suffering, the ideology of that system forms the basis of their reality. To call that reality into question is a far more difficult task than to assign the blame to some other place or group, however imaginary the link may be. The ingenuity of the fascist is the ability to provide such a scapegoat, coupled with a promise of salvation through the fight against that designated “other”.

In Italy, fascism only filled this role because of the failure of their socialist movement at the time. In the years after the First World War, working-class revolutionaries took power over factories and gained political power, stagnating only due to a lack of organization and progression, and their abandonment by the social democrats. Subsequently, to keep their members out of direct conflict and combat, the worker’s movement made concession after concession, making way for an antithetical mass movement ready to promise ambitious goals and, more importantly, to project a sense of natural aristocracy. Mussolini succeeded by appealing to the historical glory of Rome, by associating his followers with that legendary state. Such an appeal came at the welcome cost of demonizing their enemies as lesser, in so doing providing to the in-group that sense of belonging and superiority that they had lost in the period of instability.

In the United States, Trumpism appeals to the revolutionary movement that founded the nation. We see a parallel appeal to that employed by Mussolini, in response to mirrored crises of economic origin, occurring simultaneously with disorganized left-populism. The noble struggle of the Left in this country, advocating for long-needed alterations to a repressive state apparatus rooted in the slaveholding origins of the nation and its exploitative economic tendencies, have been again and again abandoned by the supposed “left” establishment (Democrats), which exists blatantly as a neoliberal, center-right party dedicated to maintaining the status quo. On top of that abandonment, massive for-profit media machines foment division through overt and omnipotent identity politics, furthering the divides among factions of the working class along sectarian lines.

Thus, the clear and decisive rhetoric of the new American Right has been welcomed with open arms by many frustrated and alienated members of the working class. They have been drawn in by anti-establishment slogans and promises of radical change; worse still is how readily Trumpists have heralded temporary economic upswings (largely ones for which the Right is not responsible) as material evidence of the truth behind their claims. This temporary and false sense of material success is necessary for the fascist to come into power fully. Its mass-movement supporters act as a battering ram, thoroughly destroying political and social obstacles in its path. We have seen this in the Trumpist destruction of the Republican Party, the undermining of the rule of law, and the delegitimization of the most basic truths. A state’s transition to fascism does not mean that the state apparatus itself is dismantled or dissolved; instead, it means that the apparatus is transformed into a tool for the suppression of political opponents, and for the defense and propagation of its own ideology.

These trends have clearly been shockingly evident as products of the Trumpist movement. Trump has put 234 federal judges into office, hand-picked according to ideological leanings. He has appointed three Supreme Court justices, with his party taking unprecedented measures to push them through against popular mandate and in direct hypocrisy to their own procedural convictions. He carried out an unheard-of ten federal executions this year alone, while doling out 92 pardons to partisan criminals as personal favors. He has deployed police and military to violently suppress peaceful protesters, and attempted to enact education reform in order to force a rightist ideological curriculum on public school students; he has suppressed minority voters while actively engaging in the most devastating attempt in history to destroy the democratic processes of the United States. And now, in a final effort to achieve that end, he incited his followers to an act of insurrection, their dogmatic devotion (the direct result of the fascist appeals explained above) making them all too willing to attempt a violent overthrow of the government, for his sake.

All the while, he has used the tools of the state—the police, the military, the courts—to further his fascist ends. The state apparatus, with its own origins deeply intertwined with racist and classist repression, leapt to attack and suppress the marginalized and the left with neither prompt nor justification. With nearly one trillion dollars in federal defense spending (more than the next ten countries combined), and similarly outsized police expenditures dominating local budgets as well, the repressive state apparatuses of the military and police forces have been used abroad as agents of imperialism, and domestically to attack minorities and activists on the left. Nonetheless, when the Trumpist insurrection stormed the Capitol, these state forces all but ushered them in, alleging that they were overwhelmed by the rioters despite the vast resources at their disposal. That hypocrisy, far from accidental, is the foremost symptom of fascism; the willingness of the state to assent to the fascist mob indicates that this trend not only enabled Trump, but will outlive him.

The times of social crisis which facilitate the rise of fascism may alternately be moments of dramatic progressive upheaval. In order to achieve that greater end, though, the lower-middle and working class must unite in the direction of their own liberation. The fascist tendency will win when one contingent or sub-contingent shifts instead towards the Right. Considering the present right-wing terrorism and violence, we can no longer fail to actively address the threat illustrated by the results of the most recent election. Trump lost, yes, and his party lost the house and senate as well. Nonetheless, in the face of the greatest social and economic chaos this country has seen in modern times, nearly 11 million more voters felt compelled to keep Trump in office than had sought to elect him in 2016. The fascist trend is moving definitively upward, and while Trump is an incoherent and unstable loudmouth guided more by hatred and narcissism than any ideology, there are plenty of far more intelligent, ideologically driven, and capable politicians, pundits, and celebrities on the right, willing and able to step into the spotlight and turn an already devastating movement into something from which we will never recover.

But all hope is not lost! It is crucial, if we are to reach a better end, a brighter, just, and egalitarian future, rather than one of despair, that we recognize this fascist movement for what it is, and that we recognize the state apparatus that gave birth to it. We cannot return to the old status quo if we are to be redeemed. Its failings, which not only enabled this fascist Trumpism but made it inevitable, cannot be simply reformed. A system based on market fundamentalism is innately tied to an individualist ideology, to the fundamental belief that one’s prosperity is a reflection of one’s worth, and therefore that exploitation is justified along with obscene excess in the face of terrible poverty and starvation. Such a corrupt moral mandate makes an eventual breakdown unavoidable: the cavalier risks taken by financial institutions for the sake of their own gain will, as we have seen in the past decade, push the exploited masses to the point of demanding change. And the time for change, whether we want to accept it or not, has now arrived—that much is clear.

If we ask ourselves, then, what combination of circumstances can turn the working class towards progress rather than reactionary repression and division, we wouldn’t find a more favorable set of conditions than those facing the USA today: economic instability, vastly inflating the wealth of an increasingly marginal elite while over a fifth of our country goes hungry, the blatant state-sanctioned racism assailing people of color, the disintegration of the rule of law and of sociopolitical norms, the crisis of democratic republicanism made clear by the rise of Trump, and the self-exposure of the Democratic establishment as unwilling to enact radical change. These conditions will only continue to ripen as corporations trend towards legal monopolization, as financial interests dominate more and more of our “representative” politics, as automation eliminates jobs and the effects of climate change wreak more and more devastation and increase resource scarcity. If we, the Left, are to have any hope of winning out, then we must accept the inadequacy of our present party and state institutions to handle the current crises, much less those to come. That basic fact can no longer be denied. Once it has been accepted, we can begin to engage with alternatives that might work better, and to organize with the goal of enacting them. But we must act fast, with the exigency of a people fighting for their very survival, because the Right is well on its way to dragging us down the opposing path.

The Fascist Farce on Washington

By Josh Lees

Republished from Red Flag.

Far right protesters forced their way into the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, on Wednesday to support Donald Trump’s failed attempt to cling to a second presidential term in the face of his election defeat. Many people, from across the political spectrum, labelled the event a coup, or an insurrection. It is the exact threat, apparently, that the pro-Biden establishment and the major US TV networks have been warning about: a major attack on US democracy.

But far from some serious “coup” or “insurrection”, this was a pathetic display highlighting the weakness of Trump and the right. The outgoing president won 74 million votes in November. He has spent nine weeks campaigning to overturn the election result. The rally in Washington was supposed to be the culmination of these efforts. Trump urged his supporters to attend the rally and he spoke at it. Yet the turnout could be counted only in the thousands. The rally was a flop—the “popular” equivalent of a Rudy Giuliani press conference.

Trump failed to win any institutional support for his bid. No section of the military has backed him, nor any other section of the US state apparatus. He has lost every court case filed. Fox News has distanced itself, along with the bulk of the Republican Party establishment. Even those, like Senator Ted Cruz, who objected to accepting the electoral college votes from Arizona, made clear that they were not trying to prevent a Biden presidency. Even Trump’s closest political allies seem to have abandoned him, while they nevertheless try to hang on to his supporters. Trump failed to mobilise any serious numbers on the streets and eventually called on them to go home.

The “storming” of the Capitol was hardly the stuff movies are made about (although I’m sure someone will try). A few windows were broken, and the only person killed was one of the far-right protesters. No real damage to the building was done. Someone sat in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s chair (the horror!). To call it a riot is generous. Perhaps “theatre” would be a better word.

Their success in gaining entry had more to do with the sympathy that the cops and other security agencies have with the far right than the protesters’ actual strength. While Black Lives Matter protests have been met with thousands upon thousands of riot police and the National Guard, tear gas, flashbang grenades, beatings, mass arrest and shootings, the fascists were met with very few cops, some of whom took selfies with the protesters as they wandered around not really knowing what to do now that they had miraculously gained entry.

We should be clear: the US state backs Biden. Besides their sympathy with the far right, this is the other reason the security apparatus was unprepared for the protesters entering the building—authorities knew that there was no coup, so they were quite relaxed. They will be ruing that it got out of hand—but in the same way all police departments are embarrassed when a protest gets out of their control when they weren’t expecting it. In the wake of the protest, Trump, having encouraged his supporters, is now more isolated than ever. 

The pathetic death-throes of his presidency does not of course mean that the far right in the US is finished. It is much weaker than the Democrats make it out to be (to cynically herd the broad left into supporting their right-wing corporate candidates). But it has certainly grown under Trump. It may grow into a more serious force still. Even if the far right doesn’t grow, its isolation and demoralisation could push some in its ranks in the direction of terrorism, as we saw with the wave of fascist shootings in the wake of successful anti-fascist mobilisations following Charlottesville. So there is a need to build movements against fascism in the US, and it would be great if there were mass protests in the coming days in response.

But a myopic focus on the far right is misorienting—a result of the highly successful campaign by the US liberal establishment to focus on Trumpism as a unique threat to the working class and people of colour, and ignore the structural features of US capitalism that the Democrats uphold and against which so many rebelled in 2020.For the last four years we heard that it was the Democrats versus fascism. Perhaps that broken record is going to play for a little while longer, albeit while the Democrats control the executive and both branches of the legislature.

The main political outcome of the far-right farce in Washington is likely to be a strengthening of Joe Biden and the Democratic Party and an attempt to use these events to rally the population around all the key institutions of US capitalism and imperialism that have copped such a battering in recent times.

The US ruling class and its state apparatus backed a Democrat presidency to better “rebuild trust” in US institutions, “unite the nation”—i.e., co-opt and crush internal resistance—and rebuild US imperial might abroad. The Democrats agree with the bulk of Trump’s policies and have often legislated worse themselves, from neoliberal attacks on workers, to racist border policies, killer cops and launching or backing wars. Hence why they have opposed Trump as an aberration—a result of Russian interference and the uneducated “deplorables” who fell for his fake news—who is weakening and dividing their otherwise wonderful country and its institutions. Biden is the saviour to, essentially, make America great again.

The main enemy in the US remains the US state, US capitalism and the new imperial presidency of Joe Biden and his Democratic majority. The more liberal wing of the Democrats is doing its best, as it has all along, to play the role of herding left-wing opinion behind Joe Biden. 

Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, celebrated hero of “the squad” among the pro-Democrat left, responded to the events by tweeting, “We will not let our Constitution be trampled on by a mob and threatened by a tyrant. Democracy will prevail”. This is nationalist blather. She and her fellow squad member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have now called for Trump to be impeached, a laughable manoeuvre to keep the focus off the incoming Biden administration.

You would be hard-pressed to come up with a duo who more personify everything that is rotten about capitalism than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. One has spent his life getting rich off a political career based on campaigning to lock up as many of the poor and people of colour as possible. The other has carried out that agenda as the top cop of California. They are loyal servants of the rich and enemies of the working class, and their key mission is to strengthen the bloodiest empire the world has ever suffered. We cannot forget this amid the breathless talk of imagined coups by small fascist groups.

Blows Against the Empire—2020 In Memoriam

By Steve Lalla

To say that 2020 has been memorable would be an understatement, but experience teaches us that our memories of the pandemic may well be struck from the record.

“The 1918 influenza epidemic is one of history’s great conundrums, obliterated from the consciousness of historians,” wrote Gina Kolata, and COVID-19 may yet meet the same fate.[1] Kolata recalls that not only was the Spanish flu omitted from basic history in her elementary and high school, but was also ignored in microbiology and virology courses in college, even though it killed more people than the first world war.

From the onset of the pandemic it was clear that it would accelerate the crumble of the u.s empire. Many had commented on the fragility of neoliberalism in the face of public health crises, and it was pretty obvious from the start that the imperialist system would prove incapable of handling COVID-19 in a reasonable manner.

While the u.s and its capitalist vassals fell prey to COVID-19, blaming it on China or insisting that “one day, like a miracle, it will disappear,” the pandemic overshadowed imperialist defeats in the Middle East and Latin America, and masked some of the scariest climate catastrophes in recorded history.

A chronology of 2020’s most salient dates:

January 5: Iraq’s parliament voted to expel all u.s troops from the country. Deputy commander of the Popular Mobilization Units of Iraq, Abu Mahdi Al-Muhandis, was assassinated in a January 3 drone strike—in addition to Iran’s General Soleimani—the last straw for Iraq politicians’ toleration of any u.s troops on their soil. About 5,000 u.s troops remain in the country. The ruling was the final blow to Bush Jr.’s lie that the Iraq War would “bring freedom” to Iraqis, who instead revile the u.s for killing a million of their brothers and sisters, destroying their economy and infrastructure, and bombing their most precious ancient sites.

January 6: Millions filled the streets of Tehran, Iran, following the drone killing of Major General Qasem Soleimani. Widely publicized footage of astounding mourning processions contradicted u.s Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s hollow boasts: “We have every expectation that people not only in Iraq, but in Iran, will view the American action last night as giving them freedom, freedom to have the opportunity for success and prosperity for their nations. While the political leadership may not want that, the people in these nations will demand it.” Coupled with the late-2019 u.s retreat in Syria, it became clear that the empire was losing their war against the Shia Crescent.

January-February: Early in the new year raging forest fires in Australia grabbed world attention. Fires incinerated over 45 million acres and caused almost 500 deaths, either directly or as a result of smoke inhalation. Ecologists estimated that over one billion mammals, birds and reptiles were killed, including about eight thousand koalas. Climate change and destruction of the environment, spurred by decades of conspicuous consumption and a dependence on fossil fuels, are the results of an anarchic capitalist economic system that profits from waste and obsolescence. The u.s produces over 30 percent of the planet’s waste but holds about 4 percent of world population, a profligate lifestyle they imagine can be exported globally.   

March 10: China announces victory in the struggle against the COVID-19 virus. To date, they’ve reported one death and a handful of cases since mid-April. Following strong measures to combat the pandemic including mandatory lockdowns and mask use, antibacterial dousing of public spaces, contact tracing, and regulating travel, China emerged as the global leader in pandemic defense. As a result China represents the one significant national economy that didn’t slump in 2020 and the world’s “only major growth engine,” according to Bloomberg. They dealt an additional blow to imperialism by sending doctors and equipment to the rescue of NATO countries, notably Italy, France, and Spain, or to stalwart u.s allies such as Brazil, Indonesia or the Philippines, in addition to helping numerous resistance nations including Palestine, Venezuela, Cuba, Syria, Iran, and Iraq, and African nations such as Algeria, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, or Zimbabwe.

April 6: Prominent right-wing political figures and news sources shared the story that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega had died of COVID-19. In reality Nicaragua had recorded only one death. Camera-shy Ortega made a rare televised speech on April 15th denouncing the u.s empire for spending trillions of dollars on bombs and war but refusing to provide basic free health care for their people. By December, the u.s death rate for COVID-19 was 40 times that of Nicaragua. 

April 20: A blitz of news regarding the death of Kim Jong-un filled all mainstream media. With the pandemic claiming lives around the world this story became huge. Unsurprisingly the lie originated with media funded by the u.s regime-change operation National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

May 3: Venezuelan fishermen foiled the Operation Gideon armed invasion led by former green berets employed by private security company Silvercorp. In March trump placed a $15 million bounty on Maduro, with predictable results. Following the arrest and confession of Silvercorp founder Jordan Goudreau, we learned that u.s officials and their Venezuelan puppets juan guaidó and leopoldo lópez planned and funded the attack. Goudreau even presented documents to prove it. Eight mercenaries were killed, seventeen were captured. The photo of prostrate commandos in front of the Casa of Socialist Fishermen was cited as one of the year’s best.

May 24: Anti-imperialist nations, locked out of world markets by u.s sanctions, were starting to team up. On this day Iranian oil tankers, escorted by boats, helicopters and planes of the Bolivarian National Armed Forces (FANB) of Venezuela, broke the blockade and landed in El Palito.

May 25: The public lynching of George Floyd horrified the world. In the middle of the street, in broad daylight, while being filmed, a Minneapolis police officer kneeled on George Floyd’s neck for over eight minutes, until Floyd breathed no more. One of over 1,000 murders by u.s police in 2020, Floyd’s killing sparked massive spontaneous protests across the u.s in every city and town. Widespread arson and looting occurred and an army of live streamers shared daily demos, speeches, and police brutality, for those at home. The protests raged for months and had many peaks. The empire deployed the National Guard, military helicopters, and by July were using unidentified troops in black vans to kidnap protesters. At least 14,000 civilians were arrested, and 19 killed, in the protests.

May 28: Protestors torched the Minneapolis’ 3rd Precinct police headquarters, where George Floyd’s killer worked. Police forces had fled the building. The incendiary images provided some of the year’s most widely shared and beloved photographs.

May 31: u.s president trump was taken to a fortified bunker as thousands of protestors besieged the White House and threatened his life. Eventually the empire’s security forces established a perimeter around the president’s residence, with multiple layers of fencing, and fought a pitched battle with bottle-throwing protestors for weeks on end.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/03/trump-bunker-george-floyd-protests

June 3: Cristobal makes landfall in Louisiana, the first of a record-breaking five named storms to hit the state in 2020. Lake Charles, a city that held almost 80,000 people, immortalized in The Band’s “Up On Cripple Creek,” will never recover. Over 45,000 homes were damaged, insured losses topped $10 billion, and thousands of residents are still displaced.

June 20: After tweeting that “almost one million people requested tickets for the Saturday night rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma!" trump spoke to only 6,000 supporters and over 13,000 empty seats. He was trolled by K-Pop fans and teens on Tik Tok who had bought up all the tickets and created fake hype around the event. Photos of a dejected trump leaving the rally were wildly popular.

August 19: Out-of-control California wildfires began to gain international media attention. By this day over 350 fires were already burning. The state went on to record over nine thousand fires, burning about 4 percent of the state’s land, by far the worst wildfire season in California’s history. The smoke from the fires, which are still burning, will create a miniature nuclear winter, contributing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than all the cars, cities and industries in the u.s during an entire year, and release energy equivalent to “hundreds of hydrogen bombs.”

October 6: Enormous protests erupted across Indonesia in the wake of the government’s passing of an Omnibus Law that undermines workers’ rights and the environment. The law was enacted November 3; protests are ongoing and have resulted in the arrest of at least six thousand civilians including 18 journalists.

October 13: In recognition of their success in maintaining the “highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights,” both Cuba and China were elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council.

October 18: Luis Arce, candidate of the Movement for Socialism (MAS), swept into power by trouncing Carlos Mesa in Bolivia’s presidential election, gaining 55 percent of the vote to Mesa’s 28 percent. The results put the lie to claims by u.s-backed Organization of American States (OAS) that the 2019 elections, in which Evo Morales was elected to a new term, were fraudulent. Arce’s election vindicated those who had argued for a year that Morales was deposed in an illegitimate, u.s-sponsored coup. Coup dictator jeanine añez and her coterie of imperialist supporters were panned worldwide. añez was captured trying to flee the country while other offending politicians, such as Minister of the Interior arturo murillo, and Minister of Defense fernando lopez, escaped.

October 25: In response to gigantic demonstrations that began in October, 2019 and still haven’t let up, Chile held a Constitutional Referendum. The main objectives of the ongoing protest movement are the removal of president piñera and of the pinochet Constitution that made Chile “ground zero” for the failed neoliberal experiment. To date over 2,500 Chileans have been injured, almost three thousand arrested, and 29 killed in the protests. In the October 25 referendum 80 percent voted for a new constitution, and chose to have it drafted by a Constituent Assembly elected by the people.

November 3: trump’s loss in the u.s presidential elections wasn’t really a defeat for imperialism because biden’s regime will prove to be just as bad, or worse,  for targets of the empire.

Nevertheless, it felt like a victory for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because trump embodied outright neo-fascism and was supported by the most reactionary, racist yankees. Secondly, because, following his electoral defeat, trump and his entourage resorted to every possible ruse that CIA regime-change operations have employed in other countries for decades: crying fraud, attacking voting centers, and denouncing imaginary communists. “trump did more for the liberation of humanity from Western imperialism, because of his crudeness, than any other u.s leader in history,” commented political analyst Laith Marouf. “The latest example was him calling the u.s elections a fraud. With that he made it impossible to undermine the elections in Venezuela.”

November 11: Evo Morales returned to Bolivia exactly one year to the day after his ouster. His return was celebrated by multitudes, and hailed as a “world historic event.” Morales assumed his place as head of MAS and as an eminent spokesperson against imperialism.

November 23: While u.s reported their largest increase in poverty since they began tracking data, China announced that they had lifted all counties out of poverty, and eradicated extreme poverty across the Republic. Since 1978 China has lifted over 850 million out of poverty, according to the World Bank.

November 25: Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez Parrilla revealed links between members of the San Isidro movement and the u.s embassy in Havana. The failed San Isidro campaign revolved around Cuban rapper Denis Solis, detained in Havana for failing to respect COVID-19 regulations and assaulting a police officer. A small group went on a highly publicized "hunger strike" demanding his release and claiming that Cuba was repressing dissent. Meanwhile Cuba's government and investigative journalists revealed the ties, including funding and numerous meetings, between San Isidro group members, Miami-based right-wing agitators and u.s politicians in Cuba. The rapper in question, Denis Solis, didn't help his case by yelling "trump 2020!" at Cuban police officers in a video he filmed and shared himself a few days after trump had lost the election.

November 26: Over 250 million took to the streets in India, reported as the “biggest organized strike in human history,” protesting new laws that will attack farm workers and subject the nation to inequitable neoliberal doctrines. Huge masses of demonstrators marched on Delhi from neighboring states. They met barricades, roadblocks, armed security forces, teargas and all manner of obstructions, but dismantled everything and reached their target. "They are trying to give away agriculture to capitalists, just like they sold so many of our important public sector companies across India," said a spokesperson. "Through this relentless privatization they want to further exploit farmers and workers."

December 6: Venezuela’s Parliamentary Election resulted in a landslide victory for Maduro’s Chavista party PSUV/GPP, breaking a deadlock in Parliament that had lasted for five years, and ushering in a new era in Venezuelan politics that will last until the end of Maduro’s term in 2024—barring a military invasion, assassination or successful coup by imperialist powers.

The upcoming year certainly holds more of the same in store for us: embarrassments for imperialism, hundreds of thousands of preventable COVID-19 deaths, and a doubling-down on capitalism’s claims that it provides the only way forward, evidenced by the hubris of promotional efforts for The Great Reset.

Notes

[1] Kolata, Gina. Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999

Elites Disparage the Working Class, Yet Deny Responsibility

(PHOTO CREDIT: Getty/Chip Somodevilla)

By Modesty Sanchez

The election of Donald Trump has often been attributed to poor, undereducated white voters who, it’s been implied, either didn’t understand the implications of Trump’s vulgarity, or were willing to overlook his bigotry because it aligned with their underlying beliefs. This demographic has been severely maligned by liberals, who are usually affluent or at least financially stable, and this repulsion felt by them towards white working class voters manifests itself in slanderous, petty insults. There are memes that make fun of people who live in squalor and immiseration, simply because they voted for Trump — the irony is lost on those applauding the memes that these types of ignoble living conditions are possible in the richest country precisely because of the politicians and government that these jokesters sycophantically praise and defend. Not to say that Trump is any better or worse at alleviating these circumstances, despite what he claimed on the campaign trail, but these types of memes and jokes are perfect reflections of liberal elites’ incapability of understanding why Trump’s anti-establishment stance and politically indecorous behavior would attract those who have been continuously marginalized by corrupt political governance.  Instead, these liberals laughed at the squalid state working class people — white and black — live in, they joked that because of these poor whites’ lack of education and purportedly bigoted belief system, they were more than deserving of these types of living conditions.  

Of course, this tireless berating and deriding is completely devoid of any type of awareness: history has shown time and time again the necessity of propagandistic slander to maintain the power of the ruling class. In 1671, when a wealthy landowner in Virginia, Nathaniel Bacon, wanted to drive Native Americans out of the incipient colony, he drew upon the frustration workers felt at their conditions in order to organize them in a revolt against the governor, William Berkeley. After what became known as Bacon’s Rebellion, the nascent capitalist class was terrified by the interracial solidarity between white indentured servants and enslaved black people because that unity showed how powerful and expansive the working class was, and how dependent upon their labor the capitalists were. To sever any links between white workers and black slaves, as well as to justify the brutal colonist practices of violently forcing Native Americans off their land and kidnapping then enslaving Africans, the foundations of modern racism were laid. A fierce propaganda campaign disavowing the humanity of anyone that wasn’t white was unleashed. Myths surrounding the intelligence and the potential of black and brown people were propagated as a way of fueling white people’s sense of superiority and to manufacture a distrust of non-white people. The white workers who had before banded together with their fellow black and brown workers, now looked upon their comrades in disgust. They were now thoroughly convinced that, while they were still being exploited by the ruling class, their position was temporary, and that, on virtue of their race, they were destined for greater things, while black and brown people were exactly where they belonged. This propaganda has proven to be successful, and the division of the working class is still present today.

Since Bacon’s Rebellion, this ambient propaganda has dictated the society we live in, and has been intensified depending on the point of history. Even Martin Luther King, Jr., in his address at the conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery March, cited this divisive rhetoric as one of the leading factors of Southern segregation following the Civil War: as a response to the emerging Populist Movement that was uniting white workers and formerly enslaved black people, the threatened capitalist class “... began immediately to engineer this development of a segregated society...Through their control of mass media, they revised the doctrine of white supremacy. They saturated the thinking of the poor white masses with it, thus clouding their minds to the real issue involved in the Populist Movement. They then directed the placement on the books of the South of laws that made it a crime for Negroes and whites to come together as equals at any level. And that did it. That crippled and eventually destroyed the Populist Movement of the nineteenth century.”

New threat, same solution: whenever there are indications of laborers working together, despite race or gender, the intimidated capitalist class resorts to a racially charged narrative that has been proven to be successful in stultifying any dissent by discouraging any type of working class unity. When white workers are led to believe they have more in common with capitalists than their fellow workers, the ruling class can more easily pass laws that not only persecute lower-class individuals (black people especially), but that also codify this bigoted propaganda. As MLK stated, this rhetoric has been solidified through legislation such as the Jim Crow Laws, but more recently through the passage of bills during the War on Drugs (like the ‘94 Crime Bill) that disproportionately disadvantaged black people while also seeming to “prove” the inherent savagery of this demographic.  

The legacy of this propaganda campaign is still resonant within our own media class, which continues to use this divisive rhetoric to serve the interests of the ruling class. The only difference is the substance: whereas before this narrative consisted of outwardly racist, white supremacist claims, now it espouses declarations of racial tolerance and concern toward the multitude of social injustices. Suddenly, media pundits are vilifying low-income people, specifically white people, for their “backwards” and “bigoted” beliefs; nevermind that this same demographic is forced to work in horrific conditions for very little compensation, and they’re too focused on their own personal immiseration to get started on their anti-racist reading lists. They’re also, understandably, fed up with these media elites who shame workers using pretentious and condescending jargon before returning to the luxuries of their affluent lives, completely insulated from the harsh reality of capitalism.

While these elites go on and on about the importance of “reconciling with America’s racist history” and creating a “radically tolerant society,” they remain incapable of sacrificing any of the prestige and comforts afforded to them by a capitalist society that runs on the exploitation and disenfranchisement of an interracial working class. Rather than acknowledge the factors contributing to the prejudices they claim comprise the working class, liberal pundits would rather reprimand white workers who are simply trying to make a living and have subscribed to the false propagandistic campaign that has been fed to them since imperialism and colonialism became major fixtures of the Western economy. The only job of the ruling class, it now seems, is to stir up superficial moral outrage at any type of racial injustice as a way to distract from the politicians (who now attempt to sway voters by disavowing interpersonal prejudices and promoting tolerance) that continue to pass policies deepening the economic crisis felt by so many Americans.

Of course, as a way to express the ruling class’s newfound commitment to representation, now black and brown people have been granted the authority to perpetuate this repulsive austerity. By diversifying the people responsible for bombing Middle Eastern countries, or for cutting Social Security, the government has inoculated themselves from any real critique. If one were to express frustration at the increasingly worsening material conditions of everyday citizens, they can be repudiated by this supposedly tolerant and understanding liberal establishment using extrapolating claims of racism, sexism, or bigotry. It’s more than clear, and at this point redundant and boring to point out, that this new mainstream media social justice narrative that champions issues of representation is merely another way to placate Americans into accepting their oppression, making anyone that rejects this narrative a narrow-minded chauvinist.

Though this contemporary media narrative isn’t outwardly racist or white supremacist, it still serves the same goal in maintaining the legitimacy of the ruling class, and does not, contrary to its outward appearance, care about creating a tolerant society in which everyone is equal. It is still just as divisive though, as shown by the persistent ridicule of the white working class, to which America’s existing backwardness is attributed. Even if it were true that this immiserated and impoverished demographic was just as openly bigoted as it’s claimed to be, any interpersonal prejudices its members hold do less damage than what liberal and conservative politicians enact on a daily basis through the passing of legislation that prioritizes corporate interests over those of everyday, working people. If people who use this morally righteous jargon truly do want to help alleviate the wretched living conditions affecting black and brown people, they should stop myopically venting their frustrations on white workers who are struggling to put food on their plates, and instead focus on dismantling a capitalist system that will always depend on the exploitation of working people in America and abroad

Three Lessons From the World’s Biggest Worker Uprising

By Aayaan Singh Jamwal

The Kisan Ekta Morcha (Farmers United Front) is a mass movement of 100,000+ farmers, youth, workers and allies from India and the diaspora. For the past 27 days, Satyagrahis have occupied all but one highway leading into Delhi, the capital of India. 1.5 million union members in Canada have declared solidarity with KAM. Protestors say that people of the country and world are with them. They are determined and equipped to occupy Delhi’s border roads until the government repeals three farm bills that were made into law in September 2020. The significance of this ultimatum by the country’s working-class peasantry is twofold: first, they are mounting an uncompromising opposition which is salient in an age of police violence forcefully suppressing anti-capitalism protests worldwide. Second, the farmers are publicly renouncing their faith in an elected ruling class whose actions do not display any care for their wellbeing.

The world’s largest general strike

On November 26, 2020 Indian workers organized the world’s largest general strike.(1)  Why did 250 million workers strike? Members of national trade unions struck from work to protest a number of the central government’s policies, such as the “dismantling [of] protective labour laws, refusal to negotiate an increase in minimum wages, [and] selling off several public sector units to private entities'' (Varma 2020). This government promises “empowerment” and keeps unilaterally passing laws to make extraction and exploitation easier for wealth-hoarding billionaires. How is the Kisan Ekta Morcha peasant uprising connected to the general strike? Peasant-farmers (at the time largely from neighboring states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh) called for a march to Delhi to show their solidarity with striking workers. As farmers approached, the police sealed border roads to try to prevent them from entering Delhi. The farmers overturned barricades and continued to march. They were injured by cops who assaulted them with tear gas and water cannons. It’s important to note that tear gas is internationally classified as a chemical weapon that is illegal to use in war as per Geneva Protocol 1925, yet nation-states continue to use tear gas domestically to harm and deter popular revolutions.

Farmers have strong precedent to believe that laws deregulating agricultural markets will create yet another profiteering mechanism for Modi’s capitalist friends.(1)(2) Narendra Modi has been the Prime Minister of India since 2014 and his party (BJP) currently has a majority in the Parliament. Despite the fact that the BJP’s dubious leadership has been sinking India into insecurity for the last 6 years, the party’s politics still have sympathetic right-wing, “anti-communist” supporters. However, KAM has also ignited many people across the world who were previously indecisive to BJP’s regime to proactively oppose its blend of economic incompetence, fascism, nationalism, and caste supremacy politics. What began as a kisan-mazdoor ekta (farmer-worker solidarity) day march on that day is now an ongoing occupation and mass movement challenging the legitimacy of harmful governance.

Down with capitalist monopolies

Modi’s collaborative relationships with India’s richest person Mukesh Ambani and with coal mining billionaire Adani are well known. Organizing unions say  The Bharatiya Janata Party says that replacing regulatory laws with “free markets” based on “freedom” and “choice” are the “revolutionary reforms” that will make “a new India”. Certainly, the claim that capitalism is the best/only structure for growth or “development” is propagated widely, and not just by the BJP, but largely by the very capitalists funding the political campaigns of all major parties. In reality, sympathizers of capitalist governance find it hard to explain why a single corporate overlord should be free to hoard billions of dollars. The middle classes say, “It’s his wealth, he earned it”-- forgetting that no wealth in the world can be created without laboring workers, farmers, and unpaid care-workers. Protestors say that increasing private monopolies instead of improving existing local structures (1) (2) is not only the opposite of balanced governance but so unethical that they will not stand it. There is now also an international campaign to boycott all products sold by Ambani and Adani’s companies (1) (2) in India and internationally. You can go to asovereignworld.com to find a developing list of their products, businesses, and investors.

The ethics this revolution works on

Even as climate change is accelerating, political elites continue to use public institutions to strengthen empires of capitalists. 2020 is the time for an ethics of care, a politics of support. However, since the prime minister’s government has refused to consider repealing the laws, despite a number of experts pointing out its flawed assumptions and the farmers’ case for its potential to harm. Farmers and youth are done watching modern empires try to pass off their destructive extraction [from People and Planet] as “goodness,” “growth” or “empowerment.” The farmers’ uprising is a non-partisan issue: the farmers are frustrated with slimy political elites writ large: they have prohibited any party’s politicians from taking the stage at their protests. Since a lot has been written and propagated about the farm laws, here I want to focus on the working-class politics of unity that are at the heart of the Kisan Ekta Morcha. Here are three key lessons about the ethics behind revolutionary actions that are fueling one of modernity’s most well sustained mass uprisings. I pay special attention to present practices of care and the power of working-class led collectives in bringing revolutionary theories to life.

1. Our love for all beings terrifies fascist mindsets.

“Love is the weapon of the oppressed. Revolution is carried through our embrace.”

- Nisha Sethi

Hand in hand with an ignorance of the structural barriers that prevent the working-poor from accessing capital and ownership of land/resources, pro-government stooges also steadfastly believe that some lives are of more value than others. On the other hand, the Sikh and Punjabi organizers of this agitation can be repeatedly heard leading with chants such as, “Nanak naam chardi kala, tere bhane sarbat da bhala!” This prayer approximately translates to “Nanak, with your name we stay in high spirits, with your blessings may all beings be well!” The first Guru (divine guide) of Sikhism was Guru Nanak Dev Ji, a legendary figure loved by Indians. At the age of 14, he repudiated his caste-privileged birth and refused to be marked as a Hindu Brahmin. Instead, he created a framework that is the 4th most-followed in the world today, a faith that tells its followers to eliminate social hierarchies. While forms of hierarchy still exist within Sikh communities, like all others, they also continue to collectivize radical protest practices like serving langar and creating free, open schools. Nobody at or near the border sites is going hungry. Since the occupation began, thousands of farmers have arrived with rations and cooking utensils. Volunteers doing langar seva (service) have been serving vegetarian food to everyone. You can eat as much as you like, and payment is not part of the equation. Langar is the Sikh practice of sitting down on the floor to eat in community. What makes KAM langars even more radical is that unhoused people and working-poor children who live nearby are regularly joining langar with protestors.

On the matter of schooling and education for all, protestors Navjot Kaur and Kawaljit Kaur were the first to initiate ‘Phulwari’ (lit: flower garden) when they noticed that young children at Singhu Border were not attending school. Navjot Kaur has a Bachelor’s in Education and believes that awareness is the cornerstone of revolution, so they began teaching them with the help of volunteers. Activists have also created libraries on-site with revolutionary texts in Punjabi and Hindi, two of the languages most spoken among protestors. Everyone is welcome to take books to read, and contribute books they want others to have. The ecosystems I’ve described that people power has created resemble what anarchist Murray Bookchin described as a free municipality. A comrade told me that the Delhi Government refused to respond to their appeals for more portable toilets, so they reached out to their own networks, and a friend’s family contributed suction trucks. Their capacity to safely manage the waste on-site has now increased. Despite the chilling cold and an uncaring regime, farmers and their comrades are well-prepared to eat, debate, sleep, dance, pray, sing, and read on these streets until their demand is respected.

2. Creating communities based on care, not hierarchy, is an ancestral commitment.

 I’m a community organizer who experiences life at the intersection of systematic advantages I was accorded through no goodness of my own and multiple systemic disadvantages. So when I began actively creating an ethic of care to bring into the spaces I was helping to build, I started to notice that it is not as an individual that you unlearn patriarchal, colonial, or capitalist tendencies. The process of taking responsibility for change around you happens in community with people who’ve cared for you, and those you care for. Revolutionizing social relations requires seeing those dominating ways that have lived within your community as house guests for so long that unless you look closely, you would not be able to tell where the hierarchies end and the furniture begins. The farmers uprising has reaffirmed something for me about creating post-capitalist visions for a life where we get respect and support instead of violations and terror. It’s that capitalist mindsets can’t swallow the realities of these protestors being friends, families. Singhu and Tikri Border are places of ancestral reverence, where protestors as young as 4 and as old as 90 reify their commitment to sharing love and building futures that prioritize well-being.

Predominant portrayals of modern protests in which working people occupy the streets to demand more life-affirming material conditions most often depict able-bodied men as the orchestrators of action. When farmers first reached borders and news of their agitation began circulating, women were said to be largely absent from the ranks of protestors. Hearing this, some organizers acted with a class and gender consciousness uncritically and began centering testimonies from women. Shergill writes that “according to Mahila Kisan Adhikaar Manch (MAKAAM) [Women’s Farmers Rights Forum], 75 percent of all farm work is conducted by women yet they own only 12 percent of the land.” This land ownership statistic will prove even more harmful for women if these laws are not repealed. The only “choice” they will be left with to earn a living, will be contracting out their bodies to Ambani Agro and Adani Agri Logistics.

3. Opposing one unjust hierarchization means discarding all in/visible forms of hierarchy.

Punjab is the place of my birth and ancestry. Our communities are large-hearted, and they are also rife with caste, patriarchal, and land-based degradation. Radical love is less a theory to be explained and more the undeniable bond we form in fleeting moments, and shared connections with our comrades who persist, despite the despair of our times. Radical love can look like accompanying uncomfortable exchanges, such as when a young protestor shared an image she took of two men: a Hindu priest and a Sikh elder who were engaged in conducting a ritual together, despite being from different religious backgrounds. Her caption said, “I wonder if they know the kid watching them and taking this photo is bisexual.” People who create revolutions and uprisings from the ground up have not forgone all prejudices within themselves. But they have taken a monumental risk; the risk to arrive within a public where they may be faced with forms of difference that they cannot immediately resolve. It is by intimately and carefully accompanying the tendency to distance ourselves from our own prejudices that we begin to circulate an ethic of care, a more considerate way of relating than one’s will to harm or hurt.

Author’s notes:

If you’d like to track on-ground updates, I recommend the following:

1. Trolley Times Official (IG: @trolley_times_official) - the protest’s own newspaper!

2. Instagram: Sikh Expo

   To hear more testimonies from the agitation:

1. Youtube: Scoopwhoop Unscripted (English subtitles available)

2. Videos: Aljazeera English’s coverage on the basics, including Shergill’s piece.

3. Web reportage: Newsclick.in, especially this (half-satirical but fact based) piece.

4. Kisan Ekta Morcha: the unions’ official handle on all social media platforms.

For thoughtful analyses of the farm laws:

1. P. Sainath, agricultural expert, for the Tribune, Newsclick, and the Wire.

2. Dr. Sudha Narayanan for the India Forum.