Tackling the US Left's Class Reductionism

(Photo Credit: Hilary Swift/The New York Times)

By Yanis Iqbal

Beginning from May 2020, the unending violence of USA’s racial capitalism was brought to the fore as a Black-led movement flowed through the bloodstained paving stones of clamorous streets. The wretched masses of America united in their call for an end to police brutality and the existing apparatuses of exploitative rule. However, these protests - instead of culminating in a significant change in the dynamics of power - rewarded the revolting people with Joe Biden - a dyed-in-the-wool bourgeoisie politician who once opposed de-segregation, called on police to shoot Black Lives Matter demonstrators in the leg, rejected the smallest of concessions to the working class, vehemently supported imperialist wars and refused to commit to even the minimal reforms of the Green New Deal.

Biden’s victory in the presidential election was a direct expression of what Antonio Gramsci called a “time of monsters” - a moment in which we are fully aware of the future direction of societal forces but it is blocked at a particular point. In the American context, the corridors leading to historical metabolization were shut off on the level of formal politics, not on the stage of grassroots mobilization. In the streets, things were moving forward by leaps and bounds - a continuous subjective churning was taking place within the helical relations of domination. In spite of these explosive potentialities, Biden succeeded in initiating a process of ideological mutilation, which included the co-optation of demands from below, the forming of new political coalitions, paying lip service to the goals of leading figures of the underclass, all done while keeping intact the hegemony of the status quoist forces.

While many factors account for the defeat of the American rebellion, the strategic errors committed by the country’s Left stick out for their obdurateness toward the complex reality of oppression. Many sectors of the country’s socialist camp promoted class reductionism, remaining insensitive to the racial roots of the then ongoing Black Lives Matter movement. Their exclusive emphasis on Bernie Sanders and Medicare for All reduced systemic racism to a merely economic issue. Electoral exigencies overrode the creation of robust bases of social resistance. The uncritical subsumption of racism under an ahistorical banner of class proved unsuccessful in carrying forward the militant momentum of an explicit mutiny against the structural cruelty of racist capitalism.

Black Self-Assertion

Frantz Fanon was a thinker who forcefully shed light on the aporias of class reductionism, arguing in favor a radical project of Black advancement. The moorings for this vibrant model of praxis were provided by G.W.F Hegel. In a famous passage of “Phenomenology of Spirit”, Hegel had written about the progression of human beings from merely self-conscious entities that are motivated by need to consume material goods into social beings who engage in recognition. The achievement of an independent self-consciousness is seen not only as an inter-subjective process, driven by a desire for recognition by the other, but also as a fundamentally conflictual one: each consciousness aspires to assert its self-certainty, initially, through the exclusion and elimination of all that is other; each thus seeks the death of the other, putting at the same time its own life at stake.

This struggle to the death can lead either to the obliteration of one consciousness (or both), whereby the process of mutual recognition will never be complete, or to one consciousness submitting to the other in the face of fear of imminent death, thus becoming the slave. The other becomes the master, the victor of the struggle. The master nevertheless depends on the slave - not only for the fulfillment of material needs, but also for his/her recognition as an independent being. His self-sufficiency is hence only apparent. The slave, by contrast, becomes aware of himself as an independent self-consciousness by means of the transformative, fear-driven labor in the natural and material world.

For Fanon, racialized colonial subjects are not in a position to sign up to the Hegelian vision of political struggle as a reciprocal structure of recognition and interdependency when colonization has denied their humanity. Race is a process in which the unity of the world and self becomes mediated by a racialized objectification of the subject. Therefore, according to Fanon, race is a form of alienation. For Hegel, the slave’s existence is an expression of the objective reality or power of the master. The master is recognized and the slave lives in a state of non-recognition. Similarly, for Fanon the alienated racial subject exists as an expression of the objective reality of whiteness. Racial existence, then, is a negation of the human character of racialized people; it is a profound state of derealization. The process of racial objectification, according to Fanon, turns people into things, identified by their skin, racial or ethnic features, as well as culture.

Hence, racialized people first need to overcome ontological denial and, in so doing, forge the basis for a positive political grouping. Thus, Fanon rejects the static Hegelian notion of the master-slave relationship - one forged among ontologically equal adversaries - and instead posits that the slave is always-already marked as less-than-being. The slave, according to Fanon, transcends that racial othering by vehemently rejecting it through what George-Ciccariello Maher - in his book “Decolonizing Dialectics” - calls “combative self-assertion” that enables the slave to reject “her self-alienation,” to “turn away from the master” and to force the master to “turn toward the slave”. The slave’s action re-starts dialectical motion and forces the master and the slave to contend with each other.

“For the racialized subject,” Maher writes, “self-consciousness as human requires counter-violence against ontological force. In a historical situation marked by the denial of reciprocity and condemnation to nonbeing, that reciprocity can only result from the combative self-assertion of identity”. In fact, it is precisely this violence that “operates toward the decolonization of being”. In this way, Fanon decolonized Hegel’s approach from the “sub-ontological realm to which the racialized are condemned,” gesturing toward the pre-dialectical and counter-ontological violence that dialectical opposition requires. Ontological self-assertion needed to identify with negritude, which, however imperfect and empirically imprecise, provided the necessary mythical mechanism through which the dialectic of subjectivity could operate. In the words of Fanon, “to make myself known” meant “to assert myself as a BLACK MAN”.

Fanon conceived of the black subject emerging in the active negation of the social relations of white supremacy. Since blackness is the objective condition of its existence in a white supremacist society, the black subject thereby establishes its own identity on this basis by inverting its objectification, effectively making the conditions of its existence subject to its own power. The existential substance of racialized people now becomes real and actual in the world by changing it to fit its own needs. In the struggle, the black subject establishes independent self-consciousness, and begins to exist as a being for itself with a liberatory aim. The self-determination of the black subject - through the forceful affirmation of black history - establishes, for the first time, the basis for mutual recognition. Blackness has now established itself, not as moral plea for admission into the liberal and idealistic world of equality, but as a material, immanent fact. Blackness remakes the world in its own image.

Here, it is important to note the two distinct but interrelated facets of Fanon’s perspective on black assertion. On the one hand, he frames the identitarian dimension of anti-colonial struggle as a social symptom of colonial alienation, on the very level of its problematic status from the perspective of more evolved forms of postcolonial consciousness. On the other hand, Fanon advances an absolute claim in favour of the black colonized subject’s right to the expression of his symptomatic alienation. In other words, Fanon wishes to underline the historical, psychological and political necessity of what he nevertheless viewed in unambiguous fashion as a defensive, repressive and narcissistic phase of anti-colonial consciousness during which the native subject constructs - out of nothing - the self-image that was simply impossible to develop in the racial context of the colonial administration.

The Fanon-Sartre Debate

The debate between Jean Paul Sartre and Fanon on the relations between class and race stand out for their continuing relevance. Sartre wrote one of the definitive commentaries on the Negritude movement for a French audience in the preface to Leopold Senghor’s important Negritude anthology, “Black Orpheus”. There Sartre argued that blackness is the “negative moment” in an overall “transition” of the non-white toward integration into the proletariat -  a “weak stage of a dialogical progression,” passed over and left for dead as swiftly as it came to life. Fanon’s reply - in “Black Skin, White Masks” - was fiercely critical of Sartre:

“For once that born Hegelian had forgotten that consciousness has to lose itself in the night of the absolute, the only condition to attain to consciousness of self. In opposition to rationalism, he summoned up the negative side, but he forgot that this negativity draws its worth from an almost substantive absoluteness. A consciousness committed to experience is ignorant, has to be ignorant, of the essences and the determinations of its being”.

Fanon firmly upheld the view that racially based identity claims on the part of non-European subjects in colonized situations carried an irreducible, cathartic importance. Sartre fails to account for this dialectic of experience through the detached intellectualization of black consciousness. “[W]hen I tried,” Fanon writes, “on the level of ideas and intellectual activity, to reclaim my negritude, it was snatched away from me”. Sartre’s narrative of decolonization did not incorporate the properly experiential dimension of black subjectivity. With the European working class lying unconscious in the stupor of post-WWII capitalism, Sartre imagines revolutionary consciousness, in the manner of the Hegelian Spirit, manifesting itself in the anti-colonial resistance of Africa and the Caribbean. This new proletarian spirit descends from the heights of abstract dialectical theory to make use of the concrete culture of negritude as a vehicle for the reactivation of a universal anti-capitalist project.

Sartre’s dialectic of abstract universalism has a disheartening effect on the colonized subjects. By passively inserting black rebellion within a pre-determined dialectic, he robs it of all agency. As Fanon states:

“[I]t is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me. It is not out of my bad nigger’s misery, my bad nigger’s teeth, my bad nigger’s hunger that I will shape a torch with which to burn down the world, but it is the torch that was already there, waiting for that turn of history. In terms of consciousness, the black consciousness is held out as an absolute density, as filled with itself, a stage preceding any invasion, any abolition of the ego by desire. Jean-Paul Sartre, in this work, has destroyed black zeal… The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself. It shatters my unreflected position. Still in terms of consciousness, black consciousness is immanent in its own eyes. I am not a potentiality of something; I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. No probability has any place inside me. My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack. It is.”

“Black zeal” is a mythical self-discovery which by necessity refuses all explanation. After all, how precisely does one adopt an identity which is dismissed ahead of time as transitory? The Sartrean subject never gets “lost” in the negative. Sartrean consciousness remains in full possession of itself. And therefore, it can have no knowledge of itself - or the other. History, society, and corporeality recede from view and what remains is a timeless and abstract ontology. Contrary to this view, Hegel remarked: consciousness “wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself...nothing is known which does not fall within experience or (as it is also expressed) which is not felt to be true”. The truth that emerges from black consciousness is possible only via a phenomenological reassembly of the self. That is why Fanon continues to push forward: “I defined myself as an absolute intensity of beginning… My cry grew more violent: I am a Negro, I am a Negro, I am a Negro”.

Fanon does not quickly pass over human suffering in the pursuit of the universal, but attends to suffering, creating space for the communication of bodily and emotional pain. In Sartre’s hands, this dialectical negation explicitly lacks positive content and, consequently, any objectivity. The rupture with racism brings forward its own content - a re-woven fabric of daily existence and new ways of organizing social life - which challenges white supremacist society. Therefore, with Sartre, the negativity expressed by this rupture is a critique of existing reality, but does not generate new conditions - a new reality - based on its own self-active negation of white supremacist social relations. In his quest to brush aside the unmediated, affect-laden, passionate dimension of the native subject of colonialism’s sensuous, lived experience, Sartre short-circuits the dialectic through an intangible leap - ignoring the necessity of slow and patient labor.

He becomes a condescending adult speaking to a child: “You’ll change, my boy; I was like that too when I was young…you’ll see, it will all pass”. In effect, the non-white is subsumed into a pre-existing, white reality. Sartre, Fanon argues, is forced to conclude that the proletariat already exists universally. Yet, Fanon states that a universal proletariat does not exist. Instead, the proletariat is always racialized; the universal which Sartre emphasizes must be built upon the foundations of mutual recognition. However, establishing the conditions of mutual recognition depends upon the dislodgment of racial alienation and establishment of the claims of a non-white humanity. Sartre misses the point that such a process unfolds within the racial relation: black existence can only become the grounds of disalienation to the extent that the specifically black subject becomes conscious of itself and the white recognizes the absoluteness of those who exist as non-white.

To summarize, though Fanon does endorse Sartre’s notion of the overcoming of negritude, he still wants to underline the necessity of re-articulating the dialectic in terms of the experiential point of view of the Black subalterns.  In more general terms, the path to the universal - a world of mutual recognitions - proceeds through the particular struggles of those battling racial discrimination. While race is undoubtedly a form of alienation which needs to be abolished, one can’t subsumes the concrete, for-itself activity of black existence into a universal proletariat. We always have to keep in mind the rich process of the self-abolition of race, which develops as a series of negations. The American Left needs to valorize black consciousness, to claim it as an integral part of the emancipatory experience of revolutionary socialism, but without overlooking its basic nature as a byproduct of racial capitalism.

Decolonization and Communism

By Nodrada

Republished from Orinoco Tribune.

“We have to give life to Indo-American socialism with our own reality, in our own language. Here is a mission worthy of a new generation.”

-José Carlos Mariátegui, “Anniversary and Balance,” José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology¹

While the turn towards analyzing ongoing settler-colonialism has finally reached the mainstream of North American political discussions, there is still a lack of popular understanding of the issues involved. Settler-colonialism is, ironically, understood within the framework of the ways of thinking brought by the European ruling classes to the Americas. By extension, the conceptions of decolonization are similarly limited. Although the transition from analyzing psychological or “discursive” decolonization to analyzing literal, concrete colonization has been extremely important, it requires some clarifications.

Settler–colonialism is a form of colonialism distinct from franchise colonialism. The colonizers seek primarily to eliminate the indigenous population rather than exploit them, as in the latter form of colonialism. Decolonization is the struggle to abolish colonial conditions, though approaches to it may vary. Societies formed on a settler-colonial basis include the United States, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and Australia. For our purposes, we will focus on the United States in analyzing local ideas of settler-colonialism and decolonization.

Among North American radicals, there are two frequent errors in approaching decolonization.

On the one hand, there are the opponents of decolonization who argue that settler-colonialism no longer exists. In their view, to identify specific concerns for Indigenous peoples and to identify the ongoing presence of settler-colonial social positions is divisive and stuck in the past. They believe that settlers no longer exist, and Euro-Americans have fully become indigenous to North America through a few centuries of residency.

On the other hand, there are proponents of decolonization who believe that Euro-Americans are eternally damned as settlers, and cannot be involved in any radical change whatsoever. The most extreme of these argue for the exclusion of Euro-Americans from radical politics entirely.

Settler-colonialism is not over, contrary to the first view. Rather, Indigenous peoples still struggle for their rights to sovereignty within and outside reservations, especially ecological-spiritual rights. Their ostensibly legally recognized rights are not respected, either. The examples of the struggles of the Wet’suwet’en, Standing Rock Lakota, Mi’kmaq, and other peoples in recent memory are testimony to this. Indigenous peoples are still here, and they are still fighting to thrive as Indigenous peoples. Capitalists drive to exploit the earth, destroying ecology and throwing society into what John Bellamy Foster calls a metabolic rift.² This means that the demands of capital for expansion are incompatible with the ‘rhythm’ of ecology, destroying concrete life for abstract aims as a result.

An atomistic, individualist worldview is what undergirds the view of settler-colonialism as over and of contemporary Euro-Americans as being just as indigenous as Indigenous peoples. When settler-colonialism is seen as an individual responsibility or guilt, we are left with a very crude concept of it.

The denialists of settler-colonialism assume that it must be over, because the colonization of the Americas is apparently over. Thus, they think that modern Euro-Americans cannot be blamed for the sins of their forefathers, since individuals shouldn’t be held responsible for things which happened outside of their lifetimes. Guilt in this conception is an assessment of whether an atomistic individual is responsible for extremely specific crimes, such as participating in something like the Paxton Boys’ ethnic cleansing campaign in 1763 Pennsylvania.

The same ideological approach characterizes the other side, which obsesses over the individual status of “settler” and micro-categorizing the contemporary residents of North America within an abstract concept of settler-colonialism. They argue that having the individual status of “settler” means one is eternally damned, one is marked as a specific person by the crimes of a social system always and forever. This hefty sentence has high stakes, thus the obsession with categorizing every unique case within a specific box.

Neither of these approaches offers a successful insight into settler-colonialism. Instead, they project the thinking of European bourgeois liberalism. The individual is defined in an atomistic way, in their characteristics, rights, crimes, and so on. The individual as a node on a web of social relations is totally out of the question here. Yet, that is how we must think if we wish to understand settler-colonialism and, therefore, abolish it.

To focus primarily on categorizing atomistic individuals, instead of focusing on social relations, loses sight of the true engine of settler-colonialism. It is not that individuals choose one day to behave brutally, or that it is simply the nature of a specific people. Instead, it has very concrete historical motivations in the global system and the rise of settler-colonialism within it. For example, North American settler-colonialism was motivated significantly by the land hunger of capitalists who grew cash crops like tobacco and cotton, which were sold on the world market. Thinking in broad, structural terms is important in order to avoid reductive analyses and approaches.

While the side which focuses on damning individual Euro-Americans certainly have land in mind while thinking about this subject, they have a static and simple concept of land. In their minds, settlers are settlers because they are present in a certain place, to which a specific Indigenous group has an abstract, moral right to exclusive habitation in. To put it simply, their thought process is “if X person is in Y place, which belongs to Z people, then they are a settler.”

They do not understand the social relation of Indigenous peoples to their homelands, which extends into the aspects of ecology, history, spirituality, etc. That is, Indigeneity as itself a social relation. Indigenous peoples explicitly refer to their nations and homelands as relations. Their relation to land is not to land as an abstract thing, but to specific spaces that are inseparable from their specific communal lives.

In the context of describing his people’s history, Nick Estes (Lower Brulé Lakota) said in Our History is the Future:

“Next to the maintenance of good relations within the nation, an individual’s second duty was the protection of communal territory. In the east, the vast wild rice patties and seasonal farms that grew corn, beans, and squash demarcated Dakota territory. In the west, Lakota territory extended as far as the buffalo herds that traveled in the fertile Powder River country. For Dakotas, Lakotas, and Nakotas, territory was defined as any place where they cultivated relations with plant and animal life; this often overlaid, and was sometimes in conflict, with other Indigenous nations.”³

Identity and mode of life in communalist societies is specific to spaces, because keeping in the ‘rhythm’ of these spaces is a basic guiding logic of life. Because land is a relative, there was and is significant resistance among Indigenous peoples to the settler seizure of land and commodification of their non-human relative. The European bourgeoisie, meanwhile, was more concerned with what value could be extracted from the land, their worldview being based in abstract concepts of Right, Justice, Liberty and so on.

The faction in question does not understand settler-colonists as part of social relations which seek to negate that communal land social relation for concrete aims. They lack broad perspective, they only see society as a collection of atoms, falling into micro-categories, bundled together.

Having critiqued these two views, we can now give a better idea of how to properly approach the category groupings involved in analysis of settler-colonialism.

Indigeneity is defined by continuity of long-standing communal relations and identities indigenous to a certain region. Relation to a specific homeland or region is important to this, but the loss of direct ties to land does not necessarily negate Indigeneity. Rather, the continuity of belonging to a certain ‘mode of life’ and community is key.

A settler is one who is outside of these relations, and plays an active role in the negation of these Indigenous relations. A settler is not merely a settler because they are foreign. Rather, they are a settler because of this active negating role.

To play an active negating role does not necessarily mean one personally enforces colonial laws. Instead, it means that one directly benefits from their participation in the destruction of these relations, such as by gaining residencies or employment at the expense of those land-relations. An important aspect of being a settler is being a socio-political citizen of a settler-colonial society. This means that, in law and in social practice, one has the full rights of belonging to the settler-colonial nation, and is recognized as such in ideology.

Many analysts of settler-colonialism, such as Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw), use a third category in their analysis: arrivants.⁴ Arrivants are those who are part of social structures which dissolve those land-relations, but lack the citizenship and agency of settlers. An example of this would be Filipino debt peons. They cannot fully belong to the settler structures, in practice or in ideology, but they are still part of those structures. In North American history, these groups have at various times been explicitly excluded from the potential to own property or obtain full legal citizenship. Said citizenship was directly defined around whiteness, first de jure, and later de facto.

These categories should be treated in a nuanced way, as tools to understand a concrete society and history. We should avoid trying to bend reality to fit abstract categories. Otherwise, one assumes these categories are destiny. One assumes that Indigenous peoples cannot be part of settler-colonial structures, or that all settlers are eternally damned and cannot overcome their social role.

In history, there are many examples of Indigenous peoples participating in settler-colonial processes, such as with Tohono O’odham warriors participating in the Camp Grant Massacre against Apaches, or the Indigenous Vice President Charles Curtis sponsoring assimilation and allotment of communal lands. There are also examples of people without full socio-political citizenship participating in these processes, such as with Black Buffalo Soldiers fighting on the front lines of Manifest Destiny.

There are also examples of Euro-Americans defecting to Indigenous societies in order to escape bourgeois “civilization.” Cynthia Ann Parker was abducted and adopted as a child by a Comanche war band. Texas Rangers, who had massacred her adopted relatives, had to force her to return to Euro-American society. While adopted Euro-Americans remained Euro-Americans, inclusion in those communal relations transformed them. Instead of playing a negating influence on the part of bourgeois society, they became participants in Indigenous relations. To be a settler is not destiny, but is a status which can be negated through a revolutionary transformation of society. In a word, through decolonization.

To obsess over policing micro-categories is not helpful for understanding or fighting settler-colonialism. Being conscious of it is important, but the key is to focus on broad social structures. The way we alter individuals is by altering social relations, and the way we fight for Indigenous sovereignty is by abolishing the negating forces in society. To successfully treat a disease, one must keep in mind the body as a system rather than a simple collection of parts. The same applies to society.

Settler-colonialism in North America is the conflict of two social forms, one fighting to negate the other. The capitalist system: private, individualist, focused on expanding an abstract ‘god’ (capital). The Indigenous communal modes of life: premised on relationality, collectivist, focused on viewing the individual as a part of a whole.

The bourgeoisie seek exclusive, private ownership of land as property to be bought and sold as a commodity. They do not recognize communal land rights, or anything like having a social relation with a place. Instead, they seek to cut off the nerves connecting every aspect of communal life in order to box things in as commodities, so that they can be abstracted into an exchange-value.

The 1887 Dawes Act, which dissolved Indigenous communal landholdings in the United States, was aimed at forcing this system on Indigenous peoples.⁵ In the eyes of the ruling class, this was simply “civilization.” The bourgeoisie had to go to war with these communal ways of life to construct a capitalist system in its place. In the communal systems, unlike capitalism: land itself has rights as a relative instead of being merely a vehicle for value, people live off the land as a community instead of being landless wage-laborers, and exploitation is heavily frowned upon.

The first Red Scare in the United States was not during the 1919–1920 assault on organized labor and anti-war activists, but during the struggle of the government and capitalists against Indigenous communal modes of life.⁶

This war of generalized commodity production, capitalism, against alternative ways of being extended to ways of knowing. When forcing Indigenous children into boarding schools, the colonizers worked hard to destroy languages, religious practices, and cultural practices.⁷ In their place, they promoted individualism, bourgeois values, and a future as wage-laborers.

The liberal view of individuals is quite representative of typical bourgeois thinking. Liberalism posits individuals in an atomistic way, without considering them as concrete beings with concrete relationships in a real world. It sees individuals as simply bundles of rights, obligations, and so on. It premises meaning on extremely abstract, albeit universalizing concepts, such as “justice.” The rights of the liberal citizen are rights they have apart from society. Their freedom is a space separate from society, since they see others as fundamentally competitors.

This abstract thinking, individualism, and competitive view makes plenty of sense for a bourgeois. Their well-off conditions and obsession with preserving their private property against others reflect in their lack of concern for positive rights (rights to things, like food or shelter). What they want is to realize their capital, defeat their competitors, and pay as little as they have to for the working class’s living.

They only concern themselves with concrete things as far as they relate to their mission to realize abstract, congealed labor: capital. Capital commands them. If they do not expand their capital through exploitation and investment, they fall behind and decay in the rat race. Thus, the bourgeois is shrewd, atomistic, and anti-social.

By contrast, the communal view of individuals which is characteristic of Indigenous nations is focused on very concrete things. Individuals are part of specific communities with specific histories, who are relatives with specific land-spaces. To preserve balance in one’s real relations is an important value, contrasting sharply to the obsession with satisfying the god of abstract capital by feeding it concrete sacrifices. The key to this worldview is keeping in the ‘rhythm’ of life: the rhythm of one’s human relatives, non-human relatives, the ecology, the spirits, etc.

The latter view has a sibling in the views of Karl Marx. In the sixth thesis from Theses On Feuerbach, Marx said:

[…]the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.⁸

Further, Marx was very concerned with the metabolic rift wrought by capitalism. In his view, while capitalism had for the first time linked up the whole world and all people into one global social system of production, it had also unleashed forces it could not control. While everyone in capitalism depends on everyone else, the system is controlled by self-interested bourgeoisie, who have no concern for humans, animals, or ecology.

Therefore, there is a need for a working class revolution, where the people who produce what the world runs on establish social control of this social production. Through that social control, they must restore the balance of humanity and nature, using the planning of production to end the chaos and blindness characteristic of capital. Once they have fully developed this system of social control and planning and brought about a world where all people contribute to the social product instead of anyone exploiting anyone else, they will have established a communist society.

The basis for Pan-Indigenism in North America was laid by the proletarianization of Indigenous peoples during and after World War II.⁹ The Federal government explicitly hoped to use this to assimilate Indigenous peoples by removing them from communal life on reservations. Instead, the contact of many distinct peoples in urban workforces and communities led to the development of a new, broad concept of Indigeneity. These proletarians thought of themselves not only as, for example, Standing Rock Lakota or Chiricahua Apache, but also as “Indigenous.”

This had precedence with people such as Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee leaders of a Pan-Indigenous resistance to settler-colonialism in late 18th and early 19th century Ohio, or Wovoka, the Paiute founder of the Ghost Dance movement in the late 19th century. However, it had never reached this scale before. The same forces which sought to destroy Indigenous identity created means of establishing a new political movement in defense of it.

This universalization of identity from particular to general, without necessarily negating the particular, is something which must be done by social revolution as well. Proletarianization unites many distinct peoples into one class, leading to radical contacts between worlds. It lays the basis for a revolution which for the first time establishes a real community of all of humanity.

Decolonization ties directly into this project of social revolution. Capital attacks communal relations to establish and reproduce itself, yet by doing this it lays the foundation for a more universal form of communal life: communism. To decolonize is not to merely undo history and return to the past. We cannot undo centuries of change, of destruction.

Instead, as advocated by anti-colonial theorists like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, we must assert indigenous aims on the basis of the world colonialism has brought. This must take the form of the social revolution, because capital leaves intact the negating force against communalism and the relations of domination between groups of people.

In our theorizing of communism, we must avoid the thought patterns of the bourgeoisie. We must not only avoid individualism, but avoid the denigration of communalist ways of life. Indigenous peoples are at the forefront of the defense of bio-diversity. They are staunch protectors of the earth, of their ways of life and of their relation with the earth. They resist capitalist primitive accumulation, defending their sovereignty, daily. Communism cannot be some form of universalized bourgeois society, nor can it carry over the denigrated view the bourgeoisie have of life. Instead, it must be communalism reasserted on a universal scale.

Decolonization does not mean one throws out settlers. It does not mean we send Euro-Americans back to Europe. This belief is premised on a bourgeois, colonial thinking about life. It assumes that behavior is ahistoric, inscribed into the DNA of people. Rather, it is social relations that we must expel, transforming people through incorporation into new ones.

In the past, the adoption of Euro-Americans served as an alternative to their behavior as settlers. A decolonized society can follow this model on a broader scale, while preserving the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples over their homelands. Indigenous conceptions of land are not based on bourgeois exclusive right, but the right of specific people to have an ongoing relation with specific spaces. Abolishing the negating force, capitalism, and asserting these ways of life while working to establish the universalist form, communism, must be our program.

To put it simply, decolonization should be understood as the indigenization of settlers. This necessitates a social revolution in all aspects of life. It does not mean settlers must immediately “play Native.” Within the context of bourgeois settler-colonialism, that is part of a process of dissolving Indigenous communities, destroying their ability to remain sovereign. Rather, it means that we must destroy the capitalist society which drives these antagonisms.

This decolonization also necessitates a conscious revolution in ideology as part and parcel of social transformation. As discussed, communalist societies have a strong sense of concrete locality, of specificity according to a space and the relations of that space. Capitalism seeks to negate that in favor of universalist abstractions. Communism must take the universalizing capitalism has engaged in and place it on a concrete, conscious basis.

We ought to oppose the negation of local life capitalism engages in, while having the universal goal of revolution. That is, unite the particular with the universal, establish the particular as the basis of the universal. The old, European bourgeois ways of thinking, lacking metabolism or relationality with other humans and with ecology, must be overcome.

Communism is the abolition of the present state of things on the basis of existing premises. The emancipatory project of communism should not be hostile to, but a student of Indigenous peoples. When all people are one kin, when they are not divided by class or other social antagonisms, then we will all be free. That is the relation of decolonization to communism.

Juneteenth: A Marxist Perspective

By Scott Cooper

Republished from Left Voice.

The United States, like all of the Americas, was built on the backs of enslaved labor, by the labor of people ripped from their homelands and brought to stolen lands. On Juneteenth, we celebrate the emancipation of the last of the enslaved Black people in the United States, as well as remember and commit to fight against the legacy of slavery. In the midst of the current uprising, this is more important than ever.

Socialists have a long history of fighting against slavery. Karl Marx, who wrote extensively about the Civil War and slavery in the United States, made it abundantly clear that enslaved Black people in North America had to be free before all the wage slaves of the working class could be free of exploitation.

Marx and the Abolition of Slavery

The materialist conception of history developed by Marx explains that human society progresses through different stages that are characterized by the material conditions of production. The Union states represented a more progressive stage in which capitalism was developing the productive forces and in which Black people were not held in bondage. The Confederacy remained in a backward stage, with vestiges of property relations that had long been overturned in Europe. The capitalists waging a war to free slaves from their bondage, with the support of the Northern working class, was to Marx, therefore, progressive.

In a letter from London dated December 10, 1861, Marx made clear that the “slavery question” was “the question underlying the whole Civil War.” Marx was a staunch supporter of a Union victory in the Civil War, and not because he supported the Northern capitalists. He argued against those who advocated simply letting the South’s secession stand and letting the Confederacy constitute itself as a new country. Marx vehemently opposed the Southern slavocracy, which profited from the hyper-exploitation of Black people and worsened conditions for workers and oppressed people as a whole. Slavery’s place was the dustbin of history. To Marx, there could be no emancipation for the proletariat while slavery continued to exist. 

Marx also made clear that the fight to free enslaved Black people in America was inextricably linked to the fight to free the entire working class from what he called wage slavery — working people having to sell their labor for 8, 10, 12 hours a day in order to survive. The fight to crush the Confederacy, for Marx, was not about the “dissolution of the Union,” but against what he saw as the true objective of the slavocracy: 

[R]eorganization on the basis of slavery, under the recognized control of the slaveholding oligarchy … The slave system would infect the whole Union. In the Northern states, where Negro slavery is in practice unworkable, the white working class would gradually be forced down to the level of helotry. This would fully accord with the loudly proclaimed principle that only certain races are capable of freedom, and as the actual labor is the lot of the Negro in the South, so in the North it is the lot of the German and the Irishman, or their direct descendants.

Revolutionary socialists view Juneteenth through the prism of Marx’s analysis. Abolishing slavery was a revolutionary act to free Black people from the most brutal bondage. It was also a victory for the working class as a whole. Marx said it directly:

The present struggle between the South and North is, therefore, nothing but a struggle between two social systems, the system of slavery and the system of free labor. The struggle has broken out because the two systems can no longer live peacefully side-by-side on the North American continent. It can only be ended by the victory of one system or the other.

Marx saw the defeat of the slave system as a prerequisite for building a revolutionary struggle to overturn capitalism. If humanity was to advance, a social and economic order based on slavery had to be destroyed everywhere.

The Road to Juneteenth

Before the Civil War broke out, there had already been numerous slave rebellions and insurrections in the United States. Documentary evidence suggests at least 250 uprisings or attempted uprisings involving 10 or more slaves, beginning in the 16th century. In 1800, an enslaved man by the name of Gabriel (now known as Gabriel Prosser) planned a large slave rebellion in the area of Richmond, Virginia — but news got out and he and 25 of his followers were hanged. Prosser had learned to read, and the Virginia legislature henceforth prohibited educating slaves who might, like Gabriel, be inclined to use their skills for similar purposes. Another enslaved man in Charleston, South Carolina named Denmark Vesey was executed in 1822 for planning a slave revolt in that city. In 1831, a rebellion of fugitive slaves led by Nat Turner in Southampton, Virginia, killed more than 50 white people but was put down after a few days; Turner went into hiding but was discovered more than two months later. Some 21 of the rebels were hanged and another 16 were sold away from the region.

Such slave insurrections were a prelude to the Civil War. The war itself was full of Black soldiers and sailors. In fact, by war’s end, roughly 179,000 Black men had served as soldiers in the U.S. Army — accounting for about 10 percent of the total forces — and another 19,000 served in the Navy. The Civil War took the lives of nearly 40,000 soldiers, three-fourths of whom died not in combat but from infections or disease.

These combatants served bravely and were clearly a vital component of the Union war effort. Among them were the enlisted members of the famous 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Many enslaved Black people who ran away from Southern plantations to Union encampments enlisted in the Army to fight against their former owners — with weapons supplied to them by the U.S. government. These actions by Black slaves forced President Abraham Lincoln’s hand. Originally, Lincoln insisted the war was not about slavery — despite every document of the Confederacy making clear the exact opposite — but an effort to save the Union. But as former slaves rose up against their masters and joined the war effort, Lincoln could either embrace them as allies in the war or continue to risk both a bloody war and a more widespread slave rebellion. Due to the actions of runaway slaves, Lincoln chose the former. 

Over a year into the war, on September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which would go into effect on the following January 1. It declared that enslaved Black peoples in the Confederate states were free. If they escaped across Union lines or were liberated by the advancing Union Army, they were permanently free. Of course, the Union went on to defeat the Confederacy — at the cost of between 620,000 and 750,000 lives. 

The proclamation wasn’t a full emancipation, even formally. It applied only to the 3.5 million slaves in the 10 states of the Confederacy and to all segments of the executive branch of the U.S. government, including the Army and Navy. It excluded the border slave states. It left a half-million enslaved people in bondage. But the fact that the proclamation was issued encouraged all those in slavery to rise up and fight, as well as to join the Union forces. This depleted the Confederacy’s labor force, which hurt the production of arms for the South’s rebellion.

The Emancipation Proclamation also brought to a halt the Confederacy’s campaign to win recognition from European countries, particularly England and France — both countries that were officially anti-slavery. But English textile mills needed Southern cotton; consequently capitalist pressure to recognize the Confederate States of America and open full trade was strong. Lincoln’s proclamation made it impossible for anyone to pretend that the war was about anything other than slavery, and the mill owners were forced to back down.

Put simply, the Emancipation Proclamation was a public commitment by the United States to end slavery. It killed the Fugitive Slave Laws and outlawed the return of escaped slaves to the South. It was a manifestation of the slave revolt, with Northern support, the South had always feared.

Of course, enforcement depended in large part on Union advances through the Confederate states — which brings us to Juneteenth.

June 19, 1865

Texas was the westernmost part of the Confederacy, having been stolen from Mexico just 20 years before. Its geographic isolation largely shielded it from the battles of the Civil War, and over the course of the war Texas filled with slaveholders who moved to escape the fighting across the Deep South. They brought their human property with them — some to work on newly acquired or established farms, but others to be domestic servants in cities such as Houston and Galveston. There were about 250,000 people in enslavement in Texas by 1865.

It took many weeks for news of the April 9, 1865 surrender by Robert E. Lee to reach Texas, and even longer — until June 2 — for the Confederate Army of the Trans-Mississippi to surrender. On June 18, 2,000 U.S. troops arrived at Galveston Island to occupy Texas for the federal government, under the command of Union Army General Gordon Granger. The next day, he stood on the balcony of the Ashton Villa and read aloud General Order No. 3:

The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.

This was the first news of the Emancipation Proclamation that those enslaved in Galveston had heard. Likely, few if any Texas slaves had heard that they had been officially freed more than two years earlier. A celebration broke out, and the next year, in 1866, the freedmen of Texas held on June 19 what became an annual celebration — Jubilee Day. These early celebrations became political rallies centered on registering newly freed slaves as voters. They helped spark the advances of the Reconstruction Era.

The Civil War had not, obviously, destroyed racism. White Texans, for instance, did everything they could to keep these June 19 celebrations from happening. Landowners would interrupt with demands that their laborers return to work. Cities and towns would bar Black people from using public parks, for instance, which were segregated. So, freed slaves across Texas began to pool their resources and purchase land where they could celebrate Juneteenth. Emancipation Park, 10 acres of land in Houston purchased in 1872 by a group of Black ministers and business owners, is one such location still in use today. It was established expressly for the city’s annual Juneteenth celebration.

Black people taking control of a part of their lives that the racists could not take from them — including just celebrating Juneteenth — so upset the white power structure that they created whatever obstacles they could devise. Eventually, between 1890 and 1908, every one of the former Confederate states, Texas included, passed new laws or revised their constitutions to disenfranchise Black voters, exclude them from public facilities, and enshrine the racist Jim Crow system as a new form of the old plantation.

Since then, Juneteenth has been associated with many of the struggles of Black people against racist and economic oppression. And it has taken up broader social issues as well. In 1968, for instance, the Poor People’s Campaign — organized by Martin Luther King, Jr. and then carried out under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy after King’s assassination, raised demands for economic and human rights for all poor Americans. As part of that campaign, Juneteenth was designated Solidarity Day, and 100,000 people — including many whites — marched in Washington. That day, Coretta Scott King spoke out against the Vietnam War.

Today, with the urgency of the fight against racism as strong as ever, Juneteenth stands as a reminder of the emancipation of slaves and the destruction of the South’s backward socioeconomic system. It is also a reminder of how much more work there is to do. While U.S. military bases are named for Confederate officers and statues to “heroes of the Confederacy” dot the Southern landscape, efforts to make Juneteenth a national holiday in the United States have been thwarted every time. 

Racism Cannot Be Eradicated without Eradicating Capitalism

This year, Juneteenth comes just as the fight against racism in the United States and around the world has taken a new turn. The murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis cops has sparked an uprising against the structural racism that was begun in 1619, when the first Africans were brought as slaves to Virginia. This structural racism was not resolved with the Civil War.

For weeks, in the midst of a global pandemic, the streets of cities across the country have been filled with people of all races, ages, genders, and socioeconomic statuses, demanding change. These protests, by calling the police as an institution into question, are questioning a key component of capitalism  — since the police are the armed force of the capitalist state and serve to uphold capitalist property relations.

Capitalism is inherently racist. In the United States, structural racism is the direct legacy of slavery. Once slaves were freed, the Southerners who were no longer able to enslave people legally, as well as the Northern industrial capitalists, began a systematic recreation of Black oppression to guarantee their profits throughout the United States. Black people became the bottom rung of a growing working class. They were unable to unionize, paid the lowest wages, and kept out of key jobs. Attempts at Black capitalism were systematically crushed, like the Tulsa white supremacist uprising that burned Black small businesses.

After the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was enacted in 1865, formally abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude in the entire United States (and thus going further than the Emancipation Proclamation), Black Codes, state-sanctioned white supremacist violence, and the growth of the Ku Klux Klan all began. Black people were subjected to involuntary labor throughout the South as states and their cops refused to enforce statutes meant to prevent such circumstances. And then there are prisons.

The United States incarcerates more people than any other country, and more than one-third of the prison population is Black people — who are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of whites. Capitalism uses this imprisoned population as slave labor, doing all sorts of work at pennies on the dollar or for no pay at all to feed the capitalist profit-making machine.

Racism is a tool the capitalists wield with great skill; they enforce it with laws and the police. As long as capitalism exists, the capitalists will seek to elevate some people and denigrate others, sowing divisions to deflect attention away from a common enemy.

Thus, the fight to eradicate capitalism is inextricably linked with the fight against racism, and vice versa: the anti-racist struggle is the struggle for socialism. 

Lenin saw the Civil War as a revolutionary war. In a “Letter to American Workers” in 1918, he wrote words that resonate with as much relevance today as they did less than a year after the Russian Revolution. He began by celebrating the “revolutionary tradition” of the American proletariat, and pointed to “the immense, world-historic, progressive and revolutionary significance of the American Civil War of 1863-65!” And like Marx before him, he explained that the fight against the enslavement of Black people in the United States is linked to the fight against wage slavery.

The representatives of the bourgeoisie understand that for the sake of overthrowing Negro slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the slaveowners, it was worth letting the country go through long years of civil war … But now, when we are confronted with the vastly greater task of overthrowing capitalist wage-slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the bourgeoisie — now, the representatives and defenders of the bourgeoisie, and also the reformist socialists who have been frightened by the bourgeoisie and are shunning the revolution, cannot and do not want to understand that civil war is necessary and legitimate.

The American workers will not follow the bourgeoisie. They will be with us, for civil war against the bourgeoisie. The whole history of the world and of the American labor movement strengthens my conviction that this is so. 

We can honor Juneteenth in 2020 by taking deliberate steps to liberate humanity from capitalism and the institutional racism that feeds its profits.

Whiteness As A Covenant

By John Kamaal Sunjata

White supremacy, whatever its latest evolution, whatever its latest iteration, ensures that one man’s apocalypse is always another man’s paradise. The blessings and promises that whiteness bestows upon its “chosen people” are inextricably linked to absolute, total, and seamless damnation of generations and generations of racialized people. Whiteness has fabricated itself in its own image; therefore, in its own eyes, whiteness is divinity. Whiteness is perfect, without spot, wrinkle, or blemish—whiteness is god. White people are thus imbued with power and dominion over the Earth and all its living creatures, especially inferior “species” of humanity that the racialized descend from. The mandate by which white people are empowered is the Covenant of Whiteness.

This Covenant is more than a simple social contract, as “contracts” always have a definite end, covenants are forever. It is not reducible to a ritualistic prostration of individual whites or even mere flagellation of racial capitalism, but it is a totalizing affair. It has created a planet hostile to racialized people, it has encircled not only our tangible realities but captured our imaginations. For us, salvation comes through death because only by reaching Heaven can we live a life comparable to what white people presently live on Earth. We live in a world of their creation and our souls are damned from birth—we are permanently forsaken, and we have inherited the original sin of darkness. Covenants are always solemnized through blood and every white person is covered in the blood—of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people. The racialized have a permanent spiritual connection to the Earth because so much of our own blood cries out from the ground. The brutality of whiteness guarantees our mourning is ceaseless, it guarantees that our graveyards are evergreen from our tears. Our cries have no resting place because we never get a rest. Under whiteness, many are culled, but few are chosen.

When you are truly a god, you can never lose your anointing. When you are truly a god, your authority and capacity may never be extinguished by lesser “species” of being. The problem posed by whiteness is that white people—the instruments by which the racial-colonial project is maintained—are semipotent, not omnipotent. The prospect of lost “anointing” is a terrifying prospect for white people as it strikes at the heart of the Covenant they are conscripted under. It reveals that their blessings are not the result of good works; therefore, their overflow is not predestined. Their divinity is not destiny, but the latest destination of productive forces in the historical thrust of the racial capitalist political economy. It is only through the consistent deployment of violence and terror that whiteness has given its covenant form and substance. 

Whenever the racialized ingratiate ourselves to the production of whiteness, we uphold the moral superiority of a system premised on our enslavement and our genocide. We do the unthinkable by deifying a death-dealing regime that masquerades as a moral authority on “justice” and “righteousness.” No respect should be extended to any system of racial othering that instills fear and deploys wanton destruction. Whenever we worship whiteness, we declare fealty to its false gods: racism, consumerism, and militarism. The racialized are regularly sacrificed at the altar of white supremacy, our bodies and spirits are ritualistically broken to fortify the auspices of this racial-colonial project. The racialized may be “converted” to this tyrannical religion, but no amount of repentance will make our sins—our skins—“as white as snow.”

Whiteness does not require zealots for its expansion, but stable systems only. It is fortified by the ideological and repressive apparatuses of the state formation. So long as white supremacist institutions and technologies are not critically challenged or assailed by the racialized, whiteness will continue into perpetuity. Challenges from the racialized invokes revanchism disguised as righteous indignation because nothing is more threatening to the edifice—the fragile façade—of whiteness than decolonization. For a political economy structured and articulated by whiteness, decolonization feels like the Book of Revelation coming to life and the Chosen People know their actions are desperately wicked. Whiteness forestalls insurrection by reforming the presentation of its doctrine to deceive the racialized into being congregants, true believers in whiteness. Despite its attempts at reinventing itself, whiteness has at least one defining characteristic, an immutable property: a limitless capacity to inflict infinite harms with finite resources. It maximizes cruelty at every juncture: it is as arbitrary as it is petty and as petty as it is brutal. It is premised on a dehumanizing lie that keeps the racialized in constant search of the truth: the reality of our dignity and self-worth. 

We are a disillusioned people in constant search of new life-affirming consciousness to combat the death-dealing regime of whiteness. As whiteness was bought and ratified through the blood of racialized people, our freedom will also be bought with blood. The conditions of white supremacy produces its own antagonisms, generates its own resistance; therefore, mapping out the path to its own destruction. Whiteness has prefigured its own end: it may be the alpha, but the racialized are the omega. The racialized have no path to political salvation except by decolonization, it is the way, the truth, and the life for all racialized people. Decolonization is the process by which inferior “species” of humans are elevated, the process by which “the last shall be first.” Whiteness produces false gods, decolonization produces faithful servants. The racialized must shed the blood of our oppressors, overthrow the systems of our oppression and bring truth to the well-known phrase: “the meek shall inherit the Earth.” It is through decolonization that the Covenant of Whiteness is superseded and a new Covenant takes its place. Under this new Covenant, the racialized shall sign and seal our freedom and redemption once and for all, for all at once.

Rock-A-Bye Baby: On the State's Legitimation of Juneteenth and Liberal Concessions as Political Anesthetization In Slavery's Afterlives

(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

By Joshua Briond

“Everything has changed on the surface and nothing else has been touched[...] In a way, the state is more powerful than ever, because it has given us so many tokens.”

—James Baldwin

On Thursday, June 17th, President Joe Biden signed a bill establishing June 19 as Juneteenth National Independence Day, a US federal holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. According to CNN, the holiday will become the first federal law holiday established since Martin Luther King Jr. Day was signed into law in 1983. Ultimately, the bill will allow a fragment of the nations’ surplus populations —excluding much of the largely racialized lumpenproletariat and underclass— a day ‘free’ from the capitalist exploitation and alienation that comes with the traditional day-to-day of the laboring class. The timing of the implementation of the national holiday—amidst rebellions, particularly in Minneapolis, in the aftermath of Winston Smith’s clearly politically-motivated, state-sanctioned assassination—cannot be understood as anything other than yet another attempt at anesthetizing the captive Black colonies in sentimentality and symbolic gestures. 

"this is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. i, too, am the afterlife of slavery."

—saidiya hartman, lose your mother: a journey along the atlantic slave route (2006)

The institution of Black slavery, that rendered Black captives as chattel, capital, productive property, was economically, culturally, and politically ubiquitous. Yet, despite its legacies and afterlives, there has been no material reckoning, or atonement for its anti-Black psychosexual and physical terror and violence. In fact, the ghosts of what is largely understood as slavery’s past, have continued to manifest in the economic polity, modern policing and prisons, and social, cultural, and ideological underpinnings, etc. Descendants of Black captives whom, in many ways, remain hyper-surveilled, overpoliced, hyper-exploited, underpaid, alienated, and often succumbed to occupation of our communities and premature death, have little-to-nothing to show for being major instruments in assembling and maintaining the global capitalist economy since we were trafficked to the Euro-Americas. But you are damn sure we have one month per year, and now an extra day, to learn about and hashtag-celebrate the most whitewashed and bleak articulations of Black historical events—events that have largely only taken place because of Black resistance to white terror, violence, and domination. 

“A critical genealogy of White Reconstruction requires close examination of the non-normative—nonwhite, queer, non-Christian, and so on—iterations of white supremacy within contemporary institutionalizations of diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism. Such non-normativities are constitutive of (rather than incidental or exceptional to) the protocols, planning, and statecraft of contemporary counterinsurgency/domestic war, extending and complicating rather than disrupting or abolishing the historical ensembles of anti-Black and racial-colonial state violence.” 

—Dylan Rodriguez, White Reconstruction 

Since 1776 and the founding of the United States of America, the white power structure has been in a constant state of attempting to—arguably, at times, successfully—ideologically and politically sedate the most wretched, particularly the Black colonies, through incremental concessions and symbolic gestures while ultimately supplementing white rule. As Gerald Horne has taught us, this founding itself was brought into being after a successful power struggle against the British rulers to preserve the institution of Black slavery. As noted by Dylan Rodriguez in the epigraph above, and throughout his book White Reconstruction, the white settler-colonial state has had to “undergo substantive reform to remain politically and institutionally viable.” This includes, but is not limited to, incremental (neo)liberal reform as sedation and the multicultural diversification of settler-colonial, surveillance-capitalist, and imperialist apparatuses.

If we are to understand the American project itself as a consequence of intra-European counterrevolution to preserve the institution of slavery. The civil war as described by Frederick Douglass, “[starting] in the interest of slavery on both sides[...]both despising the Negro, both insulting the Negro.” The Reconstruction era as an attempt to establish a workers-democracy—in the aftermath of the countless slave revolts across North America and the Civil War ultimately ending chattel slavery—only to be defeated by ruling class forces. Jim Crow as an inevitability of the settler state and its individual deputized upholders’ idiosyncratic anxieties surrounding the collapsing synonymity of Blackness and the slave positionality. The Civil Rights Movement as an understandably decentralized reformist effort toward Black freedom, through attempts to expand the civil liberties of Black people within the American colony, co-existence with whites within the white power structure that became co-opted by the state ordained Black bourgeoisie and US intelligence leading to mild concessions. Then, we—as Black people—have to understand that we have been in an outright war of attrition with the white power structure for nearly half a millennium.

It is important to recontextualize major historical events — from the Civil War, to the crushing of the Reconstruction era, to Jim Crow, to the Civil Rights Movement, to the rise of neoliberalism and the expansion of the carceral regimes posited as the solution to Black rebellion in the 1980s, to modern policing and prisons, etc. — are all distinct types of “reforms” to politically sedate Black surplus populations and sustain white settler-capitalist hegemony. 

In an interview at Howard University, Gerald Horne discusses the weakening and marginalization of Black radical independent institutions, publications, and leaders, such as Shirley Graham, W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, as a trade-off to disintegrate Jim Crow in return for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Voting Rights Act of 1965, and “other examples of legislation meant to chip away at Jim Crow.” Horne goes on to question whether the price for political “freedom,” in the electoral arena (which many Black radicals would argue, in the age of neocolonialism and pseudo-independence was never actually freedom) was substantial enough to warrant celebration as a form of Black progress without the economic infrastructure and self-determination needed for true liberation and justice. Just like in the 60s, as Horne notes, we are still performing uneven trade-offs with white power. We demand an end to police terror with Defunding the Police at the outset; they give us painted Black Lives Matter streets, while celebritizing, commodifying, and cannibalizing the names and faces of Black martyrs like George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. We demand healthcare, living wages, and erased student loans; they give us a federal holiday. In the post-Civil Rights era, and the state’s crushing of Black Power, there has been a depoliticization, if not outright assassination, of Black politics: all symbolism, uneven trade-offs, bare-minimum concessions, and identity reductionist representation as a substitute for actual Black power and self-determination. In the era of neo-colonialism, with the expansion and symbolic inclusion into the plantation economy through our coerced [lumpen]proletarization, we have been anesthetized to our continued exploitation, alienation, destruction, and genocide. Liberal multiculturalism, reform, or as I would call it, political anesthetization, at the very least, temporarily, has been able to halt the “problem” of black resistance.

“The understanding that modern policing has emerged out of the dreadful history of Black enslavement brings with it an urgent need to acknowledge what is not yet behind us. The plantation isn’t, as so many of us, Black and otherwise, think or at least wish to believe, a thing of the past; rather, the plantation persists as a largely unseen superstructure shaping modern, everyday life and many of its practices, attitudes, and assumptions, even if some of these have been, over time, transformed.”

- Rinaldo Walcott, “On Property” 

Though there has been a virtual erasing of our chains and the physical plantation (at least for those of us who are not “legally” incarcerated), the plantation economy has expanded and the mere logics and ideological production have remained the same: keep the slave(s) in check. The white power structure has always been concerned with keeping its thumb on the pulse of its slave population. There has been a non-stop, coordinated counterinsurgent effort by the white power apparatus to divert energy away from the inevitable radical potentialities of the slave, colonized, dispossessed, and superexploited classes—especially as capitalism’s contradictions become far too blatant to disguise. The marking of Juneteenth National Independence Day is just a continuation of the settler society’s legacy of empty promises and symbolic gestures to supplant material gains and maintain their hegemony. 

The United States is incapable of bringing about true justice or accountability for the crimes of its psychosexual and political economy beyond these hauntingly insulting and psychopathic attempts at state recognition of its own historical aberrations through moral symbolism. True justice and accountability must be avoided at all costs by this power structure, as this would inevitably expand the political imaginations of people, leading to the incrimination of every cop, soldier, politician, wall street hack, ceo, etc., and exposing itself for what it is: illegitimate and obsolete. Once you realize that all of the violence being exported everyday in and around the US are not individual aberrations that could be changed with a shift in political leadership, but an inevitable and continual outcome of superstructures built on and sustained through anti-Black slavery, capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, everything begins to make sense. It is liberatory. Heartbreaking. Infuriating, even. Because the solution becomes clear. It is the solution that everyone—whether subconsciously or not—is doing everything in their power to avoid coming to. It is the solution the United States and its propaganda networks spend billions of dollars every year to shield from the psyches of its captives. It is what Black captives in Haiti realized circa 1791, and are still being punished for ‘till this day. 

There is a special, psychopathic irony in the legitimation of Juneteenth through the colonial-capitalist state’s immortalizing of the liberation of the slaves through the very structural foundations in which said slaves were rendered productive property as captives, in which the legacies of slavery remain pervasive across social, cultural, political, and economic lineages. Not to mention the colonial and imperialist technologies inspired largely by the events of (anti-)Black slavery and colonialism, exported across the imperialized world for the purposes of land, capital, and resources—under the guise of (white) freedom and democracy. To paraphrase Frederick Douglass, what is the state’s recognition of Juneteenth to its Black captives? To the Afro-Palestinians living under the world’s largest open-air prison on the United States’ dime? Or the slave-labor of mineral miners in the Congo supplying the U.S. resources? How can visualizations of Nancy Pelosi and Black lawmakers singing Lift Every Voice and Sing in ceremony for the bill making Juneteenth a federal holiday—while actively rejecting Black organizers’ rallying cries that could improve Black people’s material conditions and save lives, such as Defunding the Police— signal anything other than yet another colonial lullaby to anaesthetize our dreams and efforts toward Black liberation and self-determination? While openly and unapologetically pledging their allegiance to multiculturalist white supremacy in the age of neocolonialism? 

“Let me put it this way, that from a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports, and the railroads of the country, the economy, especially of the southern states, could not conceivably be what it has become, if they had not had and do not still have, indeed, for so long and for so many generations, cheap labor. I am stating very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked the cotton, and I carried it to the market, and I built the railroads under someone else’s whip for nothing[...] This, in the land of the free, and the home of the brave. And no one can challenge that statement, it is a matter of a historical record. In another way, this dream is at the expense of the American Negro.”

—James Baldwin, 1965

From Black Wall Street to Black Capitalism

By Too Black

Republished from Hood Communist.

“As word of what some would later call the “Negro uprising” began to spread across the white community, groups of armed whites began to gather at hastily-arranged meeting  places, to discuss what to do next.”

Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921

“For far too long, Black liberal, you have been allowed to domesticate Black radicalism. Because our oppressors prefer you to us and at any sign of trouble, rush out to find you to speak on behalf of all Black people, you have eagerly taken the chance to hog all of the mics and silence us. You weaken our revolt with your narration.”

- Yannick Giovanni Marshall, Black liberal, your time is up

“Black capitalism is still capitalism.” – Terrell

The Tulsa Massacre began 100 years ago on May 31st, 1921 when an angry white mob accused a 19-year-old Black man, Dick Rowland, of raping a 17-year-old white girl, Sarah Page. Flustered by the perceived “Negro Uprising” of Black men armed to defend and protect Dick Rowland outside the Tulsa courthouse, the inflamed white mob, sanctioned by the state, responded with brute terror — burning down the Black segregated neighborhood of Greenwood destroying 1,256 homes, nearly 191 Black businesses and the death of roughly 300 (likely more) people by the morning of June 1st, 1921.

100 years since these 16 hours of white barbarism occurred, suppressive forces have steadily worked to delete this tragedy from scribing its crimson pages into the books of American history. But, as history shows, bloodstains prove difficult to remove. Recently, decorating over these stains as “blemishes” of an otherwise promising American Dream towards Black capitalism has proven to be a more sufficient means to quell dissent. What has materialized is an emphasis on what was destroyed over who was destroyed. Effectively, redeeming the state — the combined authority of government (elected), the bureaucracies (positions), corporate control, and private interests — in the process.

Decorating a Utopia that never was

As the summer of 2020 was steaming from protests against continued racialized state violence, the attention economy suddenly rediscovered the blood of 1921 by pivoting to what Booker T. Washington reportedly called “Negro Wall Street” or what is now known as Black Wall Street — the historic Black business district of the segregated Greenwood neighborhood destroyed in the massacre. According to Google Trends, the term “Black Wall Street” was googled more in June of 2020 than within the last 5 years.

Posited within 3-4 Blocks of the Greenwood neighborhood, this business district, disparagingly referred to by Tulsa whites as “Little Africa,” was the home to a number of Black-owned enterprises including a fifty-four room hotel, a public library, two newspapers, a seven-hundred, and fifty seat theater, multiple cleaners, and two dozen grocery stores among more. Through these efforts, Black Wall Street produced a prosperous Black business class fancying “some of the city’s more elegant homes” and successful Black businesses in the state.

Faced with only these facts, it’s understandable why one would view Black Wall Street as a wealthy “self-sustaining” utopia violently interrupted by a white vigilante mob as it’s widely reported to have been. However, a much more complicated narrative scrubbed from decorated legend lies underneath the folklore of a Black American Wakanda.

Although Black Wall Street certainly brought pride to the Black residents of Greenwood, that pride failed to translate to a prosperous economic status for most. A report by the American Association of Social Workers on the living conditions of Black folks in Tulsa at the time stated, “95 percent of the Negro residents in the Black belt lived in poorly constructed frame houses, without  conveniences, and on streets which were unpaved and on which the drainage was all surface.” Furthermore, most Greenwood residents were not only living in substandard housing but were employed outside of Black Wall Street according to the Oklahoma Commission study on the Tulsa Race Riot:

“Despite the growing fame of its commercial district, the vast majority of Greenwood’s adults were neither businessmen nor businesswomen but worked long hours, under trying conditions, for white employers [emphasis added]. Largely barred from employment in both the oil industry and from most of Tulsa’s manufacturing facilities, these men and women toiled at difficult, often dirty, and generally menial jobs — the kinds that most whites consider beneath them—as janitors and ditch-diggers, dishwashers, and maids, porters and day laborers, domestics and service workers.  Unsung and largely forgotten, it was, nevertheless, their paychecks that built Greenwood,  and their hard work that helped to build Tulsa. [Emphasis added]“

Truthfully, as the report makes clear, Tulsa and Black Wall Street were both consequences of de jure segregation. Segregation operated as a public policy purposely made to suppress Black wages for the benefit of white capital while simultaneously limiting where those suppressed wages could be spent — inadvertently creating a monopoly for a petite Black professional class. Put differently, it was the super-exploitation of poor Black labor that facilitated both the function of Tulsa as a whole and the Black Wall Street District. Neither could have existed without the presence of poor Black people. Yet, their presence is rarely acknowledged in the revisionist plot. The suffering of the Black poor typically only matters when it can be used to bolster the class position of the Black Elite — the appointed political, cultural, and social representative and a moneyed class of Black people — and reinforce the state.

Decorating Blackness

As previously indicated, last summer, while police precincts became bonfires illustriously lighting up the night sky, the terms “Black Wall Street” and “Black business” were receiving more Google searches than ever before. The presuppositions of the searches call for questioning: Will a world on fire be resolved by the memory of a business district burnt down by a white mob? What is the correlation between a cop kneecapping a poor Black man’s neck and buying Black? How can I buy my way out of a chokehold? Do corporate pledges to “support Black business” deflect the oncoming bullets of State violence?

All Black people are subject to a degree of state violence but in today’s post-civil rights era, those flung to the bottom of the capitalist ladder  *George Floyd* experience the worst fate — police murders, stop and frisk, incarceration, poverty, homelessness, and worse. In essence, LeBron James’ sons could not be Kalief Browder because not only can LeBron afford to bail his sons out of jail but Brentwood, CA is far from the overpoliced neighborhood Browder was originally profiled in. Despite her same race and gender, Oprah is not Breonna Taylor. No knock warrants are unheard of in Montecito, CA, and gentrification does not work in reverse.

The point here is not to diminish the racism experienced by the Black Elite but to challenge the universalizing of Blackness. Universalizing Blackness as a flat experience allows Amazon to proclaim #BlackLivesMatter, create a Black-owned business page but crush the unions organized by its Black workers. It allows the NBA to paint BLM on its hardwoods, highlight Black business during the NBA finals but pay its predominantly Black and temp workers dirt wages. Universalizing Blackness distorts Blackness itself. It is decorating at its worst.

A repercussion of universalizing Blackness is elite capture — what philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò defines as “how political projects can be hijacked—in principle or effect—by the well-positioned and resourced.” This begins to explain how a radical demand such as abolishing the police either becomes dismissed or co-opted while the state offers its full cosmetic support behind Black business and representation. The class of Black people most well-positioned to make demands upon the state is better situated to benefit from Black business creation and corporate diversity hires than police abolition or the unionization of Amazon. They are considerably less afflicted by the problems of the people they claim to represent.

Universalizing Blackness collapses the interests of Black people as if we’re all equally invested in the same solutions. It’s precisely how the knees of killer cops on Black necks correlate with buying Black because as Táíwò notes, “When elites run the show, the “group’s” interests get whittled down to what they have in common with those at the top.” It’s how the poverty of Greenwood ceases to appear in documentaries or presidential speeches when the Black wealth of a few needs attention. Commenting on sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s groundbreaking 1954 text The Black Bourgeoisie, Táíwò observes how two seemingly opposing ideas continue to find continuity, “Why did the myth of a Black economy as a comprehensive response to anti-Black racism survive when it was never a serious possibility? In Frazier’s telling, it did because it furthered the class interests of the Black bourgeoisie.” The class interests remain.

Black Capitalism, the Ultimate Decoration

The elite capture of a movement requires a series of decorative myths — ideas that obscure the nature of the problem for the maintenance of the status quo. Last Summer Black capitalism emerged once again as the most decorated myth. The revisionism of Black Wall Street, as an extension of Black capitalism, neatly fits the narrative of universal Blackness. It utilizes the universality of a tragedy suffered by an entire Black population to advocate for a solution (Black capitalism) that has shown to primarily benefit a particular class of Black people.

Black capitalism is a concatenation of propaganda. It relies on complementary myths such as Black buying power and Black dollar circulation that are premised upon shaming Black people, particularly the poor ones, for their alleged frivolous spending. Besides the fact that Black people spend their money no more recklessly than anyone else, Black capitalism feeds on stereotypes of broke Black people foolishly buying Jordans and weaves they cannot afford to justify its existence. The saying typically goes “if we spend with our own then we can have our own” as if Black people’s spending habits are moral barometers.

This decorative myth is exemplified in the creation of the Greenwood banking app. Popularized by rapper Killer Mike and actor Jesse Williams this app is “inspired by the early 1900’s Greenwood District, where recirculation of Black wealth occurred all day, every day, and where Black businesses thrived.” The website, littered with unsubstantiated claims of Black dollar circulation, conveniently fails to discuss the rampant Black poverty in the “1900’s Greenwood District” they claim to want to recreate. To highlight such a contradiction would ruin their business model.

Businesses such as Greenwood use the history of how collective Black wealth has been systematically destroyed by capitalism to leverage (guilt) white investors for funding. In the case of Greenwood, receiving 40 million dollars from banking institutions including JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Trust among others. The billions of corporate dollars injected into “racial equity” campaigns this last year were all sparked by the militant response to the blatant murder of a poor Black man who was allegedly arrested for purchasing items with a counterfeit bill. Disturbingly, the death of poor Black people is a lucrative fundraising drive for everybody but the ones experiencing death.

Decorating an Empire

What rests at the heart of these issues is the Black Elite’s general unwillingness to confront the state and all the violence it subsumes. As a class, they are much more invested in collaborating — either for perceived survival and/or personal gain. What tends to go unsaid is that when they collaborate with the state they often lose even on their terms. The police still confuse them for poor “thugs.” They remain underrepresented and underpaid in their respective fields. Laws that sustain their lifestyle are constantly eroded. Yet, historically, they have made the most “progress” in periods where the masses of Black people dissented. Due to their economic instability, they are unable to exist as a class by themselves — hence the need for the symbolic support of the masses analogous to how Black Wall Street needed the paychecks of the Black poor to thrive as a business district.

The state uses these decorators of empire, knowingly or not, to maintain its legitimacy. White supremacy may have obliterated Black Wall Street — 1st through violence, 2nd through policy — nevertheless “if that massacre never happened who knows how that shapes America today.” The bloodshed of the past is decorated by the false promise of “a more perfect union.” Organizing for a world beyond American hegemony is scolded as unrealistic and sophomoric. The most moderate of Black radical demands such as “defund the police” are derided and blamed unfairly for costing congressional seats as if Democratic party success is synonymous with Black liberation.

Decorators of empire must corral dissent. This type of agency reduction has a footprint leaping back to the Cold War and much further. Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, assistant professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College, thoroughly documents how the Black Elite of the time — Black Cold War liberals, “reduced the collective agency of other African Americans by marginalizing or maligning the panoply of liberation strategies emanating from the Black left.” This was a necessary strategy because the Black Cold War Liberals “formed important relationships with powerful Whites to procure goods and services for the Black community while offering no challenge to exploitative economic and social relations.” Modes of thinking outside of these brokered relationships threatened to bring backlash from the state. Faced with the mounting repression of the anti-communist McCarthy era,

“…Black Cold War liberals began to distinguish themselves from the left by rejecting militant agendas that might align them with those deemed “communist fronts,” including the Council on African Affairs (CAA), the Peace Information Center (PIC), and the National Negro Labor Council. Black Cold War liberals signaled such rejection by casting their platform in anti-communist terms and by constructing Black people as loyal, trustworthy Americans who deserved to be recognized as full citizens.”

Consistent with elite capture, Black Cold War liberals corralled the ideologies of the Black masses. “Seditious” communist ideas and “backward” social behavior would not earn the acceptance of the state. Irrespective of the oppression they faced, Black people of the time were corralled to focus their aspirations on proving to the state they were just as American as everyone else.

Today, building on a similar logic, Black American suffering is promoted as a badge of honor — a “justice claim” made because “we built this country.” Black people are “the Soul of the Nation” who “saved American democracy.” Again, the bloodshed of the past is used to redeem the present. President Biden, in his speech for the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre, leveraged this Black American exceptionalism to bolster the empire, “we should know the good, the bad, everything. That is what great nations do. They come to terms. With their dark side. We are a great nation.” Only in America can a nation be “great” for acknowledging a single massacre 100 years later with no reparations to show — decorating at its finest.

Conclusion

Remembering the Tulsa Massacre not as a violent white response to Black self-defense and determination but instead as the destruction of property and mythical Black wealth favorably leaves space for American redemption. It reduces the violence to a tragic interruption of the American dream and Black capitalism while minimizing other race massacres that did not include a well of black business class.

Wall Street is a parasitic model we should not emulate — still, I empathize with Black  people’s desire for Black ownership and self-determination. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this desire. However, positioning slogans like #BuyBlack and #SupportBlackBusinness as the respectable alternative to radical transformative demands is decorating for the state — particularly when these slogans are attached to faulty concepts like trickle-down economics and universal Blackness. Black ownership is elite capture without the correct redistribution and collective ownership of the wealth we create.

Lastly, it need not be stated that the victims of the Tulsa Massacre — as well as their descendants and all African people — deserve their reparations. That is not in question. We should question the state’s legitimacy to define our collective goals. We must be vigilant towards the state’s attempts to use the atrocities committed against us as a means to redeem itself by decorating its crimes. The world we deserve is irreducible to a Black Wall Street and abundantly superior to anything America currently has to offer. It’s on us and those in solidarity to fight for it.

Too Black is a poet, writer, and host of The Black Myths Podcast based in Indianapolis, Indiana. He can be reached at tooblack8808@gmail.com or @too_black_ on Twitter.

On Police Abolition: Decolonization Is The Only Way

(Photo taken by Jordan Gale for The New York Times)

By John Kamaal Sunjata

The United States is a project of both anti-Blackness and racial-colonial power. From the founding of this white supremacist settler-colonial state, Black people have endured 250 years of slavery, ninety years of Jim Crow, sixty years of “separate but equal” legal doctrine, and thirty-five years of explicitly anti-Black housing laws among other insidious forms of de jure and de facto racial discrimination. The racial capitalist state and its policing functionaries employ state violence as a means of containing and controlling the working-class, especially racialized and colonized domestic peripheries. The late political prisoner and revolutionary ancestor George Jackson (1971, p. 99) writes the following:

The purpose of the chief repressive institutions within the totalitarian capitalist state is clearly to discourage and prohibit certain activity, and the prohibitions are aimed at very distinctly defined sectors of the class- and race-sensitized society. The ultimate expression of law is not order—it’s prison. There are hundreds upon hundreds of prisons, thousands upon thousands of laws, yet there is no social order, no social peace. …Bourgeois law protects property relations and not social relationships.

The United States is a punitive carceral state with 25 percent of the world’s population behind bars despite comprising only 5 percent of the world’s population (Collier, 2014, p. 56; Hayes, 2017, p. 17). The American criminal so-called “justice” system holds almost 2.3 million people in 1,833 state prisons, 110 federal prisons, 1,772 juvenile prisons, 3,134 local jails, 218 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. settler-colonies (Sawyer & Wagner, 2020). U.S. incarceration is disproportionately racialized, targeting Black and brown people who represent 60 percent of the incarcerated (Marable, 2015). If Black and Latino people were incarcerated at the same rate as whites, their imprisoned and jailed populations would decline by almost 40 percent (NAACP, 2019). The problems are not rooted in crime but policing itself which constructs, (re)produces, and institutes white supremacy and anti-Blackness through racial capitalism. The police have been waging asymmetric domestic warfare on Black people, encircling, and capturing their prospects for self-determination and self-actualization. From the Greensboro Massacre of 1979 to the murder of Marcus Deon Smith of 2018 to the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the only solution for Black liberation is abolishing the police and freeing what is essentially a semi-colony of peripheral peoples.

This essay has five sections. This first section discusses the problems of policing. The second section explains the history of U.S. policing and its development. The third section lays out the failure of liberal reforms to grapple with policing as an institution. The fourth section argues the case for police abolition. The last section concludes.

The History of U.S. Policing

The earliest origins of policing in the United States evolved from directly slavery, settler-colonialism, and brutal control of an emergent industrial working-class (Vitale, 2017, p. 34). The organization of police forces within the United States was modeled after that of England. In the early colonial forms, policing was informal and communal, which is referred to as the “Watch” or private-for-profit policing, also known as the “Big Stick.” These policing models had little with fighting crime and more to do with “managing disorder and protecting the propertied classes from the rabble” (Vitale, 2017, p. 35). Strike-breaking and labor surveillance were among the most important services provided by private-for-profit policing, the Pinkerton’s were among the more notable agencies (Spitzer, 1979, p. 195). The “Big Stick” dissolved when 1) company towns declined, 2) labor costs grew more socialized, 3) organized labor grew in its militancy and strength, and 4) major changes happened in U.S. socioeconomic infrastructure (1979, p. 195).

The watch system was not particularly effective at halting crime as watchmen were often drunk or asleep on duty (Potter, 2013, p. 2). As a method of process improvement came the implementation of a system of constables—official law enforcement officers—who were normally paid according to the warrants they served (2013, p. 2). Informal policing models persisted until 1838 when Boston implemented a centralized municipal police force based on the London Metropolitan Police force and New York followed suit in 1845 (Vitale, 2017, p. 36). The main functions of the London Metropolitan Police Force were “protect property, quell riots, put down strikes and other industrial actions, and produce a disciplined industrial work force” (Vitale, 2017, p. 36).

In Southern states, modern U.S. policing developed from the “Slave Patrol” (Potter, 2013, p. 3; Vitale, 2017, p. 46). Slave patrols were tasked with developing terroristic infrastructure designed to prevent slave revolts (Hadden, 2001, p. 20; Vitale, 2017, p. 46; NAACP,  2019). They were vested with the power to “ride from plantation to plantation, and into any plantation” taking up slaves who did not have a ticket from their masters (2001, p. 20). The slave patrols could forcibly enter any private property[ii] solely on the suspicions of harboring runaway slaves (Vitale, 2017, p. 46; NAACP, 2019). The slave patrols had three primary functions: 1) chase, apprehend, and return runaway slaves to their owners; 2) organize terror squads to deter slave rebellions, and; 3) maintain legal and extralegal disciplinary measures for slaves who violated plantation rules to produce desired behavior (Potter, 2013, p. 3; NAACP, 2019).

White people had “tremendous social anxiety” about large groups of unaccompanied slaves and free Blacks intermingling. The police responded by regulating their behavior through the “constant monitoring and inspection of the [B]lack population” (Vitale, 2017, p. 47). After the Civil War, slave patrols were replaced by modern Southern police departments who controlled freed slaves who were now entering the workforce which was primarily agricultural (Potter, 2013, p. 3). The work of the modern police force included enforcing Jim Crow segregation laws and denying Black people equality de jure and de facto (2013, p. 3). The primary concern during this period was forcing Black people into sociopolitical docility (Vitale, 2017, p. 47). More than a response to crime, the police are for instituting a social order that is safe for capital penetration for the sake of capital accumulation, especially from the Black masses (Marable, 2015, p. 94). Capital accumulation requires a stable and orderly workforce for a predictable order of business (Potter, 2013, p. 4). The racial capitalist state, therefore, absorbs the costs of the private sector, protecting its enterprises. The environment must be made safe for capital through an organized system of social control (Potter, 2013, p. 4; Vitale, 2017, p. 34; Marable,  2015, p. 95). Under a system of racial capitalism[i], Black people are among the most brutalized by the carceral state.

The Failure of Liberal Reforms

Liberal efforts at reforming the police have largely been adject failures mostly because liberals misunderstand the role of the police. They ignore that policing itself is an inherently anti-Black institution that is premised on the repression of the domestic Black periphery for the purposes of capital penetration for capital accumulation. The role of the police has served to protect white supremacy and wealth creation for white people while denying Black people essential human rights (Vitale, 2017, p. 33). In the face of 400 years of anti-Black policing institutions that have, through every evolution, maintained a systemic logic of settler-colonialism that relegates the Black masses to a semi-colony within white America, liberals have proposed more training, more diversity, and community policing (Vitale, 2017, p. 33; Samudzi & Anderson, 2018,  p. 13; Rodríguez, 2021, p. 45).

The push for more police training is well-intentioned but it misses the point. Whenever a Black person is killed by police, a common refrain from liberal reformers is “improve use-of-force training.” If these same reformers were around during slavery, there is no doubt they would have called for slave masters to employ more ethical whip deployment techniques. Despite the racial bias training that many officers have undergone, researchers have found that outcomes remain unchanged with respect to racial disparities in traffic stops and marijuana arrests (Vitale, 2017, p. 8). Racist policing is not merely a matter of individual bigotry but institutionalized racism. Asking for increased training of police so police learn “restraint” ignores how the police already exercise restraint against populations that are not marginalized and not targeted. The Capitol Hill riots were illustrative of the police’s ability to show remarkable restraint. The mostly white rioters were not subjected to nearly as much force as Black protestors are for nominally peaceful protests (Henderson & Alexander, 2021). Any training that justifies the institution of policing will only strengthen its white supremacist and anti-Black logics, even if there is a rhetorical shift from “Warrior mentality” to “Guardian mentality.”

Another common liberal reform to policing involves diversity hires, in hopes this will result in communities of color being treated with “greater dignity, respect, and fairness” (Vitale, 2017, p. 11). There is no evidence that diversifying police forces affects, much less reduces, their use of force (Friedrich,  1977; Garner, Schade, Hepburn, & Buchanan, 1995; Brown & Frank, 2006;  Lawton, 2007). This tactic of reform is even more insidious because it is a method of counterinsurgency through promiscuous inclusion (Rodríguez, 2021, p. 45). Through political warfare against the domestic Black periphery, the racial capitalist state seeks to (neo)colonize its colonized subjects within their own communities.

Diversity is a tool for manufacturing credibility, increasing external institutional legitimacy without dramatically changing internal institutional formations or technologies of repression (2021, p. 45). Diversity changes the presentation of the white supremacist order, but it does not change its outcome: domestic warfare (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 13; Rodríguez,  2021, p. 51). White supremacy is a multicultural enterprise: just because the beneficiaries of the racial-colonial order are primarily white does not preclude the use of semi-colonized peoples to accomplish white supremacist ends. Diversity hires will not solve the problems of policing, but they will ensure the white supremacy runs through a sepia filter.

Liberal reformers may present “community policing” as possible reform and prima facie, it sounds reasonable. Who would not want neighborhood persons, known and respected by the communities they live, as officers? The answer to that question maybe someone who understands the role and the institution of policing. Police are tasked with criminalizing disorderly conduct, using up to and including lethal force, and responding to populist resistance with state-sanctioned assertiveness. This is well illustrated in the city of Greensboro, North Carolina by its City Council. At a Greensboro City Council meeting from July 31, 2020, the members of the City Council spoke favorably of community policing. Councilwoman Marikay Abuzaiter is on record saying, “[I]f we ever did consider incentivizing [police officers to live in the neighborhoods they work]. I would think the Chief would need a big raise in his police budget because you are looking at money there.” In the same session, Councilwoman Sharon Hightower said:

In reading articles about ‘community policing,’ it never emphasizes resident, it always talked about relationships. And we can start to build relationships, so we can eradicate this distrust in my community because right now, a lot of people I talk to in my community see a police car and their hair stands up on their neck. So, let’s start to work on that. Build that trust, and if somebody moves in the neighborhood? Great, that’s fantastic. …Let’s spend our resources where we get the most bang for our buck. As community talks about more investment in community problems, let’s do that.

It was certainly admirable that Councilwoman Sharon Hightower wanted to “eradicate distrust” and “build relationships,” but the solutions to the problems for the domestic Black periphery of Greensboro are rooted in anti-Black racism and racial capitalism more broadly, not a lack of police presence. What tools do the police possess for “community”? Punitive enforcement actions such as arrests and ticketing (Vitale, 2017, p. 16). Community policing is only possible as a solution if the police do not have police powers. Attempts at community policing, as demonstrated by the Greensboro City Council members, prioritizes giving more resources to the police to live in neighborhoods than giving resources directly to the marginalized members of the communities. Community policing does not empower the domestic Black periphery, but it strengthens the tools of repression and suppression on the part of the police by increasing their proximity to the territories they occupy.

Recently, the #8CantWait campaign has gathered significant support from liberal reformers who wish to address “police brutality.” It is a set of ideas from the nonprofit Campaign Zero, with policy proposals such as ban chokeholds, change reporting standards for use of force incidents, require police officers to warn before they shoot, and more (Murray, 2020). The #8CantWait campaign is not trying to solve racist policing, it is trying to reduce police killings by 72 percent (2020). Mayor Nancy Vaughan endorsed the #8CantWait proposals (Greensboro City Council, 2020):

I have been looking at some resolutions, I have been looking at one from the city of Memphis who is codifying the #8CantWait, we are looking at making it for the City of Greensboro. It has not been finalized but I would like the City Council to look at, once we get it all written up for the City of Greensboro, passing a resolution for the #8CantWait. I don’t want to wait until [the] next meeting because it’s quite a ways [sic] out, so maybe we could have a meeting and a work session because our next meeting is quite a ways away and the #8CantWait and I don’t think we should wait.

After a similar comment from Councilwoman Sharon Hightower, Greensboro Police Chief Brian L. James responded, “In reference to the #8CantWait and looking at that, we are almost there with some of the things that I have recently [done] and some of the things that I did previously as well as our regular policies and there’s one on the #8CantWait that I would like to have some conversation with y’all around the specific wording…” This underscores not only the uselessness of the #8CantWait campaign but the overall failure of liberal reforms to produce meaningful structural change.

The Argument

The concrete historicity of the United States’ state-imposed, state-promoted, and state-tolerated anti-Black racial-colonial violence and white supremacist domination has perpetuated a consistent and persistent situation of Black devalorization, disinvestment, devastation, destruction, and dislocation. White supremacy articulates and structures the American polity; race as a social construct articulates and structures every social relation and institution. This reality produces a domestic Black periphery, an underclass—a subproletariat—that exists as mere residents of a settler-colony (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 6). The Black community itself exists as semi-colony within the United States wherein the police are an occupying army (Allen, 1969).

The police have consistently represented (and erected) institutional barriers to Black agency, equality, self-determination, and political expression. That is because policing within the United States is inherently white supremacist and extends the logics of racial-capitalism and anti-Blackness throughout the political economy. With the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865, slavery was only abolished as “except as punishment for crime [emphasis added]” (Gilmore, 2020). Black people have been subjected to targeted police surveillance, coercion, force, and incarceration. Slavery was never abolished, it was reformed.

For the domestic Black periphery, the American carceral state and its functionaries have always been in a state of permanent asymmetrical warfare against them (Vitale,  2017, p. 27; Burden-Stelly, 2020, p. 8; Rodríguez, 2021, p. 42). James Baldwin compared policing Black communities to settler-colonial occupation (Baldwin, 1966):

And the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function. They are, moreover—even in a country which makes the very grave error of equating ignorance with simplicity—quite stunningly ignorant; and, since they know that they are hated, they are always afraid. One cannot possibly arrive at a more surefire formula for cruelty. … Occupied territory is occupied territory, even though it be found in that New World which the Europeans conquered, and it is axiomatic, in occupied territory, that any act of resistance, even though it be executed by a child, be answered at once, and with the full weight of the occupying forces.

Black people are not citizens, we are residents of settler-colonial occupation. Black lives do not matter under a regime of racial capitalism and ironically enough, Black people were at our most valuable (i.e. most insulated from public executions and imprisonment) when we were legal chattel. In that sense, doing irreparable damage to property-in-chattel was bad for business and few slave patrollers wanted to foot the bill (Marable, 2015, p. 97). A citizen would have a Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial, but the residents of the domestic Black periphery can be legally and extralegally murdered by police with impunity (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 14; Briond, 2020).

The regime of racial capitalism has at its heart, private property ownership, an institution fiercely protected by the carceral state and its settler-colonial agents in policing. Racial capitalism reproduces and buttresses itself and the white supremacist order through a series of supposedly race-neutral policies (Stein, 2019, p. 44). Race-neutral policies themselves have been used to both “discredit and rationalized practices that perpetuate racial stratification” (Siegel, 2000, p. 106). Hence why white supremacy and the anti-Black order it entails can “coexist happily with formal commitments to objectivity, neutrality, and colorblindness” (Harris, 1994, p. 759). The earliest origins of property rights are rooted in racial domination and the interactions between race and private property have played a critical role in subordinating the domestic Black periphery within the American political economy (Harris C. , 1993, p. 1714). Whiteness itself, as a historized social and legal construct, marks power and domination over non-white others (Mumm, 2017, p. 103). Whiteness is valorized and private property ownership is an expression of whiteness; thus, property ownership is conflated with (white) personhood under racial capitalism (Safransky, 2014, p. 238; Bhandar & Toscano,  2015, p. 8). That is why in American society it is perfectly acceptable for white people to kill Black people in defense of private property; however, the domestic Black periphery can never destroy private property in response to the murder of a Black person. Blackness itself represents powerlessness, enslavement, and dispossession (Burden-Stelly, 2020).

The domestic Black periphery exists at the nexus of indispensability and disposability (Burden-Stelly, 2020), subhumanity and superhumanity. The technologies of white supremacy and their accompanying legal strictures and structures reify white supremacist ideologies into the carceral state. Black people represent 28 percent of all people killed by police in 2020 despite being 13 percent of the United States population (Sinyangwe, 2021). Black people are three times more likely to be killed by the police than white people are, and Black people are 1.3 times more likely to be unarmed as well (2021). This demonstrates that “[a]t any given time our government can utilize and maneuver the boundaries of legality and illegality as applicable to the material interests of the ruling class” (Briond, 2020).

Freedom for the domestic Black periphery poses an existential threat to white supremacy as a political economy within the United States because “free[ing] Black people necessitates a complete transformation and destruction of this settler state” (Samudzi & Anderson, 2018, p. 13). The United States cannot exist without the predominant systems of domination and oppression of Black people; it cannot exist without the hyper-policing and hyper-regulation of Blackness. For an internal semi-colony to be free across a geospatial territory, it must be decolonized. For an enslaved people to be free, they must not reform slavery’s conditions but abolish it in its totality. Police abolition is but one step, but a necessary step, in the Black liberation struggle.

Conclusion

The domestic Black periphery can never know freedom so long as policing exists within this settler-colonial state. So long as the Black masses exist as mere residents, citizens in name only, as a semi-colony of white America, constantly surveilled and brutalized by arms of the state, the United States will exist. The United States as a carceral nation begets anti-Black oppressive systems and institutions and that is best exemplified through the police, who act as an occupying army in Black territories, rather than guardians within Black communities. The ideological resistance to police abolition within Greensboro is in part informed by the “racialized colonial logics of the biologically determined criminal, slave, and savage” (Briond, 2020).

There is a Hobbesian assumption that the domestic Black periphery will descend into “the state of nature” unless they are constantly patrolled, surveilled, and policed according to the logics of settler-colonial occupation. The underlying fear has been a constant feature of white supremacist anxieties, a justification for ceaseless instances of anti-Black violence by police who see Blackness as a synthesis of subhumanity and superhumanity incarnate. The amazing feat of political economy has been the militarization of police, the multiculturalism of white supremacy via diversifying the police force, and the escalation of wanton violence against semi-colonized subjects. The central contradiction of the United States is settler-colonialism, the structural location of the domestic Black periphery as simultaneous indispensable and disposable. If Black masses are semi-colonized, the solution is decolonization. If slavery was merely reformed, slavery must be abolished in all its iterations. The U.S. police are the representation and manifestation of modern-day slave patrols. For these reasons and others, the police must be abolished in their entirety and other carceral institutions as well.

Bibliography

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Baldwin, J.   (1966, July 11). Report from Occupied Territory. Nation, pp. 39-43.

Bhandar, B.,   & Toscano, A. (2015). Race, Real Estate and Real Abstraction. Radical Philosophy, 8-17.

Briond, J.   (2020, June 6). Understanding The Role Of Police Towards Abolitionism: On   Black Death As An American Necessity, Abolition, Non-Violence, And Whiteness.  Clifton Park.

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Burden-Stelly,   C. (2020). Modern U.S. Racial Capitalism: Some Theoretical Insights. Monthly Review, 8-20.

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[i] Racial capitalism does not describe a distinct permutation of capitalism or imply there exists a non-racial capitalism, but rather emphasizes that, in the words of Dr. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines.” As a system of political economy, it depends on racist practices and racial hierarchies because it is a direct descendent of settler-colonialism. It is a translation of the “racial, tribal, linguistic, and regional” antagonisms of European feudal society, reconstituted for the American context. It profits off the differentiated derivations of human values, non-white people are especially devalorized and their exploitation is a justifiable and profitable enterprise (see Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The making of the Black radical tradition. University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

[ii] Private property is not the same as personal property, which is almost exclusively wielded for its use value, it is not a personal possession, it is social relation of excludability. It is the ownership of capital as mediated by private power ownership that removes legal obstacles for one’s existence and provides an unalloyed right to violence. It is “the legally-sanctioned power to dispose” of the factors of production and “thus dispose of [labor-power]: property as synonymous with capital.” Toscano, Alberto, and Brenna Bhandar. “Race, real estate and real abstraction.” Radical Philosophy 194 (2015): 8–17.

Fascism and the Politics of the Past

By Yanis Iqbal

Fascist groupings are in the ascendant throughout the world. While some are emerging from the political peripheries - slowly but steadily gaining traction on the terrain of ideological hegemony - some have already taken the reins of state power. This new wave of fascism poses an important question: why did the intensifying crisis of neoliberalism strengthen the Right instead of revitalizing the Left? The post-1990s trajectory of austerity and immiseration should have bolstered the appeal of progressive forces among the masses. However, what we have been witnessing is the growing hold of extremely conservative ideas on the proletariat.

Non-synchronicity

Ernst Bloch, a German Marxist philosopher, witnessed a similar situation as the left-wing camp in his country was trounced by Nazism. His response to this contradictory development resonates with the current conjuncture. Bloch deployed the concept of “non-synchronicity” to understand fascism, writing, “Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, by virtue of the fact that they may all be seen today. But that does not mean that they are living at the same time with others”. There are social strata that have been left behind in the process of modernization. These layers express their dissatisfaction with the present by looking back, towards a better past.

In other words, fascism draws from the future in the past, calling up mythologized forces, responding to modern disenchantment, joining a romantic anti-capitalism - roots, soil, homeland - among rural strata with fears of decline and genuine impoverishment among middling urban strata and a youth out of step with the capitalist drive toward abstraction and immateriality. Fascism, therefore, expresses an authentic longing for something different. It creates new figures, synthesizing various elements into hybrid structures, using materials from elsewhere - fairytales, myth, kitsch, Romanticism, occultism and magic, masculine qualities (strength, openness, decency, purity), as well as vitalist philosophy (will, life, creation, instinctive knowledge).

The palingenetic ideals of fascism serve transhistorically as a medium for processing every historical present. The subjects of fascism are called upon to leave a shameful normal life and to enter a proud life of bravery. It is important to note that pride and shame are fundamentally related. Feeling pride involves a realization of the ideals that define the faults and errors that cause us to feel ashamed. Shame collapses the “I” with the “we” in the failure to transform the social ideal into action, a failure which, when witnessed, confirms the ideal, and makes possible a return to pride. In the fascist case, the return to pride depends on the positioning of the subject as someone who confesses to being part of the imminent chaos and decline. Thus, the enactment of shame functions as a means of returning to pride. This return involves correcting wrongdoings by defending the survival of the nation, the people and the race.

Destroying Public Discourse

Fascism’s nostalgic idealizations are always empty. And yet, we know that the emptiness of the mythically constructed past that the Right holds out as a lost version of a better life as well as the emptiness of its promises with regard to the contradictions of capitalism are precisely the point of the underlying strategy. Empty times and spaces are effective spaces for the creation of the fears, fantasies, and hopes that the Right seeks to cultivate. Vague references to a better past ask the audience to fill in the gaps in content and logic with their own nonsynchronous projections; a rhetorical model of broad strokes, vague slogans, provocations, and propositions clearly replaced articulated programs. The point is not precision or the communication of actual information but the establishment of spaces in which anomy and anxiety can play themselves out and which can amplify discontent rather than finding answers to it.

The invocation of historically indeterminate imageries has real consequences for electoral battles and discursive struggles. Eberhard Knödler-Bunte argues that the entanglement of fascist ideology in the past turns it into a “depoliticized mass movement.” The “fascist public sphere,” Knödler-Bunte contends, is ultimately nothing other than “a politicized public sphere aimed at real depoliticization.” Hence, fascism operates on an innately contradictory ground - establishing a public sphere that encourages politicization while simultaneously reducing political dialogue and thought to impoverished versions of public deliberation.

Knödler-Bunte’s arguments help us understand the strategy of contemporary right-wing governments that lower the bar of public and political discourse in order to replace political dialogue with emotionally charged slogans. Paired with the mere semblance of rebelliousness, these tactics obfuscate structural problems and promote a depoliticized discourse, including pseudo-political branding efforts, disinformation campaigns, and conspiracy narratives, in place of political analysis, debate, and programmatic thinking. The extreme Right has traditionally relied on this co-optation of revolutionary energy and its displacement from a critique of capitalism to a vehement yearning for a hazy past.

Liberatory History

Fascism has a constitutive contradiction: the rising tensions between the ironclad rhythms of the working day and the promise of a magical rupture with these empty homogenous routines. Demagogic talks about national-cultural regeneration are always in dissonance with the brute system of surplus value extraction. In order to use these weaknesses of fascism to its own benefit, the Left needs to adopt a liberatory conception of history. Instead of turning to the past to restore lost forms of order, we may understand the past as a rich collection of unheard appeals, unfulfilled hopes, of silenced demands for freedom - and such a relation to the past in turn shows us what is missing in the present and what cries out for completion.

Understood in this manner, the past denotes for us not mythical unity and purity but the history of systemic injustice, oppression, and exploitation, which in turn means that the past contains the energy that leads the way into the future. The past is not just what was. It is that which was never allowed to be, that which never could be, and it therefore points towards that which may yet be. A truly utopian and revolutionary imagination examines the past as an archive of emancipatory struggles that were repressed or abandoned but that reach into our present and herald a future through their continuous demand for realization.

How 'Justice for George Floyd!' Shook the Ruling Class to the Core

By Nino Brown

Republished from Liberation News.

On May 25, 2020, 44-year-old white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin knelt on 46-year-old unarmed Black man George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds, sadistically murdering him. Floyd was accused of using a counterfeit 20 dollar bill at a local convenience store in the middle of a pandemic that left tens of millions of Americans out of work and deeper in poverty. Floyd was a victim of the capitalist system, one of the tens of millions who were out of employment. The deadly encounter between Floyd and Chauvin was captured on video by community members and went viral shortly thereafter. 

The next day, the Black working-class communities of Minneapolis led thousands of people of all nationalities demanding justice and accountability, inspiring a nationwide protest movement against racism and police brutality that brought an estimated 35 million people into the streets in righteous and militant indignation. Solidarity protests were held in 60 countries all over the world from Palestine to Haiti to South Korea and more. As brutal force and thousands upon thousands of arrests were employed to repress the movement, the racist underbelly of so-called U.S. democracy was on display to the entire world.

One year since these rebellions began, many reforms have been passed and changes made to combat racism. Politicians and corporations have pivoted to allay the rage of the masses of people across the country sick and tired of racist police terror and the entire system of capitalism with its disgusting inequality. All across the country organizers, activists and progressive groups have demanded radical change, with some raising the slogan “defund the police” and “abolish the police” — representing a marked shift in the struggle for justice.

Derek Chauvin was convicted of two counts of murder and one count of manslaughter on April 20. Facing sentencing in June, Chauvin could be put in prison for 40 years for second-degree murder, up to 25 years for third-degree murder and up to 10 years for manslaughter. 

Yet, since that fateful day in May 2020, many more people have been killed by U.S. police. Some of these people’s names are widely known, such as Daunte Wright, Ma’Khia Bryant, Adam Toledo and Andre Brown. George Floyd’s murder was the “straw that broke the camels back.” But no matter how much negative attention the police get, as an institution of racist rule by a tiny class of the super-rich, they cannot help but enact all kinds of violence against poor and working-class communities, especially Black communities. The fundamental task of the police is to preserve the racist, capitalist status quo.

In the year since Floyd’s murder, activists all over the country have taken aim at qualified immunity, which shields officers from civil and criminal liability. President Joe Biden met with the Floyd family and other families of police brutality on Tuesday in a push to get the Senate to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. The bill would impose limitations on the use of police chokeholds, standards for no-knock warrants and limits on the sharing of military equipment by the Defense Department with police departments. Many of these reforms were already on the books in various cities and towns, yet they have not significantly hindered the police from continuing to kill and enact wanton violence on the people. The ruling class is far more reluctant about stripping the police of qualified immunity — their carte blanche to kill, maim, harass and bully. This continues to be an important front of struggle.

The police have been killing people since they were formalized as an organization growing out of the slave patrols in the U.S. South and out of the needs of the capitalist class to police immigrants and low-wage workers in the industrial North. The violence is not new, and many outright murders and assassinations have been captured on camera by civilians. So what is new? What has changed? It is the consciousness of the working class. All of last summer and even into the fall and winter, people continued to rise up against racist police terror and state violence.

As revolutionaries, we know that in order to win basic reforms and so much more, the working class and oppressed people of this country need to be organized. Our class must continue to keep the pressure on through mobilization, education and agitation — drawing in more people to the fight for justice in the immediate sense and also more broadly against racism and capitalism and imperialism. The rebellions have changed the political calculus of the ruling class and thus the terrain of the class struggle. 

In the aftermath of the conviction of Derek Chauvin, many debated what more needed to be done to win true justice. While the verdict was a victory secured through arduous struggle, we know that true, enduring justice can only be enjoyed by winning a new system that removes the basis for white supremacy and all the other unspeakable injustices in this society. To honor George Floyd’s memory, millions have and will commit themselves to this task.

Bourgeois Education and the Reproduction of Common Sense

By Christian Noakes

Republished from Peace, Land, and Bread.

Despite right-wing conspiracy theories depicting universities as a communist threat to capitalist society, academia serves as a primary institution in the reproduction of the bourgeois common sense on which capitalism relies. Furthermore, it presents its own version of knowledge as not only self-evident but “progressive,” while denouncing any effective attempt to confront capitalism and imperialism.

With a few flips of intellectual gymnastics, it often asserts that Marxism is the “master’s tools.” As such, it presents Marxism as an oppressive force and bourgeois thought as a force of liberation—albeit one in need of periodic reforms. Fundamental to this inversion is the complete misunderstanding—or at least misrepresentation—of both Marx and the larger historical tradition of Marxism.

Marx is typically treated as a class reductionist who never addressed the interrelated issues of racism, colonialism, and slavery. However, all three of these are given significant attention by Marx and were in fact treated as fundemental to the capitalist processes of accumulation, dispossession, and exploitation. One needn’t delve deep into Marx’s writings to begin to see this. In the first pages of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels state:

“The discovery of America, the rounding of the cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie... The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.”[1]

Elsewhere they state:

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of negroes, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.”[2]

Marx and Engels do not equivocate the role of racial oppression and colonialism which are both a means of capitalist expansion and an outgrowth of it. Not only are these pervasive forms of oppression central to the birth of capitalism, but confronting these twin evils of racism and colonialism are essential to combating capitalism today. This is no doubt what Marx means when he noted that, “labor in the white skin cannot emancipate itself where the black skin is branded.”[3] In other words, capitalist exploitation cannot be eradicated so long as racial oppression remains intact.

To even talk about class within the hallowed walls of the academy is too often assumed to be a “white issue”—a convenient assumption that obscures the material reality of racial oppression. The explicitly anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-slavocratic sentiments in the writings of Marx suggest that many who, in good faith, claim Marxism is implicitly “white”—and therefore conserving racial oppression—are drawing such conclusions without doing the readings. Under the influence of bourgeois thought that pervades capitalist educational institutions, “one knows it is absurd without reading it and one doesn't read it because one knows it is absurd, and therefore one glories in one's ignorance of the position.”[4]

This fundemental misunderstanding—premised on hubristic ignorance—goes far beyond Marx and Engels to encompass all of Marxism. The Guyanese guerrilla intellectual Walter Rodney argued that the perennial debate on the relevance of Marxism across time and place is both an outgrowth of the dominant bourgeois ideology and a fundamental misunderstanding of Marxism.[5] Contrary to an understanding of Marxism as a static manual of revolution, Rodney points out that Marxism is a living thing—a methodology and ideology which concerns itself with material relations in the service of the oppressed and exploited classes.

As a methodology or a scientific lens of analysis, Marxism concerns itself with the material conditions of society, the relations of production which exist—in various forms—across time and place. Marx, and the Marxist tradition which has developed from his contributions to the revolutionary struggle, give considerable attention to the particular relations of production under capitalism—a system into which the Global South has long been forced at gun point. Rejecting Marxism as irrelevant to any context outside of 19th Century Europe follows the same logic as if one were to claim that the theory or relativity—and other developments in physics built on such understandings—only applies to the world Einstein inhabited.[6]

To deny the relevance of Marxist methodology is to inadvertanly suggest that relations of production (especially the predominant capitalist relations) do not exist—a bourgeois position that serves to preserve capitalist exploitation and the racial/colonial relations which underpin it. Despite the often good intentions, such assertions are inevitably in line with bourgeois ideology in that they serve to reproduce the common sense of capitalism which both naturalizes and obscures the social relations of capital. Such academic positions also ignore the historical role of Marxism in national liberation struggles throughout the Global South—an historical fact that makes the question of the relevance of Marxism itself irrelevant.

However, the relationship between Western academia and the Global South is not simply a matter of the erasure of national liberation struggles; it is also openly antagonistic in that the former provides the intellectual justification for imperialism under a facade of progress.

For the sake of brevity, we will limit ourselves to recent events in Bolivia.

On 10 November 2019, the Indigenous President Evo Morales was ousted in an apparent coup. Support for this coup—which would quickly reveal itself as deeply anti-Indigenous and reactionary—included a letter signed by several US academics. Signatories included the anthropologist Devin Beaulieu, a vocal opponent of the Movement for Socialism (MAS) party. Beaulieu—like many other academics—framed their opposition to MAS in pro-Indigenous language. Central to this position has been the reduction of Indigeneity to a monolith in opposition to Morales.[7] This has, in a sense, included the construction of the Indio permitido (the authorized Indian). Under a progressive facade, academics like Beaulieu sit comfortably in the imperial core, deciding for themselves which Indigenous voices are legitimate. Not unlike their colonial predecessors, they rely on a deeply imperialist conception of progress as a modern “white man’s burden.”

Other academics are not so blatantly imperialist. For instance Fabricant and Postero correctly point out how treating Indigenous peoples as a monolith is akin to defining Indio permitido and Indio prohibido (the prohibited Indian).[8] Their acknowledgement of heterogenous Indigeneity is markedly different from the treatment seen in the likes of Beaulieu. However, despite this difference they too fall into the dichotomous thinking which frames MAS as both a capitalist movement for the mestizo and an opposition to Indigenous Bolivians. Despite their apparent attempts to provide balanced analysis, they conflate efforts toward self-determination via the utilization of the country’s natural resources and the fostering non-US trade relations as “capitalist” and “neoliberal,” when in reality not utilizing national resources means a continued subjugation of Bolivia to the imperial core—a position these academics ponder from relative comfort. These (not-so-blatant) imperialist academics also refer to concerns of Indigenous groups over national development as a concern of “further colonisation by Andean coca growers.”[9] Where these coca growers are, in fact, Indigenous, this position only succeeds in weaponizing anti-colonial rhetoric against the colonized.

All of the above is emphasized to say that bourgeois academia’s primary social function is to reproduce capitalist common sense and to reinvent capitalist society with ever-new, illusory facades of progress and liberation. As a central institution of the capitalist superstructure, the university as a whole cannot help but be anything else.

As Jose Carlos Mariategui observed:

“Vain is all mental effort to conceive the apolitical school or the neutral school. The school of bourgeois order will continue to be a bourgeois school. The new school will come with the new order.”[10]

This is not to say that individuals or groups cannot exist in opposition in such institutions or that no revolutionaries should attend university. Institutions of higher learning can and should be treated as sites of struggle from which guerilla intellectuals can, in a sense, redistribute the resources and means of knowledge production otherwise kept from the public.

Following in the footsteps of revolutionaries such as Marx and Rodney, Marxists should utilize capitalist institutions to better understand and combat capitalism. However, the bourgeois academy should never be treated as something that can be adequately reformed under capitalism; or, further, that bourgeois academia is the only source of knowledge production under capitalism. Indeed, a true guerrilla intellectual need not be of the academy at all, and, in fact, cannot be a true guerrilla intellectual if they are confined to the bourgeois institutions which serve only to reproduce capitalist common sense in opposition to the true struggles of liberation.

Endnotes

[1] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. In The Marx-Engles Reader (2nd ed.) Robert C. Tucker (ed), 275-276.

[2] Karl Marx. Capital, Vol. 1. (Chicago 1952), P.372.

[3] Karl Marx: On America and the Civil War (New York, 1972) p. 275.

[4] Walter Rodney (1975). “Marxism and African Liberation.” https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney- walter/works/marxismandafrica.htm.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Jose Carlos Mariategui. “The World Crisis and the Peruvian Proletariat.” in Selected Works of José Carlos Mariátegui.