The Man on the Fence Post

[Photograph: Steve Liss/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty]

By AJ Reed

I remember it like it was yesterday. I just sat down to work on my computer project for my vocational class when a breaking story came across the television playing in my class: Man Found on Fence Post, Laramie, Wyoming. The story that broke during their class period addressed a man that was on a fence post outside of Laramie, Wyoming—turning towards the television—listening intently to the news report. The adolescent learned that the story was about the man on the fence post that was left through the night. The story went on to say that two other men were with this particular man, who then beat him, put him in the back of their truck, and propped him up like a scarecrow on the fence post where he spent his final hours. When the man's body was found and taken to the hospital, is when they officially declared him dead after several days in the hospital. The adolescent felt an emptiness. They did not know the man on the news. However, they felt a loss of someone who was part of their community. The adolescent for a moment reflected that they could have been that man on the fence post in the news. The man on the fence was Matthew Shepard, and it was that moment that sparked my queer liberation.

As I began my queer liberation, I could that living in Midwest presented challenges. There were no real outlets or spaces for me to go to when I had questions, no mentors to help guide me. The only places where experiences and information were readily available were house parties thrown by gay men or heading into the bigger metro areas. Living in a rural area also meant that we did not have many figures to look up to when it came to conducting actions that needed to be done. When young people wanted to organize and affect change, there wasn’t a blue print already laid out by more experienced activists. So what do any young and idealistic people do? I joined forces with some friends and our first action just days after Matthew Shepard’s murder was participating in the National Day of Silence. With black electrical tape over our mouths, we walked the halls of our school in silent solidarity with queer students who are often not heard and seen by school systems. School staff did not always respond well to this type of protest. Students lost participation points in class or punished with detention. As the National Day of Silence movement took hold, progressive schools found ways to accommodate students who protested through this medium.

After graduating high school, I dug into the LGBTQ Rights movement. I developed an LGBTQ+ student organization, worked on marriage equality campaigns, and served in LGBTQ+ organizations that pushed for policy change. I also worked in social service and organizing in the own community. The quest to further my queer liberation led me to Christopher Street and the infamous Stonewall Inn. Sitting across the street from the historic space, I closed my eyes and listened to what the past and the present were trying to tell me. I heard the laughing and felt the hugs from my brothers and sisters of 1969. I heard the police sirens that broke into the spirit of what was Stonewall and the increasing desperation for equality that was bubbling out of the Inn. I was brought back to present day with police sirens as they quickly approached where I was sitting. In that moment, I wondered how far have we actually come since June 28, 1969 when the LGBTQ+ community had had enough and took to the streets.

We’ve made great strides since Stonewall. Nearly 20 countries, including the US, have legalized same-sex marriage. Organizations like the American Psychology Association and the World Health Organization dropped "homosexuality" as a mental illness in 1974 and declassified transgender as a mental disorder. The US Supreme Court declared that marriage for LGBTQ+ folx is constitutional and ruled that it is unconstitutional to discriminate against LGBTQ individuals in the workplace.

But what about Matthew Shepard? Or the 49 souls that were taken at Pulse Nightclub? Why are our trans and non-binary brothers and sisters being murdered at an alarming rate? Why is suicide the second leading cause of death among young folx who are queer? Why are we losing so many incredible people when we have all these rights?

Because the reality is that while we have laws in place to protect queer folx, we also have social organizations such as organized religion that are using their platforms to atoll their beliefs that loving someone of the same sex or gender is wrong. Our young people are hearing these messages and internalizing the hate toward themselves. The reality is that while the Supreme Court has acknowledged that marriage is something that everyone should have access to and that discrimination across the board is unconstitutional, there are people within the government ranks that are actively trying to dismantle policies and safeguards that are protecting marginalized communities. The reality is that there are businesses that are using religion and holes in the law to allow them to discriminate.

There will be challenges along the way when reaching towards progress, but we must not forget about the groundwork that has already been laid out for us. As Aristotle once said, “If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.” Look at pride parades today. Pride parades started as an uprising at the Stonewall Inn. An act of expression to demand the rights we need to be visible in mainstream society. It was a rallying cry to remind people of why we stood up to oppression in 1969. Today it is nothing more than corporate sponsorship, political opportunism, and allowing law enforcement to tell us how to run our parade. And when marriage equality became federal law, was when the other rights for our community got put on the backburner. As if marriage equality was the big move to be in a post-queer liberation state. Those that are fighting for queer liberation have not stopped since marriage equality, nor when rainbow capitalists took over pride parades. Our fight is more than marriage equality.

Queer liberation is more than just marriage equality. So many activists left the movement when marriage equality became federal law. Make no mistake, queer liberation means that we must demand a living wage, access to affordable and safe housing, employment, racial justice, access to meaningful healthcare, access to human services, opening the border, and abolishing the prison industrial complex. Veteran activist David Mixner reminds us that we are on the brink of losing our history. Pioneers and trailblazers are disappearing before our eyes. We cannot lose our history as the other side wants to erase our journey. Time is running out. Let us keep the spark for our fight for queer liberation.

Group Violence as it Relates to Lynching and Police Violence

[Photo credit: Getty Images]

By V. Alexis

What is Group Violence?

Collective or group violence is a type of violence enacted by people who identify as members of a group (Hawdon). In all the literature on group violence, there is little written on lynching. This piece will cover the basic features of group violence, or more specifically how people who are considered “ordinary” are capable of committing atrocities. The atrocities discussed in this piece are police violence and lynching. This piece will also propose that police violence is a form of group violence and functions similar to lynch mobs. 

There are three main features of group violence as it relates to lynching and police violence. These features include strongly identifying with said group, dehumanizing outside groups, and fear mongering. Group membership boosts self-esteem and provides a sense of self and pride. These groups create members and non-members. People tend to define themselves in contrast of other groups. This creates and “us” versus “them” mentality towards other people outside of the group. Discriminating against people outside of the group is often a way to elevate one’s position within the group. As the difference between “us” and “them” grows, there is more of a chance for violence against the outside group(s).

When people who are not experienced with violence do engage in violent behavior, they typically experience physiological and psychological distress. The proposed reason for why this occurs is that the person who committed an act of violence experiences outcome aversion. This outcome aversion is distress from considering the negative outcomes associated with harming others. These negative outcomes can come from knowing that the victim is likely experiencing distress or from expecting punitive consequences.

Motivation for Engaging in Group Violence and the Manifestation of White Supremacy

One way groups will decrease the aversive effects of committing acts of violence is through creating more social distance between them and the outside group. A common way to increase this social distance is through dehumanization. Strong social ties in the group make it easier for dehumanization to occur. Having strong social ties within groups decrease the need for making connections with people in outside groups.

One example of dehumanization is the history of claiming that black people have more proximity to animals than any other race of humans. Early scientists used to examine every part of the black body, but specifically facial angles to prove their theory that black people are less human. These practices and ideas have evolved but have never gone away (Hund). In modern times, there are studies which show that even many medical professionals have the preconceived notion that black people feel less pain (Hoffman). Just last year, there were a few female Track and Field athletes who were subjected to constant scrutiny of their bodies in an effort to figure out why they were so successful in their respective events. Some officials and scientists employed to conduct studies even went as far as insisting these women either take medicine to decrease their testosterone levels or compete with men.

The strategy of fear mongering entails claiming the outside group poses a threat. This threat can be economic, social, or a threat to survival. After the civil war, black veterans were targeted for lynching because white people thought black participation in the war meant that black people were getting “too much power” within the broader society. When lynching was prominent, there was a trend that as prices of cotton went up, the number of lynchings went down (Dutton). One could presume that this trend meant that when black and white people were closer to being financially equal, white people felt threatened economically. Or that black people were only worthy of living when being productive for white owners. Current studies show that black children are viewed as older and black names evoke threatening images in white minds. Black people are viewed as inherently dangerous.

How this Applies to Lynching

Lynch mobs included three main groups of people; instigators, participants, and spectators. Instigators are the group leaders. They are the people who motivate others to lynch people. Participants are the people who participate in the brutalizing of the victim. The spectators are people who would come to watch and pass around limbs like it was some festival. Even children were spectators and celebrated these brutal deaths. The in-group in the case of lynch mobs are “white conservatives.” I specify conservative because white people with progressive ideas were also lynched. They were not, however, as nearly as vulnerable to lynching as black people.

How this Applies to Police Violence

One could argue that the violence of the U.S police force should be considered as group violence instead of individual isolated incidents or “bad apples.” Following the same framework as previously laid out, the U.S police force has a collective identity characterized as an in-group. This in-group would be considered “the good guys.” The outside group or out-group would perhaps be considered “the bad guys.” The bad guys are disproportionately black, brown, and indigenous people.

The use of dehumanization is arguably the same as during chattel slavery and the time of frequent lynching (Goff). The description of Michael Brown, who was murdered by the police in Ferguson, is one additional example of modern-day dehumanization of black people. The cop Darren Wilson’s account of the murder described Michael Brown as “superhuman.” He was quoted saying, “The only way I can describe it is I felt like a 5-year-old holding on to Hulk Hogan. That’s just how big he felt and how small I felt just from grasping his arm.” Wilson also said, Brown looked like a “demon.” The idea that black people are simultaneously in bad health and superhuman has been around since at least the Jim-Crow era.

This idea that black people are superhuman also falls under the category of fear mongering – having ideas that black and indigenous people are inherently dangerous and thus must be controlled or dominated. The three groups in lynch mobs can all be applied to police violence: The instigators are the cops who start the aggression; the participants are those who are physically involved in the brutality and or murder; and the spectators are the so called “good cops” who do nothing to stop the “bad cops.”

Thinking of police violence as collective or group violence is important because all too often it is blamed on one “maniac” or “psychotic” individual. This type of language takes away from the fact that these cops are simply racist and/or are working in a racist system, performing in-group duties within a racist group (institution) with violent tendencies. It’s worth noting that this type of language is also ableist, as it further stigmatizes people with mental illnesses. Not everyone who is psychotic or who has any mental illness is violent and not every violent person is mentally ill or has psychotic traits. The only way to stop these acts of group violence, both lynching and police violence, is to abolish the in-groups.

References

Dutton, Donald G. The Psychology of Genocide, Massacres, and Extreme Violence: Why "Normal" People Come to Commit Atrocities. Praeger Security International, 2007.

Goff, Phillip Atiba, et al. “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Apr. 2014, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24564373.

Hawdon, James. “Group Violence Revisited: Common Themes across Types of Group Violence.” Academia.edu, www.academia.edu/20265986/Group_Violence_Revisited_Common_Themes_across_Types_of_Group_Violence.

Hoffman, Kelly M, et al. “Racial Bias in Pain Assessment and Treatment Recommendations, and False Beliefs about Biological Differences between Blacks and Whites.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, National Academy of Sciences, 19 Apr. 2016, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27044069.

Hund, Wulf D., et al. Simianization: Apes, Gender, Class, and Race. Lit Verlag, 2016.

A High Road for the 21st Century

[Photo credit: Black Socialists in America]

By Russell Weaver

In the 1990s, American scholar Joel Rogers proposed the term “High Road” to refer to policies and institutions that jointly uphold and advance the three social values of shared prosperity, environmental sustainability, and participatory democracy. Shared prosperity refers to improvements in human well-being and equal opportunities for all humans to “participate in and benefit from” the activities that produce those improvements. Environmental sustainability refers to “efficient use, maintenance, and restoration of the environmental services needed to support human life.” And participatory democracy refers to governance according to the maxim of “of, by, and for the people.”[1]

While these values are as laudable and fundamental to social life today as they ever were, the intersecting and multiplying crises coming to a head in the 21st Century – climate change, the global COVID-19 pandemic, systemic racism, racial and gender oppression, state violence, police militarization and police brutality, mass surveillance, political polarization, rising inequality, and so many others – call for an updated definition of the High Road. One that makes explicit not only what the High Road stands for, but what it opposes. One that is overtly connected to a broader theory of change regarding how to build a High Road future. One that offers allies a specific set of criteria on which to evaluate policies and practices in order to inform advocacy strategies and grassroots campaigns. In short, 21st Century crises demand a 21st Century High Road (“High Road-21”).

Importantly, the High Road that Rogers built still possesses a rock-solid foundation, and we are not calling for its wholesale replacement. High Road-21 is simply about broadening and repaving the surface, painting brighter lines, and installing new lighting to illuminate the paths that lead away from the harmful, discriminatory, gridlocked systems in which most of us have spent the majority of our lives, and to which we’re told that there is no alternative.

There are alternatives. Below, we articulate four key pillars of an alternative, High Road system for the 21st Century. We then translate each pillar into one or more High Road-21 policy objectives, and we briefly situate the resulting vision into a broader theory of change. We conclude with a call to action: we ask readers to endorse this statement, and to join us in our attempts to embrace and enact High Road-21 principles and values in our many, ever-changing social roles.

The Four Essential Pillars of High Road-21

Four main, interlocking and interdependent pillars hold the 21st Century High Road in place.

Pillar 1: The High Road is Anti-Racist

High Road-21 is anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-misogynist, anti-ableist, anti-homophobic, anti-transphobic, anti-classist, and opposed to all other forms of prejudice. While the original High Road principle of shared prosperity is consistent with this pillar in spirit, being for shared prosperity is not enough. It is just as critical to be against all policies, institutions, norms, rules, regulations, conventions, and practices that produce, reinforce, or fail to dismantle the structures and systems that give rise to inequitable outcomes in the human population. As such, High Road-21 explicitly rejects all sources of inequity, violence, and oppression.

A policy or institution is anti-racist if it “produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups.” To be anti-racist is to recognize that there:

“is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.”[2]

Following from these observations, one objective of High Road policy in the 21st Century is to actively tear down, with the intent to fully eradicate, the sources of racial, social, economic, environmental, and political inequity and injustice that presently transcend all scales of our shared society, from the local to the global.

Pillar 2: The High Road is Restorative and Reparative

Whereas High Road-21 is against policies and institutions that produce and sustain inequity, it is for policies and institutions that (1) advance equity in the pursuit of justice, and (2) realign and rescale human activities so that they progressively repair and enhance the ecological systems in which an equitable and just society is capable of flourishing. In other words, High Road-21 is in part a reparative and restorative project.

In line with notions of reparative[3] and restorative[4] justice, the High Road-21 agenda aims to explicitly recognize and purposefully redress the harms caused by a legacy of Low Road – i.e., racist, inequitable, extractive, destructive – policies and patterns of social-political-environmental relations. That means that High Road-21 is committed to:

·         Including all parties – including voices for nonhuman species and ecological systems – as full, authentic participants in decision-making processes that affect them, and which have previously rendered disproportionate levels of harm onto some of them;

·         Creating new opportunities for encounters with or interactions between those parties so that all become aware of the ways in which existing institutions produce and distribute harm across our social and environmental systems;

·         Devising new solutions and crafting new institutions and policies that make amends for these patterns of harm; and

·         Striving to reintegrate or resituate parties into their shared environments with new tools and infrastructure to become caretakers and community members, not competitors.[5]

Along these lines, another objective of High Road policy in the 21st Century is to actively invest in, and develop mechanisms that convey, material and symbolic reparations to the people, places, and ecosystems on which inequitable, extractive institutions and policies have thrust disproportionate levels of harm.

Pillar 3: The High Road is Cooperative and Solidaristic

As evidenced by the list of commitments laid out above for Pillar 2, High Road-21 adopts and advances the values of democratic participation, social cohesion, government responsiveness, and the spirit of compromise.[6] Put differently, High Road-21 is cooperative and solidaristic. It views democratic society as a common-pool resource. Like a fishery or other commons, a democratic society can deliver benefits to all of its constituents. Also like a fishery, however, a democratic society is vulnerable to the polluting forces of greed, short-term profit-seeking, hyper-individualism, and rival competition. Low Road policies and institutions that reward or otherwise promote these tendencies undermine the health and well-being of our common-pool democratic society.

High Road-21 recognizes that a common-pool democratic society is most likely to be sustainably managed – and strengthened – when its members share a sense of identity and solidarity with one another. Shared identity and solidarity fuel and sustain the trusting, reciprocal relationships that are vital for prosocial cooperation to emerge and challenge the Low Road system’s prevailing forces of antisocial competition.[7] Solidarity and the cooperative tendencies that it unleashes are buttressed by processes and rules that provide for democratic self-governance and self-determination, equitable distributions of contributions and benefits, and fair and inclusive decision-making.[8] Low Road policies and practices that concentrate wealth and power in the hands of the few are necessarily anti-solidaristic, giving rise to the patterns of inter-group conflict and competition that are so visible in our contemporary crises.

Thus, a third objective of High Road policy in the 21st Century is to actively build new and reinforce existing mechanisms that produce solidarity and trust and promote cooperative tendencies among diverse members of society.

Solidarity and cooperation among humans contribute to the sustainable management of a democratic society. However, a cooperative, democratic society cannot thrive in the absence of healthy, supportive, life-giving ecological systems. Since at least the Industrial Revolution, an extractive, anthropocentric policy agenda has treated ecological systems as inexhaustible sources of free materials, and bottomless sinks for wastes and debris. Arguably the most visible form of human environmental impacts, global climate change, is just one – albeit the most dramatic, large-scale, and urgent – example of the environmental degradation and destruction caused by human activities.

Although human impacts on the physical world occur virtually everywhere and affect all ecosystems, environmental degradation and destruction disproportionately harm communities of color.[9] Thus, for moral reasons that are rooted both in (1) a land ethic[10] and respect for the environment, and (2) a social contract and respect for fellow humans, High Road-21 is committed to building solidarity and cooperation between humans and nature. As such, a fourth objective of High Road policy in the 21st Century is to actively create new and reinforce existing mechanisms that decenter human activities on the planet, realigning and rescaling those activities so they promote the healthy, unimpaired functioning of ecological systems.

Pillar 4: The High Road is Prefigurative

To say that High Road-21 is prefigurative is to say that it is at once visionary and practical. It builds and showcases rules, institutions, and social-environmental relations in the here-and-now – using tools of the present – that model what a High Road society can be in the future. In other words, the 21st Century High Road is not a destination to be reached at some unknown point in the future. It is a path that is already under construction across the planet – a path that leads away from the racist, extractive, short-term, Low Road infrastructure that we’ve been investing in for centuries.

It’s time to finally let the costs of those Low Road investments, and the harmful infrastructure they erected, sink. High Road institutions like worker-owned cooperatives and community land trusts,[11] mutual aid networks,[12] and local agricultural cooperatives and independent grassroots political parties,[13] are modeling what a High Road, sustainable, cooperative, democratic economy and society can look like…if we choose to invest in it. On that note, a fifth objective of High Road policy in the 21st Century is to immediately and actively defund or otherwise withdraw economic support from Low Road institutions, programs, and regulatory systems, and to redirect those resources to the anti-racist, reparative, restorative, cooperative, solidaristic High Road alternatives that already exist and are continuing to emerge throughout society.

High Road-21 and the Dual Power Theory of Change

The Four Pillars of High Road-21 are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. They are all vital to the structural integrity of a 21st Century High Road. As such, they should not be treated as separate elements than can or ought to be built one at a time.

Still, it is a useful thought exercise to consider the individual Pillars somewhat sequentially, in reverse order, insofar as doing so tells a story of change. If the vision is an anti-racist, reparative, cooperative, solidaristic, High Road democratic society, then how do we exit off the Low Road and start moving in that direction?

According to the theory of change to which High Road-21 subscribes,[14] one answer to this question is that we prefigure the envisioned society by modeling it in the here-and-now. That is, we use the tools and resources at our disposal in the present to build equitable and democratic institutions that directly challenge the future viability of the Low Road. For example, we:

• Form place-based “people’s assemblies” wherein participatory or direct democracy procedures set policy agendas that inform “organizing campaigns…and long-term institution building and development work” to challenge the status quo.[15]

• Organize independent political parties and mobilize voting blocs to advocate for and elect candidates – and pass referenda – that challenge Low Road power structures.[16]

• Establish community land trusts and co-housing opportunities to challenge traditional concepts of private property and property ownership.

• Build cooperative businesses to challenge stockholder-centered enterprise designs.

• Create benefit corporations, social enterprises, and limited-profit firms to challenge conventional views that businesses must put profits first, minimizing costs and maximizing revenues with every decision.

• Set up public and community-owned banks, utilities, and energy grids to challenge the misguided belief that market competition makes the private sector better suited to provide these essential goods and services.

The list goes on and on. The point is not to name every variety of High Road institution, but to affirm that they exist. Here. Now.

Collectively, these High Road institutions form the building blocks of a democratic, High Road base of real political and economic power. As that power base grows and becomes more distributed over space, it competes for economic and political legitimacy with the prevailing Low Road power base.

The notion that a democratic power coexists and competes with the concentrated power of the ruling class is what is meant by dual power.[17] To build dual power is to invest in High Road institutions and policies that are “of, by, and for” the people in a democratic society – institutions and policies designed and operated in contraposition to prevailing, highly uneven patterns of power and privilege.

According to the dual power theory of change, as the High Road expands, society can become more equitable, democratic, inclusive, and sustainable. However, while the presence of prefigurative High Road institutions and voting blocs is a necessary condition for weakening the Low Road power base, it is not sufficient. Rather, it is also essential to build solidarity between High Road institutions, and between those institutions and the population at large. If we are all to eventually live on the High Road together, then we need to see and get to know one another. The High Road, in other words, cannot be built without strong networking, organizing, and mobilization.

With a visible, networked, and expanding alternative to the Low Road in place, the potential for social cooperation – in the form of collective withdrawal from the Low Road economy and movement toward High Road alternatives – grows. As this potential gets realized, the scales start to tip in favor of the High Road. Eventually, the swelling democratic power base gains legitimacy. With added legitimacy comes greater political power to dismantle preexisting inequitable, racist, Low Road policies, and to make amends for their legacies. In other words, a strong base of legitimate democratic power paves the way for restorative and reparative measures that undo the harms of the past. In their place, the High Road power installs sustainable and anti-racist fixtures that guarantee equity and justice for all.

Over time, the interplay of (1) dismantling and making amends for mechanisms that lead to inequity and environmental destruction, and (2) building equitable, sustainable mechanisms to take their place, closes off the Low Road and helps the few who remain stuck in its gridlock to join the rest of us on the High Road.[18]

In sum, the 21st Century High Road is the welcoming, sustainable infrastructure on which we build dual power. It’s where relentlessly democratic, equitable, anti-racist, solidaristic institutions, campaigns, and policies will allow all humans to flourish as equal members of healthy, well-functioning ecological systems. Simply put, it’s where we go from here.

Take Action

To add your name and/or the name of your organization to the list of parties who support the 21st Century High Road agenda laid out above, visit www.highroad-21.org and click on the “Endorse” link at the bottom of the page. Onward, in solidarity.

Notes

[1] Rogers, Joel. “What does 'high road' mean?” University of Wisconsin-Madison, COWS, 1990. Last accessed 3 June 2020. https://www.cows.org/_data/documents/1776.pdf

[2] Kendi, I.X., 2019. How to be an Antiracist. One World/Ballantine. (p. 18).

[3] International Center for Transitional Justice, n.d. “Gender and Transitinoal Justice: A Training Module Series.” Last accessed 4 June 2020. https://www.ictj.org/multimedia/interactive/gender-and-transitional-justice-training-module-series

[4] Centre for Justice and Reconciliation, n.d. “Lesson 1: What is Restorative Justice?” Last accessed 4 June 2020. http://restorativejustice.org/restorative-justice/about-restorative-justice/tutorial-intro-to-restorative-justice/lesson-1-what-is-restorative-justice/

[5] Ibid.

[6] Fung, A., 2019. Saving Democracy from Ourselves: Democracy as a Tragedy of the Commons. In Satz, D. and Lever, A. eds. Ideas That Matter: Democracy, Justice, Rights. Oxford University Press, USA.

[7] Ostrom, E., 1990. Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge university press.

[8] Atkins, P.W., Wilson, D.S. and Hayes, S.C., 2019. Prosocial: using evolutionary science to build productive, equitable, and collaborative groups. New Harbinger Publications.

[9] Bullard, R.D., 2000. Dumping in Dixie: Race, class, and environmental quality. Routledge.

[10] Leopold, A., 1989. A Sand County almanac, and sketches here and there. Oxford University Press, USA.

[11]Colón, J.M., Herson-Hord, M., Horvath, K.S., Martindale, D. and Porges, M., 2017. Community, Democracy, and Mutual Aid: Toward Dual Power and Beyond. The Next System Project, https://thenextsystem.org/sites/default/files/2017-07/Symbiosis_AtLargeFirst-corrected-2.pdf.

[12] Mutual Aid Networks, n.d. Last accessed 3 June 2020. https://www.mutualaidnetwork.org/

[13] Akuno, K., 2014. The Jackson-Kush Plan: The Struggle for Black Self-Determination and Economic Democracy.

[14] Colón et al. Also see: Akuno, K., Nangwaya, A. and Jackson, C., 2017. Jackson rising: The struggle for economic democracy and black self-determination in Jackson, Mississippi. Daraja Press.

[15] Akuno.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Black Socialists of America. “Dual power map.” Last accessed 3 June 2020. https://blacksocialists.us/dual-power-map

[18] Rogers, Joel and Wright, E., 2015. American society: How it really works, 2E. New York: WW Norton. (p. 228).

Contact: Russell Weaver is Research Director at the Cornell University ILR Buffalo Co-Lab.  rcweaver@cornell.edu | http://highroadpolicy.org

Abolish it All: Towards Eradicating the Prison and Military Industrial Complex

By Blake Simons

I, like many other Black radicals who follow the Black radical tradition, are filled with hope to see such a large amount of people talking about abolishment of the police. A few months ago, many would deem us wild to even think that abolishment was such a possibility, let alone a mainstream conversation. With national discussion, however, nuance is erased and conversations become watered down, and the reality of the conditions we are in are not properly articulated. I want to recognize the work of Mariame Kaba, who helped me come to this abolitionist politic; in addition, I want to thank the many folks like Angela Davis who have laid the foundation for abolitionist thought. This piece seeks to provide clarity and guidance to the people, and a framework for which abolishment of the prison industrial complex is possible. 

For starters, it is important to note that the prison industrial complex is deeply tied to the military industrial complex. The weapons and gear manufactured by captured Africans in penitentiaries is used to loot countries in the 3rd world. This makes way for corporations like apple, tesla, google, and microsoft to come to the continent to loot Africa’s resources while also using African child labor. This is only made possible because the police force captures Africans and then enslaves us in penitentiaries in which our people are forced to make weapons and materials for the military. This undeniably connects the prison industrial complex with the military industrial complex. It’s important that we know our enemy and what we are up against if we are going to abolish the PIC. 

The us empire and its military is the most violent imperial regime in human history. Do we think that the biggest purveyor of violence will willingly concede to demands of abolishment? The national guard was called in and military rule began when windows were broken and buildings were burned. Similarly, if we seek to abolish the PIC, this fascist state will have a violent response. I purposefully start here with this framework because it’s important to know what we will be up against if we seek to truly abolish prisons and the police, and thus the military industrial complex. 

america’s economy runs off the exploitation of captured Africans and global imperial dominance. To think that prisons and police will be abolished through non violence underestimates the capacity for violence that america has. ‬america will do anything to preserve its colonial violence, history shows us this and it is a scientific fact.

Prisons won’t be abolished through the reformist calls to defund. Schools are defunded. Healthcare is defunded. Section 8 housing services are defunded. Just because the police are defunded doesn’t mean that they will be abolished. Revolution doesn’t come from policy changes, it comes from destroying these systems that kill us. This is an important distinction necessary for us to be aware of. We must be wary of reformist calls that will somehow “lead” us to abolishment. 

We know that reform only furthers fascism. The past 400 years shows us that. We can’t settle for nothing less than the complete eradication of the systems of oppression that kill and exploit our people on the daily. Whether it is transphobia, ableism, or police violence (which are all deeply connected and often intersect at the same time) we can’t concede to the demands of a fascist state for reform. As George Jackson says,.“...with each reform, revolution became more remote[...]But if one were forced for the sake of clarity to define [fascism] in a word simple enough for all to understand, that word would be ‘reform.”Our people’s lives depend on revolution. 

While new calls to abolish the police show that the general public is ready for change, we have to be honest about what true abolishment will take. As prison-industrial-complex abolitionists, we seek to eradicate systems of violence that enslave, kill, and exploit us. We seek to create new systems that address violence at its core to create peace in our communities. Kwame Ture teaches us that we (revolutionaries) are not only destroyers but we are creators. Creators of a new world where peace is possible. But we must understand that in order for peace to exist, there is a scientific method that must be used to obtain it.

We must understand that armed struggle in defense of and against this fascist state is the only way to eradicate fascism. Mussolini wasn’t defeated through non-violent protests. Hitler wasn’t defeated through non-violent protests. And trump and the united corporations of america won’t be destroyed through non-violence. Revolutionary (counter)violence, which is a defensive and life-affirming posture as much as it is an act of self-preservation, will create the conditions in which we can abolish these systems that have oppressed us for the past 400 years. As Malcolm X said best, there’s been no revolution in the world without bloodshed — from Haiti, to Venezuela, to Cuba, to Ghana. 

While many might say our people are not ready for this, I would like to remind people that it was unarmed protestors in Minneapolis who sent pigs squealing and retreating from their precinct. This happened as people in current time created a plan to do so. Imagine if the people had more organization? Imagine if the people were armed? There’s endless possibilities if we have an organized guerrilla front. 

As I said earlier, revolutionary (counter)violence is at the core of abolishment, but as revolutionaries we also create twice as much as we seek to destroy. As my comrade noname said,

“when the dust settles and the protests stop, communities will still be poor, police will still murder and violate citizens. prisons will still be filled with millions of ppl. half a million ppl will still be houseless. the past 2 weeks was the easy part. solidarity isn’t a trend”.

This is why we have to create programs, people’s programs, that serve the material needs of our people pending armed struggle. We have to show our people that a future outside the parasitic conditions of capitalism do exist. We need food programs for the hungry. Housing programs for the houseless. Medical programs for the people. COVID-19 testing for the community. We must provide this for our people. If we are to claim the title as revolutionary, it is our duty to serve the people, love the people, and free the people. 

In struggle.

*

Blake Simons is co-host of Hella Black podcast and co-founder of People’s Breakfast Oakland, a grassroots Black socialist organization in Oakland, CA. The author is on Twitter @BlakeDontCrack.

Law Enforcement Continues the Racist Legacy it Was Born From

By Ben Luongo

The killing of George Floyd has put on full display the persistent and overt racism present in America’s law enforcement. The way in which he was murdered typifies the gratuitous violence that white officers use on a daily basis against black men. The police always deploy force disproportionately against minorities, and that force is often deadly. Black men make up only thirteen percent of the population, but they constitute a quarter of the people shot and killed by cops. This makes them three times more likely than white people to be killed by police, despite the fact that white people are more likely to be armed.

The brutal and oppressive racism in the police force has led activists and political leaders in recent years to call for police reform. Those calls have reached new levels following the murder of George Floyd. One example is Joe Biden who said on a live-stream last week “It’s time for us to face that deep open wound we have in this nation. We need justice for George Floyd. We need real police reform.” Other examples include the founder of Utah’s Black Lives Matter, Lex Scott, who recently called for certain measures such as “data collection, de-escalation training for police, implicit bias training for police, less than lethal weapons for police.”

These are reasonable measures and we should seriously consider them. However, it is important that we not place complete faith in the promise of reform and that we remain open to alternatives to law enforcement. The reason for this is that the police have major structural problems which may be too deep-seated for modest reforms to solve. The idea of reform assumes that a system functions largely as it should aside from a few noticeable flaws. Whatever those flaws are can be corrected, or reformed, by implementing simple adjustments to improve how the system functions. As this relates to police reform, it assumes that police are a vital part of law enforcement and that we can fix the problem of racism to ensure that policing is more just and fair.

There are two issues with this view, however, which exposes the limitation of police reform. The first is that it assumes police are somehow a natural fixture of modern society that play a necessary role in maintaining order. This just isn’t the case. In reality, today’s institution of policing is a rather recent historical development emerging out of modern changes of property relations and white supremacy. As a result, policing continues an outmoded legacy of social order which serves very little purpose for our modern society. This brings up the second issue: because the police are rooted in racist and classist modes of social order, white supremacy may be a built-in feature which cannot be expunged from the institution of police.

One has only to consider this history in order to realize that the police were never intended to serve and protect people. Instead, they were designed to protect the property and economic interest of white elites and slave owners. Two related points in American history exemplify this.

The first can be found in 200 year-old methods designed to control and repress slave populations. As historian Salley Hadden writes in Slave Patrol, “the new American innovation in law enforcement during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was the creation of racially focused law enforcement groups in the American south.” As the south began to industrialize, slave owners found new lucrative opportunities in “renting out” their slaves to employers in the city. This meant that slaves spent more time away from their owners who were used to monitoring their every move. White people grew fearful of the opportunities this provided for slaves to organize and revolt against their masters. As a result, the state instituted race-based forms of legal repression called slave patrols. These slave patrols, as Robert Wintersmith rights, “scoured the country side day and night, intimidating, terrorizing, and brutalizing slaves into submission.”

Today’s police also has its origins in 19th century class struggle and how American cities in the north used state violence to repress and control immigrants and the working poor. As historian Sydney Harring writes in Policing a Class Society, “The criminologist's definition of 'public order crimes' comes perilously close to the historian's description of 'working-class leisure-time activity.” As rural peasants migrated to urban areas looking for work, city and business leaders worried about the rise of “disorderly conduct,” which was essentially code for worker strikes, riots, and other kinds of collective activity. Cities stopped this kind of activity by hiring watchmen, which were groups of men who often resorted to extreme forms of violence in order to keep the peace. They slowly morphed into municipal police departments in the mid-19th century as states began to centralize power.

In general, the origins of the police reflects an oppressive history of white and propertied elites protecting their interests by controlling black people, immigrants, and the working poor. As a result, our modern society has been saddled with a paradigm of social order which reflects the interests of white supremacy and private property. Just consider how white cops brutally murdered George Floyd after receiving a report of him allegedly purchasing merchandize with counterfeit money. We like to think that, after two hundred years, today’s police academy reflects more modern values of justice and equality. While social institutions do evolve throughout history, however, they rarely abandon the legacy they were born out of. The structures of power that gave rise to the police simply reproduce themselves in new ways that make the paradigm of police violence more acceptable. In today’s context, this takes form in a racist discourse that justifies police brutality against the backdrop of “super-predators” and “thugs” that threaten social order.

Quite frankly, the idea that cops prevent crime is a myth that Americans should disabuse themselves of. Not only has the overall number of cops declined for the past five years, but the ratio of police per citizen has dropped for the past two decades. During this time, the number of violent crimes have actually gone down. This shows quite clearly that social order is not maintained by police. Instead, we need to recognize that social stability is rooted in racial equality regarding issues in housing, education, health, and employment. Just like the police, however, each of these issues continue an insidious and persistent legacy of racism which still haunts black Americans today. The best way to address these injustices is to take resources wasted on police reform and redirect it to rebuilding our communities.

Consider the fact that Minneapolis spent just over a third of its general fund ($163 million) on police. The general fund refers to discretionary spending which could very well have been spent on a more constructive community-based initiative. For instance, Minneapolis has the fourth highest unemployment gap between white and black residents in America. Imagine how that money could have be spent on closing that gap. It’s these kinds of investments which are necessary for erecting a fair and just society.

Ultimately, we need to adopt a new paradigm of social order, one that doesn’t rely on reforming the police. The problem of racism is far too entrenched and widespread for police reform to solve. Correcting this requires that we rebuild and restore the lives of black Americans which the police, up to this point, have only ruined.

*

Ben Luongo teaches international human rights and international political economy at University of South Florida’s School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies. He previously worked as a campaign organizer and directed several campaigns for groups like the Human Rights Campaign and Save the Children. His analysis has appeared in the Foreign Policy Journal, Foreign Policy in Focus, International Policy Digest, and New Politics.

False Flags Fail to Derail National Uprising

By Werner Lange

The use of false flag operations designed to crush democracy and create tyranny has a long and sordid history. Arguably the most notorious and effective one took place in Berlin with the burning of the Reichstag on February 27, 1933, less than a month after Hitler was named Chancellor by an anxious capitalist elite threatened with a workers’ revolution. The very next day President von Hindenburg stripped the German people of core freedoms protected under the Weimar Constitution and thereby opened the legal door for the Nazi reign of terror. The empowered Nazis, who were the actual arsonists, successfully laid blame on anti-fascists, particularly Communists, and began a bloody campaign of persecution and extermination of all opponents of Hitler’s Third Reich. Within weeks some 10,000 German anti-fascists were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Yet anti-fascist resistance continued both inside the Third Reich and in exile. Among the most effective of the early anti-fascist organizations was the Paris-based “International Struggle Against War and Fascism” and its widely distributed publication “ANTIFAschisticheFRONT”, which demanded the downfall of the brown-shirt arsonists in its September 1933 edition. That did not happen, and internal Nazi terror systematically degenerated into total war by 1939 when a series of false flag operations along the German-Polish border were used to justify the invasion of Poland.

Since its use in the 1930s as the title for an anti-fascist publication, ANTIFA has gained new notoriety in 2020. So have false flag operations. On May 31, St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square (one block from the White House), also known as “The Church of Presidents,” was damaged by arsonists. It was Pentecost Sunday, a day when the scripture reading for churches everywhere came from the account of the first Pentecost recorded in the Book of Acts which, interestingly enough, makes explicit reference to “tongues of fire.” No reference to Pentecost or anything else was made by President Trump holding a bible during his brief visit to the damaged church the very next day. A path through Lafayette Park was cleared for Trump and his entourage (Attorney General Barr, Secretary of Defense Esper, and Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Milley) by violently driving out anti-racist protestors with clouds of tear gas and swarms of baton-wielding officers decked out in riot gear. Immediately before this awkwardly staged photo op at the church, Trump issued a short but ominous threat in the Rose Garden to protestors, singling out Anitifa twice by name. Similarly, right-wing media outlets, like Christianpost.com were quick to post tweets blaming the church arson on Antifa and claiming that “earlier in the night, rioters ripped down a U.S. flag displayed outside the church as people chanted, ‘burn that shit.’”

This has all the markings of a false flag operation, but an unsuccessful one. The same holds true for a series of violent attacks, arson fires, organized looting, and wanton property damage perpetrated by a host of agent provocateurs throughout the country who infiltrated Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Memorial Day. Members of scores of violent right-wing groups, some recently minted, emerged from their chambers of hate onto the streets of America to damage the legitimacy of anti-racist protests as much as possible. Though carrying various group identities, several agent provocateurs also carried various assault weapons to demonstrations, and all carried the common goal of inciting violence to such extent that it would ignite a “fascist counterrevolution through accelerationism.” The intent is to accelerate societal collapse, foment civil disorder, foster polarization, and, as one of their leading neo-Nazi ideologues put it, “to fan the flames” against “The System.” That may have literally been the plan in Minneapolis, epicenter for the mass protests, where some 87 fires broke out in a span of five days following the police murder of George Floyd. On the night of May 30 alone, over 40 persons were arrested in Minneapolis and, according to its Safety Commissioner, “some were people linked to white-supremacist groups.”

Among the most vicious and violent of the white-supremacist groups is The Base (in Arabic, al-Qaeda), founded in 2018 and hell-bent on fomenting a race war to create white ethnostates. Its recruiting motto is “save your race, join the base.” In January 2020, three of its members were arrested in Georgia for plotting to murder a married couple affiliated with Antifa.  An older racist group, Alexandria-based Identity Evropa, whose members habitually show up to assault and harass protesters at Trump rallies, recently ran a fake ANTIFA twitter account calling upon members to loot “white hoods.” Rumors about busloads of ANTIFA rioters coming to “fuck up the white hoods” sufficed to get scores of heavy-armed residents onto neighborhood streets in several rural counties. Even the elderly protester who was forcefully shoved to the pavement by Buffalo police officers and left bleeding from his head was called a possible “ANTIFA provocateur” by Trump. ANTIFA was also explicitly identified as a “threat to national security” and its members as “domestic terrorists” in a video recently posted by Three-Percenters, a pro-gun right-wing militia taking its name from the dubious belief that only 3% of American colonists actively fought against the British (one of their members, the leader of the White Rabbit Three Percent Illinois Patriot Freedom Fighters Militia, was arrested for bombing a mosque in Minnesota). The very name of another extreme right-wing outfit, Boogaloo, is a code word for another civil war. Three of its members, all with extensive military experience, were arrested in Nevada for manufacturing explosives to be used at protests in Las Vegas and for urging participants to resort to violence. Another “Boogaloo Boi” was arrested in Texas in April after declaring his intent to kill police officers. Some have a habit of displaying Nazi symbols and all carry assault weapons wherever they appear, as they have at protests in at least six states.

Related in ideology and identify are the Proud Boys, a virulent pro-Trump gang of thugs who plan to hold a “Resist Marxism” rally in Providence in 2020 and pride themselves in their stated desire to “smash commies.” Their affiliate on the West Coast, Patriot Prayer, engaged in violent actions in Los Angeles and Portland. Heavily-armed members of another vigilante gang, New Mexico Civil Guard, showed up at a BLM protest on June 1 to harass and intimidate participants. On the same day, three heavily-armed white men from southern Ohio who identified themselves as “Ohio patriots” menaced peaceful protesters in Warren, in NE Ohio. At least one Boogaloo member, armed with assault weapons, traveled from North Carolina to infiltrate protests in Minneapolis. Two young anti-government agitators who traveled from Pennsylvania to protests in Cleveland were arrested for conspiring to incite violence after police found commercial fire gel, a Glock firearm, ammunition, spray paint, and a hammer in their car; five others carrying fire starters were arrested for trying to break into Progressive Field, home of the Cleveland Indians. At a June 5 news conference, the U.S. Attorney for northern Ohio affirmed the hijacking of peaceful protests: “So let me get out in front of any questions as to whether there were out-of-state agitators who hijacked last weekend’s peaceful protest for their own purposes. The answer is undoubtedly yes, as seen with today’s arrests.” The same can be said for nearly all other protests.

Despite some attempts to show support, unprovoked police violence against protestors remains the norm, often with fatal consequences, as in Columbus and Louisville where protestors were killed by police action; two other protesters were killed in Indianapolis by unknown assailants. Also increasingly common is outright affiliation of law enforcement officers with white supremacist groups. A former Officer of the Month in the Philadelphia Police Department proudly wears a Nazi tattoo on his arm. A current Chicago police officer actively engaged with Proud Boys in a “Fuck Antifa” telegram chat channel. Among the New Mexico Civil Guard harassing protesters was an officer from the ICE prison in Torrance County.  A former sheriff’s deputy in Illinois is an active member of a Three Percenters militia.  A heavily disguised white man who wantonly smashed windows with a hammer at a Minneapolis AutoZone store and sprayed-painted “Free Shit for Everyone Zone” on its wall is alleged to have been a St. Paul police officer.  To facilitate destruction of property, piles of bricks have been strategically placed and left unattended in several U.S. cities hit by major protests. And as happened with the murder of a young woman protesting the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, cars are increasingly being used as weapons against BLM protestors who are commonly labeled “speed bumps” by militias. A black protestor was killed by a white driver in Bakersfield; and, in Seattle, a white man who drove his car menacingly into a BLM crowd shot and wounded a black man upon exiting his car on June 6. On the same day, the president of the state’s KKK plowed his truck into a BLM protest in Virginia. At least 17 such incidents have occurred since Memorial Day, resulting in serious injury to protesters and a few attempted murder charges against their assailants.

A nationwide call from “Team Trump” for direct action against protesters was posted on FaceBook in early June by the “Trump Make America Great Again Committee”: “Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups are running through our streets and causing absolute mayhem. They are DESTROYING our cities and rioting - it’s absolute madness. It’s important that EVERY American comes together at a time like this to send a united message that we will not stand for their radical actions any longer. We’re calling on YOU to make a public statement and add your name to stand with President Trump against ANTIFA. Please add your name IMMEDIATELY to stand with your President and his decision to declare ANTIFA a terrorist organization.” That message, essentially a call to arms, will resonate with millions of pro-Trump Americans, ones who have foolishly forgotten that not so long ago hundreds of thousands of Americans, along with millions of others, gave their lives in an existential struggle against fascism. “Either the United States will destroy ignorance,” prophetically proclaimed W.E.B. Du Bois during another dark period in our history, “or ignorance will destroy the United States.” Team Trump is making sure ignorance wins.

While the full extent and nature of ties between white-supremacist groups inciting the violence and the Trump regime is unknown, it is clear that both share a virulent racist ideology and praxis. The self-identified “President of Law and Order” has no reservations about explicitly calling for looters to be shot; threatening to unleash “vicious dogs and most ominous weapons” against protesters; identifying elected officials who reject violent suppression of protests as “weak liberals”; labeling protesters themselves, such as the ones he terrorized in Lafayette Park, as terrorists; and surrounding himself with avowed racists like Stephen Miller, a senior Trump advisor and ally of a white-supremacist “nativist empire.” White supremacy, a defining feature of fascism, is the tie that binds Trump’s regime to his racist foot soldiers in the streets attempting to accelerate the trajectory toward civil war in America.

Demonization of anti-fascists in particular, and anti-racist protesters in general, as “terrorists” has its consequences, both intended and unintended. For we treat people and situations as we define them. As a classic sociological dictum has it: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” Whether or not the definition is true or accurate is immaterial; false definitions, like false flags, have real consequences. And in this case, to be defined as terrorist is an open invitation for pre-emptive violence, even murder. Also at work here are the dynamics of the self-fulfilling prophecy as articulated by sociologist Robert Merton: “The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the original false conception come ‘true’. The specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error.” Reign of terror more accurately approaches our current reality. As of today, the 76th anniversary of D-day which marked the beginning of the end of the fascist Third Reich, US military forces are at a near-wartime alert level (Force Protection Condition Charlie) in and around the nation’s capital to stop projected acts of violence by anti-fascists. As proclaimed by Trump on June 1, “I want the organizers of this terror to be on notice that you will face severe criminal penalties and lengthy sentences in jail. This includes Antifa and others who are leading instigators of this violence.” However, an internal FBI report found no evidence of Antifa involvement in this violence but did warn of calls by “far-right provocateurs to attack federal agents” and “use automatic weapons against protesters.”

Masters of deceit are not interested in facts, and the Trump regime has repeatedly demonstrated its utter disdain for truth. Given the dismal track record of this thoroughly racist regime, it is not beyond imagination that a major false flag operation is in the works and will explode in the near future or come as an October surprise. If and when that happens, it will be conducted covertly by criminal fascist gangs in the suites emboldened and empowered by a Trump regime threatened with disempowerment.

Attempted manipulation of anti-racist protests by an assortment of far-right groups to ignite a new civil war through a series of coordinated false flag operations has, so far, failed. By contrast, unlike its largely marginalized status for years, the Black Lives Matter movement has caught fire and carries with it the potential for change – radical, systemic change. For as Marx clearly realized in another historical context pregnant with potential for revolutionary change: “The weapons of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.” Black Lives Matter is not only an idea whose time has come, but an idea that has clearly gripped the masses of all colors, especially America’s youth. a luta continua vitória é certa.

The 1992 Rebellion in Los Angeles: The Context of a Proletarian Uprising

Originally published by Aufheben Group (1992).

April 29th, 1992, Los Angeles exploded in the most serious urban uprising in America this century. It took the federal army, the national guard and police from throughout the country five days to restore order, by which time residents of L.A. had appropriated millions of dollars worth of goods and destroyed a billion dollars of capitalist property. Most readers will be familiar with many of the details of the rebellion. This article will attempt to make sense of the uprising by putting the events into the context of the present state of class relations in Los Angeles and America in order to see where this new militancy in the class struggle may lead.

Before the rebellion, there were two basic attitudes on the state of class struggle in America. The pessimistic view is that the American working class has been decisively defeated. This view has held that the U.S. is - in terms of the topography of the global class struggle - little more than a desert. The more optimistic view held, that despite the weakness of the traditional working class against the massive cuts in wages, what we see in the domination of the American left by single issue campaigns and "Politically Correct" discourse is actually evidence of the vitality of the autonomous struggles of sections of the working class. The explosion of class struggle in L.A. shows the need to go beyond these one-sided views.

Beyond the Image

As most of our information about the rioting has come through the capitalist media, it is necessary to deal with the distorted perspective it has given. Just as in the Gulf War, the media presented an appearance of full immersion in what happened while actually constructing a falsified view of the events. While in the Gulf there was a concrete effort to disinform, in L.A. the distortion was a product not so much of censorship as much as of the total incomprehension of the bourgeois media when faced with proletarian insurrection. As Mike Davis points out, most reporters, "merely lip-synched suburban cliches as they tramped through the ruins of lives they had no desire to understand. A violent kaleidoscope of bewildering complexity was flattened into a single, categorical scenario: legitimate black anger over the King decision hijacked by hard-core street criminals and transformed into a maddened assault on their own community." Such a picture is far from the truth.

The beating of Rodney King in 1991 was no isolated incident and, but for the chance filming of the event, would have passed unnoticed into the pattern of racist police repression of the inner cities that characterizes the present form of capitalist domination in America. But, because of the insertion of this everyday event into general public awareness the incident became emblematic. While the mainstream television audience forgot the event through the interminable court proceedings, the eyes of the residents of South Central L.A. and other inner cities remained fixed on a case that had become a focus for their anger towards the system King's beating was typical of. Across the country, but especially in L.A., there was the feeling and preparation that, whatever the result of the trial, the authorities were going to experience people's anger. For the residents of South Central, the King incident was just a trigger. They ignored his televised appeals for an end to the uprising because it wasn't about him. The rebellion was against the constant racism on the streets and about the systematic oppression of the inner cities; it was against the everyday reality of racist American capitalism.

One of the media's set responses to similar situations has been to label them as "race riots". Such a compartmentalisation broke down very quickly in L.A. as indicated in Newsweek's reports of the rebellion: "Instead of enraged young black men shouting `Kill Whitey', Hispanics and even some whites - men, women and children - mingled with African-Americans. The mob's primary lust appeared to be for property, not blood. In a fiesta mood, looters grabbed for expensive consumer goods that had suddenly become `free'. Better-off black as well as white and Asian-American business people all got burned." Newsweek turned to an "expert" - an urban sociologist - who told them, "This wasn't a race riot. It was a class riot." (Newsweek, May 11th, 1992).

Perhaps uncomfortable with this analysis they turned to "Richard Cunningham, 19", "a clerk with a neat goatee": "They don't care for anything. Right now they're just on a spree. They want to live the lifestyle they see people on TV living. They see people with big old houses, nice cars, all the stereo equipment they want, and now that it's free, they're gonna get it." As the sociologist told them - a class riot.

In L.A., Hispanics, blacks and some whites united against the police; the composition of the riot reflected the composition of the area. Of the first 5,000 arrests, 52 per cent were poor Latinos, 10 per cent whites and only 38 per cent blacks.

Faced with such facts, the media found it impossible to make the label "race riot" stick. They were more successful, however, in presenting what happened as random violence and as a senseless attack by people on their own community. It is not that there was no pattern to the violence, it is that the media did not like the pattern it took. Common targets were journalists and photographers, including black and Hispanic ones. Why should the rioters target the media? - 1) these scavengers gathering around the story offer a real danger of identifying participants by their photos and reports. 2) The uncomprehending deluge of coverage of the rebellion follows years of total neglect of the people of South Central except their representation as criminals and drug addicts. In South Central, reporters are now being called "image looters".

But the three fundamental aspects to the rebellion were the refusal of representation, direct appropriation of wealth and attacks on property; the participants went about all three thoroughly.

Refusal of Representation

While the rebellion in '65 had been limited to the Watts district, in '92 the rioters circulated their struggle very effectively. Their first task was to bypass their "representatives". The black leadership - from local government politicians through church organizations and civil rights bureaucracy - failed in its task of controlling its community. Elsewhere in the States this strata did to a large extent succeed in channeling people's anger away from the direct action of L.A., managing to stop the spread of the rebellion. The struggle was circulated, but we can only imagine the crisis that would have ensued if the actions in other cities had reached L.A.'s intensity. Still, in L.A. both the self-appointed and elected representatives were by-passed. They cannot deliver. The rioters showed the same disrespect for their "leaders" as did their Watts counterparts. Years of advancement by a section of blacks, their intersection of themselves as mediators between "their" community and US capital and state, was shown as irrelevant. While community leaders tried to restrain the residents, "gang leaders brandishing pipes, sticks and baseball bats whipped up hotheads, urging them not to trash their own neighborhoods but to attack the richer turf to the west".

"It was too dangerous for the police to go on to the streets" (Observer, May 3rd 1992).

Attacks on Property

The insurgents used portable phones to monitor the police. The freeways that have done so much to divide the communities of L.A. were used by the insurgents to spread their struggle. Cars of blacks and Hispanics moved throughout a large part of the city burning their targets - commercial premises, the sites of capitalist exploitation - while at other points traffic jams formed outside malls as their contents were liberated. As well as being the first multi-ethnic riot in American history, it was its first car-borne riot. The police were totally overwhelmed by the creativity and ingenuity of the rioters.

Direct Appropriations

"Looting, which instantly destroys the commodity as such, also discloses what the commodity ultimately implies: The army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state's monopoly of armed violence."

Once the rioters had got the police off the streets looting was clearly an overwhelming aspect of the insurrection. The rebellion in Los Angeles was an explosion of anger against capitalism but also an eruption of what could take its place: creativity, initiative, joy.

A middle-aged woman said: "Stealing is a sin, but this is more like a television game show where everyone in the audience gets to win." Davis article in The Nation, June 1st.

"Looters of all races owned the streets, storefronts and malls. Blond kids loaded their Volkswagon with stereo gear... Filipinos in a banged up old clunker stocked up on baseball mitts and sneakers. Hispanic mothers with children browsed the gaping chain drug marts and clothing stores. A few Asians were spotted as well. Where the looting at Watts had been desperate, angry, mean, the mood this time was closer to a maniac fiesta".

The direct appropriation of wealth (pejoratively labelled "looting") breaks the circuit of capital (Work-Wage-Consumption) and such a struggle is just as unacceptable to capital as a strike. However it is also true that, for a large section of the L.A. working class, rebellion at the level of production is impossible. From the constant awareness of a "good life" out of reach - commodities they cannot have - to the contradiction of the simplest commodity, the use-values they need are all stamped with a price tag; they experience the contradictions of capital not at the level of alienated production but at the level of alienated consumption, not at the level of labor but at the level of the commodity.

"A lot of people feel that it's reparations. It's what already belongs to us." Will M., former gang member, on the "looting". (International Herald Tribune May 8th)

It is important to grasp the importance of direct appropriation, especially for subjects such as those in L.A. who are relatively marginalized from production. This "involves an ability to understand working-class behavior as tending to bring about, in opposition to the law of value, a direct relationship with the social wealth that is produced. Capitalist development itself, having reached this level of class struggle, destroys the `objective' parameters of social exchange. The proletariat can thus only recompose itself, within this level, through a material will to reappropriate to itself in real terms the relation to social wealth that capital has formally redimensioned".

Race and Class Composition

So even Newsweek, a voice of the American bourgeoisie, conceded that what happened was not a "race riot" but a "class riot". But in identifying the events as a class rebellion we do not have to deny they had "racial" elements. The overwhelming importance of the riots was the extent to which the racial divisions in the American working class were transcended in the act of rebellion; but it would be ludicrous to say that race was absent as an issue. There were "racial" incidents: what we need to do is see how these elements are an expression of the underlying class conflict. Some of the crowd who initiated the rebellion at the Normandie and Florence intersection went on to attack a white truck driver, Reginald Oliver Denny. The media latched on to the beating, transmitting it live to confirm suburban white fear of urban blacks. But how representative was this incident? An analysis of the deaths during the uprising shows it was not.

Still, we need to see how the class war is articulated in "racial" ways.

In America generally, the ruling class has always promoted and manipulated racism, from the genocide of native Americans, through slavery, to the continuing use of ethnicity to divide the labor force. The black working class experience is to a large extent that of being pushed out of occupations by succeeding waves of immigrants. While most groups in American society on arrival at the bottom of the labor market gradually move up, blacks have constantly been leapfrogged. Moreover, the racism this involves has been a damper on the development of class consciousness on the part of white workers.

In L.A. specifically, the inhabitants of South Central constitute some of the most excluded sectors of the working class. Capital's strategy with regards these sectors is one of repression carried out by the police - a class issue. However the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is predominantly white and its victims massively black and Hispanic (or as P.C. discourse would have it, people of color). Unlike in other cities, where the racist nature of the split between the included and excluded sectors is blurred by the state's success in co-opting large numbers of blacks on to the police force, in L.A. capital's racist strategy of division and containment is revealed in every encounter between the LAPD and the population - a race issue.

When the blacks and Hispanics of L.A. have been marginalized and oppressed according to their skin color, it is not surprising that in their explosion of class anger against their oppressors they will use skin color as a racial shorthand in identifying the enemy, just as it has been used against them. So even if the uprising had been a "race riot", it would still have been a class riot. It is also important to recognize the extent to which the participants went beyond racial stereotypes. While the attacks on the police, the acts of appropriation and attacks on property were seen as proper and necessary by nearly everyone involved, there is evidence that acts of violence against individuals on the basis of their skin color were neither typical of the rebellion nor widely supported. In the context of the racist nature of L.A. class oppression, it would have been surprising if there had not been a racial element to some of the rebellion. What is surprising and gratifying is the overwhelming extent to which this was not the case, the extent to which the insurgents by-passed capital's racist strategies of control.

"A lot of people feel that in order to come together we have to sacrifice the neighborhood." Will M., former gang member, on the destruction of businesses. (International Herald Tribune May 8th, 1992.)

One form the rebellion took was a systematic assault on Korean businesses. The Koreans are on the front-line of the confrontation between capital and the residents of central L.A. - they are the face of capital for these communities. Relations between the black community and the Koreans had collapsed following the Harlins incident and its judicial result. In an argument over a $1.79 bottle of orange juice, Latasha Harlins, a 15-year old black girl, was shot in the back of the head by a Korean grocer - Soon Ja Du - who was then let off with a $500 fine and some community service. While the American State packs its Gulags with poor blacks for just trying to survive, it allows a shopkeeper to kill their children. But though this event had a strong effect on the blacks of South Central, their attack on Korean property cannot be reduced to vengeance for one incident - it was directed against the whole system of exchange. The uprising attacked capital in its form of property, not any property but the property of businesses - the institutions of exploitation; and in the black and Hispanic areas, most of these properties and businesses were owned by Koreans. But though we should understand the resentment towards the Koreans as class-based, it is necessary to put this in the context of the overall situation. In L.A., the black working-class's position deteriorated in the late 1970s with the closure of heavy industry, whereas at the end of the 60s they had started to be employed in large numbers. This was part of the internationalization of L.A.'s economy, its insertion into the Pacific Rim center of accumulation which also involved an influx of mainly Japanese capital into downtown redevelopment, immigration of over a million Latin Americans to take the new low-wage manufacturing jobs that replaced the jobs blacks had been employed in, and the influx of South Koreans into L.A.'s mercantile economy. Thus while Latinos offered competition for jobs, the Koreans came to represent capital to blacks. However, these racial divisions are totally contingent. Within the overall restructuring, the jobs removed from L.A. blacks were relocated to other parts of the Pacific Rim such as South Korea. The combativity of these South Korean workers shows that the petty-bourgeois role Koreans take in L.A. is but part of a wider picture in which class conflict crosses all national and ethnic divides as global finance capital dances around trying to escape its nemesis but always recreating it.

Class Composition and Capitalist Restructuring

The American working class is divided between waged and unwaged, blue and white collar, immigrant and citizen labor, guaranteed and unguaranteed; but as well as this, and often synonymous with these distinctions, it is divided along ethnic lines. Moreover, these divisions are real divisions in terms of power and expectations. We cannot just cover them up with a call for class unity or fatalistically believe that, until the class is united behind a Leninist party or other such vanguard, it will not be able to take on capital. In terms of the American situation as well as with other areas of the global class conflict it is necessary to use the dynamic notion of class composition rather than a static notion of social classes.

"When Bush visited the area security was massive. TV networks were asked not to broadcast any of Mr Bush's visit live to keep from giving away his exact location in the area." (International Herald Tribune, May 8th, 1992.)

The rebellion in South Central Los Angeles and the associated actions across the United States showed the presence of an antagonistic proletarian subject within American capitalism. This presence had been occluded by a double process: on the one hand, a sizeable section of American workers have had their consciousness of being proletarian - of being in antagonism to capital - obscured in a widespread identification with the idea of being "middle-class"; and on the other, for a sizeable minority, perhaps a quarter of the population, there has being their recomposition as marginalized sub-workers excluded from consideration as a part of society by the label "underclass". The material basis for such sociological categorizations is that, on the one hand there is the increased access to "luxury" consumption for certain "higher" strata, while on the other there is the exclusion from anything but "subsistence" consumption by those "lower" strata consigned to unemployment or badly paid part-time or irregular work.

This strategy of capital's carries risks, for while the included sector is generally kept in line by the brute force of economic relations, redoubled by the fear of falling into the excluded sector, the excluded themselves, for whom the American dream has been revealed as a nightmare, must be kept down by sheer police repression. In this repression, the war on drugs has acted as a cover for measures that increasingly contradict the "civil rights" which bourgeois society, especially in America, has prided itself on bringing into the world.

Part of the U.S. capital's response to the Watts and other 60s rebellions was to give ground. To a large section of the working class revolting because its needs were not being met, capital responded with money - the form of mediation par excellence - trying to meet some of that pressure within the limits of capitalist control. This was not maintained into the 80s. For example, federal aid to cities fell from $47.2 billion in 1980 to $21.7 billion in 1992. The pattern is that of the global response to the proletarian offensives of the 60s and 70s: first give way - allowing wage increases, increasing welfare spending (i.e. meeting the social needs of the proletariat) - then, when capital has consolidated its forces, the second part - restructure accumulation on a different basis - destructure knots of working class militancy, create unemployment.

In America, this strategy was on the surface more successful than in Europe. The American bourgeoisie had managed to halt the general rise in wages by selectively allowing some sectors of the working class to maintain or increase their living standards while others had their's massively reduced. One sector in particular has felt the brunt of this strategy: the residents of the inner city who are largely black and Hispanic. The average yearly income of black high school graduates fell by 44% between 1973 and 1990, there have been severe cutbacks in social programs and massive disinvestment. With the uprising, the American working class has shown that capital's success in isolating and screwing this section has been temporary.

The re-emergence of an active proletarian subject shows the importance, when considering the strategies of capital, of not forgetting that its restructuring is a response to working class power. The working class is not just an object within capital's process. It is a subject (or plurality of subjects), and, at the level of political class composition reached by the proletariat in the 60s, it undermined the process. Capital's restructuring was an attack on this class composition, an attempt to transform the subject back into an object, into labor-power.

Capitalist restructuring tried to introduce fragmentation and hierarchy into a class subject which was tending towards unity (a unity that respected multilaterality). It moved production to other parts of the world (only, as in Korea, to export class struggle as well); it tried to break the strength of the "mass worker" by breaking up the labor force within factories into teams and by spreading the factory to lots of small enterprises; it has also turned many wage-laborers into self-employed to make people internalise capital's dictates. In America, the fragmentation also occurred along the lines of ethnicity. Black blue-collar workers have been a driving force in working class militancy as recorded by C.L.R. James and others. For a large number of blacks and others, the new plan involved their relegation to Third World poverty levels. But as Negri puts it, "marginalization is as far as capital can go in excluding people from the circuits of production - expulsion is impossible. Isolation within the circuit of production - this is the most that capital's action of restructuration can hope to achieve." When recognizing the power of capital's restructuring it is necessary to affirm the fundamental place of working class struggles as the motor force of capital's development. Capital attacks a certain level of political class composition and a new level is recomposed; but this is not the creation of the perfect, pliable working class - it is only ever a provisional recomposition of the class on the basis of its previously attained level.

Capitalist restructuring has taken the form in Los Angeles of its insertion into the Pacific Rim pole of accumulation. Metal banging and transport industry jobs, which blacks only started moving into in the tail end of the boom in late 60s and the early 70s, have left the city, while about one million Latino immigrants have arrived, taking jobs in low-wage manufacturing and labor-intensive services. The effect on the Los Angeles black community has not been homogeneous; while a sizeable section has attained guaranteed status through white-collar jobs in the public sector, the majority who were employed in the private sector in traditional working class jobs have become unemployed. It is working class youth who have fared worse, with unemployment rates of 45% in South Central.

But the recomposition of the L.A. working class has not been entirely a victory of capitalist restructuring. Capital would like this section of society to work. It would like its progressive undermining of the welfare system to make the "underclass" go and search for jobs, any jobs anywhere. Instead, many residents survive by "Aid to Families With Dependent Children", forcing the cost of reproducing labor power on to the state, which is particularly irksome when the labor power produced is so unruly. The present consensus among bourgeois commentators is that the problem is the "decline of the family and its values." Capital's imperative is to re-impose its model of the family as a model of work discipline and form of reproduction (make the proles take on the cost of reproduction themselves).

A Note on Architecture and the Postmodernist

Los Angeles, as we know, is the "city of the future". In the 30s the progressive vision of business interests prevailed and the L.A. streetcars - one of the best public transport systems in America - were ripped up; freeways followed. It was in Los Angeles that Adorno & Horkheimer first painted their melancholy picture of consciousness subsumed by capitalism and where Marcuse later pronounced man "One Dimensional". More recently, Los Angeles has been the inspiration for fashionable post-theory. Baudrillard, Derrida and other postmodernist, post-structuralist scum have all visited and performed in the city. Baudrillard even found here "utopia achieved".

The "postmodern" celebrators of capitalism love the architecture of Los Angeles, its endless freeways and the redeveloped downtown. They write eulogies to the sublime space within the $200 a night Bonaventura hotel, but miss the destruction of public space outside. The postmodernists, though happy to extend a term from architecture to the whole of society, and even the epoch, are reluctant to extend their analysis of the architecture just an inch beneath the surface. The "postmodern" buildings of Los Angeles have been built with an influx of mainly Japanese capital into the city. Downtown L.A. is now second only to Tokyo as a financial center for the Pacific Rim. But the redevelopment has been at the expense of the residents of the inner city. Tom Bradley, an ex-cop and Mayor since 1975, has been a perfect black figurehead for capital's restructuring of L.A.. He has supported the massive redevelopment of downtown L.A., which has been exclusively for the benefit of business. In 1987, at the request of the Central City East Association of Businesses, he ordered the destruction of the makeshift pavement camps of the homeless; there are an estimated 50,000 homeless in L.A., 10,000 of them children. Elsewhere, city planning has involved the destruction of people's homes and of working class work opportunities to make way for business development funded by Pacific Rim capital - a siege by international capital of working class Los Angeles.

But the postmodernists did not even have to look at this behind-the-scenes movement, for the violent nature of the development is apparent from a look at the constructions themselves. The architecture of Los Angeles is characterised by militarization. City planning in Los Angeles is essentially a matter for the police. An overwhelming feature of the L.A. environment is the presence of security barriers, surveillance technology - the policing of space. Buildings in public use like the inner city malls and a public library are built like fortresses, surrounded by giant security walls and dotted with surveillance cameras.

In Los Angeles, "on the bad edge of postmodernity, one observes an unprecedented tendency to merge urban design, architecture and the police apparatus in a single comprehensive security effort." (Davis, City of Quartz p. 224) Just as Haussman redesigned Paris after the revolutions of 1848, building boulevards to give clear lines of fire, L.A. architects and city planners have remade L.A. since the Watts rebellion. Public space is closed, the attempt is made to kill the street as a means of killing the crowd. Such a strategy is not unique to Los Angeles, but here it has reached absurd levels: the police are so desperate to "kill the crowd" that they have taken the unprecedented step of killing the toilet. Around office developments "public" art buildings and landscaped garden "microparks" are designed into the parking structures to allow office workers to move from car to office or shop without being exposed to the dangers of the street. The public spaces that remain are militarized, from "bum-proof" bus shelter benches to automatic sprinklers in the parks to stop people sleeping there. White middle class areas are surrounded by walls and private security. During the riots, the residents of these enclaves either fled or armed themselves and nervously waited.

We see, then, that in the States, but especially in L.A., architecture is not merely a question of aesthetics, it is used along with the police to separate the included and the excluded sections of capitalist society. But this phenomenon is by no means unique to America. Across the advanced capitalist countries we see attempts to redevelop away urban areas that have been sites of contestation. In Paris, for example, we have seen, under the flag of "culture", the Pompidou centre built on a old working class area, as a celebration of the defeat of the '68 movement. Here in Britain the whole of Docklands was taken over by a private development corporation to redevelop the area - for a while yuppie flats sprang up at ridiculous prices and the long-standing residents felt besieged in their estates by armies of private security guards. Still, we saw how that ended... Now in Germany, the urban areas previously marginalized by the Wall, such as Kreuzberg and the Potzdamer Platz, have become battlegrounds over who's needs the new Berlin will satisfy.

Of course, such observations and criticisms of the "bad edge of postmodernity", if they fail to see the antagonism to the process and allow themselves to be captivated by capital's dialectic, by its creation of our dystopia, could fall into mirroring the postmodernists' celebration of it. There is no need for pessimism - what the rebellion showed was that capital has not killed the crowd. Space is still contested. Just as Haussman's plans did not stop the Paris Commune, L.A. redevelopment did not stop the 1992 rebellion.

Gangs

"In June 1988 the police easily won Police Commission approval for the issuing of flesh-ripping hollow-point ammunition: precisely the same `dum-dum' bullets banned in warfare by the Geneva Conventions." (Mike Davis, 1990, City of Quartz, p. 290.)

We cannot deny the role gangs played in the uprising. The systematic nature of the rioting is directly linked to their participation and most importantly to the truce on internal fighting they called before the uprising. Gang members often took the lead which the rest of the proletariat followed. The militancy of the gangs - their hatred of the police - flows from the unprecedented repression the youth of South Central have experienced: a level of state repression on a par with that dished out to rebellious natives by colonial forces such as that suffered by Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Under the guise of gang-busting and dealing with the "crack menace", the LAPD have launched massive "swamp" operations; they have formed files on much of the youth of South Central and murdered lots of proletarians.

As Mike Davis put it in 1988, "the contemporary Gang scare has become an imaginary class relationship, a terrain of pseudo-knowledge and fantasy projection, a talisman." The "gang threat" has been used as an excuse to criminalise the youth of South Central L.A. We should not deny the existence of the problems of crack use and inter-gang violence, but we need to see that, what has actually been a massive case of working class on working class violence, a sorry example of internalised aggression resulting from a position of frustrated needs, has been interpreted as a "lawless threat" to justify more of the repression and oppression that created the situation in the first place. To understand recent gang warfare and the role of gangs in the rebellion we must look at the history of the gang phenomenon.

In Los Angeles, black street gangs emerged in the late 1940s primarily as a response to white racist attacks in schools and on the streets. When Nation of Islam and other black nationalist groups formed in the late 50s, Chief Parker of the LAPD conflated the two phenomena as a combined black menace. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, for the repression launched against the gangs and black militants had the effect of radicalizing the gangs. This politicization reached a peak in the Watts rebellion, when, as in '92, gang members made a truce and were instrumental in the black working class success in holding off the police for four days. The truce formed in the heat of the rebellion lasted for most of the rest of the 60s. Many gang members joined the Black Panther Party or formed other radical political groupings. There was a general feeling that the gangs had "joined the Revolution".

The repression of the movement involved the FBI's COINTELPRO program and the LAPD's own red squad. The Panthers were shot on the streets and on the campuses both directly by the police and by their agents, their headquarters in L.A. were besieged by LAPD SWAT teams, and dissension was sown in their ranks. Although the Panthers' politics were flawed, they were an organic expression of the black proletariat's experience of American capitalism. The systematic nature of their repression shows just how dangerous they were perceived to be.

As even the L.A. Times admitted, the recrudescence of gangs in L.A. in the early 70s was a direct consequence of the decimation of the more political expressions of black frustration. A new aspect of this phenomena was the prodigious spread of Crip sets which caused the other gangs to federate as the Bloods. As Davis puts it, "this was not merely a gang revival, but a radical permutation of black gang culture. The Crips, however perversely, inherited the Panther aura of fearlessness and transmitted the ideology of armed vanguardism (shorn of its program). But too often Crippin' came to represent an escalation of intra-ghetto violence to Clockwork Orange levels (murder as a status symbol, and so on)...[the Crips] achieved a "managerial revolution" in gang organisation. If they began as a teenage substitute for the fallen Panthers, they evolved through the 1970s into a hybrid of teen cult and proto-mafia".

That gangs, even in their murderous mutation as "proto-mafia" Crips and Bloods, have been an expression of the need for political organisation is indicated in a few instances where they have made political interventions. In two major situations, the Monrovia riots in 1972 and the L.A. schools busing crisis of 1977-79, the Crips intervened in support of the black community. These gangs, as an expression of the proletariat, are not in the grips of a false consciousness that makes them think all there is to life is gold chains and violence. Whenever they have been given a chance to speak, for instance in December 1972 at the beginning of the transformation of the gangs into the ultra-violent Crips and Bloods, they have come out with clear political demands. Every time they have been given a chance to express themselves, similar demands have been voiced. The LAPD does everything in its power to stop the gangs being given a voice so as to maintain its war against them.

Still, if the gangs wanted to appeal to people's sympathies, they have done themselves no favors by dealing in crack. However, if we look closely at this we find that the mass move into this trade is pushed on them by capital. Young blacks moved into the alternative economy of drugs when traditional occupations were destroyed. We are dealing with material pressures.

For a member of South Central's youth proletariat, the only rational economic choice is to sell drugs. While the internationalization of the Los Angeles economy has meant a loss for working class blacks, what the Crips and Bloods have managed to do is insert themselves back into the circuit of international trade. While the international trade in legal commodities decided that the Los Angeles blacks were expendable another branch found them eminently useful. Southern California has taken over from Florida as the main route of entry of cocaine into the United States. When in the early 80s the cocaine business found the market for its product saturated, its price falling and profits threatened, it, like any other multinational, diversified and developed new products, the chief one being crack - "the poor man's cocaine". Young proletarians participate in this business because it is the work on offer. It is not them but capital that reduces life to survival/work. We can see, then, that selling crack is in a sense just another undesirable activity like making weapons or cigarettes that proletarians are forced to engage in. But there is a significant difference. Within most occupations proletarians can organize directly within and against capital; but the drug dealing gangs do not confront capital as labor. Gangs do not confront the capital of the enterprise, they confront the repressive arm of capital-in-general: the State. In fact, to the extent that the gangs engage in the cocaine trade and fit firmly into the circuit of international capital, they are the capitalist enterprise. This is a problem. The drive-by shootings and lethal turf wars of the black gangs is the proletariat killing itself for capital.

It is necessary to see, then, that the murderous gangbanging phenomenon which is presently halted has not been, as the bourgeois press would have it, the result of the breakdown of "family values" and the loss of the restraining influence of the middle class as they left for the suburbs; rather it resulted from: 1) the economics of capitalist restructuring (the replacing of traditional industries with drugs) and 2) the active destruction of political forms of self-organisation by state repression. The solution to the problem of the murderous crack wars is the rediscovery of political self-activity of the sort shown in the rebellion. The solution to inter-proletarian violence is proletarian violence.

The irrepressible nature of the gang-phenomenon shows the pressing need for organisation on the part of the youth proletariat of L.A. For a while in the 60s it took a self-consciously political form. When this manifestly political form of organisation was repressed, the gangs came back with a vengeance, showing that they express a real and pressing need. What we have seen in and since the uprising is a new politicization of gang culture: a return of the repressed.

Political Ideas of the Gangs

Since the rebellion, some attention has been given to the political ideas and proposals of the gangs (or, more precisely, the gang leadership). The proposals are mixed. Some are unobjectionable, like that for gang members with video cameras to follow the police to prevent brutality and for money for locally community controlled rebuilding of the neighbourhood; but others, like replacing welfare with workfare, and for close cooperation between the gangs and corporations, are more dubious. The political ideas from which these proposals spring seem largely limited to black nationalism. So how should we understand these proposals and this ideology?

The attempt by the gang leadership to interpose themselves as mediators of the ghetto has similarities to the role of unions and we should perhaps apply to them a similar critique to that which we apply to unions. It is necessary: 1) to recognise a difference between the leaders and the ordinary members 2) to recognise the role of the leadership as recuperating and channelling the demands of the rank and file.

Some of the gang leaders' conceptions are, quite apart from being reactionary, manifestly unrealistic. In the context of capitalist restructuring, the inner city ghetto and its "underclass" is surplus to requirements - it has been written off - it has no place in capitalist strategy, except perhaps as a terror to encourage the others. It is extremely unlikely that there will be a renegotiation of the social contract to bring these subjects back into the main rhythm of capitalist development. This was to an extent possible in the 60s and 70s, but no longer.

Understandably, in the light of the main options available, there is a desire in the inhabitants of L.A. for secure unionized employment. But capital has moved many industries away and they will not come back. Many of the people in these areas recognise the change and want jobs in computers and other areas of the new industries. But, although individual people from the ghetto may manage to get a job in these sectors (probably only by moving), for the vast majority this will remain a dream. Within capital's restructuring, these jobs are available to a certain section of the working class, and, while a few from the ghetto might insert themselves into that section, the attractive security of that section is founded on an overall recomposition of the proletariat that necessarily posits the existence of the marginalized "underclass".

But, leaving aside the change in the conditions which makes large scale investment in the inner cities very unlikely, what do the gang leaders proposals amount to? Faced with the re-allocation of South Central residents as unguaranteed excluded objects within capital's plan of development, the gang leaders present themselves as negotiators of a new deal: they seek to present the rebellion as a $1 billion warning to American capital/state that it must bring these subjects into the fold with the gang leaders as mediators. They are saying that they accept the reduction of life to Work-Wage-Consumption, but that there is not enough work (!) i.e. they want the proletariat's refusal of mediation - its direct meeting of its needs - to force capital to re-insert them into the normal capitalist mediation of needs through work and the wage. The gangs, with their labor-intensive drug industry, have been operating a crypto-Keynesian employment programme; now in their plans for urban renewal the gang leadership want fully-fledged Keynesianism, with them instead of the unions as the brokers of labor-power. But, even apart from the fact that capital will not be able to deliver what the gang leaders seek, the rebellion has shown the whole American proletariat a different way of realising its needs; by collective direct action they can take back what's theirs.

These demands show the similarity of gang and union leadership: how they both act to limit the aspirations of their members to what can be met within the capitalist order. But for all the negative aspects to the union/gang organization, we must recognise that they do originate from real needs of the proletariat: the needs for solidarity, collective defense and a sense of belongingness felt by the atomised proletarian subject. Moreover the gangs are closer to this point of origin than the sclerotic unions of advanced capitalist countries. The gang is not the form of organization for blacks or other groups, but it is a form of organization that exists, that has shown itself prepared to engage in class struggle and that has had in the past and now it seems again to have the potential for radicalizing itself into a real threat to capital.

Black Nationalism

The limitations of the practical proposals of the gang leaders are partly a result of their conflict of interest with the ordinary members but also a function of the limits of their ideology. The gangs' political ideas are trapped within the limits of black nationalism. But how should we view this when their practice is so obviously beyond their theory? After all, as someone once observed, one doesn't judge the proletariat by what this or that proletarian thinks but by what it is necessary impelled to do by its historical situation. The gangs took seriously Public Enemy's Farrakhan-influenced stance on non-black businesses and "shut 'em down". Although Farrakhan does not preach violence as a political means many in the black gangs agree with his goal of black economic self-determination and saw the violence as a means towards that goal. In reality this goal of a "black capitalism" is wrong but the means they chose were right. The tendency of separation and antagonism shown by the rebellion is absolutely correct but it needs to be an antagonism and separation from capital rather than from non-black society. It is necessary that as the marginalized sector rediscovers the organisation and political ideas that were repressed in the 60s and 70s that it goes beyond those positions.

But, just as blacks were not the only or even the majority of rioters, the Crips and Bloods are not the only gangs. Chinese, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Salvadorans and most other Latin American immigrants have all evolved the gang as an organizational form for youth. Now, just as these gangs are far less involved in the international side of the drug business - selling indigenous drugs such as marijuana, PCP and speed at much smaller profit - they also do not have the nationalist leanings of the black gangs. Before the rebellion, a level of communication was reached between black and Latino youth through the shared culture of rap music and the experience it expresses. The tentative alliance between blacks and Latinos that emerged during the uprising shows a way forward. Los Angeles and America generally does need a rainbow coalition, but not one putting faith in Jesse Jackson; rather, one from below focusing on people's needs and rejecting the mediation of the existing political system. For [working-class] blacks, a leap is required, but it will not happen through some "battle of ideas" with the black nationalists carried out in the abstract, but only in connection with practice; only by and through struggle will the [working-class] blacks of L.A. and the rest of the American proletariat develop a need for communism to which the direct appropriation of goods showed the way.

"In one crowded apartment building 75% of the tenants were found to possess looted goods and were swapping goods among themselves." LAPD Lieutenant Rick Morton (International Herald Tribune, May 8th 1992.)

We might say the proletariat only sets itself the problems it can solve. Only by and through a new round of struggles such as began in L.A. will there be the opening for the American working class to find the ideas and organizational forms that it needs.

Conclusion

"Let us please not go back to normal." Distressed caller on radio talk show during the riots. (Understanding the Riots, LA Times book, 1992.)

The rebellion in Los Angeles marked a leap forward in the global class struggle. In direct appropriation and as an offensive against the sites of capitalist exploitation, the whole of the population of South Central felt its power. There is a need to go on. The struggle has politicised the population. The truce is fundamental - the proletariat has to stop killing itself. The LAPD is worried and are surely now considering the sort of measures they used to break the gang unity that followed the Watts rebellion. The police are scared by the truce and by the wave of politicisation which may follow it. That politicization will have to go beyond black nationalism and the incorporative leanings of the gang leadership - another leap is required. In the multi-ethnic nature of the uprising and the solidarity actions across the country, we saw signs that the proletariat can take this leap.

For years, American rulers could let the ghetto kill itself. In May '92 its guns were turned on the oppressor. A new wave of struggle has begun.

The Sadism of American Power

[Photo by Will Lester, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin/SCNG]

By Kenn Orphan

It was just a couple of weeks ago that President Trump was both inciting and praising anti-lockdown protesters around the country. These included armed white militia men who stormed state capitol buildings demanding an end to public health measures to curb the spread of the deadly Covid-19 virus. Many of them were filmed harassing nurses and blocking ambulances from reaching hospitals, but to Trump they were all just “good people.” He did this all while the deaths in the US from the pandemic lurched toward the 100,000 mark, the highest recorded death toll for any nation on the planet.

But in just the span of a few days Trump’s rhetoric shifted. After the sadistic murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, he labeled the protesters against police brutality “thugs” and tweeted “once the looting starts the shooting starts.” A clear call for state violence. Floyd was a Black man who was accused of using a $20 counterfeit bill. For this he was handcuffed and pinned to the ground by several white officers. One of them, Derek Chauvin, kneeled on Floyd’s neck for an agonizing 8 minutes and 46 seconds, as he gasped for air, begged for his life, and called out for his late mother. At no time did Floyd appear to be resisting and bystanders pleaded with the officers to stop their assault. Chauvin continued to kneel on Floyd’s neck for 2 minutes and 53 seconds after he lost consciousness.

Trump’s shift in tone regarding the protests of this horrific act of brutality shouldn’t come as any surprise. One of his most consistent traits has been to incite violence. At his rallies he has reveled in ridiculing the most vulnerable and has encouraged his feckless fans to “beat the crap” out of those who oppose him. “The man who once said that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters” was not kidding. More recently, Trump threatened protesters against police brutality outside the White House:

“The front line was replaced with fresh agents, like magic. Big crowd, professionally organized, but nobody came close to breaching the fence. If they had they would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen. That’s when people would have been really badly hurt, at least. Many Secret Service agents just waiting for action. ‘We put the young ones on the front line, sir, they love it, and … good practice.”

But Trump is the odious symptom of a grave disease. One which has inflicted far more damage than any virus. The systemic violence of the American project has always been rooted in sadistic racism. For instance, the demonstrations that formed after the footage of George Floyd’s killing was released were largely non-violent. Despite this, they have been met with the full force of state violence. Police used tear gas, pepper spray, flash grenades, and rubber bullets, not only at protesters but also members of the press. One Black reporter for CNN was arrested while his white colleagues were not despite them being together. There were also many credible reports of agents provocateurs among the protesters. One video shows a white man in a gas mask smashing windows. The US Customs and Border Patrol even flew one of its predator drones around Minneapolis amidst the protests. Like the tanks used at Standing Rock, this is an ominous sign that America’s war machine, that has made life a misery for millions abroad, is being turned inward.

There were no such police responses to the anti-lockdown protests which were composed mostly of white people. On the contrary, multiple videos show cops gently dealing with unruly white protesters despite many of them wielding assault rifles. It is a textbook example of structural racism at work. Given the armed nature of these demonstrations, one would guess that had there been a forceful approach by the police they would have been far more destruction than the “I Can’t Breathe” protests in Minneapolis and other US cities.

Trump’s blatant racism and belligerence are not anomalies to American culture. And those tempted to say “this is not us,” yet again, should pause before doing so. At a certain point there must be a reckoning to what America started out as and what it has become. The United States was founded upon white supremacy and violence. And it is not something of the distant past. Its tendrils reach deep into the very fabric of American society today.

Like all colonial empires, sadism has always been the driving force of American power. Not freedom. Not liberty. From genocide of the native population to centuries of slavery, from Jim Crow and the internment of Japanese citizens, from the carpet bombing of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to drone strikes in Afghanistan and Somalia, from Wounded Knee, to the Trail of Tears, to the Tulsa Massacre, to My Lai, to Abu Ghraib, to Guantanamo, the message has always been one of coercion through sadistic cruelty and violence. It explains how 48% of Americans can justify torture. It explains how so many Americans can easily forgive their war criminals. It explains how the US military could use Agent Orange, and white phosphorus, and depleted uranium in its warfare. It explains how immigrant children can be separated from their parents with nearly 70,000 of them held in squalid detention camps. And it has always thrived on supremacy. This is demonstrable in its abysmal response to the pandemic. Most of the victims in the US are people of color, immigrants, Native Americans, and the poor. It is no accident that they are being forced back to work in many states and abandoned to die should they become ill.

The knee that mercilessly crushed the neck of George Floyd is the same knee that has crushed the global south everywhere, both in the US and abroad. The US is not alone in this, but it surpasses every one else in terms of capital and brute strength. To think that Trump is some kind of glitch is both ahistorical and ludicrous. Indeed, there have been scores of Trumps throughout the bloody history of the US and before. There are scores of them now, and many in positions of power, from the military, to ICE, to the CBP, to the judiciary, to the police, to correctional officers, to corporate executives. Trump has definitely emboldened them. But, in truth, they do not need much encouragement to begin with, because there is a long legacy of barbarism for any of them to draw from.

Late-Stage Capitalism and the Pedagogical Resurgence of Anti-Fascism

By Colin Jenkins

This essay originally appeared in Keywords in Radical Philosophy and Education: Common Concepts for Contemporary Movements (2019, BRILL)

Social unrest is a daily part of American life. Between the alarming regularity of mass killings and school shootings and the violent street clashes between right-wing fascists and left-wing anti-fascists, it seems as though America’s chickens are finally coming home to roost. Despite its uniqueness, the United States is heading down the same path as so many hegemonic empires of the past, quickly approaching its demise through a combination of exhaustive military campaigns abroad and chronic neglect of a majority of its citizenry at home. Mainstream American culture is inadvertently responding to its empire’s demise. Dystopian-based “entertainment” is on the rise again, millennials are abandoning the traditional American lifestyle en masse, virtual lives based in gaming culture and social media have seemingly grabbed a hold of many wishing to escape and withdraw from the drudgery of real life, and political poles are becoming more polarized as extremist centrism intensifies to protect the status quo.

While many recognize that something is wrong, most have difficulties pinpointing what it is, let alone what is causing it. The pronounced social unrest and emergence of mainstream nihilism have sparked a cavalcade of typical, cutesy, click-bait articles online, claiming “millennials are killing [insert here]” and pushing for “minimalist lifestyles” while hawking shipping-container homes, and superficial corporate news analysis which resembles more of tabloid “journalism” than anything approaching substance. Even so-called “progressive” movements that have formed within this climate, such as Black Lives Matter, the Poor People’s Campaign, and the Women’s March, have failed to reach a substantive level of resistance by ignoring the roots of the people’s problems while insisting on operating within the narrow confines of the mainstream political arena.

The good news is that these social phenomena are not mysterious forces rising out of thin air. They have roots. They have causes. And with multiple political forces coming to a head, many are starting to not only search for these causes, but are starting to identify them. The sudden resurgence of socialism in the United States – after laying dormant since the counterinsurgency of the US government during the 1960s, which resulted in violent state repression against radical resistance groups, the subsequent “Reagan revolution” and rise of the neoliberal era, and Francis Fukuyama’s infamous suggestion that “history had ended” — signifies a much-needed counter to capitalist culture. The wave of counter-hegemony that has come with it defies capitalism’s insistence that we are nothing but commodities — laborers and consumers born to serve as conduits to the rapid upward flow of profit — and has begun to construct a wall against the spread of fascism that is inevitable with late-stage capitalism, as well as a battering ram that seeks to bring this system to its knees once and for all.

Capitalism’s Destructive Path

Humanity has been on a collision course with the capitalist system since its inception. While Marx’s famous prediction that capitalists would eventually serve as their own gravediggers has been delayed by a multitude of unforeseen forces, most notably the overwhelming power and adaptability of the imperialist and capitalist state, it is nonetheless charging toward fruition. As the term “late-stage capitalism” has become widely used among the American Left, it is important to understand what it is referring to. This understanding may only come through systemic and historical analysis, and especially that of the basic mechanisms of capitalism, the social and economic conditions that birthed capitalism, and the subsequent stages of capitalism over the past few centuries.

Referring to capitalism as being in a “late stage” is based on the understanding that the system – with all of its internal contradictions, its tendency to concentrate wealth and power into the hands of a few, and its increased reliance on imperialism and domestic control – is nearing an inevitable implosion. However, the implication that capitalism naturally develops on a path toward fascism is both accurate and potentially misleading. On one hand, this idea suggests that capitalism, in its most basic state of operating, does not already possess inherent fascistic qualities. This is incorrect, and it’s important to understand this. Capitalism, in its orthodoxy, is a system that relies on authoritative, controlling, and exploitative relationships, most notably between that of capitalists and workers. The latter, in its need to survive, must submit itself to wage labor. The former, in its wanting to accumulate a constant flow of profit, uses wage labor as a way to steal productivity from the worker in a perpetual cycle that moves wealth upwards into a relatively tiny sector of the population, while simultaneously impoverishing the masses below. Scientific socialists have always known this to be true, and now that the trickery of “trickle-down economics” has been exposed, many others are beginning to realize it.

Capitalism’s authoritative tendencies are far-reaching throughout a society’s development. Because of this, the system has relied upon and reproduced social inequities that fortify its economic woes. Friedrich Engels touched on its effects for the family unit in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Silvia Federici brilliantly illustrated its reliance on patriarchy in Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, the emergence of social reproduction theory has provided insight on the layers of exploitation that effect women in the home, and many have written about the cozy relationship between capitalism and white supremacy, most importantly noting that the system’s birth in the Americas relied heavily upon the racialized chattel slave system. In fact, it is impossible to accurately discuss the inherent problems of capitalism without discussing its propensity to drive social oppression in a variety of forms. If oppression can be defined as “the absence of choices,” as bell hooks once said, then our default status as members of the proletariat is oppression. And when compounded with other social constructs such as patriarchy, white supremacy, heteronormativity, and able-bodiedness, this oppression becomes even more pronounced and marginalizing.

The inherent fascism built into capitalism is rooted in wage labor, which is maintained through coercive means. This coercion that drives capitalism comes from the dispossession of the masses of people from not only the means of production, but also from the means to sustenance and land. The Enclosure Acts tell us all we need to know about this foundation. The fact that feudal peasants had to be forced to participate in wage labor through a legislative destruction of the commons, which kicked them off the land and immediately transformed human needs from basic rights to commodities, says a lot about the requisite landscape of a capitalist system. As such, feudal peasants in Europe viewed capitalism as a downgrade. They were consequently prodded into factories and mills like cattle. In many other parts of the world, stripping entire populations of sustenance for the sake of private property was unheard of. Yet capitalism required this mass dispossession in order to proceed on its desired path. Thus, “between 1604 and 1914, over 5,200 individual enclosure acts were passed, covering 6.8 million acres of land,” all designed to systematically erase the idea of common land. (Parliament of UK)

Understanding that capitalism is a system built on a foundation of oppression, and that it operates on natural internal mechanisms of coercion and exploitation, allows us to also understand that its development has not created these qualities, but rather intensified them. Therefore, the idea of “late-stage capitalism” makes sense from an analytical point of view, as it simply refers to an evolutionary path that has brought its nature to the forefront and, most importantly, in doing so, has resulted in severe consequences for the majority of the global population. And whether we’re talking about late-stage capitalism, or monopoly capitalism, or corporate capitalism, or “crony capitalism,” it all refers to the same thing: capitalism’s natural conclusion. A natural conclusion that is a breeding ground for fascism.

Realizing Fascism

“When the bourgeoisie sees that power is slipping out of its hands, it brings up fascism to hold onto its privileges.” - Buenaventura Durruti

There are many definitions and aspects of and to fascism, but perhaps the best way to identify it is as an effect. In terms of capitalism, the development and strengthening of fascistic tendencies are tied directly to the sociopolitical structures that form in its defense. Or as Samir Amin puts it, “Fascism is a particular political response to the challenges with which the management of capitalist society may be confronted in specific circumstances.” (Amin, 2014) But this only describes one of the major aspects of fascism – that being the systemic and structural; or more specifically, the capitalist system and the capitalist state that naturally forms to protect and promote it. There is also a cultural aspect to fascism that forms from within the populace. It is shaped by structural operations, being the main force of culture, and it manifests as an emotional and defensive response from individuals within this system that naturally coerces, exploits, and dispossesses them from their ability to sustain. In other words, the mass insecurity that stems from capitalism naturally produces reactionary responses of misdirected angst from the people it serves, or rather disserves.  

During these late stages of capitalism, “fascism has returned to the West, East, and South; and this return is naturally connected with the spread of the systemic crisis of generalized, financialized, and globalized monopoly capitalism.” (Amin,2014) The reactionary, right-wing response to the capitalist degradation of society is to target the most vulnerable of that society, viewing them as “drains” on public resources without realizing that such resources have been depleted by the pursuit for profit from those above, and most intensely during the era of neoliberalism, which opened the door for rampant greed to extract nearly everything of value from society in the name of privatization. In this structural sense, fascism comes to its complete fruition through a blindness that develops under capitalist culture, whether intentional or subconscious; a blindness that seeks every type of remedy imaginable for the problems created by the system without ever questioning the system itself.

The fascist regimes that surface during these times of crisis “are willing to manage the government and society in such a way as not to call the fundamental principles of capitalism into question, specifically private capitalist property, including that of modern monopoly capitalism.” (Amin, 2014) And that is why fascism intensifies under this pretense of “managing capitalism” and not simply in “political forms that challenge the latter’s legitimacy, even if ‘capitalism’ or ‘plutocracies’ [are] subject to long diatribes in the rhetoric of fascist speeches.” (Amin, 2014) This shows how the fascist tide is fundamentally structural; and the cultural developments that parallel it do so as a byproduct of capitalism’s systemic failures. Because of this, analyses “must focus on these crises.” And any focus on these systemic crises must also focus on the fundamental coercion inherent in the system’s productive mechanisms — that which former slave and American abolitionist Frederick Douglass once referred to as “a slavery of wages only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery,” and “a slavery of wages that must go down with the other.”

The notion of wage slavery has been all but lost over the course of the last century. Once understood among the masses as a common-sense recognition of capitalist coercion, it has given way to the insidious nature of capitalist propaganda, which intensified in a very deliberate way after the cultural revolution of the 1960s, culminating in a neoliberal wave that has dominated since. While the originators of anti-capitalist theory and scientific socialism had exposed this form of slavery inherent in the system – with Marx referring to workers as “mere appendages to machines,” and Bakunin illustrating its ever-shifting nomenclature, from “slavery” to “serfdom” to “wage earners” – there was a brief resurgence of this analysis in the 1960s and 70s, from a variety of leftist radicals. One of the most under-appreciated of these analyses was the one provided by the imprisoned Black Panther, George Jackson, who in his extensive works made reference to the condition of “neo-slavery” that plagued the working-class masses. In a rather lengthy excerpt from Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson, Jackson uncovered the forgotten importance of this coercive element that drives capitalism:

“Slavery is an economic condition. Today’s neo-slavery must be defined in terms of economics… [in the days of chattel slavery], the slaveowner, in order to ‘keep it (the slave) and enjoy all of the benefits that property of this kind can render, he must feed it sometimes, he must clothe it against the elements, he must provide a modicum of shelter.’ The ‘new slavery (capitalism), the modern variety of chattel slavery updated to disguise itself, places the victim in a factory or in the case of most blacks in support roles inside and around the factory system (service trades), working for a wage. However (in contrast to chattel slavery), if work cannot be found in or around the factory complex, today’s neo-slavery does not allow even for a modicum of food and shelter. You are free – to starve.

…The sense and meaning of slavery comes through as a result of our ties to the wage. You must have it, without it you would starve or expose yourself to the elements. One’s entire day centers around the acquisition of the wage. The control of your eight or ten hours on the job is determined by others. You are left with fourteen to sixteen hours. But since you don’t live at the factory you have to subtract at least another hour for transportation. Then you are left with thirteen to fifteen hours to yourself. If you can afford three meals you are left with ten to twelve hours. Rest is also a factor in efficiency so we have to take eight hours away for sleeping, leaving two to four hours. But – one must bathe, comb, clean teeth, shave, dress – there is no point in protracting this. I think it should be generally accepted that if a man or woman works for a wage at a job that they don’t enjoy, and I am convinced that no one could enjoy any type of assembly-line work, or plumbing or hod carrying, or any job in the service trades, then they qualify for this definition of neo-slave.

…The man who owns the [business] runs your life; you are dependent on this owner. He organizes your work, the work upon which your whole life source and style depends. He indirectly determines your whole day, in organizing you for work. If you don’t make any more in wages than you need to live (or even enough to live for that matter), you are a neo-slave.” And most of us who find ourselves in this precarious position as a working-class person under capitalism have no mobility, whether in a literal or figurative sense. We are “held in one spot on this earth because of our economic status, it is just the same as being held in one spot because you are the owner’s property.” (Jackson, 1994)

The era of neoliberalism, with its insistence of re-imagining laissez-faire economics, has revved up the authoritarian and oppressive underpinnings of the capitalist system by loosening historical constraints stemming from the age-old social contract — the idea that bourgeois governments had a minimal degree of responsibility for the well-being of their citizenries. In the United States, this has amounted to private entities (individuals, corporations, conglomerates) accumulating unprecedented amounts of wealth and power over the course of a few decades, while the majority of people have been thrown to the wolves. During this process, the structural basis of fascism – the merger of corporate and governmental power – has been fully realized, buoyed by the internal coercion of the capitalist system.

The Pedagogical Resurgence of Anti-Fascism

As capitalism’s internal contradictions continue to drive us deeper into a fascist reality, counter-hegemonic movements have aptly pivoted into anti-fascist forces. The most visible of these forces has been the anarchist-led “antifa,” which cracked into the mainstream-US consciousness during its numerous street clashes with reactionary groups during and after Donald Trump’s electoral rise. By heeding to a strategic tactic known as “no-platforming,” these black-clad resistance fighters deploy offensive attacks against both fascist speakers/leaders and marches to prevent them from gaining a public platform and, thus, legitimacy and momentum.

In a 2017 piece for In These Times, Natasha Lennard explained the philosophy behind no-platforming, how it extends from an all-encompassing radical abolitionist movement, and how it differs from liberalism:

“While I don’t believe we can or should establish an unbendable set of rules, I submit that a best practice is to deny fascist, racist speech a platform. It should not be recognized as a legitimate strand of public discourse, to be heard, spread and gain traction. And we must recognize that when the far Right speaks, the stage becomes an organizing platform, where followers meet and multiply. For this, we should have no tolerance.

No-platforming is only useful if it is contextualized in a broader abolitionist struggle, which recognizes that white supremacy will not do away with itself by virtue of being ‘wrong.’ Surely by now liberals have realized the folly in assuming justice is delivered by ‘speaking truth to power’? Power knows the truth, and determines what gets to be the regime of truth. The ‘truth’ of racial justice will not be discovered, proved or argued into lived actuality, but fought for and established.” (Lennard, 2017)

The physical tactics carried out under “no-platforming” are only a small part of a broader movement. While anti-fascists continue to confront fascists in the streets, a pedagogical resurgence of anti-fascism must continue to guide the movement as a whole by providing an intellectual, philosophical, and strategic battle plan. This plan must include: (1) a deep understanding of systemic forces generating from capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy; (2) an understanding of power dynamics and the need to form and deploy power effectively; (3) an understanding of the two major fronts of the anti-fascist war, which include the systemic and upward-focused class war and the anti-reactionary, horizontally-focused culture war; (4)an understanding of anti-capitalist ideology, including but not limited to Marxism, socialism, and anarchism; and, most importantly, (5) a mass push for class consciousness.

Class Consciousness

Building class consciousness is the most crucial task of our time, being citizens within the capitalist and imperialist empire that is the United States, facing down the impending fascist tide, and attempting to confront and defeat this tide along with the capitalist and imperialist systems as a whole. Recalibrating a working class that has been deliberately detached from its role is imperative. Regardless of how one prefers carrying out this task, whether through the formation of a vanguard of trained cadre or a direct engagement toward mass consciousness, it must be carried out within the proletariat itself, where much of capitalist and reactionary culture has become blindingly influential. This must be done not by rejecting theory and deeming it “too elite and alien for the masses,” but rather by embracing the organic intellectualism that is inherent within the masses and serving as facilitators to awaken this abundance of untapped potential. This must be done by realizing the working class is more than capable of thinking, understanding, and comprehending our position in society, if only given the chance to do so, free from the capitalist propaganda that drowns and consumes us.

In creating a working-class culture that not only embraces its inherent intellectualism, but does so in a way that explicitly challenges the dominant intellectual orthodoxy that fortifies capitalist relations, we may look to Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who provided a clear and convincing relationship between counter-hegemony and working-class, or organic, intellectualism that is rooted in “spontaneous philosophy”:

“It is essential to destroy the widespread prejudice that philosophy is a strange and difficult thing just because it is the specific intellectual activity of a particular category of specialists or of professional and systematic philosophers. It must first be shown that all [people] are ‘philosophers,’ by defining the limits and characteristics of the ‘spontaneous philosophy’ which is proper to everybody. This philosophy is contained in:  (1) language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and concepts and not just of words grammatically devoid of content; (2) ‘common sense’ and ‘good sense’; and (3) popular religion and, therefore, also in the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and of acting, which are collectively bundled together under the name of ‘folklore.’” (Gramsci, 1971)

The formation of class consciousness, therefore, rests on this notion, sprouts from the lived experience of proletarian life in the capitalist system, and may essentially replace Gramsci’s already-existing third parameter of “popular religion,” by simply substituting “folklore” with a materialist perspective. This process reminds us of Fred Hampton’s insistence that we proceed in “plain, proletarian English,” which is not to say that revolutionaries must “dumb down” their message in order to appeal to the masses, but rather return revolutionary theory to where it belongs: within working-class culture. Prior to Gramsci and Hampton, Marx had already gone through this process of realizing the existence of organic intellectualism. This process, the subsequent views that developed within Marxist circles throughout the 20th century, and the sometimes-regressive ideology that formed from such is effectively illustrated by Raya Dunayevskaya’s critique of Jean-Paul Sartre in her book, Philosophy and Revolution: From Hegel to Sartre, and from Marx to Mao:

“Methodologically, Sartre’s organic petty-bourgeois inability to understand what it is that Marx meant by praxis has nothing whatever to do with the Ego, much less with not being able ‘to read’ Marx. It has everything to do with his isolation from the proletariat.

The very point at which Sartre thinks that Marx, because he had to turn to ‘clarifying’ practice, stopped developing theory is when Marx broke with the bourgeois concept of theory and created his most original concept of theory out of ‘history and its process,’ not only in the class struggles outside the factory but in it, at the very point of production, faced with the ‘automation’ which was dominating the worker transforming him into a mere ‘appendage.’ Marx’s whole point what that the worker was thinking his own thoughts, expressing his total opposition to the mode of labor instinctually and by creating new forms of struggle and new human relations with his fellow workers. Where, in Marx, history comes alive because the masses have been prepared by the daily struggle at the point of production to burst out spontaneously, ‘to storm the heavens’ creatively as they had done in the Paris Commune, in Sartre practice appears as inert practicality bereft of all historic sense and any consciousness of consequences. Where, in Marx, Individuality itself arises through history, in Sartre History means subordination of individual to group-in-fusion who alone know where the action is. Sartre the Existentialist rightly used to laugh at Communists for thinking man was born on his first payday; Sartre ‘the Marxist’ sees even as world-shaking an event as the Russian Revolution, not at its self-emancipatory moment of birth with its creation of totally new forms of workers’ rule – soviets – but rather at the moment when it was transformed into its opposite with Stalin’s victory, the totalitarian initiation of the Five-Year Plans with the Moscow Frame-Up Trials and forced-labor camps.” (Dunayevskaya, 2003)

Organic Intellectualism and Political Consciousness

The process of tapping organic intellectualism is perhaps best described by Paulo Freire in his crucial text, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. To Freire, revolutionary class consciousness can only be realized through an embrace of radicalism, or as Angela Davis once phrased it, “simply grasping things at the root.” Applying our intellectualism and relating it to our lived experiences is only a partial awakening on the revolutionary path. To complete the transition, understanding the roots, or systems, that represent the foundational causes of our problems is crucial, not only for identifying the magnitude of the ultimate solution, and thus avoiding spending time and energy on inconsequential activities, but also for understanding that there is a solution. “The more radical the person is, the more fully he or she enters into reality so that, knowing it better, he or she can transform it,” Freire tells us. “This individual is not afraid to confront, to listen, to see the world unveiled. This person is not afraid to meet the people or to enter into a dialogue with them. This person does not consider himself or herself the proprietor of history or of all people, or the liberator of the oppressed; but he or she does commit himself or herself, within history, to fight at their side.” (Freire, 2014)

With this realization in mind, we can better understand the four levels of consciousness and identify the pedagogical route, or remedies, that can be applied to ourselves and others. From the “magical consciousness,” where political impotence is maintained by inconceivable forces like gods and mythology, through the “naive consciousness,” where the material world becomes realized, and our interactions with others, with nature, within society, begin to take on some semblance of control, to “critical consciousness,” which introduces four distinct qualities that may be applied to this material reality: power awareness, or knowing and recognizing the existence of power and who possesses power in society; critical literacy, which leads to the development of analysis, writing, thinking, reading, discussing, and understanding deeper meaning; de-socialization, which allows one to recognize and challenge forms of power; and self-organization/self-education, which amounts to taking initiative to overcome the anti-intellectualism and indoctrination of capitalist “education.” (Wheeler, 2016; Daily Struggles, 2018) And, finally, the realization of a “political consciousness,” or class consciousness, which brings us to the understanding of a shared reality with most others, as well as the need for collective struggle to break our interlocking chains of oppression.

Ultimately, the path through these levels of consciousness are about power; moving from an impotent position to a powerful position — a powerful position that can only be forged through the realization of collective struggle. Freire describes this transition as a break from the “banking concept of education” that is designed to perpetuate ignorance to a critical pedagogy that is designed to empower the oppressed; a pedagogical process that, again, can only be carried out in a proletarian environment:

“In their political activity, the dominant elites utilize the banking concept to encourage passivity in the oppressed, corresponding with the latter's ‘submerged’ state of consciousness, and take advantage of that passivity to ‘fill’ that consciousness with slogans which create even more fear of freedom. This practice is incompatible with a truly liberating course of action, which, by presenting the oppressors slogans as a problem, helps the oppressed to ‘eject’ those slogans from within themselves. After all, the task of the humanists is surely not that of pitting their slogans against the slogans of the oppressors, with the oppressed as the testing ground, ‘housing’ the slogans of first one group and then the other. On the contrary, the task of the humanists is to see that the oppressed become aware of the fact that as dual beings, ‘housing’ the oppressors within themselves, they cannot be truly human.

This task implies that revolutionary leaders do not go to the people in order to bring them a message of ‘salvation,’ but in order to come to know through dialogue with them both their objective situation and their awareness of that situation—the various levels of perception of themselves and of the world in which and with which they exist. One cannot expect positive results from an educational or political action program which fails to respect the particular view of the world held by the people. Such a program constitutes cultural invasion, good intentions notwithstanding.” (Freire, 2014)

And this task must be done in a collective manner, with the clear intention of not only challenging power, but creating our own collective, working-class power that has the potential to destroy the existing power structure emanating from authoritative systems like capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. After all, “freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift,” and “nobody liberates themselves alone; human beings liberate themselves in communion.” (Freire, 2014)

Understanding Collective Power, Separating Radical from Liberal, and Exposing Centrist Extremism and Horseshoe Theory

“There is a whole apparatus that controls the presidency that is absolutely resistant to change. Which isn’t to excuse Obama from taking bolder steps. I think there are steps that he could have taken had he insisted. But if one looks at the history of struggles against racism in the US, no change has ever happened simply because the president chose to move in a more progressive direction. Every change that has happened has come as a result of mass movements – from the era of slavery, the Civil War, and the involvement of Black people in the Civil War, which really determined the outcome. Many people are under the impression that it was Abraham Lincoln who played the major role, and he did as a matter of fact help to accelerate the move toward abolition, but it was the decision on the part of slaves to emancipate themselves and to join the Union Army – both women and men – that was primarily responsible for the victory over slavery. It was the slaves themselves and of course the abolitionist movement that led to the dismantling of slavery. When one looks at the civil rights era, it was those mass movements – anchored by women, incidentally – that pushed the government to bring about change.” (Davis, 2016)

This excerpt is from an interview with Angela Davis, where she shares some knowledge on how to deal with power. Davis’s point is that people create and force change, collectively and from the bottom. This is an inherently radical perspective that comes from a development of political consciousness and the realization that representative democracy, in all of its supposed glory, is a reactionary system that has rarely if ever carried through on its “democratic” advertisement. It is a radical perspective that comes from a place of understanding why and how the founding fathers, in all of their land-owning, slave-owning elitism, chose this system of governing: “to protect,” as James Madison put it, “the opulent of the minority against the majority.” (Madison, 1787)

Davis’s point is reiterated by Noam Chomsky, in his peculiar declaration that Richard Nixon was “the last liberal President” of the United States — a statement that also comes from a radical perspective which realizes the systemic influence of capitalism and, more specifically, of the intensified capitalist period known as neoliberalism. And it comes from an understanding that Nixon the man, cantankerously racist and temperamentally conservative, did not create the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), set employment quotas on affirmative action programs, propose employer-funded healthcare, sign the Fair Labor Standards Act, and approve a series of regulations on big business because he personally championed these causes, or even believed in them. (Conetta, 2014; Fund, 2013) Rather, he was pressured from below, in the same way that Reagan, the Bushs, Clinton, and Obama have been pressured from above to enact and maintain the corporate stranglehold on politics ever since.

Systemic pressure always supplants personal philosophies, beliefs, ideologies, and preferences; and our systemic default, which is predetermined by the capitalist order, will always prevail over electoral and representative politics. Political consciousness exposes this fact, separating radical from liberal. The cases of Lincoln and Nixon, while signifying how pressure from below can force change, are outliers. They were chinks in the system. And since Nixon, these chinks have seemingly been fortified by the “whole apparatus that controls the presidency that is absolutely resistant to change.” The legislation passed by Nixon, as well as the legislation that came about through the New Deal era, the “Great Society,” and Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, have all been tamed by this apparatus. Our environmental crisis has intensified, white-supremacist terror remains prevalent in American streets, economic inequality has reached unprecedented levels, and our racialized prison industrial complex has grown by a rate of over 600 percent since the Civil Rights movement – all realities suggesting that “progressive” legislation is ultimately toothless. Thus, any reforms that develop through the electoral system, as a result of pressure from the bottom, are ultimately curtailed and circumvented by capitalism’s economic base, which always seeks to undermine a common good in the pursuit of never-ending growth and profit. The so-called “liberal reforms” that occurred during the Nixon years were largely rendered useless during the proceeding neoliberal era, which represents a deliberate plan to unleash the capitalist system.

This fact does not render grassroots power useless; it merely suggests that it needs to be redirected. Returning to Davis’s comments, the case of Abraham Lincoln is perhaps one of the best examples of the impotence built into the political system. Lincoln the individual had vacillated on his stance regarding slavery, expressing personal “dislike” for the institution and even displaying empathy for slaves (Lincoln, 1855) during a time when such empathy was often lost on many Americans. At the same time, Lincoln the president recognized his duty to protect the rights of slaveowners as the executive administrator of the United States and its constitution, and ultimately admitted that his institutional duty, which was to “save the Union” and maintain the power structures as created by the founders, even if it meant that slavery would stay intact, far outweighed any personal misgivings he may have had toward slavery. The same logic, when coming from cogs within the power structure, can be applied to capitalism and imperialism, and has been for centuries.

Both Nixon’s and Lincoln’s yield to external pressure illustrates two important points: (1) the personality, ideological leanings, and personal beliefs of a politician, even if the most powerful politician, have no real consequence within the US political system; and (2) the foundation of US politics and government, as arranged by the founders of the country, will never allow for genuine democratic elements to materialize. The first point often represents the most telling demarcation between radical and liberal, with the former realizing this fact, and the latter unable to realize and thus placing focus on individual identity. Because of the liberal’s inability to understand this systemic reality, damaging electoral strategies such as “lesser-evilism” have established a firm place in the American political arena, inevitably causing a gradual deterioration toward more reactionary political platforms designed to protect the decaying capitalist system, which in modern times translates to a very real fascistic slide. Hence, we now have modern Democratic Party politicians that resemble 1970s/80s conservatives, and Republicans that continue to push the envelope of fascism.

Since Nixon, the flock of modern presidents who have bent the knee to multinational corporate and banking power further illustrate the utter insignificance of identity; ironically, during a political era where “marketing personalities” is usually the only determinate for “success.” This contradiction cannot be understated, and it is an accurate barometer that can be used to measure class/political consciousness in the United States, or the lack thereof. Ironically, the fact that voter turnout throughout the country has maintained such low levels during the tail-end of the neoliberal era and late-stage capitalism is a sign that class and political consciousness are actually rising. For when the working class realizes en masse that there is no change coming through electoral politics, and thus have shed the capitalist elite’s “banking concept,” we know that revolutionary change is on the horizon. And any such period must include mass education and a mass movement toward political consciousness – an understanding once echoed by Lucy Parsons: “[radicals] know that a long period of education must precede any great fundamental change in society, hence they do not believe in vote begging, nor political campaigns, but rather in the development of self-thinking individuals.” (Lewis, 2017) Self-thinking, in this case, simply means realizing our inherent political consciousness that is based in our material position in the socioeconomic system beyond the construction and obstruction of capitalist ideology and culture.

As we collectively separate ourselves from a mainstream political arena that has been established to ensure our continued demise as working-class people, we also must be wary of blowback from the system. The most common response to a delegitimizing of the power structure is an appeal to authority, safety, and stability. This defensive posture forms from within the power structure, with corporate-political unity between both major political parties, in an attempt to construct an extremist center. At this stage, the extremist center has one task at hand — to protect the status quo at all costs. In the US, this means keeping the white-supremacist capitalist/imperialist system intact, as well as the bourgeois class that both maintains these systems and benefits from them. To do so, this extremist center exploits the fear of instability in order to build mass support, labels both fascist and anti-fascist ground movements as enemies of the state (although does not necessarily respond to them in the same ways), indecipherable from one another in their mutual “extremism,” and proceeds with an all-out attack on civil liberties in order to suppress popular movements that may challenge the embedded systems.

We have seen this response materialize over the past decade. In the aftermath of 9/11, civil liberties have been systematically removed from members of both political parties. During the street clashes between white nationalists and anti-fascists, we witnessed politicians from both parties as well as media denounce “both sides” as extremists, creating a convenient false dichotomy that completely ignores the most common-sense discussion – what the two sides actually believe in or are trying to accomplish.  And we have seen “horseshoe theory” enter into the mainstream arena as “philosophical justification” for this false dichotomy.  “In the current state of things, the electoral successes of the extreme right stem from contemporary capitalism itself. These successes allow the media to throw together, with the same opprobrium, the ‘populists of the extreme right and those of the extreme left,’ obscuring the fact that the former are pro-capitalist (as the term ‘extreme right’ demonstrates) and thus possible allies for capital, while the latter are the only potentially dangerous opponents of capital’s system of power.” (Amin, 2014) The result of this has been a strengthening of the system as we know it, a virtual circling of the wagons around our reality of corporate politics, inequality, joblessness, homelessness, racism, misogyny, and all of the oppressive social phobias that accompany them.  Still, the resistance looms, it is radical in nature, and it is growing.

Conclusion

The current state of the world — socially, politically, economically, and environmentally — indicates that we have entered the late stages of the global capitalist system. In the heart of the capitalist empire, the United States, social unrest has become the norm. Capitalism’s systemic contradictions, as well as its coercive and authoritarian core, have become increasingly uncontrollable for the country’s capitalist political parties. Social inequities are becoming more pronounced, the political arena is showing irregularities like never before, and an overtly fascist tide is starting to rear its ugly head.

The American working class has responded in various ways. On one side, reactionary mentalities have intensified among hordes of newly-dispossessed whites, thus leading them into the arms of the state’s fascist slide. On another side, a mass awakening has developed among many who have decided instead to tap into our organic intellectualism, turn to radical analysis, and return to anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist class politics. In response to the fascist tide, a formidable wave of anti-fascist action has sprung to life. To bolster this, a pedagogical resurgence of anti-fascism has formed both organically and through the forging of this new collective political and class consciousness. Rosa Luxemburg’s 1916 ultimatum has suddenly reached the ears of many within the American working class – will we transition away from capitalism and toward socialism, or will we regress further into barbarism?

Capitalism, imperialism, and white supremacy know where they stand. Politicians from both capitalist parties have regrouped to form and extreme center. Corporate executives, bankers, bosses, business owners, arms manufacturers, hedge-fund operators, landlords, military officials, police, and the prison industry have all placed their bets on barbarism. The ball is now in our court. The time is ripe for the people to seize power, but the process of a political awakening, anchored by a mass shaping of class consciousness, must gear up. And, most importantly, our army must be built from the ground-up, from within the proletariat, with the understanding that we are all leaders in this struggle.

A war for consciousness must continue, and must be won, while we proceed in building mass political power. And this must be done with an all-out rejection of capitalist culture and the conditioned mentality that comes with it, because the people’s struggle is doomed to fail if it does not develop “a consciousness of the insidious promotion of capitalist individualism.” In doing so, “it is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize our potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle.” (Barat, 2014) We are on the precipice. The world and its future literally rest on our collective shoulders.

All power to the people.

Bibliography

Amin, Samir (2014) The Return of Fascism in Contemporary Capitalism, Monthly Review, September 1, 2014. Accessed at https://monthlyreview.org/2014/09/01/the-return-of-fascism-in-contemporary-capitalism/

Barat, Frank (2014) Progressive Struggles against Insidious Capitalist Individualism: An Interview with Angela Davis, Hampton Institute. Accessed at http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/angela-davis-interview.html

Conetta, Christine (2014) Noam Chomsky: Richard Nixon Was Last Liberal President, Huffington Post, 2/21/14. Accessed at https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/21/noam-chomsky-richard-nixon_n_4832847.html

Daily Struggles Blog (2018) Paulo Freire and the Role of Critical Pedagogy. Accessed at http://daily-struggles.tumblr.com/post/18785753110/paulo-freire-and-the-role-of-critical-pedagogy

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Freire, Paulo (2014) Pedagogy of the Oppressed: 30th Anniversary edition (Bloomsbury)

Fund, John (2013) Nixon at 100: Was He America’s Last Liberal? (National Review online, January 11, 2013) Accessed at https://www.nationalreview.com/2013/01/nixon-100-was-he-americas-last-liberal-john-fund/

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Here Comes the Second Wave

By Andrew Gavin Marshall

Originally published at Empire and Economics.

As the pandemic spread across the world, unprecedented lockdowns followed. Now, as many of those countries are in the early weeks of lifting restrictions, we see signs of what may be the start of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. And we cannot rule out a second wave of lockdowns.

The spread of the viral pandemic resulted in one country after another beginning the process of shutting down its society. It began in Asia, spread to Europe, then to North America and across much of the rest of the world. By early April, half of humanity was living under lockdown.

The lockdowns were incredibly controversial. This time period will be seared into the collective human memory for as long as we all live. Its significance to our societies, our economies, our political systems and our own individual experiences cannot be overstated.

People have grown tired of the lockdowns, and understandably so. But business leaders and politicians feel worried about the economy most of all, and want to reopen in order to revive the economy.

Countries in Asia began the process of lifting the lockdowns last month. With the earliest cases of the pandemic and some of the more effective means of handling it, everyone was keeping a close eye on these countries as they emerged from restrictions.

South Korea marked the ending of the most strict social distancing measures last week. Within days, numbers of the infected began to spike. The spike in South Korea’s numbers resulted entirely from one man’s night out going to clubs. South Korean President Moon Jae-in warned Koreans to “brace for the pandemic’s second wave.”

The Chinese province of Wuhan, where the COVID19 outbreak first began and where the lockdown ended the previous month, experienced its first cluster of new infections.

Iran – one of the early epicentres of the epidemic – had lifted its lockdown. But on May 10, Iran put a region of the country under a second lockdown after a sharp increase of cases in the province.

Lebanon, after emerging from the virus and the restrictions nearly two weeks ago, has put the entire country again under a lockdown as infections started to spike. Just ten days after reopening, Lebanon announced a four-day lockdown of the country, prompting grocery stores to once again be quickly emptied of essential items. This is all taking place in the midst of the country experiencing a brutal economic and financial crisis, one which began prior to the pandemic, and resulted in massive protests and social unrest that began late last year and continued even in the midst of the pandemic, as hunger and desperation spread. (Meanwhile, many Americans were protesting because they want haircuts, to go golfing, and for their favourite restaurants to be opened again.)

Europe followed Asia’s example in the lifting of restrictions and ending of lockdowns. This is a slow process that looks different in different countries. Ultimately, however, it follows the same course of slowly removing restrictions and opening public spaces, schools, businesses and borders, and incrementally easing social distancing measures.

At the start of April, virtually all of Europe except for Sweden was under lockdown. By the second week of May, most of the continent had started easing restrictions. The United Kingdom was the only large European country to not be easing (as it was one of the last to impose a lockdown).

Last week, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned about proceeding “extremely carefully” in seeking to emerge from the lockdowns in order to avoid another spike in infections.

“The risk of returning to lockdown remains very real if countries do not manage the transition extremely carefully and in a planned approach.” – WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus

“If lockdown measures are lifted too quickly, the virus can take off.” – Maria Ban Kerkhove, WHO epidemiologist

Within days of Germany starting the process of easing restrictions, cases began to spike. Not only the largest country in Europe (by population, economic weight and political power), Germany is also one of the more successful models of countries in dealing with the pandemic. Despite its size, deaths from the virus in Germany were fractions of those witnessed in Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom and France. Thus, with German infection rates starting to increase, fears grow of a second wave.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned, “We always have to be aware that we are still at the beginning of the pandemic… And there’s still a long way in dealing with this virus in front of us.”

The United States, with the most known cases of COVID19 in the world, has witnessed many individual states begin to reopen their societies in the past weeks. As businesses opened and people started to go to public places, infection rates began to spike in multiple U.S. states. The actual effects of reopening will take weeks to know, however. Though various official models suggest that we can expect a spike in cases and deaths over the coming weeks as a result.

Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, one of the leading experts in the fight against COVID19 in the United States, warned on May 12 that if U.S. states reopened too quickly and ignored guidelines from public health authorities, “you will trigger an outbreak that you might not be able to control,” which would lead “to some suffering and death that could be avoided.” But, he added, “that could even set you back on the road to try to get economic recovery.” Doing so, he added, “could almost turn the clock back rather than going forward.”

A research paper from a Harvard economist examined the past Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, looking at the various successes and failures of lockdowns and openings. He concluded that an assortment of restrictions and lockdowns failed to save as many lives in the past because the duration of the lockdowns was for too short a period: four weeks (one month), on average. The lesson from this, he concluded, was that restrictions and lockdowns “have to be maintained for substantially longer than a few weeks. Most likely, 12 weeks work much better than 4-6 weeks.”

People have entered into a state of mental lockdown. Many have shut down to the overconsumption of information and simply grasp onto the hope that things seem to be opening and that, therefore, the worst is behind us and the future is simply a slow decline from present extremes. This is a very hopeful – and one might say naive – perspective. It is fine to hope for miracles, or even to wish them into being, but misguided to plan for them.

Instead, we should mentally prepare ourselves for a second wave of the pandemic and the potential for future lockdowns as a result. South Korea and Germany are among the most successful and advanced nations in dealing with the pandemic, and when their leaders are saying to “brace for the pandemic’s second wave” and that “we are still at the beginning,” we should take these claims seriously.

We are still in the early stages and months of this pandemic and in understanding the virus itself, so nothing can be said of the near and medium-term future with any certainty. Well, except for one thing: the virus is here now.

“Exactly how long remains to be seen… It’s going to be a matter of managing it over months to a couple of years. It’s not a matter of getting past the peak, as some people seem to believe.” – Marc Lipsitch, infectious disease epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health

One wave of lockdowns and social distancing is not going to be enough in the long term. Thus, it is important to manage our expectations and understandings. The virus comes in waves and so we must become like liquid, more able to adapt to the contours of the wave and outlast its peaks and crashes.

Our societies must also become more adaptive. This means that we will need to be more willing to spend and support large segments of the population for extended durations of time. If our politicians and leaders do not meet these standards, widespread (unnecessary) suffering will result. But we can and we must adapt to the necessities and realities of the pandemic.

The pandemic does not have to be hopeless. We can and will get through this. But it is a test of our society and our civilization as to how we get through it. Do we prioritize reopening economies or do we prioritize keeping people safe? If we maintain or return to lockdowns, how do we address and meet the needs of the population confined to their homes? How do we meet the needs of those who don’t have the option to stay home?

There is hope in how we answer these questions and how we move forward through the pandemic and emerge from it. But it is important to not waste our hope on the empty notions that this is over or near its end. We are still in the beginning. There is more to come. Prepare yourselves mentally, arm yourselves intellectually, and plan accordingly.

Put your hope in the right places. But plan according to reality. Yes, we all want haircuts and to spend time with our friends and go out for a drink (or ten). But if the cost of that is to see tens of thousands more infections and thousands more deaths, I can make peace with some out-of-control hair. This “sacrifice” is nothing compared to the lives that will be sacrificed from reopening too early.

This is still the beginning. Plan accordingly.