Alligator Alcatraz Was Already Here

By Aaron Kirshenbaum and Grace Siegelman

In the middle of the Big Cypress National Preserve in Ochopee, Florida, and almost dead center of the Florida Everglades, surrounded by alligators and pythons, is the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport. For years, plans to expand the airport’s infrastructure have been stalled in an attempt to preserve the surrounding marshlands and a critical freshwater source. On July 3, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, per the request of President Donald Trump and Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Kristi Noem, used emergency powers to seize the abandoned airport and open Alligator Alcatraz, named for Trump’s twisted fantasy to reopen the deadly Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay. The makeshift prison is currently capable of detaining up to 5,000 migrants (with capacity expected to double) and celebrated for being inexpensive due to its ‘natural’ barriers.

Recent news reports have documented the horrific conditions: tents that provide no protection from rising summer temperatures, maggot-infested food, little access to clean drinking water, flooding near electrical cables, and bedding. Prominent environmental organizations like the Center for Biological Diversity have sued Noem for the environmental impacts the detention center will have on the surrounding marshlands, water sources, and sacred land of the Miccosukee and Seminole tribes. Five Florida state lawmakers have also sued Governor DeSantis over being denied entry into the detention facility.

We must break down the divisions between movements to fight against Alligator Alcatraz and to prevent similar facilities from opening in the future. This facility is the natural culmination of decades of build-up of the war economy, of the prison system, and of policy prioritizing money above human needs. Its opening is activating environmentalists, anti-war advocates, and immigration organizers alike. Alligator Alcatraz is a catalyst for us to stand together to call for the destruction of detention centers in the US and the divestment from militarism here and everywhere.

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The funding sources for this detention center are absurdly symbolic. In a statement to the Associated Press, Noem stated that the facility was projected to cost $450 million. Yet leaked documents reveal that the total grant awarded to the project is worth $608 million —  all from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

FEMA is the same organization responsible for providing emergency relief after natural disasters, like the recent catastrophic flooding in Texas — and like the type that could emerge from this facility, contaminating the drinking water of the eight million people served by the aquifer adjacent to Alligator Alcatraz. Recent cuts have resulted in an inadequate early warning system in states like Texas, which left residents helpless during the catastrophic and deadly flooding. This prioritization of a war-economy budget over a people’s economy turns all areas impacted by the militarism-induced climate crisis into sacrifice zones of human and ecological life.

The timing of the opening coincides with President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, which gives tax breaks to the U.S.’s wealthiest five percent and $150 billion to further militarization here and abroad, all while cutting social programs like Medicaid, SNAP benefits, and student loan assistance.

This sacrifice of life is the function of prisons, the build-up of which emerged through disinvestment in the public sector as a catch-all solution to social issues. Instead of investing in schools, housing, education, or jobs, local and federal governments elected to build prisons as a way to contain poverty and extract people from their communities — in turn extracting their time, their autonomy, and the money that otherwise could have gone toward their lives, instead throwing it into brutality, confinement, and militarization of the police to enforce this financial arrangement.

The same answer rings true whether you are talking about Alligator Alcatraz. U.S. funds and intelligence aiding the Israeli bombing of Palestinian hospitals, homes of doctors and lawyers, or U.S. taxpayer dollars being stripped from education, housing, and healthcare. The United States government is not in the business of sustaining life, but rather sustaining profits, control, and more profits. Our money is being used to illegally detain thousands of people every day for existing, and Alligator Alcatraz is a jarring example of what is already here. Thirteen thousand people have died in U.S. prisons due to summer heat waves in the past twenty years. Nearly half of the drinking water in U.S. prisons is contaminated with forever chemicals; like Alligator Alcatraz, most prisons and jails are built on abandoned industrial sites linked to disease, cancers, and death. Prisons are especially vulnerable during natural disasters. Last October, for instance, several prisons were not evacuated in Hurricane Milton’s Zone A Evacuation Center. Additionally, during Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of incarcerated folks were left locked in prison for four days without food and water while their cells flooded with water and other elements.

Whether it be prisons, FEMA-funded ICE detention facilities, or increased funding for the Pentagon, the extractive motivation is always the same. We need to approach prisons as a form of militarization at home — taking people out of their communities, not to extract their labor in the prison in most cases, but so that the State can extract their lives and “save” resources outside of the prison. This facility is funded for a PR campaign, and condemns those incarcerated to an early death. This murder is accelerated by the climate crisis, which has been accelerated by our warmaking, all for the sake of continuing to extract labor and resources across the world.

Whether it’s the over 800 U.S. military bases leaking toxic chemicals and jet fuel, prisons and cop cities, or ICE detention facilities, our targets are the same, and the reasons for their funding are a common thread. These deadly facilities are being built on sacred indigenous land, decimating the health and water sources of local communities, and extracting the lives of people who our economic and political systems have discarded.

Alligator Alcatraz, Alligator Auschwitz, is a brutal reminder of the daily happenings here in the belly of the beast. Trump and Congress continue to find pay cuts in government spending for life-affirming resources while piling money into starving and incarcerating its own people and funding the ecocide and genocide of people outside its borders. Our money is being filtered away from the things we need most and toward systems that will kill us and the planet. We cannot allow our struggle against all forms of domestic and international militarism to be siloed.  We must push forward and never look away.

If we want an end to ICE detention centers and deportations, if we want our money invested in things that matter to our survival, we must cut the one trillion-dollar war budget today. Find out how to get started in your local community now.

Aaron Kirshenbaum is CODEPINK's War is Not Green campaigner and East Coast regional organizer. Based in and originally from Brooklyn, New York, Aaron holds an M.A. in Community Development and Planning from Clark University. They also have a B.A. in Human-Environmental and Urban-Economic Geography from Clark. During their time in school, Aaron worked on internationalist climate justice organizing, educational program development, and Palestine, tenant, and abolitionist organizing.

Grace Siegelman is CODEPINK's Engagement Manager. Grace completed her Master's Degree in Women and Gender Studies and Bachelor's Degree in Peace, Justice and Conflict Studies at DePaul University. She has been organizing for over 6 years in Chicago. Her organizing and research focus on prison and police abolition, queer theory, gendered violence and anti-war efforts. She has led youth campaigns on Ban the Box, a national movement to remove the question of criminal history from college applications and led letter writing and education initiatives to incarcerated survivors of domestic violence. Her writing can be found in Common Dreams, CounterPunch, LA Progressive and more.

Where Do We Go From Here: The Future of Black Studies

[Photo credit: The Washington Post/Getty Images]

By Kemuel Benyehudah

Globalization, immigration and intermarriage have led to contemporary black identity becoming more complex. Black Studies emphasis on the nationalist perspectives in the discipline may be causing it to limit broader discussions around the black experience. Shockley and Cleveland (2011) exhorts black students to connect to a “larger struggle” rooted in Afrocentrism, but they don’t describe the benefits of looking at three emerging trends. The discipline faces the following challenges: 1) How to maintain relevance within an increasingly neoliberal higher education culture? 2) How to meet the needs of a black student body which has seen its interethnic diversity grow? 3) How to respond to declining Black Studies degrees awarded and subsequent threats of defunding? This paper critically examines the aforementioned three trends which are changing black identity.

To address these trends, this paper posits a conceptual framework utilizing epistemic privilege, inquiry, and multiplicity. Kuhn (1962) argued that a “paradigm shift” occurs when the persons in the field agree on the conceptual model to solve a particular problem. In the past the discipline of Black Studies relied on foregrounding whiteness for analysis and integration from the margins (Butler, 2011). Whereas today, the field is faced with addressing the growing state of hybridity among black students. Glick (2012) argued that “contemporary identity studies cannot adequately speak to the challenges that have begun to emerge” (p. 520). Due to these rapid changes occurring in the black community, this paper proposes a reconceptualization of the field of Black Studies to address this rising emergence..

Why must new black voices rise from the margins in higher education and be heard?

On any given day, multiple conversations are taking place in higher education related to the diverse experiences shaping black students' lives. Often, these experiences originated in black students communities and then moved to academic disciplines for validation. However, some  experiences have not been properly documented and catalogued in the records of higher education. Harding (2004) a feminist scholar argued that the conditions of “oppression and marginalization” occur in academic disciplines when there is “unequal access to epistemic resources” to theorize and explain phenomena (p. 348). Black Studies emerged as a critique of higher education’s oppression of black epistemic privileges during the civil rights era (Okafor, 2014). However, for many black students living in the post-civil rights era, the Black Studies nationalist framework offers constraints which may make the discipline unappealing. One which stands out, is a perceived lack of sensitivity towards the cultural, social, and historical differences of black students in higher education. 

According to Giroux (2004) “despite the growing cultural diversity of students in higher education, there are few examples of curricular sensitivity to the multiplicity of economic, social, and cultural factors bearing on students’ lives” (p. 101). Black students falling outside of the historical lineage of the Black Studies discipline may not see themselves in the traditional scholarship and may choose not to enroll because of this reason. When considering the growing neoliberal agenda of modern universities today, declines in Black Studies degrees earned is a vector that the discipline can ill afford (Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, 2014). According to the National Center for Education Statistics (2011 - 2015) the number of Bachelor’s degrees awarded in Black Studies fell by 37% percent between 2010-11 and 2014-15, while the number of master’s degrees dropped by 32%.

This is problematic since mainstream disciplines rarely apply sustained critical inquiry into systemic racism and the historical forces that have shaped black identity (Jones, 2011). More to the point, supporters of Black Studies argued that racially neutral stances are examples of institutional racism (Phillips, 2010). According to Rojas (2007) black scholars have argued that institutional autonomy is necessary if black students are to be afforded the opportunity to make deeper meaning about their lived experiences. However, if black students do not have access to “critical communities” that provide them with opportunities to unpack their experiences, then it may be difficult for them to form bonds of trust and solidarity outside of their insider groups (Bettez, 2011). Adding to this point, Douglas and Peck (2013) said that the black diaspora includes many subcultures within it, and should not oversimplify all people of African descent within one narrative. As such, honoring “difference” would provide an opportunity for a more robust discussion of blackness in higher education. In the section below, we will look at the particular set of historical circumstances which Black Studies was situated within, and discuss how this differs from the post-civil rights era.

Historical overview of Black Studies during the civil rights to the post-civil rights era

Before we can enter into a meaningful discussion around Black Studies, it is important to briefly look at the field from an historical context. After the Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court ruling in 1896, de jure segregation barred black people from higher education. Until the civil rights era, segregation left black people with very few tertiary options except for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (Allen & Jewell, 2002). The pre-civil rights era didn’t close until the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954 ended de jure segregation (Smith, 2014). Yet, even after this legal victory, black students’ experiences were still mostly excluded from the dominant higher education curriculum.

According to Rogers (2012) “students developed and first presented the Black Studies idea to a group of professors in 1966” (p. 22). However, Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968 helped motivate a conviction in black students to challenge the status quo in higher education (Rojas, 2007). Following this tragic event, the San Francisco State student strike in 1968 was one of the first legitimate attempts to integrate Black Studies into higher education. The documentary Agents of Change (2016) argued that Black Studies’ institutionalization at San Francisco State was the Brown vs. the Board of Education moment for black students in higher education. Although San Francisco State’s student strike helped integrate the discipline, it also brought the ire of conservatives.

Ever since, Black Studies has been constrained by limited funding opportunities, and an existential preoccupation with fighting back racist practices that pose a threat to the black community.  This historical tradition of defining black students within the context of community arose from demand for a more inclusive curriculum (Pellerin, 2009). Rogers (2010) claimed that the field should retain its connection to the black community, but he doesn’t fully elaborate on who constitutes the community. However, federal, institutional, and neoliberal policies today are complicating the notion of a fixed idea of black community. Meaning, these aforementioned policies are stretching the black community into a more expansive type requiring more border crossing. Hollinger (2006) explored “community” in another way and argued that it became a way of establishing circles of “we” and “they” or who is in and who is out (p. 189). Although Hollinger is not a traditional scholar in Black Studies, his ideas on “suppression of diversity” amongst ethnic “blocs” provides useful perspectives for re-thinking Black Studies mindsets and traditional policies.

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Intermarriage, immigration, and globalization of higher education

As mentioned earlier, there are three trends expanding black identity in the United States. These trends are immigration, intermarriage, and the globalization of higher education. Each of these trends have worked separately and together to expand the notion of the black community. In the sub-sections below we will more closely analyze each trend, and discuss further how each is complicating our traditional constructions of blackness.

Intermarriage

According to Wang (2015) “fully a quarter of black men who got married in 2013 married someone who was not black. While on the other hand, half a quarter of black women married outside of their race.” Anderson (2015) also argued that black immigrants are more likely to be married than native born blacks. Cokely et al. (2015) said, black students are not a monolithic group, but are part of multiple ethnic groups who increasingly identify as biracial or multiracial. Considering these trends, not only are black students diversifying in terms of identity, but they also display distinct levels of educational achievement (Page, 2007). In order to better accommodate interethnic stratification occurring out in the black student population, higher education will need to address these shifts. As higher education continues to become more global, and admit more international students these trends will only continue to grow. This is important to note as higher education learns to better integrate more students of color in the future.   

Immigration

During the Civil Rights era, the black population was less ethnically diverse according to the Pew Research center (2015). According to Anderson (2015) “black immigrants are a diverse group with notable differences in demographic, economic and geographic characteristics, often tied to the regions of their birth countries.” As recently as 1980, only 3.1 % of the black population was foreign born (Kent, 2007).  However, during the post-civil rights era, U.S. immigration policy has caused changes in the black population. The passage of The Immigration act of 1965 and subsequent revisions in 1976, 1980, 1986, and 1990 have led to a tripling of immigrant blacks between 1980 and 2005 (Kent, 2007). According to Trostle and Zheng (2014) “the Census Bureau projects that by 2060, 16.5% of America’s black population will be foreign-born (p. 11 ).” The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, “loosened” and afforded opportunities for family reunification and skilled labor (Kent, 2007, p. 6). Whereas, the U.S. Immigration Act of 1990 increased the number of immigrants from underrepresented nations (Anderson, 2015). Many recent immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean (where this writer’s mother hails from) benefited from these policies (Kent, 2007). The story here is that U.S. immigration policy has not only changed black identity today, but will also do so in the foreseeable future. This is important to note because black immigrants are also more likely than U.S. born blacks to have a college degree or to be married (Anderson, 2015). Therefore, higher education must account for intra-racial differences and not construct all black students as a monolithic identity group.

Globalization of higher education

According to Kent (2007) “higher education has been a favored route for Africans coming to the United States” (p. 9). Education and social mobility is strongly favored by not only immigrant black students, but also by most immigrant students who leave their countries of origin. As a result, Massey et al. (2007) argued that black immigrants are more likely to be overrepresented in the most selective schools. This phenomenon has caused some tensions with U.S. born blacks who argue that foreign born blacks are benefiting from affirmative action policies instead of the descendants of slaves which the policy was designed to redress (Kent, 2007). For this reason (Cokely et al., 2015) said, “addressing only the traditional barriers to higher education is no longer sufficient given the emerging challenges related to the conflation of black ethnic groups and the increasing numbers of biracial and multiracial identification” (p. 48). Hence, in order to more fully capture the diverse narratives of black students in higher education, proposed below is an interdisciplinary framework addressing these trends.

Reconceptualizing Black Studies in higher education

Applying interdisciplinary frameworks would allow Black Studies to move away from the white/black binary and conduct further self examination of the discipline’s scholarship. Critical Race Theory and Intersectionality provide useful frameworks for critically analyzing race relations but not so much for analyzing growing black hybridity. Munoz et al. (2008) argued that “transdisciplinarity” or interdisciplinary scholarship provides ‘fertile ground’ to ‘explode the arbitrary categorical restraints of discipline” (p. 297). In order to respond to these constraints, scholars will need to look outside of their disciplines for inspiration to create new theories. Some of the popular conceptual frameworks for analyzing racial oppression of the “black community” – such as CRT, intersectionality, and disability studies  – fall short in accounting for black students' complexity due to an overreliance on structuralism. To move beyond structuralism and its essentializing tendencies, a more self-reflexive approach is needed in Black Studies (Kincheloe & McLaren, 2002). Making such a move would allow students to engage in critical inquiry with themselves, the Black Studies discipline would provide them with a framework to find their voice in the higher education curriculum. The frameworks proposed for dealing with black identity in the post-civil rights era is epistemic privilege as emerged from Women's Studies, inquiry as influenced by critical theory, and multiplicity as presented by realist accounts of identity.

Identifying epistemic privilege in Black Studies

According to Kotzee (2010) epistemic privilege advantages members of marginalized social groups to describe their oppression. This is because the oppressed “have a systematically clearer view on political reality than their oppressors” (p. 274). As is the case, black students emerging from intermarriage, globalization, and immigration also should have the privilege to assert their knowledge claims and push back on grand narratives of blackness. Borrowing again from Women's Studies, Janack (1997) argued:

“Members of oppressed groups, including all women, have a perspective on the

world that is not just different from the perspective available to members of the

ruling class, but is also epistemically advantageous” (p. 126).

For the purposes of this essay, “ruling class” is defined as the gatekeepers of the Black Studies discipline in higher education. Esteemed black scholars should use their academic power to improve the lives of all black students no matter from where they hail.  Feminist scholar Alcoff (2013) writes that epistemic privilege was appropriated from Marxist thought as a means of empowering the socially marginalized. As such, Black Studies must use its privileged position within the academy to once again empower the marginalized, and not only serve the interest of the neoliberal plutocracy. Meaning, Black Studies must prioritize the black student community’s empirical needs and resist higher education’s tendency to reify black students into racialized stereotypes. Further probing and inquiry is needed to better understand their individual needs.

Inquiry

Structuralism is heavily valued in the civil rights tradition of Black Studies, including higher education. Meaning, the higher education industry’s preoccupation with race in the aggregate often ignores and loses the opportunity to study nuance. Therefore, critiquing and going beyond the white/black binary dominance in education research requires critical inquiry within the discipline, and critical engagement with sister disciplines. For example, Crowley (1999) argued that the construction of the oppressor/oppressed binary within Women’s Studies had to be reconfigured in order to prevent “undertheorization” about the experiences and knowledge about women. Black Studies will need to make a similar move to prevent marginalization of phenomena happening amongst black students.

According to Douglas (2017) inquiry or “searching” involves three interrelated concepts which are research, “mesearch” and “wesearch (p. 22). Mesearch involves interrogating the inner core of who you are; while wesearch searches involves asking questions about what is needed for those we serve; research investigates available research (p. 22). Douglas (2017) said that asking questions would help black students to harness their story, as well as engage in critical dialog with other students bringing their personal histories into the classroom. Therefore, the discipline should accept that some of the questions posed by students will not lead to support of the traditional framework, but to questions of problematizing. Problematizing will help black students to better understand their positionality and relationships and to choose frameworks which makes sense when trying to understand their experiences in the world.

Moving from intersectionality to multiplicity

Intersectionality was coined by Crenshaw (1989) to provide a deeper understanding of how race, class, and gender worked together as an interconnected system of oppression on people of color. However, intersectionality was conceived in the 1980s before recent societal trends started to make a more visible mark in the black student population. As such, Hames-Garcia (2011) said we should rethink our “overextension” of intersectionality, and instead used “multiplicity as a theory of identity rather than a theory of oppression” (preface, 11). As mentioned earlier, waves of new black narratives have entered the conversation, therefore accommodating and integrating these perspectives are crucial for establishing greater solidarity within the discipline, and with students.

According to Choo and Ferree (2010) intersectionality has been essentialized as a framework to study oppression. Whereas, multiplicity is described as the self in relation to social identity, because understanding the self only as the sum of discrete parts is inadequate (p. 5). Borrowing from Hames Garcia, black students must steadily find the commonalities, connections, and similarities of their experiences to “coexist within a complex multiplicity” (p. 34). Meaning, mutual bonds of trust and respect must be re-affirmed within the discipline to ensure that all black students are made to feel welcome to express their right to generate knowledge.

Discussion and Implications of the Counter-Public

If the field hopes to survive, it will require building not only interethnic coalitions but also cross-racial allyship built on mutual dialog and solidarity. According to Chavez (2011) “a significant function of rhetoric within contexts of movement activity is to generate coalitions” (p. 2). As Chavez discussed, these multicultural coalitions can function as “counterpublics” to support black students scholarship and activism on their campuses. Adding to the ideas on counter publics mentioned earlier, Frazer (1995) said:

“Historically…. members of subordinated social groups - women, workers, peoples of color, and gays and lesbians - have repeatedly found it advantageous to constitute alternative publics. I have called these “subaltern counterpublics” in order to signal that they are parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses.” (p. 291)

During the civil rights era, institutionalization of Black Studies brought the conversation from the margins and into the center of the academy. Whereas today, Black Studies is resisting displacement from the center of higher education and subsequent banishment back to the margins. To prevent this from happening, Black Studies must widen its appeal to the black students in/outside of higher education. According to Douglas and Peck (2013) references to blackness must remain diligent in not reducing or oversimplifying black people. Rebranding and expanding the field as welcoming to a community of heterogenous voices of African descent will require an active ground up strategy recruiting Black students from wider backgrounds into an active counter-public.

Fraser (1992) said counterpublics are ‘‘spaces of withdrawal and regroupment’’ and operate as ‘‘bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics’’ (p. 124). Black scholars and students should work together to identify the issues in the mainstream higher education publics that require scholarship to support their activist goals. Some of the issues that black students and scholars can begin to map as areas of concern are: 1. increasing student enrollment rates in Black Studies, 2. meeting the diverse needs of students in higher education by generating relevant scholarship and 3. Challenging grand narratives which attempt to dehumanize black students and essentialize them as stereotypes and monolithic communities. 

Reconstituting the field of Black Studies as a site of resistance and praxis during the post civil rights era will require multi-vocal scholarship (Bakhtin, 1995). By multi-vocal scholarship, I mean a more democratic inclusive accounting of black experiences. A multivocal discipline would allow for multiple narratives which include a broad range of student perspectives. This type of participatory practice might increase demand for the discipline, and act as a bulwark against further possible defunding (Rhodes, 2011). As higher education continues to supply less funding for humanities education programs like Black Studies, students and scholars of all backgrounds will need to advocate for its existence. To this point, Shockley (2011) said fragmentation along the border lines of black ethnic identity politics risks imperiling the viability of Black Studies to solve modern black problems.

In order to move beyond these institutional constraints, black scholars will need to make the case that the traditional civil rights framework is no longer sufficient to move the field of Black Studies forward or to serve its expanded community needs. Santos (2015) said “rearguard theory” is “craftsmanship rather than architecture, committed testimony rather than clairvoyant leadership and intercultural approximation to what is new for some and old for others” (p. 44). One way to validate this idea is to empower black students to make knowledge claims grounded in their own unique experiences and not in the high towers of the academy.

Conclusion

Black studies needs to be reconceptualized to meet the changing needs of the black student population in the post-civil rights era. Globalization, immigration, and intermarriage are trends that are changing black identity, and can no longer be ignored. Innovating new conceptual frameworks in the post-civil rights era is necessary for ensuring that a fuller picture is provided of black students' experiences in higher education. Otherwise, disregarding these trends pose an ominous future for the field of Black Studies and black students in higher education. 

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No Breakfast For the Children: A Concise History of the FBI’s War on the Black Panther Party

[Pictured: The Black Panther Party’s Free Breakfast for Children Program in action, New York, 1969. Photo by Bev Grant/Getty Images]

By Samatha Pleasants

The first chapter of The Black Panther Party came out of Oakland, CA, in October 1966. From then on, the party spread like wildfire across the nation, from Oakland to New Haven, CT. The Oakland Chapter compiled the Black Panther Party Ten-Point Program, detailing the Black Panthers’ purpose and intentions. The program cites freedom, equal employment, equal opportunities, an end to capitalism, equal housing, exemption from military service, an end to police brutality, freedom for the incarcerated, etc. The party implemented social services, including The Free Ambulance Program, health clinics, The Black Panther Newspaper, youth institutes, and legal aid offices. Some of these, like The Children’s Free Breakfast Program, exist today. The Black Panther Party was not a fly-by-night organization. According to the Party’s own history: “The Black Panther Party at one point of time or another, between 1966 to 1971, had official chapters with the same name or affiliated organizations under other names in at least 61 cities in 26 states and the District of Columbia”.[1] The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) followed behind Black organizers quickly with a Counterintelligence Program initiative (COINTELPRO) to eradicate the potential threat of Black Nationalism. Though the BPP lasted into the 1980s, the FBI completed its objective by rendering them ineffective. The COINTELPRO was a multi-dimensional effort that was ultimately very successful in marginalizing the Black Panther Party from the populace of the United States without completely taking the party out.

The 1960s were a politically charged decade and a pivotal time for Civil Rights. Nearly a century after the ratification of the 13th Amendment, Black Americans still faced life-threatening prejudice. As the decade went on, the Civil Rights movement flourished. Uprisings across the country, from Detroit to Newark, spoke to the angry Black populous fighting for equality. Unrest in the community continued to grow, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation's concern about organized revolution grew along with it. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the revisions made to the Civil Rights Act in 1968 were not enough of a gesture from the United States Government to rectify the injustices faced by the Black Population. This, in turn, created a more radical approach to gaining equality- the Civil Rights Movement shifted into Black Power. The FBI's greatest fear was Black leaders engendering a sense of freedom within their community. The Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was a campaign conducted by the FBI and created by its director, J. Edgar Hoover, from 1956 to 1971. Through COINTELPRO, the FBI targeted groups that it deemed subversive. The FBI's goal was to dismantle these groups and to destroy their public perception as much as possible. The first group targeted by COINTELPRO was the U.S. Communist Party during the Red Scare of the 1950s. The program eventually expanded to target more groups during the 1960's. In August 1967, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover expanded the bureau's Counterintelligence Program to tackle Black Nationalism.

Did the FBI target the Black Panther Party because they were a "black extremist organization… advocating the use of violence and guerrilla tactics to overthrow the U.S. government"[2]? Or was it actually because of their "free breakfast program," which FBI director J. Edgar Hoover feared brought about a sense of unity and strength in the Black Community? In the film A Huey P Newton Story, Roger Guenveur Smith states:

If you read the FBI files, you will see that even Mr. J. Edgar Hoover himself had to say that it was not the guns that were the greatest threat to the International security of the United States of America; it was not the guns, it was the Free Children's Breakfast Program that was the greatest threat to the international security of the United States of America. [3]

In 1971, a robbery conducted by the Citizens Committee to Investigate the FBI led to a leak of the COINTELPRO files to the media. The backlash from politicians and the public caused the FBI to discontinue the Counterintelligence Program. Later, more information would be discovered through Freedom of Information Act requests and lawsuits filed by BPP members. Next came information obtained from federal agents who came forward and confessed their wrongdoings and involvement in the COINTELPRO. In 1976, the Senate formed a special Senate committee- The Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence (later nicknamed the "Church Committee"). Unfortunately, many documents from the COINTELPRO went unreleased, and parts of the documents released were blacked out. The investigation concluded that the FBI wrongfully targeted, surveilled, and violated the rights of average citizens.

The Black Panther Party experienced significant splits in 1971; from that point on, the party started to decline. According to political scientist Ollie A. Johnson: “From 1970-1974, the party changed from a large, decentralized, revolutionary organization to a small, highly centralized reformist group.”[4] All the chapters, besides Oakland, were shut down. Though the Black Panther Party went on into the early 1980s, the party as it was no longer existed. The FBI may not have diminished them entirely, but they crippled the Panthers so severely that the party could never recover- thereby achieving their goal. This was accomplished through consistent harassment, surveillance, covert operations that used illegal tactics and infiltration, multiple coalitions with local law enforcement, and reinforcement from the Panther's negative perception in the media.

Historiography

The Federal Bureau of Investigations’ Counterintelligence Program spanned from 1956 to 1971 and has remained controversial. The program involved the illegal surveillance of numerous U.S. citizens, covert and illegal operations, and the production of false narratives. The program, in turn, significantly impacted various political movements in the United States- especially the Civil Rights Movement. The FBI stated that “the purpose of this new counterintelligence program is to expose, disrupt, misdirect, and otherwise neutralize the activities of Black Nationalist organizations and groupings and their leadership, spokesmen, made, and supporters.”[5] The COINTELRO focused significantly on Black Liberation groups. This period of history has garnered substantial attention from historians due to its profound impact on groups like the Black Panther Party. Though the consensus of the program is that it had a negative effect, some historians argue that the program was not the cause of the demise of the BPP. Historians Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, for instance, argued that “To what extent federal counterintelligence measures may have contributed to the unraveling of… the Oakland Party in the 1970’s is difficult to determine.” [6] Also, most historians have concluded that, even after the exposure of COINTELPRO to the public, the general population still saw the FBI positively.

One of the first notable books on the topic is Racial Matters: the FBI's Secret War on Black America, 1960-1972, published in 1989. Author Kenneth O'Reilly received his Ph.D. in American history from Marquette University. He has published several books on the Federal Bureau of Investigation and is a professor specializing in 20th-century U.S. history. Chapter 8 and Chapter 9 of O'Reilly's book focus on the relationship between the FBI and the Black Panther Party. Here, O'Reilly tears into the FBI and its intentions with COINTELPRO, debunking the portrayal of the Bureau as one that made great strides toward racial justice. O’Reilly highlights the racist ideals that FBI director J Edgar Hoover shared with white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. O'Reilly’s take on President Johnson and his administration’s role in enabling the Bureau’s illegal actions, however, is confusing. This point was brought up in Robert Justin Goldstein’s review of O’Reilly’s book as “another example of overreaching”[7]. He asserts that Johnson enabled the FBI’s attacks on the Black Panther Party. O’Reilly states that Hoover and his aides "interpreted the president's obsession with militants and nationalists, and as well with those civil rights leaders who opposed the Vietnam war, as an Oval Office grant of authority to do whatever was necessary to neutralize them"[8]. Right after that,  O'Reilly admits that it is uncertain how much Lyndon B Johnson knew about the FBI's counterintelligence. Goldstein does agree with O’Reilly “that not only Johnson but John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon… were directly responsible for encouraging massive FBI intelligence gathering”. Goldstein and O’Reilly agree that the lack of control and supervision of the FBI puts much of the responsibility on these presidential administrations.  Though Goldstein’s review of O’Reilly’s work was not all praise, he gives credit where it is due, deeming this book as “the most comprehensive account yet published concerning the FBI and the civil rights movement” [9]. O’Reilly concludes that the nation's congressional leaders overwhelmingly favored the dismantling of Black Power groups and the jailing of their prominent members.

At the beginning of a review of O'Reilly's book, Steven F. Lawson agrees with O’Reilly’s assertion that, even after the exposure of the illegal and unethical Counterintelligence Program, the public still admired the FBI. Lawson seems to disdain J. Edgar Hoover, which is something to consider when reading the book review. Nevertheless, facts support his disdain concerning Hoover's character. He goes on to emphasize Hoover's fear of racial equality and his sympathizing with white supremacy groups.

O’Reilly notes the impact that Attorney General Clark had on the FBI's operations — adding another actor to the list of those who enabled the FBI’s mentions. Though Clark was not the most loved official by Hoover, he was a part of introducing surveillance to the United States government. According to the text, J. Edgar Hoover called Attorney General Clark "a coddler of crooks and Black terrorists and an enemy of law-and-order values."[10] Many people in Washington viewed Clark negatively. AG Clark supported recruiting informants, but Hoover clarified that he would do it on his terms. Once the "communist menace" was replaced with a new Black one, the FBI began targeting Black Power organizations. 

In 2001, Bettye Collier-Thomas and V.P. Franklin put together Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement- a compilation of separate essays. This book addresses the many instances where the FBI targeted an African American woman—going as far back as 1940 when the FBI targeted Ella Baker. In the essay "No One Ever Asks a Mans Roll in The Revolution," the author Tracey A Matthews mentions the BPP, highlighting the "competing gender ideologies"[11] within the Black Power Movement and the BPP. Not only did the party have external forces depleting them, but there were internal forces as well. The struggle with gender roles took its toll, and the FBI took advantage of any division it discovered within the party. Both Matthews and O'Reilly would agree that the Panther's various social programs, including the Free Children's Breakfast Program, horrified the FBI. The programs they implemented went neck and neck with the destruction campaigns implemented by the Bureau.  Matthews, like O'Reilly, discusses the importance of FBI destruction campaigns, like using informants to achieve their goal. These informants gathered information for the FBI and incited activity that would put the party at risk. Matthews states that "many of the FBI's activities against the Party were designed to undermine the free breakfast for children operations." The motive behind the FBI's covert operations were to destroy the party; it could not achieve its goal if the party were doing credible things for the community.

In 2011, Ryan J. Kirby wrote an article titled, “Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Community Activism and the Black Panther Party”. This article examines the activism of the Black Panther Party from 1966 to 1971, focusing on the relationship between the FBI and the BPP. 1968 was a big year for the party; the "Free Huey" campaign took the party from Oakland all across the country. The growth of the party and the surprising amount of support it engendered was a significant concern to the FBI. The larger the party got, the more the Counterintelligence Program expanded. The Bureau matched every move the party made. According to Kirby, in these four years, the COINTELPRO attacks on the BPP led to "violent confrontations, arrests, and fines that depleted the party's funds and strength."[12] This quote made me consider the primary sources I examined at Yale Sterling Memorial Library and the National Archives in D.C. The John R. Williams Papers contains subpoenas of the party's finances, and so do the congressional records in D.C. Kirby's article also mentions a point made in the Matthews's article from Sisters in the Struggle[13]- the party had internal issues that impacted them- they were hindered more by the FBI's interference.

Jakobi Williams published the book From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago in 2013. William’s is currently a professor in African American Studies and African diaspora at Indiana University. Williams dives into the tumultuous but significant relationship between the Chicago BPP (ILBPP- Illinois Black Panther Party) and the FBI. Williams and O’Reilly (among other historians) have come to the same conclusions about J. Edgar Hoover’s motives and his character. On page 172, Williams states that J. Edgar Hoover “disliked political leftists, believed in white supremacy, and aligned his position with U.S. elites to maintain blacks in subordinate economic positions.”[14] Where there is smoke, there is fire- most historians who have written about J. Edgar Hoover have articulated the same things.

William’s highlighting of the ILBPP allows for a new perspective of the party. Scholarship about the BPP was often centered around its Oakland chapter, putting the focus on Chicago adds more pieces to the puzzle. Williams credits the FBI's particular interest in the Chicago chapter to its leader, Fred Hampton. Due to the political climate in Chicago and across the nation, Chicago BPP concluded that partnering with the Black Stone Rangers (another Black Liberation group) would help increase their rank and file. One of the first things on the FBI's to-do list was to destroy the relationship between the Black Panthers and Black Stone Rangers in Chicago. Historians writing about COINTELPRO consistently bring up the FBI's strategy of causing strife within Black liberation movements to weaken them. Williams finds, like many others, that the interferences made by the FBI heightened the rift between the groups.

The book is perfectly separated into well-thought-out chapters breaking down the strategy the FBI, in partnership with law enforcement, used to dismantle the ILBPP. Chapter Five is titled Law Enforcement Repressions and the Assassination of Chairman Fred Hampton. The mention of using local media to help heighten the public’s fear of the party is a common theme in all of the sources cited so far- going back to O’Reilly’s book. At the chapter's start, Williams states, “Both the Chicago Police Department, intelligence arm, the Red Squad, and FBI agents enlisted the local media in efforts to discredit the Panthers.” [15] Williams emphasizes an essential fact about the relationship between the FBI and the local Chicago Police. Judson Jefferies raves in a book review about how Williams unpacked the BPP’s campaign against the Mayor of Chicago.[16] The relationship between the Mayor and the Chicago Police speaks to how deep the fight was to destroy the BPP. The fact is that the FBI could not complete the task alone, and it was not the only group that wanted something to be done about the Panthers. The protests at Chicago’s Democratic National Convention increased the Party’s attention. Williams refers to the mayor’s “stranglehold on political protest, the brutality of the city’s police force, and (though this did not come to light for many years) the city government’s infiltration of protest groups.”[17]

Though the FBI cooperated with various departments nationwide, their relationship with Chicago was profound. The Chicago police were thoroughly intertwined with the Bureau, as stated in the text, “to an extent not duplicated in any other city.”[18] The two forces worked closely together to deplete the BPP of their resources and instill fear and paranoia. Raids and arrests happened often, and the BPP did not have the money to back up the costs of bail or lawyers. Also, spending money on bail and lawyers meant less funding for their community programs.

As mentioned earlier, in 2013, Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr. wrote an informative study of the Oakland Party, discussing the impact of surveillance and COINTELPRO in particular. Bloom and Martin argue that the state's repression did not significantly impact the BPP in Oakland, or at least not to the degree that other historians thought. This take is not common, but the points made throughout the book are valid. For example, the party’s involvement with so-called enemies of the state and third-world nations greatly hindered them. However, this book fails to mention many key factors, as noted in a book review by Navid Farnia. Farnia states that they overlook the “ruthlessness of what Judson L. Jeffries calls the repressive government apparatus.”[19]

In 2020, Brian Mullgardt wrote an article in the Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society (1998-), further delving into the story of the ILBPP. Here, he quotes Bloom and Martin’s piece, citing their indecisiveness on the impact of COINTELPRO on the BPP. What stands out to in Mullgardt’s piece is his mention of COINTELPRO’s ineffectiveness in completing specific tasks. He explains ‘that the Panthers, along with the Puerto Rican organization the Young Lords and the white groups the Young Patriots and Rising Up Angry, formed the Rainbow Coalition in 1969, further indicating COINTELPRO’s ineffectiveness at sowing discord in Illinois.”[20]. That does not mean the Rainbow Coalition was a huge success- the coalition did not last, but its impact did. That is noted in Ana Durkin Keating’s review of Williams’s work. She mentions the importance of the book’s conclusion, looking at the lasting impact of the ILBPP-noting the Rainbow Coalition's effect on electing Chicago’s first Black mayor in 1983. [21]

Each monograph and essay examined reaffirms my choice of primary sources. These primary sources include the Freedom of Information Act, congressional records, first-hand accounts from Black Panthers and Bureau members, and newspaper articles. The only concern with the primary sources is the FOIA documents- some are hard to interpret due to the redacted pieces. However, that does not mean they aren't valuable. Even looking as far back as O'Reilly's book Racial Matters: the FBI's Secret War on Black America, 1960-1972 from 1989, most historians researching the topic used what they could from the Freedom-of-Information Act FBI documents. These files, combined with Congressional records, first-hand accounts, and newspaper articles, give a well-informed view of the strategies used by the FBI to dismantle the BPP.

Main Body

The FBI’s nationwide coalition with local law enforcement was its most potent COINTELPRO weapon. Black Panther Déqui Kioni-Sadiki asserts that the length and extent of the FBI's surveillance wasn't common knowledge, that "almost from its inception, J. Edgar Hoover  engaged in an undeclared and clandestine Counter Intelligence Program war- on the BPP in particular and on the whole Black Power Movement in general.”[22] By the end of 1967, the COINTELPRO Black Power initiative had commenced and was implemented with the help of police precincts across the country, from Oakland, CA, to New Haven, CT. Those in local law enforcement working alongside the FBI would be referred to in correspondence as SAC (special agents in charge). From the beginning of the creation of the Black Panther Party's first chapter in Oakland, CA, in 1966, the FBI was on its tail.

The released Counterintelligence Program records include memorandums, letters, "Airtels," and other forms of correspondence. An Airtel communication was to be sent the same day it was composed. Correspondence's being marked Airtel hinted at a sense of urgency. These communications were sometimes made between the Director of the FBI and SACs in various police offices across the country. By 1967, the COINTELPRO operation was in 43 cities across the United States. On February 29, 1968, an Airtel correspondence from G. C. Moore (FBI Associate Director) to William C. Sullivan (Assistant FBI Director, leader of domestic intelligence operations) affirmed that the program was in full force. The subject of the Airtel: COUNTERINTELLIGENCE PROGRAM /BLACK NATIONALIST-HATE GROUPS. Moore starts the Airtel by laying out the purpose of the initiative, "to extend the Counterintelligence Program designed to neutralize militant black nationalist groups from 23 to 41 field divisions to cover the great majority of black nationalist activity in this country". This Airtel was in reference to another Airtel sent on August 25, 1967, that held instructions regarding the COINTELPRO Black nationalist operation. At the time, the Airtel went to twenty-three different cities nationwide. Moore referred to the "tremendous increase in black nationalist activity," asserting that a sense of urgency needed to be behind the implementation of the FBI's COINTELPRO initiative. This Airtel established guidelines that the SACs should follow. One is that all SACs submit progress reports periodically and have any COINTELPRO initiatives approved before implementation. Though it is apparent looking through the records that these guidelines aren’t as stringent.

The post haste feel of the Airtel proved that the FBI was concerned. They no longer saw Black resistance as unorganized and lacking in leadership; they started to see it as an actual threat. How could it not be? The Black Panther Party had stretched across the country, coast to coast. They had legitimate parties in major cities like Chicago, IL, and Charleston, NC; the FBI was on top of the growing "problem." An Airtel dated March 4, 1968, from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to SAC Albany lists all the FBI field offices that were participating in the initiative to take down Black “extremist” groups. A few locations listed include Atlanta, GA; Baltimore, MA; Detroit, MI; Memphis, TN; Los Angeles, CA; New Orleans, LA; New York, NY. The Airtel stated that "the Counterintelligence Program is now being expanded to include 41 offices. Each office added to this program should designate an agent familiar with black nationalist activity… this agent will be responsible for the periodic progress letters being requested."  [23] The Airtel also laid out a list of goals set by the Bureau, which each field office was required to follow. Though the Black Panther Party wasn't the only Black Nationalist group on the FBI's radar, it was at the top of the list.

Another Airtel correspondence dated May 27, 1969, from J. Edgar Hoover to SAC, San Francisco, displays the blatant push to distort the image of the Black Panther Party. This Airtel was in response to another Airtel made to the Director by SAC, San Francisco, on May 14, 1969. One in which SAC San Francisco expressed their hesitance to pursue the Black Panther Party. The DOJ sees the BPP as a Black Nationalist group intending to overthrow the government; San Francisco disagreed, writing that though the Black Panther Party is seen as a subversive, violent organization, “there seems to be little likelihood of this.”  The director's response starts with a defensive tone, arguing that the Airtel sent by the San Francisco office expresses a negative outlook on COINTELPRO and is unacceptable to the Bureau, stating that “your (SAC, San Francisco) reasoning is not in line with Bureau objectives…”[24]. The Airtel starts with counterarguments to statements made by SAC, San Francisco. According to the Airtel, SAC, San Francisco was not urgently ensuring the FBI COINTELPRO objectives were met in their jurisdiction. Hoover then lists the various concerns the BPP poses to San Francisco and its surrounding area. Throughout the Airtel, the director continuously emphasized keeping the BPP away from "moderate" Black and white community members who might support them. Hoovers' next topic of concern was The Breakfast for Children Program. The FBI feared that The Breakfast For Children Program, a program that gave free food to children before they went to school, would likely appeal to moderate Black and white community members. This food wasn't only intended for Black and brown children, but it was also for poor white children. Hoover insists that The Breakfast for Children Program was developed with malicious intent. This implies that the Panthers conducted programs like this simply to build their public image and recruit youth for their cause. Hoover informed SAC, San Francisco, that their COINTELPRO operations needed re-evaluation. Suggesting that San Francisco pick other agents better suited for COINTELPRO operations. This correspondence made it clear that Hoover and the FBI had little tolerance for those in the COINTELPRO network questioning their orders and the motives behind them. From the beginning of the COINTELPRO Black Nationalist initiative, the goal was to establish a strong allegiance between the FBI and the SAC offices. Local police needed to prove their loyalty to the FBI and the COINTELPRO. These connections would play a key role in the FBI’s initiative and the ultimate downfall of the Black Panther Party.

The SAC at work: various cases from city to city

Different objectives made in cities nationwide by law enforcement were key to getting at the weak points of the Black Panther Party’s infrastructure.  At the end of Huey Newton's Revolutionary Suicide, he states, "A revolutionary party is under continual stress from both internal and external forces. By its very nature, a political organization dedicated to social change invites attack from the established order, constantly vigilant to destroy it." The FBI had the time, the resources, and the grit to continually attack and infiltrate the Black Panther Party at any chance it could get.

Fighting within political groups, especially ones garnered around the motivation of revolution, was inevitable. The FBI wanted to heighten their chances of things going awry within the confines of the Black Panther Party, so they strategized. Inserting informants and agent provocateurs was a standard method used by the FBI to infiltrate BPP chapters. Direct and indirect action from the FBI's COINTELPRO initiative weighed heavy on the party.

SAC, San Diego cites their accomplishments in an AIRTEL from August 20, 1969, "Shootings, beatings, and high degree of unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of Southeast San Diego although no specific counterintelligence action can be credited with contributing to this over-all situation, it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributed to this program…”[25] Straight from the horse's mouth, law enforcement took responsibility for destroying local communities through the COINTELPRO initiative. The Black revolutionaries of San Diego were victims of the FBI’s manipulation, which would lead to infighting and eventually the death of two of the BPP San Diego Chapter’s leaders.

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The FBI intended to destroy the morale of the BPP and its members; attacking leadership could have a domino effect. The FBI and local law enforcement knew it was necessary to get into the minds of the youth. This was made evident in an Airtel from SAC, San Francisco, stating that "The Negro youth and moderate must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries." The Black Panther Party was being made an example of by local and federal law enforcement. Many BPP members were incarcerated, some of whom remained behind bars for a long time. Being tangled up in the carceral system was mentally and physically exhausting and a great way to deplete morale. It was also a way to rob the party of their funding stashed away for community purposes.

From its formation, the BPP saw the FBI as an immediate threat which had no mercy.  Former Panther Sundiata Acoli (former Panther) recalls the beginning of the COINTELPRO initiative against the BPP in "An Updated History of the New Afrikan Prison Struggle" from the book Look For Me in The Whirlwind. Acoli writes:

It began with the mass arrest of Lumumba Shakur and the New York Panther 21. It followed with a series of military raids on the Black Panther Party offices in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Haven, Jersey City, Detroit, Chicago, Denver, Omaha, Sacramento, and San Diego, and was capped off with an early-morning four-hour siege that poured thousands of rounds into the Los Angeles BPP office.[26]

Chicago, Illinois

The case of the Black Panther Party in Chicago exemplifies the devastating tactics used in COINTELPRO. An Airtel, from the FBI Director to SAC, Chicago, gives the SAC office authority to carry out an operation they detailed to the FBI. The letter states, "Authority is granted" for the mailing of anonymous letters, a tactic often used by the SAC offices. The bureau directed the SAC office to "utilize a commercially purchased envelope for this letter and ensure that the mailing is not traced to the source.”[27] Informants were to take every step to ensure that no one suspected law enforcement of composing the letters. That letter was for Black Stone Rangers leader Jeff Fort, another Black community organization founded in Chicago . The bureau hoped this letter would create strife between the Black Stone Rangers and the BPP. Fred Hampton’s willingness and intention to work with other organizations scared the FBI and bogus letters like this prevented those coalitions that Fred Hampton hoped to form and ruined those the BPP already had.  After the letters were sent, the conflict between both parties arose, and there was no hope of working with the Black Stone Rangers. Using this tactic, along with others, dissolved Fred Hampton’s dream of a “rainbow coalition,” giving the Bureau what it wanted.

Like fake letters, informants were frequent during the height of the COINTELPRO objective. The most notable use being with William O’Neal in Chicago, IL. O’Neal was the informant who infiltrated the Chicago Black Panther Party in 1969, leading to the death of revered leader Fred Hampton. FBI informants did not follow any code of conduct- the mission was for them to get as much information as possible and hopefully cause some trouble in the process. Fred Hampton's case was gruesome and unjustifiable, but a great example of the extent to which the FBI went to achieve its goals. You can see the threat he posed to the FBI just by looking at the files dedicated to Fred Hampton. In the FOIA COINTELPRO records, Fred Hampton Part 1 file is compiled of 100 pages. [28] The file includes newspaper articles around the death of Fred Hampton, transcripts from a news conference held by the Maywood Human Relations Commission, Airtel’s, and other records.

The FBI informant William O’Neal tells his story in The Eyes on the Prize series documentary.  [29] William O’Neal became an FBI informant after a run-in with the law. O’Neal and a friend stole a car, drove around Chicago, and left to visit a relative out of state. They stopped at a pool hall, where visitors were required to leave their names and addresses. After playing a few games, the gentlemen left the pool hall, got into an accident outside, and fled. They managed to get back to Chicago, and "about three, four months later," O’Neal was contacted by FBI agent Roy Mitchell. Mitchell let O’Neal know that the FBI knew of the accident in the stolen car, playing a game of cat and mouse back and forth with O’Neal for several minutes. Mitchell assured O’Neal that though his lies weren't believable, he had nothing to worry about- if he helped him out. Something is troubling about the circumstances O’Neal faced- a man encounters legal issues, and the police approach him with a quid pro quo situation to buy his freedom. In the interview, O’Neal details the authority that Chicago’s SAC gave him. He explained that FBI agent Roy Mitchell "gave me a lot of room, a lot of leash, in order to be a Panther. He wanted me to become a Panther before I became an FBI agent."[30] The tone in O’Neal’s voice throughout the interview and the constant self-assurance that he was not responsible for the assassination of Fred Hampton spoke to his guilt.

O’Neal got close to the party, gained its members' trust, and obtained secrets vital to the Chicago PD's operations. O’Neal became Hampton’s bodyguard and eventually the head of BPP security in Chicago. He was so close to Fred Hampton that he was able to create a map of Hampton's home. This map considered every detail, from the purpose of each room down to the location of furniture. Chicago PD used this to plan the assassination, disguised as a so-called arms raid of Fred Hampton’s residence on December 3, 1969. That evening, O’Neal drugged Hampton, assuring that he would be subdued during the planned raid. Finally, at 4 am the Chicago PD busted into the Hampton residence, achieving their goal of killing Fred Hampton.

California to Connecticut

The case of Ericka Huggins exemplifies how depleting it was to be a part of the Black Panther Party and constantly under the microscope of the FBI. Huggins is known for participating in the New Haven, CT chapter. But, Huggins roots are in Los Angeles, where she lived with her husband, Jon Huggins. Huggins was murdered, not directly by the FBI or any informants, but he did die due to the FBI’s actions through their COINTELPRO initiative. The bureau had clandestine, indirect ways of getting what it wanted. In an Airtel communication from SAC, Los Angeles, to the FBI Director, SAC agents lay out operations "under consideration."[31] The operations bore a resemblance to those implemented in Chicago. The Airtel discusses a series of anonymous letters that the SAC office will send out—one to the BPP from a member of the US organization (a rival Black nationalist organization). The letter would go on to state that members of the group US are aware of "plans" that the BPP had to kill their leader, Ron Karenga. SAC, Los Angeles, hoped this would "result in a US and BPP vendetta." [32] Next, a letter was sent to the party's donor, The Peace and Freedom Party (PFP). The intention of the letter was for the PFP to cut ties with the BPP. The letter warned that "when the armed rebellion comes, the whites in the PFP will be lined up against the wall with the rest of the whites."[33] The anonymous letter would indefinitely cause a stir and cripple the relationship that both organizations had.  This was proven on January 17, 1969, when Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and Jon Huggins were killed by members of the US. A tragedy that would forever tarnish the relationship between both groups and reassured the FBI that their initiative was working.

As stated before, BPP leader Ericka Huggins moved to New Haven after her husband's death to be close to his family.   June 4, 1971, an Airtel was sent to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover from SAC, New Haven[34].  A monthly summary from New Haven, reporting to headquarters and keeping everyone updated. Part 1 of the summary lists the informants involved in SAC New Haven operations, but the actual list is deleted from the file. Here, the informants laid out every piece of information they received from their deceptive fieldwork. The document included the branch's name, national leaders, local leaders, headquarters location, and support groups. They knew everything the party and its members did, down to the last detail. In that same Airtel, SAC New Haven lists the party's "public appearances," mainly referring to their various demonstrations, how unorganized they were, how many people were in attendance, etc. The case of the New Haven Black Panthers involved Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale. Both Panthers were charged with conspiracy involving the murder of Alex Rackley in 1969 after a tape of Huggins interrogating the victim was released. The trial was less than a year long, from October 1970 to May 1971, but Huggins was imprisoned for two years. Due to the controversy surrounding the case, the jury selection process was the most prolonged in the history of Connecticut. Ericka was in prison, away from a tiny baby, as well as dealing with the death of her husband- living in a mentally exhausted state. This was all intentional- everything worked out as planned.

In an Airtel, the New Haven SAC mentioned the release of Ericka Huggins on May 25, 1971, "the case against the Panthers was dismissed, and ERICKA HUGGINS was immediately freed.” [35] Though Huggins was freed, it did not take away the trauma that she endured throughout the process. The work became grueling and the continual interaction with law enforcement was life-altering. Another Airtel from SAC New Haven from June 11, 1971, contains a transcript from a telephone conversation. This conversation shows the very real impact all this legal trouble had on the Black Panther Party. Panther Millie Farmer calls George Edwards in the transcript, stating that she "exhausted all of her sources in New Haven" [36] and needed to borrow $380 before the 15th when she goes to a court hearing. The FBI's plan was working; they were exhausting the members of the BPP in every way possible. All those involved in the COINTELPRO initiative knew it was necessary to get into the minds of the youth. In a correspondence to the FBI, SAC San Francisco stated that, "The Negro youth and moderate must be made to understand that if they succumb to revolutionary teaching, they will be dead revolutionaries." Many BPP members were incarcerated, some of whom remained behind bars for quite some time. Dealing with the carceral system is exhausting and a great way to deplete morale. It is mentally and physically exhausting and could rob a party of a good portion of their funding stashed away for community purposes.

North Carolina

The case of The Black Panther Party in North Carolina also speaks directly to the FBI's devastating impact. So, it seems that wherever a chapter popped up, the FBI followed. SAC Charlotte reported back to the FBI that on April 21, 1969, a man (whose name was deleted) from Greensboro contacted the BPP in Oakland to get the okay to form their own chapter. The Oakland chapter gave them “no authority at this time to organize”. [37] On May 8, 1969, SAC, Charlotte contacted the FBI Director via Airtel. The Airtel states that after reviewing information through investigation, they had determined “that a charter has not been issued to a Black Panther unit in North Carolina... informants report that the Charlotte, N.C., and Greensboro, N. C. Both have hopes of receiving charters…” [38] There is another COINTELPRO correspondence in this FBI file where the sender and receiver have been blacked out. However, the correspondence starts by informing us that on May 21, 1969, posters were being passed around Charlotte. The next page of the file contains a copy of the flyer for a rally that will last from 12 to 4 pm at a restaurant called Chicken and Ribs. The flyer cited the organizers as “Citizens of the Black Community who are interested in organizing. A Black Panther Party”[39]. The FBI knew every single move of Black organizers, whether they were officially affiliated with the Black Panther Party or not.

In a memorandum on August 25, 1969, the FBI in Charlotte stated that "this group (Afro-American Unity Organization) has since the fall of 1968 been unsuccessfully attempting to affiliate nationally with the Black Panther Party… advised that this group even though they are not affiliated nationally with the BPP do wear the garb of the BPP and study from books supplied by the BPP.”[40]  The purpose of the memorandum is to investigate the possibility of a BPP chapter being formed, due to a meeting of "the potential BPP" in Charlotte. That is six months of investigation, and there is still no assurance of any affiliation. Nevertheless, the SAC office was established in Charlotte; the agents began documenting every single step made by those active in Charlotte. Even if they weren't affiliated, this proactiveness on the part of the FBI put them one step ahead.

The FBI North Carolina Files are extensive; the focus isn’t just on one city in North Carolina. Greensboro, Charlotte, and Winston-Salem are the three cities most frequently mentioned. On the FOIA archive, there is a section listed as “Black Panther Party, Winston Salem, NC.” some of these are duplicate files as the ones in the FBI vault and on the Internet Archive website.[41] In Part 01 file, a document details the BPP’s activity in North Carolina. In the heading of this document, it says UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE FEDERAL BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION. Bellow that title says, “copy to:” and then lists several army bases. The report of date lists SA, something blacked out, May 23, 1969. The next page lists a table of Contents and Part 1 is Charlotte. Subsection A starts on page 4, titled Organizational Activities and Connections with the Black Panther Party Headquarters, Berkley, California. First notation, December 13, 1968, an individual (name blacked out) had recently contacted the BPP headquarters in Oakland, referring to themself as a member of the Charlotte-based group Afro-American Unity Organization. The person was inquiring about affiliating with the Black Panther Party, stating that he was told “it would be necessary for him to forward the amount of $300.00 to the national headquarters so that a representative of the national office… could travel to Charlotte, North Carolina, to indoctrinate the new members”.[42] Further on in the document it states that on December 30, a blacked-out name advised that Jerome Clifton Johnson, known as “The Fox” held a meeting at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, claiming to be a member of the Black Panther Party.[43] This subsection of the document concludes that Jerome Johnson wasn’t able to “establish affiliation with the BPP of California”. Apparently, the reasoning behind the delay in receiving national accreditation is due to “a purge being conducted within the national party to get rid of informants and undesirable characters.”[44] It was confirmed on May 13, 1969, that Charlotte did not have a “charter group of the BPP”. The paranoia and fear that came over BPP members indicated that the FBI’s strategies were hard at work. This made it clear that the constant interference from law enforcement hindered the party’s expansion and ultimately trust with one another. Without a strong rank and file, the BPP had nothing.

Local police thoroughly documented the activities of anyone associated with the BPP.   Looking to correspondence from SAC, Charlotte, to the FBI director labeled 5:31 PM URGENT, stamped for March 17, 1969, though the incident detailed occurred on February 8. The agent composing the letter goes on to describe a “plot to bomb” a local market by the Black Panthers in Greensboro. Even if there is no evidence to back up claims, the SAC office delivers the claims to the bureau. The very first sentence of the correspondence is blacked out. Still, the following sentence says “members of the Black Panther Party (BPP), Greensboro, NC are discussing the possibility of bombing the Thrifty Curb Market in Greensboro NC”.  No matter who did it, if it talked like a Panther and walked like a Panther, the FBI was on top of them. The surveillance that came along with the COINTELPRO initiative was constant and excessive.

New York, NY

The Collective Autobiography of the New York 21 (1971) gives great insight into the extent of the harassment the Black Panther Party faced at the hands of local law enforcement and the FBI. The Case is one of great significance; not only did it deplete the resources of the New York Panthers, but it also tarnished the relationship between the New York Panthers and the National Chapter (Oakland, CA). The New York 21 trial was one of the costliest New York had seen at the time and quickly became a prominent topic in the media. According to Déqui Kioni-Sadiki the expensive and prolonged trial was "never about justice or protecting people or places from Panthers allegedly conspiring to harm or destroy them”[45] The group known as the New York Panther 21 had been charged with an array of crimes, 186 counts including attempted arson and conspiracy to blow up police precincts, schools, and other locations, including the New York Botanical Garden[46] It seemed that "almost the entire" Harlem-Bronx chapter of the party was tied up in the web. On May 13, 1971, the jury found those Black Panthers not guilty. This might seem like a win for the BPP, but the impact of the trial left a more significant mark.

The legal issues that the New York chapter faced led to a need for more support for incarcerated members. They called on the national leadership to step up and aid their chapter- unfortunately, Oakland did not answer their calls for help. The New York chapter did not appreciate the lack of support they received from Oakland and parted ways from them in 1971. Slowly, the cracks in the party became bigger and bigger, breaking up coalitions and giving the FBI what it wanted.

The Committee on Internal Security of the United States House of Representatives Hearings on the Black Panther Party

Another outcome of the FBI’s COINTELPRO campaign was formal House of Representative investigations into the Black Panther Party- these did not help the Party maintain its durability and optimism. In 1970, The Committee on Internal Security of the House of Representatives held a series of hearings concerning various chapters of the BPP. On Tuesday, March 3, 1970, the committee started its investigation discussing the Kansas City Chapters and its activities. Day two was led by Chairman, Representative Richard H. Ichard. He begins by discussing claims of the party’s activity (referring to the press) and the contradictory claims from The Black Panther Party and its supporters. Ichard states that “It's effects and supposed successes in the communities throughout the Nation, the amount of police work that has been consumed because of it, and the attention it has been afforded by the press seems to me to be inordinately disproportionate to the size of the Black Panthers.[47] Representative Ichard points out that the party did not present a significant threat. Then why the hearings? Though the party appeared unorganized and small in scale, the hearings alone prove that the BPP posed a threat. Unfortunately, false narratives about the party ignited the fear held by many Americans at the time. This lead to local representatives taking action under the pressure of their constituents.

The revolutionary vocabulary and statements used by Black Panther leaders rubbed many people the wrong way. Richard explains his reasoning for voting yes for the investigation, citing the Panther’s 10-point program as a concern. He continues to assert that though the words of Panther leaders could be rhetoric, there is enough evidence around those words that they pose a threat; “… In view of these statements and in view of the depth of specific and comprehensive data and in order to ascertain if there are deficiencies in the law which are in need of remedy. Order to permit society to contend to such organizations, this committee has authorized an investigation and hearings.”[48] What Representative Ichard said next really strikes a chord. If the Federal Government was responsible for keeping law and order in Kansas City, "then we (the United States) must have a national police force. Very few people in the Congress, very few people in this Nation, want a national police force."[49] The mention of this concern reassures the fact that Congress, to a certain extent, was aware of the FBI's plans. Nevertheless, the local government was taking its own measures to examine the party and its intentions. Probing the Black Panther Party, subpoenaing witnesses, and collecting evidence "until we are satisfied that enough is known to make an intelligent evaluation.”

In part two of the hearings, the committee examined the Seattle, WA, chapter of the BPP. This was referred to as a “continuation of the series of hearings concerning the Black Panther Party.” [50] The committee subpoenaed witnesses who would testify, along with committee investigators. Representative Richardson Preyer of North Carolina proclaimed that these testimonies pertained to the BPP Seattle chapter and “the general reaction of the Seattle community to the Black Panther Party”[51] The community’s perception was key for the Black Panther’s survival, if the community did not show support success would be hard to achieve. The first witness is a special investigator from the Seattle Police Department. Officer Porter concluded that the Black Panther Party in Seattle was dying off, and turnout was dropping. He estimated that the chapter’s membership decreased from around “12 to 15” to “8 to 11” members.  The officer blames this decline in membership on the party’s radicalism, stating, “They felt that the party had nothing to offer them. To quote several of those youngsters, they didn’t feel like going to a meeting and listening to lectures and studying out of Chairman Mao’s “red book”. This is a bold statement, without actual evidence but his account and estimations. Knowing how corrupt the police were when dealing with the BPP, these words don’t hold as much weight. Representative Ichord asked the same question, “How do you know that?”. He wants to know how accurate the testimony of this officer is. The officer also credits the various arrests, charges, and convictions that party members have received as another reason why membership declined.

Part three of the hearings lasted from July 21, to the 24. In this hearing, the committee examined three cities: Detroit, MI, Philadelphia, PA, and Indianapolis, IN. Representative Pryor states that “the subjects that we will inquire into today relate to the history, the origin, the organization, character, the objectives, and activities of the Black Panther Party.”[52] Three of the four witnesses were formally BPP members, one from either of the three cities. The fourth is the Philadelphia Police Sergeant. The first witness was from Detroit. Representative Pryror asked a variety of questions regarding the promotion and education of self-defense. The party’s use of weapons and self-defense courses worried U.S. officials. Berry recalled the death of the BPP's defense captain being the reason that the chapter briefly closed. Though he was not present, he recalls what was conveyed to him- stating that he was killed in a Black Panther home with twelve other members present. Calls from the Chicago chapter, which held seniority over Detroit, pressured the party to disperse. Berry asserts that though the death of the captain was the straw that broke the camel’s back, the Black Panther Party is no longer in Detroit for various reasons. Barry painted a clear picture of the BPP as a corrupt, unorganized, and violent organization. According to Barry, Chief of Staff (BPP Chicago chapter), David Hilliard contacted him after hearing that the BPP was still active in Detroit. Berry claimed that Hilliard threatened him, “he told me that we could get in trouble for posing as Panthers because there were no Black Panthers in Detroit.” Those left of the BPP in Detroit who still wanted to organize created, what Berry refers to as, an organizing branch titled The National Committee to Combat Fascism. Berry never joined that branch, and by his testimony, it was clear the biases he had toward radical dissent. Barry bragged about his harmony with law enforcement; then he claimed that the national party called him “chicken.” These claims help paint the narrative that the BPP is corrupt and violence prone. The three witnesses being former Panthers make those testimony’s biased- they separated from the party for a reason, there was going to be negative feedback. Therefor, these testimonies would not represent the party fairly.

Part four, the final part of the Congressional hearings, involved an examination of the National Office and of the Des Moines, Iowa and Omaha, Nebraska branches of the BPP. These hearings took place on October 6, 7, 8, 13, 14, 15 and November 17 of 1970. Representative Richardson Preyer, again, started by stating that the hearigs were a “continuation of hearings concerning the Black Panther Party”. [53] But, more specifically, he states that the purpose of this fourth part of the hearings is” to develop information on the activities and objectives of the national office of the Black Panther Party” emphasizing statements made by the party about “revolutionary violence” that emanated from “national leaders or printed in the Black Panther Party newspaper”. They would like to conclude, are these statements simply rhetoric? Or is the BPP the real deal, ready to take “revolutionary action”? Again, one of the witnesses is a former Black Panther. Another is Quinn Tamm, executive director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police; Sheriff Frank Madigan, Alameda County sheriff’s office, representing the National Sheriffs Association; and John J. Harrington, national president of Fraternal Order of Police.[54] Representative Preyer believed that these witnesses, “representing three levels of local law enforcement, are in an excellent position to relate to the committee the problems facing the local law enforcement officers in this area and discuss the need for Federal legislation”. It seems that speaking only to law enforcement is biased, showing one side of the argument and not that of the BPP. The first witness called is Investigator Robert M. Horner, chief investigator for the Committee on Internal Security. Investigator Horner answers most of the representatives’ questions in great detail- laying out the activities of the BPP, related groups, affiliated groups, the number of members, the percentage of female members, the age group of the average leader, etc. Then he goes on to state that, “thirty-six out of forty-two groups reported upon were said to have been in possession of firearms” and that “seventeen groups having active chapters and five having inactive chapters were reported to have been in possession of explosives.” Each of those statements was made with no examples nor evidence presented.

Investigator Horner then mentions that “most cities reported that the relationship between the police and the Negro communities is good; that community support of the Panthers is small; and that few, if any, benefits have accrued to the Negro communities through the efforts of the Black Panthers.” The information that the investigator presented was acquired through surveys. These surveys were based upon inquiries directed to seventy-seven law enforcement agencies with active BPP chapters in their jurisdiction. There are going to be biased responses.

The witness, Mr. De Patten, was a former Black Panther as a member of both the Des Moines and Kansas City Chapter. He refers to his actions after joining the BPP, how he came up “with some off the wall theory of marching downtown, destroying it..[55]” Though this is a former member, he wasn’t as dismissive of the BPP belief system as the BPP member cited in the Seattle hearing.  Patten began to describe how he was taught to deal with “right-wingers” when out in public, representing the BPP. He detailed an incident when a white woman came up to him, behaving erratically, stating that she is a “poor white working woman and that they are doing everything for those black people; they even passed a law in Kansas where if they rioted and robbed the stores, nothing would happen to them. I didn’t know anything about any such law and I still don’t.. I told her if she was a white working woman, then we should ally ourselves; that she should be my normal ally… because we were talking about not a race struggle, we were talking about a class struggle…” Patten articulated that, by speaking to her and relating their struggles, he got her to listen. The questioning continued, as if Representative Romines did not want to hear that response; that wasn’t enough to make the party look bad.

The representative continued to question the former Panther. He hounded him about the existence of a BPP in Des Moines, whether it was actually disbanded, and if the National Chapter was the one that ordered the disbanding. He then asked a couple of questions, to which the witness outright said that he “isn’t sure” in response. For example, when representative Romines says, “You made the statement that the des moines Black Panther chapter wanted to relate more on a hard-core community level, is that right?” But, he told Representative Rominespreviously that he “believe(d), they wanted to relate more on a cultural level; that is from my understanding. I have not been to Kansas City, I don’t know for sure about Kansas City”[56]. However, the representative is taking these statements as truth, and in no way does he fact-check these responses. These investigations and those statements made so matter-of-factly applied more pressure on the Black Panther Party.

The media as a catalyst of negative public perception

The mainstream media played an essential role in assisting the FBI in its plan to destroy the Black Panther Party. Though the newspaper articles were not being put out directly by the FBI, it was clear what side the mainstream media resided on. Yes, there were underground revolutionary periodicals like the Black Panther Newspaper, which spoke on the oppression that the party faced at the hands of the police. Despite that, the public was mostly fed negativity concering  the BPP. During the congressional hearing on the Investigation of the Black Panther Party's Kansas City Chapter Representative Ichard addressed those in attendance, stating that "a great number of my colleagues in the House have expressed concerns about the intentions and the capabilities of the Black Panther Party. Citizens throughout the country, and my own constituency included, have been alarmed by press accounts of open incitement to kill, destroy, and revolt.”[57] The constant outpouring of horror stories surrounding the actions and motives of the Black Panther Party plagued public perception.

The New York Times

The New York Times played a role in perpetuating a negative narrative of the Black Panther Party. April 8, 1969, The New York Times published an article titled "Former Members Liken Black Panthers to the Klan". In 1969, The New York Times had 800,000 subscribers. It has been a major news outlet since its founding in 1851.[58]  The black Panther Party was covered by other major newspapers like the Chicago-Sun Times, The Seattle Times, etc. People were reading what was being put out about the party- good or bad, those articles shaped public opinion. The New York Times in particular, whether they knew it or not, played a major role in the public's ongoing fear of the Black Panthers.

Even mainstream media that incorporated the Black Panthers voice in news story’s still inserted police propaganda into the mix. Before the assassination of Fred Hampton, The New York Times published an article titled "Panther Toll Is Now 28" regarding the Chicago Panther's chapter. The start of the article relays a cry out from the Chicago Black Panthers, delivering to the public their claims of a "national conspiracy to wipe out their leadership and destroy their organization."  [59]  The article then goes on to make some obvious and somewhat pointless statements- reinforcing that the audience knows the Black Panthers are “Black” and what type of attire they sport. Once that is over, the journalist lists the Chicago Black Panther's Death Toll, the latest being on January 1, 1968. Twenty-eight people dead, that's quite the toll on a small organization that is up against local police and the federal government of a world superpower. But then, the article shifts to the point of view of the police officers involved in the murders, describing the last shootout as a "furious gun battle which ensued after a woman opened up on the officers with a shotgun." [60] Generally, police across the country were revered as respectable and honest citizens who kept communities safe. In 1968, Gallup took a survey and found that seventy-seven percent of Americans had respect for the police[61]They would be more likely to take the word of one officer over that of a group of radical Black Nationalists.

In New York City, May 1968, the Fillmore East Theater set the stage for a Black Panther Benefit Performance. This Benefit was detailed in a New York Times article on May 22, 1968, titled Black Panthers Stage a Benefit: 3 Theater Troupes Perform to Aid 7 Jailed Members. The journalist Dan Sullivan starts off by describing the event as "a rhetoric composed of racial paranoia, political jargon, Utopian idealism, unprintable threats, gutty 'soul' talk and shrewd humor"[62]  He was very careful about how he spoke regarding the police, the FBI, and local government. Though the author holds nothing back when delivering his opinions about the Black Panther Party from a self-proclaimed "mild-mannered white liberal". Sullivan referred to the event as a "depressing indication of just how deep the chasm between the white community and the militant black community really is."   [63] Now, what does that even mean? What about the gap between the white community and the Black community in general? There continued to be a push to separate the Black Panther Party from the Civil Rights movement- labeling them as a rogue and radical Black Nationalist group with a separate agenda. That narrative is what made it easier for "mild-mannered white liberals" to condemn the actions of the Black Panther Party but support the actions of peaceful civil rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr. The article went on to use language that was guaranteed to scare the white populous, quoting speeches calling "white men … 'devils'… Policeman  was 'Gestapo pigs'… the Black Panther Party 'hates you, white people".[64] Wording like this fed the propaganda machine which influenced the majority of the American. As stated in the article, for "civil libertarians”, the arrest of the 'Panther 21' appeared to be a case of the government engaging in preventive, political detention and ignoring due process.[65] After word of the Bernstein’s support got to law enforcement, they became a target of the FBI's smear campaign, using the media as their catalyst. They were painted as villains, making a mockery of those who were "actually" fighting for civil rights and equality. As stated in The New York Times,

“Emergence of the Black Panthers as the romanticized darlings of the politico-cultural jet set is an affront to the majority of black Americans. ...The group therapy plus fund-raising soirée at the home of Leonard Bernstein... represents the sort of elegant slumming that degrades patrons and patronized alike. It might be dismissed as guilt-relieving fun spiked with social consciousness, except for its impact on those blacks and whites seriously working for complete equality and social justice. It mocked the memory of Martin Luther King Jr…."[66]

Media on behalf of the Black Panther Party

The Worker, considered a communist newspaper, appealed to a very niche group ofpeople and often published articles about the Black Panther Party. On June 28, 1968, The Worker released an article titled “Demand Fair Jury For Huey Newton.” The article mentioned a group of white liberals who were raising money for Huey, the Huey P. Newton Defense Committee, once known as “Honkies for Huey.” That group of white people were quote, “also involved in fundraising and educational programs in the white community.” This was the fear of the Bureau coming true- the Black Panther Party was infiltrating the surrounding white communities through their white liberal supporters. Fear of underground media use was apparent in an Airtel from FBI Director to SAC San Francisco on May 27, 1969. Director Hoover stated that “activities of the BPP have reached the black and white communities as evidenced by their weekly newspaper, which has reached a circulation of 45,000.”[67]

The Black Panther Party’s coalition with the white left was one of the reasons Stokely Carmichael left the party, but he did not oppose the coalition for the same reason that the FBI did. Carmichael not only saw organizing with whites as an off-kilter approach, but he thought it was not wise to seek out their support in any way. Carmichael noted that being friendly with white folks, radical or liberal, had its faults. Especially in terms of dealing with the white press. In his book Ready for a Revolution, Carmichael writes that “Ramparts began to run features on the Panther leadership and proclaimed the party the ‘revolutionary vanguard.’ The establishment media followed suit, presenting the Panthers as the militant black wing of the American youth rebellion, the black shock troops of the white New Left and the ‘counterculture’… whether it’s the left’s revolutionary fantasy or the right’s racist nightmare: angry young Negroes with guns”.[68] Various articles from the height of the Black Panther Party’s tenure support Carmichaels argument. Look as far back as December 6, 1968.  The New York Times put out an article from San Francisco titled “Black Panthers Growing, but Their Troubles Rise”. Earl Caldwell is the journalist who wrote the article, starting off by observing a storefront that the “Black Panther movement occupies.”[69] He goes on to describe the ongoings outside of the store- the “noisy teen-aged youths” that were “hustling newspapers”. It is important to look at the language Caldwell used. Instead of referring to them as “noisy” teens, he could have said “energetic young people”; instead of “hustling,” he simply could have used the term “selling.” Unfortunately, that specific wording would help paint a negative narrative for the public. During the field investigation done for the article, Caldwell stopped and asked a random man about the Panther’s activity on that block; the man replied, “You’re damn right they sell a lot of those papers…a lot of people are afraid not to buy it…”. Again, this is another example of Caldwell painting a narrative. Though these words did not come out of Caldwell’s mouth, he chose to publish them.

Conclusion

By the end of 1971, the damage had already been done- irreversible events that had a long-lasting impact transpired. The harassment from police, along with internal party struggles, backlash in the media, and loss of resources, began to take its toll on the Party. As Dhoruba Bin Wahad writes in Excluding the Nightmare after the Dream, “resources were depleted, and programs cut back due to the relentless overt and covert police attacks and prosecutions.”[70] In just two years, from December 1967 to December 1969, the Black Panther Party put out over two hundred thousand dollars in bail for members[71]. The ruthlessness of the FBI and local law enforcement tactics created hostile environments, with party members constantly on edge. The funding collected by the party was being used for legal aid and survival instead of implementing community programs. Every time the BPP made a step forward, the actions of the FBI and local law enforcement set them two steps backward. The actions and motives of the police appeared to be endorsed by the mass media, which aided the COINTELPRO efforts. The Black Panther Party was not immune to the tricks of the media, even after adapting to the art of propaganda. According to former Panther Acoli Sundiat, “too many Panthers fell into the habit of making boisterous claims in the public media…”[72] Members were losing patience and became emboldened when being interviewed- often writing checks they couldn’t cash and making promises to the public that were unrealistic, thereby bringing down morale and community support. It is safe to say that 1971 was the year that the Black Panther Party ceased to exist as it was. They started to see a very swift drop in numbers, and people were becoming less and less enamored with the revolution; as Sundiat stated in a brief History of the BPP, “COINTELPRO eventually intimidated and corrupted all three of the BPP’s top leaders: Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver. Each, in his way, caved into the pressures and began acting in a manner that was designed deliberately to destroy the BPP.” [73]

The COINTELPRO initiative was finally exposed, thanks to a group known as the Citizens Committee to Investigate the FBI. [74] They managed to steal an assortment of the COINTELPRO files from an FBI office in Media, PA. They then gave these files to the media. The backlash the FBI faced led to an official “dismissal” of the program. However, the FBI continued operations not under the official COINTELPRO name from 1972 to around 1974.  This is apparent from the countless COINTELPRO documents from after 1971. For example, in the FBI Vault Black Panther Party Part 30 of 34, an Airtel is sent from SAC, Charlotte, to the FBI director concerning “Black Panther Party Finances and Extremist Matters,” dated August 21, 1972. [75]People started coming forward and talking, especially former agents and informants with stories from inside the COINTELPRO. Irreversible damage had been done to citizens who now intended to hold the bureau accountable in court. Finally, in 1976, the Church Committee concluded that the Federal Bureau of Investigation wrongfully targeted, surveilled, and violated the rights of average citizens. Also, after the hearings, the Senate created The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to provide “vigilant legislative oversight over the intelligence activities of the United States to assure that such activities are in conformity with the Constitution and laws of the United States.”[76] After, in 1977, The House of Representatives created the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

Even after the end of the COINTELPRO, the pieces left of the BPP crumbled. As stated by former BPP member Sekou Odinga, “The illegal Counterintelligence Program of the U.S. government seemed so effective that work above ground was no longer strategic. We couldn’t work under the banner of the Black Panther Party, which was at war with itself.”[77] The Black Panther Party as it was had disappeared, and though COINTELPRO was put to an abrupt stop, they accomplished what they set out to. Eventually, the Church Committee hearings concluded wrongdoing and condemned the actions of the FBI through the illegal COINTELPRO operation. However, no formal investigation has been implemented to hold the federal government accountable.

There have been no investigations into the criminal convictions, and there have been no attempts to free “political prisoners” who are victims of COINTELPRO. On September 14, 2000, Representative Cynthia McKinney ‘convened a ‘brain trust” on this subject (COINTELPRO) as part of the Congressional Black Caucus’ Legislative Conference, a yearly series of forums and panel discussions on issues of importance to the communities represented by the Caucus.” [78] . The first speaker on the panel was Professor Nkechi Taifa, whose record is more than impressive, ranging from director of the Howard University Law School Equal Justice Program to staff attorney for the National Prison Project, having worked with “issues involving COINTELPRO and political prisoners since 1975.” [79] Professor Taifa highlights the hypocrisy of the FBI’s campaign, stating that “we have to remember that it was actually the FBI who was fomenting the violence (not the BPP).” The next speaker was Kathleen Cleaver, communications secretary of the Black Panther Party from 1967 to 1971. Cleaver starts by detailing her history with the Black Liberation Movement, particularly the Black Panther Party. Cleaver highlights the egregious number of cases involving the Black Panther Party, which turned members into political prisoners. She mentioned Romain Fitzgerald, “who after 30 years is still serving time in California for killing a policeman and it is known that he did not do the shooting. He is very ill”.  There are many former Panthers, victims of the FBI’s illegal COINTELPRO, who are still facing consequences for things they did not do. Cleaver was in the trenches, at the forefront of the battle between the FBI and the BPP. She states that, “The issue is always human rights. The government tried to redefine our struggle for us, to minimize the international broad concept of human rights that motivated us and turn it into something smaller and less threatening.” Cleaver and other leaders knew that the FBI planned to cripple the party, shrink them, and render them incapable of achieving any of their goals. The FBI’s COINTELPRO initiative was ultimately a success, leaving a mark on the Black revolutionaries it victimized.

Notes

[1] NYPL, Black Panther Party Harlem Branch Files 1969-1970. https://archives.nypl.org/scm/20948

[2] Federal Bureau of Investigation, “The Vault, The Black Panther Party”, https://vault.fbi.gov/Black%20Panther%20Party%20

[3] Smith, Roger Guenveur, Spike Lee, and U.S Public Broadcasting Service. A Huey P. Newton story. [Alexandria, Va.: PBS, 2002).

[4] Johnson, Ollie A. (1998) Explaining the Demise of The Black Panther Party The Role of Internal Factors. theanarchistlibrary.org pp. 8

[5] Day, Susie and Whitehorn, Laura. (2001). “Human Rights in the United States: The Unfinished Story of Political Prisoners and COINTELPRO”, New Political Science, Vol. 23, No. 2 (2001) 8.

[6]Bloom, Joshua, Waldo E. Martin, Jr. (2013) Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkley: University of California Press. P. 382.

[7] Goldstein, Robert Justin. 1990. Reviewed Work(s): “Racial Matters”: The FBI’s Secret File on       Black America, 1960-1972. The Journal of American History, Vol. 77, No. 1. Oxford University Press on behalf of Organization of American History.

[8] O’Reilly, K. (1989). Racial Matters: the FBI’s Secret File on Black America, 1960-1972. Free  Press.

[9] Goldstein, Reviewed Work(s): “Racial Matters”.

[10] O’Reilly, Racial Matters, P. 265

[11] Collier-Thomas, Bettye and V.P. Franklin. (2001). “No One Ever Asks a Mans Roll in The Revolution”. Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Cilvil Rights-Black Power Movement. New York University Press. P. 230.

[12] Kirby, Ryan J. (2011). “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” Community Activism and the Black Panther Party, 1966-1971.

[13] Collier-Thomas, Bettye and V.P. Franklin. (2001). “No One Ever Asks a Mans Roll in The Revolution”. Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Cilvil Rights-Black Power Movement. New York University Press, 230.

[14]Williams, Jakobi. (2013). From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 172

[15]Williams, Jakobi.From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. The University of North Carolina Press, 161

[16] Jeffries, Judson L. Reviewed Work(s): From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago.

[17] Williams, Jakobi.From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago. The University of North Carolina Press, 107

[18] Williams, From the Bullet to the Ballot, 174

[19] Farnia, Navid. State Repression and the Black Panther Party: Analyzing Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin’s Black against Empire.

[20] Mullgardt, Brian. (2020). “Further Harassment and Neutralization”: The FBI’s counterintelligence program (COINTELPRO) in Illinois, 107

[21] Keating, Ann Drukin. From the Bullet to the Ballot: The Illinois Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Racial Coalition Politics in Chicago by Jakobi Williams (review). 127.

[22] Kioni-Sadiki, Dequi, “The Past Catches Up to The Present,” Look For Me in The Whirlwind: From the Panther 21 to 21st Century Revolutions, edited by Dequi Kioni-Sadiki and Matt Meyer, 21-35. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2017.

[23] Churchill, Ward. The Cointelpro Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent. Boston, MA: South End Press, 109.

[24] Churchill, The Cointelpro Papers, 144

[25] Churchill, Ward. The Cointelpro Papers: Documents from the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent. Boston, MA: South End Press, 133

[26] Sundiata Acoli, “An Updated History of the New African Prison Struggle,” Look For Me in The Whirl wind, edited by Dequi Kioni-Sadiki and Matt Meyer, 41-79. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2017.

[27] Churchill, W., & Vander Wall, J. (1990). The COINTELPRO papers: Documents from the FBI's secret wars against domestic dissent. Boston, MA: South End Press, 138.

[28] Freedom of Information and Privacy Acts. FBI. Fred Hampton. 44-HQ-44202. Part 1.

[29]A production of Blackside, Inc. ; [ creator and executive producer, Henry Hampton]. Eyes on the Prize [ Alexandria, Va.] : PBS Video, 2006. William O’Neil interview Part 1

[30] FBI: The Vault. Black Panther Party. Fred Hampton. 44-HQ-44202. Part 2.

[31] Churchill, W., & Vander Wall, J. (1990). The Cointelpro Papers: Documents From the FBI's Secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent. Boston: South End Press, 132

[32]Churchill, The COINTELPRO Papers, 132

[33] Churchill, The Cointelpro Papers, 132

[34] SAC, New Haven Airtel to FBI Director, 4 June 1971, Box 10, John R. Williams Papers.

[35]“SAC, New Haven Airtel to FBI Director, 4 June 1971,” Box 10, Folder 71, John R. Williams Papers.

[36] “Airtel SAC San Francisco to FBI Director, 17 June 1971,” Box 10, Folder 66, John R. Williams Papers.

[37]FBI Files, 1968-1976 Black Panther Party, North Carolina, Vol. 2-15. Federal (various) Bureau of Investigations Electronic Reading Room, P 28 (https://archive.org/details/FBI-BPP-North-Carolina/105-HQ-165706-8-01/page/n49/mode/2up).

[38] FBI Files, Vol. 2-15, 74

[39] FBI Files, 1968-1976 Black Panther Party, North Carolina, Vol. 2-15. Federal (various) Bureau of Investigations Electronic Reading Room, pp. 75 (https://archive.org/details/FBI-BPP-North-Carolina/105-HQ-165706-8-01/page/n49/mode/2up).

[40] FBI Files, 1968-1976 Black Panther Party, North Carolina, Vol. 1-15. Federal Bureau of Investigations Electronic Reading Room. Pp. 48

[41] FBI Files, Black Panther Party, Winston Salem, Vol. 1. Freedom of Information Act. Pp. 30 https://webharvest.gov/peth04/20041019154956/http://foia.fbi.gov/bpanther/bpanther1.pdf .

[42] FBI Files, Black Panther Party, Winston Salem, Vol. 1. Freedom of Information Act. Pp. 30

[43] FBI Files, Black Panther Party, Winston Salem, Vol. 1. Freedom of Information Act. https://webharvest.gov/peth04/20041019154956/http://foia.fbi.gov/bpanther/bpanther1.pdf Page 30 of PDF.

[44]FBI Files, Black Panther Party, Winston Salem Vol. 1. Page 30

[45] Kioni-Sadiki, Dequi, “The Past Catches Up to The Present,” Look For Me in The Whirlwind: From the Panther 21 to 21st-Century Revolutions, edited by Dequi Kioni-Sadiki and Matt Meyer, 21-35. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 201. (23).

[46]Kioni-Sadiki, Dequi, pp. 21-35.

[47] United States House of Representatives. Black Panther Party Part 1: Investigation of Activities in Kansas City, Missouri.; and Indianapolis, Ind. Hearings Before the Committee on Internal Security House of Representatives. Ninety-first Congress. 2nd Session July 21-24, 1970.
(http://blackfreedom.proquest.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/blackpanther19.pdf)

[48] United States House of Representatives, Kansas City, pp. 2616

[49] United States House of Representatives, Kansas City, pp. 2616

[50] United States House of Representatives. Black Panther Party Part 2: Investigation of Activities in Seattle, Washington.; and Indianapolis, Ind. Hearings Before the Committee on Internal Security House of Representatives. Ninety-first Congress. 2nd Session July 21-24, 1970.
(http://blackfreedom.proquest.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/blackpanther20.pdf)

[51] United States House of Representatives, Seattle, pp. 4298.

[52] United States House of Representatives. Black Panther Party Part 3: Investigation of Activities in Detroit, Mich; Philadelphia, Pa.; and Indianapolis,  Hearings Before Committee on Internal Security House of Representatives. Ninety-first Congress. 2nd Session July 21-24, 1970. (http://blackfreedom.proquest.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/blackpanther21.pdf)

[53] United States House of Representatives. Black Panther Party Part 4 Investigation of Des Moines, Iowa and Omaha, Nebraska: Hearings Before the Committee on Internal Security House of Representatives. Ninety-first Congress, second session. Washington D.C. (1970)

[54] United States House of Representatives. Black Panther Party Part 4: National Office and Investigation of Activities in Des Moines, Iowa, and Omaha, Nebr. . Hearings Before the Committee on Internal Security House of Representatives. Ninety-first Congress. 2nd Session July 21-24, 1970, P 4718 (http://blackfreedom.proquest.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/blackpanther22.pdf)

[55]United States House of Representatives. Black Panther Party Part 4: National Office and Investigation of Activities in Des Moines, Iowa, and Omaha, Nebr. . Hearings Before the Committee on Internal Security House of Representatives. Ninety-first Congress. 2nd Session July 21-24, 1970, P 4792 (http://blackfreedom.proquest.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/blackpanther22.pdf)

[56] United States House of Representatives. Black Panther Party Part 4: National Office and Investigation of Activities in Des Moines, Iowa, and Omaha, Nebr. . Hearings Before the Committee on Internal Security House of Representatives. Ninety-first Congress. 2nd Session July 21-24, 1970, P 4795 (http://blackfreedom.proquest.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/blackpanther22.pdf)

[57] United States House of Representatives. Black Panther Party Part 1: Investigation of Activities in Kansas City, Missouri.; and Indianapolis, Ind. Hearings Before the Committee on Internal Security House of Representatives. Ninety-first Congress. 2nd Session July 21-24, 1970. (http://blackfreedom.proquest.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/blackpanther19.pdf)

[58] New York Times. https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-New-York-Times. Britannica (2024)

[59]Kifner, John. “The Black Panther Toll is Now 28”. The New York Times. December 7, 1969.

[60] Kifner, “The Black Panther Toll is Now 28”

[61] Gallop. “Americans Respect For Police Surges”. https://news.gallup.com/poll/196610/americans-respect-police-surges.aspx

[62]”Black Panthers Stage a Benefit”233.20. NARA- Washington, D.C.

[63] ”Black Panthers Stage a Benefit” 233.20. NARA- Washington, D.C.

[64] ”Black Panthers Stage a Benefit” 233.20. NARA- Washington, D.C.

[65] Chisholm, The Panther 21 Fundraiser and “Radical Chic”.Leonard Bernstein Office.

[66] Chisholm, The Panther 21 Fundraiser and “Radical Chic”.Leonard Bernstein Office.

[67]Churchill, W., & Vander Wall, J. (1990). The COINTELPRO papers: Documents from the FBI's secret wars against domestic dissent. Boston: South End Press. 148

[68]Carmichael, Stokely. Ready For Revolution: the Life and Struggles of Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). New York, NY. Scribner, 2003. 663

[69] Caldwell, Earl. (1968). “Black Panthers Growing, but Their Troubles Rise”. New York Times

[70] Bin Wahad, Dhoruba“Assata Shakur, Excluding the Nightmare after the Dream: The Terrorist Label and the Criminalization of Revolutionary Black Movements in the USA,”Look For Me in The Whirl wind, edited by Dequi Kioni-Sadiki and Matt Meyer, 103-125.Oakland,CA: PM Press, 2017.

[71] Charles R. Garry, “A Survey of the Persecution of the Black Panther Party,”

The Black Panthers Speak, edited by Philip S. Foner (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 257–258.

[72] Sundiata Acoli, “A Brief History of the Black Panther Party and its Place in the Black Liberation Movement,” Look For Me in The Whirl wind, edited by Dequi Kioni-Sadiki and Matt Meyer, 79-85. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2017

[73] Sundiat,“A Brief History of the Black Panther Party and its Place in the Black Liberation Movement,” , P 79-85.

[74] Stealing J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret. January 7, 2014. Retro Report for the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000002635482/stealing-j-edgar-hoovers-secrets.html?searchResultPosition=22

[75] Federal Bureau of Investigation, Part 30 of 34, “The Vault, The Black Panther Party”, 30. (https://vault.fbi.gov/Black%20Panther%20Party%20)

[76] Senate Resolution 400. Church Committee. 1976.

[77] Bin Wahad, Dhoruba“Assata Shakur, Excluding the Nightmare after the Dream: The Terrorist Label and the Criminalization of Revolutionary Black Movements in the USA,”Look ForMe in The Whirl wind, edited by Dequi Kioni-Sadiki and Matt Meyer, pp. 91.Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2017.

[78] Day, S., & Whitehorn, L. (2001). Human Rights in the United States: The Unfinished Story of Political Prisoners and Cointelpro. New Political Science,  pp. 23(2), 286. https://doi.org/10.1080/07393140120056009

[79] Day, Human Rights in the United States, 287

The End of an Empire: Systemic Decay and the Economic Foundation of American Fascism

By Colin Jenkins

If you live in the United States and feel like everything is caving in around you, like you are being attacked and fleeced from every angle, like you can’t breathe, like you can’t ever seem to catch a break despite doing everything seemingly right, like you are on the verge of a mental-health crisis and/or homelessness, your feelings are justified.

We are living in the middle of widespread societal breakdown. We are witnessing the erosion of an empire. We are experiencing the effects of a rotten system (capitalism) coming to its inevitable conclusion. Simply put, the capitalist class and their two political parties have run out of ways to steal from us. Because we have nothing left for them to take. So, the system is responding like a vampire who is unable to find the blood it needs to survive… erratic, rabid, frenzied, and increasingly desperate and violent, while frantically searching for new avenues of exploitation to keep it churning.

The collapse of the United States is not just happening on a whim. There are very clear, systemic reasons for it. It began in the 1970s/80s, mostly due to the inevitable trajectory of capitalism, which went through a series of late-stage developments throughout the 20th Century. These stages interacted with the realization of a globalized capitalist economy near the turn of the 21st Century and a conscious policy shift implemented by the capitalist state, commonly referred to as neoliberalism. An era of financialization, buoyed by monetary policy that caters to finance capital by feeding it a seemingly never-ending stream of free money, has paralleled these other developments to culminate into a desperate and destructive effort to feed the capitalist class during a time when the system’s profit rates are decades deep in perpetual decline.

How Capitalism’s Perpetually Falling Rates of Profit Have Shaped the Modern World

The moves that have been made by the capitalist state in the US are typically done under the rhetoric of “stimuli” or “recovery.” Historically referred to as monetary policy, they are designed as a system of life support for capitalism and advertised as necessary steps to “protect the economy.” They are desperate measures that defy the reality of capitalism’s falling rates of profit. In other words, despite the apparent success of US corporations, which have amassed unprecedented amounts of profit and wealth during the neoliberal era (1980s – 2020s), the truth is the underbelly of capitalism is slowly rotting away due to countless internal contradictions inherent to the system. This perpetual degradation, which was long ago recognized in part by classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, exists in addition to the system’s cyclical need for crises and is one of the main phenomena that is driving capitalism to its grave. In his pivotal work, Capital, Karl Marx expanded, in detail, how this process develops over time:

“… proceeding from the nature of the capitalist mode of production, it is thereby proved logical necessity that in its development the general average rate of surplus-value must express itself in a falling general rate of profit. Since the mass of the employed living labor is continually on the decline as compared to the mass of materialized labor set in motion by it, i.e., to the productively consumed means of production, it follows that the portion of living labor, unpaid and congealed in surplus-value, must also be continually on the decrease compared to the amount of value represented by the invested total capital. Since the ratio of the mass of surplus-value to the value of the invested total capital forms the rate of profit, this rate must constantly fall.” [1]

Simply put, as surplus value (the extraction of unpaid labor) represents the lifeblood of capitalism, it must remain constant for the system to return the same rate of profit over a given time. However, as capitalism matures, and as capitalists constantly seek to lower costs by introducing machines, laying off workers, keeping wages low and stagnant, etc., the extraction of surplus value from human labor experiences a perpetually decreasing rate, even as cumulative profits seemingly grow. “Marx’s LTRPF (Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall) argues that the rate of profit will fall if the organic composition of capital (OCC) rises faster than the rate of surplus value or exploitation of labor,” Michael Roberts summarizes. “That is the underlying reason for the fall.” Marx explains further,

“Take a certain working population of, say, two million. Assume, furthermore, that the length and intensity of the average working-day, and the level of wages, and thereby the proportion between necessary and surplus-labor, are given. In that case the aggregate labor of these two million, and their surplus-labor expressed in surplus-value, always produces the same magnitude of value. But with the growth of the mass of the constant (fixed and circulating) capital set in motion by this labor, this produced quantity of value declines in relation to the value of this capital, which value grows with its mass, even if not in quite the same proportion. This ratio, and consequently the rate of profit, shrinks in spite of the fact that the mass of commanded living labor is the same as before, and the same amount of surplus-labor is sucked out of it by the capital. It changes because the mass of materialized labor set in motion by living labor increases, and not because the mass of living labor has shrunk. It is a relative decrease, not an absolute one, and has, in fact, nothing to do with the absolute magnitude of the labor and surplus-labor set in motion. The drop in the rate of profit is not due to an absolute, but only to a relative decrease of the variable part of the total capital, i.e., to its decrease in relation to the constant part.” [2]

Marxian and (some) non-Marxian economists alike have recognized a virtual ceiling for the global capitalist system that seems to have been touched in and around the 1970s, for various reasons. Despite the post-World War 2 boom that benefited the United States and, subsequently, the imperialist core countries throughout the West, in their service to global capital, this phenomenon of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) has remained the ultimate Achilles heel in that it seems immune to supercharged imperialism, neoliberalism’s monetary policy, ending the gold standard, multiple bouts of quantitative easing, and nearly every trick pulled out of the bag by the capitalist state since then. Thus, the reality is: capitalism is no longer viable, even for capitalists. Yet, the billionaire class (and soon-to-be trillionaire class?) which came to being during this era still needs to be fed. So, the system, and its imperialist state, continues to suck every ounce of blood available from the masses. In this process, the former industrialized “middle class” has been destroyed, big capitalists and landlords are devouring small capitalists and landlords (so-called “mom and pops”), and the US state has seemingly embraced at least some form of modern monetary theory (MMT) to benefit the capitalist class while pretending to play by the old-school rules determined by taxation, “controlled” spending, and debt when it comes to the working class.

The US government (the capitalist state), mainly through the Federal Reserve and its monetary policy, has kept capitalism churning, and thus kept capitalists wealthy, by constantly increasing the flow of new currency into the system and by using so-called public funds to purchase private assets that are deemed too toxic, or “too big to fail.” These golden parachutes, as they’ve become known, are introduced in true classist fashion, only benefitting large financial institutions, big capitalists, and wealthy shareholder. Marx predicted such a development, telling us

“… a fall in the rate of profit hastens the concentration of capital and its centralization through the expropriation of the smaller capitalists, the expropriation of the last survivors of the direct producers who still have anything to give up. This accelerates on one hand the accumulation, so far as mass is concerned, although the rate of accumulation falls with the rate of profit.” [3]

And, being consistent with the entire era of neoliberalism, this newfound creation of “unproductive capital” almost never trickles down because those who are awarded it are no longer incentivized to invest in the types of productive ventures that may have existed during the early days of capitalism and industrialization, as well as during the post-WW 2 boom. Now, with the arrival of globalization (1990s) and the subsequent death of the industrialized “middle class” within the imperial core (due to offshoring), the backbone of the US economy is an array of hollow service industries, which are buoyed by the arms industry, the highly speculative and unproductive financialization racket known as the stock market, and the rapidly dying staple of home ownership. Thus, capitalists can become extremely wealthy, relatively quickly, by merely moving fiat currency in and out of Wall Street through legalized strongarming that is only available to those with large amounts of capital and access to loopholes (i.e., hedge funds). For instance, the practice of artificially shorting stocks, a tactic that was exposed by the historical 2021 runup of GameStop, which was spurred by retail investors who miraculously destroyed the gargantuan Melvin Capital despite unethical steps that were taken to eventually halt buying of the stock.

Simply put, the capitalist class and its empires like that of the United States are running out of tricks to keep this decaying system alive. They are stuck in a cycle of creating seemingly unlimited amounts of currency to counter falling rates of profit, finding creative ways to take more value out of our labor without going over the tipping point of complete societal breakdown, and constantly shifting rates and numbers to keep the sinking ship afloat. This is all being done to keep capitalists wealthy, especially in relation to the working-class masses, who as always remain the sacrificial lambs in this process. So, for working people like ourselves, we may see rising wages like the recent move by some states to increase the minimum wage to $15/hour; however, such steps are naturally met with rising costs implemented by the owning class – capitalists and landlords alike – who don’t need to increase prices to maintain profit, but do so because (1) they own and control our means of survival, and (2) they utilize these means as a form of power to siphon all of our earned income, which they view as exponentially rising rates of return on their “investments.” This is, after all, the entire point of capitalism.

As with every such dynamic that exists under capitalism, the foundation of profit is merely unpaid labor. So, as wages appear to grow, this growth will almost always translate into more forceful actions made by the owning class to further exploit workers. Thus, maintaining growing profits amongst the systemic phenomenon of falling rates of profit requires hitting the working class harder and harder as time goes on, from all different directions and in increasingly creative ways.

While capitalists have employed their own army of economists to challenge both the surplus value of labor and falling rates of profit, Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall has been bolstered by substantial evidence over the past century. Starting with the empirical evidence alone, Roberts explains,

“…the formula is s/(C+v), when s = surplus value; C= stock of fixed and circulating means of production and v = value of labor power (wage costs).  Marx’s two key points on the LTRPF are 1) there will be a long-term secular decline in the average rate of profit on capital stock as capitalism develops and 2) the balance of tendential and counter-tendential factors in the law explains the regular booms and slumps in capitalist production.” [4]

Roberts and Guglielmo Carchedi’s “World in Crisis: A Global Analysis of Marx's Law of Profitability” provides a collection of analyses that streamlines evidence of “empirical validity to the hypothesis that the cause of recurring economic crises or slumps in output, investment, and employment in modern economies can be found in Marx’s law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit.” As the editors explain, “Marx believed, and we agree, that this is ‘the most important law in political economy.” [5] Thus, understanding this perpetual decomposition of capital can help to explain many things, especially with regards to how the superstructure responds to this economic reality. It tells us why capitalist states like the US implement so many policies that are ultimately detrimental to its masses, who are viewed as collateral damage in the real business of serving and saving capitalism, buoying capital, and allowing the rich to continue accumulating wealth and property despite perpetually falling rates of profit.

Within this valuable collection, Esteban Ezequiel Maito explains how the recognition of this law has transcended theoretical spheres over the past few centuries, only becoming “irrelevant” within the neoliberal Chicago and Austrian schools that developed as more of a justification for capitalism rather than schools of analysis or critical thought. “In classical political economy, there was a concern about the downward trend in the rate of profit,” Maito tells us. “Adam Smith and David Ricardo, among others, noted that there was such a trend. The systemic tendency to crisis and insufficient profits generation has also been discerned by exponents of other economic schools (like Schumpeter or Keynes). All accepted the immanently real nature of this trend, despite the theoretical particularities of each of these economic schools.” [6]

As the United States is the clear forerunner of both capitalism and imperialism, its economy provides the greatest insights into the life cycle of global capitalism. The country has gone through the most advanced stages of capitalist development, has dealt with falling rates of profit by increasingly involving the government in the market (ironically under the guise of a “free” market), and has shown numerous signs of material degradation, most notably following the period of post-industrialization, which has especially impacted the American working class. Roberts and Carchedi argue that profit rates for US capital began to experience significant downturns even in the “boom” era, as early as 1948, before hitting a cyclical bottom in 1982:

“Empirical evidence confirms this. We shall focus on the United States since World War II. 4 Figure 1.1 shows that the rate of profit has been falling since the mid-1950s and is well below where it was in 1947. There has been a secular decline; the rate of profit has not moved in a straight line. After the war, it was high but decreasing during the so-called “Golden Age,” from 1948–65. This was also the fastest period of economic growth in American history. Profitability kept falling from 1965 to 1982, as well. The growth of gross domestic product (GDP) was much slower, and American capitalism (as did capitalism elsewhere) suffered severe slumps in 1974–75 and 1980–82.” [7]

In looking at not only the trajectory of global capital, but more specifically the US system in general, we can also see that a historic profitability crisis occurred in or around the 1970s. This crisis was temporarily halted during the first sixteen years of the neoliberal era, specifically between 1982 to 1997, due to many factors, including globalization, financialization schemes, and increased exploitation of workers within the imperial core. Roberts and Carchedi go on to explain this temporary halt and the real effects it had on profitability during this period:

“Then, as figure 1.2 shows, in the era of what is called “neoliberalism”— from 1982 to 1997—profitability rose. Capitalism managed to bring into play the counteracting factors to falling profitability: namely, greater exploitation of the American workforce (falling wage share), wider exploitation of the labor force elsewhere (globalization), and speculation in unproductive sectors (particularly, real estate and finance capital). Between 1982 and 1997, the rate of profit rose 19 percent, as the rate of surplus value rose nearly 24 percent and the organic composition of capital rose just 6 percent…

This “neoliberal period” had fewer severe slumps, although economic growth was still slower than in the Golden Age because profitability was still below that of the latter, particularly in the productive sectors of the US economy. Much of the profit was diverted away from real investment and into the financial sector. Profitability peaked in 1997 and began to decline. Between 1997 and 2008, the rate of profit dropped 6 percent and the rate of surplus value fell 5 percent, while the organic composition of capital rose 3 percent. This laid the basis for the Great Recession of 2008–2009.” [8]

The aberrations that occurred during this period, which allowed for not only a break in the downward trend but also an increase in many sectors, was never sustainable and ultimately represented a crossroads. It was also relatively insignificant, as we can see in Figure 1.1. As many economists across the spectrum have noted, the crisis that began in the 1970s now appears to be unique in both scale and in its effects on the reproduction of capital, to the point where some have pinpointed it as the peak of capitalism’s potential and beginning of the system’s overall decay.

The historical significance of the profitability crisis of the 1970s has also been backed by empirical evidence. In a 2020 paper published by Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, Paris Yeros and Praveen Jha illustrate how the reproduction of capital and profit have been on a permanent downward turn since, characterized by chronic recessions within the imperial core and residual depressions within the semi-peripheries:

“Overall, there has been a long-term decline of the rate of profit in the productive sectors of the leading capitalist state. This decline began in earnest in 1965 and persisted all through the 1970s. Then, a partial recovery occurred from 1982 to 1997, at roughly two-thirds the 1965 level. This was followed by another drop after 1997 and then another recovery in 2006, back up to 1997 levels. But this was then followed by a sharp fall in the course of the 2008 crisis, which took the profit rate down to roughly one-third of the 1965 level. Thereafter, another weak recovery ensued. This, indeed, makes for a long crisis—and on this we can agree. It has been a long systemic crisis punctuated by crashes, recessions and even depressions in some countries, particularly in the peripheries and semi-peripheries, including inside Europe. Indeed, it is no longer odd to encounter conditions comparable to those obtaining among advanced countries after 1929, with dramatic losses in gross domestic product (GDP) of up to 30 per cent and unemployment levels surpassing 20 per cent.” [9]

By examining the trajectory of capital over the past fifty years, especially regarding the relationship between technological advances and the system’s reliance on imperialism, Yeros and Jha expand on Marx’s TRPF to shows the uniqueness of the neoliberal-era crisis:

“If we take Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall ipsis litteris, we could easily reach the conclusion that the current crisis of capitalism is essentially like any other…

Yet, this is not a crisis essentially like any other, nor is its primary contradiction reducible to that between capital and labor. Some historical and analytical perspective on the long transition remains in order for a fuller explanation of what is at stake. We are witnessing not just a re-run of capitalist crisis, but the dramatic denouement of a 500-year-old social system. We cannot agree with Roberts (2016, p. 6) that ‘there is no permanent slump in capitalism that cannot be eventually overcome by capital itself’. This can only become clearer if we illuminate the mechanisms of systemic crisis by building on the original formulation of Marx’s law. For the exclusive focus on technological change and the construal of crisis exclusively to the organic composition of capital obscures the operation of imperialism and its modes of rule, reducing imperialism to a mere add-on—when considered at all. Even in Marx’s time, the connection between technology and profits was perched on a colonial relationship of primitive accumulation; this was observed, described and denounced, but never properly theorized. We would be remiss if we persisted with this flaw.” [10]

Finally, in representing perhaps the most substantial evidence to how this historic crisis has doomed this system to the dustbin of history,

“The financialization of profits has taken hold in an unprecedented manner. Industrial firms have become dependent on financial profits, even against industrial profits, and debt has ballooned among corporations, governments and households, with the USA at the forefront and with the active support of monetary authorities. This policy has reached the point today of obtaining negative interest rates across the Eurozone, Japan and the USA (in real terms)—to no good effect. We can, indeed, speak of the establishment of an enduring, systemic financialization logic, or monopoly-finance capital (Foster, 2010), whose great feat has been the perpetuation of a ‘wealth effect’ by the systematic inflation of asset prices, against falling profits in production. This has placed monopoly capitalism on life support and explains its perseverance, if not also the magnitude of its foretold collapse.” [11]

Imperialism, Globalization, and the “New Imperialism” as a precursor to domestic fascism

Analysis on imperialism’s relation to capital began to appear at the turn of the 20th century. VI Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism remains perhaps the most important contribution to this topic, and was written in response to both the first world war and the works of John Atkinson Hobson (1902), Rudolf Hilferding (1910), and most directly, Karl Kautsky, a fellow Marxist who had contributed much to the topic.

Lenin’s critiques of Hobson and Kautsky are especially useful in understanding the context of his own work. In Hobson, Lenin appreciated much of the analysis, although stopping short at the typical blind spots of social liberalism, which fail to recognize the revolutionary proletariat as the only force capable of combating the ills of imperialism. Ultimately, Hobson was unable or unwilling to view the matter through a Marxist lens.  In Kautsky, Lenin had a more piercing critique that arose in response to two main points. First was his belief that Kautsky erroneously identified imperialism as a mere “policy choice” made by competing capitalist nations, rather than a byproduct of a later stage of capitalist development. Lenin summarized this as “divorcing imperialist politics from imperialist economics, and divorcing monopoly in politics from monopoly in economics.” [12] Second, Lenin believed Kautsky’s motivation to separate politics from economics was to “obscure the most profound contradictions of imperialism and thus justify the theory of ‘unity’ with the apologists of imperialism and the outright social chauvinists and opportunists.” [13] To Lenin, the social chauvinists and opportunists were the petty bourgeoisie and upper echelons of the proletariat within the imperialist nations, which he referred to as a “labor aristocracy” who had been “bribed out of imperialist superprofits and converted to watchdogs of capitalism and corrupters of the labor movement… on the backs of Asia and Africa.” [14] This echoed the words of Friedrich Engels in 1858, which he wrote in a letter to Marx,

“The English proletariat is becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation that exploits the whole world, this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.” [15]

Lenin recognized that six decades of accumulation had only intensified this development, now extending far beyond the UK and infesting a group of imperialist nations, led by the US.  Most importantly, Lenin tied this social phenomenon directly to the concentrations of capital within each nation, as well as the inevitable decay that occurs with falling rates of profit, reconnecting the political with the economic and identifying this development as a distinct stage of capitalist production:

“As we have seen, the deepest economic foundation of imperialism is monopoly. This is capitalist monopoly, i.e., monopoly which has grown out of capitalism, and which exists in the general environment of capitalism, commodity production and competition, in permanent and insoluble contradiction to this general environment. Nevertheless, like all monopoly, it inevitably engenders a tendency of stagnation and decay. Since monopoly prices are established, even temporarily, the motive cause of technical and, consequently, of all other progress disappears to a certain extent and, further, the economic possibility arises of deliberately retarding technical progress.” [16]

While written a century ago, Lenin’s work remains as relevant as ever, especially in the United States, where these developments and effects have continued to manifest in various ways and within different theaters, both domestically and internationally. The post-Soviet global order, which left the United States as the sole superpower for the past three decades, has brought some developments perhaps unforeseen by the likes of Lenin and Marx, but still mirror many of the systemic tendencies they pinpointed so long ago. The most important of these remains their predictions of capital inevitably concentrating into the hands of fewer and fewer, leading to both the death of free competition and the birth of a bevy of corporatized states that become necessary for protecting the interests of capital against a constant growth of discontent among the masses. Lenin’s prediction of big capital eventually devouring small capital can especially be seen in the modern-day United States, where so-called “mom and pop” stores and small landlords are being pushed out by the ever-growing tentacles of private equity firms and finance capital. Lenin described this transition as the socialization of capital, which he predicted would lead to the development of a new social order where large corporate states are forced to subsidize the concentration of capital, or the capitalist class, leading to a scenario where gains are privatized, but losses are socialized (absorbed by the state and passed down to the people):

“Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads directly to the most comprehensive socialization of production; it, so to speak, drags the capitalists, against their will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialization…

Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few. The general framework of formally recognized free competition remains, and the yoke of a few monopolists on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times heavier, more burdensome and intolerable.

…Here we no longer have competition between small and large, between technically developed and backward enterprises. We see here the monopolists throttling those who do not submit to them, to their yoke, to their dictation.” [17]

Lenin foresaw not only the structural developments that we have experienced throughout the latter part of the 20th century and beginning part of the 21st century, but also the inevitable reactions to them. In the 2025 United States, we see small capitalists and more privileged sectors of the working class which had meshed with the bourgeoisie through property ownership or inclusion into the stock market now railing against finance capital as some sort of aberration, even ignorantly referring to it as a form of socialism. So-called “libertarians” are most known for this type of emotional response, believing it to be rooted in analysis provided by their revered Austrian School economists. What they do not realize, however, is that the concentration of capital was inevitable, as was the need for a corporatized state to form and strengthen alongside this concentration. Additionally, the “free market” that they most often associate with capitalism never actually existed, even during the system’s earliest days. Rather, capitalism has always required a highly-interventionist state for everything from destroying the commons (enclosure acts), enslaving Africans, forcing peasants into factories and mills, and breaking strikes to maintaining domestic exploitation, enforcing property laws, destroying socialist movements, and forcefully extracting resources from abroad. Lenin explains,

“Translated into ordinary human language this means that the development of capitalism has arrived at a stage when, although commodity production still “reigns” and continues to be regarded as the basis of economic life, it has in reality been undermined and the bulk of the profits go to the “geniuses” of financial manipulation. At the basis of these manipulations and swindles lies socialized production; but the immense progress of mankind, which achieved this socialization, goes to benefit . . . the speculators. We shall see later how “on these grounds” reactionary, petty-bourgeois critics of capitalist imperialism dream of going back to “free,” “peaceful” and “honest” competition.’ [18]

The pinnacle of US capitalism occurred within a relatively small window that opened after World War II and was only made possible by the near-total destruction of Europe, which allowed the US to use its geographical advantage to emerge as the global forerunner of capital. This, in turn, led to the US becoming the most advanced capitalist state the world has seen. The US working class experienced residual benefits from this advantageous position, but this was relatively short lived, essentially ending when US capitalists successfully globalized the labor market, began offshoring production to exploit cheap labor, and kicked off the neoliberal era of monetary policy in the 1970s and 80s.

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Not coincidentally, this also paralleled the profitability crisis of the 1970s, which has been identified as a significant period of stagnation caused by falling rates of profit. As mentioned before, this period is viewed by some as the point where capital reached a permanent breaking point in terms of representing a force of innovation and productivity. As such, a shift from industrialization to financialization occurred within the US to address the essential deadening of capital, which has since taken on a vampiristically toxic presence in advanced capitalist nations like the US. In simple terms, capitalism outlived its usefulness during this period and has been on life support ever since, for the mere purpose of appeasing the monopolistic conglomerates and financiers who both control the capitalist state and benefit from its interventions, which of course come at the expense of everyone else (from the most precarious of workers to even small capitalists). Lenin foresaw this development as well, telling us,

“Under the general conditions of commodity production and private property, the “business operations” of capitalist monopolies inevitably lead to the domination of a financial oligarchy.

…Finance capital, concentrated in a few hands and exercising a virtual monopoly, exacts enormous and ever-increasing profits from the floating of companies, issue of stock, state loans, etc., strengthens the domination of the financial oligarchy and levies tribute upon the whole of society for the benefit of monopolists.

…A monopoly, once it is formed and controls thousands of millions, inevitably penetrates into every sphere of public life, regardless of the form of government and all other “details.” [19]

Understanding the period in and around the 1970s as a crucial turning point for the capitalist system is important in understanding every development – whether social, political, or governmental – that has occurred in the US since then. This new form of capitalism, which would quickly become intertwined with the capitalist state out of necessity, is most easily viewed as the pinnacle of monopoly capital: the natural concentration of capital into unchecked monopolies that use unprecedented wealth to destroy competition via political power. John Bellamy Foster explains,

“Monopoly capital” is the term often used in Marxian political economy and by some non-Marxist analysts to designate the new form of capital, embodied in the modern giant corporation, that, beginning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, displaced the small family firm as the dominant economic unit of the system, marking the end of the freely competitive stage of capitalism and the beginning of monopoly capitalism.” [20]

In further explaining how this new form of capital materialized through the system’s evolution, Bellamy Foster calls on Marx:

“The battle of competition,” he [Marx] wrote, “is fought by the cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities depends, ceteris paribus, on the productiveness of labor, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger capitals beat the smaller…. Competition rages in direct portion to the number and in inverse proportion to the magnitude of the rival capitals.” Hence, capital accumulation presupposed both a growth in the size of individual capitals (concentration, or accumulation proper) and the fusion together of many capitals into “a huge mass in a single hand” (centralization). Moreover, the credit system, which begins as a “humble assistant of accumulation,” soon “becomes a new and terrible weapon in the battle of competition and is finally transformed into an enormous social mechanism for the centralization of capitals.” [21]

In the political realm, this new form of capital came to overwhelm the capitalist state in its liberal democratic form, leading to a shift in monetary policy from Keynesianism to neoliberalism, and the eventual formation of a full-blown corporate state that was realized at some point between the 1970s and 1990s. The formation of corporate governance is often blamed on individual players like Reagan, Carter, Nixon, or Milton Friedman, or entities like the much-maligned Federal Reserve. However, when analyzed from a materialist perspective, we can see that the corporate state was an inevitability — a structural necessity to address the monumental shift from entrepreneurial and industrial capitalism to corporate capitalism and what became known as financialization. It wasn’t created in opposition to capitalism, but to support it as a means of wealth creation, beyond its usefulness as an innovative force. More specifically, this shift was a systemic response to (1) the basic laws of capital accumulation, which led to large concentrations of wealth, as well as (2) perpetually falling rates of profit, which required increasing amounts of state intervention to manage. Thus, the large concentrationsn of wealth naturally transformed into large concentrations of political power for capitalists. And since “unproductive capital” now represented the dominant form, this power flowed to the financial sector while no longer offering avenues of innovation from below. The individual players who helped usher in this era just happened to be in power at the time of this necessary shift.

Therefore, it is not merely coincidental that the state became fully intertwined with capital to offset falling rates of profit and, in doing so, began to directly address systemic constraints that were compounding the negative effects of capital accumulation, such as the gold standard. As Ted Reese explains, with this structural understanding of the system, we can see that rather than neoliberalism serving as a turn away from Keynesianism, it more accurately represented a bridge to neoliberalism. [22]

The shift away from a productive and innovative form of capitalism is explained in detail by Bellamy Foster, who calls on the 1966 classic, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order by Paul Sweezy and Paul A. Baran:

“Capitalist consumption accounted for a decreasing share of demand as income grew, while investment took the form of new productive capacity, which served to inhibit new net investment. Although there was always the possibility that altogether new “epoch-making innovations”—resembling the steam engine, the railroad, and the automobile in their overall scale and effect—could emerge, allowing the system to break free from the stagnation tendency, such massive, capital-absorbing innovations were by definition few and far between. Hence, the system of private accumulation, if left to itself, exhibited a powerful tendency toward stagnation. If periods of rapid growth nonetheless occurred—Baran and Sweezy were writing at the high point of the post-Second World War expansion—this was due to such countervailing factors to stagnation as the sales effort, military spending, and financial expansion (the last addressed at the end of their chapter on the sales effort). All such countervailing factors were, however, of a self-limiting character and could be expected to lead to bigger contradictions in the future.” [23]

Fully merging with the capitalist state between the 1970s and 1990s allowed monopoly capital to further consolidate into an insurmountable political force, which would eventually consume both capitalist political parties in the United States. This marked the end of traditional liberalism in the US, which had been the source of periodic concessions made by the capitalist class to the working class throughout the 20th century, most notably with New Deal and Great Society legislation. With the implementation of neoliberalism, a concentrated effort to unleash monopoly capital from any remaining constraints tied to the Keynesian model, the arrival of a newly globalized labor/consumer market, and the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union (which had served as the only formidable check on global capital), monopoly capitalists in the US were set on a clear path of global domination.

Referring to this as the “new imperialist structure,” Samir Amin explains,

“Contemporary capitalism is a capitalism of generalized monopolies. What I mean by that is that monopolies no longer form islands (important as they may be) in an ocean of corporations that are not monopolies—and consequently are relatively autonomous—but an integrated system, and consequently now tightly control all productive systems. Small and medium-sized companies, and even large ones that are not themselves formally owned by the oligopolies, are enclosed in networks of control established by the monopolies upstream and downstream. Consequently, their margin of autonomy has shrunk considerably. These production units have become subcontractors for the monopolies. This system of generalized monopolies is the result of a new stage in the centralization of capital in the countries of the triad that developed in the 1980s and ’90s.” [24]

Expanding on the dynamics of this new paradigm, Amin tells us,

“These generalized monopolies dominate the world economy. Globalization is the name that they themselves have given to the imperatives through which they exercise their control over the productive systems of world capitalism’s peripheries (the entire world beyond the partners of the triad). This is nothing other than a new stage of imperialism.” [25]

This new imperialism, which became an extension of the corporate state that had already nestled in much of the world via market globalization, has allowed the United States, along with the West, NATO, and global capital, to run roughshod over much of the world, culminating into over 800 US military bases worldwide. Meddling in foreign governments and elections, carrying out coups, destroying and sabotaging socialist movements, stealing natural resources, and establishing new labor and consumer markets have all been included in this decades-long agenda that has continued without much interference. Despite trillions of dollars of “new capital” (i.e. exploited labor) created by this globalized racket, the corporate state has maintained its negligence of the US population, continuing to privatize most of the US infrastructure for the benefit of capital at home, and using monetary policy such as quantitative easing (under the TANF umbrella) to bail out corporations and financial institutions through the purchasing of toxic assets in wake of the 2008 housing crash.

This new stage of capital, combined with the formation of a fully intertwined corporate state and the development of a “new imperialist structure,” has ironically begun to reverse the process of bourgeoization that Engels and Lenin had pinpointed in the past, increasingly harming the upper echelons of the working classes within the imperial core. Unfortunately, rather than decoupling this group from the interests of capital, it has created a phenomenon where the privileged children of the former middle classes are largely turning to more overt forms of fascist politics, mostly at the behest of capitalist media. This development is useful in explaining the hard right-wing shift of Democrats and the political rise of Donald Trump, as well as the coordinated attacks against immigrants and more ambiguous things like “wokeness” – all of which have been designed to redirect attention away from the capitalist system. In a sense, what we are seeing play out in the US could aptly be viewed as a petty-bourgeois revolution, where more privileged sectors of the US working class are joining up with small capitalists and landlords to unknowingly bolster the corporate agenda via Trump, who has been falsely advertised as an outsider coming in to “shake things up.” [26]

Needless to say, in material terms, all of this has come at the expense of the American population as a whole, which now includes a sizable portion that is chronically unemployed and underemployed, a working class that is mostly living paycheck to paycheck, a housing market that is no longer accessible to a majority of working people, and costs of living that continue to grow out of control.

Marxism (DIALECTICAL/HISTORICAL MATERIALISM) is Needed to Decipher the Matrix

It is impossible to understand not only the present world but also modern global history without understanding capitalism. And the only way to truly understand the inner and outer workings of capitalism is to view things through a Marxist lens. This is why Marx, and the Marxist school of thought and analysis, is so widely demonized and suppressed within the United States. It is quite literally the key to exposing the corrupt power structure, both in terms of the economic system itself and those who serve the system from the halls of Congress, the oval office, the Supreme Court, the Pentagon, the DoD, the Federal Reserve, mass media, executive offices, board rooms, courts, police stations, etc. In other words, every aspect of our society stems from the arrangements set by capitalist modes of production.

As Shane Mage describes it, Marxism provides “sheer intellectual power” to the masses of people, as Marx “provided the concepts, categories, and structural analyses that were, and largely remain, indispensable for understanding the human historical process over past centuries and in the immediate historical present.” To think in a Marxian way is to seek mass liberation for the human race via working-class emancipation. Simply put,

“To be revolutionary, and truthful, all social thought must be essentially Marxian. Only two conditions are obligatory: awareness that there is something basically and gravely wrong with the human condition as it exists and has existed throughout the history of class society; and seriousness in the reading and study of Marx’s writings and those of his professed followers. Anyone who fulfills those conditions necessarily starts to think in a Marxian way.” [27]

Thus, in order to understand capitalism’s current slide into a more overt form of fascism, one must understand that capitalism, in and of itself and in its purest form, is already deeply rooted in fascistic tendencies. It is, after all, the latest stage of what Thorstein Veblen once referred to as the “predatory phase of human development,” which has been characterized within Western society by transitions between feudalism, chattel slavery, and capitalism (wage slavery), all of which include similar exploitative dynamics of a wealthy minority feeding off a toiling majority. As the Marxist historian Michael Parenti explains,

“There can be no rich slaveholders living in idle comfort without a mass of penniless slaves to support their luxurious lifestyle, no lords of the manor who live in opulence without a mass of impoverished landless serfs who till the lords' lands from dawn to dusk. So too under capitalism, there can be no financial moguls and industrial tycoons without millions of underpaid and overworked employees.” [28]

With this understanding of capitalism’s foundation, we can begin to develop systemic analysis that pinpoint stages in its development. However, this can only be done accurately through a Marxist lens. And this is precisely why the capitalist class in the US, as well as its government and all institutions that anchor capitalist society, have made such a massive effort in both obstructing people from Marxism as a school of analysis and wholly demonizing it as some vague force of evil. Because, ultimately, Marxism is the key to understanding capitalism, not through dogmatic beliefs and childish rejections, but through scientific analysis. Marxism is not a magical blueprint for society, nor is it a utopian leap of faith, but rather it is an analytical tool for understanding capitalist modes of production as a stage of human development, class struggle as the driving force behind societal change, and the social offshoots of these modes of production, which make up what we refer to as society. Marxist economist, Michael Roberts, sums this up nicely by explaining,

“If we do not develop general theories then we remain in ignorance at the level of surface appearance.  In the case of crises, every slump in capitalist production may appear to have a different cause.  The 1929 crash was caused by a stock market collapse; the 1974-5 global slump by oil price hikes; the 2008-9 Great Recession by a property crash.  And yet, crises under capitalism occur regularly and repeatedly.  That suggests that there are underlying general causes of crises to be discovered.  Capitalist slumps are not just random events or shocks.

The scientific method is an attempt to draw out laws that explain why things happen and thus be able to understand how, why and when they may happen again.  I reckon that the scientific method applies to economics and political economy just as much as it does to what are called the ‘natural sciences’.  Of course, it is difficult to get accurate scientific results when human behavior is involved and laboratory experiments are ruled out.  But the power of the aggregate and the multiplicity of data points help.  Trends can be ascertained and even points of reversal.

If we can develop a general theory of crises, then we can test against the evidence to see if it is valid – and even more, we can try and predict the likelihood and timing of the next slump.  Weather forecasting used to be unscientific and just based on the experience of farmers over centuries (not without some validity).  But scientists, applying theory and using more data have improved forecasting so that it is pretty accurate three days ahead and very accurate hours ahead.

Finally, a general theory of crises also reveals that capitalism is a flawed mode of production that can never deliver a harmonious and stable development of the productive forces to meet people’s needs across the globe.  Only its replacement by planned production in common ownership offers that.” [29]

In capitalist society, we are bombarded with superficial definitions of capitalism through what Antonio Gramsci referred to as cultural hegemony, which are normalized interactions and sources of information and values that extend from the economic base, thus portraying the system in a positive light to manufacture consent even from the masses of workers whose exploitation fuels it. The before-mentioned bourgeoization of the working classes within the imperial core like the US makes this process of conditioning easier for the capitalist class as it can separate workers of the world into various sects. From our schools to our media, capitalism is described as a “free exchange of goods and services,” as being synonymous with “freedom and liberty,” or simply as the “free market.” Most, if not all, of these definitions and descriptors intentionally omit both the foundations and fundamental aspects of the system. Granted, Marx himself, and more importantly, the scientific methods that guide Marxist analysis (historical/dialectical materialism), view capitalism as a necessary evil in the progression of human civilization, especially in terms of creating the productive capacities necessary to sustain life. But, the scientific method also allows us to understand why this stage of production, which is aptly described as the most advanced stage of the “predatory phase,” will either (1) give way to the formation of socialism or (2) destroy both human civilization and our planet.

Parenti goes on to explain the illuminating effects of seeing things through a Marxist lens:

“To understand capitalism, one first has to strip away the appearances presented by its ideology. Unlike most bourgeois (mainstream) theorists, Marx realized that what capitalism claims to be and what it actually is are two different things. What is unique about capitalism is the systematic expropriation of labor for the sole purpose of accumulation. Capital annexes living labor in order to accumulate more capital. The ultimate purpose of work is not to perform services for consumers or sustain life and society, but to make more and more money for the investor irrespective of the human and environmental costs. An essential point of Marxist analysis is that the social structure and class order prefigure our behavior in many ways. Capitalism moves into every area of work and community, harnessing all of social life to its pursuit of profit. It converts nature, labor, science art, music, and medicine into commodities and commodities into capital. It transforms land into real estate, folk culture into mass culture, and citizens into debt-ridden workers and consumers. Marxists understand that a class society is not just a divided society but one ruled by class power, with the state playing the crucial role in maintaining the existing class structure. Marxism might be considered a "holistic" science in that it recognizes the links between various components of the social system. Capitalism is not just an economic system but a political and cultural one as well, an entire social order. When we study any part of that order, be it the news or entertainment media, criminal justice, Congress, defense spending, overseas military intervention, intelligence agencies, campaign finance, science and technology, education, medical care, taxation, transportation, housing, or whatever, we will see how the particular part reflects the nature of the whole. Its unique dynamic often buttresses and is shaped by the larger social system — especially the systems overriding need to maintain the prerogatives of the corporate class.” [30]

To use a Marxist lens is to see human history as an ongoing development in response to material reality or, more specifically, how a particular society arranges its means to produce and distribute the needs required to sustain human life. For instance, under capitalism, private interests own and control not only the means to produce/provide everything from food and shelter to medical care, but also the actual land that we inhabit. Thus, access to capital/currency (backed by a particular state) determines who can own and control natural resources. Then, in turn, those who take ownership (capitalists) deploy laborers, or what they refer to as “human resources,” on and with natural resources to produce commodities that can be sold back to the laborers, or general public, for profit. In this arrangement, those of us who make up the working-class masses are compelled to sell ourselves as commodities to capitalists because they have eliminated the commons (i.e. our ability to live off the land) and tied our survival to their for-profit commodity production.

The fundamental relationship between capital (the wealthy minority) and labor (the landless majority) naturally creates class division in this society, and understanding the class division that is inherent to privately-owned means of production (capitalism) is crucial to understanding nearly every other development within that society. When one is able to see it for what it is, understanding how it was constructed and how it functions in historical terms, it becomes clear as day; yet the institutions that extend from it – including schools and media – naturally obscure this reality to protect the interests of the owning class, who also control and disseminate the means of information. And they do this through various avenues, with the total obstruction and demonization of Marxist analysis/understanding being one of the primary aims of the US ruling class.

So, what this creates is a massive blind spot in mainstream (bourgeois) “reality,” to the point where many are unable to even see the reality that we live in. Thus, living in capitalist society without a basic understanding of a materialist conception of history and its subsequent developments is like being plugged into the Matrix, blind to your bondage and living a lie. From a working-class perspective, bourgeois analysis is largely impotent. And, whether intentional or not, this severe lack of understanding leaves most to rely on emotion – or reaction – in responding to structural developments that affect us on an individual level. For instance, take the current hot button issue of illegal immigration that is being pushed by mainstream media. From a bourgeois perspective, so-called “illegals” are easily decontextualized into mere criminals who are crossing the border to rape, steal, and take advantage of the “entitlements” offered in the US. Hence, the hysterical and irrational attempts to label this crisis as an “invasion,” something that is even more effective when sold to an already highly indoctrinated, racist, and xenophobic population.

Without a Marxist lens, issues like immigration — and poverty, homelessness, crime, child abuse, etc. — appear to occur in a vacuum, completely unattached from the capitalist/imperialist system and caused by mysterious “forces of evil” or simply “poor choices.” Or, as Parenti puts it, “lacking a holistic approach to society, conventional social science tends to compartmentalize social experience.” [31] So, we see in this development the same phenomena that Lenin saw in Kautsky’s analysis of imperialism – a divorce between the political/social and economic. This is precisely what the owning class wants because it knows that an informed and aware working class would become increasingly uncontrollable and, thus, unexploitable.

To understand this further, it is useful to compare the differences between mainstream/bourgeois perspectives versus the Marxist lens. Using racism as an example, Parenti contrasts the differences between the liberal and Marxist views:

“Consider a specific phenomenon like racism. Racism is presented as essentially a set of bad attitudes held by racists. There is little analysis of what makes it so functional for a class society. Instead, race and class are treated as mutually exclusive concepts in competition with each other. But those who have an understanding of class power know that as class contradictions deepen and come to the fore, racism becomes not less but more important as a factor in class conflict. In short, both race and class are likely to be crucial arenas of struggle at the very same time.

Marxists further maintain that racism involves not just personal attitude but institutional structure and systemic power. They point out that racist organizations and sentiments are often propagated by well-financed reactionary forces seeking to divide the working populace against itself, fracturing it into antagonistic ethnic enclaves.

Marxists also point out that racism is used as a means of depressing wages by keeping a segment of the labor force vulnerable to super-exploitation. To see racism in the larger context of corporate society is to move from a liberal complaint to a radical analysis. Instead of thinking that racism is an irrational output of a basically rational and benign system, we should see it is a rational output of a basically irrational and unjust system. By "rational" I mean purposive and functional in sustaining the system that nurtures it.” [32]

This understanding of an intimate connection between the base (capitalist modes of production/distribution) and superstructure (the social and political extensions of that base) is what made the original Black Panther Party, as Marxist-Leninists, so dangerous to the oppressive capitalist power structure in the US. It is why J. Edgar Hoover was adamant about killing Fred Hampton. It is why the US government was so heavily involved in sabotaging Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the black power movement, and much of the anti-war movement. It is why McCarthyism and the Red Scare developed, why people-powered movements of self-determination (mostly of which are Marxist/Communist) throughout the Global South – from Latin America to Africa and Asia — are so fiercely opposed by global capital and its military forces from the US, Europe, and NATO. Because these movements figured out (or were on the verge of figuring out) that things like colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, etc. are all extensions of capital’s need to grow, expand, and dominate like a cancer cell.

Imperial Boomerang, Fascism, and the Collapse of the American Empire

Viewing the history of capitalism through a Marxist lens allows us to identify stages of its development. Chronologically, these stages can roughly be broken down into agricultural capitalism, merchant/entrepreneurial capitalism, industrial capitalism, and monopoly/finance capitalism. More nuance can and has been applied to these stages. For instance, the American Marxist Erik Olin Wright referred to “a schema of six stages: primitive accumulation, manufacture, machinofacture, monopoly capital, advanced monopoly capital, and state-directed monopoly capitalism.” [33] Within these macro-stages include micro-stages, which can consider anything from geographical significance to state interference through monetary policy. Some, like world-systems analyst Giovanni Arrighi, have identified four systemic cycles of primitive accumulation that occurred in different eras, centered around the successive spheres of influence from European colonization:  “the Genoese cycle: from the 15th century to the beginning of the 16th century; the Dutch cycle: from the end of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th century; the English cycle: from the last half of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century; The American cycle: in the 20th century.” [34]  

Other world-systems analysts like Emmanuel Wallerstein and Samir Amin have used this lens to analyze how both colonialism and imperialism have interplayed with capitalist development, separating regions and countries into three distinct categories of “core, semi-periphery, and periphery,” all of which are determined by their relation to capital (from the oppressive and parasitic imperialist core to the oppressed and colonized/underdeveloped periphery, and those which fluctuate in between representing the semi-periphery. [35]

The United States has become the apex predator of capital over the past few centuries, benefitting from its geographical position/size and its early reliance on chattel slavery, which amounted to countless trillions of dollars’ worth of forced labor over the course of 241 official years (1619 – 1860) and is widely considered to be “the capital that jumpstarted American capitalism.” The invention of “whiteness” and the systemic perpetuation of white supremacy has allowed the capitalist class to create a distinct underclass based on racial identity, both internationally and domestically. This has been a significant factor in creating a strange bond between capitalists and working-class whites, many of whom willingly assumed the role of sycophantic class traitors in return for a more worthy designation of being white. W.E.B. Du Bois illustrated this powerful dynamic in his historical classic, Black Reconstruction in America:

“Most persons do not realize how far [the view that common oppression would create interracial solidarity] failed to work in the South, and it failed to work because the theory of race was supplemented by a carefully planned and slowly evolved method, which drove such a wedge between the white and black workers  that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest.

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.” [36]

Historically, the invention of “race” became an integral part of capitalist development, which was rooted in both European colonialism and the forced transformation of feudal peasants into proletarians. The former process occurred externally through the conquering and domination of foreign lands, while the latter was an internal process of exploitation whereas European Lords gave way to the European bourgeoisie, a new class of wealthy landowners who became the capitalist class. Both processes were rooted in the forced extraction of natural (land) and human resources (labor), the two elements required for capitalists to establish their means of exploitative production for profit. But these simultaneous developments were not easy to balance, especially since the forced creation of an industrial working class (which occurred through the destruction of common land) caused significant blowback in the form of peasant revolts. The capitalist class learned from this and used notions of gender/sex (in the Old World) and race (in the New World) to divide and weaken this newly formed industrial working class. In Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Cedric Robinson touches on this historical development that paralleled the birth of capitalism:

“The contrasts of wealth and power between labor, capital, and the middle classes had become too stark to sustain the continued maintenance of privileged classes at home and the support of the engines of capitalist domination abroad. New mystifications, more appropriate to the times, were required, authorized by new lights. The delusions of medieval citizenship, which had been expanded into shared patrimony and had persisted for five centuries in western Europe as the single great leveling principle, were to be supplanted by race and (to use the German phrase) Herrenvolk, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The functions of these latter ideological constructions were related but different. Race became largely the rationalization for the domination, exploitation, and/or extermination of non-Europeans.” [37]

The formation of the United States brought this entire process to a head, with the extermination of a Native population, the forced takeover of land, the introduction of a massive slave trade, and the establishment of a new ruling class made up of wealthy landowners and merchants who relied on both stolen land and bodies to be used as tools for economic development. This was the foundation of not only American capitalism, but also of the global system that came to dominate the modern world. But it is now coming to an end, as capitalism has run its course, and the American ruling class has seemingly run out of targets to exploit. The capitalist state in the US has exhausted its efforts in keeping capitalists extremely wealthy and, in doing so, has effectively impoverished a large majority of its own population, which has essentially joined the rest of the world in a race to the bottom.

This latest development of mass degradation has occurred in the neoliberal era due to (1) the systemic breakdown of capital (driven by falling rates of profit) and (2) a concerted reaction to the working-class rebellions of the 1960s, which were described by the ruling class as a dangerous “excess of democracy.” Six decades later, we have reached a point of no return, as this system has become a husk of toxicity that leaves no room for reversal. As Amin explains,

“The system of generalized monopoly capitalism, “globalized” (imperialist) and financialized, is imploding right before our eyes. This system is visibly incapable of overcoming its growing internal contradictions and is condemned to pursue its mad rush. The crisis of the system is due to nothing other than its own “success.” The strategy used by the monopolies has always resulted in the sought-after results up to this very day: austerity plans, the so-called social (in fact antisocial) plans for layoffs, are still imposed in spite of resistance. The initiative still remains, even now, in the hands of the monopolies (the markets) and their political servants (the governments that submit their decisions to the so-called requirements of the market).” [38]

Now, the US imperialist state must turn inward, and will call upon tactics that it has deployed throughout the world, especially in the Global South, to punish its own citizens. The difference between the US empire and other such states that have experienced “imperial boomerang” is that it already has a large network of internal systems of oppression, most notably in regard to its own black population which has historically been corralled into internal colonies complete with police forces that resemble foreign occupying militaries. The country’s prison industrial complex, which boasts the most prisoners per capita in the world, also serves as a useful proving ground for targeting a growing portion of US citizens in the coming years as more and more are cut loose from the decaying system.

Much like Keynesianism served as a bridge to neoliberalism, neoliberalism has served as a bridge to overt fascism. This fascism is forming from two distinct directions within the United States:

• First, through the foundation of a fully merged corporate state (a necessity to address capitalist decay from the economic base),

• Second, through cultural developments that are responding to the material degradation of capitalist decay (this includes organic reactions from within the population as well as the likely occurrence of government psyops designed to protect capitalists from retribution by redirecting anger and thus feeding reactionary politics).

From a structural standpoint, the economic base in the US has been ravaged by both the falling rates of profit, as discussed by Marx as a natural phenomenon, and the shift to a post-industrial society, which was the result of American capitalists moving overseas in droves during the 1990s to chase cheap labor. Since then, the capitalist state has relied on the military/arms industry and financialization to maintain so-called wealth, with financialization relying solely on fiat currency being moved around by big players in a way that represents unproductive capital disguised as wealth – meaning that it produces nothing of value in ways that manufacturing industries do. Ironically, this has created a snowball effect for the already-disastrous results stemming from falling profit rates, to the point where US capital has become further squeezed by its inability to reproduce itself without massive consequences for the population. As Roberts tells us,

“Until this overhang of unproductive capital is cleared (“deleveraged”), profitability cannot be restored sufficiently to get investment and economic growth going again. Indeed, it is likely that another huge slump will be necessary to “cleanse” the system of this “dead” (toxic) capital. The Long Depression will continue until then. Despite the very high mass of profit that has been generated since the economic recovery began in 2009, 10 the rate of profit stopped rising in 2011. The average rate of profit remains below the peak of 1997.” [39]

The capitalist state (i.e. the US government) realized long ago that it must become increasingly authoritarian in its service of capital (the rich) against the working-class masses who are being decimated by debt, rising costs of living, underemployment, etc. despite working longer hours than ever before. This is both an organic development in response to the downward trajectory of capital and a conscious attack against the masses for the protection of the wealthy. It is class war personified, and it is being carried out on multiple fronts, including everything from monetary policy, austerity, and increased police budgets to smothering propaganda campaigns, the criminalization of debt and poverty, and the likely formation of government psychological operations that are promoting culture wars. This centralization of power has developed out of necessity to keep capitalism churning. In doing so, it has brought capitalism to a very late stage in its lifespan, transforming into what many have come to refer to as “crony capitalism.” Amin explains,

“The centralization of power, even more marked than the concentration of capital, reinforces the interpenetration of economic and political power. The “traditional” ideology of capitalism placed the emphasis on the virtues of property in general, particularly small property—in reality medium or medium-large property—considered to purvey technological and social progress through its stability. In opposition to that, the new ideology heaps praise on the “winners” and despises the “losers” without any other consideration. The “winner” here is almost always right, even when the means used are borderline illegal, if they are not patently so, and in any case they ignore commonly accepted moral values…

Contemporary capitalism has become crony capitalism through the force of the logic of accumulation. The English term crony capitalism should not be reserved only for the “underdeveloped and corrupt” forms of Southeast Asia and Latin America that the “economists” (the sincere and convinced believers in the virtues of liberalism) denounced earlier. It now applies to capitalism in the contemporary United States and Europe. This ruling class’s current behavior is quite close to that of the mafia, even if the comparison appears to be insulting and extreme.” [40]

This concentration of wealth and power has manifested itself in very real ways throughout the country. For example, the agents of the surveillance state, which include everyone from police, prosecutors, and judges to ICE, FBI, and National Guard soldiers, are being emboldened to serve as a protective cushion between (1) the corporate state and its wealthy beneficiaries and (2) the increasingly desperate masses. However, these authoritarian mechanisms are nothing new in the US. As George Jackson told us in 1971, “The police state isn’t coming — it’s here, glaring and threatening.” It has always existed, only targeting certain demographics based on racial and class identities. McCarthyism was an extremely authoritarian process of targeting citizens based on political ideology. COINTELPRO consisted of spying, sabotage, and even political assassinations (most notably of Fred Hampton), and so on.

While it has always existed, the police state is now being expanded to target a much larger portion of the population, with the construction of an all-encompassing security state underway since the 1990s, and especially after the World Trade Center attacks that occurred on 9/11. Both capitalist parties have participated in expanding and strengthening this state, creating the 1033 program in 1997, which transfers military equipment and weaponry to police departments across the country, passing the Patriot Act in 2001, approving multiple bouts of the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act), bolstering the NSA (National Security Agency), expanding FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) reach, creating the US Department of Homeland Security in 2002 and ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in 2003, exponentially increasing police and military budgets, building “Cop Cities” (for urban warfare training) across the country, and bringing tech companies on board to spy on citizens via social media, computers, and cellular devices, with the latest incarnation of such being Trump’s 2025 contract with Palantir to create a database that streamlines private information of citizens (bank accounts, tax returns, social media accounts, etc).

However, even this powerful security state is not enough to protect the rich from the mass discontent and unrest that has become inevitable. The working class still far outnumbers the ruling class. And, the second amendment still exists. So, for fascism to truly cement itself as the ultimate defender of capitalism within the US, a significant portion of the exploited masses must become supporters of the corporate project. This can only be accomplished by convincing many of its necessity. Thus, in the modern US, propaganda campaigns seeking both “manufactured consent” and “active participation/collaboration” are targeting the upper portions of the working class and/or the modern petty bourgeoisie, which consists of small business owners, landlords, and a more privileged sector of the working class that has inherited boomer wealth. These targeting campaigns are being carried out by both politicians and capitalist media, exploiting the lack of material analysis that exists within the US population to pull emotional strings that are rooted in insecurity and fear. The manufactured hysteria about illegal immigrants, which is a common tactic being used by all Western/capitalist governments in these times, is a classic example of misdirection via propaganda. As Frances Moore Lappe and Hannah Stokes-Ramos explain,

“Americans are struggling not because of immigrants taking their jobs and using up their resources. The real threat is the worsening and highly alarming concentrations of wealth and income in our country—more extreme here than in over 100 nations. The top 1 percent of Americans control 30.4 percent of the wealth. Just 806 billionaires hold more wealth than the entire bottom half of all Americans.”

In other words, the historic transfer of wealth that has occurred in the US over the past several decades is not due to immigration, but rather to conscious and deliberate moves being made by the capitalist class to further enrich itself in the face of falling rates of profit. Put simply: the American working class has been robbed by the American capitalist class. Capitalist media – both liberal and conservative – are certainly not going to focus on this fact, so it must find distractions and formulate misdirection. First and foremost, the capitalist class must obstruct the formation of a class-conscious population that would see this truth and then, in turn, seek solutions through class struggle. To date, they not only have been successful in doing so but have also convinced a significant portion of the population to support more authoritarian forms of government to their own detriment. In the short-term, these enablers of fascism may feel secure in their calls for violence against fellow citizens, but this collaboration will inevitably end poorly for them in the long-term as the corporate state will be forced to extend its brutality over time.

Conclusion

In its attempt to protect the sanctity of profit, we are seeing that capitalism will completely give in to its fascistic tendencies centered around (1) property/wealth dynamics, (2) the inherently exploitative relationship between capital and labor, and (3) minority dominance over the masses, especially within a dying US empire that is spread thin externally and unraveling internally. The fascist reality that has always existed for the hyper-oppressed (poor, homeless, black, brown, immigrants, women, LGBT) members of the working class has begun slowly extending into more privileged sectors (most notably, former “middle class" whites) since the 1970s. The difference is, rather than organizing with fellow workers against capitalism/fascism by embracing socialism, many of these white workers who have been decimated in the neoliberal era are being swayed to support the overtly fascist transition to maintain their privileges, at least in the short-term. In doing so, they are becoming willing foot soldiers for the corporate government, spurred to action by racist narratives and irrational fears disseminated by capitalist media.

This unfortunate development shows us why social identities that exist within the superstructure, while ultimately secondary to one's relationship to the means of production, cannot be ignored or separated from class – because such an approach creates massive blind spots that are already being exploited by the ruling class. And, conversely, this is also why class cannot be ignored or separated from identity, as the ruling class has already fully coopted "identity politics" to be used as a smokescreen to obscure the class struggle. This process is well underway since corporate governance was fully cemented during the Reagan years, under the banner of neoliberalism, and has rapidly progressed before our eyes over the past decade alone. The Republican party is pushing the fascist envelope, while the Democrat party is enabling and steadying the transition. An authentic people's movement, grounded primarily in class struggle with a firm understanding of how identity is used to both intensify class domination and obscure avenues of working-class liberation, is needed.

People must come to understand that the liberal democratic order which replaced monarchy and feudalism is no longer viable. Capitalism cannot be reformed. It cannot be regulated. And the US cannot be reindustrialized under capitalist control. Those days are long gone, as the system has reached its inevitable conclusion and, since the 1970s, has come to a fork in the road with only two paths: full-blown fascism (corporate governance with an authoritarian police/surveillance state) or socialism (working-class/community control of the means of production). The former is winning outright, but the game isn’t over.

Notes

[1] Karl Marx. Capital Vol. III, Part III. The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, Chapter 13. The Law As Such. Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch13.htm

[2] Ibid

[3] Ibid

[4] Michael Roberts. A world rate of profit: important new evidence. January 22,2022. Accessed at A world rate of profit: important new evidence – Michael Roberts Blog

[5] World in Crisis: A Global Analysis of Marx's Law of Profitability, edited by Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts. Haymarket Books (October 2018)

[6] Ibid

[7] Ibid

[8] Ibid

[9] Paris Yeros and Praveen Jha, Late Neo-colonialism: Monopoly Capitalism in Permanent Crisis. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 9(1) 78–93, 2020 (Centre for Agrarian Research and Education for South: CARES) Accessed at Late Neo-colonialism: Monopoly Capitalism in Permanent Crisis

[10] Ibid

[11] Ibid

[12] VI Lenin, Imperialism and the Split in Socialism (October 1916). Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm

[13] Ibid

[14] Ibid

[15] Marx-Engels Correspondence, Engels to Marx in London (October 7, 1858) Accessed at https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1858/letters/58_10_07.htm

[16] VI Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). Chapter 8: Parasitism and Decay of Capitalism. Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch08.htm

[17] Ibid, Chapter 1: Concentration of Production and Monopolies. Accessed at Lenin: 1916/imp-hsc: I. CONCENTRATION OF PRODUCTION AND MONOPOLIES

[18] Ibid

[19] Ibid, Chapter3: Financial Capital and the Financial Oligarchy. Accessed at Lenin: 1916/imp-hsc: III. FINANCE CAPITAL AND THE FINANCIAL OLIGARCHY

[20] John Bellamy Foster. What is Monopoly Capital? (Monthly Review: January 1, 2018). Accessed at Monthly Review | What Is Monopoly Capital?

[21] Ibid

[22] Ted Reese. Keynesianism: A Bridge to Neoliberalism. (June 20, 2022) Sublation Magazine online. Accessed at Keynesianism: A Bridge to Neoliberalism

[23] John Bellamy Foster. What is Monopoly Capital? (Monthly Review: January 1, 2018). Accessed at Monthly Review | What Is Monopoly Capital?

[24] Samir Amin. The New Imperialist Structure. (Monthly Review: July 1, 2019) Accessed at Monthly Review | The New Imperialist Structure

[25] Ibid

[26] The Corporate State and its Fascist Foot Soldiers: Understanding Trumpism and the Liberal Response. (Hampton Institute: February 17, 2025). Accessed at The Corporate State and Its Fascist Foot Soldiers: Understanding Trumpism and the Liberal Response — Hampton Institute

[27] The Intellectual Power of Marxism: An Interview with Shane Mage. (The Platypus Affiliated Society: December 2020). Interview by CD Hardy and DL Jacobs. Accessed at The Platypus Affiliated Society – The intellectual power of Marxism: An interview with Shane Mage

[28] Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (City Lights Books: 2007)

[29] Michael Roberts. The profitability of crises, an interview by Jose Carlos Diaz Silva. March 2018. Accessed at The profitability of crises – Michael Roberts Blog

[30] Michael Parenti. Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism. (City Lights Books: 1997)

[31] Ibid, p. 134

[32] Ibid

[33] Erik Olin Wright, Alternative Perspectives in Marxist Theory of Accumulation and Crisis. Enriching the Sociological Imagination: How Radical Sociology Changed the Discipline (Brill: January 2004)

[34] Giovanni Arrighi and Jason W. Moore, Capitalist Development in World Historical Perspective. Phases of Capitalist Development: Booms, Crises and Globalizations (Palgrave: 2001)

[35] Luis Bresser-Pereira, Phases of capitalism – from mercantilism to neoliberalism (São Paulo, 2023). This paper was prepared for the book being, “The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Rentier Capitalism.” Accessed at https://www.bresserpereira.org.br/248-phases-of-capitalism.pdf

[36] WEB Du Bois, Black Reconstruction In America [1935], p. 700-701.

[37] Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, (University of North Carolina Press: 1983), p.26-27.

[38] Samir Amin. The New Imperialist Structure. (Monthly Review: July 1, 2019) Accessed at Monthly Review | The New Imperialist Structure

[39] Michael Roberts. The rate of profit is key (2012). Accessed at https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/07/26/the-rate-of-profit-is-key/

[40] Samir Amin. The New Imperialist Structure. (Monthly Review: July 1, 2019) Accessed at Monthly Review | The New Imperialist Structure

Black Literature: Beyond Bourgeois Pleading and “Achievement”

[Pictured: Richard Wright sitting on a sofa, Lido, Venice, 1950. (Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche/Getty Images)]

By Jerome Louison

What makes a Black novel (poem, play, or non-fiction work) truly great? Since the time of Phyllis Wheatley, Black writers in America, and their mostly white benefactors, have had to grapple with this question. The question also inspired the origins of this blog. As a lover of old books by Black writers, I’m constantly struck by how many incredible ideas and artistic works have been lost to time. This is due almost entirely to the nature of Black oppression in American society. Black writers and thinkers, regardless of their motivations, have historically conformed to standards imposed by external factors. This has left a legacy of Black writing that, for all its highlights and geniuses, never quite reached its full potential. It also never galvanized the masses of Black people long-term, nor maintained enough Black institutions to perpetuate it. But several thinkers saw this in real-time and warned against it. Richard Wright was one such thinker.

The Historical Role of the Black Writer

While immortalized for his fiction work, particularly his legendary novel “Native Son,” it is Wright’s non-fiction writings that we are concerned with. In particular, we’ll focus on his 1937 essay, “Blueprint for Negro Writing.”1 While a member of the Communist Party, Wright contributed this piece to the leftist magazine New Challenge, which he also helped edit. The essay was meant to underscore the theoretical foundation of the magazine. Wright begins the piece by delineating the types of roles Black writers had historically played in American literature. For white audiences, Wright states:

“[Black writers] entered the Court of American Public Opinion dressed in the knee-pants of servility, curtsying to show that the Negro was not inferior, that he was human, and that he had a life comparable to that of other people.”

As such, these writers were not offered any serious critique for their works on artistic grounds. For Black readership, folks were just happy to see accomplished writers of the race. The result was that, for Wright, “...Negro writing has been something external to the lives of educated Negroes themselves. That the productions of their writers should have been something of a guide in their daily lives is a matter which seems to never have been raised seriously.” Black writers thus had two roles: pleaders for Black humanity to whites generally, and models of “achievement” for the Black petty bourgeoisie to showcase, like trophies. Meanwhile, the lives, and particularly the social and political activity, of working-class Black people went almost completely neglected. Black union organizing and political organizing against lynchings in the South (and North) were absent from Black literature at the time. This was especially egregious to Wright, given that “Lacking the handicaps of false ambition and property, [the Black working-class] have access to a wide social vision and a deep social consciousness.”

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In addition, working-class Black people (who make up the large majority of Black people in America) have a unique culture, developed and recorded mainly through the Black church and folklore. Wright recounts how, through the church, Black people “first entered the shrine of western culture.” For millions of Black people at the time, the church’s teachings were all they knew of the world. On the other hand, Black people retained their deep thought through an oral tradition that included “Blues, spirituals, and folk tales…” Wright explains further:

“...the whispered words of a black mother to her black daughter on the ways of men, to confidential wisdom of a black father to his black son; the swapping of sex experiences on street corners from boy to boy in the deepest vernacular; work songs sung under blazing suns - all these formed the channels through which the racial wisdom flowed.”

In the late 19th to early 20th centuries, Black writers, on the whole, captured none of this. Instead, they strove to use their art to escape their conditions and the people attached to it. Black literature did not have a Black audience in mind.

Nationalism - Endemic to Black Life in America

As a communist writing in a Marxist magazine, Richard Wright makes great pains not to promote a nationalist perspective. The inherent internationalist and integrationist politics of the Communist Party were at odds with Black nationalism, at the time typified by the likes of Marcus Garvey and his UNIA-ACL. However, as Wright remarks, “...the nationalist character of the Negro people is unmistakable.” This “nationalist character” is held in the Black oral tradition and folklore more than anywhere else. Says Wright,

“Here are those vital beginnings of a recognition of value in life as it is lived, a recognition that marks the emergence of a new culture in the shell of the old.”

The plethora of Black institutions, from the church to newspapers to sports leagues, total “a Negro way of life in America.” And it is through these institutions that any progress for Black people is to occur, because, according to Wright, “...all other channels are closed.” Any Black writers looking to make an impact on their people’s conditions must grapple with the nationalist character as it is first, before anything else. It is worth quoting Wright at length here, as this is the core thesis of the essay:

“Negro writers must accept the nationalist implications of their lives, not in order to encourage them, but in order to change and transcend them. They must accept the concept of nationalism because, in order to transcend it, they must possess and understand it. And a nationalist spirit in Negro writing means a nationalism carrying the highest possible pitch of social consciousness. It means a nationalism that knows its origins, its limitations; that is aware of the dangers of its position; that knows its ultimate aims are unrealizeable in capitalist America; a nationalism whose reason for being lies in the simple fact of self-possession and in the consciousness of the interdependence of people in modern society.”

Collective Work and Responsibility

According to Wright, as the 20th century reached its midway point, Black writers had a new level of responsibility. They were uniquely qualified to fill the leadership void left by the “gradual decline of the moral authority of the Negro church, and the increasing irresolution which is paralyzing the Negro middle class leadership…” Through their art, Black writers could and should “create values by which his race is to struggle, live and die.”

Black writers thus need a framework to analyze society and Black people’s place in it. For Wright, a Marxist framework was necessary. Marxian dialectics, which Wright used throughout the essay, explained the dynamic nature of Black life and the various social and economic classes involved. It also imbues one with the will to change the world, not just describe it. True to his nature, however, Wright was not content with Marxist analysis alone. As he writes,

“Yet, for the Negro writer, Marxism is but the starting point. No theory of life can take the place of life. After Marxism has laid bare the skeleton of society, there remains the task of the writer to plant flesh upon those bones out of his will to live.” [emphasis mine]

Throughout the essay, Wright talks of writers having a consciousness. For him, this consciousness is not meant to compel Black writers to preach to their audiences, but to inform the writer’s perspective about the modern world and their place in it. Without that, the writer is “...a lost victim in a world he cannot understand or control.” It is through this consciousness, or “perspective” as Wright also calls it, that the Black writer can connect the daily lives of their people with the machinations of a global economic and political structure which defines the parameters of those lives.

This consciousness is also historical in scope. It involves some understanding of the African origins of Black Americans, and what was lost, as well as retained. With this perspective in place, the number of themes for Black writers is limitless. Dialectically, however, the limitless themes are themselves bound by the limit of the craft itself. Writing does not replace other forms of communication or artistic expression - it complements them.

That complementarity implicitly means that Black writers must work collectively, both among themselves and with other writers. Wright states,

“The ideological unity of Negro writers and the alliance of that unity with all the progressive ideas of our day is the primary prerequisite for collective work.”

Writing near the end of the Great Depression, on the eve of World War II, with the rise of Nazi Germany abroad, and the end of the Harlem Renaissance at home, Wright recognized the tumultuous moment he was in. His blueprint was meant to invigorate a new generation of Black writers to meet this moment. It feels fitting to leave Wright with the last word, which holds much resonance for our current time:

“These tasks are imperative in light of the fact that we live in a time when the majority of the basic assumptions of life can no longer be taken for granted. Tradition is no longer a guide. The world has grown huge and cold. Surely this is the moment to ask questions, to theorize, to speculate, to wonder what materials can a human world be built.”

Notes

[1] The essay can be found in “Richard Wright Reader”, edited by Ellen Wright and Michael Fabre.

What Correctly Defines Pan-Africanism in 2025 and Beyond

By Ahjamu Umi

Republished from Hood Communist.

Since its initial organizational expression in 1900, the phrase Pan-Africanism has been expressed in many different forms. For some, its current meaning is defined as unity between all people of African descent across the world. For others, Pan-Africanism is an ideology defined by nebulous elements of the type of unity previously described. For still many others, Pan-Africanism is represented by social media famous individuals who claim Pan-Africanism as a set of beliefs without any clear defining criteria.

For those of us who identify Pan-Africanism not as an ideology, but as an objective, we define Pan-Africanism as the total liberation and unification of Africa under a continental wide scientific socialist government. This is the framework for revolutionary Pan-Africanists who endorse the concepts of Pan-Africanism laid out by the ideas of Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, Amilcar Cabral, and others. The reasons we humbly, yet firmly, advance one unified socialist Africa as really the only serious definition of Pan-Africanism are connected to dialectical and historical materialism. By dialectical and historical materialism we mean the historical components that define matter and the conflictual elements that transform that matter. In other words, the history of a thing and the forces that have come to shape that thing’s characteristics over time.

For example, for African people (“All people of African descent are African and belong to the African nation”—Kwame Nkrumah—“Class Struggle in Africa), the reason we live on three continents and the Caribbean in large numbers in 2025 is not the result of higher desire on our part to see the world. It’s not because God placed people who look like us in every corner of the planet. The only reason is because colonialism and slavery exploited Africa’s human and material resources to build up the wealth of the Western capitalist world. As a result of this irrefutable reality, it makes zero sense in 2025 for African people to imitate the logic of other people in defining ourselves based solely upon where we are born.

This approach is illogical because African people were kidnapped from Africa and spread across the world. Even the Africans who left Africa on their own to live in the Western industrialized countries, did so only because colonialism made the resources they seek unavailable in Africa. Consequently, an African in Brazil can and does have biological relatives in the Dominican Republic, Canada, Portugal, the U.S., etc. These people will most likely never meet and even if they came across each other, they probably could not communicate due to language barriers, but none of this changes the cold stark reality that they could easily be related. So, it makes no sense for Africans to accept colonial borders to define ourselves i.e., “I’m Jamaican and have no connection to Black people in the U.S., etc.”

Secondly, and more important, wherever African people are in 2025, we are at the bottom of that society. The reasons for this are not that there is something wrong with African people or that we don’t work hard enough and don’t have ambition. Anyone who has arisen at 5am on any day in Africa knows those conceptions of African people are bogus. Any bus depot at that time of morning shows thousands of people up, hustling, struggling to begin the day trying to earn resources for their families. The real reason we are on the bottom everywhere is because the capitalist system was built on exploiting our human and material resources. As a result, capitalism today cannot function without that exploitation. In other words, in order for DeBeers Diamonds to remain the largest diamond producer on earth, African people in Zimbabwe, the Congo, Azania (South Africa), etc., must continue to be viciously exploited to produce the diamonds. Its this system that has made the zionist state of Israel one of the world’s main diamond polishing economies despite the fact diamond mines don’t exist in occupied Palestine (Israel). Apple, Motorola, Samsung, Hershey, Godiva, Nestle, etc., all rely on similar exploitative systems that steal African resources and labor to continue to produce riches for those multinational corporations while the masses of African people die young from black lung, mining these resources, often by hand.

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Meanwhile, since the wealth of capitalism is dependent upon this system of exploitation to continue uninterrupted, the mechanisms of the capitalist system have to ensure that African people are prohibited from waking up to this reality. Thus, the maintenance of systems of oppression to keep the foot of the system firmly placed on the necks of African people everywhere. Whether its police, social services, etc., this is true. This exploitation marks the origin of the problem, and therefore, logically, it is also where the solution must be addressed. In other words, while we can recognize that the consequences of this exploitation have global dimensions, we cannot expect the problem to be resolved solely through actions taken outside of Africa, such as in the U.S. or elsewhere.

All of the above explains why one unified socialist Africa has to be the only real definition for Pan-Africanism. Capitalism, as the driving force behind the exploitation of Africa and the global African diaspora, cannot serve as the solution to the suffering it has created. Instead, Africa’s vast resources—including its 600 million hectares of arable land, its immense mineral wealth, and the collective potential of its people—must be reorganized into ways to eradicate poverty and disease, including

Ways to educate all who need education to increase the skills to solve these problems. And, in accomplishing all of this, our pride as African people based upon our abilities to govern our own lives, coupled with the necessity for others to respect us for the same, eliminates the constant disrespect—internal and external—which defines African existence today.

This Pan-Africanist reality will eliminate the scores of African people who are ashamed of their African identity overnight. Now, what we will see is those same people clamoring to instantly become a part of the blossoming African nation.

Revolutionary Pan-Africanism cannot be mistaken in 2025 as a pipe dream or simply the hopes of Africans everywhere. Building capacity for this reality is the actual on the ground work that many genuinely revolutionary Pan-Africanist organizations are engaging in on a daily basis. The work to forge that collective unity based upon the principles cited by people like Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, Amilcar Cabral, Thomas Sankara, Robert Sobukwe, Lumumba, Marcus Garvey, Amy/Amy Jacques Garvey, Carmen Peirera, etc. Principles of humanism, collectivism, and egalitarianism.,the Revolutionary African Personality articulated by Nkrumah, the understanding of how to build political party structures as documented by Ture,the understanding of the role of culture in guiding our actions as expressed by Cabral, etc., and many of these types of cultural and principle approaches to building society have been seen in recent times through the work of the former Libyan Jamihiriya and what’s currently happening in the Sahel region. These efforts will only increase and become even more mass in character.

We challenge a single person to express why revolutionary Pan-Africanism is not what’s needed for African people. Not just as one of many ideas, but as the single objective that would address all of our collective problems. Hearing and seeing no one who can refute that statement, the next step is how we collectively increase African consciousness around the necessity to contribute to on the ground Pan-African work. The first step is getting people to see the importance of getting involved in organized struggle. The second step is ensuring that those organizations have institutionalized, consistent, ideological training as a priority.

To seriously embark upon this work brings no individual recognition. It brings no prestige. It requires a clear focus and a commitment to detail, but what it will produce is an ever increasing capacity that will one day manifest itself in the type of revolutionary Pan-Africanism described here that will fulfill the aspirations of African people everywhere while placing us in the position to contribute to all peace and justice pursuing struggles across the planet earth.

Trump Terror, Complicit Local Leadership, and the Assault Against Southeast D.C.

[PIctured: Trump’s Homeland Security Advisor, Stephen Miller. Photo Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images]

By Oliver Robinson

On March 27, 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the “Safe and Beautiful” federal task force for Washington, DC. Framed as a public safety and beautification campaign, the initiative is led by his Homeland Security Advisor, Stephen Miller—a figure known for his hardline white nationalist policies. Under the guise of civic improvement, this task force seeks to further entrench surveillance, policing, and state control over DC’s most marginalized communities, particularly Black working-class residents in the Southeast neighborhood.

The order calls for a rapid expansion of federal law enforcement in the city, heightened pretrial detention, aggressive encampment clearances, increased immigration raids, and expedited licensing for concealed carry weapons—available, in Trump’s words, to “law-abiding citizens.” But beneath this language lies a clear agenda: consolidate white power, criminalize poverty, and militarize public space.

The expedited concealed carry provision is a particularly dangerous signal. It encourages white, affluent residents to arm themselves, invoking a vigilante ethos reminiscent of colonial settler militias. “Law-abiding” is not a neutral term; it encodes race, class, and political allegiance. The invitation to arm and police the city is not extended to all residents—it is targeted toward those who benefit from and uphold the existing racial and economic order. This strategy turns ordinary citizens into foot soldiers of state repression, authorizing them to defend property and privilege against imagined threats posed by the presence of poor Black people.

This moment is not new—it is a continuation of a long-standing colonial tradition in U.S. governance. Settler colonialism has always relied on deputizing white civilians to enforce racial boundaries and defend elite interests. From slave patrols to Jim Crow possees to “stand your ground” laws, white citizens have been authorized to use violence in defense of a racialized social order.

During the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, we saw armed civilians collaborating with police departments across the country, using protest as a pretext for violent reassertion of racial control. Trump’s current order revives that logic, cloaked in language about safety and civic pride. It asserts that DC’s white and wealthy wards must be secured, and the presence of Black working-class people is rendered not only undesirable, but criminal.

To be clear, Trump’s order did not introduce these policies from scratch—they merely formalized and expanded practices already embraced by the DC government. Under Mayor Muriel Bowser and the DC Council, the city has long adopted a punitive, repressive approach to poverty and displacement. The 2024 Secure DC Omnibus Crime Bill expanded pretrial detention, granting judges more discretion to incarcerate individuals before trial based on vague predictions of risk. This has led to a surge in jail populations, disproportionately affecting Black residents in Southeast DC.  The more recently proposed DC Peace Plan, would further increase police funding and usher in a permanent expansion of pretrial detention. Excessive and arbitrary pretrial detention has long been considered a violation of international human rights.

Even before the federal task force was launched, the city conducted aggressive encampment sweeps under the pretense of public health, displacing unhoused residents without providing stable alternatives. Transit police began cracking down on fare evasion in December 2024, further criminalizing the daily survival of low-income riders. Last week, D.C. launched a new juvenile crime unit, a measure likely to increase the criminalization and harassment of D.C. youth. These moves were not incidental—they reflected a strategic consensus between local and federal actors on policing the poor.

In effect, DC’s local leadership did Trump’s bidding before this executive order.. The same Democratic officials who posture as defenders of the city against federal overreach have in practice laid the groundwork for a full-scale assault on Southeast DC. The repression we are seeing now is not a clash between federal authoritarianism and local progressivism—it is a collaboration.

At the heart of this repression lies a profound contradiction: the state punishes people not for what they have done, but for what they lack. The homeless are not criminalized for actions, but for existing without shelter. Fare evaders are not punished for theft, but for poverty. Those detained pretrial are not convicted criminals, but people who cannot afford bail or who the court deems “risky” based on opaque metrics.

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The city’s approach treats deprivation as deviance. It does not address the root causes of poverty—joblessness, gentrification, structural racism—but instead targets the visible signs of social failure. The presence of unhoused people in parks, the visibility of mental health crises on public transportation, the survival economies people turn to when excluded from formal labor—these are not treated as social emergencies, but as threats to be removed.

In this system, the absence of resources becomes grounds for incarceration. Hunger is met with handcuffs. Displacement is met with surveillance. The logic of colonial control defines who is allowed to exist in the city and under what terms. Poor and working-class Black people are not only excluded from the city’s prosperity—they are blamed for disrupting its image.

For decades, political leaders have framed DC statehood as a solution to federal intrusion and Home Rule as democratic protection for DC residents. But these crises reveal the hollowness of those positions. The problem is not merely that DC lacks representation—it’s that its elected representatives are themselves deeply implicated in maintaining the status quo.

Statehood will not resolve the crisis when local officials already embrace draconian policies. Home Rule means little when the city uses its autonomy to displace the poor and protect real estate interests. Democratic leadership in DC has repeatedly shown that it is more invested in attracting capital than in defending communities. The problem is not just who governs—it’s how they govern, and on whose behalf.

Trump’s agenda did not descend on DC as a foreign imposition. It emerged from a bipartisan consensus that treats working-class Black life as disposable. Statehood might change the city’s formal status, but it won’t transform the deeper power structures that define who is safe, who is served, and who is sacrificed.

True safety will not come from more police, more surveillance, or more statehood. It will come from collective self-determination and community resilience. We must build power from below—through organizing, mutual aid, and political education—to challenge the systems that have abandoned and targeted us.

Survival programs are a cornerstone of this effort. Rooted in the legacy of the Black Panther Party, survival programs meet people’s immediate needs while raising consciousness about the systems that produce those needs in the first place. This means setting up community-run food distribution, free clinics, tenants’ unions, legal defense funds, and harm reduction centers. It means creating networks of care that don’t rely on the nonprofit industrial complex or city contracts, but are autonomous and accountable to the people they serve.

Popular education campaigns are equally essential. Communities must understand not just the what of these policies, but the why—why homelessness is punished instead of solved, why police budgets grow while schools crumble, why poor Black neighborhoods are always the ones targeted. Education must be participatory, rooted in raising political consciousness, and focused on action. It is not enough to critique the system—we must equip people to change it.

Political independence is also key. Communities must stop relying on corporate-backed candidates who claim progressive values but govern through repression. Instead, we must build independent coalitions and decision making structures that challenge the political establishment, not negotiate with it. 

The struggle for Southeast DC is a struggle against colonial control. It is not just about resisting Trump or criticizing Bowser—it is about overturning the entire arrangement that treats Black working-class communities as disposable. We are not fighting for inclusion in a system built on our exclusion. We are fighting to dismantle that system and build something new.

DC will not be saved by statehood. It will not be redeemed by Democratic majorities. Its liberation will come from the people who have always borne the brunt of state violence—and who continue to organize, resist, and imagine another world. The task ahead is not only to survive, but to fight—and to win.

Imperialism and White Settler Colonialism in Marxist Theory

By John Bellamy Foster

Republished from Monthly Review.

The concept of settler colonialism has always been a key element in the Marxist theory of imperialism, the meaning of which has gradually evolved over a century and a half. Today the reemergence of powerful Indigenous movements in the struggles over cultural survival, the earth, sovereignty, and recognition, plus the resistance to the genocide inflicted by the Israeli state on the Palestinian people in the occupied territories, have brought the notion of settler colonialism to the fore of the global debate. In these circumstances, a recovery and reconstruction of the Marxist understanding of the relation between imperialism and settler colonialism is a crucial step in aiding Indigenous movements and the world revolt against imperialism.

Such a recovery and reconstruction of Marxist analyses in this area is all the more important since a new paradigm of settler colonial studies, pioneered in Australia by such distinguished intellectual figures as Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini, has emerged over the last quarter-century. This now constitutes a distinct field globally—one that, in its current dominant form in the academy, is focused on a pure “logic of elimination.” In this way, settler colonialism as an analytical category based on autonomous collectives of settlers is divorced from colonialism more generally, and from imperialism, exploitation, and class.[1] Settler colonialism, in this sense, is often said to be an overriding planetary force in and of itself. In Veracini’s words, “It was a settler colonial power that became a global hegemon.… The many American occupations” around the world are “settler colonial” occupations. We are now told that not just the “pure” or ideal-typical settler colonies of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel can be seen as such, as originally conceived by Wolfe, but also the “whole of Africa,” plus much of Asia and Latin America, have been “shaped” to a considerable extent by the “logic of elimination,” as opposed to exploitation. Rather than seeing settler colonialism as an integral part of the development of the imperialist world system, it has become, in some accounts, its own complete explanation.[2]

It would be wrong to deny the importance of the work of figures like Wolfe and Veracini, and the new settler colonial paradigm. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz states in Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion, Wolfe carried out “groundbreaking research” demonstrating that “settler colonialism was a structure not an event.” He did a great service in bringing the notion of settler colonialism and the entire Indigenous struggle into the center of things. Nevertheless, in the case of the United States, she adds, in a corrective to Wolfe’s account, the founders were not simply settler colonists, they were “imperialists who visualized the conquest of the continent and gaining access to the Pacific and China.” The projection of U.S. imperialist expansion from the first had no territorial boundaries and was geared to unlimited empire. Settler colonialism reinforced, rather than defined, this global imperialist trajectory, which had roots in capitalism itself. This suggests that there is a historical-materialist approach to settler colonialism that sees it as dialectically connected to capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, rather than as an isolated category.[3]

Marx and Settler Colonialism

It is now widely recognized in the research on settler colonialism that Karl Marx was the foundational thinker in this area in his discussion of “so-called primitive accumulation”; his references to colonialism proper, or settler colonialism; and his analysis of Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the “The Modern Theory of Colonization,” with which he ended the first volume of Capital.[4] However, such recognition of Marx’s numerous references to settler colonialism seldom goes on to uncover the full depth of his analysis in this regard.

As an authority on ancient Greek philosophy who wrote his dissertation on the ancient materialist philosopher Epicurus, Marx was very familiar with the ancient Greek cleruchy, or settler colony established as an extension of its founding city state. In many ways, the most notable Athenian cleruchy was the island/polis of Samos, the birthplace of Epicurus, whose parents were cleruchs or settler colonialists. The cleruchy in Samos was established in 365 BCE, when the Athenians forcibly removed the inhabitants of the island and replaced them with Athenian citizens drawn from the indigent population of an overcrowded Athens, turning Samos not only into a settler colony, but also a garrison state within the Athenian Empire. The dispute in the Greek world over the cleruchy in Samos was subsequently at the center of two major wars fought by Athens, resulting in the final downfall of Athens as a major power with its defeat by Macedonia in 322 BCE. This led to the dismantling of the cleruchy in Samos (in compliance with a decree issued by Alexander the Great shortly before his death), the removal of the Athenian settlers, and the return of the original population to the island.[5]

For Marx and other classically educated thinkers in the nineteenth century, the Athenian cleruchy in Samos represented a pure model of colonialism. Although settler colonialism was to take new and more vicious forms under capitalism, reinforced by religion and racism, the underlying phenomenon was thus well known in antiquity and familiar to nineteenth-century scholars. In his analysis of colonialism in Capital and elsewhere, Marx referred to what is now called “settler colonialism” as “colonialism properly so-called”—a usage that was later adopted by Frederick Engels and V. I. Lenin.[6] The concept of colonialism proper clearly reflected the classical viewpoint centered on Greek antiquity. Moreover, any use of “settler” to modify “colonialism” would have been regarded as redundant in the nineteenth century, as the etymological root of “colonialism,” derived from Latin and the Romance languages, was colonus/colona, signifying “farmer” or “settler.”[7] Hence, the original meaning of the word colonialism was literally settlerism. But by the twentieth century, the meaning of colonialism had so broadened that it was no longer associated with its classical historical origins or its linguistic roots, making the use of the term “settler colonialism” more acceptable.

Colonialism proper, in Marx’s conception, took two forms, both having as their precondition a logic of extermination, in the nineteenth century sense of exterminate, meaning both forcible eradication and expulsion.[8] The “first type” was represented by “the United States, Australia, etc.”, associated with a form of production based on “the mass of the farming colonists” who set out “to produce their own livelihood,” and whose mode of production was thus not immediately capitalist in character. The “second type” consisted of “plantations—where commercial speculations figure from the start and production is intended for the world market.” This type was part of “the capitalist mode of production, although only in the formal sense, since the slavery of Negroes [on New World plantations] precludes free wage labor, which is the basis of capitalist production. But the business in which slaves are used is conducted by capitalists.”[9]

Settler colonialism of the first type, that of farming colonists, was dominant in the northern United States, while the second type of settler colony, founded on slave plantations, dominated the U.S. South. The second type, or what Marx also referred to as a “second colonialism,” was rooted in slave labor and plantation economies that were run by capitalists who were also large landowners, with capitalist relations “grafted on” slavery. The settler colonies in the antebellum South, while based in the main on plantation slavery, also included fairly large numbers of subsistence “farming colonists,” or poor whites who existed on a marginal, subsistence basis, since slave plantation owners had seized the most fertile land.[10]

In this way, Marx’s approach to settler colonialism encompassed not only the exterminist logic directed at Indigenous nations, but also the dual forms of production (free farmers and plantation slavery) that emerged within the resulting settler colonial structure. Nevertheless, the overall dialectic of settler colonialism had as its precondition the extermination (including removal) of Indigenous populations. As Marx expressed it in the first volume of Capital:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.…

The treatment of the indigenous population was, of course, at its most frightful in plantation-colonies set up exclusively for the export trade, such as the West Indies, and in rich and well-populated countries, such as Mexico and India, that were given over to plunder. But even in the colonies properly so called, the Christian character of primitive accumulation was not belied. In 1703 those sober exponents of Protestantism, the Puritans of New England, by decrees of their assembly set a premium of £40 on every Indian scalp and every captured redskin; in 1720, a premium of £100 was set on every scalp; in 1744, after Massachusetts Bay had proclaimed a certain tribe as rebels, the following prices were laid down: for a male scalp of 12 years and upwards, £100 in new currency, for a male prisoner £105, for women and children prisoners £50, for the scalps of women and children £50.[11]

The real significance of this barbaric price structure, as Marx intimated here, was one of extermination, since male prisoners were valued only marginally more than their scalps, which were tokens of their death; while the lives of women and children simply equaled the value of their scalps.

Marx’s primary source on colonization and the treatment of the Indigenous throughout the world, at the time he wrote Capital, was William Howitt’s Colonization and Christianity: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Natives by the Europeans in All Their Colonies (1838). Howitt’s theme with respect to the British colonies in North America was the extermination (extinction and expulsion) of the Indigenous population. Writing at the time of the Trail of Tears in the United States, he described “the exterminating campaigns of General Jackson.” In this respect, he quoted Andrew Jackson’s declaration on March 27, 1814, that he was “determined to exterminate them” all. The Native American peoples, Howitt observed, “were driven into waste [uncultivatable hinterlands], or to annihilation.”[12] Writing of the conditions facing the Indigenous nations of the Southeast faced with the advance of white settlers, he explained,

Nothing will be able to prevent the final expatriation of these southern tribes: they must pass the Mississippi till the white population is swelled sufficiently to require them to cross the Missouri; there will then remain but two barriers between them and annihilation—the rocky mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Wherever we hear now of those tribes, it is of some fresh act of aggression against them—some fresh expulsion of a portion of them—and of melancholy Indians moving off towards the western wilds.[13]

For Marx, the logic of extermination introduced by English settler colonialism in the Americas was historically tied to the earlier and ongoing conquest and plundering of Ireland, the natural wealth of which was being drained continually by England. He argued that the same “plan to exterminate” that had been employed with the utmost ferocity by the English and Scots against the Irish was later applied in the British colonies in North America “against the Red Indians.”[14] In Ireland, what was frequently called a policy of extermination, occurring alongside the enclosures in England, created a massive relative surplus population that could not be absorbed by the early Industrial Revolution in England, leading to a constant flow of English, Irish, and Scots Irish settler colonists to North America, where they sought to extinguish the Native Americans to make room for their own advance. A similar process occurred in New South Wales (originally a penal colony in Australia) with respect to the settler colonial treatment of Aboriginal peoples, as described by Howitt.[15]

Marx and Engels were also deeply concerned with the French settler colonialism in Algeria occurring in their time, and sided with the Indigenous Algerian resistance.[16] The Indigenous population of Algeria was nearly 6 million in 1830. By 1852, following the French all-out war of annihilation, including a scorched earth policy and subsequent famine, this had been reduced to 2.5 million.[17] Meanwhile, “legalistic” means were also used to seize the communal lands, which were to be turned into the private property of colonists. In his excerpts in the 1870s from the work of the Russian ethnologist M. M. Kovalevsky, Marx compiled a detailed analysis of “the planting of European colonists” in Algeria and “the expropriation of the soil of the native population by European colonists and speculators.” After a brief sojourn in Algiers near the end of his life, meant as part of a rest cure ordered by his doctor, Marx argued that there was no hope for the Indigenous Algerians “WITHOUT A REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT.”[18]

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In 1882, Engels took up the subject of the English settler colonies in a letter to Karl Kautsky, writing:

As I see it, the colonies proper, i.e., the countries occupied by European settlers, such as Canada, the Cape [South Africa], Australia, will all become independent; on the other hand, countries that are merely ruled [by colonial powers] and are inhabited by natives, such as India, Algeria and the Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish possessions, will have to be temporarily taken over by the proletariat and guided as rapidly as possible towards independence. How this process will develop is difficult to say. India may, indeed very probably will, start a revolution…. The same thing could also happen elsewhere, say in Algeria and Egypt, and would certainly suit us [that is, the socialist struggle in Europe] best.[19]

Imperialism and Settler Colonialism

Lenin quoted in 1916 from Engels’s 1882 letter to Kautsky, including the reference to “colonies proper,” and clearly agreed with Engels’s analysis.[20] But the Comintern was slow to take up the question of settler colonialism. This was only to occur at the Second Congress on the National and Colonial Questions in 1928, in the “Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies,” which was meant to provide a critique of the entire “imperialist world system,” of which settler colonialism was considered to be a key part. A sharp distinction was drawn between settler colonies and other colonies. As the Comintern document stated:

In regard to the colonial countries it is necessary to distinguish between those colonies of the capitalist countries which have served them as colonising regions for their surplus population, and which in this way have become a continuation of their capitalist system (Australia, Canada, etc.), and those colonies which are exploited by the imperialists primarily as markets for their commodities, as sources of raw material and as spheres for the export of capital. This distinction has not only a historic but also a great economic and political significance.

The colonies of the first type on the basis of their general development become “Dominions,” that is, members of the given imperialist system, with equal, or nearly equal, rights. In them, capitalist development reproduces among the immigrant white population the class structure of the metropolis, at the same time that the native population, was for the most part, exterminated. There cannot be there any talk of the [externally based] colonial regime in the form that it shows itself in the colonies of the second type.

Between these two types is to be found a transitional type (in various forms) where, alongside the numerous native population, there exists a very considerable population of white colonists (South Africa, New Zealand, Algiers, etc.). The bourgeoisie, which has come from the metropolis, in essence represents in these countries (emigrant colonies) nothing else than a colonial “prolongation” of the bourgeoisie of the metropolis.[21]

The Comintern went on to conclude that,

The metropolis is interested to a certain extent in the strengthening of its capitalist subsidiary in the colonies, in particular when this subsidiary of imperialism is successful in enslaving the original native population or even in completely destroying it. On the other hand, the competition between various imperialist systems for influence in the semi-independent countries [with large settler populations] can lead also to their breaking off from the metropolis.[22]

What emerged in the analysis of the Comintern by 1928, therefore, building on the earlier work of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, was a conception of settler colonialism as an integral part of a general theory of the imperialist world system. In the view of the Comintern, race, which was now no longer seen primarily in biological terms, but was increasingly viewed through the lens of cultural resistance—as in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois—was brought into the argument more explicitly with the concept of “whiteness,” emphasizing that these were “white” settler colonies.[23] The Comintern declaration on settler colonialism was concurrent with the first Palestinian treatments of the subject in the 1920s and ’30s.[24]

Also in the 1920s, Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui wrote of the Spanish “practice of exterminating the Indigenous population and the destruction of their institutions.… The Spanish colonizers,” he noted, “introduced to Peru a depopulation scheme.” This was, however, followed by the “enslavement” and then “assimilation of the Indians,” moving away from the exterminism of pure settler colonialism as the demand for labor became the dominant consideration. Here the primary objective of colonization, as Mariátegui recognized, had shifted from the expropriation of the land of Indigenous populations, and thus their erasure, to an emphasis on the exploitation of their labor power.[25]

The Comintern was dissolved by the Soviet Union in 1943 at a critical moment in the Second World War as a way of demonstrating that the defeat of Nazi Germany came before all else. The notion of settler colonialism, however, was carried over into dependency theory after the Second World War by the Marxist economist Paul A. Baran, then a professor at Stanford University. Baran had been born in Tsarist Russia and received his economics training in the Soviet Union, Germany, and the United States. He linked the Comintern doctrine on settler colonialism to the question of development and underdevelopment.

Writing in 1957, in The Political Economy of Growth, Baran distinguished “between the impact of Western Europe’s entrance into North America (and Australia and New Zealand) on one side, and the ‘opening up’ by Western capitalism of Asia, Africa, or Eastern Europe,” on the other. In the former case, Western Europeans “settled” as permanent residents, after eliminating the original inhabitants, arriving with “capitalism in their bones,” and establishing a society that was “from the outset capitalist in structure.”[26]

However, the situation was different with respect to Asia and Africa:

Where climate and the natural environment were such as possibly to invite Western European settlers, they were faced with established societies with rich and ancient cultures, still pre-capitalist or in the embryonic state of capitalist development. Where the existing social organizations were primitive and tribal, the general conditions and in particular the climate were such as to preclude any mass settlement of Western European arrivals. Consequently, in both cases the Western European visitors rapidly determined to extract the largest possible gains from the host countries and to take their loot home.[27]

In this way, Baran clearly contrasted the two types of colonialism, linking each to the regime of capitalist accumulation. While European white settler colonies in North America and Australasia extirpated the original inhabitants and expropriated the land, laying the ground for internal accumulation, the wider European colonial plundering of ancient and rich societies, as in the cases of India, Java, and Egypt, fed the Industrial Revolution in England (and elsewhere in Western Europe), providing it with much of the original capital for development. In the process, preexisting civilizations and cultures were disarticulated. Their communal and collective social relations, as Rosa Luxemburg emphasized, were necessarily “annihilated” by capitalism.[28]

In dependency theory from the start, white settler colonies thus stood as an exception within colonialism as a whole. Baran noted but did not analyze the role of slavery in “the primary accumulation of capital” and the development of settler colonialism. For Marx, the transatlantic slave trade was the “pedestal” on which both the accumulation of capital in the plantation South of the United States and the British cotton industry at the heart of the Industrial Revolution were to rest.[29]

In the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, settler colonialism theory became a major focus within Marxism due to struggles then occurring in Africa and Palestine. A key figure in the analysis of settler colonialism was Frantz Fanon. Originally from the French colony of Martinique, Fanon fought with the French Free Forces in the Second World War, studied psychiatry in France, and eventually joined the National Liberation Front of the Algerian Revolution. He was the author most notably of Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Influenced by both G. W. F. Hegel and Marx, Fanon applied Hegel’s master-slave dialectic to the colonizer-colonized relation in the Algerian context, accounting for the logic of violence characterizing settler colonialism and exploring the continuing search for recognition on the part of the Indigenous Algerians.[30] Critical considerations of settler colonialism were also inspired by the revolt of the Land and Freedom Army in Kenya against white settlers and plantation owners between 1952 and 1960, which led to the death in combat or execution of upwards of ten thousand Africans.[31]

In 1965, the Palestinian-Syrian scholar Fayez A. Sayegh wrote a pamphlet, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, published by the Palestine Liberation Organization, arguing that “Zionist colonialism” was “essentially incompatible with the continued existence of the ‘native population’ in the coveted country,” and had as its goal the creation of a “settler community.”[32] Two years later, in the midst of the Arab-Israeli War, French Marxist Maxime Rodinson, whose parents had both perished in Auschwitz, published his landmark work, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? Rodinson commenced by stating that “The accusation that Israel is a colonialist phenomenon is advanced by an almost unanimous Arab intelligentsia, whether on the right or the left. It is one case where Marxist theorizing has come forward with the clearest response to the requirements of ‘implicit ideology’ of the Third World and has been widely adopted.” He saw settler colonialism as linked to “the worldwide system of imperialism” and opposed to “indigenous liberation movements.” For Rodinson, Zionism thus represented “colonialism in the [classical] Greek sense,” that is, in the sense of the Athenian cleruchy, which eliminated/removed the native populations and replaced them with settlers. Settler colonialism directed at the extermination and displacement of the Indigenous peoples/nations, he indicated, had also occurred in colonial Ireland and Tasmania. Given this underlying logic, “It is possible that war is the only way out of the situation created by Zionism. I leave it to others to find cause for rejoicing in this.” Israel, Rodinson added, was not simply a settler-colonial country, but participated in imperialist exploitation and expansion abroad.[33]

Arghiri Emmanuel, the pioneering Greek Marxist economist and theorist of unequal exchange, had worked in commerce in the Belgian Congo in what seems to have been his family textile firm in the late 1930s and again in the late ’40s before relocating to France in 1958. In his time in Congo, he had encountered the white settler community there, part of which was Greek.[34] In 1969, he published his classic work Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade. In that work, Emmanuel addressed the issue of settler colonialism or “colonialism of settlement.” Here he made a distinction between, on the one hand, England’s four main “colonies of settlement”—the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which had introduced a policy of exterminism against the Indigenous population—and, on the other, the fifth such settlement, namely South Africa, where the native population had not been subjected to exterminism to the same extent. In South Africa, the Indigenous Africans were “relegated to the ghettos of apartheid,” allowing for the superexploitation of their labor by a substantial white minority.[35]

In Emmanuel’s theory of unequal exchange, wages were treated as an independent variable, based on Marx’s notion of their historically determined character. Viewed from this standpoint, Emmanuel argued that in the first four colonies of settlement, the high wages of the white workers who constituted the majority of the population had promoted rapid capital accumulation. However, in South Africa, the fifth settler colony, the wages of the majority-Black population were abysmally low, with the result being a “semideveloped” condition. Emmanuel criticized dependency theorist Andre Gunder Frank for explaining the development of the British white settler colonies primarily in culturalist terms. Rather, it was the high wages of the white settlers that promoted development.[36]

This argument was developed further in Emmanuel’s “White-Settler Colonialism and the Myth of Investment Imperialism,” published in New Left Review in 1972. Here he dealt with the frequent conflict that arose between settler colonists and the imperial powers that had given rise to them, since white settler states emerged as rivals of European colonial states, no longer subjected as easily to colonial exploitation. This dialectic led to struggles with the metropoles, most of them unsuccessful, by settlers attempting to create independent white colonial states. Here Emmanuel drew on his own experiences in the Belgian Congo. However, he put this whole dynamic in the context of the history of settler colonialism more broadly, as in Ireland and Israel/Palestine.[37]

Other Marxist theorists were to enter into the analysis of settler colonialism at this time, particularly with respect to Africa, relating it to dependency theory. In 1972, shortly after the publication of Emmanuel’s “White Settler Colonialism” article, Egyptian French Marxist economist Samir Amin discussed “settler colonization” in his article on “Underdevelopment and Dependence of Black Africa—Origins and Contemporary Forms,” mainly with respect to the failed attempts at settler colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa. Amin distinguished settler colonialism from what he called “Africa of the colonial trade economy,” relying on monopolies of trade, the colonial import-export house, and the mobilization of workers through labor reserves. Later, Amin was to write about settler colonialism in Israel, which he saw as similar to the way in which the “Red Indians” in North America were “hunted and exterminated,” but which was to be viewed in Israel’s case as intrinsically related to a wider monopoly capitalist/imperialist trajectory led by the United States aimed at global domination.[38]

For Marxist theory throughout this period, the concept of settler colonialism was viewed as crucial in defining the development of colonialism and imperialism as a whole. In 1974, writing for the Encyclopedia Britannica, Harry Magdoff underscored that colonialism took

two forms, or some combination of the two: (1) the removal of the indigenous peoples by killing them off or forcing them into specially reserved areas, thus providing room for settlers from Western Europe who then developed the agriculture and industry of these lands under the social system imported from the mother countries; or (2) the conquest of the indigenous peoples and the transformation of their existing societies to suit the changing needs of the more powerful militarily and technically advanced nations.[39]

A breakthrough in the Marxian analysis of settler colonialism occurred with the publication of the Australian historian Kenneth Good’s “Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation” in The Journal of Modern African Studies in 1976. Good drew on Marx’s notion of “so-called primitive accumulation” and on dependency theory to provide a broader, more integrated perspective on settler colonialism in its various forms. Looking at Africa, he discussed “settler states” and what he termed “colon societies,” where exterminism and settlement were “particularly heavy.” Such colon societies included “Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Cape Colony in South Africa” Much of his focus was on the colonies of settlement in Africa that, for one reason or another, did not conform to the full logic of exterminism/elimination, but which were ruled by dominant minorities of white settlers, as in Algeria, Kenya, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and South Africa. In these colonies, the object was the control of African labor as well as land, leading to apartheid-style states. Like Emmanuel, Good was primarily concerned with the complex, contradictory relation of the reactionary colons to the external colonial metropole.[40]

In 1983, J. Sakai, associated with the Black Liberation Army in the United States, wrote Settlers: The Myth of the White Proletariat.[41] Sakai’s work has often been dismissed as ultraleft in its interpretation, given its extreme position that there is effectively no such thing as a progressive white working class in the context of settler colonialism in the United States, thereby extending Lenin’s labor aristocracy notion to the entire “white proletariat.” Nevertheless, some of the insights provided in Sakai’s work connecting settler colonialism and racial capitalism were significant, and Settlers was referenced by such important Marxists thinkers on capitalism and race as David Roediger in his Wages of Whiteness and David Gilbert in No Surrender.[42]

Settler Colonialism as an Academic Paradigm

Dunbar-Ortiz’s landmark 1992 article on “Aboriginal People and Imperialism in the Western Hemisphere” explored the massive die-down in the early centuries following the European arrival. She described the historical connections between “colonialism and exterminism,” focusing on the U.S. context.[43] However, in the 1980s and ’90s, Marxist investigations into settler colonialism were less evident, due to the general retreat from imperialism theory on the part of much of the Western Left in the period.[44] There was also the problem of how to integrate settler colonialism’s effects on Indigenous populations into the understanding of imperialism in general, since the latter was directed much more at the Global North’s exploitation of the Global South than at settler colonial relations internalized in parts of the Global North.

This changed with the introduction of a definite settler colonialism paradigm in the universities internationally, evolving out of postcolonial studies. Settler colonialism as an academic field had its genesis in 1999 with Wolfe’s Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology. Its formal structure was derived from two premises introduced by Wolfe: (1) settler colonialism represented a “logic of elimination,” encompassing at one and the same time annihilation, removal, and assimilation; and (2) settler colonialism was a “structure rather than an event.”[45] The first premise recognized that settler colonialism was directed at the expropriation of the land, while Indigenous peoples who were attached to the land were seen as entirely expendable. The second premise underscored that settler colonialism was a realized structure in the present, not simply confined to the past, and had taken on a logic rooted in a permanent settler occupation.

Methodologically, Wolfe’s treatment was Weberian rather than Marxist. Settler colonialism was presented as an ideal type that excluded all but a few cases.[46] The logic of elimination was seen as only really viable when it was historically realized in an inviolable structure. In countries where the logic of settler colonialism had been introduced, but had not been fully realized, this was not characterized as settler colonialism by Wolfe. Indeed, any move toward the exploitation of the labor of the Indigenous population, rather than their elimination from the land, disqualified a country from being considered settler colonialist. According to this definition, Algeria was not a settler colonial society any more than Kenya, South Africa, or Rhodesia. As Wolfe put it, “in contradiction to the kind of colonial formation that [Amilcar] Cabral or Fanon confronted, settler colonies were not primarily established to extract surplus value from indigenous labour.”[47] Likewise, Latin America, due to the sheer complexity of its “hybrid” ethnic composition, along with its employment of Indigenous labor, was seen by Wolfe as outside the logic of settler colonialism.[48]

Wolfe’s reliance on a Weberian methodological individualism resulted in his tracing of settler colonialism to the type of the settler. While there was such a thing as a settler colonial state, this was secondary to the ideal type of the settler.[49] Settler colonialism became its own abstract logic, entirely separated from other forms of colonialism and from imperialism. This one-sided, idealist methodology has been central to the development of settler colonialism as an academic study, removing it from the Marxist tradition (and from Indigenous traditions) from which the concept had arisen.[50]

Wolfe, by the time that he introduced his settler colonial model, had already established himself as a distinguished figure on the non-Marxist/anti-Marxist left. In 1997, two years before the publication of his seminal text on settler colonialism, he published an article entitled “History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory” for the American Historical Review, which was remarkable in the sheer number of misconceptions it promoted and in the depth of its polemic against Marxism. According to Wolfe, “the definitional space of imperialism [in left discourse] becomes a vague, consensual gestalt.” Marx was a pro-colonialist/pro-imperialist and Eurocentric thinker who saw colonialism as a “Malthusian” struggle of existence; Lenin, was part of the “post-Marxian” debate on imperialism” that began with social liberal John Hobson and that led to positions diametrically opposite to those of Marx; dependency theory turned Marxism “on its head”; world-systems theory was opposed to orthodox Marxism on imperialism, as was Emmanuel’s unequal exchange theory. Finally, “a notorious color blindness” suffused Marxism as a whole, which was principally characterized by economic determinism. In writing a history of imperialism theory, Wolfe remarkably neglected to discuss Lenin’s analysis at all, beyond a few offhand negative comments. He ended his article with a reference to settler colonialism, which he failed to relate to its theoretical origins, but approached in terms of postcolonial theory, claiming that it offered “discursive distinctions which survive the de-territorialization of imperialism.” It therefore could be seen as constituting the place to “start” if imperialism were to be resisted in the present.[51]

In contrast to Marx, with his two types of settler colonialism, and distinct from most subsequent Marxist theorists, Wolfe promoted a notion of settler colonialism that was so dependent on a pure “logic of elimination,” emanating from settler farmers, that he approached plantation slavery in the southern part of the antebellum United States as simply the negative proof of the existence of settler colonialism in the northern part. “Black people in the plantation South were racialized as slaves,” whose purpose in racial capitalism was to carry out plantation labor, thus distinguishing them from Native Americans due to the purely eliminatory logic imposed on the latter. The distinction, although a sharp one in some ways, relied on a notion of settler colonialism as constituting an ideal type associated with a specific form of social action carried out by settlers. As a result, the real complexity of colonialism/imperialism, of which settler colonialism is simply a part, was lost. Wolfe saw the removal of Indigenous labor from the antebellum South as a precondition for the mixing of “the Red man’s land…with Black labor.” But after that event, settler colonialism as a structure no longer applied directly to the U.S. South. Native Americans, Wolfe argued, were subject to genocide, and Black people to slavery. With respect to African-Americans, he wrote, “the genocidal tribunal is the wrong court.”[52]

Wolfe’s approach also tended to leave Africa out of the picture. According to Robin D. G. Kelley, Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose research focuses on critical thought and movements associated with the African Diaspora, “By not incorporating more of the globe in his study, Wolfe’s particular formulation of settler colonialism delimits more than it reveals.” By excluding Africa, which did not fit into his pure eliminatory logic, Wolfe “presumes that indigenous people exist only in the Americas and Australasia…. Consequently, settler colonialism on the African continent falls out of Wolfe’s purview…. The exclusion of southern Africa and similar social formations from the definition of settler colonialism…obscures its global and transnational character.” In Africa, according to Kelley’s cogent formulation, “the European colonists wanted land and the labor, but not the people—that is to say, they sought to eliminate stable communities and their cultures of resistance.”[53]

As Sai Englert, author of Settler Colonialism: An Introduction, observed in a critique of Wolfe, the “sharp distinction between settler colonialism” and other forms of colonialism “is difficult to square with reality. On the one hand, elimination and genocide are a reality across the colonial world by means of war, famine, forced or enslaved labour, and mass murder. On the other hand, many settler colonial regimes were based primarily on the exploitation of the Indigenous populations.”[54]

Wolfe’s academic paradigm of settler colonialism following his death in 2016 was most influentially carried forward by Veracini, author of a wide array of works on the subject and the founding editor of the journal Settler Colonial Studies. Veracini, in a contradictory fashion, sought to adhere to Wolfe’s restrictive definition of settler colonialism, while at the same time giving it a more global and all-encompassing significance. He did this by separating “settler colonialism” entirely from “colonialism” and in effect subsuming the latter in the former. Thus, settler colonialism became the measuring stick for judging colonialism generally. As Veracini wrote in his Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, “This book is a reflection on settler colonialism as distinct from colonialism…. I propose to see…as analytically distinct, colonialism with settlers and settler colonialism.” Key to Veracini’s method was the postulate that settler colonialism was not a subtype of colonialism, but a separate entity, “antithetical” to colonialism. The notion of imperialism, as opposed to mere references to “imperial expansion,” disappeared almost altogether in his analysis. Figures like Emmanuel received dismissive treatment.[55]

In a confused and contradictory series of transpositions, the concept of settler colonialism metamorphosed in the work of Veracini into an all-encompassing eliminatory logic. Wolfe had seen the classical-liberal notion of primitive accumulation—a concept that, in its bourgeois “nursery tale” form, was subjected to a harsh critique by Marx—as being “inseparable from the inception of settler colonialism,” essentially equating the two concepts.[56] Prior to this, Marxist geographer David Harvey had transposed the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historical concept of original or primitive accumulation into a suprahistorical spatial notion of “accumulation by dispossession.” Going beyond both Wolfe and Harvey, Veracini proceeded to transpose Harvey’s neologism into the cognate “accumulation without reproduction,” standing for the “eliminatory logic” of settler colonialism. Accumulation without reproduction was then seen as applying to all forms of eliminatory and predatory logic, with the result that all instances of world oppression, wherever direct economic exploitation was not concerned, including issues such as climate change, could be “most productively approached within a settler-colonial studies paradigm.”[57]

In this way, not only colonialism, imperial expansion, and racial capitalism, but also the global ecological crisis, ecological debt, and the financialization of the globe, in Veracini’s expanded conception, all fell under the settler colonial paradigm, representing a dominant logic of globalized elimination. Veracini has laid great emphasis on the fact that the United States as the hegemonic power in the world today is to be seen primarily as a settler colonialist, rather than as an imperialist, power. Not surprisingly, the concept of “imperialism” was absent from his Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview.[58]

The theoretical distinction between a Marxist analysis of imperialism/colonialism with settler colonialism as one of its forms, and the new academic paradigm in which settler colonialism is seen as its own discrete, self-determining phenomenon rooted in the type of the settler, could not be more different. This can be perceived in the way thinkers like Wolfe and Veracini approached the Israeli state’s violent occupation of Palestine. Wolfe went so far as to criticize Rodinson’s classic interpretation of Israeli settler colonialism on the basis that, for the latter, this was a European (and North American) imperialist project, while, for Wolfe himself, settler colonialism was defined at all times by the role of autonomous settlers disconnected from the metropole. Rodinson’s argument, Wolfe claimed, did not explain why the Israeli project is specifically “a settler-colonial one.” But such a view relied once again on the abstraction of the settler as a distinct ideal type, giving rise to settler colonialism separated off from other social categories, thereby running counter to a holistic historical inquiry. In this view, the imperial metropoles, whatever role they had in the beginning—and, in Wolfe’s argument, Israel was unique in that it was constituted by “diffuse metropoles”—are, by definition, no longer directly implicated in what the autonomous settler colonies choose to do. Indeed, in some non-Marxist analyses, the metropoles are now seen as the helpless victims of the settler colonies, simply locked into a common cultural history from which there is no escape. Lost here is the reality that Israel is, for Washington, a garrison colony within the larger U.S./NATO-based strategy of global imperialist domination.[59]

For Veracini, as for Wolfe, in writing on Palestine, the emphasis is on the absolute autonomy of settler colonies, which are then seen as completely self-determining. Israel’s occupation of Palestine is a case in point. This meant that the whole question of the imperialist world system’s role in the Israeli-Palestine conflict is largely denied. To be sure, Veracini has indicated that the potential remained for a reestablishment of a settler colony’s dependence on the core imperial powers (a point specifically directed at Israel) that could lead to its external “recolonization.” But this is seen as unlikely.[60]

Within what has become in the mainstream settler colonial paradigm, therefore, the approach to Israel’s occupation of Palestine is worlds away from that of historical materialism. Rather than relying on a very restrictive logic, Marxist analysis seeks to place the reality of Israeli settler colonialism in a wider and more dynamic historical perspective that grasps the complex and changing dialectical relations of capitalism, class, and imperialism/militarism.

Here it is important to note Israel/Palestine is demographically unique in the history of settler colonialism, since rather than either a definite majority or a powerful minority of colonizers emerging, there is a rough equality in numbers overall. Over seven million Israelis live in present-day Israel and the West Bank in 2022, and some seven million Palestinians live in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Israel, and East Jerusalem. Given the significantly higher birth rates of Palestinians, this is viewed by Israel as a demographic threat to its logic as a Zionist settler colonial state. Tel Aviv therefore has enhanced its efforts to seize complete control of the entire region of Israel/Palestine (referred to by the Israeli right as “Greater Israel”), adopting an ever more aggressive strategy of exterminism and imperialism.[61] This strategy is fully supported, even urged on, by Washington, in its goal of absolute imperial domination of the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of South Asia—the region of the United States Central Command.

Israel’s average annual military spending as a share of GDP from 1960 to 2022 is 12 percent. After shrinking officially to around 4–5 percent in recent years, it is now again on the rise. It has the second-highest military spending per capita in the world (after Qatar) and possesses not only military superiority in the Middle East region but also an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, and biological).[62] Its war machine is supported by massive aid from the United States, which provides it with the most advanced weapons in existence. NATO has given Israel the designation of a “major non-NATO ally,” recognizing its position as a key part of the U.S.-European imperialist bloc.[63] In the United Nations, it is a member of the Western European and Other Group (WEOG) within the official regional groupings. The “Other” stands for the main settler colonial nations: the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and formerly apartheid South Africa.[64]

For Max Ajl, a senior researcher at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, Israel, while a “settler society” and tied into a logic of exterminism, has to be seen in a larger context of the imperialism/militarism of the Global North. “The question of Palestine,” he writes, “is not merely a question of national [or settler] oppression, but poses Israel’s uniqueness: a condensation of Western colonial and imperial power, a world-wide symbol of Western perfidy, a state which physically cleaves Africa and Asia, a merchant and mercenary of global counter-insurgence, all melded in a manticore of death and destruction.”[65] If Israel can be viewed as a pure settler-exterminist state, it is also a global garrison state, tied to the entire system of world domination rooted in monopoly capitalism/imperialism in which the United States is the hegemonic power.

Wasi’chu

The rise of the American Indian Movement in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s led to strong critiques of the reality of settler colonialism. An extraordinary work in this context was Wasi’chu: The Continuing Indian Wars by Bruce Johansen and Roberto Maestas. Wasi’chu is a Lakota word that refers not to white man or settler but to a logic, a state of mind, and a system. Literally, it means “takes the fat” or “greedy person,” appropriating not just what is needed for life, but also what properly belongs to the whole community. “Within the modern Indian movement,” it “has come to mean those corporations and their individuals, with their government accomplices, which continue to covet Indian lives, land, and resources for public profit.” The term was famously used by Black Elk in Black Elk Speaks, based on interviews in the early 1930s, in which he emphasized the Wasi’chu’s unrelenting desire for gold. As Johansen and Maestas explained, Wasi’chu is “a human condition based on inhumanity, racism, and exploitation. It is a sickness, a seemingly incurable and contagious disease which begot the ever-advancing society of the West.” This observation became, in the work of these authors, the basis of a searing account of settler colonialism in North America, not simply geared to the past but to the present.[66]

“Wasichu,” Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker elaborates in her Living by the Word,

was a term used by the Oglala Sioux to designate the white man, but it had no reference to the color of skin. It means: He who takes the fat. It is possible to be white and not a Wasichu and a Wasichu and not white…. The Wasichu speaks, in all his U.S. history books, of “opening up virgin lands.” Yet there were people living here on “Turtle Island,” as the Indians called it, for thousands of years….

We must absolutely reject the way of the Wasichu that we are so disastrously traveling, the way that respects most (above nature, obviously above life itself, above even the spirit of the universe) the “metal that makes men crazy”.… Many of us are afraid to abandon the way of the Wasichu because we have become addicted to his way of death. The Wasichu has promised us so many good things, and has actually delivered several. But “progress,” once claimed by the present chief of the Wasichus to be their “most important product,” has meant hunger, misery, enslavement, unemployment, and worse to millions of people on the globe.[67]

Wasi’chu, as the Indigenous understood it, was the personification of what we know as capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, a system of greed, exploitation, and expropriation of human beings and the land.[68] The Lakota people clearly understood this system of greed as one that had no limits and that was the enemy of communal existence and reverence for the earth. It is this more profound critique of capitalism/imperialism as a system dominated by the Wasi’chu that seizes “the fat,” (the surplus that is the inheritance of humanity as a whole) that we most need today. As The Red Nation’s The Red Deal states, the choice today is “decolonization or extinction,” that is, “ending the occupation” and destruction of the earth by imperialist “accumulation-based societies,” so as to “build what sustains us.”[69]

Notes

1. Key foundational works in this paradigm include Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London: Cassell, 1999); Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409; Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (June 2001): 866–905; David Lloyd and Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonial Logics and the Neoliberal Regime,” Settler Colonial Studies 6, no. 2 (May 2015): 109–18; Lorenzo Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024); Lorenzo Veracini, “Containment, Elimination, Endogeneity: Settler Colonialism in the Global Present,” Rethinking Marxism 31, no. 1 (April 2019): 118–40. Marxian-oriented critical perspectives can be found in Jack Davies, “The World Turned Outside In: Settler Colonial Studies and Political Economy,” Historical Materialism 31, no. 2 (June 2023): 197–235; and Sai Englert, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction (London: Pluto, 2022).

2. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 387–88; Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 2; Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, 51, 54–56; Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, 4–11; Veracini, “Containment, Elimination, Endogeneity,” 121; Davies, “The World Turned Outside In,” 207.

3. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (Boston: Beacon, 2021), 18; R. W. Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960).

4. Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, 39–40; Lorenzo Veracini, “Introduction: Settler Colonialism as a Distinct Mode of Domination” in The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism, Edward Cavanaugh and Lorenzo Veracini, eds. (London: Routledge, 2017), 3; Englert, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction, 29–30; John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, “Marx and the Indigenous,” Monthly Review 71, no. 9 (February 2020): 3.

5. John Bellamy Foster, Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx (New York: Monthly Review Press, forthcoming 2025).

6. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 917; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), vol. 46, 322; V. I. Lenin, “The Discussion on Social-Determination Summed Up,” July 1916, section 8, Marxists Internet Archive, marxists.org.

7. “Colony (n.),” Online Etymology Dictionary, etymonline.com. As G. E. M. de Ste. Croix states, “The Latin word coloni…had originally been used in the sense of ‘farmer’ or ‘settler.'” G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London: Duckworth, 1981), 159.

8. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “exterminate” comes from the Latin for “to drive beyond boundaries.” From the sixteenth century onward, it meant “to drive forth (a person or thing), from, of, out of, the boundaries or limits of a (place, community, region, state, etc.); to drive away, banish, put to flight.” However, by the seventeenth century it had also taken on the additional meaning of “to destroy utterly, put an end to (persons or animals); not only to root out, extirpate (species, races, populations).” Oxford English Dictionary, compact edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 938.

9. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value: Part II (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 301–3; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 917.

10. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value: Part II, 301–3; John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Brett Clark, “Marx and Slavery,” Monthly Review 72, no. 3 (July–August 2020): 98.

11. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 915–17, emphasis added; William Howitt, Colonization and Christianity: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Natives by the Europeans in All Their Colonies (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1838), 348.

12. Howitt, Colonization and Christianity, 346–49, 378–79, 403–5.

13. Howitt, Colonization and Christianity, 414.

14. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 266.

15. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question, 66, 193, 216, 283, 303, 366, 372; John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 72–75; Dunbar-Ortiz, Not “A Nation of Immigrants,” 36–46, 126.

16. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 18, 60–70, 212–13.

17. Kenneth Good, “Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation,” Journal of Modern African Studies 14, no. 4 (December 1976): 599.

18. Karl Marx, “Excerpts from M. M. Kovalevsky,” appendix to Lawrence Krader, ed., The Asiatic Mode of Production (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum and Co., 1974), 400, 406–7, 411–12; Foster, Clark, and Holleman, “Marx and the Indigenous,” 11–12.

19. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 46, 322. Translation altered slightly to change “actual colonies” to “colonies proper,” in accordance with the translation of Engels’s letter in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, n.d.), vol. 22, 352.

20. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 22, 352.

21. Communist International (Comintern), Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies (1928), in Theses and Resolutions of the VI. World Congress of the Communist Internationalvol. 8, no. 88, International Press Correspondence, no. 84, sections 10, 12 (extra paragraph indent created beginning with “Between”); Oleksa Drachewych, “Settler Colonialism and the Communist International,” in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope, eds. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021): 2418–28. Lenin’s recognition of Engels’s position on “colonialism proper” and the Comintern’s detailed treatment of settler colonialism demonstrate that Veracini’s uninformed claim that “Lenin and twentieth century Marxism…conflated colonialism and settler colonial forms” was simply false. It is further falsified, as we shall see, by numerous explicit twentieth-century Marxist treatments of settler colonialism. Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, 39.

22. Comintern, Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies, 12–13.

23. W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (New York: Harcourt Brace and Howe, 1920), 29–42.

24. Jennifer Schuessler, “What Is Settler Colonialism?,” New York Times, January 22, 2024.

25. José Carlos Mariátegui, José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology, Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker, eds. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 74–76.

26. Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957), 141.

27. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, 142.

28. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1951), 370.

29. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, 139–42, 153; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 925.

30. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 93; Simin Fadee, Global Marxism: Decolonization and Revolutionary Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024), 132–52. In the work of Glen Sean Coulthard, Fanon’s emphasis on the colonial dialectic of recognition is combined with Marx’s critique of “so-called primitive accumulation” to generate one of the most powerful theoretical analyses of settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance up to the present. See Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

31. Donald L. Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).

32. Fayez A. Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (Beirut: Palestine Liberation Organization, 1965), 1–5.

33. Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial Settler State (New York: Monad Press, 1973), 27–33, 89–96. Rodinson’s monograph was first published during the 1967 Israeli-Arab War in Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal, Le Temps Modernes.

34. Jairus Banaji, “Arghiri Emmanuel (1911–2001),” Historical Materialism (blog), n.d.

35. Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 37–71, 124–25, 370–71.

36. Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange, 363–64.

37. Arghiri Emmanuel, “White-Settler Colonialism and the Myth of Investment Imperialism,” New Left Review 1/73 (May–June 1972), 39–40, 43–44, 47; Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange 124–25, 337, 363, 370–71.

38. Samir Amin, “Underdevelopment and Dependence in Black Africa—Origins and Contemporary Forms,” Journal of Modern African Studies 10, no. 4 (December 1972): 519–22; Samir Amin, The Reawakening of the Arab World (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 182–89.

39. Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 19–20.

40. Good, “Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation.”

41. J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat (Chicago: Morningstar Press, 1989).

42. David Gilbert, No Surrender: Writings from an Anti-Imperialist Political Prisoner (Montreal: Abraham Gullen Press, 2004), 5–59; David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), 184.

43. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “Aboriginal People and Imperialism in the Western Hemisphere,” Monthly Review 44, no. 4 (September 1992): 9.

44. On the retreat from imperialism theory on much of the left, see John Bellamy Foster, “The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left,” Monthly Review 76, no. 6 (November 2024): 15–19.

45. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 2, 27, 40–43; Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 387, 402.

46. Wolfe, “Land, Labor and Difference,” 868; Englert, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction, 16.

47. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 1, 167.

48. Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, 54. On the relation of Latin America to settler colonialism, see Richard Gott, “Latin America as a White Settler Society,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 26, no. 2 (April 2007): 269–89.

49. Wolfe, Traces of History, 28.

50. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 137–82. The concept of accumulation by dispossession is contradictory in Marx’s terms, since accumulation by definition is not dispossession or expropriation, but rather is rooted in exploitation. Marx was strongly critical of the notion of “primitive accumulation” or “original accumulation,” as presented by classical-liberal economists like Adam Smith, and preferred the term “original expropriation,” or simply expropriation. See Ian Angus, The War Against the Commons (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023), 204–9.

51. Wolfe, “History and Imperialism,” 389–93, 397, 403–7, 418–20.

52. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 388, 392, 403–4; Wolfe, “Land, Labor and Difference,” 868.

53. Robin D. G. Kelley, “The Rest of Us: Rethinking Settler and Native,” American Quarterly 69, no. 2 (June 2017): 268–69.

54. Englert, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction, 15. For an indication of this complexity see Gerald Horne, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020).

55. Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, 4–12; Lorenzo Veracini, “Israel-Palestine through a Settler-Colonial Studies Lens,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 21, no. 4 (2019): 572.

56. Lloyd and Wolfe, “Settler Colonial Logics and the Neoliberal Regime,” 8; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 874; Davies, “The World Turned Outside In,” 217. On the history of the classical-liberal conception of original, or primitive, accumulation prior to Marx, see Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).

57. Veracini, “Containment, Elimination, Endogeneity,” 119, 122–28; Veracini, “Israel-Palestine Through a Settler-Colonial Studies Lens,” 579–80; Nicholas A. Brown, “The Logic of Settler Accumulation in a Landscape of Perpetual Vanishing,” Settler Colonial Studies 4, no. 1 (2014): 3–5; Davies, “The World Turned Outside In,” 214; Harvey, The New Imperialism, 137–82.

58. Veracini, “Containment, Elimination, Endogeneity,” 122–8; Davies, “The World Turned Outside In,” 214.

59. Wolfe, Traces of History, 234–37; Veracini, “Israel-Palestine through a Settler-Colonial Studies Lens,” 570; Joseph Massad, “Israel and the West: ‘Shared Values’ of Racism and Settler Colonialism,” Middle East Eye, June 13, 2019; Jordan Humphreys, “Palestine and the Classless Politics of Settler Colonial Theory,” Marxist Left Review, June 13, 2024.

60. Lorenzo Veracini, Israel and Settler Society (London: Pluto, 2006), 97. It is notable that Veracini, like Wolfe, fails to recognize the significance of Rodinson’s Israel: A Colonial Settler State, stating that it was published in “the 1970s” (the time when the English edition came out), even though it appeared in French in the midst of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and had an enormous influence at the time, instilling throughout the world increased awareness of Israeli settler colonialism.

61. Claudia de Martino and Ruth Hanau Santini, “Israel: A Demographic Ticking Bomb in Today’s One-State Reality,” Aspenia Online, July 10, 2023.

62. Varun Jain, “Interactive: Comparing Military Spend around the World,” Visual Capitalist, June 4, 2023; “Israel: Military Spending, Percent of GDP,” Global Economy, theglobaleconomy.com; U.S. Congressional Research Service, Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Weapons and Missiles: Status and Trends (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, February 20, 2008), 16.

63. Thomas Trask and Jacob Olidort, “The Case for Upgrading Israel’s ‘Major Non-NATO Ally’ Status,” Jewish Institute for National Security of America, November 6, 2023.

64. Craig Mokhiber, “WEOG: The UN’s Settler-Colonial Bloc,” Foreign Policy in Focus, September 4, 2024, fpif.org.

65. Max Ajl, “Palestine’s Great Flood, Part I,” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 13, no. 1 (March 2024): 62–88; Esther Farmer, Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, and Sarah Sills, A Land with a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021).

66. Bruce Johansen and Roberto Maestas, Wasi’chu: The Continuing Indian Wars (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 5, 11, 16, 18; Black Elk and John G. Neihard, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (New York: William Morrow, 1932), 7–9.

67. Alice Walker, Living by the Word: Selected Writings 1973–1987 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 144–49.

68. Wasi’chu, as understood here, is essentially a materialist perspective, where a generalized human nature characteristic of certain groups of social actors is seen as a reflection of an underlying logic or system. In Marx’s terms, the capitalist is presented as a personification of capital. This is in contrast to a Weberian style ideal type, rooted in methodological individualism, where social structures are interpreted in terms of a type of social action with subjective meaning traceable to a type of methodological individual. Thus, from that perspective, it is the methodological individual of the settler who is at the root of settler type meanings/actions and is the basis of colonialism/settlerism. The ideal type of the settler constitutes, rather than is constituted, and is not itself the product of an ensemble of social relations. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 ,92.

69. The Red Nation, The Red Deal (New York: Common Notions, 2021), 7, 13, 135–37; Veracini, “Israel-Palestine Through a Settler-Colonial Studies Lens,” 570–71.

Crisis in the Carolinas: The Lowcountry and Climate

By Erica Veal and Karl Malone

Republished from Hood Communist.

Africans are largely left out of conversations about environmentalism, despite the fact that we suffer from the triple threat of climatic, environmental and human rights crises. Our communities bear the brunt of the climate catastrophe, and this is especially true in the South Carolina Lowcountry where sea level rise threatens to wash away our Gullah Geechee homelands. Our relationship to environmental racism stretches back to the emergence of the local phosphate mining industry in the 1860’s and manifests today in the disproportionate exposure of Black and low income residents to environmental hazards. Today, Gullah Geechee communities disproportionately neighbor hazardous waste sites like landfills, sewage plants, incinerators and manufacturing facilities. Add to this gaping racial disparities rooted in the region’s history of chattel slavery, and it becomes clear why Black people should be the vanguard of the environmental movement.

Cooperation Jackson and the Black Environmentalist Movement

When people think about environmentalists, stereotypes about white, tree-hugging hippies come to mind. For Black environmentalist Kali Akuno, co-founder and co-director of Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi, it is important for Black people to challenge these stereotypes by taking charge of the environmental movement. As someone who has closely followed the climate crisis, he calls attention to the fact that by 2050 the large portions of the Black Belt will be underwater if the predictions of environmental scientists are accurate. The Black Belt refers to the crescent shaped strip of fertile land in the Southeastern United States which has historically been home to an almost unbroken chain of majority (or near majority) Black counties stretching from Virginia to East Texas. It is the historic homeland of Africans trafficked to North America to build the wealth of this nation during the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade and where the majority of their descendants still live today. According to Akuno, the land millions of Africans in North America currently occupy is some of the most vulnerable to climate change and, as such, Black people are most likely to be displaced as a result of climate change induced natural disasters. The rising costs of housing means finding new homelands for ourselves may prove an insurmountable task, which is why our stake in the environmental movement is so high.

Sitting less than 20 feet above sea level, Charleston, South Carolina is extremely vulnerable to sea level rise. For Gullah Geechee residents, the constant flooding, brought about by regular storms and unusually high tides, exacerbate the racial disparities we face. Flooding causes transportation delays and can mean missing work. It also causes property damage for residents whose homes flood constantly, as is the case for several public housing projects across the Charleston peninsula. Wading through flood waters can mean exposure to raw sewage, which can lead to adverse medical outcomes, medical expenses and the list goes on. For Black residents on fixed incomes, many of whom live below the poverty line, flooding is a constant nuisance and it’s only getting worse.

In the few weeks of lockdown we experienced during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic we saw how quickly the environment regenerated albeit temporarily. Industrial emissions dropped, the air became cleaner, as did waterways, migratory patterns of wildlife improved, and the list goes on. We saw that change is possible, but we live in a capitalist system that puts profits before people and the planet. We cannot afford to be silent and sit idly by while billionaires and private corporations continue to pollute our world and the people living on it to enrich themselves. Akuno says we’ve already surpassed the worst case scenario according to many climate models. Therefore to “curb ecological destruction,” Black people have a compound responsibility to organize against the systems that oppress us and take climate change seriously.

Learning from Cuba’s Fight Against Climate Change

We don’t have to reinvent the wheel in our effort to fight the climate crisis. We can learn from places like Cuba, a majority African, island nation in the Caribbean, that is largely the most sustainable country in the world. Cuba has embraced environmentalism like no nation has. It is the only country to meet the World Wildlife Fund’s definition of sustainable development. Its government has implemented policies to reduce the waste of natural resources and minimize its carbon footprint in the form of a successful 100 year plan to combat climate change called Tarea Vida (Life Task). Tarea Vida includes a ban on new home construction in potential flood zones, the introduction of heat-tolerant crops to cushion food supplies from droughts, and the restoration of Cuba’s sandy beaches to help protect the country against coastal erosion. Cuba is a leader in the environmental movement and all while struggling under an unjust and deadly 60+ year economic blockade imposed by the United States government.

Cuba underwent a successful, largely Black-led socialist revolution in the 1950’s, freed itself from the imperialist exploitation of the United States and naturalized its resources. In addition to leading the environmental movement, Cuba leads in medicine (sending doctors all over the world), has eradicated illiteracy, subsidized housing and food, has universal education from pre-K to PhD and is a shining example of what the world could be if we put people before profits. Although socialism in Cuba poses no threat to the United States, the government has kept the blockade in place and caused shortages in food, medicine, gas and other essential items at the expense of the Cuban people. Most recently, under the Trump administration, Cuba was added to the State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT) list, further exacerbating shortages on the island.

In the face of all this, there are many parallels around the climate crisis between Cuba and Gullah Geechee communities in the South Carolina Lowcountry, e.g. soil erosion and sea level rise are clear. Additionally, when considering the racial disparities faced by Gullah Geechee people (and the entire Black Belt region), it is as if we, too, are living under a form of economic blockade. Africans in North America are more likely to face food and housing insecurities and less likely to have access to quality schools, day care, health services, and a living wage. We are more likely to be exposed to environmental hazards that expose us to adverse health outcomes and all of this is a direct result of the choices made by our bought and paid for government officials, both democrats and republicans alike. Yet, Cuba, the socialist capital of the western world, has shown us things do not have to be this way. For these reasons and more we should actively organize against the US economic blockade and the removal of Cuba from the SSOT list. The future of Gullah Geechee communities may literally depend on our ability to learn from Cuba’s people centered policies and innovations in environmental science.

Environmental Racism in North Charleston

The socio-economic state of the Gullah Geechee people is daunting and stretches back to the era of slavery. Africans in North America were never meant to be anything more than a source of cheap labor for Europeans to exploit. We were kidnapped, enslaved and trafficked here for our knowledge of rice agriculture and we transformed the landscape of the Southeast Atlantic coast from a vast expanse of Bottomland Hardwood Forests to a seemingly never ending complex of rice fields working in some of the harshest conditions as chattel slaves. As a result, Charleston became the richest city in colonial America and with the the largest slave port on the continent.

After the Civil War ended in 1865, phosphate mining became the most successful form of industry in the Lowcountry, replacing the major agricultural and textiles industries that could no longer be sustained due to the loss of the free labor of enslaved Africans. Since calcium phosphate was discovered in the beds of the Ashley River, it provided former the enslavers who owned this land an opportunity to “recoup some of their financial losses after the Civil War” by either selling their land, leasing it out to mining companies that began forming everywhere, or establishing mining companies of their own. The increasing demand for labor was quickly filled by newly “freed” Gullah Geechee people, who dominated this industry due to their being locally available and accustomed to working in the sub tropical Lowcountry climate.

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Though the rise and fall of the phosphate industry in South Carolina lasted roughly 20 years, the long term damage to the environment is still being felt today. This period marked the beginning of a long history of environmental racism in the Gullah Geechee community. Studies show that “exposure to these harmful conditions results in negative health outcomes, stressed communities, and reduction in quality of life and neighborhood sustainability.” The Environmental Protection Agency has identified many of these old mining and processing locations as hazardous waste sites. One such waterfront site in North Charleston, could potentially be developed into another heavy industrial boat manufacturing facility, but Black residents are actively fighting against this.

In 2015, the Charleston County Park and Recreation Commission (CCPRC) acquired the former Baker Hospital site off Azalea Drive in North Charleston with the intention of developing the 57 acre property into a waterfront park. It has since leased 11 acres to a local company called Sea Fox Boats. According to an online petition circulated in March 2024, although “The City of North Charleston has zoning in place that will keep industrial uses off of the park property,” CCPRC applied to change the zoning to either heavy or light industrial to accommodate their new lease agreement. CCPRC claims profits from the tenant will fund the environmental cleanup and development of the remaining 46 acres park site while representatives for Sea Fox claim the manufacturing plant will bring jobs to the community. Black residents like KJ Kearney, from communities surrounding the proposed park site, are pushing back on this saying they already have jobs and this segment of North Charleston has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the area. Others have said they don’t need or want heavy industry in their communities, particularly on a site that is already contaminated because of decades of industrial use. Jobs won’t matter if residents are sick from exposure to contaminants and they don’t want jobs that will lead to the death and destruction of the environment.

While North Charleston’s city planning commission voted to deny CCPRC’s recommendation to rezone the site in March, the ultimate decision is up to city council. On Thursday, April 18th, 2024, Black residents again voiced their concerns at a public meeting saying they felt left out of the decision making process. Yes, residents want a waterfront park in that area of North Charleston, but not at the expense of exacerbating environmental conditions and hazards. The controversy surrounding the Baker Hospital site is an example of environmental racism at its best. While proponents of Sea Fox push the narrative of job creation, Kearney says, “the community is not against jobs” rather they are against the idea that “the only value historically Black communities have to their city is as a labor force.” He went on to talk about how the plant will produce tons of hazardous air pollutants and that, for a community which ranks” in the 95 percentile for asthma,” that is a risk they cannot afford to take. He suggested that the paternalistic framing of the situation by Sea Fox supporters is clear– Black people should be grateful for the opportunity to work for a rich white man who wants to invest in their communities and simply ignore the impact of the plant on their quality of life. After a long and heated meeting, the council voted to postpone making a decision on the rezoning for another 60 days so the council can gather more information, but the people who live in this area have made their position clear.

While the city council in North Charleston is mostly Black and so is the new mayor, that is not enough to ensure the will of the people is carried out. The masses of Africans in the Lowcountry must continue to actively organize against this type of blatant environmental injustice to mitigate damage to our communities and the environment. We already suffer tremendously under the crushing weight of capitalism and its partners in crime (racism, white supremacy, sexism, gender bias, etc.), but this isn’t just about us. We know the success of our liberation struggles benefit all oppressed people. If we don’t act, the climate crisis will be the death knell that marks the permanent destruction of our communities. None of us will be free until all of us are free, but what use is freedom on a dead planet?

The authors represent the Lowcountry Action Committee, a Black led grassroots organization dedicated to Black liberation through service, political education, and collective action in the Lowcountry.

Sources

1. Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi, edited by Kali Akuno and Ajamu Nangwaya

2. “Is Pollution Poisoning Charleston’s African American and Low Income Communities?” https://charlestoncitypaper.com/2016/03/09/is-pollution-poisoning-charlestons-african-american-and-low-income-communities/

3. “Free the Land w/ Kali Akuno” Hood Communist Radio https://open.spotify.com/episode/789OXvt1LdjEJ5e8pFCMUp

4. The Black Belt Thesis: A Reader by the Black Belt Thesis Study Group

5. “Flooding Intensifies Charleston Region’s Racial and Wealth Inequalities” https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/flooding-intensifies-charleston-regions-racial-and-wealth-inequities

6. Could Covid lockdown have helped save the planet? https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/29/could-covid-lockdown-have-helped-save-the-planet

7. Cuba’s Life Task: Combatting Climate Change documentary by Helen Yaffe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APN6N45Q6iU

8. “Consequences of a Blockade of Cuba” 23 April 1962 Central Intelligence Agency https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP79R00904A000800020016-7.pdf

9. “The State of Racial Disparities in Charleston County, South Carolina, 2000–2015” https://avery.charleston.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/The-State-of-Racial-Disparities-in-Charleston-County-SC-Rev.-11-14.pdf

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11. History of the Corridor: Bulow/Long Savannah https://ashleyriverhistoriccorridor.org/sites/long-savannahbulow-plantation/

12. “A History of the Phosphate Mining Industry in the South Carolina Lowcountry” http://nationalregister.sc.gov/SurveyReports/hyphosphatesindustryLowcountry2SM.pdf

13. “Baker Hospital site to become a new county park” https://www.postandcourier.com/archives/baker-hospital-site-to-become-a-new-county-park/article_0630e058-999d-5de4-9319-5addea566537.html

14. “Public input process to start this winter for Charleston County Parks’ North Charleston Ashley River Site” https://www.ccprc.com/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/1423

15. “Preserve the Former Baker Hospital as a Park” https://www.change.org/p/preserve-the-former-baker-hospital-site-as-a-park?original_footer_petition_id=35513102&algorithm=promoted&source_location=petition_footer&grid_position=15&pt=AVBldGl0aW9uAEWcQgIAAAAAZe1wynNJJ%2BAxMzdmNTMxMQ%3D%3D

16. “N. Charleston argues plans for former Baker Hospital site, fate in council hands” https://www.live5news.com/2024/03/12/n-charleston-argues-plans-former-baker-hospital-site-fate-council-hands/

17. “Delay in North Charleston zoning decision fuels frustration over old Baker Hospital site” https://abcnews4.com/news/local/delay-in-north-charleston-zoning-decision-fuels-frustration-over-old-baker-hospital-site-south-carolina-wciv-news-4

The State Can't Isolate the Imagination: Vernon T. Bateman and the Struggle to Free Them All

[Photo: Vernon T. Bateman and his supporters at “Eclipsing Injustice” at the District Theatre in Indianapolis. Credit: Indianapolis Liberation Center.]

By Jay Grillo and Derek R. Ford

U.S. prisons are universally known for their exceptional brutality and terror, with even corporate media covering their routine barbarity. What is less widely acknowledged, however, is the ongoing history of resistance against the mass incarceration system that is organized behind, across, and outside of prison bars. This political resistance is visible in the heroic hunger strikes and uprisings of our people behind enemy lines; it is also evident in the hope and creativity that not only survive, but actually foster in such isolating and despairing conditions.

There is perhaps no better example of this resistance that defies the state’s repressive apparatus than Vernon T. Bateman who, in 1998, was falsely charged and convicted of rape, criminal deviant conduct, and confinement in Gary, Indiana. The state had no evidence connecting him to the crime. Even worse, what physical evidence existed never materialized in court. As detailed below, Bateman was convicted based entirely on prosecutorial misconduct and false testimonies that were later recanted, yet he wasn’t released from prison until 2023, and he continues to live in a social prison under severe parole conditions. Although Bateman has maintained his innocence and fought for his freedom since 1998, the organized battle for his full exoneration is just beginning.

Imagination Flourishing and Isolating Conditions

Most people don’t know Bateman’s history of wrongful incarceration. He is, however, widely known for his art, something his grandfather–a poet, framer, and painter–introduced him to as a child. Vernon could draw years before he could read or write, skills he only learned once incarcerated. He did more than learn common literacy, however: he combined writing and drawing with his burgeoning artistic imagination, and he realized that creative capacity under the most repressive conditions.

Out of his 25 years served in prison, the state subjected Bateman to 10 years in solitary confinement. He turned a box meant to isolate and torture him into a space of imagination, resilience, and even community building. Solitary confinement was where Bateman, using crayons smuggled into the prison, wrote his first children’s book: Mommy I Want 2 Fly. Published in 2012, he wrote the first of what would be several children’s books as a way to parent his child from behind bars after her mother was killed by a drunk driver. The next year he published They Can’t Hurt Me No More, which tackled anti-LGBTQ bigotry and bullying.

Bateman’s art continues to expand, as does the people’s desire for it. At the end of March 2024, he unveiled his “Eclipse Murals” at The District Theatre in downtown Indianapolis to a crowd of artists, faith leaders, community organizers, friends, family, and passersby. If you watch Bateman discuss the murals, you can hear, see, and feel his dedication to community, creativity, and  justice. Originally created as gifts for the public, he eventually gave into the venue owner’s insistence on remuneration.

How the State Sent Another Innocent Black Man to Prison

Maintaining his innocence, Bateman refused to accept any plea deals. Within a few years of his sentencing, the disturbing systemic injustices and significant irregularities in the state’s case against Bateman started surfacing, ones that do more than establish reasonable doubt; they establish his innocence. Nonetheless, Bateman spent 25 years in prison, over half of his life so far. Although he was released from prison in 2023, he continues to be subjected to conditions that amount to house arrest, including ankle monitoring and curfews, the inability to attend therapy or take driving classes to get his license, and more. He hasn’t even been able to meet his own grandson yet.

Fortunately, a growing community of support is working to exonerate Bateman, a fight you can aid by signing a petition demanding his full and immediate exoneration. A new documentary provides a glimpse into the humility, kindness, optimism, and commitment to justice Bateman and his artistic work and community projects, like Baby22 Gun Safety LLC, exemplify.

PLEASE SUPPORT OUR WORK BY MAKING A DONATION TODAY!

A Corrupt Detective, False Testimony, and a Lying “Eyewitness”

When the trial started on September 14, 1998, Angela Truitt, the complaining witness, failed to appear causing the judge to issue a bench warrant; however, the next day, the same judge granted the State a continuance until September 22, 1998, rather than dismissing the charges against Bateman. That Bateman’s public defender did not object or ask for a dismissal evidenced the ineffective assistance he received at trial. Truitt’s absence is notable, especially when accompanied by the self-revelation that she did not come to court because she had “reasonable doubt” that Bateman was even involved in the crime at all.

In 2004, the alleged victim, Angela Truitt, testified under oath that chief investigator Detective Mary Banks told her to identify Bateman as one of her assailants. After confirming this, Attorney Ray L. Szarmach asked if it “was, in fact, Vernon Bateman at the rape, or was Vernon Bateman in that rape?” In her sworn testimony, Truitt said “I’m not sure. I told you they told me that’s who it was. I didn’t know who none of them guys were. The police told me he was a suspect.” When asked why Truitt recanted her testimony and if she wanted him to be free, she responded “Yes.”

The other testimony used by the state was delivered by Det. Banks, who said she got Bateman’s name “from the other suspect [Sa’ron Foley] that was in custody.” Foley was a co-defendant tried separately for the same crime. He never appeared on the stand during Bateman’s trial, depriving Bateman of his constitutional right to cross-examination. Banks delivered his testimony, which he later admitted was fabricated. Since at least 2005, Foley has adamantly worked to atone for his lie. In a 2009 affidavit, Foley stated that he “made falsified statements against Vernon Bateman on 1-23-98 to Det. M. Banks,” and that he had contacted Bateman’s attorney about five years prior to relay his willingness to testify on Bateman’s behalf. He never heard back.

Nine years later, in a handwritten letter addressed to FOX59 and reporter Angela Ganote and signed by a Notary Public, Foley wrote he had “been silent for too long” and “this evidence should have been brought to the court’s attention 20 yrs ago… Vernon Bateman was never [at the scene of the alleged crime]... That was made up by me & Det. Mary Banks.”

That same year, Foley even dedicated an entire hearing before the parole board, which only happens once a year, to advocate for Bateman’s freedom rather than his own. Foley lied because of a grudge he held against Bateman, but, as Ganote reported, “he has been trying to make things right for decades. He has written attorneys, a judge, the governor and me. He says no one will listen.” The state’s continued refusal to listen is the answer to Foley’s question.

A “Missing” Rape Kit

What is perhaps most perplexing–or rather, convincing–is that the sexual assault forensic exam performed on Truitt, the very thing that could exonerate Bateman, was never entered into evidence. Bateman’s motions requesting the results of the examination and to submit his own DNA into evidence were denied.

A physician at Methodist Northlake Hospital examined the alleged victim, Angela Truitt, and released the sexual assault kit to Det. Banks. However, the state neither tested nor introduced the rape kit as evidence during Bateman’s trial. When asked if the examination results came back during cross-examination, Banks said “I don’t know.” In 2019, when Indiana reporter Angela Ganote tried to track it down, the hospital referred her to the Gary police, who referred her to the city’s attorneys, who “told me they didn’t have it.”

To this day, the kit hasn’t been recovered. The prison authorities later explicitly denied Ganote from visiting Bateman while he remained behind bars.

Throughout this period, various legal petitions and appeals were filed, including petitions to challenge Bateman's conviction and justify his release. These efforts were met with resistance and legal hurdles, further prolonging Bateman's unjust imprisonment. Notably, a petition to vacate highlighted violations of Bateman's constitutional right to cross-examine his accuser, including the loss of crucial evidence such as the rape kit and ineffective assistance of counsel, were denied.

Join Bateman’s Struggle and Free Them All!

Bateman says he doesn’t have any ill feelings towards Truitt. “You got to understand, people like me aren’t mad at the alleged victims, but at the system. In my case, my accuser was a victim of the system, too,” he said in an April 2024 interview with the Indianapolis Liberation Center.

Bateman, his family, and even his former enemy have been fighting for his freedom for decades. The state remains unwilling to acknowledge the abundant judicial misconduct, recanted testimonies, and police corruption that kept an innocent man in prison for over half of his life and to this day keep him locked in a social prison. They can only do so as long as his story remains hidden.

What will it take to exonerate yet another innocent man held captive by the state of Indiana? An organized struggle that forces the truth into the open and makes it impossible for the state to continue avoiding accountability. This struggle, which is only possible because of Bateman’s enduring belief that justice will prevail in the end, is one that needs your support, whoever and wherever you are.

Bateman’s story demonstrates that, despite all of its repressive powers, the state remains impotent when confronted by the imagination, creativity, and resilience of humanity. That is the most powerful lesson–the one often neglected in the doomsday pieces about the racist and capitalist U.S. mass incarceration system–that Bateman’s words, works, and very being teach us every day. It’s up to us to learn and act on that lesson to win freedom not only for Bateman, but for all wrongly convicted, political, and social prisoners in the United States.

Exonerate Vernon T. Bateman now!