Resistance is Ugly: Palestine, Israel, and the Nature of Struggle

By RJ Park

October seventh, for Israel, marked a point of no return. After demonstrations by their own civilians against the country’s lack of commitment to democracy, they have now been faced with the other side of their oppressive regime. Perhaps in an attempt to win over their dissatisfied civilians in the face of a ‘greater evil’, Prime Minister Netanayahu has refused to mince his words on what he believes Palestine’s revolutionary brewings mean for his country and the people therein, stating that Hamas, the lead organization in this recent wave of resistance, has ‘launched a murderous surprise attack against Israel and its citizens.’ [1] Clearly, he does not view this conflict as a mere addition to the ever-expanding list of violent encounters between Israeli and Palestinian forces. This is a battle for the existence of Israel and, at the same time, the necessary non-existence of Palestine that is a required qualifier for the success of the entire Zionist project. [2]

For Palestine, decades of relocation, colonization, and outright murder by the hands of Israel’s military branch, the IDF, has stockpiled tensions to an unbearable degree. They have tried to be diplomatic with Israel, to no avail. They have tried to protest peacefully, and were gunned down in the streets. [3] They have tried forceful forms of resistance, and were brutalized more harshly than they had been ever before. [4] It is clear why the only path forward seems to be a full-scale overthrow of the government which has kept them under its boot heel for the better part of the past one-hundred years. That is a difficult conclusion to disagree with.

Yet for all the vocal support of Palestine that has emerged from across West’s political landscape, denunciation of Palestine’s actions in their ongoing struggle with Israel seem to be gradually gaining acceptance. This is expected of more conservative politicians and social critics, most of whom never endorsed Palestine in the first place. However, similar (occasionally identical) critiques have been adopted by individuals who previously supported Palestine in their ongoing struggle against the Israeli government. As soon as Palestinian groups like Hamas began resisting their occupation with violence, however, this support dissipated, and the same people who had called for their independence accused them of deliberately killing civilians, a claim which is a verifiable organization concocted for the sole purpose of playing into the Zionist trope  of barbaric Palestinians attacking innocent Israelis. This version of events implies that Israel’s citizens have nothing to do with the oppression of Palestinians, who are actively seeking wanton violence against Israel and all its inhabitants in order to satisfy a mindless drive for vengeance. 

When observing the history of Palestine’s struggle against Israel, both sides of this claim fall apart. Firstly, those who willingly leave their country of origin in order to live in Israel cease to be ‘innocent civilians’ the moment they step foot into the country, which is built upon occupied territory. Instead, they become active colonizers of Palestinian land, engaging in a form of violence that, although less direct, is no more forgivable than the violence enacted against Palestinians by the IDF. Secondly, it is impossible for Palestine to be the aggressor in their fight against Israel. Since they are the ones being actively oppressed, all that they do is in retaliation to that oppression. Any violent action they take is a component of their war for liberation, and their violence can only be understood in this context. Separating this violence from the history of violence committed against them by Israel does nothing but enhance Israel’s narrative of continual victimhood, which is essential to their ongoing war against Palestine.

But why have some of the most progressive voices in mainstream American politics succumbed to this narrative so easily? It seems that years of exposing Israel’s excessive use of force, their violation of human rights, and, most-relevantly, their tendency to deceive the international community by posturing as an oppressed minority despite being the most powerful country in the Middle East would have primed these politicians to be wary of any claims by Israel that their safety - not the safety of the Palestinian people - was under attack. Obviously, though, this has not been the case. These politicians have, at best, simultaneously denounced both the actions of Hamas and the IDF and, at worst, singled out Hamas as being especially malicious and bloodthirsty while excusing the actions of Israel.

Although there are many reasons for this trend, electability is a large factor. A person is a politician in the West so long as they can be elected to public office, and, as such, Westerners - including politicians themselves - view politics as a matter of marketability instead of principle. It does not appear at all odd for most of them to see a politician support a cause (such as the liberation of Palestine) while critiquing the means through which that very same cause is pursued. A degree of separation is considered acceptable between vocally supporting something and actually supporting something if the former is popular and the latter is not. 

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Observing that politicians maintain these contradictions within their individual political views goes a long way to explain why Western governments are regularly faced with deadlocks on a systemic level. Rather than electing representatives that believe in and pursue certain goals with a definite plan in mind, representatives are elected because they espouse certain beliefs without having formulated an overarching plan to put those beliefs into action, out of fear that the specifics of such a plan may have convinced less people to vote for them. So, when they actually inherit the responsibilities they were elected to wield, they have no actionable promises to fall back on. They act based on what they think will match public opinion, not what they think will help the public.

Politics do not operate like this the world over. In places like Palestine, in which the government is ostensibly subservient in the face of a military and political powerhouse like Israel, politics is a matter of on-the-ground change, not dealings in bureaucracy. Politics is a matter of life and death, not a popularity contest. Politics, ultimately,  is a very real, very definite thing, experienced consciously by every Palestinian each time they are reminded that they are in the process of being colonized, which they are reminded of fairly often. While, to the bourgeois West, political views can be divorced from the external world, Palestinians do not have this luxury. A conversation of mild disagreement between two moderates, one who leans conservative and one who leans liberal, could never take place between a Palestinian and an Israeli. The views they express are too closely tied to the nature of equality, the rights of man, and the validity of the Zionist project to be discussed in casual conversation. 

Many Western politicians, on the other hand, feel entitled to have such casual conversations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on behalf of the Israelis and Palestinians. No matter which group one supports, if this support is artificial, spurred on by a desire to be elected more than anything else, results in demeaning one group or the other (or both) for not living up to Western standards of compromise and decency. 

This view is rooted in sheer ignorance, namely ignorance of the fact that the Zionist project, from its inception, was explicitly hostile and violent towards Palestinians. Conflict between Israeli settlers and Gaza natives is not a recent development, emerging out of a difference of opinion as to which group is entitled to the land, in which neither opinion can be said to be more or less valid than the other. Zionism emerged as an unabashedly colonialist entity, with the intention of transforming Palestine from an Arab-majority country to a European-majority country, not through mutual agreement, but by force. Quoth Vladimir Jabotinsky, a 20th-century Zionist ideologue: ‘If you wish to colonize a land in which people are already living, you must provide a garrison on your behalf…Zionism is a colonizing adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force.’ [5] Clearly, the presence of violence in the establishment of Israel was never considered avoidable. Early Zionists knew that they were entering land in which other people lived, knew that those people would not be pleased with them dominating that land, and knew, because of this, that they would have to use force in order achieve their desired outcomes, yet chose to do so anyways. The recent outburst of retaliatory violence against Israel by Hamas is miniscule when compared to this decades-long ‘colonizing adventure,’ but the furious violence of Israel, which is inherent in Zionism itself and made manifest not only in military oppression by the IDF but also through avenues like property redistribution and cultural suppression, is usually ignored by the West, which will only ever briefly take note of it when it is too indefensible to gloss over. Meanwhile, the much smaller-scale violence of Palestine, which is born out of a desire for national liberation, is framed as a threat not only to Israel’s very nationhood but as a mad annihilation of innocent lives. 

All of this defamation of Palestine’s fight for freedom, all of this critique and harmful rhetoric about its methods of resistance is, once spoken by Israeli demagogues, absorbed uncritically by Western political voices, even those which outwardly express support for Palestine. The disconnect of their political imagination from the actual situation in Palestine is so severe, that, when they claim to endorse Palestinian liberation, the image they have in their mind is one of diplomacy and calm discussions in congressional halls. The actuality of liberation, the pain, the suffering, the violence, the death, comes as a surprise to them. Their fantasy of a wave of peaceful protests, meetings between community leaders, and, perhaps, an international summit of some kind being all that it takes to restore relations between the two countries (as if an amicable relationship existed in the first place) suddenly disappears before their eyes. In its place are shocking images of bombings and burning helicopters, and they are so shocked to find that the political process they imagined is not how any country can ever or will ever gain true, long-lasting freedom that they are inclined to accept the first explanation for all this chaos that somebody offers them. Unfortunately, this explanation tends to go as follows: ‘Israel is facing unprovoked attacks by Palestinian radicals.’

It is not hard to see that this explanation, beyond being overly simplistic, is also outright incorrect. In response, one may be inclined to search for an explanation through which middle ground can be found within this complex issue. Despite many popular maxims, though, the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis does not constitute a ‘complicated situation’ with ‘valid claims emerging from both sides.’ In the words of political commentator Michael Brooks: ‘It's not a complex issue. That's the big thing. It's super simple. There's one group [Israel] that has enormous power. It's the most powerful country in the Middle East. It's backed by the United States. It acts on another population of people with total impunity. It is never held accountable for anything. So, there's no symmetry in the relationship, period.’ As much as American politicians may claim to  represent a reasonable middle-ground on the issue of Palestinian liberation, this proposed ‘middle-ground’ does not and can not exist. When Israel uses violence on Palestinians, it is oppression. When Palestinians fight back against Israelis, it is self-defense. That much is certain. 

Notes

[1] Dahman, Ibrahim. Gold, Hadan. Iszo, Lauren. Netanyahu says Israel is ‘at war’ after Hamas launches surprise air and ground attack from Gaza, sec.7

[2] Kayyali, Abdul-Wahab. Zionism and Imperialism: The Historical Origins, p.110

[3] al-Mughrabi, Nidal. Israeli forces kill three Gaza border protesters, wound 600: medics, sec.1

[4] McGreal, Chris. Army pulls back from Gaza leaving 100 Palestinians dead, sec.1

[5] Jabotinsky, Vladimir. The Iron Law, pg. 26

Violence or Values? The Essence of Revolution

By Irik Robinson

Republished from Red Voice.

“When we look at a thing, we must examine its essence and treat its appearance merely as an usher at the threshold, and once we cross the threshold, we must grasp the essence of the thing; this is the only reliable and scientific method of analysis.”

- Mao Zedong

When most people think of the word "revolution," they think, almost instinctively and automatically, of violence. And of course, revolution is most definitely and very seriously a situation that necessitates and requires violence.

Malcolm taught us this:

“A revolution is bloody. Revolution is hostile. Revolution knows no compromise. Revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in its way. And you, sitting around here like a knot on the wall, saying, 'I’m going to love these folks no matter how much they hate me.' No, you need a revolution.”

Thus to associate violence with revolution isn’t necessarily or categorically wrong or incorrect. It is, however, a critical error, and a grave misrepresentation of the essence of revolution, if it is only viewed and understood strictly within a context of violence. Revolution must be waged not because of this incredible urge we seem to have for violence. It is waged because of the strong desire we have to live in a better, freer, more humane society. A society, if we can imagine, that is completely free of violence.

The capitalist press and other bourgeois institutions in America, however, will attempt to convince us that revolution is evil and bad and impractical, because it is too “violent.” They will attempt to convince us that “looting” and “rioting” and other militant forms of protests are too violent. Let’s get this straight though. As the oppressed, we will always be condemned by our oppressors for our acts of resistance. Capitalists are not opposed to using violence. They just want to be the only ones legitimized for using it. They wouldn’t have capitalism or America without violence.

It is not the oppressed who are “violent.” It is the very system we are attempting to change that is so. It is not violence or hate that we are motivated by. To the contrary, as Che Guevara once said:

“Let me tell you something at the risk of sounding ridiculous. A true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. Love of humanity. Love of justice, and truth. It is impossible to conceive of an authentic revolutionary without this quality.”

What revolutionaries desire through revolution is not this great opportunity for violence, but the greater opportunity of being able to change this society. The capitalist system is inherently vile and sick, it has no redeeming qualities that are worth preserving. In fact, it is a system that’s decaying, that's dying. As the great Trinidadian historian C.L.R James has written, “Mankind has obviously reached the end of something, the crisis is absolute. Bourgeois civilization is falling apart.”

Socialist revolution requires the overthrow of capitalism. It requires the destruction of neocolonialism and the freeing up of Indigenous lands. It requires a protracted struggle for control over the means of production and other productive forces. It requires a radical redistribution of resources. It means no more labor exploitation or class hierarchies. It means a completely new society. It means a greater sense of freedom and humanity.

Capitalism, like socialism, is not merely an economic system, isolated or separated from other societal forces that are connected to the formulation and restructuring of a given society. The economic system in a given society becomes the base on which the rest of the society is built or structured upon. Capitalism is an ideology, which means it comes with a set of core beliefs, particular ideas, and patterns of behavior, etc.

The former president of the Democratic Republic of Guinea, Sekou Toure, once said that "the material basis of social life is the mode of production." In other words, the economic system of a society shapes or determines the social mores, values and ideas of a given society. So the question must be asked, What is so wrong with the values and principles of the capitalist system that oppressed groups throughout the world are organizing against it?

Martin Luther King, Jr., began raising some serious questions about the capitalistic structure in a speech he delivered to The Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967:

“And one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.’ When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society…”

In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech that he delivered earlier that same year, Dr. King said:

“...[W]e as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing‐oriented” society to a “person‐oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered…True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice, which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth…A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Dr. King began seeing quite vividly that in capitalist societies, what truly exists within people is a fundamental and profound sense of human emptiness and social shallowness. True and authentic human values, morals and principles are sacrificed at the altar of monopoly capital; they are commodified and vulgarized. Human principles such as love, happiness, justice, truth and freedom, are casually reduced to absolutely nothing, when it cannot benefit or advance another in the form of capital or some kind of material.

Capitalism teaches us how to be self-centered egotistical individuals, and thereby we learn how to treat one another very crudely and impersonally. We only seem to respect, value and appreciate human relationships insofar as they can help advance our own personal interests and/or ambitions. People in capitalistic societies learn how to lie without blinking an eye; learn how to sleep peacefully, no matter how brutally they have abused another human being  be that physically, emotionally, or psychologically. Yet these are the values and core principles of the capitalist system. Cut-throat competition, individualism, egotism, greed, lying, cheating, stealing, indifference to the suffering of others, hedonism, etc.

People living in capitalist societies like to delude themselves into believing that they can be human while following the moral and cultural dictates of an anti-human society. You can’t do it. “The man who thinks and acts exclusively for himself is a social parasite,” said Sekou Toure. “Capitalist society doesn't lie some of the time, it lies all of the time,” said Kwame Ture. And we know that whenever people are lied to for so long the truth sounds like a lie and a lie sounds like the truth.

However, the truth is that the entire system of global capitalism is toxic. This is not something that we can pray away or positively think away, deny, or act as if it doesn't exist. Instead we must confront it and eventually uproot it. We must out of a sense of love, duty, and responsibility become revolutionaries. Because we are desperately in need of generosity, honesty, transparency, and authenticity in this horrid anti-human capitalistic society. Thus we are speaking about a class struggle. We are struggling not only for the basic control of the means of production but over proper and correct ideas. Again, “[e]very ethic or moral struggle is a class struggle,” said Sekou Toure.

We must continue to struggle for socialism because it’s core principles of living and being and structuring a society are just and humane. In Socialism and Man in Cuba, Che Guevara addressed the moral aspect of organizing for socialist revolution when he wrote,

“That is why it is very important to choose the right instrument for mobilizing the masses. Basically, this instrument must be moral in character, without neglecting, however, a correct use of the material incentive — especially of a social character.”

Guevara continues,

“As I have already said, in moments of great peril it is easy to muster a powerful response with moral incentives. Retaining their effectiveness, however, requires the development of a consciousness in which there is a new scale of values. Society as a whole must be converted into a gigantic school.”

And it is we, the oppressed, who must turn this world into gigantic schools of liberation. America is a decadent society, completely deprived of any substantive human values or principles which can lead to proper human development and growth. The capitalist system is not designed to produce healthy and functional and intelligent human beings; only mindless zombies and heartless robots who go aimlessly through life, searching desperately for a happiness they will never know, for there is no such thing as happiness in this capitalistic wilderness. It can only be cultivated through the process of revolution:

“Black, brown and white are victims together. At the end of this massive collective struggle, we will uncover our new man…He will be better equipped to wage the real struggle, the permanent struggle after the revolution – the one for new relationships between men.” George Jackson

A Brutal History: Slave Patrols and Building a Racist System with Political Power

By Kaity Baril

In the US, the modern context of ruthless policing or oppressive social control originated as far back as the 1790s. The Charleston City Watch and Guard controlled the movement of the slave population at the time. The Guard was armed with swords and pistols, and it imposed a nine o’clock curfew for Black residents of the city. White slave owners wanted to prevent uprisings and revolts. Patrols closely monitored those in captivity, especially when they were working outside of the sight or the control of the enslaver. 

The creation of the first publicly funded police force, in Boston, was in the 1830s. By the 1890s, every major city in the United States had a police presence, born from racist, slave patrols in the era of slavery and relied on through  Black Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era. 

Now, rather than upholding slavery, cops enforce laws and policies similarly meant to control the lives and movement of Black people. The late 1960s and early 1970s was a period of enormous social turmoil that raised the possibility of revolution. All fundamental institutions of society—the government, the “free” market, the military and war, the police, the nuclear family, white supremacy and others—were challenged. The elite, white, ruling class responded to these direct challenges to their power with Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Crime,” followed by Nixon’s “War on Drugs,” which were jumping off points for subsequent administrations to maintain their preferred social order. The “War on Drugs,” renewed with vigor by Ronald Reagan, still rages, and the U.S. has had the highest incarceration rate in the world since at least 2010. The increase of law enforcement in schools creates a “school to prison pipeline,” in which out-of-school suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests are increasingly used to deal with student misbehavior, especially for minor incidents, and huge numbers of children and youth are pushed out of school and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Not surprisingly, children of color (as well as children with disabilities and children from other vulnerable populations) are disproportionately targeted with these punitive measures.

During the 1980s, the ideology of “zero tolerance” school discipline originates from the “get tough on drugs and crime” policies of that era. This was also the dawn of mandatory minimum sentencing laws — fixed sentences for individuals convicted of a drug crime, with no judicial leniency allowed.  More than 1.6 million people are arrested, prosecuted, incarcerated, placed under criminal justice supervision, and/or deported each year on a drug law violation. “Three-strikes” laws, now in place in 28 states after first appearing in 1994, require anyone previously convicted of two or more violent crimes or serious felonies to receive a life sentence upon a third felony conviction,, regardless of the circumstances or, as in California, sometimes even the severity of the offense (e.g. felony petty theft).  

The Clinton Administration’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 was the largest crime bill in the history of the country. It provided 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons, and $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs.

The “War on Terror,” following the September 11, 2001 attacks, was a catalyst for the use of military grade weapons on protestors, most conspicuously in Ferguson in 2014, following the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown. So began the Black Lives Matter movement. 

Cops are Tools of Class Oppression and Mass Incarceration

For decades, starting in 1966, school districts across the country employed the “Officer Friendly” program that brought cops into local Elementary classrooms. Their goal was to indoctrinate children with the belief that the police are an indispensable part of society, who not only uphold the law but protect them. Perhaps this is because the police were established to protect the interests of the wealthy. Racial violence has always been a part of the mission to protect private, crooked institutions.

The institutions that the State has endowed with the most direct power over people’s lives, and a disproportionate share of tax dollars, are the police, prisons, courts, and the military. These enact forms of legalized punishment and repression under the guise of neutrality by being “bound to laws.” In reality, the laws primarily serve one class: the wealthy. Cops are the primary line of defense for a small fraction of the U.S. population – a handful of private corporate owners. A clear example of this is the role police played in the housing crisis. 

The number of empty, unsellable homes far exceeds the number of homeless. Based on currently available numbers, there are about 31 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S. If policing served the people, cops would have arrested the bankers and the white collar criminals who made enormous profits by manipulating the housing market, even after their schemes created a massive global recession in 2008, and a spike in homelessness. Cops would be helping to seize homes to end, not create, homelessness. Yet evictions continue on a daily basis.

Who does policing target? Police are typically deployed to criminalize poverty, concentrating their efforts on criminalizing those with dark skin, forcing millions of people – primarily people of color, people with mental illness, and those in poverty – into the prison system, depriving them of voting and employment rights, and thereby preserving privileged access to housing, jobs, land, credit, and education for whites. Police are used to break strikes and assault picket lines, where workers are struggling for basic human rights and better conditions. Protests and uprisings during the Black Lives Matter movement have resulted in the use of military crowd control techniques. The political aim of the police is seemingly to silence the demonstrators and curtail their constitutional right to free speech and freedom of assembly, especially Black, Brown, Indigenous folks, and communities of color.

The Violent Military Industrial Complex Leaks into the U.S. Police State

The Military Industrial Complex is directly connected to policing and the Prison Industrial Complex in this country. American policing has become unnecessarily and dangerously militarized, in large part through federal programs that have armed state and local law enforcement agencies with the weapons and tactics of war, with almost no public discussion or oversight. The U.S. already acts as the police force of the world, enforcing authority through drone wars, proxy battles, and meddling. Black liberation is a global struggle, and there is a link between racial oppression internationally and domestically. A militarized police is only equipped to escalate situations.

Throughout US history, the police (including federal policing agencies like the FBI) have attacked and undermined social justice organizations and efforts, at home and abroad, through various forms of surveillance, infiltration, sabotage, and assassination. The political function of the police destroys any form of revolution, so it’s no surprise that in the 10 years of anti-establishment social unrest between 1965 and 1975, the number of police officers grew by roughly 40 percent nationally. In 1974, $15 billion was spent on criminal justice, 57 percent going directly to police expenditures4. With this increase of spending, the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO “neutralized” political dissidents and threats, like the Black Panther Party, through subterfuge and extreme violence. In league with local police units, the FBI declared war on radicals and groups from nationally oppressed communities. Then, the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams were first formed in Los Angeles in 1968. Fifty years later, the US still holds these political prisoners captive, like Mumia Abu-Jamal. The Free Them All Campaign continues to advocate for their release, even as the police continue to use these tactics against protestors today

Using federal funds, state and local law enforcement agencies have amassed military arsenals to wage the failed “War on Drugs,” disproportionately in communities of color. Aggressive enforcement of this mandate from decades ago has lost its public mandate, as 67 percent of Americans think the government should focus more on treatment than on policing and prosecuting drug users. Aggressive drug arrests and prosecution has impacted millions of lives , disproportionately in communities of color, though drug use rates are quite similar across race and class. Law enforcement agencies’ routine use of heavily armed SWAT teams to search people’s homes for drugs is the same hyper-aggressive form of domestic policing that killed Breonna Taylor.  

The militarization of American policing is evident in police officer training, which encourages them to adopt a “warrior” mentality and view the people they are supposed to serve as enemies. It’s also evident in the equipment they use, such as battering rams, flashbang grenades, and APCs. The 1033 Program transferred surplus military equipment to civilian police departments. Only 45 days after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Congress effortlessly passed the Patriot Act , which George W. Bush signed less than a month after the United States invaded Afghanistan, as part of the “War on Terror”. It broadly expanded law enforcement powers to search, surveil, investigate and indefinitely detain people. Among its effects, the Patriot Act has been used to expand the racist war on drugs. 

Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security, created in 2002 to coordinate government intelligence gathering in order to improve counterterrorism efforts,  has set up centers with the FBI and local police that have been used to spy on protest movements, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter. More than 7,000 people were arrested during the Occupy movement over the course of just a few months. These arrests, alongside incidents of police brutality, were intended to stamp out a movement that took aim at the face of class oppression from the rich, elite of Wall Street.

Since May 2020, the uprising spurred by the police lynching of George Floyd, has intensified the militarized mobilization of law enforcement. The police forces are equipped in full riot gear and use weapons designed for war. Black and Brown activists in the United States, especially during the Ferguson protests, have described domestic police departments as “occupying forces,” much like those in Afghanistan or Yemen or Palestine. In fact, allowing Israeli forces and U.S. participants to learn from each others’ violent practices and tactics results in the violation of the human rights of Black and Palestinian people, but there are efforts to end this through a campaign called, “End the Deadly Exchange.” Our police, at the behest of local government, wield not only military arms, but what they’ve learned from the military’s formal joint training, tactics (both street combat and psychological operations), and other means of  suppression. At least 200 cities in the U.S. had imposed curfews by early June, while more than 31 states and Washington, D.C. activated over 75,000 National Guard personnel, arresting over 10,000 people. Yet widespread police brutality and the mobilization of military law enforcement tactics, like kidnapping protestors, have only furthered massive civil unrest. 

The Case for Revolutionary Optimism: A Path towards Abolition

So, how do we fight an institution doing what it has been designed to do, one that’s protected by government leaders and employment contracts, and is therefore incapable of reform?  The problems of punitive, racist policing are cultural — ingrained in our society — and cannot be solved by merely identifying a couple murderers or “bad apples,” if you will. 

Given how corrosive policing has historically been and continues to be, it shouldn’t be surprising that with alternatives, our society could flourish without cops. Policing could, and should, be defunded and abolished.

A society that prioritizes human needs ahead of profit means communities that have sufficient housing, food, health care workers, prisoner re-entry services, and community practices that hold all of its members accountable for any harm and enact restorative justice. Mutual aid, rather than one-time giving events, would allow us to share our skills collectively and all contribute. 

It may seem implausible or unreachable. It requires divesting from police, prisons, and the military, and instead, investing in communities of color and supporting the public policies that encourage, not inhibit, family-sustaining wages, job development, education, and the equitable distribution of resources. We cannot accept corporate, private interests to define our way of living. The ruling, capitalist class is in power, controls our government policies, and we must not capitulate to the world they want us to live in. It is one with an illegal slave system that is the Prison Industrial Complex. A society with an abolitionist as a focus will not be built on the violence of a capitalist state designed to defend property and capital, but one in which the people are empowered to provide for each other. 

We must build class unity and solidarity through organizing within our communities to protect one another. There are few tools within the system to fight the State’s abuse politically and legally, but we can ask for the immediate release of inmates in this country’s tortuous prison system; the end of three strikes and overly harsh sentencing guidelines; changing the 13th Amendment to eliminate the clauses that allow for slavery and “involuntary servitude” for people who are convicted; the end of qualified immunity for officers; the repeal of federal programs that send military equipment to local police; the end of “Broken Windows” policing tactics, including stop-and-frisk and other police harassment tactics; the prohibition of no-knock entry; and laws that make it harder for the police to obstruct free speech activity. 

While these are only reforms, we can also strengthen community accountability models that critique punitive systems that maintain repressive, colonial ideology.  Together, we can connect movements, groups, and individuals to transgress the boundaries of institutions. These alternatives must include continuing critiques to improve social conditions, as well as provide accessible, sustainable levels of resources that are consistent with anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism principles. This is how we can transform and empower communities towards justice and abolition.

Notes on the Peaceful Transition of Power: The Continuity of Violence in America's Imperial Democracy

By Bryant William Sculos

In the weeks leading up to and the hours after Donald J. Trump's inauguration as President of the United States, we've seen the media (and by media I mean the major network television and print media like CNN and Washington Post, just to name a couple) repeat and glorify the so-called "peaceful transition of power" that Inauguration Day represents. President Barack Obama has been applauded for working with and speaking so respectfully about Donald Trump's transition team. Former US Secretary of State and former Democratic Party 2016 Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has also been complimented for her near-complete silence during this period since the election. The supposed peaceful transition of power is often treated as the pinnacle achievement and representation of the greatness of the American political process, and the 2016-2017 instantiation has been no different.

While there were certainly no troops marching into Washington, DC to remove Barack Obama from office to install Donald Trump as President, nor did Trump need to resort to assassination to ascend to the American throne; there is a difference between a nonviolent transition of power and a near-complete acquiescence to the revived and remodeled cast of American neo-fascism represented by the newly empowered Trump administration.

Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and their progressive left Democratic ilk have been bright spots, as have been the thousands more organizing around the country and world to protest and resist the far-Right agenda of Trump and his alt-Right allies (though this agenda is certainly not outside the GOP platform in most respects). There is an awakening resistance, a resistance that we certainly needed more of over the past eight years when it came to demanding that Obama maintain his support for the public option, against the unending and illegal global drone war, against the increase in support for Saudi Arabia's assault on Yemen, and against Israel's apartheid regime and expanding occupation of Palestine. The good news is that the resistance is emerging again now.

What we see now is a transformation of the fugitive democratic power of the people in cities across the country and around the world, and given the near ubiquitous presence of the police and practices of state violence at these marches, rallies, and protests, these resistances to the transition of power can hardly be considered peaceful. When the people have the power and it is exercised by and for the people, in the absence of state or structural violence, only then could it ever rightly be considered peaceful.

There were mass, structural, and direct violences (re)produced by the Obama regime and there will be some of the same violences along with new, different ones under Trump (and the same would have been true under a Hillary Clinton presidency as well). The idea of the peaceful transfer of power is a troubling mythology, despite its very superficial truth. Here are several aspects of this supposed transition of power that reflect the continuity, and potential exacerbating, of structural and direct violence:

1. In one of his final acts as commander-in-chief of the US armed forces, President Obama ordered B-2 bombers to launch one final (at least of his presidency) assault against supposed ISIS-affiliated fighters in Libya . This event was seemingly ignored by the American public (because it was mostly ignored by the mainstream media and wasn't tweeted about by Trump or Kim Kardashian). What does a new president mean for the people of the countries we have been bombing over President George W. Bush's and Barack Obama's presidencies? A peaceful transition of power would seem to preclude "one last bombing for good measure," which seems to be the only way to explain this last military act-apparently not. Additionally, there is a continuity of military operations in these various countries from Obama to Trump. New standing orders will be needed for specific bombings and new campaigns, but much of the existing fighting around the world, where US troops or operational and/or financial support are involved, will continue in support of American-capitalist imperialism. The peaceful transition of power means the US will continue to kill innocent civilians around the world; they might be different people in different countries, perhaps even quantitatively less of them than under Obama (who could trust anything Trump has said, but he has promised to decrease US involvement in military operations around the world), but there is no doubt people who have literally no say in the US electoral system will continue to be subject to the systematic vengeance of our empire. This is the peaceful transition of power.

2. Another act that President Obama undertook prior to his departure from the west wing was the commutation of much of the remainder of Army whistleblower-turned political prisoner and trans-rights icon Chelsea Manning's sentence (she will be released on May 17, 2017 instead of May 17, 2035). Edward Snowden, Leonard Peltier, and the remaining detainees at Guantanamo Bay prison had no such "luck." The peaceful transition of power represents the endurance of structural and direct violence against all of those who were not pardoned nor had their sentences commuted. Obama, without violating any aspect of the constitution or law or costing himself politically (at least in regards to any potential reelection), could have pardoned or commuted the sentences of all political prisoners and those convicted of non-violent crimes. Trump certainly won't. Hillary Clinton certainly would not have. In this context, the peaceful transition of power means the maintenance of the mass incarceration system and mass violation of human rights.

3. According to a recent Oxfam report , eight men control 50% of the world's wealth. The peaceful transition of power means the endurance of this most egregious truth and the system that allows and encourages this truth to remain truth. The peaceful transfer of power represents the continuation of mass poverty and inequality in the US and around the world. People will continue to struggle to feed their families, while the world's richest men, some of whom (though none of the eight richest) have found new employment in Donald Trump's cabinet. The peaceful transition of power means failing to comprehensively reject the structural possibility for any people to be so wealthy while others on any scale, never mind the scale to which we are witnessing around the country and around the world, struggle and suffer so manifestly. The peaceful transfer of power means the transition from one group of plutocrats to even more wealthy plutocrats.

4. Relatedly, the peaceful transition of power means those who continue to lack health insurance or access to health care in any consistent or substantial way will continue to lack health insurance and access-and if the GOP has their way, even more people will lose the limited access the Affordable Care Act granted them as well as those crucial women's health services provided by Planned Parenthood in the US. Maintaining a health care system that is nearly entirely privatized is the epitome of structural violence. It may seem obvious, but it bears emphasizing: in the US, if you cannot afford preventative care or even life-saving treatments, including to necessary prescription drugs, you are truly shit out of luck-even if the number of those who are shit out of luck has decreased under the presidency of Barack Obama. Without a universally accessible public option, the peaceful transition of power means the reproduction of the barbarism of the US health care system.

5. Lastly (though there are certainly more we could come up with), the peaceful transition of power means some people could very likely lose the right to their family, whether because they of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or their immigration status. People could lose their parents, and others could lose the right to become parents. Children could lose the right to be with their parents, and others could lose the right to be adopted by gay or trans parents. Whatever Trump and the GOP do with regard to immigration, it will likely follow in the footsteps of "deporter-in-chief" Barack Obama's policy of mass deportation . Whatever Trump and the GOP do with regard to LGBTQA+ rights, it will likely only be enabled by the inability of the Democratic Party to structurally secure these rights more fully when they had the opportunity to in the first two years of Obama's presidency.

As opposed to the self-deceiving mythology of a most grotesquely violent "peaceful transition of power," we need to give new meaning to this perverse phraseology. The peaceful transition of power should only mean the end to imperial warfare and the corporate, consumer capitalist system that undergirds it. The peaceful transfer of power can only mean the democratic seizure of the means of political, economic, and social power by the people and for the people. Until then, the peaceful transfer of power will remain a cruel untruth. Until we succeed-a process that will surely take a generation or more-the peaceful transfer of power must be our goal, not the mythological paean that has never been reflective of any reality of the American system. Until that time, we will only have the violent maintenance of violent power-whether the US President is Black, white, female, or orange.

Bryant William Sculos is a contributing writer with the Hampton Institute, a PhD candidate in political theory at Florida International University, and Politics of Culture section editor for Class, Race and Corporate Power . He writes on topics including Critical Theory, global ethics, democracy, and (post)capitalism. His work has been published in New Political Science, Political Studies Review, Marx & Philosophy Review of Books, and New Politics . Bryant is an at-large member of Socialist Alternative in the US. He can be reached at bscul005@fiu.edu .

Misunderstanding the Civil Rights Movement and Diversity of Tactics

By Lorenzo Raymond

It's gotten to be a pattern on the Left. When Black protest erupts into insurrection, as it did in Ferguson and Baltimore, most liberals and white radicals express empathy for the cathartic release of anger, but urge the oppressed that this is not the way. This is "not strategic," says the leftist concern-troll. This is "what the police want." Most of the time they manage to stop short of asking "why are they burning down their own neighborhood?" -if only to be mindful of clichés-but some can't even help themselves there. In the aftermath,Amy Goodman (seemingly channeling Alex Jones) will spread conspiracy theories on how the government "orchestrated" the rioting.¹ The respectability politics of nonviolence will return.

It's hard to believe that anyone who has paid attention to Black Lives Matter takes these positions in good faith because, of course, the riots in Ferguson were objectively the best thing that happened to a movement that was already more than a year old. In August 2014, Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman had been almost completely forgotten by white America except as grim punchlines, while national civil rights leaders were more concerned with Chicago's gang killings than with the national wave of police terror. Yet by December, in the wake of recurring rioting in both Ferguson and the Bay Area, the Ferguson PD was under investigation by Amnesty International, the Justice Department and the United Nations ( and #BlackLivesMatter had been named Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society ).

This month the pushback comes with Jonathan Chait's promotion of a scholarly paper on the effects of rioting on Black liberation in the 1960s. Chait's argument can be critiqued on just about every level: the paper has a distorted idea of what liberation is (apparently, it means electing Democrats), an undefined idea of what rioting is, and on top of that the paper isn't even accredited scholarship, in the sense that it hasn't been peer-reviewed by anyone (except of course by Jonathan Chait).

Chait first got uptight about this subject last year, when he and Ta-Nehesi Coates had an indirect back-and-forth over the efficacy of Black insurrection. Chait wrote regarding Ferguson that "Property damage and looting impede social progress." Coates replied with a concise historical sketch of militancy in the civil rights era:

The Civil Rights Bill of 1964 is inseparable from the threat of riots. The housing bill of 1968-the most proactive civil-rights legislation on the books-is a direct response to the riots that swept American cities after King was killed. Violence, lingering on the outside, often backed nonviolence during the civil-rights movement. "We could go into meetings and say, 'Well, either deal with us or you will have Malcolm X coming into here,'" saidSNCC organizer Gloria Richardson. "They would get just hysterical. The police chief would say, 'Oh no!"

But now Chait claims that a draft research paper by Omar Wasow, an assistant professor at the department of politics at Princeton, fills in the blanks left within the broad strokes of that sketch. "And his answer is clear," Chait announces. "Riots on the whole provoke a hostile right-wing response. They generate attention, all right, but the wrong kind."

Chait and Wasow's position is a restatement of the timeworn "backlash thesis." Over the years, this thesis has been largely discredited by various studies (studieswhich, unlike Wasow's, were peer-reviewed). The weakness with the thesis is not that there was no serious white backlash to the anti-racist movement, but that the backlash started as soon as the civil rights struggle began in the mid-1950s, not suddenly after the mid-60s Northern rebellions.

The Limits of Nonviolence

Take for instance Michael Klarman's book From Jim Crow to Civil Rights (which one reviewer calls "the first great and indispensable work of American constitutional history in the twenty-first century"). Klarman demonstrates that Brown vs. Board of Education didn't inspire an unambiguously effective civil rights movement; it inspired an uncertain experiment in passive resistance which in turn provoked the segregationist " massive resistance" movement. And just as Brown didn't lead to widespread desegregated schools, the Supreme Court decision that emerged from the Montgomery bus boycott didn't lead to widespread desegregated buses-most Southern municipalities simply ignored it, and launched highly effective repression against Black activism and liberalism generally. Montgomery itself enactednew segregation laws after the boycott victory, andterrorized both moderate and radical political figures ( Rosa Parks fled the city after the campaign, both because she was blacklisted from work and because of credible death threats). On the rare instances where the federal government stood up for school desegregation, like in Little Rock in 1958, the conservatives were strong enough to wait out the withdrawal of troops, or else simply shut down the schools rather than comply.

A new hope seemed to emerge in the early 1960s with the lunch counter sit-ins, the Freedom Rides, and the Mississippi voter registration drives. But the sit-in movement only led to the desegregation of Woolworth's luncheonettes-most Southern eateries remained Jim Crow. The Freedom Rides were actually unpopular with the American public, most of whom thought Blacks were moving too fast. And the Freedom Rides led to yet another federal decision that was seldom honored in the South. The Mississippi movement provoked a wave of lynchings that the Kennedy administration did nothing to prevent. Klarman noted that the early civil rights movement had a "backlash-counterbacklash" dynamic.

Klarman's work builds on that of scholar Gerald Rosenberg who demonstrated that no dramatic change for Black liberation occurred until the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The direct impetus for that law was rioting in Birmingham inMay of 1963: thousands of local blacksdefied Martin Luther King's exhortations to nonviolence, set fire to nine square blocks of downtown, and sent a police officer to the operating room. The author of the most comprehensive study of President Kennedy's civil rights policy, Nicholas Bryant, noted that

It was the black-on-white violence of May 11 - not [the nonviolence of the previous weeks] - that represented the real watershed in Kennedy's thinking…Kennedy had grown used to segregationist attacks against civil rights protesters. But he - along with his brother and other administration officials - was far more troubled by black mobs running amok.²

Birmingham wasn't an isolated episode; Black insurrection flared across the country for the rest of 1963 and into 1964. Sometimes it was milder than Birmingham and sometimes it was more explosive. SNCC leader Gloria Richardson recalls that in her campaign in Cambridge, Maryland, activists exchanged gunfire with National Guardsmen just a few months prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

"Burning in every city, North and South"

President Kennedy's response to Birmingham is the key historical moment of the movement. According to White House tapes, the president initially thought about sending federal troops to Alabama in May 1963 with the idea of acting against Blacks if the rioting continued-not against Bull Connor. He ultimately kept the troops on stand-by. As the month wore on and Kennedy saw Black rebellion spread to Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York, he eventually concluded he would have to make a major gesture of support for African-Americans. On June 11, he gave his landmark Civil Rights Address, in which he first proposed the Civil Rights Act. The Address acknowledged the role of riots:

This is not a sectional issue. Difficulties over segregation and discrimination exist in every city, in every State of the Union, producing in many cities a rising tide of discontent that threatens the public safety… The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South, where legal remedies are not at hand. Redress is sought in the streets, in demonstrations, parades, and protests which create tensions and threaten violence and threaten lives.

Kennedy's speech is the first time the federal government even acknowledged it had a major racial problem in the North. The post-Birmingham uprisings were indeed the root of the nationwide white backlash, but they were also the beginningof a truly nationwide civil rights movement. And they proved to be the first real federal breakthrough in either the North or South.

Some of Professor Wasow's charts actually illustrate my points better than they illustrate his:

We can see in this chart that there was little violent activity in the early sixties movement-but we can also see that there was very littlenonviolent activity in the movement either. The marked decline of nonviolent protest shown in 1962 confirms Malcolm X's characterization in his " Message to the Grassroots" speech that the movement seemed to be on its last legs that year. Then, in 1963, we see violent and nonviolent activity spike in unison-if anything violent protest leads the trend. The riotous tendency in that year helped to stimulate nonviolent protest (including preparations for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom). And as we've already seen, it directly inspired Kennedy's Civil Rights Address and proposal of his civil rights bill.

The chart also shows a smaller but still significant curve towards violence in 1964. The peak of this curve appears to be June 1964- the month the Civil Rights Act was finally passed. And once again, riots and peaceful protests rose and fell together in similar timeframes. Also note that the Watts rebellion doesn't spring out of nowhere in August 1965; it's part of a general increase in militancy that begins in the first half of the year, which means that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 is also inseparable from the threat of riots (Note too that the overall rates of violent protest in 1965 and 1963 are nearly the same).

Wasow doesn't mention the Birmingham riot, or the Cambridge riot, or the "fires of frustration and discord…burning in every city, North and South," in 1963. They don't help his case. But they do prove the case of the anarchist writer Peter Gelderloos, who's noted for years that the civil rights movement at its strongest was a model of diversity of tactics.

The underlying premise of Wasow and Chait seems to be that since it's dangerous to win (there's a backlash) it's much better to lose. In his study of the struggle for the Civil Rights Act, legal historian Gerald Rosenberg has a more heartening message:

"Overcoming discrimination is a good news/bad news story.The bad news is that discrimination is deeply enmeshed in the fabric of American life; it is hard to change. But there is good news. The good news is that change is possible."

Originally posted at Lorenzo's blog, Diversity of Tactics.

Notes

Democracy Now uncritically publicized the idea that the National Guard stood down in Ferguson in order to encourage rioting - http://www.democracynow.org/2014/11/25/riot_as_the_language_of_the - However, it was documented later that the officials' motivation was concern about the public image of militarized policing - http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/revelations-about-national-guard-mission-in-ferguson-anger-local-businesses/article_1532b2bd-ca7e-5f3d-8a38-a379a4cb5b6a.html

Nicholas Andrew Bryant, The Bystander: John F. Kennedy And the Struggle for Black Equality (Basic Books, 2006), p. 393