By Paul Stauffer
This week, my oldest child turned three years old. She was our first miracle baby, conceived through IVF and spending her first two weeks of life in the NICU. She’s silly, fierce, and so stubbornly independent that we had to buy her a stepstool after she demanded to wash her own dishes. Her birthday party was Taylor Swift-themed.
Our son was another miracle baby, conceived again through IVF, though his journey was even rockier than his sisters. During his 12-week ultrasound, they found fluid in his chest and neck area. Unknown to us at the time, the doctors gave him little chance of survival. By some miracle, though, he pulled through. The perinatologist said she’d never seen such a turnaround in her 30-year career. Today, he’s a healthy, happy nine month old on an relentless mission to stand on his own.
Being a parent or a caregiver means experiencing new kinds of love and pride that are hard to comprehend beforehand. Just being able to witness your kids grow mentally, emotionally, physically brings an immense joy. Every day, I wake up and feel like I’m meeting two brand new kids taller than the day before, more cognizant of the world around them, more understanding, more expressive, more empathetic, and more curious. It’s as though a bit of their personality is uncovered under each rock they collect at the park, through each new friend they meet, following each talk through a meltdown. Slowly but surely, they begin to find themselves, and as their caregiver, you get the privilege to see each step they take.
It’s a beautiful, terrifying, oftentimes baffling experience. All you can do is try your best to point them in the right direction when they need guidance and hope you don’t screw them up too badly in the process.
Throughout all of it, you grow accustomed to worrying about a lot of things. Their futures are what I typically worry about most. Choking hazards are a big one, too… but mostly, I worry about their futures. Whether I’m taking them to daycare, or we’re going for a walk, or brushing our teeth before bed, I worry about the world we’re building for them and what another 20 or 30 years of uninhibited, unrestricted capitalism will mean for the climate, the economy, and the quality of life they inherit from us. Every caregiver wants their children to grow up to live happy, fulfilled lives, but with the current path our society appears to be traveling, that seems increasingly unlikely to shape up for them.
As socialists, we have no choice but to be revolutionary optimists, and though these days, it feels hard, we have to carry that optimism over into our parenting and caregiving and strive to pass that revolutionary optimism down to our children.
The values nearly all caregivers attempt to instill in their children regardless of their political leanings form the basis of the socialist egalitarian worldview: treating people fairly, loving your neighbor, telling the truth, doing the right thing, developing a love of learning, sharing what you have with others who don’t, and caring for those in need.
The transition from learning these early egalitarian life lessons to developing a mature political perspective which recognizes that our capitalist economic system operates diametrically opposed to these lessons should be a seamless one; socialist politics are the only set of beliefs that run consistent to these basic lessons ungirded by unconditional love and compassion that we try to teach our children.
Sometime around age five or so, though, we abruptly start to either consciously or subconsciously contradict these early lessons.
As they enter adolescence, our children slowly begin to observe more of the world around them. More and more, they start noticing the extreme injustices and inequalities baked into the capitalist system and the conditioned lack of empathy expressed by the adults and role models around them to that suffering. They see some people with a lot next to people with nothing, and they’re justifiably confused, as our apathy to state violence is a direct contradiction of everything they’ve been taught about how to treat other people in their short lives. They begin to call that apathy into question — why aren’t they sharing? They see people hurt and in need — why won’t anybody help them? They see bigotry and prejudice — why don’t they like them?
Caregivers react to the compassion of their children with impatience and do their best to explain away the violence. We begin treating children less as innocent and curious kids and more as budding members of capitalist society, i.e. future workers. If they’re going to grow up to fit in within the system (which of course is more important than living a life of principle and standing up for the oppressed), then they had better stop being so sensitive and start growing up and understanding how we do things around here.
We begin to demonstrate to our children through our words and actions the importance of rejecting empathy, ignoring your neighbor, kowtowing to injustice, abandoning education, embracing greed, prioritizing yourself over others, and telling everyone else they’re on their own.
We tell our kids to keep walking past the houseless person asking for help on the street.
We punish the poor, demonize the incarcerated, abandon the sick, and deny the race and gender-based inequities of our economic system that predispose specific groups to greater levels of exploitation and suffering than others. We tell our kids that we shouldn’t help those people because they brought their struggle upon themselves. In other words, they deserve the violence that the system enacts on them.
We discriminate against women, people of color, immigrants, the LGBTQ+ community, the aged, and the disability community. We segregate ourselves geographically from disadvantaged communities, divest resources from them to reallocate to the rich, over-police and lock them up at disproportionately high rates, and blame the disadvantaged for their community’s own divestment.
We preach about freedom while subordinating ourselves to capital. We’re forced to spend our best years prioritizing the accumulation of profit for our bosses over developing relationships, pursuing our interests, and realizing our self-actualization. We reject the power of collective labor solidarity and hope that groveling and stepping on our coworkers will get us ahead. We miss basketball games, spelling bees, and plays.
We’re too exhausted from working all the time to join organizations, socialize, and form community bonds. We avoid our neighbors, keep to ourselves, isolate ourselves from our communities, and try to fill the emotional voids with overconsumption.
We stress the central importance of family as long as the family fits our narrowly defined definitions of patriarchal, Christian, cis-gender heteronormativity. We expose our kids to the pressures of social media where they develop low self-worth, anxiety, and extremely toxic forms of masculinity. We revere authority figures like business owners, landlords, and the police while they actively exploit us. We idolize wealth.
We erase our history and purposefully miseducate our kids, refusing to teach them about the prosperity of their country being built on the backs of slaughtered Indigenous Americans and African slaves. We ignore the blatant efforts to privatize schools and turn their education into another commodity.
We justify the full-scale destruction of entire peoples that stand in the way of market expansion — the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Chad, Sudan, the Central African Republic, the DRC, Honduras, Haiti, El Salvador, and countless others just in the last few decades alone. Millions of working people dehumanized, terrorized, vaporized — their suffering monetized and subsidized to sustain 7% returns in the S&P 500.
We rationalize the assassination aid workers, hospital workers, journalists, priests, nuns, LGBTQ+ leaders, peace negotiators, trade unionists, artists, environmentalists, poets, and peace activists who courageously call attention to the plight of the oppressed at the hands of the capitalist state and its benefactors.
Beyond the obvious and immediate harm these attitudes enact on the vulnerable populations they are directed towards, this normalization of violence is incredibly dangerous when we model it to our children.
Our kids are smart. They’re impressionable. Even at a young age, they’re incredibly observant. They see our indifference to the suffering around us and are forced to quickly make sense of it themselves. The needless exploitation of the hyper-exploited working people around the world brought on by the capitalists’ relentless drive for profit is duly normalized and accepted by our kids.
As anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist parents and caregivers, we not only have to work to maintain a consistency with those early childhood lessons of justice, egalitarianism, and love as our children grow older and begin to witness more of our world of injustice, inequality, and hate, but we also carry the vital responsibility of actively rooting out the colonizer’s mentality that legitimates the dehumanization of the colonized within ourselves and our neighbors.
If we want to maintain any hope of ever liberating ourselves from this oppressive system, we have to reject the learned justifications for capitalist violence categorically. Each condition made to incontrovertible international working class solidarity is a crack in the dam that the capitalist class will exploit to bring it down. Every passive acceptance of class hierarchy by the worker strengthens those hierarchies which in turn oppress them and will go on to oppress their children.
Every pretext for violence enacted against working people both domestically and in the Global Periphery alienates the worker in the colonial center from their own humanity, as Frantz Fanon famously observed in Wretched of the Earth.
As Fanon put it, the colonizer working class “must realize that in the past they have often joined the ranks of our common masters where colonial questions were concerned.”
“This huge task which consists of reintroducing mankind into the world, the whole of mankind, will be carried out with the indispensable help, of the European peoples… To achieve this, the European peoples must first decide to wake up.”
Fanon’s description of the European working class’s acquiescence to colonialism was written in the context of the Algerian independence struggle of the 1950’s. It was later applied in the American context by the political prisoner and revolutionary George Jackson. Not long before his murder by prison guards in 1972, Jackson looked at the long-held truths undergirding the American project and rightly concluded that we were already living in a fascist state.
“The history of this country in the last fifty years and more, the very nature of all its fundamental elements, and its economic, social, political and military mobilization distinguish it as the prototype of the international fascist counterrevolution. The U.S. is the Korean problem, the Vietnamese problem, the problem in the Congo, Angola, Mozambique, the Middle East. It’s the grease in the British and Latin Amerikan guns that operate against the masses of common people.”
Echoing the likes of Amílcar Cabral and Fanon, Jackson acknowledged that the fascist repression of the state will intensify and turn inward on its own population within the imperial core in times of economic crisis.
“This observer is convinced that fascism not only exists in the U.S.A.,” he wrote, “but has risen out of the ruins of a once eroded and dying capitalism, phoenix-like, to its most advanced and logical arrangement.
This brings us to the worsening state of fascist violence spearheaded in the present day by the American capitalist state and what that intensification of violence means for the future of our children.
I’m finishing this essay not long after I put my kids to bed. Each night, I think about how lucky I am to be together with them at this moment, how fortunate we are to be safe and healthy, because so many parents and caregivers around the world do not share these luxuries.
The sheer masses of children torn viciously from their parents and caregivers by the brutal hands of the capitalist war machine is there for us all to see, most prominently throughout the course of the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Each night, while my kids are upstairs sleeping peacefully, I sit, catch my breath, and see the colonial violence that had been enacted in the names of my children that day. Never has the full extent of carnage committed by colonial power been so widely accessible and thoroughly documented as the genocide.
Every day, I can hug my son and daughter and turn around to see photos of little, lifeless bodies just like theirs. Children no different than them. No less fierce, or beautiful, or silly, or independent in life than my daughter. No less miraculous, or joyful, or innocent, or loved than my son. No less deserving to suffer, to starve, to be shot, or blown apart.
The only difference is my kids are still here. They’re happy and healthy. They’ve got their limbs intact. They’re alive. They haven’t been intentionally shot in the head by soldiers who don’t see them as human beings. Chances are, with the unprecedented destruction of Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure, neither one of my children would have survived past birth if they had been born there instead of here.
My children are alive simply because they’re white Americans, and the children in Palestine are not. Their undeserved suffering is published to the world, their last moments of terror embalmed on my Instagram feed memorializing a life erased as punishment for the crime of being born a Palestinian.
We witness this inexplicable suffering from thousands of miles away, committed with weapons paid for by our tax dollars, constructed in our backyards, and sent across the world with the explicit intent to eradicate these children for the sake of our children. Our democratically elected politicians justify the eradication of these children, suggesting it will make the region less hostile to American business interests. We’re told to accept that those children needed to be killed so our children could have the freedom to have cheap hummus. Our government is aiding in the mass extermination of Gaza so that they can build a Five Guys in the new illegal settlement the Zionists build over the ruins of Jabalya. But If we don’t kill them, they tell us, they’ll come after your kids next!
Then, we’re supposed to nod and agree, go to sleep, get our kids up the next day, send them to school, whistle to work to serve the business interests that materially benefit from those children’s murders, work happily and productively, whistle home, raise our kids to be happy, unquestioning, and hardworking, the same as us, and ignore the ongoing violence enacted on the children over there while we produce profit for the monsters bombing them.
Do any of us honestly think our military would be any less likely to bomb us and our children if we were there instead of here? Would our Congressperson or Senator celebrate our children’s murders and defend their killers? Would your boss think twice before playing 18 holes on the golf course built over your kids’ mass graves?
Of course, you don’t need to be a parent or caregiver to recognize the utter inhumanity and absurdity of the entire proposition being foisted on the American working class in demanding our support for the Palestinian genocide, but the sheer brazenness of the violence purported on Gaza’s innocent children should force all parents and guardians to reckon with the connotations of the violence purported to be committed for our children’s safety. We have an added responsibility to actively resist the genocide to build a more egalitarian world for our kids.
We need to be doing more than witnessing and advocating against the genocide on social media. Calling the daily witnessing of an ongoing genocide live streamed onto your social media feed a “ritual” seem to imply it’s a repetitious, self-sacrificial chore. It feigns material resistance and removes one’s complicity in the extermination, being a citizen of the imperial military state supplying the weapons and providing diplomatic coverage for the genocide to ultimately advance its economic interests. We need to be educating ourselves, educating each other, and organizing to overcome the capitalist colonial state.
Without an organized socialist movement or an international class-conscious labor movement to counteract it, the capitalists can continue the Palestinian genocide unobstructed. Neither the unenforceable objections of global governance structures nor the spontaneous protest movement of millions of working people have been able to overcome the bipartisan consensus of the ruling class that the eradication of the Palestinian people will ultimately benefit their bottom lines.
No one should be shocked that this is the conclusion to which the capitalist mentality had led; it’s completely consistent with every injustice, every outburst of the capitalist system enacted on working people across the globe. The violent byproducts of capitalist accumulation are what the bosses deem “negative externalities” that they are fiduciarily compelled to ignore when making business decisions. Their only responsibility is to direct the company in the manner which will yield the greatest return for its shareholders; in other words, the bosses’ only concern is to determine what can they do today that will result in the most profit for the company, regardless of how many people they step on to get it. If we don’t sell our quadcopters or our bulldozers or our software to the IDF, the competition will!
The same is true for the state - its backers are focused solely on what foreign policy positions will best advance their economic interests, whether that be through organizing coups to overthrow social democrats who won’t substrate themselves to US conglomerates, facilitating rampant child labor and hyper-exploitation of working people in the Global Periphery to produce mass cheap consumption goods for Western workers, expanding production of greenhouse gases and suppressing scientific evidence of their cataclysmic effects on our climate, or propping up a genocidal ethnostate to advance its regional control of trade.
This rampant pillaging and wanton mass murder is the logical endpoint of a decades-long process of an uninhibited capitalist military industrial complex given free rein to expand to more overt campaigns of war crimes, illegal occupations, assassinations, coups d'état, and unsanctioned political violence around the globe.
Unchecked, the capitalists will become more unapologetic in their utilization of violence to strengthen American hegemony for the sole purpose of facilitating economic growth. Once they can openly resort to the greatest crime a state entity can commit and still face no repercussions, they know their power is irreproachable. If we won’t stop them from committing genocide, what will we ever stop them for?
So, despite our horror, despite our Instagram shares, despite our marches and banners, the sun still sets and rises. The markets close and open. We’ve still got to earn a living. The internet bill is going up again. Our families need to eat. Our kids need their medication. We unavoidably get caught up in the daily struggles of survival in the capitalist market. Life in the imperial core continues.
The commodification of life’s necessities forces us to cooperate with the capitalist system despite our objections to its exploitative nature. The domestic economy flows around - or perhaps through - the violence outside our own doors. The two are inseparable. We learn to live with imperialism, with the police state, with immigration crackdowns, with the genocide, because we seemingly have no choice. This inexplicable level of violence is normalized, and we feel we can only keep looking at our phones aghast while the state oppression intensifies. Through our cooperation with the capitalist system, we allow the children of Gaza to be penned in, starved, and slaughtered.
Today, we are living through an intensification of the fascist state tendencies similar to the one we saw in the aftermath of 9/11. Then, it was the people of Iraq and Afghanistan at the receiving end of the war machine’s bombs, but much like today, our politicians and media class recycled the narrative that through their resistance to colonization, it was the Iraqi’s and Afghani’s own faults for being invaded, occupied, and murdered. The justification ran then as it does today in neoconservative circles: if we let them live, they’ll grow up to be terrorists anyways.
Much like then, the intensified violence abroad stokes fears that that the oppressed could take their revenge on us here in the colonial core. Protection of the homeland from the foreign hordes becomes a national security priority. We lose any semblance of privacy. Laws permitting political speech and assembly are restricted. We jail and deport our most vulnerable residents for their political speech when it threatens the colonial and economic interests of those in power as a means to silence the rest of us.
The definition of citizenship is restricted. We create agencies to hunt down undesirables. Then, we shut our doors and sit on our hands while ICE disappears members of our vulnerable immigrant population based off the tattoos on their arms and their countries of origin.
So, when George Jackson said that the United States was already fascist all the way back in 1971, he really didn’t know the half of it. Since then, an entire new framework of fascist repression has been instituted, and we need to be working to actively root out the institutions before they become normalized like they did following 9/11 with the passing of the Patriot Act and the AUMF, and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and ICE.
We need to fight the Palestinian Genocide. We need to fight the climate crisis. We need to fight for abortion access. We need to fight against the dehumanization the trans community. We cannot accept the overt oppression of the targeted members of our society. We cannot forcibly disappear immigrants. We cannot jail activists for political speech. We need to fight the system of mass consumption of cheap commodities off the backs of the exploitation of children mining cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or sewing fast fashion in Bangladesh, or manufacturing cars in Alabama.
To ignore these injustices not only condemns those working people suffering today to further misery and exploitation, but it is also degrading our collective societal humanity. The humanity of our own children is at risk as the next generation will grow up accepting genocide, climate breakdown, and concentration camps for immigrants, trans kids, and political activists - first as distant and dull, then as ordinary and expected, and finally, as moral and necessary. Our kids will learn to embrace fascism if we don’t actively destroy it today.
Though the increasingly oppressive hand of the fascist state can feel smothering, it’s important to avoid feelings of overwhelming helplessness. Remember that we have no other choice but to stand up against the fascists and believe that they can be defeated.
Despite the brutal conditions of his incarceration, George Jackson’s defiant optimism that the fascist US corporatist state would someday be overcome was evident:
“Our insistence on military action, defensive and retaliatory, has nothing to do with romanticism or precipitous idealistic fervor. We want to be effective. We want to live. Our history teaches us that the successful liberation struggles require an armed people, a whole people, actively participating in the struggle for their liberty!”
The successful liberation of ourselves and our children can thus only be accomplished through the armed, active participation in the struggle for the liberty of the children of Gaza, the immigrants disappeared into Salvadoran concentration camps, the students and political activists imprisoned for speaking out against injustice, the incarcerated workers living in penal slavery, and the hyper-exploited working class across the globe. If they aren’t free, neither are our children. And if we acquiesce and settle for trying to survive under the growing threats of late capitalism, authoritarianism, nuclear war, genocide, and climate apocalypse, the fascists will win, and their visions for the future will become our children’s reality.
