On Capitalism's Co-optation of Black Liberation: An Excerpt From Jared Ball's "The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power"

By Jared Ball

The following is an excerpt from Jared Ball’s upcoming book, "The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power” from Palgrave Pilot/Palgrave Macmillan (May 2020), republished from the author’s personal site.

The book will be released on May 25, 2020. Pre-order it here.

The Myth and Propaganda of Black Buying Power demonstrates:

• The claim that African America has roughly $1 trillion in “buying power” is popularly repeated mythology with no basis in sound economic logic or data. While the myth has a longer history it is today largely propelled by misreadings and poor (false) interpretations of Nielsen surveys and marketing reports produced by the Selig Center for Economic Growth at the Terry College of Business housed in the Bank of America Financial Center in Athens, GA. and where, as their website explains, their bias and purpose is in their founding mission. The center was, “Created to convey economic expertise to Georgia businesses and entrepreneurs, the Simon S. Selig, Jr. Center for Economic Growth is primarily responsible for conducting research on economic, demographic, and social issues related to Georgia’s current and future growth” (emphasis added).

• “Buying Power” is a marketing phrase that refers only to the “power” of consumers to purchase what are strictly available goods and is used as a measurement for corporations to better market their products. Most of the contemporary and popular understanding of the myth of buying power is derived from, and maintained by, a commercial Black press whose own commercial interests (attracting advertising dollars from the largest White corporations) supersede any journalistic mission to properly inform. “Power” here has nothing to do with actual economic strength and there is no collective $1+ trillion that Black people have and just foolishly spend ignorantly to their economic detriment.

• The myth of “buying power” functions as propaganda working to deny the reality of structural, intentional and necessary economic inequality required to maintain society as it is, one that benefits an increasingly decreasing number of people. To do this the myth functions to falsely blame the poor for being poor. Poverty, the myth encourages, is the result of the poor having little to no “financial literacy,” or as resulting from their bad spending habits, when in reality poverty is an intended result of an economic and social system.

Anyone at all familiar with any part of the Black public sphere will have heard one form or another of the following: “If we just used our money like other communities… If we didn’t spend so much on hair, cars and weed… we could make our dollar circulate like ‘they’ do and be far better off!” More specifically, those familiar with like-spaces would have heard reference to “the numbers,” that “Black America’s economy makes it among the most powerful national economies in the world…” and that “… we have a $1+ trillion that we just misuse…” From the most isolated and forcibly marginalized radical activist spaces to the most commonly populated spheres of Black public discourse the refrain is consistent and always suggests the same; that at least a solid portion of the Black oppressive political pie is comprised of a financially illiterate backwards mass incapable of correcting itself to take proper advantage of a freedom which waits just slightly beyond their feeble grasp. The suggestion that Black people lack “financial literacy” and, therefore, ignorantly refuse existing opportunities to advance economically obliterates the realities of capitalism as an economic and social system or conditions that system creates.

The idea is as simple as it is wrong but is masked by a surrounding powerful and heavily propagated mythology. The “buying power” of Black America, it is often repeated, now said to have crossed $1 trillion annually, is foolishly squandered but with some unity could be harnessed to overturn the centuries-old and eerily consistent economic deprivations suffered still. However, “buying power,” as a concept popularly held, is entirely misunderstood and has been by so many for so long that it continues to confound and inhibit conversations about economics in general, the specifics of the Black economic condition, and what might be done about it. And while all communities, all segments of all communities, businesses, municipalities, etc. have their “buying power” assessed it is only in relation to Black America that the concept becomes truly mythologized. Beyond that, the myth is politically weaponized with a very particular perniciousness and pervasiveness metastasized to the “conceptual original sin” of American racism (Downing and Husband 2005). The misunderstanding and misapplication of the concept of buying power, by those both friendly and hostile to the Black community, is unparalleled anywhere in political, economic, or media analyses.

Black America does not have an annual $1+ trillion that is collectively, by some choice, spent frivolously rather than harnessed to the betterment of the collective. Here we must develop upon the difference between power as economic strength as is conventionally understood and buying power, a concept developed by business, advertising, marketing, and government interests and where power is defined only as a group’s ability to enrich those interests. Genuine economic strength is measured in wealth, assets, land, stock, etc. and with a clarity in the differences between wealth and income, the latter being what one earns in exchange for labor, the former being income earned from the labor of others.

“Power” in the phrase “buying power” does not mean what many assume is a kind of genuine wealth, sovereignty, or autonomy. Once consigned to the phrase “buying power” that latter term loses all popularly (rightly)-held assumptions of its meaning and becomes something very different, almost dangerously different in terms of how that difference is carried to, and with what impact it has on, various audiences, and Black America specifically. In the form of its association with the word “buying” power means only the ability to spend what available money (or credit) is available on only the specific goods similarly made available for purchase. Having access to rims, fronts, hair or weed is one thing, while access to capital, stock, land, expanding business, etc. is quite another. Black people can buy marijuana just not the increasingly legal dispensaries emerging into a multi-billion dollar almost exclusively White industry (Ross 2018).

Buying power, spending power, or purchasing power are all interchangeable and applied to nearly every possibly grouped segment of society and are also applied to corporations and local, state and even national governments. But the concept, or more appropriately said, the marketing formula, is used with a particular pernicious effect, when it comes to Black America and, as such, deserves this special focus and attempt at dispelling. Nowhere else, for no one else, is buying power used as a bludgeon with such regularity and persistence within communities, both in terms of media attention and as a method of “political organization,” as is the case with Black America. For solutions to come it is true that those spaces where Black politics are most often discussed and where the futures of Black people are most seriously considered must rid themselves of this and other mythologies related to the economy of the United States and the role Black people play within. This would include challenging the prevailing wisdom, as it applies to this subject only, of past and present luminaries.

Bernie and Bloomberg Lost the Same Way

By J.E. Karla

It is ironic that both Michael Bloomberg and the “democratic socialists” pushing for Bernie Sanders made the same basic mistake in their failed presidential campaigns. In both cases they made the error of believing that subjective forces were the primary factor in political change -- a voluntarist neglect of objective conditions which they could never overcome. This is a consequence of their shared idealism, the philosophical foundation of all petit-bourgeois politics.

For the Sanders socialists, led by activists in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), their assumption was that grassroots mobilization tactics -- notably door-to-door canvassing -- would activate enough poor people, young people, and leftists to overwhelm the Democratic Party. They argued that a set of tactics expertly deployed would be enough to awaken a dormant objective force that could upend US politics.

They have instead falsified their own hypothesis, demonstrating that either no such force exists in the United States, or that it is not available to these political aims. Had they not blown off their own theoretical development they might have maintained a materialist analysis which would have kept them from wasting millions of dollars in donations and labor time in such a fruitless pursuit. 

They would have started with the premise that the primary objective factor in all historical change is the class struggle. From there they would have investigated the class character of the United States -- an imperialist settler state, the hegemonic power of global capitalism -- and recognized that the primary purpose of its political system is the continued suppression of colonized people inside and outside its borders. They could then have seen that there is not a single aspect of the elected machinery of the US state that is governed by simple majority rule -- that from the Iowa Caucuses to the Democratic National Convention to the Electoral College to the US Senate and gerrymandered House of Representatives, to unelected and lifetime-appointed judges, conservative minorities have the structural advantage over more progressive majorities. 

They would know that internal colonies within the US are the only domestic forces with an interest in fighting the system of value extraction that underwrites the ruling class, the middle class, and the labor aristocratic “working class.” They could then empirically verify that not only do large majorities of these colonized communities refuse to participate in the electoral system obviously rigged against them, but that there are centuries of well-established efforts to exclude them from the system -- mass incarceration, reduced polling places, privately-funded political campaigns which exclude candidates drawn from these communities, even “common sense” obstacles such as voter registration, exclusion of immigrants and youth from the electorate, and artificially-limited voting locations and periods. 

These communities also know that every time they do start to gather momentum towards mass enfranchisement their leaders are harrassed, intimidated, and killed by the very FBI liberals have learned to love in the era of Trump. Knocking on their doors and politely asking them to ignore all of this is actually insulting, exposing a glaring blind spot in the Sanders movement. 

It is true that objective historical forces created problems for the status quo, too. The dismantling of liberalism after the last crisis has left young people, in particular, declassed and open to social democracy. It promises to restore their former imperialist subsidy now being hoarded by the bourgeois elite. But that elite has a class fraction within it dedicated to cultural production, and this cultural production fraction has an allied element of the petit bourgeoisie -- the liberal political class, with the press at their vanguard. They objectively control the Democratic Party, and had Bernie kept winning, had moderate candidates kept splitting the vote, etc. some other tack would have been taken to deny Bernie the nomination -- they openly discussed many of them on cable news and on Op-Ed pages. 

There was never any chance that Bernie could win, and there isn’t any now. 

The silver lining comes from Bloomberg’s version of this error. Not only did Mike Bloomberg lose, which is wonderful in its own right, but his error stems from a failure to appreciate the bottom-line objective factor in politics: the masses make history. He believed that they were instead a passive substance that he could shape to his own ends with the application of money and professional political communications. But even in their inchoate condition, even with the distortions laid upon their subjective capacities through generations of bourgeois political violence, those hundreds of millions of expertly placed dollars could not budge them whatsoever in the direction of such an obvious fiend. 

Bloomberg’s voluntarism reflected his class position, just as DSA’s did theirs -- the bourgeois billions versus the petit bourgeois begging. The way forward out of this mess is a refusal to play objectively rigged games and to build institutions of mass political power that fundamentally reject ruling-class systems, elections, NGOs, and thus social democracy. Those are the subjective forces that have the potential to seize upon the objective advances of the class struggle and guaranteed crises of capitalist contradiction to come, especially if they are built to fight the attacks that will come early in their development. 

It remains to be seen how many of Bernie’s true believers are actually committed to revolution, and how many just wanted a few new benefits extracted from the very masses they tried -- and failed -- to speak for.  

Revolutionary Struggle With the New Afrikan Black Panther Party: An Interview with Kevin “Rashid” Johnson

Kevin “Rashid” Johnson is Minister of Defense for the New Afrikan Black Panther Party. He carries out his duties while imprisoned in the US. This interview originally appeared on his website.

What can we learn from the history of revolutionary struggles about the transition from bourgeois forms of security and policing to proletarian forms of state security

As a class question, we must of course begin with distinguishing between bourgeois and proletarian forms of state power. The state is nothing but the organization of the armed force of one class over its rival class(es). The bourgeoisie, as a tiny oppressor class that exploits or marginalizes all other classes to its own benefit, organizes its institutions of state power (military, police, prisons), that exist outside and above all other classes, to enforce and preserve its dominance and rule over everyone else.

To seize and exercise state power the proletariat, as the social majority, must in turn arm itself and its class allies to enforce its own power over the bourgeoisie.

Which brings us to the substance of your question concerning what lessons we’ve learned about transitioning from bourgeois state power (the capitalist state) to proletarian state power (the socialist state). In any event it won’t be and has never been a ‘peaceful’ process, simply because the bourgeoisie will never relinquish its power without the most violent resistance; which is the very reason it maintains its armed forces.

Well, we’ve had both urban and rural models of such transition. Russia was the first urban model (although subsumed in a rural society), China was the first successful rural one. There were many other attempts, but few succeeded however.

What proved necessary in the successful cases is foremost there must be a vanguard party organized under the ideological and political line of the revolutionary proletariat. This party must work to educate and organize the masses to recognize the need, and actively take up the struggle, to seize power from the bourgeoisie.

In the urban context, (especially in the advanced capitalist countries), where the bourgeoisie’s armed forces are entrenched, this requires a protracted political approach focused on educating and organizing the masses and creating institutions of dual and alternative collective political and economic power, with armed struggle prepared for but projected into the distant future (likely as civil war).

But in the rural context, where revolutionary forces have room to maneuver because the bourgeoisie’s armed forces are much less concentrated, the masses may resort to relatively immediate armed struggle, with political work operating to keep the masses and the armed forces educated and organized, and revolutionary politics in command of the armed struggle. This was Mao Tse-tung’s contribution to revolutionary armed struggle called Peoples War, and with its mobile armed mass base areas these forces operated like a state on wheels.

But the advances of technology since the 1970s, have seen conditions change that require a reassessing of the earlier methods of revolutionary struggle and transition of state power.

The rural populations (peasantry) of the underdeveloped world who are best suited to Mao’s PW model have been shrinking, as agrobusiness has been steadily pushing them off the land and into urban areas as permanent unemployables and lumpen proletarians, where they must survive by any means possible. Then too, with their traditional role as manual laborers being increasingly replaced by machines, the proletariat in the capitalist countries in also shrinking, and they too are pushed into a mass of permanent unemployables and lumpen.

So the only class, or sub-class, whose numbers are on the rise today are this bulk of marginalized largely urban people who don’t factor into the traditional roles of past struggles, with one exception. That being the struggle waged here in US the urban centers under the leadership of the original BPP, which designated itself a lumpen vanguard party. As such the BPP brought something entirely new and decisive to the table.

As the BPP’s theoretical leader, Huey P. Newton explained this changing social economic reality and accurately predicted their present development in his 1970 theory of “Revolutionary Intercommunalism,” and met the challenge of creating the type of party formation suited to meeting the new challenges of educating and organizing this growing social force for revolutionary struggle.

The BPP was able to create a model for developing institutions of dual and alternative political and economic power through its Serve the People programs creating the basis for transition of power to the marginalized under a revolutionary intercommunalist model instead of the traditional national socialist model.

The challenge in this situation where such work has been met with the most violent repression by bourgeois state forces is developing effective security forces right under their noses to protect the masses and their programs.

This is the work we in the NABPP are building on and seek to advance.

What has your experience of being a hyper-surveilled, incarcerated revolutionary taught you that is broadly applicable to the secure practice of revolutionaries in general

For one, the masses are our best and only real protection against repression. So in all the work we do, we must rely on and actively seek and win the support of the people, which is the basic Maoist method of doing political work and is what the imperialists themselves admit makes it the most effective and feared model of revolutionary struggle.

I’ve also learned that a lot of very important work fails because many people just don’t attempt it, due to policing themselves. Many fear pig repression and think any work that is effective must necessarily be done hidden out of sight, fearing as they do being seen by the state.

Essentially, they don’t know how to do aboveground work, and don’t recognize the importance of it, especially in these advanced countries. They think for work to be ‘revolutionary’ it must be underground and focused on armed struggle. And even those who do political work they stifle it by using an underground style which largely isolates them from the masses.

I think Huey P. Newton summed it up aptly when he stated,

“Many would-be revolutionaries work under the fallacious notion that the vanguard party should be a secret organization which the power structure knows nothing about, and that the masses know nothing about except for occasional letters that come their homes in the night. Underground parties cannot distribute leaflets announcing an underground meeting. Such contradictions and inconsistencies are not recognized by these so-called revolutionaries. They are, in fact, afraid of the very danger they are asking the people to confront. These so-called revolutionaries want the people to say what they themselves are afraid to say, to do what they themselves are afraid to do. That kind of revolutionary is a coward and a hypocrite. A true revolutionary realizes if he is sincere, death is imminent. The things he is saying and doing are extremely dangerous. Without this … realization, it is pointless to proceed as a revolutionary.

“If these impostors would investigate the history of revolution they would see that the vanguard group always starts out aboveground and is driven underground by the oppressor.”

Do you see it as a vulnerability to have our leaders organizing from prison? Some comrades refuse to engage in party/mass organizational work if it is conducted from prison. Don’t we sacrifice our best leadership if we don’t work directly/organizationally with our incarcerated leaders?

It can be a disadvantage, because it slows down development. But it is also an advantage, and our party is an example of this.

Historically, most revolutionary parties began on the outside and ended up targeted with repression, which included imprisonment of its cadre and supporters — fear of repression served as a deterrent for many would be revolutionaries as it was intended to do. For the NABPP, we developed in exactly the opposite direction. We began inside the prisons and are now transitioning to the outside.

Our cadre are getting out and hitting the ground going directly to work for the people. Look at our HQ in Newark, NJ where our chairman got out and has in less than a year led in developing a number of community STP programs, organizing mass protests that have shut down a prison construction project, given publicity and support to the people facing a crisis with lead in the water systems, etc.

So unlike the hothouse flower we’re already used to and steeled against state repression. The threat of prison doesn’t shake us — we’ve been there and done that. Like Huey asked, “Prison Where is Thy Victory?,” and John Sinclair of the original White Panther Party said, “prison ain’t shit to be afraid of.” And it was Malcolm X who was himself transformed into the great leader that he was inside prison who called prisons, “universities of the oppressed.”

All of my own work has been done from behind prison walls, and I have the state’s own reports and reactions of kicking me out of multiple state prison systems to attest to the value of what I’ve been able to contribute.

So, I think that, yes, some of our best leadership is definitely behind these walls.

Consider too that some of our best leaders developed inside prison: Malcolm X, George Jackson and Atiba Shanna aka James Yaki Sayles, for example. Which is something our party has factored into its strategy from day one. We’ve recognized the prisons to be potential revolutionary universities. Since our founding the NABPP has actively advanced the strategy of “transforming the prisons into schools of liberation,” of converting the lumpen (criminal) mentality into a revolutionary mentality.

In fact we can’t overlook remolding prisoners, because if we don’t, the enemy will appeal to and use them as forces of reaction against the revolutionary forces. Lenin, Mao and especially Frantz Fanon and the original BPP recognized this. What’s more, with the opposition’s ongoing strategy of mass imprisonment, massive numbers of our people have been swept up in these modern concentration camps. We must reach them with the politics of liberation. They are in fact a large part of our Party’s mass base.

How do you vet leadership and cadre? On what criteria to you make your judgement? Organizationally and personally.

Ideally this is determined by their ideological and political development and practice. But we expect and give space for people to make mistakes, although we also expect them to improve as they go. So we must be patient but also observe closely the correlation between their stated principles and their practice.

How should underground work relate to aboveground? How can the masses identify with the work of underground revolutionaries without compromising the security of the clandestine network?

Underground work serves different purposes and needs. One of which being to protect political cadre and train cadre to replace the fallen. Also to create a protective network and infrastructure for political workers forced to go to ground in the face of violent repression.

In whatever case the aboveground forces should actively educate the masses on the role, function and purpose of underground actions while ensuring that the clandestine forces consist of the most disciplined and politically grounded people. It must also be understood that these elements do not replace the masses in their role as the forces that must seize power.

In your assessment, has the balance of forces between the police and the potential of revolutionary mass action fundamentally shifted over the past 5 decades? How does this affect our ability to form organs of political power among the masses?

What shifted, but I don’t think is generally recognized by many, is the PW theory is today too simplistic. Today we must organize and create base areas under the nose of the bourgeoisie with the growing concentration of marginalized people in impoverished urban settings. As I noted earlier the traditional mass base of rural peasants who feature in the PW strategy is shrinking. And Maoist forces in rural areas have been pushed to the furthest margins of those areas unable to expand.

There is little opportunity for New Democratic revolution in these countries, which calls for alliances with the native national bourgeoisie who are now being rendered obsolete by the rise and normalization of neocolonialism and virtual elimination of nation states.

***

BOOKS BY KEVIN “RASHID” JOHNSON:

PANTHER VISION

Panther Vision: Essential Party Writings and Art of Kevin "Rashid" Johnson, Minister of Defense New Afrikan Black Panther Party

"The original Black Panther Party for Self-Defense challenged the prevailing socio-political and economic relationship between the government and Black people. The New Afrikan Black Panther Party is building on that foundation, and Rashid’s writings embrace the need for a national organization in place of that which had been destroyed by COINTELPRO and racist repression. We can only hope this book reaches many, and serves to herald and light a means for the next generation of revolutionaries to succeed in building a mass and popular movement.” --Jalil Muntaqim, Prisoner of War

Available from leftwingbooks.net, AK Press, and Amazon

DEFYING THE TOMB

Defying the Tomb: Selected Prison Writings and Art of Kevin 'Rashid' Johnson
With Russell 'Maroon' Shoats, Tom Big Warrior & Sundiata Acoli

PLEASE NOTE THAT DEFYING THE TOMB IS NOW AVAILABLE FROM AMAZON AS AN EBOOK

"Your mission (should you decide to accept it) is to buy multiple copies of this book, read it carefully, and then get it into the hands of as many prisoners as possible. I am aware of no prisoner-written book more important than this one, at least not since George Jackson s Blood In My Eye. Revolutionaries and those considering the path of progress will find Kevin Rashid Johnson s Defying The Tomb an important contribution to their political development." --Ed Mead, former political prisoner, George Jackson Brigade

Available from leftwingbooks.net, AK Press, and Amazon

WRITE RASHID

Rashid has been transferred out of state yet again, this time to Indiana. He is currently being held at:

Kevin Johnson
D.O.C. No. 264847
G-20-2C
Pendleton Correctional Facility
4490 W. Reformatory Road
Pendleton, IN 46064

The Queer Complex: Being Black and Queer in Baltimore City

By Aliyah L. Moye

“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never allow us to bring about genuine change.”

- Audre Lorde 

Mount Vernon is an eclectic area. It is a cultural hub to some, filled with cultural entertainment, culinary diversity, and local businesses, and to others, a National Historic Landmark district - thanks to the Washington Monument. Mount Vernon stands out from other communities in Baltimore, with its steady signs of economic vitality, making it a popular destination for local Baltimoreans and tourists alike. Looking at Mount Vernon today, it is easy to be remiss that this location once hosted a large LGBTQ+ community that was locally known as, the ‘gay’ neighborhood in Baltimore City. This article, unlike most articles about Mount Vernon, presents a unique perspective about being Black and queer in a predominantly Black metropolis while feeling like an ‘outsider within’ among the LGBTQ+ in the Mount Vernon community.

Mount Vernon, during the late 60’s and 70’s, was considered as a safe space for the LGBTQ+ community in Baltimore as it became associated with one of the most pivotal pioneering moments. The 1955 Pepper Hill Club raid by police is considered the largest raid ever in Baltimore, in which 162 men and women arrested on charges of ‘disorderly conduct’ or sexually deviant norms. During this time, there were other gay friendly neighborhoods like: Charles Village, Waverly, and Abell. However, Mount Vernon still remains as the premiere gay neighborhood thanks to its deeply rooted queer heritage.

The Periphery: Black and Queer

Despite Mount Vernon’s rich queer heritage, racism was rampant. Similar to other communities in America, racism plays a role between persons of color and Whites in the LGBTQ+ community. Patricia Hill Collins explains that even within the queer framework there exists a two-ness, separating persons into groups due to their shared experiences. Simply stating, the experiences for one group is not shared by the other group, therefore the narrative of one person cannot serve as the same narrative for another, despite both parties the same sexual orientation. A queer Black woman’s experience will be different from a queer White woman because of the racial benefits of being White in all spaces. 

Queer persons of color are not quick to agree with the “safe space” claims that Mt. Vernon is locally known as. Stories about acts of discrimination against men and women of color in the LGBTQ+ community being ignored speaks to the White, gay centeredness which represents mainstream gay culture, therefore diminishing the Black queer standpoint. Jared Sexton would describe this as people-of-color-blindness, or an unwillingness to see people of color. Baltimore resident Valentino Martinez (not real name) said: “...as a Black Queer male, Mount Vernon does lack now and then on their inclusivity when it comes to Black and Brown people. I don’t talk about it much because I have never felt slighted within the community, but I do have some friends that prefer to go out in Seton Hill because there is a greater community of LGBTQ+ people of color out there,” describing Collins’ outsider-within concept as it relates to being Black and queer. “I will say that I do think that Mount Vernon does lean more towards servicing white gays more than gays of color. But I hate to say that I am not surprised because that happens most places. Most places care more about people’s safety and overall experiences if their white or only when they become a white issue,” Valentino continues.

Seton Hill is a predominantly Black community located in central Baltimore that is historically known as Baltimore’s French Quarter. This lack of inclusivity felt in traditionally White gay spaces has led The Center for Black Equity to create Baltimore Black Pride in Seton Hill. Kevin Clemens, the chair of Baltimore Black Pride, believed this move to Seton Hill was necessary. Clemens explains, “There were issues affecting our community as a whole, but there were some things that were specific to the African-American community. I believe that we as African Americans bring such a wealth of talent, knowledge, and leadership but we spend so much of it just doing it without being recognized or acknowledged. Black Pride is the vehicle for that acknowledgment to happen.” The storyline of Blacks creating their own space due to being pushed out is an all-too-common narrative given the United States’ violent racial past.

Mount Vernon is a thriving community bustling with businesses, culinary diversity, cultural entertainment, and historic sites. Due to its high economic capital, it has become a popular destination for tourists and Baltimoreans alike. Nevertheless, most people would be in disbelief that this area once catered to a large LGBTQ+ community. The focus of this article was to shed light on Mount Vernon’s LGBTQ+ community in a way that it typically has not been talked about previously. I felt it necessary to talk about the lived experiences of the Black queer community within a Black metropolis such as Baltimore. I found that even though Mount Vernon is regarded as a “safe haven” or known as a gay mecca, that is not the case when it comes to the queer people of color. Black queers felt that Mount Vernon catered to White gays and lacked inclusivity. Racism was prominent, like in most other communities in the U.S., in Mount Vernon within the LGBTQ+ community leaving queers of color feeling like “outsiders within.” My hope was to bring attention to this topic and shine light on an important issue so that there could be an opportunity to bring about change.

Works Cited

Case, W. (2017). Baltimore's LGBT hub expands beyond Mount Vernon amid

discussions of inclusion, competition. Baltimore Sun. Retrieved from: https://www.baltimoresun.com/features/bs-ae-lgbt-neighborhoods-20170417-story.html

Evelyn B. Higginbotham. (1993). Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church (1880-1920). Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press.

Hunter, M.A. and Robinson, Z.F. (2018). Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American.

Oakland, California. University Press. ISBN: 9780520292833

Kiesling, E. The Missing Colors of the Rainbow: Black Queer Resistance, European

journal of American studies [Online], 11-3 | 2017, document 13, Online since 26 January 2017, connection on 10 December 2019. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11830 ; DOI : 10.4000/ejas.11830

Moll, A. (2016). Mount Vernon keeps changing, but can it remain the gayborhood?

Baltimore Sun. Retrieved from: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.baltimoresun.com/citypaper/bcp-07202016-feature-the-drinkery-20160719-story.html%3foutputType=amp

Rector, K. (2013). Welcome to Gay Matters. Baltimore Sun. Retrieved from:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.baltimoresun.com/features/bs-gm-welcome-to-gay-matters-story.html%3foutputType=amp

Seton Hill Demographics. Niche. Retrieved from:

https://www.niche.com/places-to-live/n/seton-hill-baltimore-md/residents/

(2012). Baltimore Black Pride: 10 Years of History. GayTravel. Retrieved from:

https://www.gaytravel.com/gay-blog/baltimore-black-pride-10-years-of-history/

230+ Years of White Supremacy: “Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents”

By Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

The myth of US American “greatness” is not only a right-wing narrative. Liberals too embrace the concept that the nation is fundamentally good; certainly, they insist, our worst days are behind us and we can all be grateful for the progress we’ve made. Leading us on this shining path have been enlightened figures like Lincoln, FDR, Kennedy, Carter and Obama, all of whom have sought to fulfill the promise of the wise “Founding Fathers” and their brilliant (even sacred) Constitution.

In her recently released book, “Prejudential: Black America & the Presidents,” writer and activist Margaret Kimberley skewers this fantasy. She takes on every president from Washington to Trump, with a chapter devoted to each. With the accessible, no-nonsense but pointed style she employs in her weekly Freedom Rider column on Black Agenda Report, Kimberley summarizes the words and deeds of the 44 men who have held the office. The facts are damning.

I consider myself a history buff and have read many books and articles about US history in particular, but there wasn’t a single chapter that didn’t contain surprises for me, in some cases big ones. Some of the things that were new to me:

• George Washington not only kept his slaves while president, but rotated them between Philadelphia (the capital then) and his plantation in Virginia every six months, in order to skirt a Pennsylvania law that allowed slaves to sue for freedom after more than six months in the state.

• Eleven presidents following Washington owned slaves, including seven who held onto them while in office. That’s over a quarter of the total!

• Lincoln’s vision for blacks was to expel them from the US and set them up in a colony in Africa or Central America. He was considering such a proposal just days before his death.

• In 1901, a black man named Benjamin Parker physically prevented President McKinley’s assassin from firing a third shot. Parker was a waiter at the World’s Fair where McKinley was appearing, and was standing in line to meet him when the attack happened. Kimberley tells us: “According to one story, at least one Secret Service agent was busy looking at the black man instead of observing the crowd as he should have been doing.”

• Theodore Roosevelt betrayed the Twenty-Fifth Infantry Regiment, which was made up entirely of black soldiers. In July 1906, the regiment was assigned to stay in Brownsville, Texas, but the local white population harassed them from day one, and falsely accused them of committing murders. In response, Roosevelt announced that the entire regiment—all 167 members—were “dishonorably discharged, deprived of pensions, and prevented from gaining federal employment or reinstatement to the army,” but put off the announcement until the day after the 1906 election (for which he actively sought black votes during the campaign). This offense was consistent for someone who believed that blacks were, in his own words, “altogether inferior to whites.”

• Democrat Woodrow Wilson instituted segregation in federal employment. He also didn’t lift a finger to prevent a rash of white mob violence against blacks in multiple states during the “Red Summer” of 1917, during which over a hundred blacks were murdered and thousands made homeless.

• While working as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under President Wilson, future president Franklin Delano Roosevelt “personally ordered separate restrooms” for blacks and whites in federal facilities.

• Truman used the n-word his entire life and opposed the integration of businesses and public accomodations.

• Kennedy tried to stop the March on Washington in 1963, the event where MLK gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. His attitude towards civil rights activists was that they should “cool off.”

• On the subject of ending segregation, Carter said: “I see nothing wrong with ethnic purity being maintained. I would not force racial integration of a neighborhood by government action.”

Kimberley’s volume is packed with such information. A single reading is not enough to absorb it all. As a compilation of history, it belongs on the shelf next to the works of Howard Zinn and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. It should be required reading in every school.

On the topic of our collective historical amnesia on these topics, Kimberley writes:

“Why are these facts not widely discussed today? The United States still basks in the glory of a romanticized past. If white people had the right at the time to kill Indians and take their lands and turn those lands over to the plantation economy, then they probably harbor related feelings of entitlement today. If the institutions of slavery and its aftermath aren’t examined, then objective truths like the inordinate number of blacks being killed by police won’t be questioned, either. If people like [Zachary] Taylor could steal half of Mexico and be labeled heroic, then modern-day presidents can invade nations, change regimes, and kill with mechanized drones and be considered heroic, too. Today’s propaganda differs little from that of Taylor’s era. In fact, it relies on it. If the past is examined through a microscope, then the present must be as well, and that would create cognitive dissonance.”

But the (blue-eyed) devil is not just in the details. Kimberley’s book also paints a picture of the overall sweep of events over the last 230+ years.

After the famous Founding Fathers, the presidents of the 1800s are little known, and even unheard of, except for Lincoln and maybe Grant. But as Kimberley demonstrates, every single one—regardless of party—actively upheld white supremacy in the US. Before the civil war, all of them were in favor of keeping the institution of slavery. Afterwards, they were united in their efforts to keep blacks powerless through disenfranchisement, segregation, and lynching.

Speaking about conditions at the turn of the century, Kimberley says:

“The Democrats were the party of open and proud white supremacy, and Republicans were considered the only reasonable option in the face of lynch law terrorism. This pattern of promising support that never materialized would recur into the twenty-first century. The effort to pass an anti-lynching bill foundered and was equally unsuccessful for the next five decades. Presidents may have sought black votes, but the support of black voters never mattered very much when action was needed to protect their lives” [my emphasis].

If some progress can be said to have been made by the Civil Rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s, it must also be admitted that, starting no later than Reagan, a strong counter-offensive gained traction against it, imposed top-down from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Clinton’s contribution was “ending welfare as we know it” and his “crime bill,” which were both anti-black and brown, and which could only have been passed in a Democrat-controlled Congress by a Democrat president. He and his “two for the price of one” wife have never been properly condemned for these (and other) abhorrent policies. Both Bushes, before and after Bill, were racists, despite W’s “diverse” cabinet. For being the first black president, Obama had to put in special effort to prove he wasn’t going to rock the white boat; at his speech on the anniversary of the March on Washington, he “gave a very good standup impression of a racist white man,” to quote the Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford. And not for nothing did the Black Lives Matter movement flare up under his watch.

On the subject of Obama, Kimberley explained:

“The rules for being a ‘serious’ candidate go something like this: Don’t make rich people angry. Don’t make white people angry. Don’t appear to help black people in any way, because that gets white people angrier than just about anything else. Obama knew this, but he was also instinctively a conservative man, which he said to anyone who was really paying attention. During his first campaign in 2008 he spoke lovingly of Ronald Reagan as a ‘transformative’ public figure.”

“Transformative” is one way to describe “the Gipper.” Another would be as an unrepentant bigot.

As Kimberley illustrates, the history of the US is very much the history of white supremacy, pivoting on slavery and its aftermath. Every president from the beginning has either been a southerner defending southern racism or a northerner afraid to challenge it for fear of losing southern votes (all the while denying northern racism). We have not escaped this yet. Thanks to gerrymandering and widespread voter suppression, this country is still being run by a minority made up of white racists from the South, along with their unholy allies in the West and Midwest. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013—under the watch of a president who was a lawyer of constitutional law—has not received the attention or remedy it deserves.

Trump is the last president that Kimberley describes and she ends with this:

“Trump is no anomaly. He appears at the recent end of a continuum that began with a series of slaveholders… While Trump’s demeanor makes him seem like an outlier, history proves that he is not.”

After reading this book and reflecting on the tenacity of institutional and cultural racism in the United States, one might be tempted to say, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” One could also draw inspiration from the movements and figures who have been righteously resisting this whole time. They are the real heroes in our history: the ones in the streets, churches and squares—certainly not any of the men who have ruled from the White House.

This review was originally published on the author's blog.

“Trump’s America” IS America

It's important for us to understand that "Trump’s America" IS America. There is no differentiating. As a matter of fact, based on the country's history, Trump is about as "American" as it gets - greedy, racist, classist, misogynistic, corrupt, dominating, controlling, sadistic, elitist.

America is a settler-colonial nation that was built on the backs of Native genocide and African enslavement, continuing into modern times through intricate systems of institutional white supremacy. The founders of this country were elitists and aristocrats who used their wealth to dominate others while arranging a system of immense privilege for those like them. It is a capitalist country that has been built from the toil of the working majority for centuries - masses of people who have received very little (and continue to receive very little) in return. It is an imperialist country that has bombed, colonized, and obstructed democratic movements throughout the global south and middle east for over a century. It is a misogynistic country that waited 150 years before allowing women to vote, confined women to second-class status after, and continues to breed patriarchal values that are dangerous to working women in everyday life.

"Trump's America" IS America.

Trump has continued to oversee the corporate coup started under Reagan and carried forward under the Bushs, Clinton, and Obama - a coup that is merely an inevitable late stage of capitalism, whereas wealth and power have been concentrated into a fusion of corporate governance and creeping fascism.

Trump has continued America's illegal and immoral wars abroad, same as his predecessors.

Trump has continued "starving the beast," following the neoliberal blueprint of the last 40 years by siphoning public funds into private hands.

Trump has continued the mass deportation policies implemented under Obama.

Trump has continued the attack on civil liberties started under W. Bush in the wake of 9/11.

Trump, in his role as president, carries the torch of draconian, racist, classist criminal justice policies created under Reagan.

Trump carries the torch of mass incarceration and austerity policies created under Clinton.

Trump has continued serving Wall St. and his pals/donors in the profit industries, like all of his modern predecessors.

Trump, like all presidents before, SERVES CAPITAL - not people.

He may not be the polished statesman that we've become accustomed to - those who exhibit "stability" and "civility" while acting as the figureheads of systemic brutality - but make no mistake: Trump is as American as it gets. However, "America" is largely a myth in itself, something fed to the masses from above by the wealthy and powerful few who have always demanded our loyalty despite their everyday crimes against us and our class counterparts the world over. Most Americans are despised by those who run the country from their pedestals, those who benefit from its brutality, those who gouge us at every turn, those protected by an ever-thinning, reactionary, "middle-class" buffer.

To rid ourselves of Trump and all he represents, we must rid ourselves of "America" as we know it - the myth, the systems it facilitates (capitalism/imperialism, colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy), and all of the severity that comes with it. This is a hard truth to accept, especially since it goes against everything we have been conditioned to believe. But it is a truth that must be understood and dealt with if we are to ever win a just world.

All power to the people.

Against Akon's New Liberia: Class Remains The Key Link

By Christopher Winston

This was originally published at Hood Communist.

There has been much confusion regarding the character, purpose, and benefit of projects in Africa such as those launched by multimillionaire musical artist Akon in Senegal. This project is described by the New York Post as being “run entirely on renewable energy” and Akon himself is quoted as saying: “With the AKoin we are building cities, the first one being in Senegal…we’re securing the land and closing out all the legislation papers for the city. We want to make it a free zone and cryptocurrency-driven as a test market.” Essentially, this is a capitalist project. This is an old strategy, one of wealthy diasporic Africans (Akon himself is of Senegalese extraction) returning to the motherland, buying up property, and trying to construct little Wakandas. The recolonization movement in the early 1800s (backed by wealthy colonizers in the UK and US) led to the formation of two “independent states” on the West Coast of Africa, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. These countries were not independent, they can be seen as the first neocolonial test cases. In the case of Sierra Leone, initially populated by diasporic Africans who self-liberated from slavery during the American “Revolution”, it remained a colony of Britain until 1961. Both countries lacked native control over their natural resources. Liberian rubber was the property of Yankee corporations, diamonds from Sierra Leone remained in the grasping hands of the British. One of the main reasons that the Americans sought to destroy the movement led by Marcus Garvey was that it promoted, encouraged, and developed strategies for African economic self-determination in the US, in the Caribbean and Latin America, and in the Continent. The imperialists simply could not allow this, and it is to the eternal demerit of Communists that we failed to develop mass links and a United Front with this movement which captured the energy and support of tens of millions of Africans, instead of working for its destruction because we saw it as an ideological and political rival. 

Back to the Akon City project. Akon’s goals, I believe, are not willfully malicious. I begrudge no African that thinks they are genuinely helping their people. However, this project is a capitalist project and thus is doomed to either fail or set up a wealthy utopia for Europeans and Africans with the means to play around with cryptocurrency and such. In essence, Akon is hamstrung by his class position and class stand. Rich Africans returning to the Continent and seeking to set up what are essentially little Liberias and little Wakandas is a strategy that does not take into account the presence and insidious machinations of neocolonialism and bureaucratic capitalism (compradorism). Africa is poor not because the people there are bad capitalists. Africa is poor because of capitalism and imperialism and its lackeys on the Continent who are installed to ensure the flow of resources to the old colonial metropoles. Akon City is closed to the tens of thousands of Congolese youth who mine the coltan which will fuel Akon’s cryptocurrency. Akon City is closed to the hundreds of thousands in Dakar who live in shipping containers and do not have running water, or electricity. Akon City is as real to the majority of Africans as Wakanda is. For all Africans to enjoy a high standard of living it is essential to replace capitalist pipe dreams with Pan-African socialist reality. Africans, working-class and peasant Africans, must have control of our wealth and our Continent. Neocolonialism and imperialism must be buried with armed force. As long as colonizers continue to loot our continent we will see no peace, millions of us will continue to die no matter how many glass and concrete monstrosities Akon constructs. Look to Liberia and Sierra Leone as negative examples, and study the works of those such as Kwame Nkrumah, Malcolm X, and other Pan-African revolutionaries. Apply them to our day to day reality, analyze and criticize everything, and seize the time. Take class as the key link.

MLK and the Black Misleadership Class

By Glen Ford

Originally published at Black Agenda Report.

Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday is the greatest sheer spectacle of hypocrisy and historical duplicity of the year, as Black misleaders take center stage to claim his mandate and mission on behalf of a corporate party.

The birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is commemorated each year at thousands of events in literally every U.S. city, yet the martyred human rights leader’s political philosophy is totally absent from the agenda of today’s Black Misleadership Class, a grasping cabal of hustlers and opportunists that have grown fat and infinitely corrupt through their collaboration with “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” Their “freedom train” was the Democratic Party, the half of the corporate electoral duopoly that allowed colored folks to ride as first class passengers – as long as they didn’t question the schedule or the destination. The budding Black misleaders hopped on board the Democratic Party express to the boardrooms of corporate power at about the same time that Dr. King was making his definitive break with the evil “triplets’” infernal machinery, including both corporate parties.  

In his April 4, 1967 “Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break Silence” speech  at New York City’s Riverside Church, Dr. King burned his bridges with the nation’s top Democrat, despite President Lyndon Johnson’s indispensable role in pushing civil and voting rights and anti-poverty bills through Congress and championing an affirmative action rationale that -- as spelled out in his 1965 speech  at Howard University -- was a principled endorsement of reparations for crimes committed against Black people by the U.S. society and State. Johnson went farther than any previous U.S. president in acknowledging Black American citizenship rights and grievances, even as the Republican half of the electoral duopoly was preparing to assume the role of White Man’s Party through Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy.” Yet, Dr. King, a proponent of peace and democratic socialism, understood that the way to the “Promised Land” was not through Black collaboration with the evils inherent in capitalism and its ceaseless, predatory wars. “I have come to believe that we are integrating into a burning house,” King told his friend , Harry Belafonte. 

By 1967, the War in Vietnam was consuming the promises of Johnson’s Great Society. America was undeniably the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” King declared. The U.S. had already killed a million Vietnamese, “mostly children,” but it was also a war on America’s poor. “I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube,” King told the crowd at Riverside. “So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.” That meant breaking with the Democrats and their president. More importantly, in his Riverside speech Dr. King framed the Vietnamese as engaged in a righteous struggle to complete their long quest for sovereignty and independence. King broke with imperialism, the consummate expression of the all three “triple evils.” So they killed him, the next year.

The National Security State, the protector of the capitalist order, to which both parties are beholden, then proceeded to crush the Black movement to the left of Dr. King – most fiercely in the Gestapo-like assault on the self-determinationist and staunchly anti-imperialist Black Panther Party in the bloody year of 1969. 

By 1970, the Black Radical Tradition lay mostly in the graveyard, and the way was clear for the Black Misleadership Class to monopolize Black politics on behalf of their corporate overseers. The first act of the first big city Black mayor, Cleveland’s Carl Stokes, was to put the police under the command of a Black retired general, whose first act was to issue the cops flesh- and bone-destroying hollow point bullets. 

The rise of the almost entirely Democrat-allied Black Misleadership Class is perfectly coterminous with construction of the Black Mass Incarceration State. The “New Jim Crow” was a bipartisan project, initiated under Democrat Lyndon Johnson’s Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which vastly increased the manpower and funding for local police departments, and was put on hyper-drive by Republican President Richard Nixon’s “War on Drugs” – a War on Blacks that never ended but was re-declared by Republican President Reagan and reinforced by Democrat President Bill Clinton. At the local level, the exponential growth of the Mass Black Incarceration regime was administered by increasingly Black city governments, which oversaw and processed the deportation of millions of Black men, women and children to the Prison Gulag. Virtually all of these Black operatives of race and class oppression are Democrats. And all of them are celebrating their own political ascension as the wondrous outcome of Dr. King’s “dream.”

By 2014, 80 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus was voting to continue the Pentagon 1033 program that funnels billions of dollars in military weapons and gear to local police departments. Four years later, 75 percent of the Black Caucus voted to make police a “protected class” and assault on cops a federal crime. (See BAR, “Black Caucus Sells Out Its Constituents Again – to the Cops.”)

Although the Black misleaders were quick to join the domestic war on the Black poor, African American public opinion remained war-averse, skeptical of U.S. motives on foreign shores. In 2003, only four Black members of Congress backed George Bush’s invasion of Iraq. But the advent of the Black Democratic President -- a misleader par excellence – gave much of the Black Caucus a free pass to play warmonger. Half of the Blacks in Congress voted to continue the bombing and regime change in Libya, an African nation, in the summer of 2011. None of the Caucus has raised serious objections to the U.S.-aided slaughter of more than six million Congolese under Presidents Clinton (Dem.), Bush (Rep.), Obama (Dem.), and Trump (Rep.). The American military occupation of much of the African continent through AFRICOM is a non-issue among the Black misleaders. 

RUSSIA!!! on the other hand, is an existential threat “to our democracy,” say the Black Democrats, who are eager to pledge their allegiance to the same CIA and National Security State that assassinated Patrice Lumumba, murdered Malcolm, King and scores of Black Panthers, and worked hand in glove with white-ruled South Africa to kill thousands of freedom fighters across the continent. Los Angeles Black Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who once (correctly) charged the CIA with flooding her city with crack cocaine, now struts around waving an American flag while denouncing “Russian” meddling in a U.S. election that was actually stolen by Republican suppression of Black votes, as usual – with no serious protest by Democrats, as usual. 

The Black misleaders are as silly as they are shameless, but they are not ineffectual. No white man could eviscerate Dr. King’s radical legacy, or make Malcolm X appear harmless to the imperial order – that’s a job for the Black Misleadershsip Class. While Dr. King rejected an alliance with the “triple evils,” Black Democratic misleaders describe their deal with the Devil as smart, “strategic” politics. They whip up war fever against small, non-white nations that seek only the right to govern themselves, behaving no differently on the world scene – and sometimes worse – than Donald Trump.

They shame and weaken Black America, and have joined the enemies of life on Earth. King would shake his head, mournfully. Malcolm would keep his tight smile, doggedly. Then both would organize to expose and depose the Black Misleadership Class. 

BAR executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com.

Never Forget the Real MLK

As our state-sponsored celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr. commences, let’s not forget some important facts about this great man:

1. He was against the Vietnam War during a time when many Americans were not. Decades later, this view against the war has developed into a mainstream narrative, but in the 1960s, those who spoke out and marched against it (students, Civil Rights leaders) and refused to serve (Muhammad Ali) were beaten, hosed down, killed, and jailed. He would undoubtedly be railing against the US imperialist state and its perpetual war machine today

2. He condemned issues like poverty, inequality, and racism as systemic ills, not merely individual shortcomings. To this day, such broad analyses (those touching on capitalism and white supremacy) are rejected and disregarded by most as “fringe” or “too radical.” In this way, Dr. King would still be viewed as “too radical” by the current mainstream media (the same folks who whitewash and co-opt his legacy, and then celebrate this watered-down version of the man).

3. He was hated and despised by a majority of white America. In 1966, he had a 63 percent negative poll rating. He had rocks thrown at his head and was routinely spat on during marches. This hatred still exists today. Simply turn on TV stations or radio shows or peruse social media comments to see how black liberation movements are ridiculed, loathed, and detested by the thousands. Nazis and white supremacists are marching in US streets and congregating on social media. There is no doubt that Dr. King would be on the front lines of current movements; and, therefore, would still take the brunt of this hatred, ignorance, and disrespect - even today.

4. He was considered to be “an enemy of the state” by various government agencies. The FBI tapped his phone calls, blacklisted him as a “suspected Communist,” and sent anonymous letters demeaning him and encouraging him to commit suicide. Various levels of the government, from the FBI to the Memphis Police Dept, have been found to have some involvement in his death.

5. He initiated the “Poor People’s Campaign” and put forth an economic and social bill of rights that espoused “a national responsibility to provide work for all.” Dr. King advocated for a jobs guarantee and would end unemployment by requiring the government to provide jobs to anyone who could not find one. The bill of rights also included “the right of every citizen to a minimum income," regardless of whether they are employed. Today, these proposals would be laughed at by media pundits, and he would be written off as "crazy" by many of the same folks who pretend to celebrate him.

6. He supported the Planned Parenthood Federation and believed that things like “family planning and contraception” should be fully funded by the government – ideas that are despised by modern conservatives who have no shame in calling on their whitewashed version of Dr. King’s legacy to use for their own agendas.

Celebrating Dr. King’s life and role in the struggle is important, but learning and considering the real man and his real ideas is even more crucial in a time that still needs them.

Let’s celebrate Dr. King for who he really was: a radical people’s champion who confronted the power structure, faced down the defenders of this structure, challenged capitalism, challenged poverty, challenged white supremacy, challenged militarism and war, and challenged the status quo that engulfs all of these elements – a status quo that still exists. A status quo that now shamelessly co-opts his legacy for its own use.

Never Forget.

Lessons of Rojava and Histories of Abolition

By Brendan McQuade

Originally published at Marxist sociology blog.

The Rojava Revolution is one of the most important revolutionary struggle of recent years. In the context of civil war and great power intrigue, the Kurdish movement evolved into a multi-ethnic and non-sectarian autonomous administration that governs approximately two million people in Northeastern Syria. These liberated areas have produced important experiments in direct democracy, cooperative and ecological development, and community self-defense and conflict resolution.

The Revolution is also the liberatory counterpoint to the Islamic State. In 2014 and 2015, Rojava’s militias received international attention for breaking the Islamic State’s siege of the city of Kobani and creating an evacuation corridor for some 50,000 Yazidis who were fleeing the Islamic State. Given the Syrian Civil War is also a climate conflict, the great political question of the 21st century may well be the socialism of Rojava or the barbarism of the Islamic State.

It’s no surprise the Rojava Revolution has been a point of inspiration for radicals across the world and, particularly, abolitionists and others on the libertarian-left. In their manifesto, Burn Down the American Plantation, the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement, an anarchist organization with chapters in Philadelphia, New York Chicago, New Haven, and California’s Inland Empire, considers Rojava to be a blueprint for organization elsewhere: “The Rojava Revolution, the anti-state revolution in northern Syria, provides us with a successful example of the strategies of organization and resistance we need to apply in the US today.”

It’s also no surprise that the Rojava Revolution may soon be over. The revolution developed in a power vacuum created when Assad government unilaterally withdrew from the Kurdish regions in Northeast Syria to focus on the developing civil war in Western Syria. The United States made a pragmatic alliance with Rojava during the campaign against the Islamic State but what that support meant going forward was never clear. Turkey, Syria’s neighbor to the north, is keen to both see Assad out and the Kurdish movement crushed. Between Turkey and the Trump administration, it was only a matter of time before the precarious balance of political forces shifted against Rojava. In October 2019, the US withdrew troops from Syria, clearing the way for Turkish invasion. This threat, in turn, forced Rojava to reconcile with Damascus for short term survival. What this means for the future of the Revolution is far from clear but it’s hard to feel encouraged.

What does this tragedy mean for our understanding of political struggle today? Does the seeming twilight of the Rojava Revolution mean that it is just another failed one? The Rojava Revolution could not defend itself against the state. It’s unclear how similar strategies could prevail in the United States, where the openings for the type of democratic autonomy seen Rojava are much smaller (or perhaps fundamentally different).

These questions, I contend, can only be answered if we confront them on the level of political strategy and opportunity, rather than political philosophy and identity. Abolitionists and anti-authoritarians are right to be inspired by example of Rojava but translating the lessons of the Revolution to a wildly different political context like the United States is no simple task. To better understand the Rojava Revolution, I return to the fundamentals of historical materialism. My recent article published Social Justice, “Histories of Abolition, Critiques of Security,” considers Rojava in relation to the debates abolition in the nascent US left: the rejection of abolition as fanciful and its defense as an area of non-reformist reformism in the struggle for 21st century socialism and strategy of insurrection. The impasse between a rejection of abolition and the tired revolution/reform binary can be resolved by returning to fundamentals of historical materialism, and particularly, W.E.B. Du Bois’ analysis of “abolition democracy” in his seminal work, Black Reconstruction.

Histories of Abolition

Abolition democracy refers to the social forces that led the “Reconstruction of Democracy” after the Civil War. It was revolutionary experiment made possible, first, by the direct action of black workers, a General Strike, and, later, advanced through continual mobilization (including armed self-defense) and the non-reformist reforms of Radical Reconstruction. While the antislavery struggle provided the political content of abolition democracy, this revolutionary project existed in precarious conditions, the temporary alignment of black workers, middle class abolitionists represented in Congress by the Radical Republicans, and, eventually, northern industrialists and poor southern whites. It was a revolutionary moment that was never fully consolidated and, as result, its gains were rolled back.

Despite this seeming failure, the moment held a deeper significance that middle class Abolitionists (and many subsequent scholars) largely missed. Abolition democracy challenged the fundamental class relations upon which historical capitalism stood: a racially stratified global division of labor, which, starting the in the sixteenth century, tied Europe, West Africa, and the Americas together in a capitalist world-economy. Black workers were the most devalued and exploited laborers, what Du Bois called “the foundation stone not only of Southern social structure but of Northern manufacture and commerce, of the English factory system, of European commerce, of buying and selling on a world-scale.”

By striking at the root of global capitalism, the American Civil War that produced the cataclysm and change that created the possibility for radical change. This possibility was lost because the Abolitionists never confronted capital and the labor movement never embraced abolition. When politics shifted, the temporary class alliances that enabled radical reconstruction gave way to what Du Bois called a “counter-revolution” or “dictatorship of property.”

On a more general level, Du Bois establishes the need to understand abolition in relation to the (1) social relations and (2) historical processes that define a particular historical moment, while also considering (3) social movement clusters that were contesting these relations of forces. In Black Reconstruction, then, Du Bois analyzes the abolition democracy in relation (1) the class composition of the antebellum United States, (2) the consolidation of an industrial economy, and (3) the interaction of the budding labor movement with the anti-slavery actions of black workers and Abolitionists.

In this way, Black Reconstruction offers a different understanding of abolition, beyond the tired revolution-reform binary. As an analytic and organizing concept, abolition democracy becomes the liberatory politics embedded within struggles of historically-specific mobilizations of popular forces. It is the struggle for freedom from violent regulation and subjectification. Du Bois shows that it is organically tied up with the related fights to secure conditions for social reproduction, distribute the social product, shape shared institutions, and set collective priorities. In other words, abolition—or socialism, for that matter—is not a political program we can define in the abstract and implement. It is a process of liberation tied to broader clusters of emancipatory movements as they emerge and exist within specific historical moments. The question, then, is not revolution or reform but who is fighting for abolition—or socialism—what does that even mean in the contemporary United States and what will it take to win.

Du Bois provides a historical materialist understanding of abolition as interplay of disruptive direct action and incremental change within a historically informed understanding of a particular social struggle. This holistic approach highlights the specific social relations that constitute the exploitative and oppressive social formations in which we live. In this way, Du Bois can provide the necessary perspective to ask what kind of interventions could be “non-reformist,” while also creating space to understand direct action and insurrection in terms of political strategy, rather than philosophy.

Abolition, Socialism and Political Strategy

This approach undermines some of the common slogans made about nature of structural violence today. Mass incarceration is not the New Jim Crow nor is it a direct a simple outgrowth of slavery. What Angela Davis terms “the prison of slavery and the slavery of prison” are different arrangements. Slavery, convict leasing, and Jim Crow were systems to marshal and mobilize labor. Mass incarceration is a system to warehouse surplus populations. These differences, moreover, speak to tremendous structural transformations in the world-economy and the American state. If we want to be politically effective, we, unlike abolitionists of the 1860s, must appreciate the specificities of our moment.

This means acknowledging that, as Julia Sudbury does, “the slavery-prison analogy tends to erase the presence of non-black prisoners.” It means recognizing that an exclusive focus on anti-black racism threatens to dismiss the experiences of Latinx and indigenous people with imprisonment, policing, and state violence. It means admitting that the incarceration rate for white people in the United States, while much lower than that of historically marginalized groups, is still grotesque in comparison with the rest of the world. In the words of Angela Davis, it means understanding that the prison “has become a receptacle for all those human beings who bear the inheritance of the failure to create abolition democracy in the aftermath of slavery,” while also recognizing that “this inheritance is not only born by black prisoners, but by poor Latino, Native American, Asian and white prisoners.” It means it thinking about revolutionary strategy in way that appreciates the historical forces that create our moment, without being unthinkingly tied to anachronistic ideas and strategies that today may be ineffective.

Most importantly, this perspective allows us to situate powerful moments of revolutionary breakthrough in their historical context and derive the appropriate conclusions from them. In this regard, we should not dismiss the way Burn Down the American Plantation highlights the experience of Rojava Revolution. Rather, we should understand the social processes and social relations that surround this important event, namely the collapse of the state during Syria Civil War and the trajectory of the Kurdish Movement.

Contextualizing the Rojava Revolution in this manner is not the same as dismissing its relevance. Instead, it allows us to usefully interpret its lessons from the vantage point of particular time and place. Recognizing that the Rojava Revolution took place amidst civil war and state collapse raises doubts about the applicability of the model in areas where the state is strong. Burn Down the American Plantation advocates “placing self-defense at the center of our revolutionary movement” and calls on existing anti-fascist groups and cop watches to model themselves on the self-defense forces of Rojava Revolution. Specifically, the manifesto calls on these organizations to “Develop…the capacity to begin launching offensive actions against fascists and the regime.” This advocacy for armed insurrection is misguided. It fails to appreciate the conditions that made Rojava possible, while also neglecting to mention the awesome coercive powers of the American state and the weakness of the nascent American left.

Moreover, contextualizing Rojava gives us the possibility of translating the lessons of the Revolution into our context. The continually high numbers of “police involved shootings” in the United States, the breakthrough of white supremacist movements, the escalating confrontations at protests, and mounting incidents of political violence all underscore the urgent need to community self-defense in this political moment. This is need is structural as evinced by the recent emergence of armed left formations in the United States like the Socialist Relief Association and the Red Guards of the Party for Socialism and Liberation that joined older groups like Red Neck Revolt.

More generally, there is a budding muncipalist movement in the United States that, in part, draws on some of the same intellectual currents that also inform Rojava. In this United States, this movement is best exemplified by Jackson-Kush Plan associated with Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and Cooperation Jackson. The plan has three pillars building cooperative economy, creating participatory structures at the city level, networking progressive political leaders. Moreover, this electoral road to libertarian socialism at the city level has already delivered some concrete results. In 2013, Jackson, Mississippi elected Mayor Chokwe Lumumba, who campaigned on the promises of to implement the Jackson Plan. Although Lumumba died less than year into office, his son, Chokwe Antar Lumumba, successfully won the mayoral race in June 2017. Already, the new administration pursuing an economic development strategy based around promoting cooperative businesses and putting in place a participatory process, empowering popular assemblies organized by to develop a budget proposal/

Notably, however, Chokwe Antar Lumumba’s young administration has been remarkably conventional when it comes to criminal justice. While the Mayor Lumumba has repeatedly drawn the link between crime and poverty, he’s also pledged to be “tough on crime.” Moreover, the new administration has maintained conventional police force and made no moves toward instituting community control of the police. Here, in a city where political power is held by radical administration, the self-defense experiments of the Rojava Revolution may make an instructive example, albeit not a simple blueprint. If grassroots alternatives to police existed in Jackson, could it pressure Lumumba to adopt more radical positions like community control of police or—better—disband the police department and replace it with community controlled self-defense forces and restorative justice bodies? The point here is not outline a political platform or provide a detailed analysis of contemporary attempts to create municipal socialism in Jackson but rather to demonstrate the way the holistic and historical conception of abolition advanced by Du Bois expands our expands our political parameters, allowing us to both make sense our current conditions and relate them to other powerful instances of abolitionist organizing.

Taken together, this approach to abolition allows us to both learn for the past and appreciate how previous struggles shaped the specificities of the present moment. If abolition can be usefully described as the liberatory politics immanent within the historically specific social struggles, one should be able to find abolitionist tendencies, abolitionist demands, abolitionist practices, and abolitionist institutions in most emancipatory movements. This approach can allow us to consider these moments relationally and learn the historical lessons of other moments of “abolition democracy.” This is how we learn what it takes to get free.

Brendan McQuade is an assistant professor at University of Southern Maine and author of Pacifying the Homeland. This commentary is adapted from a longer article published in Social Justice.