Black Lives Matter UK Revives the Anti-Imperialist Spirit of British Black Power

[PHOTO CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES]

By Alfie Hancox

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests that have erupted in multiple British cities including London, Birmingham, Manchester and Bristol, under the political direction of independent groups such as BLM UK* and BLM LDN, have typically been portrayed in the media as displays of solidarity with the movement in America. Black American movements have certainly always exerted a powerful influence in Britain, as Paul Gilroy’s concept of ‘The Black Atlantic’ has underscored – but British black radical politics should not be narrowly construed as just a US import.

In post-war Britain, Black Power took on a specific trajectory, based on the intertwined legacy of British colonialism in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. Black radicals in Britain drew inspiration from anti-colonial struggles, and their uncompromising internationalism put them at odds with the parochialism of the left-wing mainstream. The expansive anti-imperialism of British Black Power has strong resonances today, in the way that the BLM protestors have targeted monuments to slavery and colonialism in Britain’s historic port cities, and also in the identification of BLM UK with emergent anti-capitalist and indigenous movements in the Global South. BLM UK has especially revived the intersectional anti-imperialism of the original black women’s movement in Britain.

British Black Power’s internationalist origins

Black radical politics in Britain have a long history extending well before the ‘Windrush moment’ (when the HMT Empire Windrush carrying workers from the Caribbean docked at Tilbury, Essex in 1948). From the eighteenth century, black Jacobins in England like Robert Wedderburn preached slavery abolition and working-class rebellion, and in 1900 the inaugurating conference of Pan-Africanism was held in London. However, British black radicalism entered a new stage in the decades following the Second World War. Due to racist employment and housing discrimination, economic stagnation hit black and Asian immigrant communities particularly hard, and their insecurity was compounded by police harassment and the fascistic terror meted out by National Front thugs.

Most of the Black Power groups established in Britain in the 1960s-70s, including the British Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Front, contained both African Caribbean and Asian members. British Black Power was based on an expansive political black identity, which grew organically out of post-war ‘New Commonwealth’ immigrant resistance in Britain. Trinidad-born communist Claudia Jones, who founded the Notting Hill carnival in 1959, should be recognised as a significant progenitor of political blackness. Jones was inspired by the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference in 1955, and in her essay “The Caribbean Community in Britain” she observed that “the common experience of Afro-Asian-Caribbean peoples in Britain is leading to a growing unison among these communities as they increasingly identify an injury to one as being an injury to all”.[1] Afro-Asian unity in Britain was also partially mediated via Black Power movements in Trinidad and Guyana, both former British colonies, where political solidarities were built up between the descendants of slaves from Africa and indentured servants from India.

Black self-organising came in response to intensifying racism. After Conservative MP Enoch Powell gave his infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech in Birmingham in 1968, several black political organisations met in a pub in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire to form a radical Black People’s Alliance. Among the attendant groups was the local Indian Workers Association, which had liaised with Malcolm X during his 1965 tour of England. In January 1969, the Alliance led an enormous march of some 5,000 Asian and black people on Downing Street, demanding the repeal of the latest Immigration Act, and condemning white-minority rule in southern Africa. During the march, an effigy was burnt to chants of “Disembowel Enoch Powell”. The day was reported on enthusiastically by Darcus Howe, a prominent member of the British Black Panther movement:

It was a truly beautiful sight to witness some ten thousand MILITANT black people – Africans, Indians, Pakistanis and West Indians – come out on to the streets and place themselves firmly upon the stage of REVOLUTIONARY POLITICAL ACTIVITY here in Britain … The march moved off from Speakers Corner with deafning roars of “WE WANT BLACK POWER”, and as our people became conscious of their numbers and solidarity, the slogan became, “We ARE BLACK POWER” (Black Dimension, February 1969).

The Black People’s Alliance march was also significant for the appearance of open tensions between black radicals and the white-majority socialist groups in attendance. The sixties are often associated with a heightened socialist internationalism, and there is an element of truth to this – the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign was launched by Marxist activists in Britain in 1966. However, this campaign represented a somewhat abstract identification with a movement against US imperialism. Additionally, while the British Anti-Apartheid Movement was critical of the government’s support for white-minority rule, during the 1960s it retained a neo-imperial vision of the Commonwealth as “a multiracial group of equals”, ignoring Britain’s exploitative economic relations with its ex-colonies.[2] Howe recorded the nuisance of what might be called ‘vicarious internationalism’ at the Black People’s Alliance demonstration:

When some white demonstrators attempted to dilute these [Black Power] war cries with such meaningless shouts of “Black and white unite and fight”, they were completely phased out, and the Vietnam contingent who wanted to inject the “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh” chant, were reminded that the issues involved were right here in England.

There are parallels here with the reductionist framing of BLM protests in Britain as an exclusive response to racist violence in America. This narrative is based on a pervasive idea of British benevolence, stemming from the country’s failure to address the monstrous realities of its empire. Such denialism further subsumes a lengthy history of overt racism within Britain, including the racist pogroms in 1919 and 1958 in which colonial violence was turned inward, and the perpetual terrorising of black communities by the police, often under the pretext of ‘mugging panics’. In fact, as was highlighted by the Lammy Review, there is currently a greater disproportionality in the number of black people imprisoned in England and Wales than in America. As BLM protestors across Britain insist, in spite of prime minister Boris Johnson’s claims to the contrary, “the UK is not innocent”.

Bringing the Third World into the British metropole

Black Power developed in a global context of international political projects committed to Third World unity. The term ‘Third World’ was first used in the 1950s to designate countries outside either Cold War camp, but its meaning was soon transformed into a progressive organising principle, culminating in the New International Economic Order demanded by ‘developing’ nations at the UN in the mid-1970s.

The British Black Power movement argued that the imperialist strangulation of the Third World survived the demise of formal colonialism, through processes of capitalist unequal exchange – enforced by neo-colonial militarism, such as Britain’s post-war counterinsurgency in Malaya (initially overseen by a Labour government) – that ensured permanent underdevelopment for the ex-colonies.[3] Black radicals used the anti-imperialist concept of a global ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ to highlight a material reality of neo-colonial exploitation, but they did not perceive this as a mechanical geographical divide. In an editorial in Howe’s journal Race Today, the Third World was shown to have leaked into the metropolitan British core: “Handsworth, Notting Hill, Brixton, Southall are colonies and the struggles which emerge from within these enclaves are clearly anti-colonial in content” (Race Today, February 1976). Black Power activists thus denaturalised global economic polarisation as a political division – one that needed to be dismantled.

Internationalist connections were sometimes direct. Some Third World revolutionaries, including Walter Rodney, studied in London during the 1960s, while a number of British black radicals travelled to revolutionary nodal centres like Havana, Algiers and Dar es Salaam. After its revolutionary pilgrimage in 1978, the London-based Black Liberation Front celebrated Cuba as an example of socialism working to erode racism: “One of the most impressive sights of Havana is the people: they are composed of Afrikans, Latins, Indians, Chinese and those of mixed races. They all combine and live together as one united Cuba, without the fear of racial animosity” (Grassroots, September/October 1978). Some black radicals even interpreted Irish Republicanism as a neighbouring struggle against British imperialism.

For British Black Power militants, identification with the black and Asian working-class struggle in Britain was inseparable from their identification with developments in Third World socialist and anti-colonial movements, be they in Africa, Latin America, Asia or Australasia. As the Sri Lanka-born black radical theorist Ambalavaner Sivanandan emphasised, “the heart is where the battle is”.

Challenging nativist social democracy

Much of the appeal of Black Power in Britain stemmed from disillusionment with the Labour Party, which on taking power in 1964 enforced the Tories’ Commonwealth Immigrants Act, targeting primary immigration from Britain’s former empire. Labour’s capitulation to racist sentiments became even more apparent in March 1968 (one month before Powell’s speech in Birmingham), with its rushed updated immigration bill barring free entry to Britain’s Asian citizens in Kenya trying to flee the ‘Africanization’ campaign. Harold Wilson’s 1974 Labour government again gifted official legitimacy to anti-immigrant attitudes, enforcing the 1971 Immigration Act despite its initial opposition, and overseeing a steady increase in deportations.[4]

Gilroy’s influential critique of the mainstream left’s implicitly-racialised nationalism in There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack was prefigured in the black radical movement, which pinpointed the British labour movement’s historical imbrication in colonialism. The Fabians, for instance, who provided the intellectual underpinning of the Labour Party, were staunch imperialists. In the 1970s the Asian Youth Movement, which took up the symbolism and rhetoric of Black Power, coined the slogan “Labour, Tory both the same, both play the racist game!”[5] As sociologist John Narayan explains, British Black Power groups identified “how race and racism had infected the British labour movement and its confusion of social democracy for socialism … Britain’s (white) working class had been bound to the neo-imperial social democratic state and its outward racism and hostility to the non-white members of the British working class served as a denial of the multi-racial nature of the global working class”.[6]

This black radical critique can be extended to the contemporary phenomenon of Corbynism, which never managed to shake off the rationale of ‘nativist social democracy’. Under Corbyn’s leadership, the Labour Party continued to support hard border controls, while its 2019 Manifesto upheld the ‘national security’ framing that associates migrants with criminality. As Narayan argues, the Corbyn project tacitly repeated “the racialized and methodological nationalist idea of justice that underpinned previous forms of social democracy through a neutral [i.e. ‘race’-blind] focus on British class injustice”.[7]

As British black radicals recognised, left-wing patriotism (recently reformulated as ‘progressive patriotism’) is predicated on the whitewashing of the country’s working-class history, perhaps most notably the post-war construction of the National Health Service. While the NHS partly represented a working-class gain – or, more accurately, a ruling-class concession to stem the rising tide of trade union militancy – this is just one side of the story. To service the NHS, the Colonial Office recruited hospital staff from West Africa, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. Immigrant workers were funnelled into the lowest-grade qualifications, and often held at permanent risk of deportation. Indeed, as the Windrush scandal recently exposed, that risk never went away. There was for instance the case of Gretel Gocan, an 81-year-old Windrush-generation nurse kept out of Britain, and separated from her children for nine years, after taking a holiday to Jamaica. Meanwhile racist abuse, often compounded by sexism, continues to be routinely hurled at NHS staff. The whitewashing of the NHS further entails the erasure of a sustained history of radical resistance by women of colour workers, including nurses from the Caribbean, to gendered-racist discrimination. Women in the Race Today Collective suggested that black and Asian healthcare workers “brought the tradition of rebellion and resistance they had fashioned in the womb of colonial society” (Race Today, May 1975).

Intersectional anti-imperialism

Anti-imperialism was also the organisational pivot of the original black women’s movement in Britain, formed in opposition to the Eurocentrism of the white feminist mainstream, which posited patriarchy as a universal and monolithic system of oppression, ignoring how, for example, the history of colonialism and slavery meant that the black family was frequently a source of refuge for black women. The formation in 1978 of the national black and Asian women’s umbrella group, the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), was inspired by the self-organising of women in African national liberation movements, some of which had representatives in Britain. OWAAD’s founding statement, currently held in the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, paid homage to how “the increased scale and higher level of the women’s participation in the anti-imperialist struggle have been achieved through the successes in combatting the reaction of male domination be it in Namibia, Eritrea, Zimbabwe, Mozambique etc.” The organisation also explained how political blackness “provides us with a distinct, united identity based on our relationship to Imperialism, a system which uses the ideology of racism to rationalise its continued exploitation of our people both here and abroad” (“Afro-Asian Unity – Rhetoric or Reality?”, undated).

OWAAD members underlined how, on a global scale, capitalist-imperialism simultaneously mobilises sexism and racism within a global hierarchy of wages – including the unpaid domestic labour of especially Third World women – to capture imperialist ‘superprofits’. They also emphasised how the post-Keynesian, neo-imperialist strategy of outsourcing production to take advantage of cheap female labour in the Third World was accompanied by renewed racially-gendered discourses to naturalise the subordination of this new workforce, as in this widely-circulated Malaysian government advert: “The manual dexterity of the oriental female is famous world over. Her hands are small and she works fast with extreme care; who, therefore, could be better qualified by nature and inheritance to contribute to the efficiency of a bench-assembly production line than the oriental girl”.[8]

Several British black women’s groups sent delegations to the UN World Conferences on Women in Nairobi (1985) and Beijing (1995), joining international calls for the recognition of Third World women’s unremunerated labour.[9] Their intersectional understanding of how class exploitation is heavily shaped by race and gender has sustained relevance today, as the enormous profits accrued by Global North-based multinational corporations are often predicated on the hyper-exploitation of women of colour workers in factories and sweatshops located in places like Bangladesh, Mexico and the Philippines.

The new return to black radicalism in Britain

Immediately, the Black Lives Matter movement developed as a response to anti-black police violence in the US, and direct parallels were drawn by BLM UK to the institutional police racism and black deaths in custody in Britain. But BLM has also articulated a broader transnational political project, drawing connections with global anti-capitalist revolts over the last year including in Chile, Lebanon, Kenya and Haiti, particularly directed against the economic austerity caused by neo-colonial ‘structural adjustment programmes’ imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

A return to political blackness in its original form in Britain is unlikely, especially as it has come under retrospective criticism for flattening cultural differences, but the same process of constructing political coalitions against racism and imperialism, while simultaneously asserting specific national or ethnic positionalities, which took place in the 1960s-70s continues today. In the context of continued core-periphery polarisation, for emerging anti-imperialist forces internationally, including BLM, the ‘Global South’ has become a political term that harkens back to Black Power-era Third Worldism. BLM UK has resurrected the discerning anti-imperialist consciousness that relates local injustices to global structural inequality. Although Britain’s protracted imperial decline has not relented, British capitalism still plays a directly neo-colonial role, which was luridly underscored when, in 2017, Whitehall officials described a post-Brexit project for trade expansion with former colonies as “Empire 2.0”. A 2016 report by War on Want revealed that “101 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange — most of them British — have mining operations in 37 sub-Saharan African countries. They collectively control over one trillion dollars’ worth of Africa’s most valuable resources.” Black activists have pinpointed how Britain’s imperialism abroad, and the oppression facing migrants and communities of colour under the domestic ‘hostile environment’, are two facets of the same centralising logic of racial capitalism.

This (re)articulation of British black radicalism was seen in a speech by the 2016 NUS National Black Students’ Officer, Malia Bouattia, during Black History Month: “With many Black communities in Britain formed of recent migrants, and against the backdrop of widespread anticolonial movements in the Global South, there was also a strong, vocal support for movements for the liberation of Black people worldwide, from what for many was the heartland of empire: ‘Great Britain’.” The identification with the political Global South is reminiscent of black radicals’ dynamic conception of the core-periphery relationship, which had entailed an empowering seeping of the Third World into the British metropole. As Leah Cowan explains, “BLM UK made important connections between Britain’s colonial history and its capitalist present, in which profits are prioritised over black lives.” This new return to expansive anti-imperialist solidarities among racialised minorities thoroughly undermines the essentialising ethnic absolutism that accompanied state-driven ‘multiculturalism’ under New Labour.

The tearing down of colonial monuments by BLM protestors, continuing in the tradition of the transnational Rhodes Must Fall movement, is inherently political: directing attention towards how neo-colonial and anti-black violence remains ever present in the metropole. The well-worn criticism that colonial-era statues should instead be moved to museums has little bearing given that, as historian Louis Allday explains, the state-sponsored heritage sector often “shamelessly celebrates Britain’s imperial violence and provides little or no historical context to it”. The real outrage should be that the British government has purposefully destroyed the records of its colonial crimes. The protesters are directly confronting the colonial legacy, not only through symbolic de-colonialism – for instance, by casting the figure of slaver Edward Colston into the depths of the same Bristolian river that was once used to transport slaves – but also by forcing a much-needed conversation about racism in Britain today. The indignation expressed by liberal and conservative pundits alike when some black activists set their crosshairs on statues of Winston Churchill (the admirer of Mussolini who was responsible for a genocidal famine in India) shows just how far the country still has to go to come to terms with the inglorious underside of Britishness.

BLM has also built on the strategic intersectionalism of post-war black radicalism – the BLM movement itself was initiated by queer black feminists. BLM UK argues that “until trans, working-class, disabled, sex-worker, queer (and more) black people are free, we will all be unfree.” The foregrounding of these linkages is particularly commensurate to the political challenges posed by the intersections of homophobia and neo-imperialism. For instance, a report released in September 2019 found that, from 2016-2018, the UK Home Office refused at least 3,100 LGBT+ asylum seekers from countries where ‘same-sex acts’ are criminalised. Many of those countries had homophobic legislation imposed under British colonial rule, and some still have significant economic ties with Britain.[10]

BLM UK has made an additional crucial connection between racial-imperialism and environmental destruction. While rich nations like Britain are the main polluters, those worst impacted by climate change live in the ‘developing’ world. In 2016, during its protest to stop flights at London City airport, BLM UK pointed out how air pollution in Britain disproportionately affects working-class black communities, while again relating this local situation to a global imperialist reality:

The inequalities that turn an extreme weather event into a disaster or human catastrophe mirror the inequalities that cause the disproportionate loss of black and poor life globally – and the exact systems that Black Lives Matter fights against. … [And] due to rising global inequality – that remains part of the legacy of imperialism and colonialism, and part of the present reality of globalisation and capitalism – we also know that the resources required to respond to climate change’s impact are often not placed in the hands of the people who need them most.

The revived anti-imperialism of BLM UK poses a vital corrective to the narrow nationalism of the British left-wing mainstream. As black radicals themselves pointed out in the sixties and seventies, the parochialism of the British labour movement came at a price. While white workers immediately benefit from relative privileges vis-à-vis workers of colour (and have often been complicit in reproducing structural racism), they are still exploited, and have been negatively impacted by the diversion of intensifying class-based grievances into the imperial nostalgia that suffused the Brexit referendum. There is a particular need for the left to champion the incisive politics of intersectional anti-imperialism, pioneered by the black women’s movement, in order to understand how global capital circuits overdetermine the racially-gendered contours of anti-blackness, Islamophobia and ‘xenoracism’ in Britain today.

* While BLM UK itself did not call for protests due to the context of the COVID-19 viral pandemic, it has stated that it stands in solidarity with them, and is working to help BLM demonstrators “to protest in a way that is safe for them, as well as for our communities”.

Alfie Hancox writes about socialist and anti-imperialist movements. This article is based on his MA(Res) thesis on British Black Power.

Endnotes

[1] Claudia Jones, “The Caribbean Community in Britain”, in Carole Boyce Davies (ed.), Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment: Autobiographical Reflections, Essays and Poems (Banbury, Oxfordshire: Ayebia Clarke Publishing Ltd, 2011): 175.

[2] Jodi Burkett, Constructing Post-Imperial Britain: Britishness, ‘Race’ and the Radical Left in the 1960s (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 70.

[3] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Verso, 2018).

[4] Ambalavaner Sivanandan, A Different Hunger: Writings on Black Resistance (London: Pluto Press, 1991): 39-40.

[5] Anandi Ramamurthy, Black Star: Britain’s Asian Youth Movements (London: Pluto Press, 2013): 103.

[6] John Narayan, “British Black Power: The Anti-Imperialism of Political Blackness and the Problem of Nativist Socialism”, The Sociological Review 67, no. 5 (September 2019): 956.

[7] Ibid.: 961.

[8] Quoted in Hazel Carby, “White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood”, in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70’s Britain (London: Routledge, 1994): 219-20.

[9] Julia Sudbury, ‘Other Kinds of Dreams’: Black Women’s Organisations and the Politics of Transformation (London: Routledge, 1998): 79.

[10] Douglas E. Sanders, “377 And the Unnatural Afterlife of British Colonialism in Asia”, Asian Journal of Comparative Law 4 (2009): 1–49.

The Minneapolis Uprising and the Heavy Stick of Reaction

[PHOTO CREDIT: David Gannon/AFP/GETTY]

By Ashton Rome

Republished from Left Voice.

Vladimir Lenin is once supposed to have said, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” The events following the murder of George Floyd prove the dictum. Floyd was murdered on May 25, and less than a month later, the world looks completely different. The cops who killed Floyd were fired, and Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes, was charged with second-degree murder. The other three officers, Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane, and Tou Thao, were charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Floyd’s murder happens in the broader context of the murders Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and now Rayshard Brooks. Within the first 10 days after Floyd’s murders, protests spread from Minneapolis to cities around the country and internationally, to Germany, England, and elsewhere. Not surprisingly, it has also inspired state and reactionary responses. This rebellion has quickly gone to phase 2 — the heavy stick of the state.

The Carrot and the Stick

The protests are going on during a period of economic and social crisis, exacerbated by a global pandemic and fueling — and being fueled by — a historic decline of U.S. global hegemony. The crisis is marked by a collapse in confidence in traditional institutions of power in the United States, and growing approval of “socialism,” especially by young people and people of color. It is yet to be seen how much the capitulation of Bernie Sanders’s campaign and his endorsement of Biden has affected people’s political consciousness, but it is likely a significant factor. It has at a minimum prompted reflection on the political expediency of inside-outside and similar strategies. When the old rules and traditional institutions of a society can no longer deliver stability amid crisis, the ruling class is prone to rely on naked violence from the state and “stormtrooper”-like elements.

In the face of crisis, the capitalist class maintains power by using a combination of “carrots” and “sticks,” reform and repression. The exact ratio depends on the ruling class’s ability to contain the crisis at particular moments. The stick is often used during a crisis of legitimacy, in which the ruling class feels itself under existential threat. The reforms are meant to placate the most moderate wings of the movements. They are also an ideological tool to convince a movement that the system is “reformable,” which means that more confrontational approaches to politics are not needed. The stick, on the other hand, is meant to serve both an ideological and coercive goal — to show what happens when individuals and movements verge outside of acceptable boundaries.

A good example of these tactics is found in response to the unrest in the 1960s. In response to the challenges against what Martin Luther King called the “three evils” (racism, poverty, and war), the state combined repressive initiatives like the Counter Intelligence Program (Cointelpro) and LBJ’s Omnibus Crime and Safe Streets Act with reforms like the War on Poverty and initiatives that supported “Black capitalism” and Black elected leadership. In his book Black Awakening in Capitalist America, Robert Allen argues that the ruling class was terrified by the mass movements and promoted the ideas of “Black capitalism” and community development programs to redirect current and potential radicals into safe channels. By contrast, Cointelpro was the stick — surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting organizations deemed subversive.

As the U.S. economy shifted toward neoliberalism, the carrot has been significantly impoverished, consisting now mainly of favorable media attention, foundation funding, and positions within nonprofits. “Black capitalism,” embodied in the 1960s slogan “Black Faces in High Places” — now called “trickle-down social justice” — was promoted as a way of integrating a section of Black Americans into mainstream society. These “representational demands” were placed in contrast to the revolutionary aims of the Black Left like the Black Panther Party.

Under neoliberalism, nonprofits have also proliferated, existing within a set of relationships that link political parties and the state, donor foundations and educational institutions, leftist movements and capitalist enterprises. Because this arrangement involves class collaboration instead of class conflict, nonprofits are ripe for co-optation. The number of nonprofits in the United States has risen from 3,000 in 1960 to more than 1.5 million in 2016. Individuals and charities typically fund the bulk of these organizations, alongside philanthropic foundations redistributing a micro-percentage of the wealth accumulated by the 1 percent.

Funding from the 1 percent and nonprofits’ needs for funding have helped the financial backers direct and moderate organizations and movements. In her essay “The Price of Civil Rights,” Megan Francis shows how the NAACP’s early civil rights litigation agenda was redirected from a focus on white-supremacist violence and lynching during the crucial Red Summer of 1919 and redirected toward education and integration. The author discusses a phenomenon called “movement capture,” which she describes as “the process by which private funders use their influence in an effort to shape the agenda of vulnerable civil rights organizations.”

The usual co-option will unlikely hold in the face of the current level of social instability, anger, and scale of the protests. As Lara Putnam, Erica Chenoweth, and Jeremy Pressman point out in the Washington Post, protests are even spreading to conservative towns in rural and suburban America. They have likely occurred in more places and in greater numbers than even the Women’s Marches of 2017. The twin crises of the pandemic and economic downturn have the potential to incite protests beyond even what occurred after the 2007–8 economic crisis. Currently, just 19 percent of Americans say they can trust the government always or most of the time, among the lowest levels in the past half-century. The burning of the 3rd Precinct police station in Minneapolis is more popular than Biden and Trump. Though May’s unemployment figures may look positive due to “cooking the books,” the unemployment rate is the worst since World War II, with some estimating that 42 percent of recent layoffs could become permanent job losses.

Fascism

Political and economic crises spur mass action and sometimes even revolution, but they also provoke state reaction and counterrevolution. At the same time, fascism, a political movement that uses brute force to eliminate workers’ organizations and liberal democracy, unfolds in a way corresponding to the crisis that creates the conditions for it. The intense state reaction to the current rebellion, alongside the political violence and increased organization of the Far Right, should be cause for concern. Fascists seek to use the mass anger of a crisis situation like the one we now face — a crisis that under the right circumstances can lead to mass class action — and divert it through appeals to racism, xenophobia, and conspiracy theories.

During the 1960s, the Far Right grew substantially, waiting in reserve for when things got out of hand. It is important to remember that the massive civil rights movement was accompanied by the rise of far-right groups like the Minutemen, the KKK, and the John Birch Society. The latter had in 1966 an estimated 80,000 members, operating with a revenue of $5 million. According to Eckard Toy in The Right Side of the 1960s, the John Birch Society’s inaugural meeting included among its luminaries President Eisenhower’s first commissioner of Internal Revenue, a former personal aide of General Douglas MacArthur, two past presidents of the National Association of Manufacturers, a banker, and a University of Illinois professor and rich businessmen. These far-right groups and others aimed to figure out how to mobilize the white working class in the interest of a reactionary and violently oppressive racial order. This goal subsequently became central to the remaking of the Republican Party, reaching its apotheosis in the current presidency.

Protests by heavily armed conservative activists against the Covid-19 lockdowns suggest what can be expected if traditional state means of controlling the working class fail. The protests included an array of explicitly far-right groups, including the Proud Boys and militia groups like the Boogaloos. The majority of the attendees were small-business owners but also disgruntled workers upset by the economic devastation due to the pandemic and lockdown.

The Michigan Freedom Fund, cohost of one such rally, received more than $500,000 from the family of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, which includes among its luminaries the far-right businessman and mercenary-supplier Erik Prince. It was also assisted by Fox News, which ran favorable coverage, and President Trump, who used Twitter to mobilize his base around the protest.

State Repression

Scenes reminiscent of Ferguson have appeared throughout the country as states have deployed the National Guard and militarized police to enforce curfew orders and protect private property. So far, the National Guard has been activated in 15 states and Washington, DC, and 40 cities have imposed curfews. While police in militarized gear like tactical uniforms and utilizing armored personnel carriers were seen in previous events like Occupy and the Ferguson Protests, the Blackhawk helicopter at a DC protest on June 1 and a Predator droneat a protest in Minneapolis, are emblematic of the escalation in state repression. Equally threatening, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty soldiers if governors do not themselves violently crackdown on the protests.

Such a deployment would be the first since the 1992 Rodney King riots and the 1967 riots in Detroit. From January 1965 to October 1971, guard units were used in 260 disturbances, whereas from 1945 to 1965 they were used to handle 88 disturbances. Ironically, the Kerner Commission, which produced a presidential study of the riots of the 1960s, determined that instead of calming communities, the National Guard (as well as inadequate housing, high unemployment, and voter suppression, and racial discrimination) contributed to the years of rioting. The death of David McAtee calls into question their effectiveness in restoring “law and order” currently.

Even before the current protests, Trump and the DOJ were looking for more ways to indefinitely detain people in order to curb the protests. Importantly, Trump and Attorney General William Barr used the DOJ to help whip up the far-right and “angry middle class” protests against social distancing policies. The DOJ’s actions under Trump makes it harder for it to serve the same role as it did in response to rebellion under Obama with Eric Garner. This is because Barr’s predecessor, Jeff Sessions, severely restricted prosecutors’ ability to seek consent decrees and court-enforced agreements.

Simultaneously, Trump has again invoked the threat of “Antifa” and “anarchists,” promising on May 31 that “the United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.” Terrorist organizations, not ideology, are typically designated by the secretary of state, and once selected, they become illegal to join. Even if Trump and the security apparatus of the state do not have the constitutional authority to designate Antifa a terrorist group, there are several essential considerations. Simply threatening to label Antifa a terrorist group may signal to law enforcement that they are expected to investigate and aggressively single out one section of protesters.

The threat could inspire the creation of a category such as “Black Identity Extremist (BIE),” which was cooked up after the Ferguson Protest. Then, it was used to justify assessments or informal investigations by the FBI, subjecting protesters to physical surveillance, informants, and other means. By singling out “anarchists” and “outside agitators,” the state can likely pursue harsh charges against one section of protesters and follow up with others.

In response to inauguration protests led by DisruptJ20, an umbrella coalition of groups, 234 people, including activists, journalists, medics, and legal observers, were arrested and charged with felonies, including inciting to riot, assaulting a police officer, and conspiracy to riot, all of which carry long prison sentences. The case of Ferguson activist and live streamer Michael Avery, who was arrested by the FBI for a social media, post is worrying. They claim that he encouraged looting in Minneapolis. Such an incident, unfortunately, will not be isolated.

Relying on police and the coercive state to subdue movements is complicated. As the degree of conflict intensifies, and the police assume a greater role in repressing demonstrations, strikes, and other forms of resistance, pressure may grow among law enforcement officers to break with the state. During times of mass action and reaction, law enforcement’s everyday functions and legitimacy are called into question, and police experience broad public hostility. This development is embodied by recent calls to “Defund the Police” as a means of curtailing departments’ coercive power. Protests tend to cause splits, as seen in the wave of Black police associations created across the country to deal with racism during the civil rights era. It has also inspired police organizations to react to crisis conditions by using trade union tactics to advocate benefits or defenses against cuts. Repression is not automatic. All these reactions by the police challenge the ordinary functioning of class rule and create another reason for the state to rely on an auxiliary of far-right militants.

The “Anarchist Threat”

Within the first couple of days of the George Floyd protest in the San Francisco Bay Area, “calls to action” were posted online, some of which could easily be attributed to right-wing trolls. The “calls” have no political content and typically call for looting. These likely fake posts created local hysteria that has whipped up the right-wing reaction, up to and including armed citizen patrols, and contributed to a wave of curfews and other restrictions on freedom of movement for activists.

Across the country, news articles have detailed the violent reactions in this environment of hysteria. Only recently, a multiracial family of four visiting Forks, Washington, was confronted by cars full of people, some with semiautomatic weapons, spouting allegations that they were Antifa. There have also been social media posts alleging buses full of Antifa protesters coming to local areas. These posts are tailored to even rural counties throughout the country. These social media posts seems to be in line with a white-supremacist strategy called accelerationism, which says that supremacists should foster polarization to “accelerate” its destruction of the current political order.

Tactics

Aside from the provocations launched through fake accounts, genuine anger has led to looting. This has led to renewed conversations on the Left about tactics. The article “In Defense of Looting,” published by the New Inquiry during a wave of “riot shaming” in the Ferguson Uprising, makes some very good points. Importantly, it shows that the distinction between violent and nonviolent protesters stems from a long-standing discourse about Black criminality and ignores that, historically, change has not come through nonviolence. The author correctly points out that the attention produced by property destruction reflects the primacy of private property for the rich. In this context, the author questions the often-repeated attack that “protesters are burning down their communities”:

Although you might hang out in it, how can a chain convenience store or corporate restaurant earnestly be part of anyone’s neighborhood? The same white liberals who inveigh against corporations for destroying local communities are aghast when rioters take their critique to its actual material conclusion.

But what is the usefulness of looting as a tactic? The article says that “it represents a material way … to help the community by providing a way for people to solve some of the immediate problems of poverty and by creating a space for people to freely reproduce their lives rather than doing so through wage labor.” This could be true at an individual level, but when we talk about a capitalist system and a state that serves the ruling class, we are talking about a question of power.

Spontaneous action like looting and rioting can help disrupt business as usual. Relying on spontaneous action, however, doesn’t get past pressuring those in power to alleviate the issue. Spontaneous action may get the ruling class to pay attention. It does not answer tactical questions like how to turn a temporary rebellion into a movement by bringing in new people. Riots bring increased attention to immediate grievances, which means funding for nonprofits, career opportunities, media appearances, and VIP visits; but by failing to address the root causes of the crisis, it results in a worsening condition for Black people.

At many protests, voting has been a major theme. In November, there will be elections for all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate, and, most notably, the presidency. Joe Biden likely hopes that this uprising can be captured to bring much-needed enthusiasm to his campaign. The election might be why demands like “Dismantle/Defund the Police” have gained popularity among some elected Democrats, at least in word.

If this election cycle is anything like 2016, the Democratic Party will be cautious not to offer concrete proposals, as was recommended in a memo to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. We must also be realistic and understand that no single election decides questions of power, and that the threat of fascism is not a short-term problem. The Democratic Party’s identity as a capitalist party, albeit one based in the labor and other social movements, means that it can not offer radical solutions willingly.

The risk of fascism highlights the need for a multiracial working-class movement. Though legal support, countersurveillance, and physical defense are important, it is essential to transform the current rebellion into a movement. The economic and social crisis can be exploited to grow the ranks of the Far Right, but it can also be used to build the workers’ movement. The Left can do more than demand the conviction of the four officers who murdered George Floyd. It can and must lay out a program that will address the root causes of the current crisis.

In Our Flag Stays Red (1948), Phil Piratin, an MP for the Communist Party of Great Britain, describes how the party used its tenant associations and trade union work in the 1930s and 1940s to undercut inroads by the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in his borough of Stephaney, London. The BUF, led by former Labor MP Osward Mosley, held meetings throughout the country and was making advances into working-class communities. The party organized unemployed workers in the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement and did work to strengthen the trade union movement. As well, the party famously organized counterdemonstrations like the one that led to the Battle of Cable Street on October 4, 1936.

The CP deduced that the BUF’s anti-Semitic propaganda struck a chord among some workers, but especially in areas of East London where people were living in miserable conditions and facing unemployment and low pay. The party organized demonstrations like the famous “Battle on Cable Street” that used direct action to limit the spread of the BUF and show that it could be defeated. They also organized in working-class areas where the BUF was creating a base. In the midst of its tenant organizing, the CP discovered that one of its families were members of the BUF. Piratin wrote,

I discovered that in both cases they were members of the BUF and obviously wanted no truck with us. The other was prepared to listen. We pointed out to them, so far as we could judge … that the bailiffs had the law on their side and the only thing to do was to prevent the bailiffs gaining access. This might mean a fight, but we convinced them that it would be worth while. … We called a meeting of as many tenants as possible in one of the rooms, put to them our proposals, and they agreed to make the fight. As a result of this solidarity the other family the next morning decided to take part. Meanwhile, in conversation, we asked this member of the BUF about to be evicted what the fascists had done for him. He said that he had raised the matter, but they had no intention of doing anything. This was a very valuable piece of information to be used by us in disillusioning many of the BUF supporters.

What this historical example shows is that we can undercut the basis of fascism before it forms by appealing to economic interests. This would be much easier if we had an actual left political party and left leadership in this country that could expose the limitations of right-wing populism and fascism. Unfortunately, in its absence we are left with milquetoast Democrats who dress in kente cloth and put forth Band-Aid reforms.

Conclusion

This historical example does not mean that socialists should reduce the unique oppression of the Black working class into a “secondary contradiction.” The anti-Blackness of capitalism is the skeleton key to unlocking all the contradictions of this system for ordinary working people. It exposes the role of the police and state violence in maintaining capital’s domination of society, it exposes how race and class determine who will die from the Covid-19 pandemic, and it exposes the primacy of property in our society.

This period brings profound opportunities and dangers. The crises that define this period have created openings for the Left to grow and challenge the legitimacy of traditional institutions of power and capitalism itself. Already a majority of Americans support the protests, and white Americans’ favorable perceptions of the police have dropped by 10 points to 61 percent. This is particularly noteworthy because “riots” in the United States typically cause pro-police beliefs to rise. But we must also be attuned to, and weave into our tactics, the unique conditions that exist today for the emergence of a fascist movement.

Anti-Black Police Terrorism

By Ameer Hasan Loggins

Republished from the author’s blog.

An email was leaked the other day. In it, the sender praised the police, and wrote that people protesting in honor of George Floyd were involved in a “terrorist movement.” I repeat, the writer wrote that the protesters were involved in a terrorist movement. The person responsible was the president of the Minneapolis Federation of Police — Lieutenant Bob Kroll. The same Kroll who was accused by four Black officers of openly wearing a “White Power badge” on his motorcycle jacket.

For eight minutes and 46 seconds we watched. For eight minutes and 46 fucking seconds we were forced to fix our eyes on George Floyd’s face buried into the asphalt, gasping for air, crying out for his deceased mother’s help — but no help came. We watched a dying man scream, “Tell my kids I love them,” to whomever was willing to listen. We watched Floyd bawl, “Please let me stand,” while two policemen pinned his handcuffed body to the ground. We watched as Officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on his neck until he could no longer cry out, “I can’t breathe.”

For eight minutes and 46 seconds…

We watched an act of terror.

We watched a man being terrorized.

We watched four officers, on camera, for eight minutes and 46 seconds, commit an anti-Black

act of domestic police-terrorism.

I was not an eyewitness, but I know what I witnessed.

What I saw, with my water-filled eyes, was not a case of mere excessive force. Nor was it simply an act of police brutality. There was something so much more precious than Floyd’s civil rights being violated. That language did not fit what I watched for eight minutes and 46 seconds. There was something morbidly perverse about how unbothered Officer Derek Chauvin was as he took Floyd’s life. There was no struggle. No sense of danger. Chauvin appeared to be at peace with his decision to lynch George Floyd.

I am calling the lynching of George Floyd an anti-Black act of domestic police-terrorism because that is what I witnessed. And I am doing so by employing the framing provided by the government of the land of the (un)free, home of the enslaved to make such a proclamation.

Section 802 of the USA PATRIOT Act defines domestic terrorism as an act that occurs primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States. It is an act that is dangerous to human life, that is intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or influence the government, by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping. The FBI adds that acts of domestic terrorism are, “violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.”

Minneapolis is within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.

George Floyd is a human being that had his life violently taken away. The four men who nonchalantly terrorized Floyd, are a part of a larger group of state-sponsored law enforcers. Law enforcers who throughout America have historically and contemporarily racially profiled and targeted Black civilian populations.

Some Americans have the birthright to view the police as protectors and peacekeepers. Some fully embrace the plethora of programs painting law enforcement as heroes, heroines, and damn near deities. I am not from that America. I am from the Othered side of America. Coming from where I’m from, the police protectors of the people is a fallacy. But it is a fallacy I am familiar with. It is a fallacy that is persistently pumped into the brains of Othered-American imaginations through copaganda. Film franchises like Beverly Hills Cop, Rush Hour, Big Momma’s House, and Bad Boys all are pro-police programing. But those movies do not mirror the real-life horror films being captured on cellphones and shared through social media. We are watching Black civilians being put to death in public execution videos. And the executioners are the police.

I repeat…

For eight minutes and 46 seconds, we watched four officers, on camera, commit an anti-Black act of domestic police-terrorism.

It may come as a shock to some that I am calling the police terrorists, and their anti-Black actions acts of domestic terrorism. I am diagnosing what the police do to Black folks acts of terror because it is the truth.

I am calling it police-terrorism because I need you to come to

a

complete

stop.

I need you to critically reflect and decolonize the context in which you engage with the term terrorism within itself. It reminds me of Malcolm X asking a room packed full of Black folks, one of the most crucial questions I have ever heard. The question Brother Malcolm asked was, “Who taught you [Black people] to hate yourself?” With that question in mind, I would ask, who taught you what terrorism can be imagined as being? Who taught you which individuals and groups gets the dishonor of being labeled as a terrorist? Former White House Task Force Deputy Director on Terrorism in the Reagan administration, Edward Peck said that terrorism and terrorist are, “in the eye of the beholder.”

I am looking at police-terrorism through the eyes of a Black man.

I am looking at the police the long memory of the Black experience in America.

I am looking at policing through the Black gaze.

Policing units and individuals have terrorized Black people in the United States as far back as the slave patrols and night watches, and continue to the present. When bell hooks said, “Black folks have, from slavery on, shared in conversation with one another a ‘special’ knowledge of whiteness gleaned from close scrutiny of white people,” some of that special knowledge was, and still is, dedicated to surviving encounters with the police. That special knowledge is passed down from the elders to the young folks when they reach a certain point in physical maturity. My elders called it, “lookin’ grown.” It was an acknowledgement that I clearly was not an adult, but in the eyes of all (citizens and law enforcement) invested in policing my Black boy body, I looked older. I looked less innocent. I looked criminal.

I looked killable in the eyes of those policing me.

Black parents are forced to pass down special knowledge with their children about how to hide in the shadows and the shade to avoid the adultifying policing gaze. What routes to take coming home. What clothes to wear. What tone to speak in. How to reach for your wallet. It’s all a part of the talk to try and teach your child how to survive the unfortunate potentiality of being terrorized by the police.

The predictability of police terrorism took the lives of Oscar Grant, Aiyana Jones, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Kathryn Johnston, Kayla Moore, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and countless others. The randomness of these people reminds the broader Black community that as long as you are Black and breathing, the police are willing to steal your last breath.

While the public debate has largely focused on the appalling injustice of state-sponsored terror against individual Black folks, an additional, overlooked injustice is taking place. It is the collective consequence of seeing individuals that look like you, or someone that you love lying defenseless and dead in the streets. It is when an individual being terrorized is converted into communal terror. Police-terrorism spreads acute fear, among the whole Black community. The people who are wronged are not only those who are killed, but also their Black neighbors who witness the terror through their windows. The Black bystander filming Black death on their cellphones. The Black families who bury their breathless bodies afterwards. They feel a justifiable fear or terror of the police.

This fear is not incidental, but intentional.

From the Black gaze, the police conduct themselves as a state sponsored group of, “racially motivated violent extremists,” that target the Black community, which according to the FBI, makes them a “national threat priority.” But American history has shown that protecting Black bodies from the threat of domestic terrorism is not a priority.

Reminder…It is 2020 and lynching is still not a federal hate crime in America.

Reminder…It is 2020 and the Ku Klux Klan are not classified as a terrorist organization in America.

This is America.

And in America, the police are permitted to treat Black people with, what James Baldwin would call, a special disfavor, because of the color of our skin. It is in this special disfavor that we can have our doors kicked in by the police, and be shot to death in our sleep. It is this special disfavor that can lead to the police shooting us in the back, as we run with the same feet as our enslaved ancestors fleeing from Slave Patrolmen. It is this special disfavor that can lead to the police gunning our children down in less than two seconds, while they’re playing outside. It is this special disfavor that made a policeman rape 13 Black women, and that same special disfavor made those Black women believe that no one would believe them. It is this same special disfavor that renders the souls of Black folks breathless, while we are still physically alive. It is this special disfavor that made the world stop for eight minutes and 46 seconds to witness an act of anti-Black domestic police terrorism.

Group Violence as it Relates to Lynching and Police Violence

[Photo credit: Getty Images]

By V. Alexis

What is Group Violence?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How this Applies to Lynching

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

How this Applies to Police Violence

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

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

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

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

References

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Black America, Don't Let Them Fool You: We Cannot Vote Ourselves Out Of This Problem

By Christian Gines

Voting is not the way to solve anything for black people, oppressed people. First, reform does not work in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Every issue we hear talked about on the news, "this [issue] disproportionately affects people of color, women, the LGBTQ community, etc." This statement shouldn't be that mind-boggling. This system isn't made to benefit us in the first place, so why would a change in that system work in the first place. When a car breaks down, you put in new parts. If you continue to put new parts in a car, it will eventually break down. That is all these reformist polices are doing. If you're not abolishing the system, then you're just allowing the car to keep on going with new parts that will enable the car to run on fumes until it breaks down. Calls to abolish and defund the police are already being coopted into reformist policies to appease the ruling class. It shouldn't be that radical to call for an abolishment of a system that kills over 1,000 people a year despite being "reformed."

Second, voting is to subdue the masses to choosing between two evils and allowing them to decide what's acceptable and what's not acceptable in the realm of discussion. As Noam Chomsky eloquently put it, "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that they have free thought, but the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate." As a people, we have been taught and sold that voting is the only way to make a change in society. From talking to my parents, family members, and community members doing the peak of the 2020 Democratic primary, and now they are sold on voting as our only means of creating change. Saying we have to make the change within the system. Their stance on voting has been fed to them for so long that they will fight you to the grave on this, but it is so ahistorical that we need to disprove it today. Our ancestors didn't have the right to vote, and they achieved the abolition of slavery, end of segregation, right to citizenship, right to work, right to own property, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the removal of Jim Crow Legislation, the right to vote.

When you look at any change that has happened within the The US, the change has come from outside the system, not within. As James Connolly Said, "Governments in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class." When we vote, we are voting for whoever the ruling class has told us to vote for. Whether through endless spending with SuperPAC's or "black faces in high places," telling us who to vote for, we have no say in Democracy. As Malcolm X said, "Democracy is Hypocrisy." Voting is the way that the empire can keep us under control and keep themselves in power. The Black Panther Party couldn't vote, yet they had a Free Food, Free Housing, Free Medical Care, Free Busing, Free Clothes, and 50 other programs that we hear white liberals advocate for today. They were doing that within their community, and that's why Herbert Hoover fought to get rid of them. The BPP's initial government surveillance started because of their Free Breakfast Program. The settlers have taught us that's their way of governance is the best way, and we have fallen for that. We believe that we, the masses, and oppressed people can vote and change the system that was set up with the thought that either we weren't citizens, we weren't humans, or that we were too dumb, so there should be a safeguard.

The ruling class had a chance to maybe postpone a revolution in our lifetime with the compromise candidacy of Bernie Sanders. Sanders, running on a political revolution, had a tremendous amount of support from young people in general, but especially young black people. With his calls for Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, and other social democratic policies, they had a chance to satisfy the short term wants of most Americans. They had an opportunity to assuage the masses for a while, as they did with FDR's candidacy. The ruling class, though, was so caught up with their money and profits that they failed to see that Bernie Sanders was offering them. They were so scared that he would tax them that they colluded against him as they did in 2016 to ensure that their establishment candidate won. Now we are stuck choosing between the lesser of two evils again. We have one person who has been accused of sexual harassment and assault, an architect of mass incarceration (who refuses to apologize for it), and full of blunders. On the other hand, we have Donald Trump. I remember when people were saying that they will vote for Joe Biden over Trump because at least we can push him left. Now, this isn't an essay on whether you should vote or not, but I will say that we have had weeks of protest worldwide, and Joe Biden has not even inched to the left. He doesn't support abolishing or defunding the police department. Even Bernie Sanders said that he doesn't support defunding the police and says that they need more funding. This was the candidate who claimed that he was for the people, and he doesn't even support our demands. The Democratic Party has sold out black people for so long that it shouldn't be controversial not to support them, but we continuously have for decades. 

The façade that we can vote our problems away is one that we cannot fall victim to today. We have tried that time and time again, and what happens? The politicians run on something, go in there and don't do anything for our community. Black and white politicians alike have sold us out time and time again. To get real change, we must stay in the streets. As you see in Minneapolis, with protesting, burning, rioting, and looting, the change will come. If you support non-violent or violent protest is your prerogative. If you support the liberation of the black community and think that we must vote to get Trump out of office, that is your choice. But one thing is for sure. We cannot vote ourselves out of this situation because if we think that is the way to solve our problems, we will end up in the same place we started.

Christian Gines is a published student writer, poet, and activist whose writings discuss race within the black community and its effect on black youth.

A High Road for the 21st Century

[Photo credit: Black Socialists in America]

By Russell Weaver

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

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

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

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

The Four Essential Pillars of High Road-21

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

Pillar 1: The High Road is Anti-Racist

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

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

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

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

Pillar 2: The High Road is Restorative and Reparative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pillar 3: The High Road is Cooperative and Solidaristic

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

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

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

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

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

Pillar 4: The High Road is Prefigurative

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

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

High Road-21 and the Dual Power Theory of Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take Action

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

[5] Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[15] Akuno.

[16] Ibid.

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

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

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

Juneteenth and Abolitionist Dreams

By Justin C. Mueller

Republished from the author's blog.

Once, people dreamed of the end of slavery. Such dreams were needed, because utopias don’t birth themselves, and a world without chains was utopian before it was imagined to be inevitable. In the US, which holds 25% of the world’s prisoners, it still is.

We mark the culmination of that past utopia with the commemoration of Juneteenth, honoring when chattel slavery was finally ended in all former Confederate states. The Union Major General Gordon Granger landed in Texas, the last slaver state bastion, on June 19, 1865 with enough military power to finally enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. The Republic of Texas was already established in large part as a militant pro-slavery revolt by white settlers against the Mexican empire and it’s ban on slavery, but as the luck of the Confederacy dwindled during the war, slavers had further migrated to Texas. Fully a quarter of whites held slaves by the time Granger landed, and 30% of the Texas population were slaves.

Slavery would not die out on it’s own. It took centuries of slave resistance, abolitionist organizing, and a bloody civil war and military occupation of the South for chattel slavery and the slaver class to finally be dismantled. The re-creation of informal slavery through the Black Codes and convict leasing, debt bondage, and exploitative sharecropping conditions immediately after the Civil War, as well as the steady introduction and spread of Jim Crow laws after the end of Reconstruction led to the retrenchment of white supremacy. Yet, Juneteenth is an important holiday commemorating a rare moment of victory, however incomplete, in the dismantling of one of the systems of racial dominance and inequality that has defined the character of the United States and citizenship within it since its creation.

Utopias are won with hope and struggle, and their commemorations are time machines for drawing out their connection to the present and lessons for the future. As a memorial for the victory of a past utopia of abolition, Juneteenth can help us think about today’s struggles for abolition and the unfinished project of dismantling white supremacy. It can also, more immediately, help fuel the dreams needed to carry these utopias to fruition. We could take away many lessons, but here are three that I think are particularly important:

Lesson One: Extremism can be a more effective tool for producing a just world than moderation or compromise. The uncompromising firebrands for slavery abolition, like John Brown and Wendell Phillips, were widely castigated as impractical utopians at best and dangerously insane fanatics at worst. Alongside the persistent refusal of slaves to submit quietly to their enslavement, radical abolitionists’ firm refusal to compromise on their principles or accept “reasonable” electoral compromise with slavers played a key role in escalating the conflict over chattel slavery to the point where it could conceivably be dismantled. It was only after the smashing of the slaver regimes that the need for them to be uncompromisingly smashed could be seen as obvious or common sense. The political common sense of today is built on the dreams of dead radicals and past utopias.

The abolitionists of today who demand an end to prisons and policing are thought of as similarly unreasonable or extremist. Yet, it is by making demands that go beyond what is considered acceptable to the world as it currently is that new worlds and new boundaries of what counts as reasonable can come into being. Even when extremists don’t succeed, stridently advocating and organizing around ideas that are beyond the pale can shift what counts as a permissible reform. Remember that it is largely because of their fear of Malcolm X and the nascent, more militant Black power and Black nationalist movements that the white U.S. leadership of the 1960s eventually considered Martin Luther King, Jr. to be a comparatively safer figure to bargain with on civil rights legislation.

There are times when compromise is important in order to institutionalize political demands, but at other times compromise can be detrimental to the process of organizing people to push for comprehensive systemic change. Regardless of what a more strategically necessary at a given moment, it isn’t compromise in itself that brings about substantive or even incremental transformation.

Lesson Two: We must demand and expect more than utopia. This may seem absurd. Isn’t it unreasonable enough to demand utopia? Utopias, though, don’t require us to be naive. They can be used as standards of values and expectations that allow us, by contrast with the current world, to critically assess and understand the world as it actually is. Utopias are well-developed hopes and weaponized dreams, and they can be powerful. But, what is often forgotten about them is that they can be achieved. As underwhelming as the state of the world is today, it should be understood as the outcome of the victory of many people’s utopias, and not just the utopias of villains.

We should expect and demand utopia, not because we can’t achieve it, but precisely because we can, and will then need to demand more and continue struggling for more once those victories have been secured. Demanding a static utopia alone runs the risk of disillusionment, but being infinitely demanding of endlessly renewed utopian dreams both orients our struggles and protects us against disappointment at not achieving a static notion of a “perfect” world.

Lesson Three: Abolitionism today must be both a negative demand and a positive vision for what alternative futures are possible. Many white abolitionists were perfectly content to retire from active political life after the end of chattel slavery, even with the continuation and emergence of new forms of white supremacy and Black unfreedom. For some, like the early white settlers of Oregon, their abolitionism was even fueled by their commitments to white supremacy. Opposition is not enough. Abolitionist politics today requires not just negative opposition, such as being against incarceration or policing, but also requires what Angela Davis describes as the creation of positive social, economic, political, cultural, and institutional conditions that would make these violent institutions obsolete. Achieving these abolitionist conditions requires a utopian vision in order to guide people’s struggles and practically achieve their goals.

***

The original Juneteenth marked the utopian achievement of a negative abolition, but also the beginning of a long struggle for the achievement of a new, positive vision wherein oppression could be rendered obsolete. We must remember our past utopias, then. Not just to learn from them, mind you, but also to appreciate that they aren’t even truly past. They are ready-at-hand palettes bequeathed by the struggles of those who fought for better worlds before us, and from which we can and will find inspiration to paint the utopias of the future.

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

By Blake Simons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In struggle.

*

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

Law Enforcement Continues the Racist Legacy it Was Born From

By Ben Luongo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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

What's Next for the Anti-Racist Movement?

By T.R. Whitworth

Republished from Independent Socialist Group.

In my opinion, the young generation of whites, blacks, browns, whatever else there is, you’re living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there’s got to be a change. People in power have misused it, and now there has to be a change and a better world has to be built… And I, for one, will join in with anyone—I don’t care what color you are—as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth.

- Malcolm X, 1964

The recent murders by police of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the lynching of Ahmaud Arbery have reignited the anti-racist movement in the U.S. The current situation is eerily similar to what we saw in 2014, when Michael Brown’s murder by Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, sparked protests that quickly spread around the country. Then, as now, the protests were met with fierce repression and violence by highly militarized police forces. Then, as now, the mainstream media smeared—largely peaceful—protesters as rioters and looters in an effort to discredit the movement.

While the 2014 movement under the banner of Black Lives Matter was energetic and inspiring, like many past movements against police racism and brutality, it failed to materialize real systemic changes. The Obama Administration’s Justice Department begrudgingly carried out a few more investigations of corrupt and racist police departments, but even that minor reform was quickly rolled back by the Trump Administration. Body cameras for the police, a central demand of the 2014 movement, have only been implemented in a patchwork fashion, and even where wearing one is official policy, officers frequently turn them off without consequence.

Encouragingly, the current emerging movement is even larger and more energetic than in 2014. Protests have taken place across all 50 states, many protests continuing for days. The protests are characterized by instinctive multi-racial and multi-ethnic solidarity against racism and police violence. And public support for the movement is high. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, “64% of American adults were ‘sympathetic to people who are out protesting right now,’ while 27% said they were not and 9% were unsure.” Given the massive support for and participation of youth in the movement, this 64% figure is probably a conservative estimate.

The ruling class has been shaken to its core by this uprising, and the heavy-handed repressive response of police departments and the Trump Administration has so far backfired, adding steam to the protests instead of extinguishing them. We’ve seen a series of concessions in past days, granted under pressure from the protests. All four Minneapolis police officers involved in George Floyd’s murder have been fired and indicted. Six Atlanta police officers have been criminally charged for using excessive force on protesters. And institutions across the country, especially universities and colleges, have publicly severed ties with their cities’ police departments.

But the current anti-racist protest movement lacks organization, leadership, and democratic decision-making structures. Without these, it is vulnerable to fizzling out without achieving lasting change, as people succumb to protest fatigue. It is also vulnerable to being co-opted and de-radicalized by self-appointed “leaders” who would rather celebrate cops hugging black protesters than fight for systemic change.

What we need to win

The systemic changes we need include an end to racial profiling, “broken windows” policing, “stop and frisk” policies, the racist War on Drugs, and the criminalization of poverty—which disproportionately affects black communities. All police officers who espouse any form of racist or white supremacist ideas should be fired without question.

The assault on our democratic right to peaceful protest must end. The military, including the National Guard, should be immediately withdrawn from our cities and streets. The use of tear gas, rubber bullets, flash bangs, and riot gear in response to protests should be banned. We should demand the immediate release of all arrested protesters and the dropping of their charges, as well as the release of former Black Panthers and all other imprisoned black liberation activists.

All killer cops, past and present, should be prosecuted. It needs to be easier to fire police officers with excessive force complaints and criminally charge and convict killer cops. District attorneys’ offices have shown that they are not capable of prosecuting the same police officers that they work with on a daily basis and rely on to testify in court. Police departments have proven that they are not capable of investigating themselves.

We need community control of the police through democratically elected committees of workers and community members with hiring and firing power, the ability to review and create policy and budgets, and authority to conduct independent investigations into cases of police misconduct.

Police unions like the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association and the International Brotherhood of Police Officers should be decertified. Law enforcement unions are not like other unions. The main role of police in the U.S. is to serve the will of the capitalist class, including by enforcing racist and anti-worker policies, repressing strikes and labor activity, and putting down protests. Police unions exist to protect police officers from facing any consequences for their actions (up to and including murder). They make it difficult to discipline or fire bad cops and they oppose any public oversight of the police.

Police departments across the country must be demilitarized and their budgets reduced. Cities must stop wasting public funds on military technology and weaponry and invest the money instead in affordable housing, public transit, schools, and other social programs and services in order to make a dent in the poverty that disproportionately affects black workers. Even many police themselves complain that they are expected to do the job of social workers. Let’s take some of the public money currently spent on police budgets and use it to hire actual social workers instead.

Finally, we need a political party—a workers’ party—that will offer a real alternative to racism and austerity. Both the Democratic and Republican Parties have failed for decades to meaningfully improve the conditions under which we live: widespread poverty, entrenched racism, lack of access to decent education, housing, jobs, and healthcare. Both parties play off of each other and seek to divide workers along racial lines—as well as by nationality, gender, sexual identity, etc. Despite their more “progressive” rhetoric of racial justice, when in office the Democrats have disappointed again and again. Just look at cities like Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and Minneapolis, where decades of Democratic Party rule have not resulted in reforms to policing, and in many cases have actually passed some of the worst police policies, including “stop and frisk.” In fact, Democratic Party controlled major cities have been the epicenters of the majority of the murders of unarmed black people by police for decades.

How to win these demands and more

To achieve these needed systemic changes will require a high level of organization and coordination. The ruling class and their police and military forces are organized and we should be too. We should immediately form neighborhood committees, with elected members—workers, youth, and community members—and democratic structures, to decide future actions and tactics and develop a program with clear demands to direct the movement. These neighborhood committees should elect delegates to city-wide committees, which should in turn build links state- and nation-wide.

These elected neighborhood committees should prepare plans, train volunteers, and collect supplies and equipment for dealing with tear gas, rubber bullets, “kettling,” and other aggressive police tactics at protests and demonstrations. They should be ready to assess situations, make tough calls, and put forward proposals in the heat of the moment for how best to keep protesters and neighborhoods safe from police and right-wing aggression. They could also organize neighborhood patrols to document police interactions with community members.

Labor unions need to get involved and take a strong stand against police brutality and in support of the protests. Issuing public solidarity statements is a good first step, but unions should go further by organizing workplace meetings and discussions on the movement, and mobilizing members to form union contingents at protests. Unions should also use their legal resources to defend protesters. Representing 11.6% of all U.S. workers—and 12.7% of black workers—unions are among the most diverse institutions of the working class. Solidarity against racism and all forms of oppression must be a key point of struggle for the whole workers’ movement.

Protesting can only be one part of our organizing strategy. Protests are effective to the extent that they call attention to the issue, demonstrate public outrage or support, and disrupt “business as usual.” But ultimately the ruling class only cares about actions that affect their bottom line—their ability to make profit. We should begin to organize for 24-hour general strikes of workers in all sectors in cities across the country to win the movement’s demands by putting further economic pressure on the bosses who are already staggering from the blows of the health and economic crisis. They will quickly get the message to their paid-off politicians that it’s time to grant substantive reforms.

Unions should play a key role in calling for and planning any general strikes, but both union and non-union workers should participate. If the union bureaucrats won’t do it, rank-and-file union members and workers should take up the planning themselves (and then elect new union leaders prepared to genuinely represent their class, not suck up to the bosses).

We need to build a truly mass movement to unite workers of all races in the struggle against capitalism and the racist inequality and violence that the system was founded upon. Only a multi-racial working-class movement has the power to win demands like demilitarizing the police, convicting killer cops, ending the War on Drugs, and community control of the police.

Only a movement that unites workers and youth regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, or any other form of oppression, can win guaranteed jobs, housing, healthcare, education, and a living wage for all. These reforms can be paid for by taxing the rich and nationalizing big corporations, as a step toward ultimately ending capitalism and replacing it with a democratic and egalitarian socialist society with power firmly in the hands of the working class. As MLK, Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton all came to conclude, the only way to defeat racism is to defeat capitalism.