Study, Fast, Train, Fight: The Roots of Black August

By Joe Tache

Republished from Liberation School.

In August 1619, enslaved Africans touched foot in the first permanent English settlement in what is now the United States. The centuries since witnessed the development of a racial system more violent, extractive, and deeply entrenched than any other in human history. Yet where there is oppression, there is resistance. Since 1619, Black radicals and revolutionaries have taken bold collective action in pursuit of their freedom, threatening the fragile foundations of exploitation upon which the United States is built. These heroic struggles have won tremendous victories, but they have also produced martyrs—heroes who have been imprisoned and killed because of their efforts to transform society.

“Black August” is honored every year to commemorate the fallen freedom fighters of the Black Liberation Movement, to call for the release of political prisoners in the United States, to condemn the oppressive conditions of U.S. prisons, and to emphasize the continued importance of the Black Liberation struggle. Observers of Black August commit to higher levels of discipline throughout the month. This can include fasting from food and drink, frequent physical exercise and political study, and engagement in political struggle. In short, the principles of Black August are: “study, fast, train, fight.”

George Jackson and the origins of Black August

George Jackson was a Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party while he was incarcerated in San Quentin Prison in California. Jackson was an influential revolutionary and his assassination at the hands of a San Quentin prison guard was one of the primary catalysts for the inception of Black August.

A 19-year-old convicted of armed robbery, in 1961 George Jackson was sentenced to a prison term of “1-to-life,” meaning prison administrators had complete and arbitrary control over the length of his sentence. He never lived outside of a prison again, spending the next 11 years locked up (seven and a half years of those in solitary confinement). In those 11 years—despite living in an environment of extreme racism, repression, and state control—George Jackson’s political fire was ignited, and he became an inspiration to the other revolutionaries of his generation.

Jackson was first exposed to radical politics by fellow inmate W.L. Nolen. With Nolen’s guidance, Jackson studied the works of many revolutionaries, including Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, Mao Tse-Tung, and Frantz Fanon. Nolen, Jackson, and other  prisoners dedicated themselves to raising political consciousness among the prisoners and to organizing their peers in the California prison system. They led study sessions on radical philosophy and convened groups like the Third World Coalition and started the San Quentin Prison chapter of the Black Panther Party. Jackson even published two widely read books while incarcerated: Soledad Brother and Blood in My Eye.

Unfortunately, if predictably, these radical organizers soon found themselves in the cross-hairs of the California prison establishment. In 1970, W.L. Nolen—who had been transferred to Soledad prison and planned to file a lawsuit against its superintendent—was assassinated by a prison guard. Days later, George Jackson (also now in Soledad Prison) and fellow radical prisoners Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette were accused of killing a different prison guard in retaliation for Nolen’s death. The three were put on trial and became known as the Soledad Brothers.

That year, when it was clear that George Jackson would likely never be released from prison, his 17-year-old brother Jonathan Jackson staged an armed attack on the Marin County Courthouse to demand the Soledad Brothers’ immediate release. Jonathan Jackson enlisted the help of three additional prisoners—James McClain, William Christmas, and Ruchell Magee—during the offensive. Jonathan Jackson, McClain, and Christmas were all killed, while Magee was shot and re-arrested. Ruchell Magee, now 80 years old, is currently one of the longest held political prisoners in the world.

On August 21, 1971, just over a year after the courthouse incident, a prison guard assassinated George Jackson. The facts regarding his death are disputed. Prison authorities alleged that Jackson smuggled a gun into the prison and was killed while attempting to escape. On the other hand, literary giant James Baldwin wrote, “no Black person will ever believe that George Jackson died the way they tell us he did.”

While the particular circumstances of Jackson’s death will likely forever remain contested, two facts are clear: his death was ultimately a political assassination, and his revolutionary imprint can’t be extinguished. Through the efforts and sacrifice of George and Jonathan Jackson, Nolen, McClain, Christmas, Magee and countless other revolutionaries, the 1970s became a decade of widespread organizing and political struggle within prisons. Prisoners demanded an end to racist and violent treatment at the hands of prison guards, better living conditions, and increased access to education and adequate medical care. Tactics in these campaigns included lawsuits, strikes, and mass rebellions. The most notable example may be the Attica Prison rebellion, which occurred in New York State just weeks after George Jackson was murdered. In protest of the dehumanizing conditions they were subjected to, about 1,500 Attica Prison inmates released a manifesto with their demands and seized control of the prison for four days, beginning on September 9, 1971. Under orders from Governor Nelson Rockefeller, law enforcement authorities stormed Attica on September 12 and killed at least 29 incarcerated individuals. None of the prisoners had guns.

This is the context out of which Black August was born in 1979. It was first celebrated in California’s San Quentin prison, where George Jackson, W.L. Nolen, James McClain, Willam Christmas and Ruchell Magee were all once held. The first Black August commemorated the previous decade of courageous prison struggle, as well as the centuries of Black resistance that preceded and accompanied it.

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Political prisoners and the prison struggle

Observers of Black August call for the immediate release of all political prisoners in the United States. That the US government even holds political prisoners is a fact they attempt to obscure and deny. In reality, dozens of radicals from organizations such as the Black Panther Party, the Black Liberation Army, the American Indian Movement, and MOVE have been imprisoned for decades as a result of their political activity. As Angela Davis, who was at one time the most high profile political prisoner in the US, explains:

“There is a distinct and qualitative difference between one breaking a law for one’s own individual self-interest and violating it in the interests of a class of people whose oppression is expressed either directly or indirectly through that particular law. The former might be called criminal (though in many instances he is a victim), but the latter, as a reformist or revolutionary, is interested in universal social change. Captured, he or she is a political prisoner… In this country, however, where the special category of political prisoners is not officially acknowledged, the political prisoner inevitably stands trial for a specific criminal offense, not for a political act… In all instances, however, the political prisoner has violated the unwritten law which prohibits disturbances and upheavals in the status quo of exploitation and racism.”

Prisons in the United States are a form of social control which serve to maintain the status quo of oppression. Over the last few decades, prisons have become an increasingly important tool for the US ruling class. Prisons not only quarantine revolutionaries, but also those segments of the population who have become increasingly expendable to the capitalist system as globalized production, deindustrialization, and technological automation decrease the overall need for labor-power. These shifts, which began in earnest in the 1970s, have hit Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities the hardest, as exemplified by the sky high unemployment and incarceration rates those communities face. These groups are also historically the most prone to rebellion. Angela Davis noted in 1971 that as a result of these trends, “prisoners—especially Blacks, Chicanos and Puerto Ricans—are increasingly advancing the proposition that they are political prisoners. They contend that they are political prisoners in the sense that they are largely the victims of an oppressive politico-economic order.”

Though that definition of political prisoner is unorthodox, it illustrates the political and economic nature of criminalization. This is why observers of Black August connect the fight to free “revolutionary” political prisoners to the broader struggle against US prisons. Mass incarceration is a symptom of the same system that political prisoners have dedicated their lives towards fighting.

As increasing numbers of the US working class are “lumpenized,” or pushed out of the formal economy and stable employment, the potential significance of political struggle among the unemployed and incarcerated increases. George Jackson wrote in Blood in My Eye that “prisoners must be reached and made to understand that they are victims of social injustice. This is my task working from within. The sheer numbers of the prisoner class and the terms of their existence make them a mighty reservoir of revolutionary potential.”

George Jackson’s own journey is a perfect example of that revolutionary potential. Jackson didn’t arrive in prison a ready-made revolutionary. He had a history of petty crime and was apolitical during his first years in prison. He would have been dismissed by many people in our society as a “thug.” But comrades who knew that he held the potential inherent in every human being found him and took him in. They helped him understand his personal experiences within the context of capitalism and white supremacy. In turn, George Jackson dedicated his life to doing the same for others incarcerated individuals.

Black August today

August, more than any other month, has historically carried the weight of the Black Liberation struggle. Of course, enslaved Africans were first brought to British North America in August 1619. Just over 200 years later, in August 1831, Nat Turner led the most well-known rebellion of enslaved people in US history. This historical significance carried into the 20th century, when both the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the Watts Rebellion—an explosive uprising against racist policing in Los Angeles—occurred in August during the 1960s.

Even today, the month remains significant in the struggle. John Crawford, Michael Brown, and Korryn Gaines were three Black Americans who were murdered in high-profile cases of police brutality; Crawford and Brown in August 2014, and Gaines in August 2016. Their deaths have been part of the impetus for a revived national movement against racist police brutality. Finally, on August 21, 2018, the 47 year anniversary of George Jackson’s death, thousands of U.S. prisoners launched a national prison strike. They engaged in work stoppages, hunger strikes, and other forms of protests. The strike lasted until September 9, 47 years after the Attica Prison Uprising began. Like the Attica prisoners, the 2018 prison strike organizers put forth a comprehensive list of demands that exposed the oppression inherent to the U.S. prison system, and laid out a framework to improve their conditions.

Each of these historical and contemporary events reveal a truth that the Black radical tradition has always recognized: there can be no freedom for the masses of Black people within the white supremacist capitalist system. The fight for liberation is just that: a fight. Since its inception in San Quentin, Black August has been an indispensable part of that fight.

In the current political moment, when some misleaders would have us bury the radical nature of Black resistance and instead prop up reformist politics that glorify celebrity, wealth, and assimilation into the capitalist system, Black August is as important as ever. It connects Black people to our history and serves as a reminder that our liberation doesn’t lie in the hands of Black billionaires, Black police officers, or Black Democratic Party officials. Those “Black faces in high places” simply place a friendly face on the system that oppresses the masses of Black people in the United States and around the world, often distorting symbols of Black resistance along the way. Black liberation lies, as it always has, in the hands of the conscious and organized masses. Study, train, fight, and in the words of George Jackson, “discover your humanity and your love of revolution.”

W.E.B. Du Bois and the Meaning of Progress: Revisiting "The Souls of Black Folk" on Its 120-Year Anniversary

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

Aristotle famously starts his Metaphysics with the claim that “all men by nature desire to know.”[1] For Dubois, if there are a people in the U.S. who have immaculately embodied this statement, it is black folk. In Black Reconstruction, for instance, Du Bois says that “the eagerness to learn among American Negroes was exceptional in the case of a poor and recently emancipated folk.”[2] In The Souls of Black Folk, he highlights “how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn.”[3] This was a stark contrast with the “white laborers,” who unfortunately, as Du Bois notes, “did not demand education, and saw no need of it, save in exceptional cases.” [4]

Out of the black community’s longing to know, and out of this longing taking material and organizational form through the Freedman’s Bureau, came one of the most important accomplishments of that revolutionary period of reconstruction – the public schools and black colleges. It was these schools and colleges, Du Bois argued, which educated black leaders, and ultimately, prevented the rushed revolts and vengeance which could have driven the mass of black people back into the old form of slavery. [5]

This year marks the 120th anniversary of Dubois's masterful work, The Souls of Black Folk. In this essay, I will be concentrating my analysis on the fourth chapter, titled "Of the Meaning of Progress," where I will peruse how the subjects of education and progress are presented within a greatly racialized American capitalism.

The Tragedy of Josie

The chapter retells a story which is first set a dozen or so years after the counterrevolution of property in 1876. It is embedded in the context of the previous two decades of post-emancipation lynchings, second class citizenship, and poverty for those on the dark side of the veil.

Du Bois is a student at Fisk and is looking around in Tennessee for a teaching position. After much unsuccessful searching, he finally finds a small school shut out from the world by forests and hills. He was told about this school by Josie, the central character of the narrative. Along with a white fellow who wished to create a white school, Du Bois rode to the commissioner’s house to secure the school. After having the commissioner accept his proposal and invite him to dinner, the “shadow of the veil” fell upon him as they ate first, and he ate alone. [6]

Upon arriving at the school, he noticed its destitute condition – a stark contrast to the schools he was used to. The students, while poor and largely uneducated, expressed an insatiable longing to learn – Josie especially had her appetite for knowledge “hover like a star above … her work and worry, and she,” Du Bois says, “studied doggedly.”[7] While certainly having a “desire to rise out of [her] condition by means of education,” Josie’s quest for knowledge also went deeper than that.[8] It was, in a sense, an existential longing for education – a deeply human enterprise upon which a life-or-death struggle for being fully human ensued. “Education and work,” as Du Bois had noted in the Talented Tenth, “are the levers to uplift a people;” but “education must not simply teach work-it must teach Life.”[9] “It is the trained, living human soul,” Du Bois argues, “cultivated and strengthened by long study and thought, that breathes the real breath of life into boys and girls and makes them human, whether they be black or white, Greek, Russian or American.”[10]

Josie understood this well. She strove for that kind of human excellence and virtue the Greeks referred to as arete. But her quest was stopped in its track by the shadow of the veil; by the reality of poverty, superexploited labor, and racism which characterized the dominant social relations for the black worker.

A decade after he completed his teaching duties, Du Bois returned to that small Tennessee town. What he encountered warranted the questioning of progress itself. Josie’s family, which at one point he considered himself an adopted part of, had gone through a “heap of trouble.”[11] Lingering in destitute poverty, her brother was arrested for stealing, and her sister, “flushed with the passion of youth … brought home a nameless child.”[12] As the eldest child, Josie took it upon herself to sustain the family. She was overworked, and this was killing her; first spiritually, then materially. As Du Bois says, Josie “shivered and worked on, with the vision of schooldays all fled, with a face wan and tired,—worked until, on a summer's day, someone married another; then Josie crept to her mother like a hurt child, and slept—and sleeps.”[13]

In his youth Du Bois had asked: “to what end” might “[we] seek to strengthen character and purpose” if “people have nothing to eat or, to wear?”[14] Josie’s insatiable thirst for knowledge required leisure time, i.e., time that is unrestricted by the labor one does for their subsistence, nor by the weariness and fatigue which lingers after. Aristotle had already noted that it “was when almost all the necessities of life and the things that make for comfort and recreation had been secured,” that philosophy and the pursuit of science “in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end… began to be sought.”[15] Josie’s quest for knowledge, her longing for enlightenment, was made impossible by capitalist relations of production, and the racialized form they take in the U.S. As dilemmas within her family developed, she was forced to spend every ounce of her energy on working to sustain the meagre living conditions of the household. Afterall, as Du Bois eloquently says, “to be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”[16]

It is true, as Kant said, that “all that is required for enlightenment is freedom;” but it is not true that, while being necessary, “the freedom for man to make public use of his reason in all matters” is sufficient![17] This freedom presupposes another – the freedom to have the necessaries of life guaranteed for oneself. What good can be made of the right to free speech by the person too famished to think properly? What good is this right to those homeless souls with constricted jaws and clenched teach in the winter? The artifices intended to keep people down, as Kant calls it, are also material – that is, they refer not only to the absence of opportunities for civic and political participation, but also to the absence of economic opportunities for securing the necessities of life.[18]

The great writer can emanate universal truths from their portraits of individuals. Du Bois accomplished this with Josie, who is a concrete manifestation of black folk’s trajectory post-emancipation. In both Josie and black folk at the turn of the century, the longing to learn, the thirst for knowledge, is met by the desert of poverty common to working folk, especially those on the dark side of the veil, where opportunity doesn’t make the rounds. As an unfree, “segregated servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges,” it is not only the bodies, but the spirit and minds of black folk’s humanity which were under attack.[19] It is a natural result of a cold world – one that beats black souls and bodies down with racist violence, superexploitation, and poverty – that a “shadow of a vast despair” can hover over some black folk.[20] And yet, Du Bois argues, “democracy died save in the hearts of black folk;” and “there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes.”[21]

A Universally Dehumanizing System

Although intensified in the experience of poor and working class black folk – especially those in the U.S. – the crippling of working people’s humanity and intellect is a central component of the capitalist mode of life in general. This was already being observed by key thinkers of the 18th century Scottish enlightenment (e.g., Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, et. al.). For instance, in Smith’s magnus opus, The Wealth of Nations, he would argue that the development of the division of labor with modern industry created a class of “men whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations,” of which “no occasion to exert his understanding” occur, leaving them to “become as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”[22] “His dexterity at his own particular trade,” he argues, is “acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues.”[23] “In every improved and civilized society,” Smith observes, “this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it.”[24]

Writing almost a century later, and hence, having the opportunity of observing a more developed capitalist social totality, Marx and Engels saw that the degree of specialization acquired by the division of labor in manufacturing had even more profound dehumanizing and stupefying effects on the working class. “A labourer,” Marx argues, “who all his life performs one and the same simple operation, converts his whole body into the automatic, specialized implement of that operation.”[25] In echoing similar critiques brought forth by Ferguson and Smith, Marx explains how the worker’s productive activity is turned into “a mere appendage of the capitalist’s workshop,” and the laborer themself is converted into “a crippled monstrosity.”[26] It is a form of relationality which reduces working people to “spiritually and physically dehumanized beings.”[27] As Engels noted, capitalist manufacturing’s division of labor divides the human being and produces a “stunting of man.”[28] Alongside commodity production is the production of fractured human beings whose abilities are reduced to the activities they perform at work.

This mental and physical crippling of the worker under the capitalist process of production provides an obstacle not only to their human development, but to their struggle for liberation itself. No successful struggle against the dominant order can take place without educating, without changing the minds and hearts, of the masses being mobilized in the struggle. Education aimed at the acquisition of truth is revolutionary, that is why ignorance is an indispensable component of capitalist control. The “Socratic spirit,” as I have previously argued, “belongs to the revolutionaries;” it is in socialist revolutionary processes where education is prioritized as a central component of creating a new, fully human, people.[29] As Du Bois put it, “education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know.”[30] “The final purpose of education,” as Hegel wrote, “is liberation and the struggle for a higher liberation still.”[31]

“How shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies?”

In the capitalist mode of life, this contradiction between the un-development of human life and the development of the forces of production has always gone hand in hand. From the lens of universal history, this is one of the central antinomies of the system. Progress of a certain kind has always been conjoined with retrogression in another. Du Bois says that “Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly.”[32] He is quite correct in a dual sense. Not only has class society – and specifically, capitalist class society – always developed the productive forces at the expense of the un-development of human life in the mass of people, but also, when progress has been achieved in the social realm, it has never been thanks to the kindness and generosity of owning classes, it has never been the result of anything but an ugly, often bloody, struggle. As Fredrick Douglass famously said, “if there is no struggle, there is no progress.”[33]

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However, it is the first sense in which Du Bois’s statement on the ugliness of progress is meant. He asks, “how shall man measure Progress there where the dark-faced Josie lies?”[34] What is our standard for progress going to be? Human life and the real capacity for human flourishing? Or the development of industrial technologies and the accumulation of capital? Under the current order, all metrics are aimed at measuring progress in accordance with the latter. As I have argued before,

The economist’s obsession with gross domestic product measures is a good example. For such quantifiability to take place, qualitatively incommensurable activities must transmute themselves into being qualitatively commensurable... The consumption of a pack of cigarettes and the consumption of an apple loses the distinction which makes one cancerous and the other healthy, they’re differences boil down to the quantitative differences in the price of purchase.[35]

This standard for measuring progress corresponds to a mode of social life where, as the young Marx had observed, “the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion [to] the devaluation of the world of men.”[36] In socialist China, where the people – through their Communist Party – are in charge of developing a new social order, metrics are being developed to account for growth in human-centered terms. As Cheng Enfu has proposed, a “new economic accounting indicator, ‘Gross Domestic Product of Welfare,’”[37] (GDPW) is needed:

GDPW, unlike GDP, encompasses the total value of the welfare created by the production and business activities of all residential units in a country (or region) during a certain period. As an alternative concept of modernization, it is the aggregate of the positive and negative utility produced by the three systems of economy, nature, and society, and essentially reflects the sum of objective welfare.[38]

While forcing the reader to think critically about the notion of progress, it would be incorrect to suggest that Du Bois would like to entirely dispose of the notion. His oeuvre in general is deeply rooted in enlightenment sensibilities, in a belief in a common humanity, in the power of human reason, and in the real potential for historical progress. These are all things that, as Susan Neiman writes in Left is Not Woke, are rejected by the modern Heidegger-Schmidt-Foucualt rooted post-modern ‘woke left,’ and which stem, as Georg Lukács noted in his 1948 masterpiece, The Destruction of Reason, from the fact that capitalism, especially after the 1848 revolutions, had become a reactionary force, a phenomenon reflected in the intellectual orders by a turn away from Kant and Hegel and towards Schopenhauer, Eduard von Hartmann, Nietzsche, and various other forms of philosophical irrationalism.[39]

Instead of rejecting the notion of progress, Du Bois would urge us to understand the dialectical character of history’s unfolding – that is, the role that the ‘ugly’ has played in progress. He would urge us to reject the mythologized ‘pure’ notion of progress which prevails in quotidian society and the halls of bourgeois academia; and to understand the impurities of progress to be a necessary component of it – at least in this period of human history.

Du Bois would also urge us to understand that, while progress in the sphere of the productive forces has often not translated itself into progress at the human level, this fact does not negate the genuine potential for progress in the human sphere represented by such developments in industry, agriculture, and the sciences and technologies. Progress in the human sphere that is left unrealized by developments in the productive forces within capitalist relations ends up taking the form, to use Andrew Haas’ concept, of Being-as-Implication.[40] As Ioannis Trisokkas has recently elaborated, beyond simply being either present-at-hand (vorhandenseit) or absent, implication is another form of being; things can be implied, their being takes the form of a real potential capable of becoming actual.[41]

It is true, under the current relations of production, that the lives of people get worse while simultaneously the real potential for them being better than ever before continues to increase. This is the paradoxical character of capitalist progress. When a new machine capable of duplicating the current output in a specific industry is introduced into the productive process, this represents a genuine potential for cutting working hours in half, and allowing people to have more leisure time for creative – more human – endeavors. The development of the productive forces reduces the socially necessary labor time and can therefore potentially increase what Martin Hägglund has called socially available free time.[42] This is the time that Josie – and quite frankly, all of us poor working class people – need in order to flourish as humans. The fact that it does not do this, and often does the opposite, is not rooted in the machines and technologies themselves, but in the historically constituted social relations which mediate our relationship with these developments.

We can have a form of progress which overcomes the contradictions of the current form; but this requires revolutionizing the social relations we exist in. It requires a society where working people are in power, where the telos of production is not profit and capital accumulation in the hands of a few, but the satisfaction of human needs – both spiritual and material. A society where the state is genuinely of, by, and for the people, and not an instrument of the owners of capital. In other words, it requires socialism, what Du Bois considered to be “the only way of human life.”[43]

References 

[1] Aristotle, Metaphysics, in The Basic Works of Aristotle (Chapel Hill: The Modern Library, 2001), 689 (980a).

[2] W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Library of America, 2021), 766.

[3] W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, in Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1986), 367-368.

[4] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 770.

[5] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 770.

[6] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 407.

[7] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 406-407.

[8] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 766.

[9] Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth, In Writings, 861.

[10] Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” 854.

[11] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 411.

[12] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 411.

[13] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 411.

[14] Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” 853.

[15] Aristotle, Metaphysics, 692 (982b).

[16] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 368.

[17] Immanuel Kant, “What is Enlightenment,” in Basic Writings of Kant (New York: The Modern Library, 2001) 136.

[18] Kant, “What is Enlightenment,” 141.

[19] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 390.

[20] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 368.

[21] Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 40; Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 370.

[22] Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations Vol II (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1910), 263-264.

[23] Smith, The Wealth of Nations Vol. II, 264.

[24] Smith, The Wealth of Nations Vol. II, 264.

[25] Karl Marx, Capital Volume: I (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 339.

[26] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 360.

[27] Karl Marx, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), 86.

[28] Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1976), 291.

[29] Carlos L. Garrido, “The Real Reason Why Socrates Was Killed and Why Class Society Must Whitewash His Death,” Countercurrents (August 23, 2021): https://countercurrents.org/2021/08/the-real-reason-why-socrates-is-killed-and-why-class-society-must-whitewash-his-death/. In every revolutionary movement we’ve seen the pivotal role education is given – this is evident in the Soviet process, the Korean, the Chinese, Cuban, etc. As I am sure most know, even while engaged in guerilla warfare Che was making revolutionaries study. Education was so important that, as he mentioned in the famous letter Socialism and Man in Cuba, under socialism “the whole society… [would function] as a gigantic school.” For more see: Carlos L. Garrido and Edward Liger Smith, “Pioneros por el comunismo: Seremos como el Che,” intervención y Coyuntura: Revista de Crítica Política (October 11, 2022): https://intervencionycoyuntura.org/pioneros-por-el-comunismo-seremos-como-el-che/

[30] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 385.

[31] G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 125.

[32] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 412.

[33] Fredrick Douglass, Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. by Philip S. Foner (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1999), 367.

[34] Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 414.

[35] Carlos L. Garrido, “John Dewey and the American Tradition of Socialist Democracy, Dewey Studies 6(2) (2022), 87.

[36] Marx, Manuscripts of 1844, 71.

[37] Cheng Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectic (New York: International Publishers, 2019), 13.

[38] Enfu, China’s Economic Dialectic, 13.

[39] Susan Neiman, Left is Not Woke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023). Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason (Brooklyn: Verso Books, 2021). For more on the modern forms of philosophical irrationalism, see: John Bellamy Foster, “The New Irrationalism,” Monthly Review 74 (9) (February 2023): https://monthlyreview.org/2023/02/01/the-new-irrationalism/ and my interview with him for the Midwestern Marx Institute: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4uyNEzLlRw.

[40] Andrew Haas, “On Being in Heidegger and Hegel,” Hegel Bulletin 38(1) (2017), 162-4: doi:10.1017/hgl.2016.64.

[41] Ioannis Trisokkas, “Being, Presence, and Implication in Heidegger's Critique of Hegel,” Hegel Bulletin 44(2) (August 2023), 346: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/hgl.2022.3 Trisokkas here provides a great defense of Hegel from Heidegger’s critique of his treatment of being.

[42] Martin Hägglund, This Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019), 301-304.

[43] W. E. B. Du Bois, “Letter from W. E. B. Du Bois to Communist Party of the U.S.A., October 1, 1961,” W. E. B. Du Bois Archive: https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums312-b153-i071

The Fight for Migrant Rights in the U.S.: An Interview with Justin Akers Chacón

[Photographer: Eric Thayer/Bloomberg]

By Brendan Stanton

Republished from Red Flag.

Justin Akers Chacón, a socialist based in San Diego, California, campaigns for worker and migrant rights in the US-Mexico border region and is the author of “The Border Crossed Us: The Case for Opening the US-Mexico Border.” He caught up with Red Flag to discuss immigrant rights in the US under Democratic President Joe Biden. 

Q: After the polarisation under former President Trump, what has shifted in the politics of the border and migration during the Biden era?

A: The short answer is that it’s gotten worse. There were some 400 executive actions taken by the Trump administration that affected immigration, including family separation at the border, the Muslim travel ban, expanding the border wall and ending temporary protected status for many groups. Much of this framework has been institutionalised under Biden. 

This is despite the fact that, in the lead-up to the 2020 election, the whole discourse of the Democratic Party was towards dismantling the inhumane and punitive measures of the Trump regime. While Biden wasn’t on the left wing of that discourse, he characterised Trump as harmful to immigrants and refugees and promised a pathway to legalisation for migrants in his first 100 days. This shifted immediately after the Democrats won, and they quickly walked back any discussion.

It’s worth also mentioning that Biden technically ordered a month’s moratorium on deportations early in the administration. But the order was overruled by a Trump-appointed federal judge on the day it was issued. The administration used this as an excuse to abandon the promise completely, but it was quickly pointed out by immigration scholars that there were multiple ways in which the administration could have worked around that ruling to stop deportations. 

Although vocally opposing Title 42 [a Trump-era measure allowing authorities to turn away migrants at the border on public-health grounds], one of his first acts as president was using it to conduct a mass deportation of Haitians from south Texas. Even while the Trump policy of family separation at the border was stopped, the Biden administration announced that it’s going to begin the process of reauthorising family detention.

The Democrats’ real orientation around border politics was signalled by Kamala Harris when she was sent to Guatemala in 2021 to tell Central Americans, “Do not come to the United States”. This signalled the institutionalisation of Tump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which defunded the legal side of the asylum process.

This, of course, didn’t stop people from migrating. Just like under Trump, it created conditions where large populations are forced to live in overcrowded encampments, on the street and in other uninhabitable areas on the Mexican side of the borderlands. 

The Democrats played an equal or even greater role in building the immigration enforcement apparatus than the Republicans. They have no left or progressive or reformist orientation towards immigration, and they face pressure from the right when the Republican Party redeploys all the racist tropes like “our border is under attack”, or “we’re being invaded” during each election cycle. So they consistently diverge their rhetoric during elections, and after elections they converge with Republicans again. 

That’s how we’re in a situation where far more people were deported in Biden’s first year than under the previous four years of Trump.

Has there been any opposition from the likes of Democratic Party Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or other people who made a name for themselves calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Homeland Security division in charge of deportations?

There was this interesting period in 2019, when a lot of these people on the left of the party were going to detention centres and giving speeches. Ocasio-Cortez gave a very moving account of the horrors of a detention centre, and said we have to close the “concentration camps”.

But as soon as the Democrats won, it all evaporated. She and other “left” Democrats stopped calling these horrible places “camps” and started promoting the idea that with Democrats in office, there’s going to be reform. That reform never happened, but there has still been a shift in terms of softening rhetoric or not talking about it at all. Since the abandonment of immigration reform after the election, there has been no movement within the Democratic party to change the status quo. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if, in campaign mode leading up to 2024, the Biden administration makes similar promises as before. But for now, it’s shifted far to the right, taking the whole party tent and the stakes to the right with it. 

A couple of months ago, a story broke about undocumented children working in quite dangerous conditions for major US corporations. Have there been any significant changes around labour protection in the wake of that scandal?

It actually created an internal conflict within the Biden administration. Some officials who were monitoring the child refugee crisis were calling the administration’s attention to how many of these children were being absorbed into the workforce as early as a year and a half ago. People higher up, like Susan Rice, one of the chief advisers of Biden, knew this was happening. They basically quashed it, said it was not a priority, and so it took outside reporters to break the story.

It’s important to understand what immigration enforcement is designed to do and what it’s not designed to do. It’s not designed to stop people from migrating or to prevent people from falling into these conditions. It creates pathways for this to happen by essentially creating systems of regulation for a growing segment of the workforce in this country. 

Being exposed for their awareness that child labour is flourishing once again in the United States is a public relations problem for the Biden administration, but it hasn’t provoked a political crisis. It’s also because the Republicans and the right don’t have a problem with this issue—they’re not going to try to make it an issue. 

Even within organised labour, it’s not clear that there’s any effort to address the issue of child labour. Like so many other things, it’s either under-reported or swept under the rug really quickly. It’s a reflection of how little opposition there is inside the US to the politics of immigration enforcement.

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How do you think socialists and leftists should understand the class dynamics of border politics?

We can walk through that child refugee scenario from beginning to end and explain how this is a political function of capitalist policy. 

Between 2011 and 2016, almost 200,000 unaccompanied children, mostly from Central America, came to the United States. Two major factors played a key role in this. One is the Central American-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement first implemented in 2006. By 2010, there were radical economic changes like the opening up of these economies to unrestricted foreign capital investment and the privatisation of much of the economy. 

There was a systematic displacement of people who could no longer afford to work the land, or whose jobs in manufacturing were displaced by foreign capital. This foreign capital is invested in extreme forms of labour production associated with maquiladoras [US-owned factories], basically laboratories for increasing productivity, repressing wages and keeping unions out. 

This destroys many of the social aspects of the economy, and by 2011 we saw the first significant effects of these policies displacing people. 

Earlier, in 2007, the US initiated a region-wide security strategy called the Mérida Initiative, through which it gave money and political support to Mexican and Central American governments to expand the border enforcement apparatus of the United States further south. The US trains police and militaries in these countries to engage in the Drug War and also control migration, 

Alongside the other realities of the War on Drugs, which contributed to the growth of drug cartels, this has destabilised the region. The illegal drug industry is now one of the major industries of the Western hemisphere, and these cartels have grown in rhythm and tempo with the criminalisation of drugs and the growth of enforcement mechanisms. Instead of the cartels being contained and defeated in Mexico through this regional militarisation, they’ve been pushed further into Central America. 

In 2009, the US greenlit the overthrow of the left-of-centre president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya. This set up the rule of the far right for the next several years, including Juan Orlando Hernández, a strong US ally who was also on the payroll of the cartels. While he was president, a lot of the funding and technology he received from the US for the drug war went towards repressing indigenous populations and social movements. Lots of people were displaced, and hundreds of labour organisers, socialists, LGBTQ people, indigenous organisers and other leftists were killed. 

So all that’s happening down there while we have the building up of the border enforcement apparatus, and the children who ultimately make it through to the United States end up in the workforce to survive. How do we understand the end of that scenario without understanding how every sort of step of this process is predicated on strengthening the ability of capital to exploit? 

The overthrow of a left-of-centre president in 2009 helped embolden a far-right government to destroy the left, attack all these vulnerable groups and displace countless people. When thousands of these children and teenagers start appearing in meat production facilities and construction jobs in the US, it’s a manifestation of US regional policies. It’s not necessarily a conscious act that someone masterminded, but it’s the outcome of decisions that advocate for the interest of capital. 

This creates larger and larger pools of exploitable workers, on both sides of the border, who are hard to organise, including workers who are regulated by the state. That impacts wage thresholds and impacts the whole labour economy. And when immigrant workers rise up, as they did in 2006, that leads to an increase in the repression of the state. 

In light of these border dynamics, in what direction do you think the socialist movement and the labour movement should go?

There has to be a rejection of criminalisation and border enforcement. That has to be a demand for all workers. In 1986 it actually was, when unions backed an amnesty for undocumented workers. This led to a surge in unionisation among newly legalised workers, who were much more class conscious than the rest of the population. Legalisation was a huge boost for the union movement at a time when it was otherwise declining. It also means supporting workers as they organise on the other side of the border.

I’m going to try to paraphrase Marx. He said something like, you don’t know what the problem is until a solution presents itself. In the context of the North American class struggle, capital has invested so much by shifting production south of the border and dividing production into cross-border supply chains. Therefore, the working classes in the US and Mexico have become fused together in ways that are much more apparent. More of these workers, especially workers in Mexico, recognise that class struggle is by necessity transnational, and there have been flashes of this potential and some sustained processes of a transnational labour response. 

There are some maquiladoras in Tamaulipas [a north-eastern state bordering Texas] making parts for General Motors that are going to be used for assembly in Tennessee or in Detroit, and there are also GM plants making whole cars in Mexico. 

The workers in these factories in Mexico have to be very savvy organisers, because in Mexico you don’t just organise against the employers, you organise against the fake unions that are muscle for the employers. You often have to organise directly against local and state governments and sometimes the federal government. 

In 2019, these workers in Matamoros [across the border from Brownsville, Texas], in extreme conditions, coordinated a series of wildcat strikes all at once. Rank-and-file women and men workers organising these networks got over 35,000 workers and shut down 48 factories over a month and a half. All of them won a 20 percent pay increase and a significant rise in their annual bonuses. A big part of why they won is because shutting down their factories disrupted parts supplies all across the US and Mexico, costing bosses an estimated US$50 million per day. 

That same year, United Auto Workers union members went on strike at GM, shutting down almost all production in the US and Canada, but not in Mexico. So GM decided to shift more production to Mexico to avoid further disruption and undercut these workers. In this context, workers trying to organise a union at the largest GM plant in Mexico, in Silao, Guanajuato, said that they supported the strike and the demands of the United Auto Workers in the US. They asked for the UAW to support them and bring them into the union or at least help them build an independent union so they could strike, start the process of shutting down Mexican auto production and completely shut down General Motors production. 

Unfortunately, the UAW ignored them and accepted a largely concessionary contract. But in the fallout was some recognition that they blew this opportunity. How could they not support the organisation of auto workers in Mexico, when GM is actively using these disorganised workers to undermine them? A couple of years later, the UAW began to support these Mexican workers in their unionisation efforts—they won and even expanded to other non-GM auto plants. This didn’t create equal wages. but it was a recognition by the UAW that they can’t afford not to support Mexican workers organising. 

In this process, more workers, especially militants fighting to build fledgling unions, recognise that they have to build international solidarity and engage in class struggle across the border. They recognise they’re not fighting just the employer but all of these other forces. It’s interesting to see how these workers are recognising that, as capital is operating at a North American scale, they too have to organise against it at a North American scale and not let the border divide them.

The Immovable Black Lumpenproletariat: The Futility of White-Supremacist, State-Sanctioned Indictments of Black Factions and Gangs

By Patrick Jonathan Derilus

“Though I cannot condone it, much of the violence inflicted on my gang rivals and other blacks was an unconscious display of my frustration with poverty, racism, police brutality and other systemic injustices routinely visited upon residents of urban black colonies such as south central Los Angeles. I was frustrated because I felt trapped. I internalized the defeatist rhetoric propagated as street wisdom in my hood that there were only 3 ways out of south central, migration death or incarceration. I located a fourth option: incarcerated death.”

— Stanley Tookie Williams,  Blue Rage, Black Redemption: A Memoir

It should be made clear, if in any case there was no critical observation of the phenomena, that in our (to use ancestor bell hooks’ phrase) ‘imperialist, colonial settler, white supremacist, capitalist, cisheteropatriarchal society,’ Black people (of all ages and gender identities) are under ceaseless exploitation and violence via surveillance, harassment, instigations, and so on. With attention to Black-led organizations, factions, collectives, and in this case particularly, Black gangs, there is unquestionably a white-supremacist outroar from racists (media or otherwise), who deem these communities a threat to the status quo.

Fuck respectability politics and fuck civility; and this is to say that regardless of the objective of a Black collective, be it as revolutionary as the Black Guerilla Family (BGF), a Marxist-Leninist group that originated in San Quentin State Prison and was founded by ancestor George Jackson in 1966 or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) founded by ancestor Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and several other members in 1909, we’re niggas at the end of the day.

While we can present arguments for what this statement means is not the point, but rather, the sociohistorical result of change that is assuredly established when Black people have long struggled for: Black Liberation. Black history is every day. Black history in itself chronicles resistance, togetherness, unfettered joy, solidarity, commonality, righteous insurgence, mutuality, love—humanism, notably the urgency for Black self-defense against the white-supremacist police state.

Let us also highlight that, in spite of these elements, we recognize the settler-fascistic entities that have been responsible for the many deaths, infightings, conspiracies, and consistent destabilizations of Black-led movements, organizations, and to this day, Black gangs. Prior to the Black Panthers — and what many of us know in modern day as Crips and Bloods, were their historical predecessors, The Slausons, The Businessmen, and The Gladiators, Black-led gangs that originated in Los Angeles during the 1940s. The sociopolitical function of these gangs were a direct response against white-supremacist gangs like the Spook Hunters, who regularly terrorized Black people because of the growing Black population at the time— white flight.

In the 1960s and 70s, an example of this is Kwanzaa’s founder, Ron Karenga, who was not only a violent, self-hating misogynist responsible for kidnapping and torturing Black women, but also, an agent of fascist J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO, who exacerbated the infighting between the Black Panthers and the US Organization. Subsequently, this led to the murders of four members of the Black Panthers, whose names went by John Huggins, Sylvester Bell, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Savage.

Around the same time the Black Power movement was building momentum, the Gangster Disciples, founded by Larry Hoover, were a Black-led faction based in Chicago in the 1970s and 80s. In the same way, the Black Disciples, founded by David Barksdale, were another Black faction based in Chicago that was created at the grassroots, organizing projects such as the free breakfast program for the community and marching together with Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1966:

On Aug. 5, 1966, in Marquette Park, where King was planning to lead a march to a realtor’s office to demand properties be sold to everyone regardless of their race, he got swarmed by about 700 white protestors hurling bricks, bottles and rocks. One of those rocks hit King, and his aides rushed to shield him.

Stanley Tookie Williams, who co-founded the Crips alongside Raymond Washington in 1971, established a groundwork in which Black folk would defend themselves and their communities from neighboring adversaries in Los Angeles. Similarly, the Bloods, created by Sylvester Scott, were later created as a direct response in opposition to the Crips. Contrary to this occurrence, the remarkable moments in Black history where Bloods and Crips, despite their incendiary rivalries against each other, have come together in solidarity to protest state-sanctioned police violence against Black people. To echo the sentiment of George Jackson in his book, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson:

Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.

We highlight instances of collective protest in Atlanta, the unity of rival Bloods and Crips gangs taking place after the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1992, unity between Bloods, Crips, and the Nation of Islam in Baltimore, who banned together in honor and righteous vengeance against the state-sanctioned murder of Freddie Gray, Newark, New Jersey and a March For Peace in The Bronx that was led by rival gangs inspired by the wrongful murder of Nipsey Hussle.

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Bringing further attention to the history of white supremacist, State-sanctioned violence toward Black people in the US and across the world, we understand that surveillance and more specifically, indictment, an arbitrary charge or accusation of a crime, is no new concept to us. To be Black itself is a crime in the world. In the article, Black is Crime: Notes on Blaqillegalism, writer Dubian Ade states,

What a crime it is to be Black. To have the police be called on you for sitting in a restaurant, for grilling at a cookout, selling water, going to the pool, taking a nap, standing on the corner; to be Black and to have the presence of one’s very own body break the law and to know at any given moment a police officer can slam you to the ground and cuff you for resisting arrest, which is to say, arrest you for absolutely no reason at all. Blackness carries this implication that a law is or has been broken and is about to be broken in the future. It is the color and sign of criminal activity under white supremacist capitalism used to justify the mass incarceration and extra-judicial murder of Black people by and large. But what are the origins of this strenuous relationship between Blackness and the law? In what ways is Black criminalization constituted under the state? And if Blackness is already criminalized in the eyes of the law, what are the features of already existing Black illegal forms and what might the theoretical contours of Black illegalism (Blaqillegalism) that is principled and above all revolutionary look like?

Ancestor Huey P. Newton has already answered this question of Black criminality:

…existence is violent; I exist, therefore I am violent in that way.

To emphasize, the carceral State spares no Black human being. To name a few, learn about Mutulu Shakur, stepfather of Tupac Amaru Shakur and a member of the Black Liberation Army, who was just released from prison in December of last year after serving 60 years in prison; he was informed he only has a few months to live due to terminal cancer in April. Another is Marshall “Eddie” Conway, an elder of the Black Panther Party, who was sentenced to serving 43 years to life in prison for self-defense. Look to the instance of Tay-K, who was 19 at the time he was indicted and sentenced to 55 years in prison. 23-year old YNW Melly, who was indicted and is facing the death penalty. Look at the wrongful indictments of YSL and Young Thug and Gunna—Sheff G, Sleepy Hallow, 8 Trey Crips and 9 Ways — Woos and the Choos, the YGz and Drilly indictment and now 19-year old Kay Flock, who was just indicted with the death penalty being listed as a possible charge.

I repeat, the death penalty.

Where else have we heard the inhumane sentencing of young Black and Brown children and teenagers across AmeriKKKa?

Recall the wrongful conviction of 14-year old George Stinney in 1944, who the carceral State put to death by electric chair for allegedly murdering two white girls. The antiBlack State ritualistically likens itself to heroism and yet, their actions remain wickedly ironic because it has always been the State that has not been held accountable for its innumerable human rights violations against Black people. As long as the antiBlack State exists, there is no transformative recourse for Black lives (especially Black children and Black teenagers).

By the same token, it is far too reductive (and victim-blaming) to present cases that serve as counterarguments to the material reality in which Black children and adults are continuously subjected to. With Malcolm X’s truism, by any means necessary in mind, often many Black folk are left with no choice to navigate this colonial-settler, white-supremacist world in the best ways we can as a means of not only defending ourselves and our communities against the white-supremacist power structure, but also surviving under it. Black feminist and scholar, bell hooks, highlights the two-sidededness of this racial, socio-existential dilemma in her text, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity:

In today's world, most upwardly mobile educated black males from privileged class backgrounds share with their poor and underclass counterparts an obsession with money as the marker of successful manhood. They are as easily corrupted as their disenfranchised brothers, if not more so because the monetary stakes, as well as the rewards in their mainstream work world, are higher…assimilated black males who are “white identified” find it easier to submit to fickle arrogant white males (and white female bosses) in the workplace. However, most black males suffer psychologically in the world of work whether they make loads of money or low wages from overt and covert racially based psychological terrorism.

hooks continues,

Young beautiful brilliant black power male militants were the first black leftists to loudly call out the evils of capitalism. And during that call they unmasked wage slavery, naming it for what it was. Yet at the end of the day a black man needed money to live. If he was not going to get it working for the man, it could come from hustling his own people. Black power militants, having learned from Dr. King and Malcolm X how to call out the truth of capitalist-based materialism, identified it as gangsta culture. Patriarchal manhood was the theory and gangsta culture was its ultimate practice. No wonder then that black males of all ages living the protestant work ethic, submitting in the racist white world, envy the lowdown hustlers in the black communities who are not slaves to white power.

I have strong abolitionist sympathies and feel as though a potential alternative to the futility—the inherent uselessness of incarceration—of imprisoning Black children—Black people, is divesting money from state to state and putting the funds toward building transformative rehabilitation centers across the country similar to the Success Stories Program. As stated in their mission and values statement, the primary focus of the Success Stories program is this:

Our mission is to provide an alternative to prisons that builds safer communities by delivering feminist programming to people who have caused harm.​ We envision a world free of prisons and patriarchy as the dominant culture. We build a world where harmful behavior is seen as a symptom of patriarchy to be transformed, in the community, by our program and others like it.

What happens when the State persistently (and wrongfully) indicts Black women, men, queer folk, and children for so-called “crimes” will never resolve anything — it will never curtail anything. We are looking at a generational passing down of Black factions (of the newer generation) that will continue to repeat itself. These factions, which are defined as a group or clique within a larger group, party, government, organization, or the like, typically having different opinions and interests than the larger group, are often born out of an aversion to episodic, economic violence, impoverishment, governmental negligence, fascist police violence, —the white establishment and a yearning—a desperation to belong (commonly by homosocial bonding) to establish camaraderie between one another. In other words, regardless of how many indictments the State puts on Black people, the lumpenproletariat collectives that the State has destabilized will naturally be reborn out of generational factions in our continued struggle against the deathly whims of the US Empire.

Immigrant Residents Move to Stop Coney Island Casino Bid

By Amir Khafagy

Republished from Documented NY.

Inside a small taco stand located in the heart of the Coney Island amusement district, a small but vocal group of community members gathered over a platter of tacos al pastor, to discuss how a proposed casino would affect their lives. 

“They will push us out and push local business out,” Jenny Hernandez, 30, said at the event. She has lived in Coney Island since she immigrated with her family from Mexico when she was a child. To her, a casino would destroy everything that she loves about her neighborhood. 

 “I love Coney Island and what I love the most about it is the diversity of nationalities that is here. I want it to stay that way and I want my kids to see all the nationalities.”

As the City wrestles with the possibility of opening the first-ever legally operated full-service casino within the five boroughs, two of the proposed sites are in the heart of working-class neighborhoods with large populations of immigrants. In Flushing, Steve Cohen, the billionaire owner of the Mets, is courting residents with “visioning” sessions that promise community members vast economic opportunities. Some residents in Queens have organized to oppose the project fearing that a casino would do more harm than good. 

Likewise in Coney Island, the developers and their supporters argue that the casino will be an economic boom for the community and will rejuvenate the iconic but aging boardwalk. However, a growing number of community members are pushing back, arguing that a casino would usher in a wave of gentrification that also destroys Coney Islands’ unique character. 

Over the past few years Coney Island’s skyline, once dominated by roller coasters, the Wonder Wheel, and the Parachute Jump tower, has seen the addition of several luxury high-rise apartment towers. Fearing a casino would only accelerate the pace of redevelopment, Hernandez decided to work with the United Front Against Displacement, an organization fighting public housing privation on Coney Island, to try to stop the casino effort.   

“We have seen all these high rises coming up in the community and that means gentrification is coming, but after I heard about the casino I said we have to do something about it,” she said. 

Hernandez is not alone in her opposition to the casino. In April, Coney Island’s Community Board 13 voted 23-8 against the casino project, citing concerns about a rise in crime and increased traffic congestion. Although community board ratings are only advisory and don’t have the power to kill the casino proposal, it is a bellwether of the community’s lack of enthusiasm for the project. 

Angela Kravtchenko, a Ukrainian-born community activist, and member of Community Board 13 voted against the project because she believes the casino is more trouble than it’s worth. 

“A casino won’t bring anything meaningful to our community, it only brings problems,” she said. “Do we want economic development? Sure we do, but there are so many other ways to achieve it.”

Councilmember Ari Kagan, whose district includes Coney Island, is opposed to the casino plan as well. 

“CM Kagan strongly and publicly opposes this project in Coney Island,” said Jeannine Cherichetti, his chief of staff.

According to Cherichetti, the Councilmember believes that the project would endanger public safety by increasing crime, increasing congestion, and causing mental health and gambling problems. 

Fears of an increase in gambling addiction and crime are not entirely unfounded. Although the connection between casinos and a rise in street crime is heavily debated, a 2006 study in The Review of Economics and Statistics found that over time casinos increased all crimes except murder. The study also found that casinos increased gambling addiction. 

Developers bet big on citywide support

Despite the local opposition, the consortium of developers, which includes real estate giant Thor Equities, Saratoga Casino Holdings, the Chickasaw Nation, and Legends Hospitality, has made a great effort to build local support for the massive project that has been dubbed ‘The Coney.” They have portrayed the $3 billion project as a potential economic engine for all of South Brooklyn that could generate 2,500 jobs with wages of up to $30 an hour.

The developers have also hired political consulting firm Red Horse Strategies to help with public relations. Red Horse has deep ties to Mayor Adams, with one of the firm’s partners, Katie Moore, served as his Campaign Manager as well as the Executive Director of his transition team.  

Thor Equities directed all questions to former Councilmember Robert Cornegy Jr., who represented Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights for 8 years. He was hired as a consultant by the developer in February.  

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Since being hired by the developers, Cornegy has led a team knocking on more than 16,300 doors and meeting people on the street to gather support for the project. Cornegy claims that he has collected 4,000 signatures in support of the casino. When asked if he is leveraging his past experience as a public servant for the benefit of private developers, Cornegy framed his support for the casino in altruistic terms. 

“My presence on this project is born out of my desire to continue doing the type of work I did when I was on the council as the chair of the small business and housing and buildings committees,” he said. “As a city, and more specifically in South Brooklyn, we must commit to an economic development agenda that is focused on creating large amounts of jobs and opportunities for all communities.”

Additionally, Cornegy insisted that the project would create thousands of good-paying union jobs, would deliver millions of dollars worth of infrastructure, and improve public safety. He also stressed that the project would be built with private funds and not displace a single unit of housing. Regarding the community board’s opposition to the project, Cornegy dismissed it. 

“Those efforts in talking to people directly are more significant than a preliminary non-binding vote by a divided community board who admitted they were making a decision on the project before the application was even finished,” he said. “They have charged that we would be paying our employees too much for them to qualify for public housing subsidies. We see it differently. We see the careers created by this project as a pathway to the middle class for people living in an area that is already experiencing high unemployment.”

Bureaucratic hurdles  

However, before the project can move forward it has to overcome several major hurdles. Currently, there are 11 casino proposals vying for just three coveted downstate casino licenses that the state has authorized. A convoluted web of governing bodies is overseeing the process and they will ultimately decide which proposal will be awarded a license. Ultimately, the New York State Gaming Commission will have the final say on whether a casino license will be issued, but before it even gets to that stage, the application first has to come under the review of the New York Gaming Facility Location Board which reports directly to Governor Hochul. 

The Board has the power to establish the licensing fees as well as the power to investigate every proposal. It will then select three candidates that will go before the gaming commission for final approval. Yet after a proposal is formally submitted to the board, the proposal has to first be approved by a Community Advisory Committee (CAC). 

In New York City, the CAC would be set up in each district in which a casino is proposed to be built and would be made up of six members representing the governor, the mayor, the borough president, the local state senator, the local state assembly member, and the local council member. Coney Island’s CAC vote is scheduled for October. CAC’s are required to hold public hearings and would need at least four votes to approve the project.

If that’s not complicated enough, one other major hurdle is the fact New York City zoning laws currently do not allow for casinos. Even if a project is awarded a license, there’s no guarantee that it would be approved through the city’s nearly year-long Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP). 

According to Charles Kretchmer Lutvak, Mayor Adams’s Deputy Press Secretary, the mayor has not expressed a preference for any particular casino project. Regarding the potential obstacle the City’s current zoning laws pose for a potential casino, Lutvak pointed toward the mayor’s City of Yes for Economic Opportunity zoning proposal which would modify the city’s zoning law, making it easier for a project like a casino to be built. 

The current proposal to build a casino on Coney Island is not the first time developers had attempted to “revitalize” the boardwalk. In the late 1970s, developers eager to emulate Atlantic City, pushed for casino gambling on Coney Island. Anticipating a financial windfall, land speculation caused boardwalk real estate properties to rise from $3 to $100 per square foot.

Despite the backing of then-Mayor Ed Koch, the efforts were partly killed by Donald Trump who wanted to protect his gambling enterprises in Atlantic City. 

Now, to Jenny Hernandez, the current proposal feels like déjà vu. As a lifelong resident of Coney Island, she wants to see a future where the community takes the lead in shaping where they live. 

“Why do people who don’t live in Coney Island have a say on what happens in Coney Island?”

State Repression Targets the "Stop Cop City" Movement

[Pictured: Kamau Franklin of Community Movement Builders and other organizers announce a ballot referendum effort at a June 7 press conference in Atlanta.] (Photo: Twitter @Micahinatl)

By Margaret Kimberley

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

Cop City is an effort to ensure that state violence will bring the most draconian methods to bear against Black people. State violence is also being used proactively, in an effort to end opposition to this creation of Atlanta's white ruling class and their errand boys and girls who ostensibly control a fake mecca for Black people.

“The politicians don’t care about the people. They don’t work for the people. They work for corporations, the developers, and the police. The Atlanta City Council ignored the largest mass mobilization ever because the corporate-funded Atlanta Police Foundation controls them.”

— Kamau Franklin, Community Movement Builders

Atlanta, Georgia is no mecca. The idea that it is a “good for Black people” city is a lie. Atlanta is little more than a glorified plantation where powerful white people give directions to the Black people they choose to be overseers. The power of the latter group is severely limited of course. They can always be counted on to act on behalf of the white power structure they serve.

No one should be shocked that members of the Atlanta City Council listened to hours of impassioned testimony from their constituents opposing what they call a Public Safety Training Center yet still voted to approve an initial $31 million expenditure by a vote of 11 to 4. The center is commonly and more accurately known as Cop City and thousands of people have mobilized to keep it from being built.

In the days before the vote the degree of official perfidy was revealed when the public were informed that the estimated cost for the center was more than double what they had been told. The cost to the city is $67 million , and not the $30 million figure that has been stated ever since the project was announced.

The state of Georgia and their Atlanta lackeys swung into action after the budgetary fraud was exposed and arrested three organizers of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund , a bail fund used to support protesters who have been arrested. The city and state had already mobilized brute force, killing one protester, Manuel Paez Teran, with 57 bullet wounds and charging others with terrorism. Before the bail fund arrests, three other organizers were charged with felony intimidation of an officer when they shared already public information which identified the killer police.

Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizers were arrested by a SWAT team and charged with charity fraud and money laundering because they reimbursed themselves for expenses. Judge James Altman released the three on $15,000 bond each. “Paying for camping supplies and the like? I don’t find it very impressive. There’s not a lot of meat on the bones of the allegations that thousands of dollars are going to fund illegal activities.”

But the city of Atlanta and the state of Georgia are not alone in their acts of repression. The federal Department of Homeland Security has also weighed in calling protesters “militants” who they say comprise a “violent far-left occupation.” When the DHS report was made public, online access was suddenly removed.

Cop City would be more than a police training center. The 85-acre site would be a mock city, used to train police in “crowd control,” methods. It would be a militarized policing center training law enforcement from around the country. Cop City is a response to the 2020 protests which sprang up across the country after the police killing of George Floyd and the protests in Atlanta which took place after the killing of Rayshard Brooks. The reaction against the new movement was swift and Atlanta’s local oligarchs demanded that their Black figureheads do something to ensure that any further protests be met with the harshest measures possible.

Yet the people of Atlanta weren’t fooled, and they lined up for hours to give testimony before their so-called representatives who don’t really want to hear from them. Atlanta resident Robell Awake spoke for many when he said, “I cannot believe I am standing here, pleading with you not to spend the tax dollars of a Black city, to tear down a forest in a Black neighborhood, to increase the policing and caging of more Black people. All this in a city with Black leadership. It breaks my heart.”

As we have said many times at Black Agenda Report, we don’t have Black political leadership in this country. We have misleadership, a corrupt buffer class who do the bidding of Black people’s enemies while pretending to be our representatives.

The next step in stopping the Cop City scam is to put a referendum on the ballot. Organizers must secure 75,000 signatures from registered voters within the next two months in order to give voters a voice in the process. Direct democracy is the tool, but the same people who use SWAT teams to arrest organizers won’t stop either.

Cities, states, and the federal government will all work together at the behest of the ruling class whenever the people choose to act in favor of their own interests. They will bring terrorism charges, kill protesters, and buy off politicians in order to get what they want. As always, the question is how the masses will respond. Atlantans are ready and they are showing the way.

Margaret Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents. You can support her work on Patreon  and also find it on the Twitter  and Telegram  platforms. She can be reached via email at margaret.kimberley(at)blackagendareport.com.

More than Mercenaries: Police as the Crucible of Fascism in the U.S.

By Comrade Dremel

Republished from The Red Clarion.

Fascism is ascendant in the imperial core. The U.S. and its junior partners are waging an increasingly bloody war on all fronts, in an attempt to bolster the decaying husk of capital. The foot soldiers in this war are the police. Armed to the teeth and trained to kill, police are positioned as an occupying force in every locale across the empire. The violence perpetrated by police increases in magnitude with each passing year, with the targets of this violence being overwhelmingly the poor, Black, Indigenous, immigrant, queer, and disabled populations most despised by the empire. Even a cursory glance through the history of law enforcement in the U.S. exposes its role as the assault engine of white supremacy and capitalist hegemony.

Even before the settler-republic declared independence, slave patrols were organized to deal with the ever-growing population of enslaved African labor and the threat of rebellion. Hired guns would patrol the property, investigating and brutally punishing dissent, the possession of weapons, and attempted escapes. As far back as 1643, the English colonies were organizing themselves into confederations, pledging to enforce each others’ “right” to the return of fugitive slaves and indentured servants:

It is also agreed that if any servant run away from his master into any other of these confederated Jurisdictions, that in such case, upon the certificate of one magistrate in the Jurisdiction out of which the said servant fled, or upon other due proof; the said servant shall be delivered, either to his master, or any other that pursues and brings such certificate or proof.

Following the establishment of the United States, plantation owners quickly began entreating state legislatures to form standing patrols, as well as laws that explicitly targeted all Black people — regardless of their legal status. These fugitive slave laws and the patrollers enforcing them curtailed Black freedom of movement and assembly, subjected them to constant questioning, and inflicted unspeakably violent punishments. These practices spread throughout the colonies, and the institution of policing as a means of oppressing Black and Indigenous populations went from ad hoc posses to state machinery.

Following the U.S. civil war, despite the legal end of slavery, slave patrols prowled the countryside. Anti-Black violence, once perpetrated by pre-war slave-catching squads, took on the same form as anti-Indigenous violence: it shifted to the domain of terror groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. These vigilante terror organizations were, in many cases, composed of the elite of Southern and Western U.S. society: plantation owners, former Confederate officers, and ex-slave-catchers. Not only were these men enlisted by the secretive, semi-legal terror societies, but they also joined the rush of explicitly authorized “Indian fighters” – U.S. soldiers and cavalrymen, hired guns, and bounty hunters that poured into the Indigenous lands still left west of the Appalachian chain that the young settler-republic had determined must belong to white men.

To support this new drive, laws were carefully rewritten to empower police to enforce the political and economic repression of non-white people. This fundamental principle of U.S. settler law laid the foundation for the white-supremacist laws of today. The disproportionate impact of law enforcement on racialized populations has been thoroughly examined and excoriated for decades. The verdict is clear: law enforcement is systematically constructed to perpetuate white supremacy.

Since the creation of municipal and regional police in the 19th century, they have not only targeted Black and Indigenous persons. The police were not merely the enforcement arm of the theft of Native land and the suppression of Black labor; they have been the armed fist of capital, serving to break strikes, attack unions, and halt the labor movement in its tracks. Capitalists have consistently called upon police, private security, and the military to break strikes, often with deadly force. Under the guise of “peacekeeping,” cops respond to mass demonstrations by cracking skulls. Since the cold war, the intelligence wing of law enforcement has used the specter of communism to harry and infiltrate militant labor movements. With the blood of thousands of workers on their hands, the presence of police “unions” in labor federations like AFL-CIO is a grotesque mockery. The police are not workers: they are our most violent oppressors.

Cops are not simply hapless mercenaries, selling their labor as cogs in a repressive machine. They are not blameless workers caught up in a Kafkaesque machinery beyond their capacity to change. They are active participants in murder, genocide, labor suppression, and all the heinous acts for which they were created. They are the active agents of colonial and imperialist oppression. Indeed, the nature of policing as a tool of enforcing white supremacy and capital hegemony makes it especially appealing to a particular class of ideological actors. Police forces are staffed by the most motivated white supremacists. Fascist militias are largely populated by cops (active and retired), military veterans, and small business owners, as well as those with aspirations to law enforcement. They dedicate huge amounts of time, money, and labor to organizations designed to enforce white supremacy – all while comfortably employed in service of an empire built on those ideals. Many such groups paint themselves as “anti-government,” because they believe the U.S. government is holding them back from their fascist aims. That is, they resent the fact that the state has itself attempted to regulate white supremacist violence into a form it can control; they long for the early settler-republic, when any white man could wreak his will with a riding crop, a fist, or a Colt and no one would gainsay him.

State-sanctioned violence and extrajudicial fascist terrorism cannot be so identified as pointing out a badge.  In a recent database leak, exposing membership lists of the fascist Oathkeepers, numerous high ranking officers and sheriffs were identified among the hundreds of law enforcement officers on the books. One such lieutenant — who signed up for the Oathkeepers with the promise to use his position to recruit for the organization — was transferred to administrative duties upon knowledge of his involvement. Months later, he was back to his normal duties, as if nothing had happened. The police are police whether they wear their badges or not.

Law enforcement often dedicates some labor toward monitoring white supremacist extremism, although this is vastly overshadowed by its investment in tracking and attempting to entrap leftist organizations. Undercover agents and confidential informants insinuated into fascist groups often fail to report vital information, use their position to testify in defense of these groups, or are simply ignored by their handlers. The FBI, generally tasked with handling these investigations, are simply uninterested in the incrimination of fascists, instead instructing their informants to gather intelligence on the opponents of fascism. Law enforcement is deeply invested in the project of maintaining a white supremacist status quo. It has a long history of surveilling and violently repressing those who seek liberation, while giving unending leeway to those who attempt to heighten that oppression.

The overlap between fascist groups and law enforcement is sporadically reported on by bourgeois institutions, including media exposes, academic reviews, and even intelligence reports. Like all liberal exposes, however, these serve a dual purpose; by presenting the information, they defang it. The framework of these reports usually presents the presence of “bad apples” and promises that the issue merely needs some pressing reform. Thus, these liberal bourgeois reports disguise the fundamental nature of the white supremacist violence that pervades settler society. Through the lens of liberal “analysis,” all social ills are the result of scoundrels sullying otherwise valorous institutions. However, this misunderstands not just the material base out of which these very institutions were crafted in the first place, but also the insidious ways in which they get continuously reproduced, refined, and made more suitable to their primary purpose: maintaining the particular property relations of capitalism.

Policing presents its semi-legitimate face as “protecting the people,” originally with an explicitly racialized definition of “the people,” then retreating into implications and dog whistles. To bolster the white supremacist mythos that paints racialized populations as the source of civil strife, the ruling class has spent centuries pumping money into bad studies and employing racist professors to espouse the theory that certain populations are inherently “criminal.” Every new measure passed to empower the police has come with corresponding narratives stoking the fascist flames: “superpredators,” “crack epidemic,” “migrant caravans”. This has served to simultaneously drive recruitment and political support for the police from among the beneficiaries of white supremacy. The attractiveness of law enforcement to today’s fascists is unsurprising, given this historical context.

Law enforcement itself serves as a crucible of fascism, concentrating the most destructive aspects of the ideology into a superheated core. Its role as the violent arm of the state provides fertile soil for recruiting, training, and organizing nascent white supremacists into capable, radicalized cadres, indoctrinated with fascist ideology and inoculated against empathy. Combined with the tendencies of groups toward polarization (a meta-analysis of which can be found here), the overtly oppressive role of law enforcement creates an environment that drags its members toward fascist radicalization. This radicalization happens in much the same way that all institutions (fascist or not) mature into hegemonic forms, through the mutually-reinforcing processes of selection and intensification.

Selection is the process of sorting masses of individuals based on their demonstrated values and selecting the “best” — i.e. most well-suited to the group’s aims — for promotion, deeper into the institution. Although this can be a rigidly-defined process, as in the case of deliberately constructed organizations (such as workplaces), selection also takes place constantly throughout social life. Friend groups, community associations, activist circles, and more are constantly going through a loose process of selection; those who best fit in with the group and its purpose tend to find themselves more deeply involved in it, encouraged by those already integrated within it. The values being selected for vary from group to group, and can cover an immense range of criteria: specific skillsets, existing social ties, resources, even fashion sense or humor. The most common value being heuristically screened for, across all social structures, is how well an individual “clicks” with the existing group: like selects like. “Promotion,” of course, can also be a spectrum: anywhere from simply spending more time with like-minded individuals to actively being given more responsibilities and privileges within an organized structure. As specific traits get selected for, the individuals exhibiting those traits become better positioned to do the selecting, bringing in other individuals who share those same traits that brought them through the process themselves.

Intensification is the deepening of existing values, making individuals that move through an institution become more suited to the institution’s purpose. Again, this process can be explicit or informal, depending on the specific context. Individuals can be formally trained in specific skills, subjected to exercises designed to impart values and lessons through experience, go through rituals to promote group cohesion, or simply be subtly influenced by existing members of the group in a passive process of socialization. The more formally-organized a group is, the more explicit the programs of intensification that tend to be employed, but the social aspect is always present, and is often of the most relevance. As social creatures, humans are primed to modify our own behaviors and ideals to best integrate into our particular social environments. Over time, whether through passive or active means, groups tend to engender in their members deeper commitment and competence. Whether as education, radicalization, or collegiality, intensification works to define the character of both a group and the individuals within it.

These two processes act in concert, at all levels of institutions, playing into each other to best adapt a group to its niche. Selection elevates those individuals best adapted to modulate the intensification of others: the most charismatic speakers, the most skilled leaders, the most committed to the cause, inevitably find themselves brought up into a position to bring up their like-minded compatriots. Intensification serves as an indicator for selection, with those for whom the process yields the most favorable results increasingly demonstrating their fitness. Those who fail or refuse are seen as poorly-suited to the group and become ever-more estranged, if not outright ejected from the group. As an institution takes shape, these processes can cause it to calcify and regiment its process. Selection becomes increasingly based on set criteria, with explicitly delineated measures of promotion. Intensification practices become standardized trainings and rituals aimed at achieving specific results. But even in the absence of formal protocols, the social structure itself continues to set the pace of its own development, through the placement and shaping of its members.

Nowhere is this more typified than in the crucible of fascism. A new recruit on the force has already gone through several steps of selection and intensification that are adapted to the niche fascism aims to occupy. To even want to join, an individual must already believe in the myth of police as “peacekeepers.” They must ignore the blatant violent excesses of the institution. They already have an instinct toward protecting capitalist, white supremacy hegemony — whether they fully realize it or not. In other words, the police recruitment process itself has already selected for people who tend toward violence, chauvinism, ego, and myopia in service of capital (even if these traits are not always fully-formed in the novice). These traits are intensified during training, where recruits are taught laws, practice with firearms and other weapons, learn interrogation tactics, go through drills on handling “hostiles,” and more. Every step of the training serves to viscerally engrain in these recruits that they are the last line of defense for society against a violent, degenerate, implacable enemy, that their fellow brethren are comrades-in-arms, that the mission of the police is pure and righteous, worth laying down their very lives. They are taught that violent confrontation is not only inevitable, but righteous. In short, by the time they even become a full member of the force, people who were already filtered for traits suitable to fascism have already begun being radicalized into an ideological resentment toward the communities they police.

And then the process really gets started.

When that recruit walks into headquarters, he is entering a building absolutely packed with people who were just like him when they were recruits. Some were simply idealistic and justice-minded, without much regard for the obvious systemic horrors of the institution. Some were white supremacists from the beginning, and saw those horrors as noble. All of them went through a refinement process, and all have been modified by it in some way. They may have nervously laughed off bigoted comments, or they may have made some themselves to fit in. They may have seen squadmates commit acts of brutality, and thought to submit an official complaint — provoking the ire of their compatriots — or they may have eagerly joined in. They have spent every working day being exposed to propaganda, both informal and officially-sanctioned, about crime rates and the dangers of their profession and the fundamental threat posed by “certain communities.” They are promoted officially based on their arrests, tickets, experience, and the approval of higher ranking officers. They are promoted socially based on their cohesiveness within a group that has gone through these same radicalizing processes.

Those who couldn’t cut it — those who were too turned off by the systemic abuse, casual chauvinism, and blatant lies — are not in the room when that recruit walks in. Those who have best embraced that regressive atmosphere are introduced to him as mentors. In a radicalizing environment, the least radical have the least influence and the most radical dominate. In the case of police specifically, fascists find themselves easily making friends, enforcing “law and order,” and rising through the ranks, both institutionally and socially. They find themselves in positions of influence, and continue to shape the process that helped shape them. This attracts more of their ilk to the force, further impacting its development — and theirs. The state gains ever-more violent and rabid enforcers, while the fascists gain ever-more combat experience, fresh recruits, and institutional backing.

Whatever the particular proclivities of that recruit, he will find himself either becoming more immersed in the fascist milieu, more aligned with their ideals, tactics, and even extrajudicial organizations — or he will find himself ostracized, friendless, demoted, fired. The more the members of fascist militias integrate themselves into the (already fascistic) institution, the less common that latter outcome occurs. The initial selection process becomes implicitly more discerning, with potential recruits needing to meet a higher and higher threshold for what level of brutality they think is justified. The training and propaganda become more intense, directed as they are by those already selected for fascist allegiance. The distinction between state-sanctioned violence and paramilitary formations becomes more and more irrelevant.

This is the real reason all cops are bastards: all cops are subjected to a potent, omnipresent bastardization apparatus. They are recruited by fascists, trained by fascists, mentored by fascists, promoted by fascists. If they happen to join another fascist organization, that’s simply them branching out. And when they do, they bring with them tactical training, weapons proficiency, social prestige, state support, and an intensified clarity of purpose. The enemy of the working class is an active army: well-armed, well-resourced, well-organized, and highly motivated. They can be met with nothing less.

Comrade Dremel is a member of the Unity-Struggle-Unity Staff, an experienced educator, organizer, and scientist based in Maryland. Their organizing work has largely centered around labor agitation and fostering scientific literacy, with an emphasis on climate change and pandemic preparedness.

Corporate Personhood, Monopoly Capital, and the Precedent That Wasn't: The 1886 "Santa Clara" Case

By Curry Malott

Republished from Liberation School.

Editor’s note: Beginning with overturning Roe v. Wade, the ultra right-wing Supreme Court continues to attack hard-won and elementary democratic rights in the United States, from affirmative action to the Indian Child Welfare Act. The following article is the third in our series “Crimes of the Supreme Court,” which demonstrates the fundamentally reactionary and anti-democratic nature of the Supreme Court. By examining key decisions in the Court’s history, we explain their historical and political context, the legal concepts and frameworks used to justify their decisions, and lay out their implications for later cases. This entry focuses on an 1886 Supreme Court ruling that is often cited as the precedent guaranteeing corporations the same protections as “natural persons,” although it did no such thing. Nonetheless, this case and several preceding ones demonstrated how the struggle for corporate personhood—particularly under the “Equal Protection Clause” of the 14th Amendment—was intimately bound up in the transition to U.S. monopoly capitalism.

How do the actual people in charge of corporations manage to remain protected from the consequences of the countless crimes they commit year after year? How is it that when CEOs make clear and obvious decisions that habitually violate every existing worker-won regulation, from the Clean Air Act to the Civil Rights Act, with very few exceptions, they charge the corporation—the “artificial” or “unnatural” person—instead of the CEO—the actual, “natural person” who made those decisions?

The legal grounds that corporations have the same protections and rights as “natural persons” is commonly justified by the 1886 Supreme Court ruling in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. As we’ll see, the Court’s decision in the case didn’t establish any precedent for corporate personhood, nor did the Court make any ruling on it. To the extent that the Supreme Court even debated “artificial,” “corporate,” and other kinds of personhood, they did so to facilitate the transition from “free competition” to monopoly capitalism in the country.

In this article, we explore the Santa Clara case before turning to debates within the institutions of power in the U.S. over the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. These debates can only be understood if situated within their historical, political, and economic context: the transition to monopoly capital in the U.S. To conclude, we explore the case’s destructive legacy, or the way it was illegitimately used to set precedent for the growth of monopoly capital.

The facts and outcome of the case

During the 1878-79 California Constitutional Convention, the state enacted a new tax code that, in part, prevented railroad corporations from factoring existing debts and mortgages into their total taxable value. The Southern Pacific Railroad Company, along with the Central Pacific Railroad Company, refused to follow the new code. They did not pay the additional tax, nor did they pay the back taxes they subsequently owed.

The first point of contention were back taxes—including the interest on them—that railroad companies refused to pay in California, specifically the taxes being levied on the fencing along the railroads’ right-of-way. Among the handful of complaints brought forth, lawyers representing the railroads argued that it was the county and not the state that should have assessed the value of the fencing. As Thom Hartmann points out, “the railroad was refusing to pay taxes of about $30,000,” which is “like having a $10,000 car and refusing to pay a $10 tax on it—and taking the case to the Supreme Court” [1].

Faced with the loss of revenue, a number of counties in California, including San Mateo County, filed suit against the railroad companies in an attempt to collect the taxes that the railroads refused to pay. According to Southern Pacific’s executives, they were being treated unfairly relative to “legal” or “natural” persons who could deduct debts and mortgages from their taxable income or value. The cases were consolidated before reaching the California Supreme Court, which ruled mostly in favor of the counties and against the railroad companies. The one exception concerned the fences constructed around the railroads. The Court affirmed that the fences “were improperly included by the State Board in its assessments” and, as a result, there was no legal basis for the counties to collect additional taxes [2].

The origins of corporate personhood?

Interestingly, however, the Santa Clara decision is rarely remembered for the issue of taxation and, more specifically, the role of railroad monopolies, and is instead mostly cited as the first instance of the Supreme Court upholding “corporate personhood.”

One of the railroad’s defenses at the Supreme Court hearing included arguing that the “Equal Protection Clause” of the 14th Amendment applied to corporations, so therefore the state couldn’t tax them differently from other citizens. Yet this was only a minor point among the six arguments presented by the railroads.

Moreover, it seems Chief Justice Morrison Waite quickly dismissed the argument in the case by stating that it is a general, agreed upon principle that the clause applies to corporations.  According to the ruling’s “headnote,” Waite stated the Court would not even consider “whether the provision in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of the opinion that it does” [3].

Did the Supreme Court, then, establish a legal precedent that corporations have the same legal protections as natural persons? Despite the Supreme Court citing it as precedent for a century, and despite that it was routinely taught to law students as precedent, the ruling did no such thing.

Waite’s comment above was not part of the official ruling. Instead, it was included in a headnote written by the Court’s Reporter of Decisions, journalist J.C. Bancroft Davis, former president of the Newburgh and New York Railway Company. Headnotes are introductory summaries of cases added to Court rulings to make it easier for legal professionals and others to sift through cases.

Headnotes, therefore, are not legally-binding and hold no legal authority. It wasn’t until the 1906 ruling in United States v. Detroit Lumber Co. that the Supreme Court officially ruled in its majority opinion that headnotes aren’t part of the Court’s rulings or findings. As then-Chief Justice David Brewer wrote, “the headnote is not the work of the court, nor does it state its decision… it is simply the work of the reporter, gives his understanding of the decision, and is prepared for the convenience of the profession in the examination of the reports” [4]. This, however, hasn’t prevented the U.S. courts in general, and the Supreme Court in particular, from citing the headnote as precedent.

The headnote is significant in a few ways. First, the report of Waite’s comments didn’t include any legal or constitutional justification; it was a mere assertion. As a result, since 1886 the status of corporations as “people” protected under the Constitution has been a source of controversy. Moreover, “the concept of the corporate person lacks a principled definition and, therefore, seems to expand, or contract, depending on the circumstances and on the personal predilections of the speaker” [5].

The headnote is especially significant because of Waite’s sweeping acceptance that corporations are protected by the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. This differs from a previous Court ruling in the 1873 Slaughterhouse Cases that made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court after an 1869 Louisiana legislature decision to issue a charter confining slaughterhouse operations in New Orleans to a single corporate entity, the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company.

Crescent City’s charter required the company to run its waste downstream, ordered other slaughterhouses, most of which were much smaller, to close, and forbid the establishment of any new slaughterhouses in the area for the next 25 years. In effect, the legislature produced a monopoly on slaughterhouses for the time period. This meant that all workers, including butchers, had to work for Crescent or find work elsewhere. As a result, hundreds of members of the Butchers’ Benevolent Association, which represented smaller or independent slaughterhouses, filed suit in the Louisiana Supreme Court on the basis that the monopoly violated the 13th and 14th Amendments by forcing butchers into “involuntary servitude” and taking away their property without compensation or due process.

When the U.S. Supreme Court took up the cases, the majority opinion explicitly stated that the Amendments did not apply in this instance. The dissenting opinion by Justice Stephen Field proposed a broad definition of the Amendments at stake, one that would become more expansive as the overthrow of Reconstruction solidified. The crucial issue, he stated, was “whether the recent amendments to the Federal Constitution protect the citizens of the United States against the deprivation of their common rights by State legislation.” Field closed the dissenting opinion by asserting that the 14th Amendment applies to corporations and monopolies. He wrote that the Amendment “does afford such protection, and was so intended by the Congress which framed and the States which adopted it” [6].

Between his time on California’s Ninth Circuit Court and the Supreme Court, “Field worked tirelessly to expand the 14th Amendment to include the rights of corporations.” He was driven by careerism and a desire to reach the country’s highest court and maybe even the presidency “with the support of railroad money” [7].

In his dissenting opinion in a related railroad case, Fields expressed his outrage that the Court was neglecting the crucial question, which was if “an unlawful and unjust discrimination was made . . . and to that extent depriving it of the equal protection of the laws” [8].

Whether or not the original drafters of the post-Civil War amendments explicitly considered if and how the 14th Amendment—or the 13th— could apply to corporations or any group other than Black people is unclear. Based on available records, some argue that Congress may indeed have considered or intended for corporations to be included in the 14th Amendment, as the original drafters “were inundated with petitions from insurance companies and railroads complaining about protectionist state measures” [9]. That the 14th Amendment makes a distinction between “persons” and “citizens” is also significant, as the former “are entitled to due process and equal protection” while the latter are only “guaranteed the privileges and immunities of national citizenship” [10].

What is certainly true, however, is that almost none of the 14th Amendment cases heard by the Supreme Court concerned the rights of Black people. The Supreme Court itself affirmed this in 1938. In his dissenting opinion on Connecticut Gen Life Ins C. v. Johnson, Justice Hugo Black cited Miller’s majority opinion in the 1873 Slaughterhouse cases, doubting that the 13th and 14th Amendments would include anyone except Black people. “Yet,” he continued, “of the cases in this Court in which the 14th Amendment was applied during the first fifty years after its adoption, less than one-half of 1 per cent. invoked it in protection of the negro race, and more than 50 per cent. asked that its benefits be extended to corporations” [11].

Further, recent history affirms that the U.S. ruling class considers and treats corporate entities much more humanely than they treat Black people.

Corporate personhood and a new phase of U.S. capitalism

The period leading up to the 1886 case was characterized by monumental shifts in the political, social, economic, and racial order of the U.S. This included the heroic Reconstruction era as well as its tragic defeat and the rapid growth of monopoly capital in the country.

In the decade leading up to Santa Clara case, railroad barons emerged as a new faction of the capitalist class that provided the model for monopoly capital. This is why, just before the 1878-79 California Convention, California allowed the Southern Pacific Railroad Company to absorb several other corporations. Prior to that, Congress granted 11 million acres of land to Southern Pacific, although for their expansion the company acquired additional debts through a mortgage on its construction, equipment, railcars, and so on. Southern Pacific was also granted the legal authority to construct a line connecting San Francisco to Texas.

The trend toward monopoly predated the Civil War and coincided with the ongoing conquest of the continent. Large corporations, with state funding, facilitated the expanding interstate commerce through railways and canals, which in turn led to a larger and more integrated national economy. Federal and state legislatures promoted this centralization of capital insofar as it took the economic burden off the state while still allowing the state to use the new networks for postal and military purposes.

The pressing question for the U.S. ruling class was whether or not the government-backed monopolists would ultimately represent a unique and temporary phenomenon or provide a model for capital as a whole.

There was a clear struggle between the ideologues of small enterprises that formerly dominated the economic landscape and operated similarly to the idealistic “free competition” phase of capitalism and those of monopoly capital, where the various enterprises dispersed throughout different entities were consolidated into large ones.

As Morton J. Horowitz details in his account of how legal structures raced to keep up with the latest changes in capital, in the 1880s there wasn’t any precedent about “natural” or “corporate” persons because these categories threatened individualism and free-market competition. By the turn of the century, however, the struggles over “political economy between small entrepreneurs and emergent big business over the legitimacy of large scale enterprise” erupted [12].

The debates taking place within the ruling class had to do with whether or not there was an inherent tendency for capital to centralize. At the time, most political economists didn’t give credence to the inevitability of monopolization, seeing the railroads as exceptional. It didn’t take long until politicians, bourgeois economists, and others rightly interpreted the railroad’s economic trajectory as a precursor to a coming phase of industrial monopolization.

There was a shift in power and influence within the capitalist class from the old “free enterprise” capitalists to the new monopolists:

“By the late nineteenth century in America, fundamental changes had already taken place in the legal treatment of the corporation. First, and by far the most important, was the erosion of the so-called ‘grant’ or ‘concession’ theory of the corporation, which treated the act of incorporation as a special privilege conferred by the state for the pursuit of public purposes. Under the grant theory, the business corporation was regarded as an ‘artificial being’ created by the state with powers strictly limited by its charter of incorporation. As we shall see, a number of more specific legal doctrines were also derived from the grant theory in order to enforce the state’s interest in limiting and confining corporate power” [13].

From this point of view, the rise of monopoly capitalism, or the centralization of larger and larger sectors of the means of production into fewer and fewer hands, is driven by the self-expansive and competitive nature of capitalist production. The Supreme Court provided the legal grounds for facilitating this transformation.

Legacy of the case

In the immediate aftermath of Santa Clara, “the Court did away with 230 state laws that had been passed to regulate corporations” [14]. It was clear evidence monopoly capital was in control of politics. Supreme Court decisions in the years between 1908 and 1914, often citing corporate personhood, struck down minimum-wage laws, workers’ compensation laws, utility regulation, and child labor laws—every kind of law that a people might institute to protect its citizenry from abuses” [15].

For over a century now, the state has continued to take power and rights away from working and oppressed people and transferred it to capital. They have even perverted the hard-won gains won by people’s movements into justifications for increasing corporate power, perhaps none more disgusting than the misuse of the 14th Amendment.

While even to this day there is no clear legal basis for corporate personhood, that hasn’t stopped the Supreme Court from waging class war against the people on behalf of corporations. Because the nine unelected judges determine the law, they can legally justify whatever tactics they deploy against us.

The misuse of Santa Clara’s headnote has not only severely inhibited the ability to regulate corporations, but it has created a space for CEOs and shareholders to operate with near impunity. For example, Joel Bakan notes that “corporate illegalities are rife throughout the economy…By design, the corporate form generally protects the human beings who run corporations from legal liability, leaving the corporation, a ‘person’…the main target of criminal prosecution” [16].

The Supreme Court was created to serve the interests of the capitalist class. Its very existence stands as a barrier to the working and oppressed peoples’ desire for a true democracy. As the Supreme Court unleashes its most current wave of attacks on our basic democratic rights, we will continue to fight for a new system.

References

[1] Thom Hartmann,Unequal Protection: How Corporations Became People–and How You can Fight Back(San Francisco: ‎ Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2010), 18.
[2] Santa Clara County. v. South Pacific Railroad, 118 U.S. 394 (1886), 411. Availablehere.
[3] Ibid., 396.
[4] United States v. Detroit Lumber Co., 200 U.S. 321 (1906). Availablehere.
[5] Malcolm J. Harkins III, “The Uneasy Relationship of Hobby Lobby, Conestoga Wood, the Affordable Care Act, and the Corporate Person: How a Historical Myth Continues to Bedevil the Legal System,”Saint Louis University Journal of Health Law & Policy7, no. 2 (2014): 204.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Nicholas S. Paliewicz, “How Trains Became People: Southern Pacific Railroad Co.’s Networked Rhetorical Culture and the Dawn of Corporate Personhood,”Journal of Communication Inquiry43, no. 2 (2019): 204-205.
[8] Cited in Ibid.
[9] Matthew J. Zinn and Steven Reed, “Equal Protection and State Taxation of Interstate Business,”The Tax Lawyer41, no. 1 (1987): 89-90.
[10] Ibid., 90.
[11] Connecticut General Life Ins. Co v. Johnson, 303 U.S. 77 (1938). Availablehere.
[12] Morton J. Horowitz, “Santa Clara Revisited: The Development of Corporate Theory,”West Virginia Law Review88, no. 2 (1986): 187.
[13] Ibid., 181.
[14] Howard Zinn,A People’s History of the United States(New York: Perennial Classics, 1980/1999), 261.
[15] Hartmann,Unequal Protection, 24.
[16] Joel Bakan,The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power(New York: The Free Press, 2004), 75-79.

Revisiting Eric Williams' 'Capitalism and Slavery' and Dismantling the Accepted Narratives of History

By John Burns

Republished from Monthly Review.

When British capitalism depended on the West Indies,” Eric Williams wrote in 1938,

they ignored slavery or defended it. When British capitalism found the West Indian monopoly a nuisance, they destroyed West Indian slavery.

Williams had no time for sentimental views on the abolition of slavery. The history he dealt in was more honest, more straightforward, and unafraid to confront the accepted narratives, wherever these might be found.

And confront he did. His 1945 work, Capitalism and Slavery, systematically destroyed the traditional, rose-tinted views of abolition in the UK, replacing the cozy and humanitarian with the cold and pragmatic, substituting empathy and egalitarianism with hard economic necessity. In Williams’s view, the United Kingdom reaped the immense benefits of slavery—for centuries, in fact—and dropped the practice only when it no longer served its lucrative purpose. To look at the facts in any other light is simply a pretense.

There are voices of humanitarianism within Williams’s work. There are voices of empathy, of egalitarianism. There are people whose consciences are clear, who’s hearts are true, people who fought against slavery and the British Empire’s grim association with it. There are all of these things because there were all of these things in real life. These voices existed in Georgian and Victorian Britain, and so they are present in Williams’s writing. It’s just that these voices, these notes of discord, were lost in a far larger choir. Those making all the noise—those who truly influenced governors and policymakers—were motivated by very different factors, such as economics, geopolitics, imperialism, and capitalism.

Williams received his early education in his native Trinidad and Tobago, then still part of the British Empire. As a student, he was awarded a scholarship to Oxford University, where he excelled as a student and refined many of ideas that would characterize his later work. In 1956, Williams formed the People’s National Movement (PNM), becoming the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago that same year, and eventually led the country to independence in 1962. He continued to serve at the helm of the new nation right up until his death in 1981 at age 69, in the nation’s capital, Port of Spain.

His achievements as a freedom-minded politician and global head of state may have overshadowed his earlier work in academia, but these two aspects of his career cannot be separated. His clear-eyed and honest approach to history, and to his own people’s place within that history, shaped the path he would take in the following decades. By deconstructing UK attitudes to the slave trade, and its eventual abolition, Williams laid the foundations for dismantling British imperialism in the Caribbean. His contribution to our historical understanding, and to nationhood for Trinidad and Tobago, are inextricably linked.

Williams’s ideas are not new anymore. Capitalism and Slavery was written largely as a doctoral thesis in 1938, refined and published in 1945, and has been discussed for decades since. But Penguin’s relaunch of the book in 2022 is the first mass-market edition of the work to hit the shelves in the United Kingdom. It has, deservedly, become a bestseller.

But why does this matter now? Because we are still in danger of falling under the sway of accepted truths and fantastical narratives of history. The book is a timely reminder that history is a science that helps us better understand the culture and politics of our own age—it is not sculptor’s clay, ready to be molded into whatever shape or form best suits our own blinkered, and often prejudiced, aesthetic vision. History does not owe us anything. It is not ours to manipulate or distort.

In June 2020, the statue of enslaver Edward Colston was toppled by demonstrators in Bristol—a city that appears again and again in the pages of Capitalism and Slavery, thanks largely to the profits from the trade in sugar and enslaved people that flowed across its docks. This trade was so lucrative that Bristol became the Crown’s “second city” until 1775. It was men like Colston who helped achieve this status—hence the statue.

Colston had been, but his work as a merchant, slave trader, and subsequently, a Member of Parliament is etched into the stone upon which Bristol stands. He was almost three centuries dead by time his bronze likeness was lobbed into the Bristol Channel, and he likely had very little opinion on the matter.

Fortunately for Colston, there were plenty of people in 2020 who did have opinions on the matter. History—their history—they cried, was being erased. The “armies of wokeness” and “politically correct groupthink” were destabilizing the proud heritage of the United Kingdom, they claimed. Sure, Colston traded in slaves, but it was a different time, and Colston was a great man—a true hero of the city and its people—not to mention the criminal damage, public order offenses, or the rights of the sculptor himself.

This is an example of historical distortion and manipulation at work, pursuing ends that are nothing short of racist. History has provided us with a figure—Colston—whose great wealth led to the rise of one of the UK’s most important cities. History has provided us with the facts regarding the sources of that wealth—the slave trade; the theft of dignity from our fellow human beings. History does not provide us a way with which we can separate the two—we cannot have one without confronting the other. Erecting a statue to Colston—celebrating Colston for his efforts and his achievements—means erecting a statue to the slave trade, too.

Nor does history provide us with icons who are beyond reproach. By searching history for unimpeachable icons—symbols of a particular set of values or ethics—we are destined only for failure. If, in response to our disappointment at finding flawed human beings in lieu of the pristine icons we seek, we resort to mythologizing and hagiography, we play a very dangerous game, indeed. In another of the twentieth century’s great social texts, Women, Race and Class, Angela Y. Davis examines the relationship between feminist heroes Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and the “women first, negroes last” policies of Democratic politician Henry Blackwell.

Blackwell spoke in support of women’s suffrage in the South, asserting that “4,000,000 Southern women will counterbalance 4,000,000 negro men and women”, retaining the “political supremacy of the white race.” Davis writes about the “implicit assent” of Anthony and Stanton to Blackwell’s racist logic as she explores the troubling and complex nature of women’s suffrage during its gestation.

Like Williams and his deconstruction of accepted beliefs regarding abolition, Davis’s analysis of racist attitudes in the women’s suffrage movement leads to an awkward confrontation. Stanton and Anthony made incredible contributions to the rights of women in the United States, and this should never be forgotten—but to turn a blind eye to the gross inequality that formed the backdrop to the movement is to deny this injustice altogether, leaving us with a flawed and incomplete understanding of our own history.

This approach—this honesty, this meticulousness—is found within the pages of Capitalism and Slavery, too. This is not simply an attack on the white establishment of the United Kingdom and their forbears in the heyday of the empire; this is a methodical analysis of the key drivers behind the rise and fall of the British slave trade. Williams’s work is certainly not an attack on abolition—a critical moment in establishing of a better world for all human beings—but neither does it seek to perpetuate false ideas of who and what made the moment of abolition a reality.

Two centuries before the slave trade reached its peak, the very concept of slavery was decried by the uppermost echelons of power in the British Empire. Queen Elizabeth I herself said that enslavement would “call down the vengeance of heaven,” and yet, by the eighteenth century, all sorts of mental gymnastics were deployed to justify the trade. Church leaders, Williams said, proposed that slavery could bring “benighted beings to the chance of salvation,” while conservative thinker Edmund Burke—himself a rigorous supporter of religion’s place in society—expounded on the slaveholder’s right to maintain ownership of “their property”, that is, the human beings they had paid for. It seems ethics and morality are not absolutes, and can be manipulated to support economic prosperity.

When such leaps of logic and desperate justification can support the rise of the slave trade, why should these moral contortions suddenly cease? Why should the voices of humanity win the day, defeating the barbarism of trans-Atlantic slavery and achieving a resounding—if delayed—moral victory? The answer is simple: they didn’t. Williams foreshadows the eventual collapse of the trade by presenting the views of contemporary economists Josiah Tucker and Adam Smith, who declared the trade to be expensive and inefficient. In the end, it would be economics, not ethics, that would defeat the United Kingdom’s plantations and slave ships.

If the going was good, the slave trade would continue, no matter how many horrific acts were perpetrated on the shores of Africa and on the islands of the Caribbean. When the market stopped being profitable—when the fiscal engine driving slavery forwards started to cough and sputter—the trade would cease. The laws of business and enterprise, as cold and inhuman as they are, were far stronger than any moral outrage.

More than eight decades have gone by since Williams completed his doctoral thesis, and it is pleasant to think that we have moved on a great deal since those days. After all, Williams was then a subject of the British Empire. Now, the citizens of Trinidad and Tobago—along with the citizens of other former colonies—are free to determine their own path in the world. In 1965, the United Kingdom passed the Race Relations Act, outlawing discrimination on the “grounds of colour, race, or ethnic or national origins”—a positive step towards a better, more welcoming nation.

But we should not wrap ourselves too tightly in this comfortable blanket of pleasant thought. In 1968, three years after the Race Relations Act was passed, Enoch Powell made his rivers of blood speech in Birmingham. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, division and discrimination led to violent flashpoints as riots ripped through urban centers. In 1993, the tragic murder of Stephen Lawrence exposed the systematic racism at the core of UK policing. In 2018, the so-called Windrush Scandal, overseen by then-Home Secretary Theresa May, saw immigrant UK citizens stripped of their rights and their dignity. The fight against discrimination and prejudice is far from over, and no amount of historical airbrushing can compensate for this.

This is why Williams’s work is so relevant today: It reminds us to question the comforting and convenient narratives of accepted history. Twisting historical narratives to fit our own agenda—to reflect our own view of what Britain represents—is deceitful at best, and dangerous at worst. A more critical, clear-eyed, analytical approach to the past is necessary if we are to truly understand the challenges of the present.

John Burns is a freelance writer and editor from Nottingham in the United Kingdom, now residing in Yunnan, southwest China.

Sources

• “Collections Online: British Museum,” Collections Online | British Museum. Accessed October 31, 2022.

• Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage, 2020).

• Samuel Earle, “‘Rivers of Blood’: The Legacy of a Speech That Divided Britain,” Atlantic, April 20, 2018.

• “Edward Colston Statue: Four Cleared of Criminal Damage,” BBC News, January 5, 2022.

• “Eric Williams,” Encyclopedia Britannica. Accessed October 31, 2022.

• Chris Matthews, “Purge of Edward Colston’s Name in Bristol Continues,” Daily Mail Online, April 27, 2022.

• Matty Edwards, “‘A Monumental Moment in History’: Cable Readers React to the Colston 4 Being Cleared,” Bristol Cable, April 22, 2022.

• “Race Relations Act, 1965.” Legislation.gov.uk. Queen’s Printer of Acts of Parliament. Accessed October 31, 2022.

• Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: Penguin Books, 2022).

Whose lessons? Which direction?

[Pictured: Poster, 1962, by Nina Vatolina. The text reads: 'Peace, Labor, Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood, Happiness.']

By Jodi Dean

Republished from Liberation School.

As obituaries for neoliberalism pile up on our nightstands and Antonio Gramsci’s adage that the old is dying and the new cannot be born appears newly profound, we turn to the past for direction. What successes should guide us? What can we learn from our failures? If we are to advance politically in the twenty-first century, we need to learn the correct lessons from the twentieth. But what are they?

For some on the left, the problems we face today are as they have ever been failures of organization and collective commitment. A disciplined and organized working class could do more than compel concessions from capital; it could transform society. What’s needed is the revolutionary party. Others on the left blame labor’s political weakness on refusals to compromise. Militant organizations aren’t solutions. They’re errors. Only when unions and left parties accept capitalist social property relations do workers earn their seat at the table and engage in the bargaining that increases their share. Communist parties hinder such acceptance.

Forty years of neoliberalism reveals the bankruptcy of the latter perspective. Capital makes concessions only when it has no other choice. Ruling classes across the Global North have dismantled public sectors and decimated middle classes rather than provide the tax support necessary for maintaining social democracy. They’ve rolled back hard-won political and social gains, treating basic democratic rights as threats to their power. While strong tendencies on the right recognize radicalization as necessary for politics in a period of uncertainty and double down on their various illiberalisms, opponents of revolution insist that the lesson of the twentieth century is the necessity of compromise. Presuming there’s no alternative to capitalism, left Thatcherites declare that progress depends on leaving behind our communist baggage.

One instance of this perspective is Jonah Birch’s “The Cold War Made it Harder for the Left to Win” [1]. Criticizing Gary Gerstle’s argument in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, Birch rejects Gerstle’s claim that it was the communist threat that made significant reform possible in the twentieth century [2]. With homogeneous Sweden as his example of social democratic success, Birch asserts that conditions were worse for labor in countries with large communist parties. He concedes that the socio-economic context that led to economic growth after World War II is unlikely to reappear. Nevertheless, Birch advises the left to accept the lesson that communists hurt the working class.

The struggle against white supremacy and fascism is class struggle

Birch’s deeply conservative message moves to the right of mainstream liberal recognition of the impact of the court of world opinion during the Cold War. It is widely accepted that competition with the Soviet Union for hearts and minds pushed the U.S. to take steps toward the abolition of Jim Crow apartheid and institutionalized white supremacy. The denial of voting rights and violent repression of activists damaged the country’s reputation as democracy’s global defender. As soon as one acknowledges the multiracial and multinational character of the working class, one realizes how the Swedish fantasy operates (even in Sweden, as Tobias Hϋbinette demonstrates in a recent piece in the Boston Review) to make a small subset of struggles—the wage struggles of white workers—stand in for the broad array of struggles of the diverse multinational working class [3].

In the U.S., for example, communist involvement in the fight against lynching, segregation, and Jim Crow was more than a propaganda point in the Cold War’s great power conflict. From its early years, the Communist Party recognized that workers would only prevail if they were united. So long as Black workers were paid lower wages than white workers and so long as Black workers excluded from unions were available as strikebreakers, the position of all workers was insecure. The struggle against white supremacy was thus central to building the collective power to win the class struggle. This analysis of the national composition of the working class under conditions of white supremacy and racism committed communists to deepening engagement in “Negro work” in multiple arenas. These arenas included organizing agricultural and domestic workers, taking on legal campaigns on behalf of the falsely accused, and drawing out the connections between the conditions facing Black people in the U.S. and oppressed and colonized people all over the world. Even more broadly, the Party demonstrated how anti-fascist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist movements for peace were indispensable to class struggle insofar as they all took aim at U.S. monopoly capital [4].

Communists were at the forefront of the struggle against fascism and its doctrine of Aryan superiority. Birch treats the French and Italian Communist Parties as divisive organizations. He blames them for splitting the labor movement in their respective countries, thereby marginalizing the left and isolating the working class. On the one hand, Birch’s charges are belied by his own evidence: in both countries the communists regularly won around twenty percent of the national vote in elections, hardly an indication of marginalization and isolation. Multiple localities and municipalities had communist leaders. On the other hand, Birch’s myopic focus on the expansion of social programs as the single measure of political success leads him to neglect central communist contributions. The partisans who gave their lives in the war against European fascisms, the thousands who carried out a heroic resistance in occupied countries, are erased from view. Surely their achievements are as noteworthy as the collective bargaining institutions, and generous social services that preoccupy Birch. And since Birch concedes that the economic conditions that prevailed in the post-war heyday of social democracy are unlikely to appear again, what is the political cost today of failing to acknowledge and learn from the courage of communist resistance?

Internationalism as the ground of struggle

The significance of the communist contribution continues to expand as we zoom out from a narrow focus on Europe. No one can deny the role of communist-led national liberation movements in the colonized world. In virtually every liberation struggle Marxist-Leninists played an indispensable part. Angola, Mozambique, Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, Congo-Brazzaville, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and China are not insignificant data points just because they are not from Europe.

For decades critics of colonialism and neocolonialism have pointed out that the capitalist class has been able to secure the political passivity or even support of a large layer of the working class in the imperialist core through benefits accrued from the global exploitation of Black and brown people. These critics continue a line of argument already prominent in Lenin’s analysis of the enormous super-profits generated by imperialism. That capital is international and the struggle against it must be as well is a lesson from communists in the twentieth century that remains indispensable in the twenty-first. Workers couldn’t afford nationalist myopia then and surely cannot in today’s setting of global supply chains, mass migration, and climate change.

In the U.S., Black women in and around the Communist Party in the first half of the twentieth century demonstrated the practical implications of internationalism in their organizing. As early as 1928, Williana Burroughs emphasized concrete tasks related to engaging foreign-born Black workers in the U.S. (West Indies, South America, Cape Verde Islands, Africa) and using anti-imperialism as a point of connection (“Thousands of Negroes from Haiti, Cuba, British possessions, Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico have felt the iron heel of British or American Imperialism”) [5].

The Party took the view that Black workers in the U.S. were an oppressed national minority with a right to self-determination. While controversial within and without the Party, this line constituted a fundamental ground for unifying Black and white workers because it recognized the centrality of the struggle for Black liberation. Organizing Black workers meant organizing Black women because most Black women worked for wages to support their families. Organizing Black women meant organizing immigrants and farm workers and attending to the housing, education, and neighborhood conditions impacting workers’ lives. Organizing immigrants and farm workers meant building an understanding of the patterns of oppression and resistance facing all workers. Internationalism was more than an expression of solidarity. It was a principle with repercussions for domestic organizing.

Claudia Jones’s famous International Women’s Day speech from 1950 described the global peace movement and signature campaign against the A-bomb, Marshall Plan, and Atlantic war pact. Jones noted women’s organizations’ opposition to NATO, “which spells misery for the masses of American women and their families.” She advocated rousing the internationalism of American women in protest against “Wall Street’s puppets in Marshalized Italy, in fascist Greece and Spain.” And she linked the Justice Department’s attack on the Congress of American Women as “foreign agents” with the group’s long-standing advocacy of women’s equal rights, Negro-white unity, and child welfare and education [6].

The resolute internationalism of communists in the twentieth century was indispensable to confronting imperialism and colonialism. We build the power of the working class by emphasizing the patterns of oppression and resistance, linking struggles, and targeting capitalism as the system to be defeated.

Anti-communism is the enemy

Over the last decades of neoliberalism, the right has advanced. In the U.S., UK, Brazil, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Poland, Sweden, and elsewhere, conservative parties use nationalism to reach out to those left behind by globalization. When socialists take as their measure of success the wages of an outmoded, masculinist, and Eurocentric image of the working class, they undermine their capacity to build mass unity, strengthening the hand of the right. Insistence on the multinational composition of the labor force of all the so-called developed countries gives the lie to nationalist and isolationist fantasies as well as to the patriarchal conceptions of the family that support them.

A component of right-wing advance has been its relentless assault on communism. Thirty years after the defeat of the Soviet Union, conservatives attack even the most common sense of public measures as communist plots. More subtle but no less reactionary are the epistemological dimensions of anti-communism, what Charisse Burden-Stelly theorizes as intellectual McCarthyism [7]. Anti-communism persists today in the suppression of knowledge of the continuities between anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist struggles. Instead of the site where those struggles were unified, communism is treated as a dangerous and alien ideology. Its role in the fight against white supremacy domestically and internationally is buried.

For anti-communists disorder is foreign—the refugee, the immigrant, the Black, the Muslim, the Jew. Anti-communists disavow the capitalist disorder of competition, markets, innovation, dispossession, foreclosure, debt, and imperialist war. Dramatic changes in the character of work, communities, and life that accompany disruptive and ubiquitous technology; urbanization and rural depopulation; shifts from industry and manufacture to services and servitude; the intensification of competition for decreasing numbers of affordable houses and adequately compensated jobs—these all congeal into a disorder to be dealt with by the assertion of police, family, church, and race. Anti-communism remains the lynchpin of this assertion.

The fear that anti-communism mobilizes is a fear of loss, a fear that what you have will be taken from you, what Slavoj Žižek refers to as the “theft of enjoyment” [8]. Marx and Engels call out this mobilization of fear in The Communist Manifesto when they address charges that communists want to take people’s property. They write, “in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths” [9]. The anti-communist mobilization of fear conceals the absence of property, wealth, job security, success, sovereignty, and freedom. It posits that we have them by positioning them as stolen. Communism is what prevents you from being rich, widely admired, having lots of sex, and so on. The “theft of enjoyment” fantasy obscures the fact that under capitalism a handful of billionaires have more wealth than half the planet. By positing communism as a source of deprivation, as an ideology based on taking something away, anti-communism conceals that we don’t have what is ostensibly being stolen.

Anti-communism is not confined to the political right. It often seeps into progressive and self-described socialist circles. Left anti-communists proceed as if communism were the barrier to workers’ success, as if we would all live in a Swedish social democratic paradise but for those damned communists. Not only does this deny the multiracial and international reality of the working class, but it conceals broader left political division and weakness. Virtually nowhere does the left face the choice of reform or revolution. Virtually nowhere is the left in a position where class compromise is on the table. Anti-communism obscures this basic fact.

Communism is that modern political ideology always and everywhere on the side of the oppressed. When labor begins to appear strong, when those who have been racially, sexually, ethnically, and colonially oppressed become more visible, more organized, and more militant, anti-communism intervenes to set up barriers. On the left as well as the right, anti-communism attempts to structure the political field by establishing the terrain of possibility: which political paths are available, which are unthinkable. Even in settings where communism is dismissed as itself impossible, anti-communism mobilizes social forces to oppose it. This fight against the impossible is an ideological signal: the discussion isn’t aimed toward seriously evaluating lessons and goals. It’s about shoring up the status quo, disciplining working-class imagination by preemptive arrest of any challengers to capitalist social property relations.

The political and economic situation that prevails today differs significantly from the postwar era. The U.S. has lost both its preeminent economic status and the moral position it assumed following the end of WWII (a position always fragile and contested given the U.S.’s use of atomic weapons, backing of dictatorships, imperialist and neocolonial foreign policy, and domestic police state). Unions have lost their prior bargaining power and workers their hard-won rights and benefits. Today the issue is building organizations and movements with power sufficient to compel the socialist reconstruction of the economy in the context of a rapidly changing climate. This fight is multinational and international or it is lost.

References

[1] Jonah Birch, “The Cold War May It Harder for the Left to Win Social Democratic Reforms,”Jacobin, 15 November 2022. Availablehere.
[2] Gary Gerstle,The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order(Oxford University Press, 2022).
[3] Tobias Hϋbinette, “Race and Sweden’s Fascist Turn,”Boston Review, 19 October 2022. Availablehere.
[4] See the contributions toOrganize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing, ed. Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean (London: Verso, 2022).
[5] Williana Burroughs, “Negro Work Has Not Been Entirely Successful,”  inOrganize, Fight, Win,21-25.
[6] Claudia Jones, “International Women’s Day and the Struggle for Peace,” inOrganize, Fight, Win,181-197.
[7] Charisse Burden-Stelly, “OnBankers and Empire: Racial Capitalism, Antiblackness, and Antiradicalism,”Small Axe24, no. 2 (2020): 175-186.
[8] Slavoj Žižek,Tarrying With the Negative(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 200-237.
[9] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,The Communist Manifesto, trans. S. Moore (New York: Penguin Books, 1988/1967), 237.