The Value of Utopia: The American Tradition of Radical Utopianism

By Nick Partyka

For many centuries persons, peoples, and civilizations, have dreamed about what an ideal society (utopia) would look like, and worried about ways in which society could be much worse (dystopia). Utopian dreams and dystopian worries are powerful tools for thinking about what sorts of changes a society should pursue or avoid, and what underlying dynamics these proposed changes expose. This series examines the tradition of utopian and dystopian thought in western culture, beginning with the ancient Greeks, but continuing on into the modern period. Our focus in this series will be on the important social, political, and economic ideas and issues raised in different utopian stories. When we look into utopian stories, and their historical times, what we'll see reflected in the stories of utopia are the social, political, and economic concerns of the authors, their societies, and or their particular social class.

The meaning of the word 'utopia' comes to us from ancient Greece. In our modern world the word takes its current form because of Thomas More's 1516 book of the same name. Indeed, it is this book from which most of the modern western European utopian tradition takes its origin; or at least, this work inaugurates its most common trope. Where we have in our lexicon one 'utopia', the Greeks had two. The difference, even confusion, between them marks an essential cleavage. For the Greeks, there was both Eu- topia, and Ou-topia. Both are derived in part from the Greek word topos, which means "place", and the suffix 'ia' meaning land. Translated into English, 'Ou-topia' means something like, " No-place land", whereas 'Eu-topia' translates as "good-place land". More succinctly, the difference is between the idea of the best place, and an impossible place. It is the difference between a place which does not exist, because it has not yet been realized, and a place which cannot, and could not, ever exist.

Our modern word is pronounced as the Greeks pronounced 'Eutopia'. However, the meanings of these Greek words were confused by modern writers, who ended up with the spelling 'utopia', from the old English 'Utopie' as opposed to "Eutopia", as meaning "good place". This basic confusion about utopias, between "good place" and "no place", inserts an important ambiguity directly in the center of thinking about utopias. This ambiguity forces one to wonder of utopian writers, Are their visions supposed to be dreams of possible futures meant to incite us to action, or are they impossible dreams meant as reminders that the world is not easily re-shaped by human effort? Is a utopia supposed to be a good place or a no-place? Is the author supporting or condemning the practices of the fictional societies they describe?

One qualification must be made right away. A utopia is not a paradise. There is a colloquial usage of 'utopia' and 'utopian' that seem to suggest that it is a paradise. And compared to the societies in which actual humans lives, many of the fictional utopias would have indeed been seen as paradises, relatively speaking. However, we must draw a technical distinction between a paradise or a golden-age, and a utopia. In a paradise or golden-age no work and no effort are required by humans to obtain the things they want and need. Perhaps the most famous golden-age many are familiar with would be the Biblical Garden of Eden. Another well-known paradise is described in the mid-14th century poem The Land of Cockaigne, where fully cooked turkey legs literally fly through the air and into one's mouth. In this place the only effort one need put in is to chew.

The whole idea of a Cockaigne, or a paradise, is that everything one would ever need is abundantly supplied without any effort. The natural world is just so constructed - either at random or by design - that there springs forth automatically an abundance of everything necessary for everyone, all the time, always. In this kind of society, or world, there never arises anything resembling what we - or most societies in the history of our world - call a political problem. Everyone has enough of everything. So there is no cause for argument. There is no inequality, because everyone has everything everyone else has. Or at least, everyone has access to just as much of what others have whenever they would like it. In this kind of world what causes could there be for strife, or for civil war? A paradise, or a golden-age, is thus totally non-political, and not terribly interesting.

What this means is that utopias are enough like our own condition, our own world, that we can take inspiration from them. They are enough like the social conditions we know that we can learn lessons for and about ourselves and our societies by examining at them. This is exactly what makes utopias so interesting. As we will see, utopian literature has a long, very long, history with human beings. The enduring appeal of and, interest in utopias testifies to their relevance. This is the reason that we too are looking at utopias. We are all concerned with, or at least we are all effected by, the way our society is organized. By looking at how other ideal societies might be organized we can explore the merits, and demerits of various kinds of social institutions, and of the various ways of structuring those institutions. We are concerned to change our own society, and utopias allow us to think about the direction of that change.

We have a colloquial usage of the word 'utopia' and 'utopian' in contemporary society that works to prohibit much creative thought, and dismisses utopian thought as feckless, and as such, worthless. Part of the aims of this series is to demonstrate the value of this "worthless" endeavor. Dreaming, far from idle, far from impotent, is essential. Without wonder, without questions, the human imagination will atrophy. The value of utopia is that thinking about utopias allows us to both critique present societies, and also to articulate a vision of how we'd like our societies to be different. The deeper value of utopian thinking is that it sets us free, free to speculate and more importantly to give expression to our striving, to our desire for a better world. Everything human beings can be must first be dreamed by human beings. This is the value of utopia and dystopia. Thus, the first pre-requisite for this series is the rejection of this colloquial notion of utopia and the utopian. Dismissed from the start, it will not be a surprise if we fail to learn anything from our utopian traditions.

Introduction

Brief, but spectacular. That is how I think of the Occupy movement. An article I read recently lamented that the anniversaries of this movement seem to come and go now with but a murmur, a faint echo of the voice that all too briefly seemed capable of shaking American society out of complacency, of opening up new possibilities. There have by now been enough autopsies of this movement, and its failures, that there is no need for another. One thing that stands out is of course the fact that the movement never coalesced around a set of demands, never formulated a coherent political programme. Whether or not the Occupy movement did a good job distilling its critique, and its vision, neither were sufficiently theoretically developed or promulgated. Occupy in many senses seem to try to be a leaderless and theory-less movement. Of course, the main reason for the end of the Occupy movement was the physical clearance of the encampments by the thugs of the ruling class, that is, the police.

Much more fruitfully, when we look to the practice of Occupy, and the many encampments around the country, and indeed around the world, we can see that there is certainly a clear political, and moral ethos animating the activity and structure of the movement. What emerged from the Occupy encampments was an ethos of self-organization, free association, of de-centralized participatory democracy, and non-market modes of distribution. In Occupy encampments around the country people organized themselves to provide many kinds of basic, and some more advanced, services and community infrastructure, e.g. free meals, free educational opportunities, free healthcare, and much more. The diversity of services offered by different Occupy encampments was truly an amazing display of cooperation, solidarity, and self-organization. And indeed, this is what was really threatening about the occupy movement, it offered a robust vision of a more participatory, more solidaristic form of community, and worked diligently to create this, first within the bounds of its camps, and then the communities around the camps. Building up a vision of a new society, and a physical representation of that vision, became a major challenge to the ruling class because of the speed with which this movement grew and gathered strength.

Occupy was not the first time "utopian" ideas of more democratic, more participatory, more egalitarian, forms of community captured the imagination of Americans, and threatened the ruling class by becoming a movement. This has happened several times in our history, but, as one might expect, these lie outside the mainstream narrative of U.S. history. Thankfully, in the wake of Howard Zinn, much work has been done to recover and disseminate the knowledge and memory of the existence of radicals and revolutionaries, not to mention their important role, in American history. Utopian ideas, and vision of better societies have captured the imagination of Americans, and become large movements more than once. These largely forgotten episodes include the Bellamyite movement in the 1890s, and the Fourierist movement of the 1840s. These latter two represent the more secular and political end of the spectrum of utopian experiments in American history.

Looking Backwards, on Bellamyism

While it is almost totally forgotten now, at the end of the 19th century, the only American works of fiction to sell more copies than Edward Bellamy's Looking Backwards were Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Ben-Hur. His book, and the ideas and vision contained in it, was so wildly popular that is spawned an intense, but short-lived political movement in the form of Bellamyite "Nationalist Clubs"; indeed they were often called "Bellamy Clubs". These clubs arose quickly following the release of Bellamy's novel, and while the first club originated in Boston, chapters soon popped up in cities across the nation. These clubs, via coordinated activity, became a political force as a movement in the first half of the last decade of the nineteenth century, before disappearing after merging with the Populist movement. They turned Bellamy himself into a politician, although he was perhaps not well suited to the role of leader of a socialist political movement.

When Looking Backward was published in 1888 its popularity owed much to its readability, engaging narrative, but especially to its grand vision of a utopian future. Another big part of its popularity was conditioned by the times in which its author lived. Over the course of Edward Bellamy's forty-eight years he saw a great deal of turmoil, indeed, he would have been around fifteen the year the Civil war ended, and not quite twenty five when the Long Depression began in 1873. After the war American society experienced the rise of giant integrated capitalist firms - the infamous trusts - to positions of monopoly power; it had experienced a series of sometimes devastating economic recessions and depressions; it was experiencing increasing labor militance and strikes, for example the Great Strike of 1887; in conjunction with the latter, there was much radical socialist political agitation, see for example the 1886 Haymarket Affair and its highly controversial aftermath. Over this time the social effects of capitalism and industrialization became more pronounced. As is the still the case, it was workers, and the poor who bore the costs of material "progress". From the end of the Civil war to the turn of the century was when American capitalism really came into its own, when it rose to social and political dominance. As material prosperity of society increased, it looked to increasingly many Americans that, economically and politically, the decked was stacked against them, and that the lion's share of these gains were being accumulated by the wealthy.

Bellamy adopts the Rip Van Winkle trope and has his protagonist fall asleep in then present-day 1887, and wake up over a century later in the year 2000. Bellamy's hero, Julian West, finds himself in a utopian future society in which the evils of the world of 1887 have been rectified through application of reason, science, and technology. The book takes the form of a kind of guided tour of the future given to Julian by his host, a Dr. Leete, who is caring for Julian after he wakes up. Dr. Leete and his family take turns escorting Julian around, showing him different aspects of the future, and answering his many questions about how the world of the future works, and how things came to be that way. Long story short, the Unites States of the future has been transformed by a rational and irresistible bloodless revolution into a socialist utopia, as one giant national trust, operated for the public benefit. All industries have been nationalized, and are democratically controlled by their workers; there is centralized distribution of important goods; there is gender equality; the economy has been reorganized as a rational and egalitarian "Industrial Army". As Bellamy describes this future, there are no wars, no government, no bankers, no corruption, no jails, and no more "buying" and "selling".

The social revolution that brings about the society of the future, as Bellamy presents it, occurs much like Marx describes. The revolution is a natural occurrence, and as such irresistible, that happened once society developed to a certain level of rationality. Once people become sufficiently rational they simply perceive the need to radically transform society, and then do so in the form of a revolutionary mass social movement that peacefully takes power and then restructures society. Bellamy, like many of his age, was not keen to abandon the benefits of industrialization, and mass production, but wanted to change the composition and distribution of what is produced. Thus, his vision of the future economy is one where society takes the form of one large trust, but because it will be run democratically by worker-citizens, it will pursue their interests. Bellamy's vision is a kind of syndicalism, in which a congress of industrial unions forms the core of the national government. Moreover, because the people of the future are so rational they organize their society along the most rational, and thus egalitarian, lines. This is why, for example, in Bellamy's utopia social classes are not abolished but re-organized on rational lines, which for him means according to age. This there is a course of age-based classes, or stages, all persons pass through. All the stages are designed to maximize the development of citizens' personal talents and capacities, to effectively train people to be competent workers fit for important jobs, as well as to be active and engaged citizens.

The application of reason to social problems results, in Bellamy's utopia, in progressive policies like equal educational and occupational opportunities for women; everyone must work between 21 and 45; universal basic education for all until 21; occupations decided, as much as possible, by aptitude; remuneration based on effort; college open to all, with admissions based on social need and individual merit; free universal healthcare. In keeping with his syndicalist vision, Bellamy's utopia has a political structure framed around industrial unions. Bellamy's novel envisions the future President of the United States as the general of the Industrial Army, and serving a five year term. This person is to be elected by a vote of all those worker-citizens who have retired, i.e. those over forty five years of age. In this utopia there would be ten industrial departments, or unions, each with its own head, or chief, elected by the retied members of the individual departments; the group of these chiefs serves as a kind of cabinet to the President. There is a national congress, which meets every five years to pass or revise laws. He proposes a separate entity he calls, the Inspectorate, to pursue consumer complaints, fraud, abuse, misconduct, et cetera. The job this agency is to seek out graft, inefficiency, or waste, as well as health, safety, or environmental hazards.

The central metaphor of Bellamy's novel is presented in his analogy of the General and the Balloon. Dr. Leete in trying to explain the reasoning behind the organization of the society and economy of the future tells Julian, "It is easier for a general up in a balloon with perfect survey of the field, to manoeuvre a million men to victory then for a sergeant to mange a platoon in a thicket". [1] It is most rational to organize society into one big corporation because this will facilitate macro-level social and economic planning in the public interest. The idea is to harness the power of the large trusts, because their centralization afforded them a larger view of the economic landscape, and allows them to plan accordingly. Under capitalism this planning took the form of the great trusts trying to manage competition between oligopolists to keep prices and profits high. When all the nation's industries were organized under centralized control, like in a trust, and all these trusts nationalized, society would be able to engage in the kind of economic planning that can create the utopian society Julian West encounters.

The idea for the Bellamy clubs emerged very soon after the novel debuted. A reporter in Boston, Cyrus Field Willard, is credited with coming up with idea, as there is a surviving letter in which he ask Bellamy for permission to found a club to promote Bellamy's ideas. Bellamy assented, and the ball began rolling. In the fall of 1888 Willard's "Nationalist Circle", merged with the independently organized "Boston Bellamy Club" of Charles E. Bower & Arthur F. Deveraux to found the first permanent Bellamyite group. The Bellamyite movement was at this point more a moral association than a political party. In 1889 they began publishing a magazine, The Nationalist. Groups were very quickly founded in large Eastern cities like New York, Chicago, and Washington D.C.. The movement was particularly strong in California. That state had sixty five local clubs, whereas, even a large and populous state like New York had only sixteen local Bellamyite groups.

The early Bellamyite movement eschewed political action, that is, participation in a 'democratic' political process they felt was rigged. They focused instead on propaganda, e.g. organizing public lectures, printing and distributing pamphlets and periodicals. As the fever pitch of labor and socialist militance and agitation, combined with events like the Great Strike of 1887 and the Homestead Strike of 1892, the Bellamyite movement reversed course and engaged furiously in political activity focused on more immediate gains, with a particular emphasis on the elections of 1892. The economic and political climate of the age created other reform minded groups in addition to Bellamyites, groups which would cooperate and compete with each other as they often had large segments of over-lapping memberships. Economic depression, political corruption, financial speculation and market manipulation, all fueled the rise of the Populist movement, and of the People's Party. Bellamy, and many other members of the Nationalist clubs were so supportive of the People's Party that eventually the Bellamyite movement merged into the Populist movement. The failure of Bellamy as a political candidate did not help the situation, as the alliance of the People's Party and the Bellamyites rendered most of the latter's organizational functions redundant. In the wake of the 1892 elections the Bellamyite movement began to dissipate as it was largely subsumed by the Populist movement.

In early 1894 Bellamy's own journal, The New Nation, was forced to close due to financial difficulties. Later in this same year Bellamy ceased his political activity on behalf of the movement that bore his name. Other Bellamyite periodicals continued to be published over the next couple years, but in dwindling numbers. By 1896 there were only a handful of Bellamyite groups still active, for example those in Wisconsin which were organized enough to run candidates for state offices that year. After this, the Bellamyite movement basically vanishes as a movement, save for a scattering of die-hards. Bellamy himself would die only two years later, on May 22nd 1898. Though he claimed that he did not write his novel with the aim of providing an explicit plan of economic and political reform, his utopian vision of a more democratic, more equal future resonated deeply with a nation weary of the effects of capitalism.

Political Utopias in Antebellum America

The populist and reform movements of the 1880s and 1890s, as well as the socialist movement emerging in this era, had important precursors in American history. Indeed, the success of a radical utopian inspired movement like Bellamyism will not surprise one acquainted with the utopian movements of antebellum America. There was a very limited Owenite movement in America during the 1820s, the culmination of which was the experimental community at New Harmony, Indiana. Much more extensive and successful was the Fourierist movement that emerged in the 1840s. [2] This movement attracted a fairly large following, and was able to establish a number of experimental communities, called Phalanxes. In contrast to Bellamyism, which was an American movement, both Owenism and Fourierism are European movements which crossed the Atlantic. The success of Fourierism, and relative lack of success of Owenism, in transplanting to America is explained in part by the differences in the economic climates in which they came to America. Fourierism resonated more deeply with Americans than Owenism mostly because they were more open to radical utopian experiments in the wake of the economic crisis of 1837, and the depression that followed. If not for the economic crisis of 1873 and the ensuing depression, the 1886 Haymarket Affair, the Great Strike 1887, the crash of 1893 and the depression that followed, Bellamyism may not have emerged as a mass movement.

One major difference between Owenism and Fourierism, and a factor in their respective levels of success, is in the manner of their transplantation to America. While Owenism was brought to America by Owen and his sons, Fourierism was brought back to America by an American disciple of Fourier's, Albert Brisbane. Owen purchased the town of New Harmony in Indiana from its previous occupants with the intention of founding a utopian community there based on his philosophic principles and the lessons learned in operating his mills at New Lanark in Scotland. American Fourierists began with editing Fourier's ideas into a coherent form, and then propagandizing on behalf of these ideas. When these agitation efforts combined with economic depression in the wake of 1837, with the lingering effects of the second Great Awakening, the example of successful utopian communities in America, and the sympathetic affinities of various immigrant groups Fourierism became a rather large movement. At its high point the Fourierist movement could boast of dozens of Phalanxes across America.

Owenism

The Owenite movement in America was comprised almost entirely of the experimental utopian community the movements' founder Robert Owen established, and his efforts to acquire funding and attract personnel for this community. Though there were other Owenite communities in the U.S., the story of Owenism in America is largely the story of the New Harmony colony. Unfortunately, Owen found little success in America, less than some of the experiments within Great Britain, and his utopian experiment lasted only four years before the colonists abandoned the Owenite philosophy. The community at New Harmony persisted, but they were no longer an Owenite utopian project. Owen had originally purchased the land, and a few buildings, from the previous residents at New Harmony. These previous occupants were Rappites colonists, a mostly German Protestant religious sect, which had moved to Indiana from Pennsylvania to more freely practice their beliefs and communal way of life. After establishing the first group of settlers at his community, Owen left his son William in charge at New Harmony and returned east to find more funds and colonists for his project. When Owen returned in April of 1825 he found the community of several hundred residents in chaos. He did his best to put matters in order, and succeeded fairly well, he departed again in June 1825 in search of more funds and colonists. In all, Owen spent only a few months residing at New Harmony.

Within two years of its founding as an Owenite utopian experiment the New Harmony community was an economic failure, that is, it was not financially or materially self-supporting. There are a host of reasons that account for the failure of the Owenite experiment at New Harmony. The colony had trouble attracting residents, and those who did come were not always of the highest caliber. While New Harmony did bring in many ideologically committed Owenites, it also welcomed in many types of people. In a letter, Robert Dale Owen, one of Robert's sons, describes the population of New Harmony as, "a heterogeneous collection of radicals, enthusiastic devotees to principle, honest latitudinarians, and lazy theorists, with a sprinkling of unprincipled sharpers thrown in".[3] In another letter, William Owen, another of Robert's sons, says that besides committed Owenites, New Harmony had attracted, "crackpots, free-loaders, and adventurers whose presence in the town makes success unlikely". [4] There was a laundry list of complaints about why the New Harmony project failed; not enough skilled craftsmen; not enough unskilled laborers; insufficient and inexperienced management and supervision; not enough housing; not enough land; not enough privacy; too much freedom; not enough freedom.

Robert Owen was often away from the colony and, like him, many colonists only stayed a few months. This high turnover, as well as the problems listed above, seemed to doom this project from the outset. Between the motley collection of colonists, the factional infighting, and the lack of economic viability, the New Harmony settlement ended as a failure for Owen. The lack of economic success and factional squabbles over questions of theoretical principles and practical organization led to a large schism at New Harmony in 1826. A group carried on the Owenite project for another couple years, but finally gave up the ghost in 1829. In 1827, Owen severed ties with the community he founded, transferring ownership to his sons. After 1829 the town abandoned Owenism, and converted their community to a traditional capitalist private property system.

While the town was a failure as a utopian experiment, it did produce some very interesting and significant results and persons. Under Owenite leadership New Harmony could boast of the first free public library, and the first free public school. It also became a leading center of scientific discovery in the natural science, in particular in geology where Owen's third son David Dale achieved prominence. Robert Dale, the oldest son of Robert Owen, in addition to publishing many books and pamphlets, served in both the Indiana state legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives. He advocated for women's rights, for free public education, and opposed slavery. It was in fact Robert Dale Owen who introduced the bill which founded the now world famous Smithsonian Institution.

Fourierism

Like the Owenites, the practical activity of the Fourierist movement in America was directed towards the founding of utopian communities. In the minds of the Fourierists these communities, or rather the network of these communities, would form the basis of the new society, and the transformative effects would radiate out from these communities. Though the Fourierists did much to expound and promulgate their theories in writing, their main energy was directed at founding and linking Fourierist phalanxes. A working example of their vision of a utopian way of life would, in their estimation, be the best piece of propaganda they could have. An operational model Phalanx was more likely to attract actual converts than hundreds of pounds of printed literature. One quite decisive advantage of the Fourierists was that they, unlike Owen, were not intensely skeptical. Indeed, the embrace of religious arguments, appeals to religious morality, and the use of religious modes of presenting Fourierist ideas very much helped Fourierism gain a large following in America.

The Fourierist movement was more successful than the Owenite movement in America, and thus it was larger and more diverse. It was however, more distant in its ideology and practice from its founder than the Owenite movement was from Owen. The experience of the movement is not so directly tied to any one individual community. This movement was, like Owenism, short-lived, despite many Fourierists being intensely passionate. Albert Brisbane, an American traveling in Europe, became a votary of Charles Fourier and his utopian socialist philosophy. In the early 1830s Brisbane returned to America and eagerly set to work proselytizing for Fourier's ideas; edited and parsed by Brisbane for American audiences. By 1840 he was publishing The Phalanx, a Fourierist journal, but his big break came in 1842 when Horace Greeley allowed Brisbane to purchase a front-page column in his popular newspaper The New York Tribune. This platform allowed Brisbane to bring Fourier's ideas to the huge audience of the Tribune's readership. Running for about a year and a half, and reprinted in dozens of other newspapers, Brisbane's column, helped ignite the spark of the American Fourierist movement. We should note that Brisbane was not alone in working to advance Fourier's ideas in America, nor was his journal the only Fourierist publication, though it was among the earliest.

Over the next decade, Fourierist phalanxes sprung up across the country, perhaps the most famous of which was the Brook Farm community in Massachusetts. The organized Fourierist movement established at least thirty phalanxes, and at it height, the movement consisted of perhaps as many as fifty Fourierist communities. One must be cognizant that there were several strains of Fourierism in America, and so deciding which communities count as Fourierist can sometimes be a matter of debate. The "phalanx" was the name Fourier gave to his ideal utopian communities. They were largely agricultural, but did not reject machinery. They were designed to self-sustaining communities in which all participants would have a chance to prosper. Fourier's phalanxes were not communist, since they were supposed to contain inequalities, that is, individuals were to be rewarded both for their effort as well as their contribution of capital. By the mid-1850s however, all but a hardy few phalanxes remained. What few did survive the collapse of the movement, were wiped out by the Civil war. Most Fourierist phalanxes lasted, on average, only a couple years; indeed, critics labeled Fourierists, 'four-year-ites'. The longest lasting community was the North American Phalanx of Colts Neck, New Jersey, which was in continuous operation for twelve years.

There is one very important way that the experience of the Brook Farm community was characteristic of the larger Fourierist movement. The Brook Farm community was originally established as a utopian community by Transcendentalist-inspired reformers. In the spring of 1841 George Ripley, and a small coterie of fellows, decamped to Brook Farm and established an experimental utopian community. Their aims were to counter the effects of a depersonalized and unequal society by removing themselves from that society, and forming a more ideal communal way of life. The Brook Farmers rejected Emerson's more individualistic, more isolationist, vision of Transcendentalist "self-culture". After four years of disorganization, factional quibbles, and lack of a cohesive vision, inhibiting the communities' prosperity, the Brook Farmers decided to adopt Fourierism in1844 because it offered a more concrete plan and structure. This is what attracted many, beyond Transcendentalists, to Fourier's system, and to Fourierist phalanxes, in this era. It was a detailed plan of action for forming communities in an age when so many utopian schemes were vague and ill-defined.

The Fourierist movement, brief as its life may have been, as well as the legacy of its example, made important contributions to later American political movements. Several important legacies of the Fourierist movement stand out. First, in the 1840s the Fourierists were among the earliest and strongest critics of the nascent industrial capitalist order. The Fourierists criticized capitalism as an anti-democratic system of "industrial feudalism" which subordinated workers to employers. Fourierism, and indeed the whole communitarian movement, achieved its prominence at a kind of tipping point in American history, and its failure to stop the advance of the burgeoning industrial capitalism set American society on different path than had this movement had more success. On a longer view, the legacy of the Fourierist movement continued to be seen in the communitarian aspects of the American socialist movement, as well as in the American labor movement, especially in its advocacy of producers' and consumers' cooperatives. The Fourierist movement has an additional interesting legacy in the way that it influenced the thinking of Edward Bellamy. Indeed, several important elements of Fourierist philosophy appear in Bellamy's utopia.

Conclusion

The utopian alternative was very much alive in 19th-century America. The threat various utopian movements constituted can be seen in the sheer numbers of people who flocked to religious or secular utopian communities all over the country. From the 1820s through the 1850s thousands and thousands of Americans experimented with utopianism, joining one or another experimental community. Over these decades nearly one hundred different utopian communities and projects were launched in America. Some lasted just a few months, others only a few years. Others, however, enjoyed some longevity. In general, the utopian communities that tended to last longer were the religiously inspired ones, which also very often had the advantage of being ethno-religious groupings. Many utopian groups like the Rappites or Harmonists, the Amish, and the Hutterites, were largely German Protestant sects. Though there were religious groups, e.g. the Shakers, who were successful at converting many different kinds of people to their way of life. Other utopian groups attempted to create new religions, e.g. the Mormons, and the Oneida community.

In a fairly common pattern, people turned to utopian communities when economic hardship became most acute, and then left when conditions improved. The very existence of alternative, non-for-profit, ways of living posed a threat to the nascent capitalist order in America. It was only in the decades after the Civil war that most kinds of utopian communities became economically unviable as corporate consolidation, mechanization of production, and economies of scale replaced durable hand-made goods with cheaper but less durable factory-made goods. Utopian communities, as small-scale industrial producers of craft goods could simply not compete. Though many of these communities continued to be self-sufficient and survived as communities, their prosperity at first slowly, and then rather quickly, diminished, making attracting new followers and maintaining their communities difficult.

What the experience of utopian communities, both religious and secular, testifies to is the ability of possibility to capture the imagination, and to inspire action. Their many different aims and principles notwithstanding, these utopian movements all sought to transform the lives of human beings through radically transforming social relations. Beyond utopian experiments in communal living, utopian thinking provided some inspiration for more practical movements like the early women's suffrage movement, the abolitionist movement, and the prohibitionist movement. The Occupy movement, brief but spectacular, is part of this utopian tradition in American history. Its memory is worth preserving, its anniversaries worth noting, because of the utopian aspect of its existence. Even for a brief time, just as with our 19th century forebears, a utopian political movement allowed a great many people the freedom to participate in the dream that a better world is possible, to experience the thrill of feeling that such a possible better world could be realized.

Notes

Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward: 2000-1887. 1888. Quote from Claeys, Gregory & Lyman T. Sargent. The Utopia Reader. New York University Press, 1999.

For an excellent history of the American Fourierist movement see; Guarneri, Carl J.. The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in 19th Century America. Cornell University Press, 1991.

Quoted from; Clayton, Joseph. Robert Owen: Pioneer of Social Reforms. A.C. Fifield, 1908.

Quoted in; Wilson, William. The Angel and the Serpent: The Story of New Harmony. 2nd Ed. Indiana University Press, 1967.

A Long-War Strategy for the Left

By William T. Hathaway

As the viciousness of capitalism engulfs ever more of us, our yearnings for change are approaching desperation. The system's current leader, Barack Obama, has shown us that the only change we can believe in is what we ourselves create.

To do that, we need to know what is possible in our times and what isn't. The bitter probability is that none of us will see a society in which we'd actually want to live. Even the youngest of us will most likely have to endure an increasingly unpleasant form of capitalism. Despite its recurring crises, this system is still too strong, too adaptable, and has too many supporters in all classes for it to be overthrown any time soon. We're probably not going to be the ones to create a new society.

But we can now lay the groundwork for that, first by exposing the hoax that liberal reforms will lead to basic changes. People need to see that the purpose of liberalism is to defuse discontent with promises of the future and thus prevent mass opposition from coalescing. It diverts potentially revolutionary energy into superficial dead ends. Bernie Sanders' "long game" campaign is really only a game similar to that of his reformist predecessor, Dennis Kucinich, designed to keep us in the "big tent" of the Democratic Party. Capitalism, although resilient, is willing to change only in ways that shore it up, so before anything truly different can be built, we have to bring it down.

What we are experiencing now is the long war the ruling elite is fighting to maintain its grip on the world. The current phase began with the collapse of Keynesian capitalism, which flourished from the 1950s into the '70s, when the primary consumer market was in the capitalist headquarter countries of North America and Western Europe. Corporations were able to stimulate domestic consumption and quell worker discontent there by acceding to labor's demands for better wages and conditions. That led to a 30-year bubble of improvement for unionized workers, predominantly male and white, that began to collapse in the '80s as capitalism gradually became globalized.

Then to maintain dominance Western corporations had to reduce labor costs in order to compete against emerging competition in low-wage countries such as China, India, Russia, and Brazil. Also international consumer markets became more important than the home market, but reaching them required low prices. So capitalist leaders reversed hard-won reforms, forcing down paychecks and working conditions in the West. And they tried to keep control of crucial Mideast oil resources by tightening their neo-imperialist hold on that region: overthrowing governments, installing dictators, undermining economies.

This aggression generated armed resistance: jihadist attacks against the West. Our response has been the current holy war against terror. All of this horrible suffering is just one campaign in capitalism's long war for hegemony. Any dominator system -- including capitalism, patriarchy, and religious fundamentalism -- generates violence.

Since we are all products of such systems, the path out of them will include conflict and strife. Insisting on only peaceful tactics and ruling out armed self defense against a ruling elite that has repeatedly slaughtered millions of people is naïve, actually a way of preventing basic change. The pacifist idealism so prevalent among the petty-bourgeoisie conceals their class interest: no revolution, just reform. But until capitalism and its military are collapsing, it would be suicidal to attack them directly with force.

What we can do now as radicals is weaken capitalism and build organizations that will pass our knowledge and experience on to future generations. If we do that well enough, our great grandchildren (not really so far away) can lead a revolution. If we don't do it, our descendants will remain corporate chattel.

Our generational assignment -- should we decide to accept it -- is sedition, subversion, sabotage: a program on which socialists and anarchists can work together.

Sedition -- advocating or attempting the overthrow of the government -- is illegal only if it calls for or uses violence. Our most important job -- educating and organizing people around a revolutionary program -- is legal sedition, as is much of our writing here on The Hampton Institute.

For subversion we could, for example, focus on institutions and rituals that instill patriotism in young people. School spirit, scouts, competitive team sports, and pledges of allegiance all create in children an emotional bond to larger social units of school, city, and nation.

Kids are indoctrinated to feel these are extensions of their family and to respect and fear the authorities as they would their parents, more specifically their fathers, because this is a patriarchal chain being forged. It causes us even as adults to react to criticism of the country as an attack on our family. This hurts our feelings on a deep level, so we reject it, convinced it can't be true. It's too threatening to us.

This linkage is also the basis of the all-American trick of substituting personal emotion for political thought.

Breaking this emotional identification is crucial to reducing the widespread support this system still enjoys. Whatever we can do to show how ridiculous these institutions and rituals are will help undermine them.

For instance, teachers could refuse to lead the pledge of allegiance, or they could follow it with historical facts that would cause the students to question their indoctrination. When a teacher gets fired, the resulting legal battle can taint the whole sacrosanct ritual and challenge the way history is taught in the schools.

Subversive parenting means raising children who won't go along with the dominant culture and have the skills to live outside it as much as possible.

Much feminist activism is profoundly subversive. That's why it's opposed so vehemently by many women as well as men.

Spiritually, whatever undercuts the concept of God as daddy in the sky will help break down patriarchal conditioning and free us for new visions of the Divine.

Sabotage is more problematic. It calls to mind bombing and shooting, which at this point won't achieve anything worthwhile. But sabotage doesn't need to harm living creatures; systems can be obstructed in many ways, which I can't discuss more specifically because of the police state under which we currently live. They are described in my book Radical Peace.

We'll be most successful by using both legal and illegal tactics but keeping the two forms separate. Illegal direct action is sometimes necessary to impair the system, impede its functioning, break it in a few places, opening up points of vulnerability for coming generations to exploit. This doesn't require finely nuanced theory or total agreement on ideology, just a recognition of the overriding necessity of weakening this monster, of reducing its economic and military power. It does require secrecy, though, so it's best done individually with no one else knowing.

As groups, we should do only legal resistance. Since we have to assume we are infiltrated and our communications are monitored, illegal acts must be done alone or in small cells without links to the group. Security is essential. Police may have the identity of everyone in the group, but if members are arrested and interrogated, their knowledge will be very limited. The principles of leaderless resistance provide the most effective defense for militants.

Using these tactics, we can slow down this behemoth, curtail its expansion, make it a less effective murderer. The government will of course try to crush this resistance. But that very response can eventually seal its doom because it increases polarization and sparks more outrage. People will see the rich have not only taken away our possibility for a decent life, but now they are taking away our freedom. Then the masses revolt.

When the police and military have to attack their own people, their loyalty begins to waver. They realize they too are oppressed workers, and they start disobeying their masters. The power structure grinds down, falters, and falls. At this point the revolution can succeed, hopefully with a minimum of violence. Then the people of that generation, with the knowledge and experience we have passed on to them, can build a new society.

This is not a pleasant path of action, and those whose first priority is pleasantness are repelled by it. That's why reformism is so popular: it's an illusion that appeals to cowards. But when their backs are to the wall, which will inevitably happen, even they will fight back. And there's something glorious in that revolutionary fight even in its present stage -- much more vivid and worthwhile than the life of a lackey.

William T. Hathaway is an adjunct professor of American studies at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. His new book, Lila, the Revolutionary, is a fable for adults about an eight-year-old Indian girl who sparks a world revolution for social justice. Chapters are posted onwww.amazon.com/dp/1897455844. A selection of his writing is available at www.peacewriter.org.

Fascist Performance Art: Looking Further at Augustus Sol Invictus and Trends in the Far-Right

By Shane Burley

Normally I would not be inspired to write something in response to someone else, which is why this is intended to stand on its own. On January 11th, an article was published by me called Imperium and the Sun, which outlined the fascist motifs in the Senate run of Florida Libertarian Party candidate, Augustus Sol Invictus. Scarcely a couple of days after its publishing Augustus sent us a letter and issued a statement about the article, mainly thanking us for doing a critical look at his campaign in a substantial way. This is largely because the coverage on him has focused primarily on sensational parts of his life, mainly his use of animal sacrifice as an unusual manifestation of his pagan faith. That aspect was not incredibly concerning to me when writing the article, nor was his paganism, which is not something to really turn into an oddity. It should also be noted that in his public statement he was both fair and gracious, which did not seem insincere or meant to provoke malice. Instead, it may actually drive at some of his motivating reasons for running in the first place, where he would prefer a well-grounded critique as much as any form of commentary.

In an effort to essentially continue the discussion that happened in the previous article, I am going to use this opportunity to ask questions that can go deeper than the previous article did. I am also going use a couple of comments that were made mainly because it provides an additional avenue to discuss the issues with more guarded parts of the New Right.

In Invictus' public statement, he mentioned that he actually did name his law practice after the book Imperium by Francis Parker Yockey. This was actually a bit surprising as I would have assumed that it was more the broad concept of Imperium rather than the book itself, though there are obviously reasons to think it was simply out of admiration for the book. The book by Yockey is sort of a popularization of the ideas of Oswald Spengler and his book The Decline of the West, which came out of the sense of "national humiliation" that came over German nationalists during the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Imperium itself is less of a philosophical tome and more of an extended rant that discusses the decline of America as a decadent failed-state because of democracy, capitalism, egalitarianism, and Jews. This book was foundational to the later work of people like the Liberty Lobby's Willis Carto and is still sold as a primary text on many nationalist and traditionalist websites like Arktos, who generally deride more openly "white power" authors. Imperium is one of the most virulently anti-Semitic books in modern writing, blaming the perceived destruction of "Western man" on Jewish subversion, which happened through destroying "national consciousness" so as to achieve dominance. The book itself is largely incoherent and bizarrely structured, almost feeling as though it is the "off the cuff" belligerence of an angry madman protesting the failure of his own life.

Largely, when reading the book, I was reminded strangely of Juche. For people that look at North Korea and its development of its own nationalism based both on Korean national myths and Japanese Imperial Fascism, Juche is the state philosophy of "self reliance." The books, written by Kim Il-Sung, are in multiple volumes and in most Korean homes. When you read them, as very few in Korea have, they are largely filled with unreadable drivel lacking in depth. Brian Reynolds Myers, who wrote the analysis of North Korea's development of a paranoid, race-based nationalism in The Cleanest Race, often described it as the kind of work a professor receives from an undergraduate who wrote their term paper the night before and needed to fill up the page requirements. The books are instead meant to appear on the wall and to fill up libraries, owing to the perceived intellectual prowess of both Kim Il-Sung and the "ongoing" Korean revolution. Kim Il-Sung himself wanted to appear as a philosopher as Mao Zedong had, and so he filled up books with words just as he had. The difference was that it was largely vapid, plagiarized, and up to revision on the whims of the state. Myers maintains the Juche is not ideological in any real way since it does not contain enough substance to coordinate consciousness leading to actions. Instead, it inspires servility and elevates the leadership of the country. Imperium feels largely like Yockey's attempt to use pseudo-intellectual language in an effort to create a large volume and to create the sense that the far-Right had intellectual foundations just as the Left did.

One thing that did stick from Yockey, and we are seeing today in many sides of the New Right, is a call for unity between the Right and Left. Yockey called for a "red-brown alliance," which would be the association between fascists and anti-Zionist communists (since he saw the Jews as essentially the primary problem), and this has been much of the discussion of a Third Positionism that sees both capitalism and communism as problematic. Today, we see this incredibly present in National Anarchism, National Revolution, and National Bolshevism, as well as various strains of racialist Asatru/Odinism and parts of the Alt Right. It should be noted that they do not borrow from the Left in terms of underlining ideas, but just in tactical notions like opposition to capitalism and support of deep environmentalism.

The fact that Sol Invictus sees Imperium as such a central text is telling, primarily from a racial direction as he often eschews racial language in his speeches and interviews (though not entirely).

One criticism Augustus provides, which is much less of 'Imperium and the Sun' and more of some of the reporters who I use as sources, is using a former relationship of his who would like to remain anonymous. In this she said that Augustus had a "dim view of women," which he takes exception with because, as he says, "he worships a goddess." He notes several times is that he worships the "feminine," a point which he believes absolves him of sexism. This is one of the more transparent parts of his claims since this is essentially the religious version of "I have a female friend."

The distinction needs to be made between "worshipping the feminine" and being progressive towards, and affirmative of, women. Augustus' worship of the "feminine" is primarily a notion built on the idea that women are essentially feminine. This provides a narrative for women based on his perception of their natural essence, a notion that is both stifling and erroneous. To have relationships with women that reflect respect and equality, which is what is needed to not have the "dim" view, he would have to negate this idea that women are "essentially" feminine or any other quality. It would also require one to be critical of toxic masculinity and the oppressive nature of historic patriarchy, and this is certainly not a direction Augustus seems to go with his narrative. Some people are feminine, others are not, but this is a shifting personality characteristic that is not adequately rooted in biology or spiritual essences. This, I think, is largely something that Augustus is aware of, and something he would be unwilling to do as his conception of the "modern world" he opposes is one that believes gender is performative rather than natural. This is really the distinction between the "feminine" and "feminism," which is to say that a feminist interpretation of gender and support for female autonomy is not something Invictus sees as central to his worldview. If his perception of women as having a distinct nature that they must fulfill then this is a radically dim view of women, and one that is certainly not negated by providing a laundry list of women he respects.

Augustus took clear issue with my reference to his intended destruction of the public education system. He has said on more than one occasion that he would "gut the Department of Education," which is not unusual for a libertarian candidate; and most people, even on the moderate Left, would see as destructive for lower-income communities. The first objection he makes to this assessment is simply that he does not oppose "equal access to education," which I assumed would be the real victim of his plan. This could be an ideological assessment of this, but when looking at the proliferation of charter schools in privatized educational enclaves it is pretty clear what the results would be of demolishing the public education system in the current state of capitalism. He then mentioned that what he wanted to do was get rid of the "Marxism" that has infected our schools. He then said that I am a Marxist, which I am not, and so that this is likely not a point we could find common ground.

The problem with this line is that is lacks even a cursory understanding of Marxism as it has ever been understood, both by Marxists and by critical eyes. A term that floats around the far Right, which is not used by literally anyone outside of it, is Cultural Marxism. The term is used to designate the Frankfurt School Marxists who developed areas of critical theory and used revamped understandings of Marxism to discuss social systems. They often note that this Cultural Marxism is either created as a pseudoscience by Jews to destabilize Western man so as to support their own ethnic interests, or that Jews simply think in rash relativisms that lead the smarter ones to overly complex nonsense. This, on its face, is ridiculous anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, but it also reveals a real problem in the way that the Right (including even moderate Republicans) thinks about Marxism.

Marxism itself really did not branch extensively into social issues, and instead the ideas that they lend to "Marxist infiltration" have much different origins. In general, this broad social left sphere actually comes from the interactions of feminism, queer liberation, the civil rights movement, radical environmentalism, and other intellectual and social struggles with anarchism, which is the ideological center of this discourse, sometimes explicitly, but more often implicitly. The fundamental core of the anarchist project is an opposition to social hierarchy. This has its core in capitalism in the contemporary world, but it also intersects and has individualized hierarchies through oppressed identities and social experiences. This is a constantly evolving sphere of understanding and struggle, one that certainly owes some criticisms of capitalism from Marx, but really little else. Marx himself drew together a system of "base and superstructure." This meant that the foundations were economic, and culture and social systems derived from the relationships to material production. The Frankfurt School certainly tried to evolve it, but it did not actually catch on because of its alienating academic nature. I am often surprised that the far-right does not attack Autonomism or Situationism as they successfully evolved some of Marx's ideas for social revolution, and in fact the far-right often cites both of these threads in Marxism to support certain positions and to discuss the alienating condition of the "modern world."

Today, much of the far-right derives its discussions about Cultural Marxism in a much more specific form from former UC Long Beach professor Kevin McDonald's work. His book series, called the Culture of Critique, is supposed to be an "evolutionary psychological" look at Judaism as a "group evolutionary strategy" that is a result of Jewish ethnocentrism and high "verbal intelligence." He goes through different movements that he claims were dominated by "strongly identified Jews" and then essentially tries to prove that they were pseudoscience used to confuse and destroy the Gentiles. Cultural Marxism is one of these, where he sees it as an attempt by Jews to destroy white identity and racial consciousness as a way of protecting them from anti-Semitism. It should be said openly that he has almost no support for the radical wing of his claims, though the level of anti-Semitism increased as the volumes were released. Today, his ideas have been almost roundly rejected, where he is often accused of being misinformed about genetics, industrial history, and even what the realities of group evolution. Likewise, most of his theories involve basically counting people who may or may not be Jews, then assuming they have some coordinated conspiracy or subconscious drive to destroy white people, and then deciding that certain academic of political fields were more influential than they were. This is especially true of Frankfurt School Marxism, which he blames for just about every aspect of the progressive culture.

So then, really, why is Marxism still accused of having this effect? The reason seems to be that Marxism has historically been the dominant left revolutionary force when fascism was first developed, and a narrative about Jewish involvement in Bolshevism was so heavily relied upon during its interwar resurgence that it would be hard to create a continuity between the past and the present by rejecting Marxism as the dominant force of degeneration. Almost all levels of Marxism, from its Leninist interpretations to Trotskyist middle-road attempts to Maoist insurrectionaries and Situationist counter-cultures, are difficult to interpret for those looking to find a direct center of what they see as a force to destroy "nation and identity." This is especially difficult given the role that Marxism has played in third-world nationalism, much of which I would assume Augustus would favor. Likewise, Trotskyism seems to be an incredibly easy subsection for the far-right to highlight, often saying that it is synonymous with the Cultural Marxism that the Frankfurt School represents. This is embarrassingly misguided as there is almost no theoretical connection between the party-oriented political work of modern Trotskyist groups and the Negative Dialectics of Adorno. It is not just that they have different subsets; they are of a completely different world. Today, much of Frankfurt School Marxism has actually founded the basis for Primitivist thought, people like David Watson and John Zerzan, who are often derided for having parts of their analysis shared with those on the more esoteric "green fascist" Right. They certainly lack the "mass cultural orientation," as Zerzan calls it, that Augustus would find problematic in the global contemporary Left.

The key point here is that the effect that Augustus rails about in schools, which would be egalitarianism and general left-liberalism, has no direct correlation to Marx. I assume that I am going to receive emails in the next couple days with long citations that "prove" the correlation between transgender identity and 19th century Marxism, then to the Jewish Talmud, but beyond their racism, almost no evidence, scholarship, or political action supports this thesis.

Invictus makes an interesting note about the back and forth assertions regarding his own fascist politics and his family make-up. Without going into it too deeply, his partner is Latino/a, as are his children. This has led many to counter that he simply could not be racist, which is clearly not true, but also it drives at something more difficult about the correlation between white supremacy and fascism. Augustus himself wants to note that having Latino/a children does not mean he is not a fascist. This shows a couple of things. First, that he likes to take the label of fascist. For most looking at the far-right, this is both surprising and not surprising. While most on the Alt Right (Neoreaction, contemporary White nationalism, and other sub-divisions) think of themselves as ideologically different than fascism, which they believe is a specific politic lost in interwar Europe, they do not necessarily deride it either. Likewise, they often use the term as a semi-joke, calling each other "fashy." This is actually why I referred to Augustus' hair as "fashy," which he took exception to, which actually comes from the way that people like The Daily Shoah often call that hair style, now popular with the Alt Right after Richard Spencer chose it.

Second, he seems to be aligning himself with a sort of fascism that is primarily one of power and hierarchy rather than having its roots in race. This may seem confusing, and it is, but there have been fascist movements whose nationalism and ideals were less oriented on race (like that rising in Brazil). Augustus has made his image a very thought-out and well-crafted piece of performance art. He chooses aesthetics that would make people immediately step back in horror because of their perceived "fascist" roots. He uses a straight face, an almost ironic appearing pose, for making videos where he looks into the camera with a 10,000-yard stare. When speaking, he does the modern equivalent of screaming in front of an iron eagle, where he often uses contradictory language about "the system" while hailing from both the Left and the Right. As mentioned in the last article, he hams up his accent so much that you almost expect him to say, "I've always depended on the kindness of strangers." This is the ideological hallmark of Third Positionist fascism, while also being innately rhetorical. Over and over again he calls for revolution, then he even specifies that he does not mean to vote or volunteer for his campaign. He means revolution, and believes that he was born to lead a civil war. This is followed up by literally calling for people to support him as a candidate for office with relatively conventional political stances. It may seem like an act meant to make people feel as though they are doing more than voting; think of the 2007 Ron Paul campaign. This is likely true, but it is also driving at a fascist rhetorical strategy of fomenting revolution in spirit while not going as far as to stage actual insurrection. Instead, he wants to inject the political sphere with the feeling of revolutionary struggle with the hope that this will lead to a culture of "will to power." Augustus seems to want to recreate the feeling of fascism, the powerful speeches, the calls for unity and strength, the resurrection of the heroic motifs. He purposely references Rome in the same way that Mussolini did, which both has the same effect of dog whistling to his nationalist base while having plausible deniability when it comes to WWII tyrannies. In this way, his politics are clearly built more on the image of strength, which is backed up by his calls for natural hierarchy and eugenics, and it may or may not include race.

Augustus sent over a speech he gave at the University of Florida looking at fascism, before which he did a reading of three Cantos of Ezra Pound on usury at the Jack Kerouac house. Usury itself, the unethical lending of money, is often used as an anti-Semitic caricature of Jewish lending practices. Much of this comes from periods in European history where Jews were restricted from owning property and most professions and had lending sometimes as the only source of income, which led the anti-Semites to find another way to denigrate the Jewish community. The use of the term usury could, theoretically, mean lending with huge interest rates, but the term itself is chosen very carefully so as to bring up the Jewish caricature. Ezra Pound, who he is referencing in both speeches, was an undisputable fascist and virulent anti-Semite, and one of the few far-right intellectuals that they still have to draw on.

The racial issues are confusing in that he really does seem to shift with the environment. In a recent December 8th presentation at a small bar in Jacksonville, Florida, he stood in front of a Rock Against Communism flag as he derided the Federal Government. ROC is a punk movement that was the neo-Nazi equivalent of the growing non-racist Oi! scene, and created the foundation of the "white noise" music culture and racist skinhead gang community. One of the people helping him set up had, on his shaved head, the Heathen Mjonir and another runic symbol often associated with neo-Nazis. It could be argued, as I'm sure it will be, that these could theoretically be non-racist as well (I even own a Mjonir necklace myself), but in this particular situation it certainly would be a remarkable coincidence. Augustus then gave a speech with showed clear support for "nationalists and white racialists" and calls to "name our enemies." All of this was started with a story about a farmer being removed from his land by the federal government and another unnamed enemy. This draws heavily on the Posse Comitatus militia narrative that tries to inter-mix class struggle by re-orienting the enemy as various covert agents inside of the government, namely the Jews. He continues, throughout the speech, to accuse Marxism as seeping into the culture, which again re-orients the struggle as between near eternal enemies coming from deep in the past. He even mentioned Robert Matthews, a deceased member of the white racialist insurrectionary group The Order, who is radical even for Invictus to mention. When on shows like The Daily Shoah, he certainly seems to stand in support of their white nationalism, but he does avoid taking a clear stance on this.

I mentioned in the original article that he is a "left-hand path (LHP)" follower of Crowley's Thelema. He noted my mention, going on to let me know that he will be speaking at the Left Hand Path Consortium in Atlanta on April 10th with a lecture titled "The Nature of Power." I want to say clearly that I am far from an academic versed in esoteric traditions, but I do know my way around this discussion. The term, which is actually usually avoided in the academy, refers to two ways to possibly interpret esoteric and religious traditions. Most religions are Right-Hand Path, which sees things like universal ethical codes that are generally utilitarian. LHP rejects morality as a key dividing line, which is why it is often associated with black magick and relativism or nihilism. Iconoclastic in its roots, the most prominent forms of LHP magick is associated with Satanism, both of the metaphorical LaVeyan sensibility and the more theological type associated with organizations like the The Order of Nine Angels. The Temple of Set, Ordo Templi Orientis, some types of Hinduism and Sufi Islam, and some smaller tribal religions, could also be described as such. Much of the discourse inside of the LHP is about the attraction to power, and much of it is often associated with the desire to dominate over others and to instill hierarchies. Esoteric, elitist, and often focused on personal gain, LHP really does separate its traditions from most values associated with religion.

Many people on the Left love to joke around the Church of Satan because of its anti-Christian roots and its advocacy of sexual freedom. They often do not go deep enough to see its more ingrained right-wing ideas, where private property, personal power, and, as Crowley said, letting one's "will" be the whole of the law, are what they are founded on. This tradition plays almost perfectly into both Invictus' politics and public image, as well as the idea of Imperium that drives his life and program.

Augustus clearly liked the article about him, primarily because very few people got beyond gawking at his peculiarities so as to look at his politics. It is because of this that I think he would be willing to answer some open questions, which I am sure he would answer honestly and sincerely given his composure and penchant for honorable behavior. I put together a short list of questions, all of which are intended to be tough and revealing. A first glance, it may seem as though they are just sensationalistic, and, in a sense, they are. But they are also getting at something real, and I sincerely do not know the answers to them. The politics that Augustus is accused of, as well as those he happily embodies, have, for various reasons, not been incredibly clear to the general public. Therefore, I want to avoid any double-speak, "politician talk," or dodging that is so common even in smaller political races. Augustus has said many times that he wants a political discussion that is not simplified or dumbed down, so I think that he will appreciate being challenged in this way.

Questions for Augustus Sol Invictus:

1. Are you a racial or ethnic nationalist?

2. Do you share the view with many of the outlets in which you have spoke, that there are IQ differences that are biologically different between racial groups?

3. Do you share the idea in Imperium that the Jews are innately enemies of Western society?

4. Do you think that the Holocaust did not occur in the numbers and specifics of the standard narrative?

5. What kind of eugenics program would you want to see implemented in the U.S. if you were to have complete control over it?

6. Do you see men and women as having innately different natures?

7. In what way does Thelema influence your political ideas?

8. In this natural hierarchy that you spoke of, what types of people end up near the top, and what types of people end up towards the bottom?

9. Can you explain, in detail, what you think Marxism to be and how it has been a dominant force in Western society?

10. How would you rid society of the subversive elements, be them Marxist or Jewish or whatever you believe them to be?

11. Do you generally oppose mass democracy as a concept?

12. Do you think that people are generally equal, despite their own particular differences?

A Bayonet is a Weapon with a Worker on Each End: Rethinking Veterans Day

By Colin Jenkins

In 1885, the Knights of Labor organized a successful strike against Jay Gould's Missouri Pacific Railroad. In response to the strike, Gould famously growled, "I can hire half the working class to kill the other half."

Gould was right. In any hierarchical arrangement, where power and wealth become concentrated in the hands of a few, this tactic becomes available to those wielding this power over a vast majority. Among the masses of workers, slaves, and impoverished, there will inevitably be many willing to "police their own" in order to be in the masters' good graces. History is rife with these examples.

In ancient Greece, the "most prized" slaves were awarded authority positions over their fellow slaves, sometimes given special status as overseers. Masses of slaves captured or bought from nearby Scythia were transformed into an official police force, known as the Scythian Archers, and were "brought back to Athens to carry out the laws of the state," which basically amounted to controlling and strong-arming the slave population in the city. Naturally, their willingness to brutalize their fellow slaves was rewarded with special privileges.

On the colonial American slave plantation there were those who became actively complicit in the subjugation of their fellow slaves. In return for special privileges, these particular slaves agreed to stay close to the master, live among the master and his family, and report to the master any wrongdoings or subversive actions on the part of the masses of field slaves. William Wells Brown, a slave from Kentucky, later described the privileged status he was awarded for his "service": "I was a house servant - a situation preferable to that of a field hand, as I was better fed, better clothed, and not obliged to rise at the ringing of the bell, but about half an hour after."

In Gould's time, referred to by Mark Twain as "the Gilded Age" due to its insidious corruption and wealth inequality, social unrest among the masses of workers became commonplace. "New York City had 5,090 strikes, involving almost a million workers from 1880 to 1900; Chicago had 1,737 strikes, involving over a half a million workers in the same period." The economic elites of the time, like Gould, had two choices in addressing this unrest: (1) share a bigger piece of the pie with their workers, or (2) use force to beat workers into obedience. They chose the latter, taking Gould's words to heart, and proceeded to hire much of the working class to beat and kill the remainder into submission. Police forces and Pinkertons were amassed by the thousands to break strikes throughout the country. As consistent with history, Gould and his counterparts found plenty of workers willing to "serve" them in this role.

On a global scale, international warfare reflects this same dynamic. Throughout history, the ruling classes of each nation have utilized their working-class masses as tools of war, sending them off to fight and kill other members of the working class in remote parts of the world. The willingness of workers to follow these orders is preconditioned through various means, all of which stem from the need to maintain systems of hierarchy. The desperation that comes with being a worker in a coercive system creates immense pressure to merely survive. Today, those who find themselves choosing between minimum-wage jobs or unfathomable student loan debt are left with very little options in supporting themselves and their families. Material conditions force many into increasingly subservient positions. The mythological construction of boogeymen - savages, radicals, extremists, and terrorists - is all that is needed to create the illusion of an imminent threat. And grand tales of patriotism and "freedom" are all that is needed to persuade many to "volunteer" as tools of war.

So, we volunteer en masse. We literally hand over our bodies to powerful people whom we've never met, whose intentions and interests are not to be questioned, and whose authority over us is to be accepted as the natural order of things. We travel across the world, put our bodies in big metal machines, and take the lives of masses of working-class and impoverished people whom we've never met, whose intentions and interests are not to be questioned, and whose perceived threat to us is to be accepted as the natural order of things.

Much like the Scythian archer in ancient Athens, the house slave on a colonial Kentucky plantation, and the worker-turned-Pinkerton in Jay Gould's private army, we become willing tools of powerful interests. We choose to "serve" our masters. Many of us do this because we have no other options. Many of us do this because we are promised glory. Many of us do this because we hear the boogeyman coming. And many of us do this to simply "get in the masters' good graces." Whatever the reason, our unquestioned participation makes us complicit in maintaining the coercive systems of hierarchy that continue to dominate our world. And, despite the pats on our backs and choruses of "thank you" directed at us a few days a year, we remain collectively buried in this system, no different than our working-class counterparts throughout the world who we've been ordered to extinguish for the past two centuries.

The best way to honor Veterans is to question the system that creates us, uses us, and discards us. And the best way to honor our service is to ask ourselves who we really served and for what purpose.

The Black Lives Matter Schism: Towards a Vision for Black Autonomy

By Joel Northam

The Black Lives Matter movement exhibited a schism since the first few days following the first Ferguson rebellion. I remember watching live streams of the rebellion early on as Ferguson's youth waged small scale urban combat armed with little more than rubble and glass bottles. The heroic resistance to state power, against all odds of victory in forcing a retreat of the occupying militarized police, and in the face of material consequences in the form of a brutal crackdown, was a demonstration of courage that we all should aspire to.

The repression by the armed apparatus of the state in Ferguson ( and Baltimore months later) provoked another popular response. But this response took on a different character. It seemed to want to place distance between itself and those who were engaged in combat with the police. Cloaked in a veneer of inclusiveness, it drowned out the original spirit of resistance that the rebelling youths exhibited nights before. The message was "we don't want to be associated with them and we will 'resist' within the confines of rules and regulations given to us by established power".

The latter trend did what it set out to do. It attracted a vast segment of the liberal left, respectable quasi-radicals, nonprofit organizations and sympathetic politicians. There were denunciations of riots, looting, and property destruction as these tactics were considered "infantile" and "alienating" to potential supporters and allies. Think piece after think piece was written about the merits and demerits of various tactics of resisting police occupation. The ones who fought back against the police in Ferguson and Baltimore were touted as "misguided" and "lacking in overall strategy" and they were ultimately left with virtually no material support to continue their organic, grass roots, militant struggle.

This schism between militant resistance and respectability has since become more acute. The mass movement has become amorphous, and what should have been channeled into organic revolutionary energy has dissipated under the weight of having an incoherent structure and lack of a declarative revolutionary political program that includes building international, intercommunal alliances with other Black left movements and anti-imperialist organizations worldwide. This flaw was seized upon by petit bourgeois elements, who have seen fit to reduce the Black Lives Matter movement to a "New Civil Rights Movement", hell bent on simply effecting policy changes rather than assigning it the character of a revolutionary liberation struggle that requires a coherent strategy and a diversity of tactics for its success.

This notwithstanding, there have been enormous organizational strides made my local chapters of Black Lives Matter that have challenged the status quo at an operational level. It shouldn't be overlooked that the overall indictment of institutional racism that the movement has reintroduced into mainstream discourse has indeed had an effect on the consciousness of various strata of the population. The question at hand is whether or not this indictment can be carried through to its ultimate conclusion: that those invested in maintaining our systemic oppression are not fit to rule and should be removed from power. The longer Black Lives Matter waits to answer this question, the more vulnerable it is to co-optation, derailment and ultimately, dissolution.

Naturally, within a power structure that is programmed to halt all revolutionary advances and counter all threats to its existence, the reformist trend within the Black Lives Matter schism obviously picked up the most steam; grant offers from foundations, visits to see liberal capitalist politicians and airtime on CNN and MSNBC ensured that. Now we have the ultimate bastardization of militant resistance manifested in the form of Campaign Zero, a series of policy proposals that seek to end police violence in America, as if it's possible that an institution founded in order to capture and torture runaway slaves and to protect slave masters' property can be reformed.

Campaign Zero was proposed by so called leaders of the movement and twitter celebrities alike, with virtually no consultation with the mass base of people who put themselves on the line in the streets against the armed apparatus of the state. It is an arbitrary and piecemeal attempt to synthesize militant resistance with the "progressivism" of the Democratic Party, which ultimately leaves white supremacist institutions intact. This overt display of conciliatory politics is nothing short of a betrayal by Black petit-bourgeois liberals who legitimately hate the system, but couldn't garner the fortitude to imagine what they would do without it. It is opportunist defeatism in writing.

Anyone who has a halfway decent grasp of history knows that the wanton destruction of social movements spurred on by establishment liberals is not a new phenomenon. At this point it's formulaic. The Democratic party exists to adapt to the ebbs and flows of social changes in this country in a manner that provides concessions while maintaining the current political economy of white supremacist, capitalist society. This is the Democratic party's only real demarcation from the outward and openly bigoted reactionary Republican party. Both preserve the system. It is not far off to suggest that the rapid resurgence of white nationalist fascism that is currently being nurtured by the political right wing is a safeguard should the liberal wing of the political establishment fail to disrupt the movement and quell Black radicalism entirely.

With Campaign Zero and the corresponding frantic search for support within the current bourgeois political milieu, the reformists within Black Lives Matter are holding their breath for the 2016 elections, where the US ruling class will ultimately decide whether the reactionary or "humanitarian" wings of ruling power will respond to the political unrest in a way that guarantees their continued existence. While this anticipation may signal a decline in movement activity, it should be primer to those activists (who don't have to be reminded that the white supremacist capitalist power structure will remain in place no matter who wins the presidency) to begin to nurture the elements within the movement that are not seeking to coexist with the system.

"Black Lives Matter" should not be declared as an appeal to ruling power or racist white America to accept us as human. They don't and they won't. Our value in this country has always been directly proportional to the amount of profit we produce. With the advent of financial mechanisms that no longer rely on Black labor to produce wealth, we have now become disposable. The increase of extrajudicial murders by the state and relative impunity that racist vigilante murderers of our people seem to have are indicators of this. We say "Black Lives Matter" as a reminder to us as Black people that our lives matter regardless if we're accepted as human by white society or not, and is said as a declaration of resistance to our condition as beasts of burden for capital.

But a declaration is not enough. Neither are policy reforms, symbolic political actions and awareness campaigns. What is needed right now is an entire shift in orientation. A complete overhaul of all of the resources we have and can acquire at our disposal dedicated to the purpose of relinquishing our dependency on the economic system that exploits us; the building, maintenance, and defense of our own institutions and organs of power, channeled for the general uplift of our people, for our people, and by our people. The institutions that the state uses to oppress us must have their diametrical counterpart built by us for liberation purposes and must function to fill the void that has been left by the excesses and crises of transnational capitalism. Responsibility for the defense of our institutions rests with us, and this defense will also serve the purpose of resisting any and all attempts to put us back on the capitalist plantation.

We must strive for nothing less than the goal of complete self-determination and autonomy of African descended people in the US and abroad, working hand in hand in communal fellowship with other oppressed peoples who have their own contradictions with the power structure. Only by aligning ourselves with the international anticolonial, anti-imperial movement can success be achieved, as we represent only a little less than 13% of the national population.

Our organs of power will create a situation in which dual power will give rise to all manner of reactionary fascism and their corresponding weapons, as we are under siege on two sides: one side by the state that wants to continue our exploitation or annihilate us, and on the other side by the nation's white nationalist and white supremacist silent majority which simply just wants to annihilate us. Organization, preparation, and development of the means to combat these threats is paramount and should be considered an immediate priority.

This is our reality. We do not live in a reality whereby those who are materially invested in our subjugation will suddenly come to their senses, take pity on us, pay us reparations while we ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after like the reformists tacitly imply by their attempts at negotiating with US elites. The rest of the colonized and neo-colonized world is ready to shake off their yoke of oppression the moment it becomes clear that we've made our move. Evidence is seen in the way that African Jews in Israel were inspired by videos of Baltimore's youth overrunning riot squads. The comrades shutting down traffic arteries and battling police in Tel Aviv were hardly inspired by paid activists with forty thousand dollar a year salaries and 401Ks, but by those who heroically abandoned all respectability and asserted their identity as a threat to the establishment.

US fascism would not have established itself so securely, with every safeguard in place and every mechanism utilized at its disposal to stifle the growth of revolutionary consciousness of Black people in the US were we not innately and at our deepest core threatening to the white power structure. Acknowledgement of this orientation puts US fascism on the defensive. A movement of angry Black people should be threatening. It should heighten contradictions, it should make those invested in the status quo uneasy, and it should provoke raging emotions in ourselves as well as our class enemies.

The movement for Black Autonomy, although nascent, is the inevitable outgrowth of a decaying strategy of reformist appeals to power. We know Black lives matter. The question is whether or not we have the capacity to check any attempts at devaluation by counterrevolutionary elements from the outside and from within. The autonomous movement is building this capacity, synthesizing elements of anarchism and revolutionary socialism. Modern examples of this type of political self-determination include the Kurdish PYD/PKK in Syria and Turkey and the Zapatistas and Autodefensas in Mexico.

The autonomous movement explicitly rejects of the kind of separatist reactionary nationalism which is unfortunately endemic to many formations within the Black Liberation movement. It rejects the hetero-patriarchal ethos that women should be relegated to servant status. It rejects the demonization of Black queer and trans people and instead uplifts them as leaders. We hold that one immediately relinquishes the role of "vanguard" if one subscribes to Eurocentric authoritarian hetero-patriarchal standards of gender and their corresponding roles as the norm.

The movement for Black autonomy does not include coexistence with white supremacist authority in its platform. We understand that the development of a scientific, intersectional revolutionary political theory that is applicable to our specific material conditions in the US, and our development of a praxis that tangibly counters the power of white supremacist institutions that control our lives, is the difference between being victims of genocide or soldiers at war. We understand that the striving for autonomy means provoking violent reactionary resistance to our advances. We accept this. We understand that Black liberation means human liberation, so we act in solidarity with the oppressed. Long live the Black resistance. We have nothing to lose but our chains!

Institutionalizing Lone-Wolf Terrorism: How Fascist Organizations Inspire Mass Violence

By Shane Burley

As Mulugeta Seraw and a friend hopped out of their ride's car, they didn't notice the pack of three skinheads wearing tight Levi's tucked into leather boots, laces tied from toe to ankle. The gang were members of East Side White Pride, affiliated with the larger White Aryan Resistance. Seraw was a student who had come to Portland, Oregon from Ethiopia, likely expecting Portland's long reputation of diversity and liberal values. It has another history, one that is caked in the KKK revival in the Northern USA and would later be marked by white expansion and gentrification. When the three men saw him on the corner of SE 31st and Pine street, a flurry of racial slurs were thrown before they took a baseball bat and caved in his head. This was just one of the many violent attacks that marked the war on the streets of Portland in the 1980s and 90s, where Antifa and anti-racist skinheads went literally up in arms with Volksfront, Hammerskin Nation, and other white pride gangs. The blood was visible on the corner of that street for weeks, and some swear you can still see it at night.(1)

This story resonates as we are inundated with recent horrors like the Dylan Roof massacre of nine church-goers after reading the Council of Conservative Citizens website, or the two men who beat an older hispanic man in south Boston after listening to Donald Trump's speech of racial arson.

The radical right can fundamentally be dropped into two camps. There are the above ground operations that focus on propagating "ideas" or political programs. These would be things like the "HBD" scientific racist organizations like American Renaissance, Mankind Quarterly, and the Pioneer Fund. There are the neo-fascist cultural and "radical traditionalist" organizations like Traditionalist Youth Network, Occidental Observer, and The National Policy Institute. There are vague political parties and organizations like the American Freedom Party and Council of Conservative Citizens, but the time that formations like these had any mainstream power has shortly passed. There are many other subdivisions of these, but in most of them you are likely not to hear the N-word or see many iron crosses or swastikas.

The second type of organization you can likely call insurrectionary, vanguardist, revolutionary, or simply angrily racist. These are organizations whose prime mission is a right-wing racialist revolution of some sorts, or the use of direct action in the re-establishment of formal white supremacy. There have been versions of this type of organization that has formed often over the years. The uniquely American flavor of this type of confrontational white supremacist organizing has its deep history in the Ku Klux Klan. Formed first in 1866, the clan used a fraternal structure that places former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest as its Grand Wizard. From 1867 forward the KKK founded its purpose to challenge the entry of freed slaves into public life during Reconstruction. In this way they acted as a sort of guerilla army attempting to, if not reverse the course of the Civil War, re-establish the kind of white hegemony that they had during the time of slave patrols. Northern politicians would essentially go to war with the Klan as they murdered seven of the first black legislators during the 1867-68 congressional convention. The real resurgence of the Klan came in the 1920s when they brought back an extensive leadership using the Greek fraternal system, and rose to the ranks of about four million people. This meant that they were a real political force, leading in Senators and Governors, as well as many that had to seek Klan endorsement if they were to be elected. This political clout certainly influenced policy of the time, but the real power was to terrorize communities of color with mass lynching and tortures of black people all across the south. This violence became institutional as the Klan infiltrated all areas of law enforcement, and lynching were so wide spread and accepted that people literally sold photos of dead black men hanging from trees as popular postcards. The political power it had in the 1920s was never again replicated, though it came out again as a powerful force for violence during the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s. This helped to push forward the White Citizen's Councils that would evolve into the Council of Conservative Citizens that we have today. (2)

While the Klan is all but gone in the 21st century, the other element of white resistance was the neo-Nazi skinhead movement. This was much more inspired from their British punk-rock dissidents of the Rock Against Communism flair. This created an essentially "working class" urban racialist movement that was drawn from the organizing traditions of anti-racist Trojan Skinheads. The skinhead culture, with networks like Volksfront and Hammerskin Nation dominating the U.S. scene, operate like street gangs with initiations and requirements of members to engage in racist violence. Their connections to other essentially "white gangs," most notably different motorcycle gangs, has cemented their association with distributing drugs like Crystal Meth and Oxycontin, though on the more militant side there is also a straight edge tradition.

The main threat of organizations like this was never successful political organizing, though semi-skinhead organizations like the National Socialist Movement maintain delusions that they will someday have political influence through bridge topics like immigration and affirmative action. The real threat here was violence on an interpersonal level, often times resulting in random violence against targeted groups on the streets. This can appear as "random" violence, but is only random in as much as there is not an overarching political goal that can be seen with any coherence. Beyond the skinhead gangs and shrinking KKK locals, these will also include groups that do have an ideological framework and some sense of revolutionary organizing in the long-term, yet do not work with the more moderate kinds of above ground organizations. This includes many of the racialist Christian Identity churches that are tied to survivalist militias. The Church of Jesus Christ - Christian, otherwise known as Aryan Nations, was one of the largest and best known of these, residing in Hayden Lake, Idaho. There they had a large compound where they held sermons about how Jews were biologically descended from Satan, how people of color were literally the "Beasts of the field" and were animals that did not have souls, and that all white people are the people called Israelites in the Bible. They tied racial revolution to Biblical eschatology for a conspiracy-laden mix of Nazism and American conservative Christianity. After several members attacked a family driving by the compound, the church and its leader, Reverend Richard Butler, were sued and the land confiscated. Today Christian Identity still plays a major role in underground militia oriented circles, though Kinism, a slightly more mainstream appearing racist Christian interpretation, is stealing many converts.

The National Socialist Movement, National Alliance, and many other militant Nazi organizations have straddled the line between organizing and revolutionary violence for most of their life. While their stated goals are often just well organized propaganda, education, and political programs, their revolutionary rhetoric has seen more results with inspiring single individuals to commit homicidal acts than having any kind of political program of any value.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of individual strands that all attempt to claim some serious legitimacy on political or ideological grounds, but they broadly can fall into the two categories and hold much of the same potential for inspiring singular acts of extreme violence. The violence that is exhibited is markedly different between groups based principally on the location and specific revolutionary vision of the organizations, but all the violence takes the form of singular acts of terrorism. What this means is that the kind of violent incidents that is seen from militia groups like The Order and Posse Comitatus is much different than the street skinheads of Vinland.

When it comes to the kind of racist violence that Anti-Fascist Action has staked much of its history on was confronting the random violence of the urban skinhead gangs. Much of the focus on these groups is that they tended to be one of the few groups that engaged in public acts of violent direct action into the 1990s, while the Ku Klux Klan and other groups had really receded or were attempting to moderate their politics. Skinheads, on the other hand, were mirroring other punk rock subcultures and creating a counter culture that engaged in gang violence in large cities. They were also coming into direct contact with left-oriented organizations by having some subcultural crossover in music venues, as well as having a high presence in drug running and prison gang culture. These were not heavily ideological groups, and those that had a stronger sense of white nationalism evolved into the more moderate path that many of the Klan splinter groups did in the 1980s.

Instead of being a more overarching political program, the myth about skinheads was based in their seemingly random targeting of minorities in public locations for incidental acts of incredibly cruelty. This has led to a consistent set of attacks since the mid 1970s, where people of color are often targeted in otherwise white areas, or young queer folks are "hunted" in areas where they might frequent. This has the effect of generalized fear since the attacks seem to be randomly selected, do not have a distinct pattern, and can essentially happen "anytime and anywhere."

People have always tried to see these gangs as part of a larger fascist movement or political vision, but this is difficult since there is not a lot of connection between them and the more mainstream intellectual movements and the violence itself would be hard to systematize. What occurs internally is to create a culture where violence is foundational to the community, and where prestige within the group is based on the history of engaging in violence. Since there is no outlet for this growing violent culture in anyway that can be a part of a larger political movement, as there would have been with the KKK in the 1920s, they instead wait in the wings for chances to let rage explode at random targets. Violence is the impetus for these groups, and recruiting often targets people who may have a history of violence and disaffection already, taking on an almost "cult like" structure of taking over a new recruit's world. This violence is stoked so effectively internally that it doesn't even require some type of antagonism from the left, as would happen at some kind of political protest clash. Instead, right from the start recruits are being emotionally prepared to engage in some type of violence as a way of securing a place in the social order that has chosen them.

As said earlier, the image that AFA and ARA organizers have of racist violence often comes from northern skinhead gangs because those are the street clashes that are common, the risk of larger incidents of violence are actually coming out of the woods instead of the alleys. The militia movement, though often associated with the far right, is not always considered a racialized group. While much of the rhetoric is made up of racial "dog whistle" language and vague discussions of "socialism" or "the federal government,", a large contingent of racial revolutionaries mix with these groups and have their own agenda. Over the course of the 1980s we have seen massive trends towards violence, some of it on an almost unbelievable scale. The Order, active through 1983 and 1984, took credit for the murder of Jewish radio talk show host Alan Berg as well as bank robberies totaling over $3.6 million. They were berthed out of groups like the Aryan Nations and National Alliance, which they kept in close contact with. The most famous of these men was David Lane, who went on to coin the Wotanist religion, which is essentially a hyper-racist version of folkish Asatru. He is best known for coining what white nationalists refer to at the "14 Words," which says, "We must secure the existence of our people and the future for White Children." The Order maintained a close relationship with Frazier Glenn Miller of the White Patriot Party. He went on to shoot several congregants at the Jewish Community Center and the Village Shalom retirement center. He killed several here in a moment of mass murder, several of which turned out not to be Jewish. Similarly, Aryan Nations member Buford O. Furrow, Jr. shot and killed several children at the Jewish Community Center in L.A., as well as murdering a Filipino postal worker. All of these different members discussed the need to engage in revolution against the Zionist Occupation Government, in which subversive Jews use "mud races" to destroy the purity of the white race.

The most dramatic example of these is obviously the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 that killed 168 people while injuring an additional 680 others. A huge number of these were children since the Federal Building that was attacked had a childcare center in it. This was carried out by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols driven by anti-Federal ideas that were heavily racialized. McVeigh was even found to have pages from the Turner Diaries in his car. The book, which is something of a Bible from the racist militia movement, is a novel written by National Alliance founder William Pierce that describes an incredibly violent race war where blacks and Jews are exterminated at will. Their connections to the fringes of these movements were clear, yet what they actually intended to result from their actions were not. In many of these cases, the idea is for the violence to trigger the subliminal racism of middle America to rise up against their "subversive Jewish masters."

These kinds of gun-based attacks have largely come out of the more militant groups dealing both with racialized ideologies and also having connections to broader militia groups, conspiracy theory organizations, and the new Sovereign Citizens movement. On the west coast the Posse Comitatus had been on the vanguard of this racist militia milieu for years, and more recently groups like the Northwest Front may be taking up that mantle. It would be nice to write these attacks up to a few disturbed people, and, in a lot of ways, you can. The organizations that do still exist that pushed these people into their moments of extreme violence often times denounce the actions, or passively support them. What we do see is that organizations like these use people with questionable social standing and emotional stability to commit the most violent acts against people of color, queer folks, Muslims, immigrants, and anyone else they have decided to hate that week.

What is important to also consider when thinking about these types of groups is that their lip service, and even attacks, against the government are not what is really at issue. The state is only a subject of attack because of its relationship to communities of color, Jews, and others. The real violence here is against random minority community members and, in the case of bomb attacks, low-level government workers. Their threat is still, no matter what they say they target, against individuals in our communities and not lofty government or corporate actors.

The acts of mass murder themselves have often taken on the "blaze of glory" format where the act itself is not always hidden very well, and the actor tends to see this as the culminating act of their life. This again has led many in the media and state agencies to list these people as just being emotionally disturbed, and this is a narrative that many of the larger revolutionary racist organizations have supported. Instead, it actually comes at the direct result of much of the organizing rhetoric that happens internal to these organizations.

Two primary organizing documents have led to help create the space for these acts of mass killings. The first is "leaderless resistance," which is the name of an essay written by white nationalist Col. Ulius Louis Amoss in 1962. The notion came from the idea that the top-down "pyramid structure" used by white vanguard organizations were easy to be infiltrated and instead advocated a "phantom cell" model that lacks any kind of centralized control. Many would actually see that this is similar to many "affinity group" models used in insurrectionary left-anarchist organizing, but while there are connections in the use of anti-organizational modes, the goals are radically different. As Simson Garfinkel writes in the journal First Monday, the goals of leaderless resistance in this context is in interpersonal violence.

Under many circumstances, the "resistance" advocated by Beam could easily devolve into random acts of anarchistic violence without any formal political objective. Indeed, the effects of Leaderless Resistance can easily be dismissed as the work of "wannabe terrorists", petty criminals engaging in copycat crimes, and angry loners participating in "sympathy attacks." That is, it could easily devolve into traditional forms of "resistance" or "cultural resistance" employed by the poor or powerless to impede or subvert a more powerful foe. The violence of Leaderless Resistance is different from what sociologists often refer to as "cultural resistance." While it is uncoordinated, Leaderless Resistance supports a common political goal: it is violence with an agenda. Typically, this agenda is set by political tracts or other documents that set forth objectives, demands, and classes of particular targets. Agenda-setting is also performed by specific individuals who take part in terrorist activities: when one Earth Liberation Front member attacks a dealership for sport utility vehicles (SUVs) that opens another "front" in the "battle", and gives others the idea and motivation of attacking SUV dealerships as well. (3)

He goes on to note that there actually is a kind of de facto leadership in this format in that there tends to be public figures who advocate these methodologies. These end up existing as leadership, and the constant media feedback loop creates a sense of validation in the actions.

The second concept that was important to this is that of the "lone wolf" type action. This concept was heavily popularized by people like Tom Metzger, whose group White Aryan Resistance was a major driving force in supporting neo-Nazi skinhead formations in the U.S. He saw the potential of these groups as the KKK went into decline, seeing them as vanguardist "brown shirts." Metzger's concept of the lonewolf is again a form of leaderless resistance, except specifically focused on assassination-ready targets. As he says in his famous essay "Laws for the Lone Wolf," "anyone is capable of being a Lone Wolf."

Always start off small. Many small victories are better than one huge blunder (which may be the end of your career as a Lone Wolf). Every little bit counts in a resistance. Knowledge is power. Learn from your mistakes as well as the mistakes of others. Never rush into anything, time and planning are keys to success. Never attempt anything beyond your own abilities, failure could lead to disaster. The less any outsider knows, the safer and more successful you will be. Keep your mouth shut and your ears open. Never truly admit to anything…I have never said their will never be a time when all small cells and lonewolves may evolve into a highly structure but ruthlessly militant organization with steel hard leaders. That time is not now and will not be for the foreseeable future. No present leader including myself will be leading that phase. We are only to prepare the way. Hopefully what we say and do now will make future victory possible. Remember, those who have come before you are counting on you, those who will come after you are depending on you. Think white, act White, be White! (4)

While Metzger tries to be vague, he is discussing the murder of high-level targets. This could be politicians that he sees as being a part of ZOG, or this could just be people in interracial relationships, anti-fascist and left-wing organizers, and people organizing the protections of LGBTQ people. This methodology has been a popular idea taken up in various KKK and neo-Nazi factions, the militia movement, and in some of the more violent racialist ideology, like the vile Creativity Movement. You can see this resulting in incidents like the recent targeting of the Sikh Temple members, the killing of the security guard at the Smithsonian Holocaust Museum, and the various Jewish Temple shootings.

Metzger's ideas often come under a free-speech caveat, and it would be unwise to head into a liberal "anti-hate speech" line of organizing as this would end up being counter-productive. But his words do have meaning.

After all three skinheads indicted for Mulugeta Seraw's murder, Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center thought that the case needed to go further than just those with literal blood on their hands. The SPLC is known for doing its research, education, and trainings around hate groups, as well as having different court cases and lawsuits targeting these organizations and individuals. Dees wanted to target one of the overarching organizations and individuals that had been pushing these neo-Nazi skinheads into acts of individual violence. Tom Metzger and WAR became the obvious culprits, and after Dees found a letter that John Metzger, Tom's son, had told the skinhead who committed to murder to show his town how this "Aryan Youth Movement worked." Dees won a $7 million lawsuit against Tom Metzger, functionally bankrupting him and his organization. Metzger's ideas have been central to the functioning of these bouts of skinhead violence, and this court case put him up for it. But he is still out there, legally allowed to keep publishing and the skinheads who continue to read his diatribes continue to stay inspired.

The question as to why violence seems inevitable from these organizations brings up a lot of complicated answers. The vanguard and revolutionary fascists groups do not have the political clout to ever engage in an actual military insurrection against the government. The fear of this type of action is much more theoretical and more based around the more organized above-ground groups since they have the potential to create a radical undercurrent that could be militant come periods of mass collapse and crisis. The current militia and skinhead groups, however, will not have enough pull in the contemporary world to actually mobilize against the state in any meaningful way. Even on their small scale, antifascist organizations, both liberal and radical, successfully shut down their growth and any resources they get their mitts on the second they do. At the same time, their rhetoric, often tied to movements so roundly reviled at this point, such as Nazi Germany, does not have enough palatability to ever be a dangerous political movement.

While they do not have the ability to put a person in congress, or even put enough people successfully in fatigues, they do tend to maintain the most radical elements in the insurrectionary racist ranks. These organizations attract and groom those prone to violence. While the people often engaging in the violence may be walking into the actions themselves with a mix both of ideology and interpersonal issues, there is still a political impetus that drives these organizations to groom people towards violence. It is actually this dynamic that reminds us of many debates on the left circles of insurrectionary anarchism, where by militant actions that may or may not be considered violent are often used to "break the spell" of the current order and inspire further action. This is the classic "propaganda of the deed" mentality that led to the assassinations of presidents and bombings of law enforcement strongholds. It is essentially this notion that actually drives many of these violent acts, the idea being that this will break the "spell of multiculturalism" and drive people to engage in RaHoWa (Racial Holy War).

The very nature of these organizations are in their dissent from the largest fascist milieu, and that point is usually on the basis of the necessity of violence. The larger organizations have differing opinions on whether or not to engage in the political system. Many still advocate running candidates in local elections, both inside open racialist parties like the American Freedom Party or through closely aligned political formations like the Tea Party or the Constitution Party. Others instead want to create a cultural and social milieu in challenge to the system, but is not advocating open insurrection. We see this in the Radix, Alternative Right, H.L. Menken Club crowd, where many actually do advocate revolutionary politics but would never openly associate with violent direct action. Groups like Aryan Nations exists, to a large part, because they are willing to acknowledge the need for violence in the here and now. It is what gives these organizations a modicum of individuality and a purpose to exist.

Because violence is at the heart of their reason to exist, it is inevitable that these formations will lead to violence. As mentioned before, since there is no chance at revolutionary militarism, this takes the form of random acts of violence towards target communities.

Outside of the existing organizations, there is one area where vanguardist fascists have made their way into that has seen a notable rise in violence. The movement against racist police violence has been given a steroid injection with Black Lives Matter rising out of Ferguson, Brooklyn, and Baltimore. It is here that the institutionalized biases lead police to use their positions as defenders of capital to lord over communities of color, engaging in lethal violence at inordinate rates against people of color. This is implicit to a racist society where capitalism and the state rely on racial inequality, and this is baked into the social order that gives police their queues as to who they see as being threatening.

In the now widely publicized FBI report of 2006 titled "White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement" gives us a sense of where much of the effort for state subversion could be for organized racists. Even the state itself acknowledges that its role as the monopolistic holder over the right to violence could allow fascists to use it to further wield violence.

White supremacist presence among law enforcement personnel is a concern due to the access they may possess to restricted areas vulnerable to sabotage and to elected officials or protected persons, whom they could see as potential targets for violence. (5)

The limitations of this report are obvious in the fact that the main threat they see is that those who would like to engage in the sort of "apocalyptic violence" may have access to otherwise "restricted" government officials. What they fail to address is the actual threat that racists who see people of color as subhuman will have access to them as subjects of lethal force.

Much of this draws from the obvious rise in racial extremism between 2008 and 2014, which also marked the increase for the more mainstream versions of these groups like the Tea Party. The reasons for this are obvious as Barack Obama is a bridge-too-far for many of them, but in general the changing demographics of the country is baiting those that simply cannot take the idea of a multi-ethnic society. Many of these organizations target law enforcement because they would like to personally aid in shifting towards a militarized pro-white avenue within policing, where they really do see people of color as violent threats to white society. Policing adds a lethal dimension to the existing inequality of a society, and as the vanguards of white privilege these organizations want to help further make the police force a violent protector of white hegemony. On the more interpersonal level, the petty power that many low-level police get mirrors the kind of white privilege that white nationalists and reactionaries desperately want to hold onto at the cost of the working class unity that could afford them a better position in the world. The same situation has proven true in many of the anti-Islamic threads in the military or, more appropriately, in the private military complex with companies like Blackwater. Here a racist ideological thread helps to aid in the career choice, where protecting the U.S. from "dangerous Muslims and foreigners" may seem like a morally positive choice.

The reality of this situation can only be heightened by its seeming impossibility. With the beauracratic state that essentially weeds out dissenting opinions through Human Resource apparatus, you would think that these kind of racial revolutionaries would be barred from employment. Then we see the high number of organized racists heading into the police force, or radicalizing within the police force due to the type of racialized policing methods that can warp their perception of the communities of color they engage with. We see in countries like Greece where Golden Dawn may only get a small percentage of votes from the general electorate, but have over fifty percent support from the Police. And we need to remember what kind of threat this actually holds even beyond the fact that we can expect for more racist violence from the police. In periods of revolutionary upheaval, the police can easily align themselves with reactionary direct action parties and embody the brown-shirt role they already socially hold.

One of the primary elements that anti-fascists have always confronted is that the dissemination of racist ideas will continue to increase racist violence, even if much racist violence on a daily basis are happening outside of the organized racist movement. This increase is not only due to the production of material from the revolutionary groups, but the intellectual organizing-focused fascist organizations play just as much into producing the material that eventually pushes "lone wolves" over the edge. As pointed out in Why We Fight I, the primary threat in terms of organizing is over the fate of radicalism, but there is also an intensification effect that these groups have over the violent wing of their movement. They continue to stoke racial hatred, the need for "revolution," and other ideas that lead to conscious acts of protecting white supremacy.

Notes

1. Denson, Bryan. "Legacy of a hate crime: Mulugeta Seraw's death a decade ago avenged." Oregonlive.com. 1998: Republished November 12, 2014. http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2014/11/1998_story_legacy_of_a_hate_cr.html.

2. "Ku Klux Klan." History.com. Last accessed September 11th, 2015. http://www.history.com/topics/ku-klux-klan.

3. Garfinkel, Simson L. "Leaderless resistance today." First Monday, Volume 8, Number 3. 3 March 2003. http://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1040/961.

4. Metzger, Tom. "Laws for the Lone Wolf." Resist. http://www.resist.com/Articles/literature/LawsForTheLoneWolfByTomMetzger.htm.

5. FBI Counterterrorism Division. "(U) White Supremacist Infiltration of Law Enforcement." Federal Bureau of Investigation Intelligence Assessment. 17 October 2006. http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/402521/doc-26-white-supremacist-infiltration.pdf.

Retracing Toledo's Radical History

By Derek Ide

It is not difficult to sense the alienation and demoralization that impinges upon so many people as they drive through the streets of Toledo, Ohio. These are streets that were constructed to be driven on and nothing else. Unlike many of the cities in Europe, or even some in the United States, it is not a walkable city. The haphazard urban planning, or lack thereof, and the complete lack of any public transit system, with the exception of TARTA buses and private cabs, combine to make Toledo more than inhospitable to those without their own private vehicle. Those who can afford it have spent the past five decades fleeing to outlying suburbs, and those who cannot remain trapped within the confines of a "Little Detroit" which, after the 1970s, has witnessed the gutting of its manufacturing base. Since 2000, Toledo area poverty has risen faster than any other U.S. city. [1] In 2009, nearly 30% of the population of Toledo lived below the poverty line. Over 11% lived below half the poverty line.[2]

In Toledo, isolation is the rule rather than the anomaly. While the Occupy Wall Street movement rocked the United States in 2011, Toledo's Occupy Wall Street was anemic and enervated. Responses exist but they are individual, small-scale, and incapable of drawing the numbers that such dire conditions warrant. Aside from a few key activists and organizers, most individuals, even those who have lived here their whole lives, have taken the state of things for granted, or at least feel powerless to change them. No mass movement exists, in spite of the abject conditions, that people can plug themselves into. Toledo, as someone recently put it, is "a hard place to love if you didn't grow up here."

This has not always been the case, however. Toledo was once a center for economic activity, a hub of material exchange through which goods and labor moved rapidly. More importantly, however, Toledo has a long and radical history, one that has often been hidden away by the quotidian drudgery and daily grind of life. From the 1934 Auto-Lite Strike to the Black Panther Party headquarters on Door St., the city has not always been bereft of a culture of resistance. This once-proud resistance was not only manifest in one of the few general strikes to every rock a major U.S. city, or in the sheer violence and force brought down against the Panthers, it was also located on the campus of the University itself. From UT's Students for a Democratic Society in the early 1970s to the Black Student Union, which spearheaded the divestment movement from South Africa in the mid-1980s, Toledo students have always been engaged in the struggles of the day. The purpose of this article is to recount these struggles, but more importantly to provide as much space as possible to the voices that engaged in them. It should be noted that while what comes below is not an all-encompassing account of every radical initiative and movement in Toledo's history, plenty of which remain to be written about and exceed the knowledge of the author, this is a brief attempt to retrace as much of Toledo's radical history as possible. It is a history that every Toledo worker, student, and citizen should know.

The 1934 Auto-Lite Strike

By 1934, Toledo was in the midst of the depression. While the crisis was astute on the national scale, in Toledo it was catastrophic. Whereas 25 percent of all workers and 37 of all nonfarm workers were unemployed in 1933,[3] Toledo faced an unemployment rate of over 50% in 1934.[4] As Rebecca E. Zietlow[5] and James Gray Pope explain:

Without an economic safety net, people literally struggled to survive. Toledoans told stories about families eating nothing but apples, and burning their furniture to warm themselves during the harsh upper Midwest winters. These conditions were devastating for those workers without jobs, but they also had a profound impact on employed workers. The managers at industrial plants such as the Auto-Lite plant treated unskilled and semi-skilled workers as fungible and disposable.

Over one-third of Toledo's population lived on meager emergency relief during the depression. Willys-Overland employed 28,000 in 1929, out of a total population in Toledo of 290,000. By 1932, it employed only 3,000 people.[6] As Willys-Overland and other automobile plants shut down or significantly reduced production, so too did auto parts manufacturers, a significant component of Toledo's industrial base.

The Electric Auto-Lite Company, an auto parts manufacturer, was the site of one of the most heroic and historic strikes in not only Toledo, but U.S. history. At Auto-Lite, workers were treated contemptuously, and supervisors exercised arbitrary power over all aspects of their work life. Although Congress had enacted the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in 1933 which, under Section 7(a), provided workers with the right to organize, Roosevelt's insertion of merit clauses "granted employers the right to establish open shops and discriminate against militants." [7] As Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward explain:

Early in 1934, demands for union recognition at the Electric Auto-Lite Company and several smaller firms were rejected, and 4,000 workers walked out. The workers returned to the plants after federal officials secured a commitment from the employers to "set up a machinery" for negotiations. But Auto-Lite then refused to negotiate, and a second strike was called on April 11. Only a minority of the workers joined the walkout this time, however, and the company determined to keep its plant open, hiring strikebreakers to reach full production.

Toledo was a stronghold of A. J. Muste's radical Unemployed Leagues, and the Musteites rapidly mobilized large numbers of unemployed workers to reinforce the picket lines. On April 17 the company responded by obtaining a court order limiting picketing and prohibiting league members from picketing altogether. But the Musteites decided to violate the restraining order, and some local Communists joined in with the slogan "Smash the Injunction by Mass Picketing" (Keeran, 168). A handful of militants then began picketing. They were quickly arrested, but upon their release, they returned to the picket lines, their numbers now enlarged by workers emboldened by the militants' example. More arrests and further court injunctions seemed to only galvanize the strikers, and the numbers of people on the picket lines grew larger day by day. Sympathy for the strikers in Toledo was such that the sheriff could not use the local police to protect the strikebreakers and instead deputized special police, paid for by Auto-Lite.

By May 23, the crowd massed outside the plant had grown to some 10,000 people, effectively imprisoning the 1,500 strikebreakers inside the factory. The sheriff then decided to take the initiative, and the deputies attacked. The crowd fought back, several people were seriously wounded, and a contingent of the Ohio National Guard was called in. Armed with machine guns and bayoneted rifles, the Guardsmen marched into the Auto-Lite plant in the quiet of dawn and succeeded in evacuating the strikebreaking workers. But the next day, the crowd gathered again, advanced on the Guardsmen, showering them with bricks and bottles. On the third advance, the Guard fired into the crowd, killing two and wounding many more. The crowd still did not disperse. Four more companies of Guards men were called up, and Auto-Lite agreed to close the plant. Then, with the threat of a general strike in the air, the employers finally agreed to federal mediation which resulted in a 22 percent wage increase and limited recognition for the union. [8]

The AWP skillfully utilized the language of slavery and emancipation to inspire the strikers:

Its banner equated the end of chattel slavery in 1865 with the end of wage slavery through collective action in 1934. AWP flyers produced at the time made this connection more explicit. One leaflet proclaimed, "Toledo workers will not work at the points of bayonets like craven slaves." Another declared, "[T]he workers of Toledo . . . have starved and sweated and cried in their misery while waiting for this hour. Now they have shaken off the chains of their masters." A leaflet produced by the Auto Workers Union Organization Committee agreed, "It now remains the task of completely closing this slave pen of Minniger."[9]

One of the most important elements of the strike was the influence of A.J. Muste, a leader of the American Workers Party, who helped organize the Lucas County Unemployed League.[10] Charles Bogle explains the vital importance of this development:

The strike would have ended… had it not been for the actions of a committee of Auto-Lite workers who asked for assistance from the Unemployed League. The Unemployed League, affiliated with the socialist American Workers Party (AWP), had formed in 1933 to organize mass actions by Toledo unemployed workers to obtain cash relief. More important for the fate of the Auto-Lite striking workers, the League's policy was to unify the employed and unemployed. [11]

This policy of unification was a vital component of the strike, and allowed a limited, plant-based battle to transform into one of the most important industrial city-wide struggles in U.S. history.[12]

The success of the Toledo strike was a significant factor that contributed to the formation of the United Auto Workers, one of the few remaining unions of any significance in the United States. More importantly, it acted as a catalyst for passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) of 1935, which codified the legality of trade unions, collective bargaining, elected labor representation, and the right to strike. Although the plant was demolished in 1999, the entrance was left standing, with an inscription that reads: "This stone doorway will stand forever as a symbol of the Toledo Auto-Lite workers' commitment, loyalty, and solidarity, which enabled them to break with the past, and enter a better future." As Zeitlow and Pope maintain, "That future has now receded into the past, and the example of the Auto-Lite strikers affirms to a new generation that with commitment, loyalty, and solidarity, a better future can be won."[13]

National Committee to Combat Fascism (Black Panther Party)

On July 25, 1967, Dorr Street, dubbed "Black Mecca" for the array of black-owned shops, restaurants, and nightclubs, had been the site of a large-scale uprising that came on the heels of an even larger rebellion in Detroit two days prior.[14] One witness to the riots proclaimed "The reasons for the riots, I think, were to achieve some kind of justice - we just didn't have it all the time." [15] Three years later, an organization had arisen to politically direct the energy and frustration manifest in 1967. By 1970, the 1300 block of Dorr Street was home to the Toledo chapter Black Panther Party headquarters. The Toledo Panthers, at this time operating under the name the National Committee to Combat Fascism (NCCF), had organized a nascent Free Clothing program and [16] a Free Breakfast program, in step with other chapters across the country.

Already at this time across the country, Black Panther Party headquarters had been attacked and raided, and the 21-year old martyr Fred Hampton had been pulled out of his bed and shot in the head less than a year before. In the early morning hours of September 18, 1970, a man approached Toledo Police Officer William Miscannon, stationed outside the Party headquarters at Junction and Dorr. The stories differ as to what happened next. One source suggests Miscannon asked the man what was going on, to which the man responded "This is what's going on," before pulling a silver handgun and shooting Miscannon in the head.[17] Yet another source suggests the man approached and shouted "Hey baby, I've got something for you!" before shooting.[18] Either way, Miscannon was killed and the murder was blamed on local Panther John McClellan. Although McClellan was charged, two different trials ended in hung juries, and no new evidence was able to be presented against him.

The Toledo Police, however, took no qualms in using the killing as a pretext for attacking the Panther headquarters. Within hours, some forty officers surrounded the headquarters and "riddled… [the] Panther headquarters with bullets during a five-hour battle," in what Mike Cross, the Panther defense minister in Toledo, called "an unprovoked attack by racist pigs."[19] The guns were apparently procured by John McClellan's brother, Larry, who took "about 20 rifles" from a shooting range at Bowling Green State University, near Toledo. [20] Sixteen year old Troy Montgomery was seriously wounded. When the ambulance arrived, the police refused to allow the black ambulance driver Leroy Hardnett to take the boy to the hospital. Hardnett reported at the time that "They told us to leave him in the streets and die."[21] The boy was eventually taken to Mercy Hospital and survived. The Panthers stockpile of weapons was confiscated by the police. The assault did not end that night, however. One Black Panther article titled "Toledo Piggery Continues" detailed how "Two members of the Toledo N.C.C.F. (brothers Conrad and Kenneth) were kidnapped, while on their way to the office, and illegally held for eight days in the Toledo Pig Pen. The brothers were unable to make a phone call to let anyone know what had happened to them." [22] Although Panther operations were hampered by this attack, this was not the end of the Toledo chapter.

The thugs of the state continued their war on Toledo's Panthers. On November 28, 1970 an article entitled "The Dungeon" appeared in the Black Panther party newspaper exposing the conditions that prisoners faced in Toledo's Lucas Country jail. The report was signed by ten prisoners, five Black and five white, and immediately they faced retaliation for their political commitments to the struggle. This excerpt from the Black Panther detailing the attack deserves to be quoted at length:

The Inmates knew that their lives would be in grave danger because of this, but they felt that getting the truth to the people about what was happening in this fascist pig pen was much more important than their own personal safety. This was clearly shown in the last paragraph of the article which stated "All the men (five Black and five White) incarcerated in this jail's maximum security section have signed this report being well aware of the physical and mental repression that will follow from the jail's administration. They wish the people to know that no matter what happens to them they have stood up and are resisting as men."

Tuesday Dec. 8. 1970, under pretense of conducting a weapons search, more than 25 racist pigs and their bootlicking flunky nigger pigs, launched an unprovoked, brutal attack against the men in the maximum security section of the Lucas County Jail. When the pigs started brutalizing and beating them, the brothers righteously began to defend themselves. Within minutes the rest of the inmates on all three jail floors began to join in the resistance against the pig deputies. For 2 hours the prisoners of the dungeon resisted heavily armed pigs from the Sheriffs Dept. and city Police… 17 prisoners were beaten, stripped of their clothes and sent to the hole (A 10' × 12' windowless room in the basement). Included among them was a sick 73 year old Black man and two members of the N.C.C.F., John and Larry McClellan. All 17 prisoners remained in this room for 2 days and were literally covered with their own wastes. The only food they received was one cup of water and one slice of bread a day per person.

…[On] Thursday Dec. 10, incarcerated N.C.C.F. member John McClellan, accused of offing racist pig Miscannon Sept. 18th, 1970, stopped a pre-trial motion in his defense to expose the conditions that he and 16 other men had been subjected to for over 48 hours in the hole. He refused to participate any further in the court proceedings until the cruel and unusual punishment was immediately ended.

Presiding Judge, Wiley, adjourned the court and visited the jail along with newsmen and attorneys, from 1:30 P.M. to 2:30 P.M. When court was re-convened he ordered that John McClellan released from the hole immediately. This brother again showed that he is a true servant of the people when he said. "The constitutional rights of the other 16 men are also being violated. I will not leave those other men in the hole to die. If we are not all released together, then I will return to the hole with my friends, many, who are sick and will die it not released immediately." Judge Wiley then ordered Sheriff Metzger to release all the men held in the hole. This racist pig Judge had seen with his own eyes, the degradation of 17 naked human beings covered with their own wastes and visibly very sick. Yet, all he could relate to was releasing John McClellan. This brother exposed the true-nature of this pig and backed him up against the wall, where in order not to show his fascist nature, he had to recognize the rights of the other prisoners held in the hole…

Now a prisoner can remain in the hole for only 12 hours at a time and then be released for 6 hours before returning again. Still this rule doesn't stop his said constitutional rights against cruel and unusual punishment from being violated. It just determines how long his rights will be violated.

A prisoner will still he stripped naked, forced to sleep on a concrete floor if its not too crowded, have no toilet facilities or running water and receive bread and water to eat. Actually, nothing has changed regarding the way the prisoners are treated in the hole. only the length of time they are to be kept in there. To end the sham. Pig judge Wiley had the nerve to dink the following statement' "This is an unsatisfactory solution, but I had to balance the necessity for security against a minimum of decency."

The pigs have always put their security and profits before the desires and needs of the people. The crimes being committed daily in the "Dungeon" are comparable to the horrendous war crimes committed by the Nazis against their victims in the concentration camps.

Today, the barbarous ruling class of America far surpasses the Nazis in Germany. They are making and implementing plans for the total extermination of Black people in America, and waging a genocidal war on the rest of the poor and oppressed in the world. We are not going to rid ourselves of the brutality and murder waged daily against the people of the world by the Nixon-Agnew-Mitchell-Hoover fascist clique, unless all people rise up and begin to wage revolutionary armed struggle within every oppressed community of the world. In essence, we must relate to the social and political ideology of inter-communalism so that all people of the world can no longer be manipulated along racial, cultural, and national lines by the fascists of America.

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

THROUGH REVOLUTIONARY INTERCOMMUNAL SOLIDARITY!

Toledo N.C.C.F.

1334 Dorr St.

Toledo, Ohio[23]

In stark contrast, The Byran Times presented the "disturbance" as an "attempt to free two Black Panthers." This revolt was "quelled" by the "authorities."[24] But the Panthers and McClellan were not demonized by the Black community, despite how the press sought to malign them. Indeed, in July of 1972 the Toledo NCCF held a "Community Day of Justice." Some "6,000 people, mostly Black, attended Community Day for Justice to show support for Comrade John McClellan." The John McClellan Free Food Program distributed "1,000 free full bags of groceries (with a chicken in every bag)" and over 1,000 Sickle Cell Anemia tests were given. A "massive number" of people were registered to vote. When the bags of food arrived, "everyone felt as one beautiful, Black sister did: 'Lord knows, those Panthers are really going to do it'." [25]

Campus Activism from the Black Student Union to Students for Justice in Palestine

As the Black Panthers were organizing on Door Street, just a mile or so west students were organizing around a variety of issues on the "Toledo University" (now University of Toledo) campus. Both the Black Student Union as well as the Students for a Democratic Society became politically active at the college. Toledo's SDS, while small, ruffled a lot of feathers on campus and were even the target of extensive FBI surveillance. Recently declassified documents reveal their tactics were extremely dirty. One COINTELPRO operative, Gene Foder, recalled how he "would attend an organization's meeting and wait for speakers to denounce law enforcement, as they often did. Then, with a burst of apparent outrage, he would rise and point out his fellow undercover officers. The groups would kick out those officers and often welcome Mr. Fodor into their ranks, grateful for his watchful eye and unaware that he too was a part of the system they opposed."[26] The BSU, for its part, was also quite militant. At one point it occupied University Hall, the iconic building on campus,[27] in the aftermath of the the Jackson State shooting:

At 6:00 a.m. on Monday May 18, Black students blocked the entrances to University Hall for five hours. A crowd of about 2,000 gathered when they could not get into the building to attend classes, some angry and some supportive of the BSU. Their demands, very similar to those of Black students at San Francisco State College and Cornell, were as follows: "$200,000 for a Black studies programs, manned and directed by Blacks; the hiring of a full time coordinator of Black studies; first priority placed on hiring of Black professors in each department; a Black student enrollment commensurate with the population of Blacks in the City of Toledo; a minimum of three Black graduate students in every department" ("The Declaration," 1970, May 18). These demands arose after the BSU perceived that the UT administration did not respond to the deaths at Jackson State.[28]

The BSU continued this confident, militant approach throughout the 1980s. In 1985, at the age of 43 years old, co-founder of the Black Panther Party Huey P. Newton broke ten years of silence by addressing a crowd at the University of Toledo. He had been invited by the University of Toledo Black Student Union (BSU), which was in the midst of its struggle to get the University of Toledo to divest from its holdings in apartheid South Africa. He told the audience he had "thought BSUs had gone the way of my organization of SNCC," but instead that explained that the BSUs represented a "structure to start to build a national organization freedom." He maintained that students in general, and black students in particular, were becoming politically conscious largely through the struggle against apartheid in South Africa.[29] The BSU also brought former Black Panther, Communist Party leader, and prison scholar Angela Davis to campus. She, like Newton, engaged the issue of the divestment movement on campus: "I hear that there is a pretty strong divestment movement on this campus… Well, I think that you should keep on pushing for full and immediate divestment." [30]

The BSU at UT in the 1980s was at the forefront of radical student politics with leaders like Mansour Bey who not only brought figures like Newton and Davis to Toledo, but militantly challenged the administration on issues like divestment from South Africa, even in the face of intimidation. [31] Throughout 1984 and 1985 the BSU brought anti-apartheid activists and native South Africans to campus to raise awareness and in June 1985 circulated a divestment petition. In October 1985 the BSU organized a march with over 100. Chants like "Long Live the African National Congress!" and signs such as "Apartheid is dead… may it rest in hell" characterized the march. [32] When protests alone did not accomplish their goals, the BSU erected mock shanties in protest, calling for total divestment. As The Blade reported at the time, the student action "placed TU [UT] on the crest of the biggest wave of protests on college campuses since the Vietnam War."[33] The shanty they erected was not removed until Mansour Bey, president of the BSU at the time, had secured a meeting with UT's president James McComas, who explained that UT would make its position on divestment public in three weeks.

Throughout this entire process the university administration harassed and threatened BSU leaders. As one statement explains, on the same day that they finally received a telephone call from the president in July of 1985, another call "came into the Black Student Union to tell us that campus security was investigating the records" of BSU leaders, including president Anthony Muharib and vice-president Mansour Bey. Then, Chief of Campus security Frank Pizzulo confronted Mansour Bey about some "old bench warrants" on the activists, which they claimed may "prove embarrassing if we, as student leaders were to be arrested." The BSU's July 31, 1985 remained defiant, however:

What we are concerned with here today is the double standard that prompted today's press conference [regarding divestment]. On the one hand, James [McComas] establishes a committee to study U.T.'s investments in South Africa, while on the underhand, the U.T. Security Forces launches an investigation and surveillance of those campus activists who have led the campaign to raise the political and moral consciousness of U.T.'s students and faculty… We are also very concerned with the overall implications of these police tactics which remind us of the very oppressive and inhumanitarian policies of the South African government which we are protesting against. Why these police tactics? Are they intended to intimdate all students into backing away from getting involved in controversial and unpopular issues? If so, it is not working! Therefore, we are today calling upon the support of the progressive elements of the Toledo community to stand with the Black Student Union in solidarity for our right as students and citizens of the United States to express our constitutionally guaranteed rights of freedom of speech. And furthermore, that we be permitted to continue our campaign to educate and motivate this campus to speak out on the evils and injust practices of the Botha regime in South Africa. Finally, we demand that the university's campus police forces cease and desist their harassment, investigations, and surveillance of U.T. students.[34]

In the end the University of Toledo convened an ad hoc South African Investments Study Committee that eventually called for divestment from South African apartheid. By August 1989, on the midnight hour of the apartheid regime, UT and two related private organizations completed their divestment from South Africa, totaling some $4.7 million in investments.[35]

Today the BSU is a far cry from the militant organization of the 1980s. Instead, some of the BSU's responses to the rampant murder of young black men has been paltry, acquiescent, and cowardly, not to mention their refusal to challenge US imperialism and militarism. [36] Part of this stems from the social composition of the current Black Student Union. In 2014 the BSU president refused to sign on to a statement linking the #BlackLivesMatter movement with Israel's summer assault on Gaza. The president of the BSU cited that with four of seven of their executive board members serving in armed forces via the University of Toledo's ROTC program, the BSU could not critique US policies. UT itself has recently been "recognized as a top school for military education,"[37] with one of the categories of qualification being "military culture," as can be obscenely witnessed by the disproportionate amount of students roaming the campus in their fatigues and the various training and combat simulation drills that regularly occur on campus grounds.

The BSU is not alone in this transformation from radicalism to acquiescence, however. The Latino Student Union, with radical Mexican-American working class roots, has largely devolved into a social organization that occasionally parrots US propaganda against radical states in Latin America. In 2014, for instance, the LSU become the marionette of a small but influential group of Venezuelan expats at the University of Toledo when they willingly spread vicious lies against the Venezuelan state.[38] The malicious campaign of propaganda continued in 2015, with one prominent Venezuelan student calling for US sanctions against her own country in an effort to oust Nicolas Maduro, the inheritor of Hugo Chavez's legacy, and the radical PSUV.[39] To combat this a collective of students interested in challenging the narrative of the powerful and privileged Venezuelan elites came together to form the University of Toledo Friends of Venezuela Society. Their first public statement called for "Hands off Venezuela, no to sanctions":

Aside from the delusions of wealthy Venezuelan expatriates in Toledo and other U.S. cities, there is nothing the Venezuelan government has done that warrants sanctions. The primary reason they want to apply sanctions is because Chavez, Maduro, and the PSUV have threatened both the cupidity of the ruling class in Venezuela and challenged US hegemony in the region. As scholar George Ciccariello-Maher has argued in Jacobin magazine, "While the Venezuelan opposition in Venezuela is almost as delusional as the Venezuelan self-exiles in Miami [or Toledo], there's one big difference: opposition leaders on the ground have to live with the consequences of their catastrophic decisions… [Thus] while radical right-wingers in Florida [or Ohio] may be celebrating the sanctions, it would be suicidal for the opposition in Venezuela to do the same. They would simply prove what Chavistas already believe: that they are treasonous lapdogs of imperial power."

Indeed, students at UT and people of conscience should not fall for the narrative espoused by "treasonous lapdogs of imperial power." It is imperative, now more than ever, that progressive forces here in the US and around the world stand up and say "No to Sanctions!" and "Hands Off Venezuela!" Within just over a week four million Venezuelans signed a petition condemning sanctions against their country. We ought to listen to the millions of urban workers and campesinos, not the spawn of the elite here at UT.

Perhaps the most important political development on UT's campus in the past few years, however, has been the advent and augmentation of the Palestine solidarity movement. Inspired by the upsurge in Palestine solidarity organizing around the country, a group of students came together to form Toledo's first organization dedicated to Palestinian solidarity in the summer of 2011. After four years of organization, education, and agitation on the issue, UT Students for Justice in Palestine led one of the most high profile divestment campaigns in the country. Calling on UT to divest from corporations that profited from the occupation of Palestine, UTSJP spearheaded an initiative modeled on the BSU's successful anti-apartheid divestment initiative. [40] In September, 2014 UTSJP paired with UT's Student African American Brotherhood to celebrate the resistance to police violence in Ferguson and the resistance to Israeli occupation in Gaza. Furthermore, they called "for the immediate end to police militarization and violence aimed at black communities in the U.S. and an immediate cessation of the $3 billion provided to Israel annually by our government to oppress the Palestinian people."[41]

By early 2015 UTSJP had pushed divestment to the forefront of campus life. In what was called "the craziest stories we've ever reported" by prominent commentator Phillip Weiss, the UT administration and Student Government originally colluded to shut down the UT Divest movement in a kangaroo court that ruled divestment "unconstitutional."[42] After a massive campaign led by a strong coalition of student groups at UT and solidarity organizations from around the country, the Student Government was eventually forced to reverse its position and voted 21 to 4 in favor of divestment on March 3, 2015.[43] Just over a month later, in late April, UT Divest won a major victory in the form of a student-wide referendum in which 57.13% of students voted to divest. Despite all of this, the university has refused to divest against the will of a majority of its students. As UTSJP's post-referendum victory letter explains, however, the struggle continues:

We do not believe divestment is "contentious" or "incredibly difficult." Society's intolerable injustices do not require the search for a full consensus on what perfect justice looks like. We support divestment because we believe in human rights and international law. We believe UT should strive to actually implement its ethical and moral commitments, and adhere to its own mission statement of "improving the human condition." The majority of UT students agree with us. #UTDivest has created a movement on campus, a movement so resilient that it will continue to grow, to learn, to evolve, and to win. We will continue to work with and organize alongside all organizations that support social justice, and will struggle to ensure that UT is a place where human life is more important than profit. Consciousness has been raised, bodies have been moved, hearts and minds have been won. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. #UTDivest will continue to move forward in the struggle for justice. [44]

The 2005 Toledo Rebellion and #BlackLivesMatter

One of the moments Toledo captured national media attention was in 2005 when a small group of neo-Nazis from outside of Toledo came to the city, ostensibly protest "crime." The neo-Nazis successfully utilized the state security apparatus to protect and shield themselves from mass popular resentment, invoking first amendment rights in order to acquire police protection. Hundreds of antiracists forced the city to cancel the attempted march by the neo-Nazi group, called the "National Socialist Movement," through a mostly black neighborhood in North Toledo. Instead, hundreds of residents faced off with 15 Nazis standing in "formation" on the lawn of Woodward High School. After escorting the neo-Nazis away from the anti-racist demonstration, riot police clashed with local residents angry over the neo-Nazi presence and the police protection provided by the city of Toledo. These clashes made national headlines. The city spent over $100,000 protecting the Nazis in 2005. As one local community activist, Washington Muhammad, explained at the time: "Everybody else does without a police escort. The Nazis should have had a banner behind them that said, 'Sponsored by the City of Toledo.'" [45] Anger spilled over into a small uprising, with some shops and local establishments being broken into and looted. Many of the black youth who clashed with police were arrested and sentenced, some for prison terms. In all some 114 protesters were arrested, with charges ranging from "assault, vandalism, failure to obey police, failure to disperse and overnight curfew violations." [46] The neo-Nazis were not only protected by the city of Toledo, they were successful in using the repressive apparatus of the state to arrest and then imprison black youth.

A decade later, on the tenth anniversary of their original visit, the same neo-Nazi organization, this time with a few more members, decided to attempt the same routine as before. This time, however, the city of Toledo confined them to a small section of downtown Toledo, and all of the surrounding blocks were shut down. Hundreds of on-duty, over-time, and volunteer police officers protected the small group of neo-Nazis. A highly militarized riot squad had dozens of police, some armed with assault rifles. These riot police were paired with hundreds of regular police officers. Armored vehicles were present, as well as an elaborate identification system that required facial photographs of any individual entering the area near the neo-Nazis. Although no clashes took place this time, largely due to the efforts of local organizers who held a well-attended Black Lives Matter Day in a separate location, the city of Toledo spent some $76,000 in overtime pay to protect the Nazis.[47]

Thus, the tactics of the neo-Nazi groups who came to Toledo suggest that these small extremist organizations make full use of the resources of the repressive state apparatus. The tentacles of the state not only shield the racists from popular anger, they are also used, as in 2005, to assault targeted populations and further the strategic goals of the neo-Nazis. Thus, as one local organizer proclaimed after the 2015 visit, there were around 300 fascists in Toledo that day; only 25 of them were neo-Nazis.

It is not coincidental that both visits by the Nazis were preceded by events in which the Toledo Police Department were involved in the deaths of black men. In February of 2005 TPD had electrocuted 41-year-old Jeffery Turner to death after shocking him nine times with a taser. His crime had been "loitering" near the Art Museum. Two years later a judge promptly dismissed the lawsuit his family brought against the TPD. [48] In March, 2015 34 year-old Aaron Pope died under police custody. Karen Madden, Pope's mother, explained that the police did not call for an ambulance and used excessive force against Pope. "I want justice. This has gone on too long," she exclaimed, her words not unlike those of the many mothers who have lost their sons to police violence.[49] The TPD is not alone in exercising immense state violence against black bodies. In Ohio alone many high-profile murders of black men and boys have occurred including John Crawford in Beavercreek, 12 year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Samuel DuBose in Cincinnati, among others. The first two had been holding toy guns, the later was stopped in traffic for not having a front license plate. All were murdered in "unprovoked attack by racist pigs," to harp back to the language of the Toledo Panthers. In the United States a black person is murdered every 28 hours by police. By early June some 500 people had been killed by police in 2015 alone, nearly 30% of them black.[50] In response a collective of Toledo residents and long-standing community activists have formed the Community Solidarity Response Network. CSRN has been on the forefront of challenging police violence against black communities in Toledo.

Conclusion

In summation, then, Toledo is not without its radicalism. Toledo has been the site of social, economic, and political struggle for decades. From the Auto-Lite Strike to #BlackLivesMatter, the Palestine Solidarity movement to the Black Panthers, those of us residing in Toledo have a prodigious amount of inspiration to draw from. Toledo is represents more than just social isolation and neoliberal deindustrialization. Toledo is also the Polish, Hungarian, and Italian immigrant workers who led the Auto-Lite strike, the Black prisoners and "lumpen-proletariat" that formed the Black Panthers and fought back against state repression, the activists who stood alongside their South African counterparts to end apartheid in South Africa, the Palestinian students in the diaspora who fight Israel's occupation. It is them and so much more. As the great Marxist historian and professor at the University of Toledo proclaimed in his final speech at UT: "We have the World to gain, the Earth to recuperate."[51] We in Toledo have always been and must continue to be part of the struggle to recuperate the Earth.

Notes

[1] http://www.toledoblade.com/Economy/2011/11/03/Toledo-area-poverty-rate-worst-in-U-S.html

[2] http://www.city-data.com/poverty/poverty-Toledo-Ohio.html

[3] http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/GreatDepression.html

[4] See Zeitlow and Pope, 843.

[5] University of Toledo, College of Law.

[6] http://libcom.org/history/us-industrial-workers-movement

[7] http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/05/tole-m27.html

[8] http://libcom.org/history/us-industrial-workers-movement

[9] See Zeitlow and Pope, 846-7.

[10] On the divide between the Musteites and the Communists, and the role of radical workers in the strike, see Roger Keeren, The Communist Party and the Auto Workers Unions. https://libcom.org/history/communist-party-socialists-during-1934-toledo-auto-lite-strike

[11] http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2009/05/tole-m27.html

[12] For more on the Auto-Lite Strike and other struggles during the period, see Irving Bernstein, Turbulent Years: A History of the American Worker, 1933-1941.

[13] See Zeitlow and Pope, 854.

[14] Patrick Dyer, http://socialistworker.org/2007-2/639/639_10_Detroit.shtml

[15] http://www.toledofreepress.com/2006/08/30/residents-recall-dorr-streets-black-mecca-days/

[16] https://iheartthreadbared.wordpress.com/2011/10/17/body-and-soul/

[17] http://www.toledoblade.com/Police-Fire/2007/02/21/Toledo-police-officer-killed-in-1970-shooting.html

[18] The Times - Sep. 18, 1970, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1665&dat=19700918&id=wxsaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=iCQEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5985,3714699

[19] The Times - Sep. 18, 1970, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1665&dat=19700918&id=wxsaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=iCQEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5985,3714699

[20] The Bryan Times - Dec 9, 1970

[21] The Times - Sep. 18, 1970, http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1665&dat=19700918&id=wxsaAAAAIBAJ&sjid=iCQEAAAAIBAJ&pg=5985,3714699

[22] http://www.negroartist.com/writings/BLACK%20PANTHER%20NEWSPAPERS/5%20no%207.htm

[23] http://www.negroartist.com/writings/BLACK%20PANTHER%20NEWSPAPERS/5%20no%2030.htm

[24] The Bryan Times - Dec 9, 1970 - http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=799&dat=19701209&id=nVEwAAAAIBAJ&sjid=TVIDAAAAIBAJ&pg=3745,4165846

[25] http://www.negroartist.com/writings/BLACK%20PANTHER%20NEWSPAPERS/8%20no%2021.htm

[26] http://www.toledoblade.com/Police-Fire/2012/07/15/Surveillance-records-from-60s-70s-found.html#IVhTrVSb05tOu1gs.99

[27] For more on University Hall from one of Toledo's most radical professors, see Peter Linebaugh, http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/16/how-did-we-get-here-university-hall-at-this-point-of-time-the-anthropocene/

[28] For more on unrest at UT in the 1965-72 period, see Matthew J. Deters, Preventing Violent Unrest: Student Protest at the University of Toledo, 1965-1972. MA Thesis, University of Toledo.

[29] Newspaper clipping, "Newton Ends 10-Year Silence With Talk at TU," Canaday Center, University of Toledo.

[30] Newspaper clipping, John Nichols, Toledo Blade, Canaday Center, University of Toledo.

[31] Add in BSU Statement here.

[32] Newspaper clipping, "Over 100 protestors march against apartheid," The Collegian.

[33] Newspaper clipping, Tanber, "TU Students Erect Shanty in Protest of Apartheid, Ask Total Divestitute," The Blade.

[34] Press Statement, Black Student Union, July 31 1985. Canaday Center.

[35] Newspaper clipping, "UT, 2 groups divest holdings in South Africa," The Blade.

[36] It should be noted that this may be shifting in the 2015-6 academic year, as the BSU is under a new leadership that appears more willing to confront this issue head-on.

[37] http://independentcollegian.com/2015/01/28/news/ut-recognized-as-a-top-school-for-military-education/

[38] http://www.hamptoninstitution.org/latino-student-organizations.html#.VcQHJPlVhBc

[39] http://independentcollegian.com/2015/03/25/opinion/letter-venezuela-benefits-from-sanctions/

[40] For a resevior of video, statements, etc. on #UTDivest, see http://utdivest.blogspot.com/

[41] http://independentcollegian.com/2014/09/16/opinion/letter-to-the-editor-solidarity-for-human-rights/

[42] http://mondoweiss.net/2015/02/divestment-officials-federation

[43] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkT2RTndz-c

[44] https://www.facebook.com/UTDivest/posts/866974650049245

[45] http://socialistworker.org/2005-2/562/562_12_Toledo.shtml

[46] http://www.foxnews.com/story/2005/10/16/neo-nazi-march-causes-riots/

[47] http://www.toledonewsnow.com/story/28883577/city-neo-nazi-rally-cost-taxpayers-76767-in-overtime?clienttype=generic

[48] http://www.toledoblade.com/Courts/2012/05/16/Taser-death-suit-dismissed.html

[49] http://www.toledoblade.com/Police-Fire/2015/03/30/Family-of-Toledo-man-who-died-in-police-custody-seek-answers.html#EiPD6bCw4z4b9qHk.99

[50] http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/10/the-counted-500-people-killed-by-police-2015

[51] http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/16/how-did-we-get-here-university-hall-at-this-point-of-time-the-anthropocene/

Trumph of the Will: Taking Donald Trump's Fascism Seriously

By Justin C. Mueller

The GOP presidential candidacy of Donald Trump has been seen by many as a hilarious farce. How could this former reality TV star, a multiply-bankrupt billionaire, an all of a sudden family-values champion with four failed marriages, whose official politics have shifted loudly with the political winds NOT be seen as a ridiculous indictment of the spectacle of American electoral politics? As some have noted, his very appeal to some people is in his willingness to say things that normal politicians just don't usually say… at least, out loud. As several commentators have observed, however, Trump is simply not funny any more. What has changed?

Some have alluded to the eerily fascist-like character of his rhetoric and policies. Many people may consider this to be a ridiculous, hyperbolic, or unthinkable comparison. After all, Hitler killed millions. While Trump may have destroyed communities through his business practices, such a comparison must be wildly inappropriate, or even disrespectful to the victims of early 20th century fascism. In internet culture, this common sense manifests itself in the idea of Godwin's Law, which argues that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1". The implication of this is that such comparisons are toxic, abused and overused rhetorically, and intended more to de-legitimize an opponent rather than say anything of worth. While comparisons to fascism can certainly be over-used in rhetoric, they are under-used in actual analysis. Fascism, and Hitler in particular, have generally been treated as exhausted signifiers of the kind described by Roland Barthes - drained of metaphorical, conceptual, and descriptive utility. Simultaneously, Hitler in particular has become too mythical and distant of a figure, ensconced firmly within Western national mythologies regarding the moral status of World War II.

It is a fundamental mistake (really more of an ideological maneuver) to imagine that early 20th century fascists were an exceptional evil, emerging out of nothing and returning to that nothing, and that no useful comparisons can be made with them. The politics of Trump and his cousins, Le Pen and the National Front in France, the Golden Dawn in Greece, UKIP (as well as the BNP) in the UK, and a slew of others can show us otherwise. Read the transcripts of Hitler's early speeches and then listen to Trump's speeches, as well as his initial reactions to finding out that he is inspiring white racists to assault brown-skinned immigrants. There are differences in historically specific circumstances, of course, but they are appealing to common themes and fears. They are also using similar mechanisms for rhetorically constructing who is the dangerous and corrupting "problem" that needs to be "solved" (even if their targets differ). Trump is a fascist, even if only a fascist out of electoral convenience.

The Anatomy of Trump's Fascism

Robert O. Paxton, the esteemed scholar of fascism, provides us with a synthesized anatomy of key characteristics of different fascisms. While fascism is - somewhat ironically - not a strictly unified ideology as some imagine, it is a distinct kind of political project and mode of doing politics, and different fascisms have family resemblances with each other. In spite of diverse local expressions (anti-semitism, for instance, is by no means a uniting prerequisite among fascists), they share common themes and priorities that are intelligible and not limited simply to those early 20th century movements, people, and organizations who self-identified as fascists. Fascists need not wear the conspicuous symbols of German Nazis, such as the Swastika, or goose step in jackboots. These were symbols designed to inspire, energize, and even reassure a different national audience at a different time. Paxton warns us that an "authentic American fascism" would not adopt these alien trappings, but instead display "the Stars and Stripes (or Stars and Bars) and Christian crosses. No fascist salute, but mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance. These symbols contain no whiff of fascism in themselves, of course, but an American fascism would transform them into obligatory litmus tests for detecting the internal enemy" (p.202).

After a careful comparative analysis, Paxton defines fascism as

a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.(p.218)

Fascism is fueled not simply by elite manipulation, but by a variety of "mobilizing passions" spread through a critical mass of a populace (p.219). The overwhelmingly white, less educated (and thus more economically vulnerable), immigrant averse, confederate flag-supporting, "traditional" values-espousing nationalists who think that conditions of poverty for the Black community is mostly their own fault feel a chord struck when Trump speaks. They see themselves genuinely as victims, of precarious economic conditions, the perceptions of waning national ascendance, demographic marginalization, cultural change, and distant federal elites meddling in their way of life. Trump plays on all of these grievances with his promise to "Make America Great Again".

Offering a sympathetic producerist narrative to these aggrieved souls, Trump will attack immigrants as murderers, welfare parasites, rapists, and drug dealers, while also slamming hedge fund managers as undeserving of their wealth and Ford motors for having operations in Mexico. He dismisses global warming concerns by calling it a Chinese plot to undermine U.S. economic competitiveness. He emptily notes his "understanding" of why Black Americans distrust police, while doubling down on the necessity of police being "tougher"on "crime" and having no tolerance for movements like Black Lives Matter (even hinting that he would fight disruptive protesters himself). He retroactively opposes earlier US involvement in Iraq, since the Iraq war is apparently Bad now among conservatives… likely less because of the mass murder and devastation of the Iraqi people, and more because it has produced a sense of national military impotence and made something Complicated. Except, he also supports a new occupation of Iraq in order to fight ISIS, and/or maybe also Iran (are they different? Who cares, really?), and either taking out or simply taking "the oil fields", which will mean (in a striking paraphrase of one of the original rationalizations for the 2003 invasion) that "We're going to have so much money". With the nuclear deal with Iran, he would be "tough, so tough" and make a deal that is "100 times better". How? Unimportant! He would be tough, like We can be again (he describes himself as "the most militaristic person there is", of course).

In Trumpian rhetoric, every supposed geopolitical "threat" from Mexico to China is "laughing at us", and "killing us economically" (yes, Mexico). The "American Dream is dead", and "We don't have victories any more". Rather than being the long-time victims of military intervention, coups, and debilitating sanctions by a hegemonic U.S. government, Trump's Iran and "the Persians generally" are devious, master negotiators, diplomatically pillaging the hapless United States. The victimhood of his audience and their feelings of anxiety and resentment are constantly affirmed in heavy-handed fashion. In the same breath, he declares that the immigrants being sent to the U.S. "are not their best" and "are not you" (aw shucks, Donald), reaffirming the out-group's alien and dangerous character, the legitimacy of his audience's fears, and the audience's real, occluded worth. The need to purge, remove defiling elements, and erect armor against out-group forces become primary concerns as a means of restoring group well-being.

This sense of victimhood also provides justification for extraordinary measures to be used against the assailing or corrupting forces. Rights, practicality, legality, and consideration of the needs or well-being of those outside of the group are minimized or dispensed with entirely. For Trump, the U.S. government should have invaded Mexico instead of Iraq, should build an impregnable border wall across the entire Southern border in spite of the billions it will cost (and make Mexico pay for it), and should have a mass deportation of all 11million undocumented immigrants - literally rounding up millions of brown people around the country and forcing them onto buses and out of the country (but in a "very humane" way because Trump is a "great manager").

While Trump is also not entirely guilty by association, it pays to look at who affirms his politics as being in line with their own. White nationalists have supported Trump's stance on immigration (even though he has semi-officially declined their support). The two white Bostonians from Southie who brutally beat and urinated on a Latino homeless man said that "Donald Trump was right-all these illegals need to be deported". The Donald's initial response was a tepid distancing, while at the same time saying that his supporters are just "very passionate" people. The failure of the normal way of doing politics to prevent the group's decline requires extraordinary measures in order to secure the group's rightful place of dominance, prevent challengers, and purge undesirable elements. Much like the 20th century fascists, Trump is posing as a leader who wants to shake up the flaccid, impotent status quo in order to unify and secure the group's strength and respectability (at least, the "true" members of it). He is seen as "independent", a strong-arm who knows how to "get things done", and as less "bought" and corrupted by ineffectual, normal electoral politics precisely because of his wealth.

We can certainly question how much Trump really means anything he says. In his The Art of the Deal, he is quite explicit in his defense of using strategic hyperbole, deception, and whatever tools are at hand in order to win. Hitler and Mussolini were true believers in ways that seem more genuine than Trump. In his own way, though, Trump - the con-man billionaire and former reality TV show star - is embodying other aspects of fascism's distinctiveness, namely its instrumental, fluid, and sometimes oppositional relationship with rationality, logic, and truth, and its marked lack of concern with building systematic philosophical justification for its policies and doctrine. Logical coherence or justification are often besides the point for fascists (something Mussolini delighted in taunting liberals, conservatives, and socialists alike with). Programs and policies can be cobbled together with little heed paid to whether they are actionable or coherent, and changed just as easily. What is important is the emotional effect of a statement, a policy, a ritual, an aesthetic, in energizing and tempering the pertinent mass of people into a cohesive national body with a renewed sense of primacy, moral certainty, the expression of a unified will, and sense of purpose and even destiny. Fascist truth is whatever brings about this transformation.

There is an deep, affective dimension to Trump's candidacy that appeals to a mostly-white, racist, xenophobic demographic who feel impotent, but who also hold deep resentment against outsiders and those who seem to embody the destruction of a mythic homogeneous community in which they can feel at ease. They long for security and certainty, and feel their world slipping away, lost from within through traitors ("liberals", "cultural Marxists", teachers, etc.), and under attack from without by China, and Mexican murder-rapist-druglords who simultaneously want to steal American jobs and do nothing but make "anchor babies" and collect welfare. He represents a big middle-finger to highly choreographed traditional politicians and the electoral theater (something that also elevated the appeal of early 20th century fascists), but also to empathy, thinking critically about social complexity, about consequences of one's actions, and about privilege and inequality. He embodies the renewal of a kind of leveling simplicity of the world: certainty about right and wrong, friends and enemies, the recovery of a "lost" (white) golden age, and theatrically exaggerated "common sense" policies that legitimize this demographic's varied resentments, fears, and frustrations. We may question Trump's authenticity, but if the politics he is cultivating to ground his support base is a functional equivalent of fascism, resting on the same mobilizing passions, then this line of concern seems immaterial.

Trump is not funny any more, because Trump is a fascist, and the "humor" of a fascist is to "punch down" on the already marginalized and oppressed while at the same time claiming victimhood. I am not saying that Trump and his ilk would kill tens of millions and lead to another world war. We are in different historical conditions now than those of the interwar period. You don't need to successfully ignite a world war, acquire authority, or even kill many people in order to be a fascist. He is having a measurable effect, however, and will continue to even if he fails to win the primary or get elected. His militaristic and anti-immigrant talk is becoming infectious, shifting the Overton Window and leading to an escalation in the violent rhetoric and proposed policies of the already impressive authoritarianism and racism fueling the energetic base of the GOP. We can laugh at the absurdity of building 20 ft border walls with sentry turrets, underground electric fences, armed drone patrols, moats with sharks bearing lasers on their heads, or whatever stage of hysterical social hypochondria we are at, but a material consequence of this rhetoric will be more dead brown people for as long as we tolerate it. There is a large, angry, racist, xenophobic, reactionary-populist segment of the American populace, and they are taking Trump very seriously as a signal allowing them to embody their cretinous innermost selves.

This commentary originally appeared on Justin's blog.

Reclaiming the Community: A People's Project for Self-Determination

By Mychal Odom

San Diego, California is home to a unique grassroots project called Reclaiming the Community (RTC). This project exemplifies what was once called operational unity, comprising community activists and artists in San Diego from a variety of political positions, races and ethnicities, religious orientations, and, importantly, gang affiliations. The underlying goal of all liberation movements has been what many people call "self-determination." Self-determination in the most fundamental sense is defined as the right of members of a group to govern themselves and choose their own destiny. In the long history of liberation movements for African Americans and other people of color in the United States, this notion of self-determination has been translated to another highly important term, "community control." People from San Diego to Selma, Alabama have long understood that global change mandates robust progressive action at the local level. The Reclaiming the Community movement was founded by local Barber/Activist, Tau Baraka and a coalition of local organizations, and community members in response to the murder of Courtney Graham in 2010. Since then, the movement has continued to adapt and grow and is now made up of a larger coalition of people from a variety of different, longstanding, and well-respected organizations. The activism of the RTC movement has embodied the notion of community control by mandating that local residents be the ones who regulate the administration of education, political representation, and, importantly, criminal justice.

The Reclaiming the Community members have adopted the following declaration: "As a member of the Reclaiming the Community movement I recognize that power abuse by law enforcement and fratricide are the two most immediate issues facing our community." Herein lays the radical importance of the RTC movement to local, national, and international struggles. RTC has not separated its struggles against structural racism and economic oppression from the conversations we ourselves need to have as a community. In recent years, deeply conservative segments of American society have cynically used the waves of drug and gang violence throughout the United States as a retort to the popular statement "Black Lives Matter." "If Black Lives Matter, then why haven't you said anything about the killings in [Insert Major City with Gang/Drug Violence here]." However, these critics clearly have little to no interest in actually engaging the scourge of gang and drug violence that has assaulted Black people and communities of color consistently for four decades. Comparatively, some progressive activists shy away from internal conversations about gang and drug violence for fear that it might damage or lessen the concerns for structural inequality. RTC does not believe that conversations about police abuse and mass incarceration need to be separate from concerns over intra-community violence. Its members strive to "end mass incarceration and the targeting of Black and Brown community members by law enforcement" and to "renounce fratricide and the murder of our children, family members, and friends." The cause of these economic and social problems in places like Southeast San Diego is structural inequality. However, RTC has shown that the solution is, first and foremost, a form of empowerment that looks towards everyday people as leaders and change makers. For this reason, RTC has mixed more traditional forms of community engagement with cultural and social methods to create a strong base of grassroots activists.

In the spring and summer of 2014, the RTC movement held public marches and gatherings in a variety of Southeast San Diego neighborhoods and parks. Since the 1970s, Skyline, Encanto, Mount Hope, and Mountain View/Lincoln Park have been central to the gang and drug activity within the San Diego area. Yet reversing the tradition of urban flight, RTC did not shun these places and people; instead, RTC saw an important opportunity to organize the people where they are, gathering hundreds of residents and members to hold public marches throughout these areas. These marches were only a prologue to a longer discussion with Southeast San Diego. The goal of the marches was to introduce RTC's united front to the community. Following each march, RTC threw public barbecues with free food, drinks and music at the parks of the various districts. In doing so, RTC fostered important public conversations between community members, which eventually grew to larger community engagement with very real and important legislative changes in California. Amongst its many victories, these marches helped rally community support for the passage of California Proposition 47, which reclassified most non-serious drug and property crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. The main goal of the marches and RTC movement, however, has always been about moving people, and not just changing policy. Since the marches, the RTC movement has consistently engaged a variety of public concerns, with its largest focus on policing and criminal justice.

Critical to self-determination and community control is another term, "self-definition." Before a people can decide where they want to go, they must first decide who they are. Culture is vastly important to the self-definition of a people and it is therefore logical that cultural workers such as musicians, poets, visual artists, and other creatively minded people have always played a prominent role in movements for liberation. Cultural and social events prove just as important, if not more, as canvassing neighborhoods, polling, and holding public rallies. In 2014, while RTC was organizing the community marches, one of its founding members Khalid Alexander of Pillars of the Community, proposed the composition of a hip hop soundtrack. RTC organizers had utilized music as a tool during their community marches, and local artists such as Big June and Wilnisha Sutton, in addition to other musicians, had played an important role as community organizers. RTC members believed that a soundtrack would help further unite San Diego and carry RTC's message to the masses. Further, a major component of this message was criticisms of recent unjust and racist criminal conspiracy charges against a variety of young men and women from the Lincoln Park section of San Diego.

Among this group of men and women were two young men, Aaron Harvey and rapper Brandon "Tiny Doo" Duncan, who were arrested in June 2014 and charged with murder under the extremely controversial Proposition 21. Passed in 2000, Proposition 21 allows for the prosecution of anyone determined to benefit from or promote crimes committed by gang members. Actually admitting that Harvey and Duncan had no involvement in a series of killings that took place in 2012 and 2013, San Diego District Attorney charged that Facebook postings and music of the respective defendants allowed them to profit from the series of killings. Members of the RTC movement and other parts of San Diego rallied against these unjust charges against Harvey, Duncan and other defendants. In addition to presenting a clear violation of the First Amendment, these charges were grounded in the logic and working of a long history of racism and anti-blackness embedded in our criminal justice system. The charges against Harvey and Duncan are only comprehensible to people who are unable to separate Black people from their art or, even worse, the deviant images conjured in the popular imagination. In the spring of 2015, the charges against Harvey and Duncan were proven to be unfounded and they were released. But the charges against Duncan substantiated the power of Black and minority cultural production in San Diego. If rap lyrics could be used by Bonnie Dumanis to try to take away the lives of people, then why couldn't rap music be used as a tool of unity and to give life? As a counterpoint to the oppression and misappropriation of justice waged by Dumanis and her office, collective mobilization against these charges served to energize the RTC album project. Rappers and musicians have therefore played a critical role in RTC from the beginning. As the album's producer Parker Edison has noted, "The street rappers and hip hop artists are the voice [of the people maligned by throughout the US]. This CD is the natural outcome of the larger push for positivity and desire for self-determination that we see throughout South East San Diego."

The RTC album is an important tool in community organizing, as it brings together a group of local artists, many whom have intimate ties to the hard streets of Southeast but have also dedicated their life's work to trying to find an alternate and more positive way forward for all of San Diego. A reflection of RTC's overall political beliefs, the album project lets the community speak for itself, as opposed to just being spoken to. Parker notes, "It is meant to encourage all of those who are struggling for positivity and to overcome the many obstacles that society has place in their way, but most of all, it is a reflection of the realities we live with here on a daily basis; the good and the bad." The RTC album challenges the dominant narratives about life in South East San Diego, especially the ones that promote cultural links of Blacks and poor people to criminality. The album stands in direct opposition to the images that Dumanis, in her attempts to prosecute Harvey and Duncan, sought to exploit. In an interview, one of the album's artists Ecay Uno pronounced his appreciation for being a part of the RTC project because, despite his history of gangs and drugs, ever since his youth, he has wanted "to be a part of what gets people out of the mindset that we are in which causes us to make the choices that we make…a lot of the negative activity in the streets."

It is phenomenal and a testament to the artists themselves that this album was able to be completed. The album brings together artists such as Tiny Doo and C-Hecc, whose Blood and Crip neighborhoods have been in longstanding feuds with each other. Despite this, both artists recognize in their songs on the album that the decades-long genocide that Southeast has endured is a result of limited public and economic resources, and the destruction of the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Tiny Doo's track is entitled "Deserve This" and C-Hecc's track is entitled "True Story." Both songs do what all great art is supposed to do and ask the people to imagine a new Southeast, a new San Diego, a new world beyond the one given to us. C-Hecc states, "Picture the progress, transforming the new day/not only money, our people living a new way/all that malice in their hear and they tears gone/no more mamas going broke over headstones/understanding is key to this transition/now these kids ain't got they brothers and they dads missing." In his song, Tiny Doo demands a return of the leadership of people like Huey P. Newton as a possible solution to the current state in which the Black community finds itself. In fact, the RTC movement and album have already engaged the tradition and ideals passed down by the Black Panthers-which they inherited from Malcolm X.

Students of the teachings of Malcolm X, the Panthers and other radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s understood that all successful liberation movements must organize what Huey Newton called "the brothers and sisters on the corner" and other people have referred to as the lumpenproletariat. Huey understood this personally because, like Malcolm, he too had spent a wealth of his childhood incarcerated. Malcolm once stated that to be born in America is to be born Black in America is to be born a prisoner. For this reason, the problem of mass incarceration in the RTC project is understood as one that impacts all of us and not just the formerly incarcerated. What's more, it is the formerly incarcerated who are best prepared to lead the movement because as one historian asked, "Who better to define freedom than the slave?" The victims of "neoslavery" are the ones leading this fight for freedom.

The RTC album released July 28, 2015 amidst a well historic moment for the history of American liberation movements. This date marks the 150th year anniversary of the end of the American Civil War and the passing of the 13th amendment. In an alternate universe, this would be a year in which we celebrate how far our nation has come. However, just as the great writer and critic James Baldwin noted in his famed letter to his nephew, "My Dungeon Shook," we are not truly free until the legacy and the structures of white supremacy have been defeated. The RTC album project was released on the 28th of July because that is the same day in 1868 that the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified by the Secretary of State William Seward and the Congress. The 14th Amendment was supposed to bestow citizenship, equal rights, and due process to the formerly enslaved and ensure that no one is denied their inalienable rights regardless of race, creed or color, but the continued struggles over the past 150 years underscore that this has yet to come. In this light, the RTC album is more than your average hip hop compilation-it is a political manifesto, a treatise. The RTC album is not the first San Diego album to bring together such a diverse grouping of artists across gang and racial boundaries. A dozen years ago, many of these same artists came together to create the now legendary compilation Str8 Off the Streets of Southeast. A couple of years later, the New West compilation album released. What makes this album different is the explicit political purpose amidst a larger political moment. RTC artists such as Black Mikey, Ecay Uno, and Odessa Kane have a longstanding tradition of progressive and radical lyrical content. Wilnisha Sutton is a local artist and a budding activist. Following the decision not to indict Darren Wilson for his killing of Mike Brown last fall, she was among the first to take to the streets in the mass actions in Southern California. However connected to the larger local, national, and international movement, the RTC album carries historic significance as it extends their activism to new height.

The RTC album was composed, produced, and released in lockstep with the RTC movement and within the spirit of the age. The album gives voice to the disposed and forgotten. It has transformed the "brothers and sisters of the corner" into agents for change. Be it about Mike Brown, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, or Tiny Doo, everyday people are discussing the long history of injustice. They are reading, studying, and preparing for a new day. They are demanding that that change come now and that we no longer be asked to wait patiently. As the RTC artist letter notes, it "is the sound track to that feeling. It is a voice for those who society would leave voiceless. This album is a call to action, a call to solidarity, and a collective effort to haul up a new day. We believe a new day is dawning in America and you are the artists that are making it happen."

***

The RTC album project is available for download at https://rtcproject.bandcamp.com/. As an extra treat, the album has a second part-a mixtape. The album hosts the local artists Hotta (aka Silhouette), Tiny Doo, Big June, Ecay Uno, Odessa Kane, Black Mikey, Jaz Williams, Wilnisha A. Sutton, Looselyric, Aye Hitt, Licwit Loco, C-Hecc, Dave Moss, and Bossman Hogg. The mixtape contains music from Real J Wallace, Aki Kharmicel, Piff PCH, Ric Scales, Pedalay the Boss, Leon Saint Heron, GMG and Von Dream. For people who are less tech-savvy or are old school and like to purchase albums themselves, the artists will be selling copies; as well local barbershops such as Imperial Barbershop have copies for sale. The prices of both discs have been set at $10 each. The proceeds from the album will go to support this completely grassroots and remarkable movement.

Identity, Inc.: Liberal Multiculturalism and the Political Economy of Identity Politics

By Jacob Ertel

The Left in the United States is at a critical juncture. Then again, it has been for roughly the past 35 years. With the onset of neoliberalism and the dissolution of the class-based politics of the 1960s and 1970s, a new political framework has emerged typified by the politicization of identity. It is this discourse that has prevailed on the Left since the early 1980s, always in tension with popular currents Marxian critique but oft posited as the sole truly radical theory and practice. To be sure, identity politics comes with indisputable benefits, including the reclaiming and centering of historical narratives and a more nuanced understanding of interpersonal forms of aggression and abuse. At the same time, however, certain critical features of Marxian critique have taken a backseat to this framework, which largely abjures a substantive analysis of the material conditions central to capitalist social relations in lieu of the purported deconstruction of institutional norms. In other words, the critique of classism (the individual denigration of people not exhibiting behavior or values associated with certain social classes) has largely superseded the critique of capitalism. It is worth considering, then, whether there is anything inherent about identity politics that necessitates an abandonment of veritable anti-capitalism in lieu of a more individualized form of putative radicalism. Is it purely by chance that the rise of identity politics coincides with the imposition of neoliberalism?

Many might argue that political movements have in fact secured significant victories since the 1980s. This sentiment often hinges on the successes of mainstream gay rights movements, but is perhaps most explicitly embodied by myopic utterances of 'post-racialism' since the beginning of the Obama presidency. However, victories such as the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell, and the election of Obama, do nothing to prevent state violence or the conditions that undergird it; at best they present a hyper-individualized conception of success and at worst they further legitimate the state as the supreme arbiter of rights in its capacity to promote ostensibly progressive social values, but without questioning how such rights are contingent on the state's own monopoly on violence both domestic and abroad. Perhaps most disturbing is that many self-described 'radicals' who share similar critiques of mainstream political movements maintain the central logic of identity politics while espousing a militant rhetoric that claims to challenge white bourgeois norms at the same time as it inadvertently reaffirms them. Identity politics, then, must be rooted in liberalism.

Much has been made of the deficiencies of identity politics and its cousin, liberal multiculturalism; fewer analyses actually trace the genealogy of these discourses. In moving from early liberal theorists to contemporary critics, this essay attempts to briefly sketch such a genealogy. In doing so, it examines the effects of these discourses on the potential for militant anti-capitalist organizing. It is ultimately argued that identity politics serves to further retrench the state's narrative of progress and liberal multiculturalism at the same time that economic stratification only intensifies under neoliberalism, in which appeals to a rights-based framework focused on representing a diversity of experiences do little to mitigate large-scale social upheaval. In this way, the shift from the insurgent materialist perspectives of the 1960s and early 1970s to a politics of identity often plays into same narratives that it positions itself against.

Liberalism and the Individual

The exercising of individual rights is a key tenet of civic liberalism that dates back to the 17th and 18th centuries, first articulated by theoreticians such as John Locke and John Stuart Mill. Mill in particular asserts the primacy of the self-determining liberal subject in contributing to societal progress. Through exercising individual liberties, he argues, "human life also becomes rich, diversified and animating, furnishing more abundant aliment to high thoughts and elevating feelings, and strengthening the tie to which binds every individual to the race, by making the race infinitely better worth belonging to."[1] Such liberty is not without parameters, however. In fact, Mill avers that it is precisely the necessary limits to behavior imposed on individuals through rights that enable "human beings [to] become a noble and beautiful object of contemplation" and fully cultivate themselves.[2] Law serves a paradoxical purpose here: it imposes limits on the individual at the same time as it engenders it through its very constitution. In other words, the individual, as an inherently juridical construct, cannot exist without the law and the limitations it imposes. Mill himself is acutely aware of this contradiction. "Whenever…there is definite damage, or a definite risk of damage, either to an individual or to the public," he explains, "the case is taken out of the province of liberty and placed in that of morality or law."[3] Individual self-determination can thus only be understood as such when it is circumscribed in accordance with the purview of the state's legal personality.

This facet of liberalism presents essential problems for early critics such as Marx. In "On the Jewish Question" in particular, Marx argues that the law's primary function is the maintenance of private property as the central structuring mechanism of society. For Marx, property embodies the truest expression of self-interest, "the right to enjoy one's fortune and to dispose of it as one will; without regard for other men and independently of society…this individual liberty, and it's application, form the basis of civil society."[4] Such enjoyment, however, must also be secured through legal curtailment, as an unregulated expression of self-interest could hinder others' ability to cultivate their own property and thus develop as citizens. In this sense security is a natural consequence of private property and no less foundational to civil society. This dynamic poses an immitigable tension for Marx. If society "exists only in order to guarantee for each of its members the preservation of his person, his rights and his property,"[5] and if such preservation is inherently limiting to individual expression in its truest form, then the individual-and the political community to which the individual contributes-exists as a mere means for the preservation of rights. [6] Within this framework, the bourgeois property owner becomes the symbol of authenticity as the personification of liberal rights. This is why for Marx the achievement of "political emancipation" is ultimately futile as a finite strategy: political rights entail state recognition, and thus the perpetuation of the capitalist mode of production in which rights are constituted as an indispensable precondition.

Liberal Multiculturalism as 'American-ness'

Liberalism has endured as a central philosophical strain centuries after Mill formulated his famed treatise. Indeed, liberalism's emphasis on individual liberty, unregulated market rationality, and universality characterizes both the social dynamics and capital flows that permeate society. Yet it is important to interrogate the codification of individual freedom within a given set of all encompassing, state-legitimated rights. It is easily observed that not everyone residing in liberal states receives truly equal treatment; more often than not the law may appear to operate unfairly, and its ostensible commitment to equality can undermine radically unequal material conditions. Black people in the United States, for example, have been particularly subjected to tremendous physical violence, but also legally excluded from civic participation. Many activists and scholars believe that because of this, an intuitive approach to political agitation should involve advocating for greater state recognition. This stance takes for granted that, as Will Kymlicka puts it, "accommodating ethnic and national differences is only part of a larger struggle to make a more tolerant and inclusive democracy…An adequate theory of the rights of cultural minorities must therefore be compatible with the just demands of disadvantaged social groups…." [7] Kymlicka's proposition is important because it attempts to mitigate social inequities through a multicultural and rights-based framework deemed able to accommodate historical, social, and cultural differences. Rather than emphasizing the benefits of legal universalism, Kymlicka acknowledges that a blanketed application of the law is insufficient.

His provocation is less successful in its application, however. In positioning "the fact that anyone can integrate into the common culture, regardless of race or color"[8] as the great triumph of liberal democracy, Kymlicka participates in the very mode of erasure he seeks to ameliorate by failing to interrogate the composition of the "common" (read: middle-class, white) culture into which minorities are purportedly choosing to incorporate themselves. His assertion that "…[Latino] immigrants who come to the United States with the intention to stay and become citizens…are committed to learning English and participating in the mainstream society,"[9] for example, whitewashes any semblance of difference by commending minority groups for their ability to effectively shed such difference in striving for political recognition. On the other hand, Kymlicka misunderstands the effectiveness of specific legal provisions, claiming that "…national minorities in the Unites States have a range of rights intended to reflect and protect their status as distinct cultural communities, and they have fought to retain and expand these rights."[10] Kymlicka takes this to signify the superiority of liberal democracy while characterizing integration into the US legal framework as liberalism's crowning achievement.

On the contrary, the dual subsumption and glorification of difference is foundational to US nation building. To recall Marx, it is the normalization of political emancipation-as opposed to full human emancipation-as the main form of struggle that naturalizes the capitalist social order by positing the bourgeois property owner as the telos of human progress. Reading Kymlicka through Mill in conjunction with Marx, then, illustrates that liberal multiculturalism presupposes a universal standard that both inherently limits individual expression through the incorporation of minority groups into a presumptively 'common culture' premised on specifically normative discourses and institutions. This mode of incorporation circumvents the potential for opposition to capitalism while simultaneously producing newly racialized subjects who are excluded from the political rights now propounded as the fullest actualization of freedom. Jodi Melamed explains how this dynamic has been maintained through the US' efforts to promote racial equality by espousing a formal policy of "racial liberalism" not dissimilar to Kymlicka's propositions. Writes Melamed, "…the liberal race paradigm recognizes racial inequality as a problem, and it secures a liberal symbolic framework for race reform centered in abstract equality, market individualism, and inclusive civic nationalism. Antiracism becomes a nationally recognized social value and, for the first time, gets absorbed into US governmentality." [11] Moreover, the official antiracism of the post-war period can be read as constitutive in and of itself of US nationalism, as it becomes a rationalization for transnational capitalism and foreign intervention in the name of US interests. [12] The "suturing of liberal antiracism to US nationalism, which manages, develops, and depoliticizes capitalism by collapsing it with Americanism," Melamed writes, "results in a situation where 'official' antiracist discourse and politics actually limit awareness of global capitalism."[13] In other words, a policy of racial liberalism positions the US as a fully multicultural state necessarily counterpoised to the "monoculturalism" of non-Western societies.[14]

Multiculturalism as American-ness now reflects a universal subject, construed as a victory against racism at the same time as it is repurposed to further entrench global capitalism.[15] Liberal multiculturalism here functions not only with regard to race, but all non-normative identities. A pertinent example is the enfolding of queer people into the narrative of US nationalism after the September 11, 2001 attacks. As Jasbir Puar explains, "…even as patriotism immediately after September 11 was inextricably tied to a reinvigoration of heterosexual norms for Americans, progressive sexuality was championed as a hallmark of US modernity." Despite this glorification of heteronormativity, "the United States was also portrayed as 'feminist' in relation to the Taliban's treatment of Afghani women…and gay-safe in comparison to the Middle East." [16] Puar's insight demonstrates the ease with which non-normative cultural narratives are incorporated into US nationalism under liberal multiculturalism and subsequently recast as no less normative than Marx's bourgeois property owner. Queerness is still politicized, but not as an oppositional identity; rather, capitalism, orientalism, and heteronormativity are grafted onto it and reconstitute it as the expression of truly American values.

The Political-Economy of Identity Politics

Though is crucial to identify the development of liberal multiculturalism as essential to the naturalization of capitalism, it is also worth gauging the extent to which liberal multiculturalism has been enmeshed within larger political-economic processes such as the dissolution of Fordism. As the post-war Fordist model of standardized mass production and mass consumption began to outpace more relaxed consumption patterns, Fordism's systemic rigidities began to negatively impact its ability (in tandem with a relatively strong Keynesian welfare state) to mitigate capitalism's volatility. When exogenous factors such as the OPEC oil shock of 1973 compounded this dynamic, firms attempted to deal with these increasingly unsustainable political-economic features by diversifying their production lines to spike demand, a tactical shift made possible through the flexibilization of production along with the growingly transnational character of capital flows. Many firms moved their production lines off shore and marked up prices by way of customization at the same time as production costs were drastically lowered. As Wolfgang Streeck argues, however, a new accumulation regime is not just a new accumulation regime: it engenders a new individual.[17]

Within a globalizing economy, the expression of individual autonomy increasingly rests upon the exercising of agency now inextricable from the political economy of customized consumption. Streeck refers to this dynamic as "a way for individuals to link up to others and thereby define their place in the world" in which one may "conceive an act of purchase…as an act of self-identification and self-presentation, one that sets the individual apart from some social groups while uniting him or her with others."[18] It is not as though individuals regularly defined themselves in contrast to normative identities before the neoliberal turn, through a range of practices not inherently contingent on the act of consumption; however, the development of identity politics in conjunction with neoliberalism's emergence at the very least shares an affinity with the differentiated patterns of individuation present within the flexibilized production processes explicated by Streeck, in which politics is decontextualized as "individual market choice trumps collective political choice."[19]

Fordism's demise contributed to the fundamental restructuring of the Left in the US. The class-based politics of Left movements began to erode as New Right politicians like Reagan and Thatcher grew to ascendance in the late 1970s and early 1980s and used the inflationary crisis as a means to radically restructure their respective countries' economies. Such a restructuring involved scaling back social welfare institutions, busting unions, and imposing austerity measures, all of which present grave consequences for the ability of the working class to sustain itself politically. Whereas the New Left of the 1960s and 1970s had largely foregone an analysis of cultural difference (often to a fault) in lieu of forming strong class-based alliances, Left movements arising during the 1980s began to mirror the individualized ethos and distrust of political institutions embodied by neoliberal governments. As Adolph Reed Jr. notes, within the purview of this new form of identity politics, "as in Thatcher's apothegm, there is no such thing as society, 'only individuals and their families.'"[20] With the subsequent rightward turn of the Democratic Party in the US, moreover, much of the working class "…by and large proceeded to distance itself from the New Left's agenda, no longer seeing themselves reflected in or spoken for by its politics or its electoral strategies."[21]

Originally conceived in the late 1950s as a response to the bureaucratic, top-down approach of the Old Left, the New Left had attempted to politicize identity throughout the 1960s and early 1970s in response to the Vietnam War and virulent racism on the home front. Though the movement often included significant numbers of people of color and sexual minorities, the explicit politicization of these identities was never understood as central to its functioning.[22] The emergence of identity politics, in contrast, represents "the achievement of minority public 'voice,' metaphorically speaking, an enfranchisement of black, female, gay, bisexual, and ethnic communities," both within intentional political communities and the state at large.[23] This structuring of political communities by way of politicized identity takes as its foundation that the achievement of "social and economic equality" depends on increasing "political equality." [24] Here we can begin to outline how identity politics as a contemporary iteration of Left radicalism is in fact inextricable from the regimes of racial liberalism and liberal multiculturalism.

Identity, Inc.

The aim here is not to critique identity politics in and of itself as a method of organizing, but rather to demonstrate how compatible it is with the discourse of liberal multiculturalism. Identity politics in part arose as a reaction to the New Left's inability to account for difference in its composition. At the same time, a range of political-economic factors such as the collapse of Fordism and the consequent restructuring of the welfare state dissolved the New Left's ability to maintain a veritable anti-capitalist disposition. Reed also points to the notable retreat of the Left into academia and the materialization of identity politics as a corollary of cultural studies and post-structuralist discourse characterized by the "rejection of any form of centralizing power or notion of objective truth."[25] In practice, according to Reed, this discourse translates into "a focus on the supposedly liberatory significance of communities and practices defined by their marginality in relation to systems of entrenched power or institutions, a preference for strategies of 'resistance' to imperatives of institutions and 'transgression' of conventions rather than strategies aimed at transformation of institutions and social relations," and the belief that radical political movements should be composed of "groups formed around ascriptive identities that relate to one another on a principle of recognizing and preserving the integrity of their various differences." [26] Reed opposes identity politics because he believes it uncritically accepts capitalist social relations by focusing its efforts on transgression of institutional norms rather than on institutions themselves. In recalling Puar's explication of the manipulation of queer narratives after September 11, Reed's concern is understandable because of how seamlessly difference is codified through narratives of societal progress and liberal social values that both pass implicit judgment on those who continue to reside outside the parameters of normative liberal discourse, while legitimating imperialist projects abroad in opposition to putatively less-accepting 'monocultural' states.

At the same time, activists and scholars have argued in defense of identity politics as a radical discourse that enables the "re-creation of minority histories in a public sphere that had long been hostile or indifferent to narratives of that self and community." For Grant Farred, "Identity politics…represents not only the marginal subject speaking back, but a more engaging philosophical project: the oppressed not only resisting but also negotiating the limitations of agency."[27] In other words, the reclaiming of historical narratives and the construction of intentional communities through identity politics embodies the redefining of state-imposed limitations to self-determination and can thus contribute to both radical social transformation and a more nuanced and culturally aware Left. Indeed, potential exists for identity politics to enable the construction of previously censored histories or cultural narratives. There is certainly a perennial need within the Left for more complex understandings of power, for more less dogmatic visions of emancipation, and for a more expansive formulation of class-based politics. Yet while all this may be true, Wendy Brown explains, identity politics is "partly dependent on the demise of a critique of capitalism and of bourgeois cultural and economic values," and "tethered to a formulation of justice which, ironically, reinscribes a bourgeois ideal as its measure." [28]

Discursive Dilemmas

Drawing on Foucault's theoretical contributions, Brown notes that identity itself is produced through disciplinary mechanisms that, when combined with liberalism's true inability to provide the universal protections it claims to embody, results in "the emergence of politicized identity rooted in disciplinary productions but oriented by liberal discourse toward protest against exclusion from a discursive formation of universal justice." [29] In other words, the politicization of identity is discursively ineluctable from liberalism's claim to universality. Through this form of protest, identity politics is driven by an inherent desire for incorporation into this universal framework, one that, as we have seen through Mill and Kymlicka, has come to tolerate a degree of diversity while presupposing the universal standard of the bourgeois white male property owner. Such a standard can only function when codified through the conferral of rights. Brown questions that if it is "this ideal against which many of the exclusions and privations of people of color, gays and lesbians, and women are articulated, then the political purchase of contemporary American identity politics would seem to be achieved in part through a certain discursive renaturalization of capitalism that can be said to have marked progressive discourse since the 1970s."[30]

None of this is to deride the tactics of various social and political groups, but to acknowledge how the destruction of the Fordist-Keynesian regime has made it more difficult to center an analysis of class when the already-insubstantial institutions of class-based social cohesion have been so drastically eroded since the 1970s and 1980s especially. In this way we may understand neoliberalism not solely as the political-economic reassertion of free market rationality, but also as the reconstitution of Mill's brand of civic liberalism through a multicultural discourse that, as Brown notes, "retains the real or imagined holdings of its reviled subject-in this case, the bourgeois male privileges-as objects of desire." [31] Identity politics thus necessarily "abjure[s] a critique of class power and class norms precisely because the injuries suffered by these identities are measured by bourgeois norms of social acceptance, legal protection, relative material comfort, and social acceptance."[32] The politicization of identity under neoliberalism thus arises through the exclusion of identity from liberalism's presumptively universal subjectivity, thus reinstalling the ideal of the white bourgeoisie as the base expression of such subjectivity. Politicized identity requires the maintenance of this universal subjectivity, as well as its own exclusion from it, in order to endure as identity itself.[33]

As a vehicle for protesting exclusion through the incorporation of the interests of social groups into the bourgeois power structure, identity politics inadvertently reifies it while framing rights, recognition, or (in its most militant variation) the transgression of norms as the actualization of resistance. What might an alternative political praxis to identity politics look like, then? How can the liberalism at the core of identity politics actually be contested when it seems to be so pervasive within a range of radical leftist circles? It is difficult to know for sure. Perhaps it would entail a recommitment to challenging the liberal discourse through which capitalism is legitimated. Perhaps it would include a recognition of and sensitivity towards the intersectional character of difference while seeking to destabilize the paradigm of transgression-as-revolution in lieu of a more fundamentally materialist framework that specifically prioritizes working class struggle. Perhaps it would mean a re-articulation of identity as a fluid rather than a historically and biologically fixed point while continuing to center the importance of historical and cultural narratives. These are merely provocations, however; it is ultimately up to the people to decide.

Works Cited

Brown, Wendy. "Wounded Attachments." Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 3 (August 1993), pp. 390-410.

Farred, Grant. "Endgame Identity? Mapping the New Left Root of Identity Politics." New Literary History, Vol. 31 (2000), pp. 627-648.

Kymlicka, Will. "The Politics of Multiculturalism," in Multicultural Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Marx, Karl. "On the Jewish Question," in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978.

Melamed, Jodi. "From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism." Social Text 89, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Winter 2006), pp. 1-24.

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty, in 'On Liberty' and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Puar, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

Reed Jr., Adolph. Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene. New York: The New Press, 2001.

Streeck, Wolfgang. "Citizens as Customers: Considerations on the New Politics of Consumption." New Left Review, Vol. 76 (July-August 2012), pp. 27-47.

Young, Iris Marion. "Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship," in Theorizing Citizenship, ed. Ronald Beiner. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.

Citations

[1] John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, in 'On Liberty' and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 60.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid, 80.

[4] Karl Marx, "On the Jewish Question," in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1978), 42.

[5] Ibid, 43.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Will Kymlicka, "The Politics of Multiculturalism," in Multicultural Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 10.

[8] Ibid, 15.

[9] Ibid, 8.

[10] Ibid, 4.

[11] Jodi Melamed, "From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism," Social Text 89, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Winter 2006), 2.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid, 6.

[14] Ibid, 8.

[15] Ibid, 6.

[16] Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 41.

[17] Wolfgang Streeck, "Citizens as Customers: Considerations on the New Politics of Consumption," New Left Review, Vol. 76 (July-August 2012), 35.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid, 44.

[20] Adolph Reed Jr., Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New York: The New Press, 2001), xxvi.

[21] Grant Farred, "Endgame Identity? Mapping the New Left Root of Identity Politics," New Literary History, Vol. 31 (2000), 634.

[22] Ibid, 636.

[23] Ibid, 631.

[24] Iris Marion Young, "Polity and Group Difference: A Critique of the Ideal of Universal Citizenship," in Theorizing Citizenship, ed. Ronald Beiner (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 185.

[25] Reed, Class Notes, xiv.

[26] Ibid.

[27] Farred, "Endgame Identity? Mapping the New Left Roots of Identity Politics," 638.

[28] Wendy Brown, "Wounded Attachments," Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 3 (August 1993), 394.

[29] Ibid, 393.

[30] Ibid, 394.

[31] Ibid.

[32] Ibid.

[33] Ibid, 398.