The Quest For a Revolutionary Theory: Gramsci in Althusser's Eyes

By Youssef Shawky Magdy

"There is no revolutionary movement, without a revolutionary theory"

-V.I. Lenin ("What is to be done?")

In order to continue to be a theory that interests in Reality and at the same time provides critical concepts and theoretical tools to interpret this reality, Marxist theory should not fold upon itself in a dogmatic manner, as this self closure is contradicting the theory itself and its alluding to reality, as well as its finite formulation; as the importance of Marxist theory (especially, Marxist critique to capitalism) will diminish upon changing conditions and Realities, this changing what the theory is all about.

On the other hand, we find many revisionist approaches and the harmonizing tendency with the spirit of the era: as the mechanistic and economistic views of Marxism, Neo-kantian formulations, humanistic interpretations, postmodern Marxism...Etc. All these discourses, regardless of their different forms and the conditions in which they are produced, have the tendency to minimize or cut the critical distance between Marxism and other philosophies and Ideologies.

But as we know, Marxist theory contains a critical philosophy, as it tries to absorb or enclose other philosophies within the Marxist framework; this closure means simply interpreting these ideologies from an objective materialistic stance by relating them to the social formation with its interwoven complex structures. This implies that in order to do this job, Marxist theory should not subordinate theoretically to the problematics of these philosophies which means fleeing their magic and "laying bare" what is consolidated under colorful rhetoric. What makes this clearer is the discovery of struggle between Idealism and Materialism in every ideological or philosophical system. In this context we may refer to how Lenin read Hegel, as Lenin had discovered that the Hegelian "absolute idea" is Materialistic rather than idealistic. This discovery or laying bare was done through Hegel's system itself, as Hegel had asserted that: "Logic" is a process without a subject or a center, even Logic negates itself and with that, negating the center or the beginning. This negation corresponds to scientific objectivity that Marx adopted in Das Kapital (Althusser 1971, 123).

The pioneers of this Marxist critical stance are Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser, as they had gone beyond the return and rereading of Marx and emancipation of Marxism from prevalent ideologies, drawing great attention to more or less successful revolutionary practices which happened around them and extracting from their critique very important theoretical conclusions.

From this stance, it is important to make up an imaginary discussion between the two figures, and that’s what Althusser did. But from the point of view of justice is it right to hold this discussion when one of the two figures didn't reply to the other? It is not that simple, as there is no winner and loser here, rather what should concern us is the struggle over the interpretation of Gramsci and currents of thoughts that try to absorb him. This struggle has originated partially because of special conditions related to the life and thought of Gramsci as can be discussed in few points:

1. Althusserian theses were directed partially to prevalent Humanistic Marxism in France, so in case of Gramsci we can't separate between theoretical abstract theses of Gramsci and what happened in Italy in the period that preceded the rise of Fascism when the labor movements had lost many decisive battles. According to Gramsci, this loss was linked to the economistic view that was adopted by Italian socialist party, this stance implies that the economic struggle (strikes and so on)  is sufficient for the workers to win their battles against capitalism , so accordingly the party was not interested in the formation of coalitions between different factions of popular classes (Simon 1999, 15) as peasants, Agricultural laborers, low middle class employees and so forth, these coalitions which would have taken a political color. And from this point we can understand Gramsci's assertion about the importance of both political and ideological moments in the struggle for Hegemony. These moments which need a kind of human volunteerism or agency.

2. In some cases we may find a difficulty to fully understand some of Gramsci's theses but of course that isn't related to the difficulty of Gramsci's style of writing or thought, but to the circumstances in which Prison Notebooks had been written as it included a severe watchful periodical inspection from the guards, this dictated a self censorship carried by Gramsci through a distracting style of writing and choosing of words. This in addition to his illness and great difficulty to have books in prison.

3. When Gramsci wrote about Marx, he warned us from oeuvres that were published posthumously, as they are far from being complete and distinct but they contain ideas which are in development and adjustment, and if the author had an opportunity to complete or adjust his works, he might denounce them or regard them as insufficient (Gramsci 1999, 715-716), this short story says a lot about what Gramsci had thought about the notebooks he was writing.

And now we can tell that the struggle about Gramsci is related to two points:

Firstly: interpretation of Gramsci, as Humanistic Marxism in France, had given a humanistic interpretation to Gramsci supported by some obvious texts, as well as the Neo-Marxist interpretation that exploits the notion of historical bloc to take in theoretically the new type of protests which can be designated as liberal, for example: 3rd wave feminism and environmentalism. The direct obvious content of these protests didn't change considerably but what changed is the social relationship that this content has kept with the whole social struggle, especially class struggle. What is obvious today is detachment of the content from the whole social framework and harmonization of these movements with late capitalist context.  

Secondly: does Gramsci represent a self-sufficient (Adequate) intellectual system? Does he provide concepts and theoretical tools (which as any tools need to be improved continuously) wich make up a system that doesn't contain any central or fundamental  problems within the structure of the theory itself (regardless of regular problems that face any intellectual system and get resolved with time)?

Roughly, we can say that Althusser was interested in the second point, which means that he didn't think that Gramsci's intellectual project can form a complete or self-sufficient theoretical system. But this didn't stop Althusser from appreciating what Gramsci asserted about the state, which can't be reduced to a coercive apparatus but also includes the civil society with its different organizations, even if Gramsci didn't indicate systematically the effect of each apparatus and its relatively different role (Althusser 2014, 242, note 7). And in other places, Althusser appreciated the welding nature of ideology that was discovered by Gramsci (Althusser 2014, 227), who said that ideology resembles cement because it connects different elements of the hegemonic/ruling bloc.

This doesn't mean that Gramsci's system doesn't contain crucial flaws that, according to Althusser, can have serious outcomes in relation to theoretical and political practice.  For example, Gramsci's failure to formulate an obvious relationship between philosophy and science (Althusser 2016, a letter) as we will discuss shortly.

Althusser's critique, which is somehow scattered in various texts, culminated into an article which then became a chapter in Reading Capital. This article will be our main source besides Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks.

The distinct trait in Gramsci's texts is "humanistic historicism," which means that every social phenomena is in an ongoing state of change and historical development as successive historical eras, thus there is no kind of knowledge that supersedes history. To make it simple: historical era dictates any kind of knowledge. That's the historical part; the other part indicates that people or "Human" is responsible for this historical process by taking part through her free will in various practices that change history.  And of course these practices are participated in the "present" (a moment in history) which humans want to change.  

There is a distinction between historicism and humanism but, according to Althusser, this difference is superficial and they share the same problems.

First: Historicism

Gramsci puts history above everything, including philosophy, science, and politics. That, of course, includes Marxism. He went further to say that Marxism is an "absolute Historicism" (Gramsci 1999, 836) which means that he views Marxism as a methodology which interprets various phenomena in the light of history, historical eras, and its peculiarities — even Marxism itself is part of this history. Thus, all different forms of human knowledge and practice occur in a specific moment in history called "present.” This occurrence makes these forms of knowledge carry the present within it and express the present.  And there is also an expressive relationship between forms of knowledge (scientific, political…etc.) so everything expresses everything with the same structural degree because they are exposed to the same "present.” This is what what Althusser called "direct expression." (Althusser 2015, 211) This leads to the idea of contemporaneity, which will be discussed shortly.

Accordingly, we can then understand Gramsci telling that philosophy can't be separated from the history of philosophy and also culture from the history of culture (Gramsci 1999, 628). Thus philosophy can't break with its history as new philosophy will enclose the old within itself considering it as history. But what about Science? Science also behaves like philosophy in this historical path, based on this, Gramsci wrote that electricity for example has its historical significance only when it has become an essential element in production process, and here manifests the instrumental tendency Gramsci had about science (Althusser 2016, a letter). According to that, by inclusion in history (its peculiarities and specific eras) science has the same epistemological value as philosophy and may be as  politics also, as the result of "direct expressionism", so at the end we find that peculiarity of science is lost. But science is the peculiar element of Marxism and it is what separates it from other ideologies (Althusser 2015, 211); what is important about science is its formulation and concepts which try to catch up with  objective reality which is separated from subject's experience; this reality Gramsci views as metaphysical as it related to human existence, and if a human is a historical being, then this reality and knowledge related to it and resulted from it are also historical beings (Gramsci 1999, 807). This asserts the Gramsci's devaluation of science and objectivity which is a theoretical tendency that is adopted by material philosophy as Linen indicated in "Materialism and empirio-criticism" (Althusser 1971, 48-49) this materialism is what Gramsci called metaphysical (Gramsci 1999, 836 ).

So according to what preceded, we find that the distance separating Marxist philosophy (Dialectical materialism) and science (Historical materialism) disappeared in Gramscian thought where Historicism swallows everything and then the material science of history becomes a mere organic ideology incorporated in the historical bloc and included in the superstructure of society (Althusser 2016, a letter).

And here comes the idea of "contemporaneity" that we referred to earlier. "Direct Expressionism" makes all instances; scientific, philosophical, political…etc, are exposed by the same degree to the historical present (Althusser 2015, 212) and also exposed to themselves by an equal extent. That manifests a Hegelian influence especially Hegelian Totality that designates everything as the reflection of the internal dialectic of the absolute idea. But the Marxist totality is different in the sense that it separates between different instances and provides each instance with a degree of "Relative Autonomy". So Superstructure is relatively autonomous from "the Base", and the ideological apparatuses is relatively autonomous from coercive ones and the components of the ideological apparatus each has a degree of independence and so on, not to mention the political structure and its great degree of independency and determining power. Here we find that different instances are not the same in effect and we can't reduce them to be mere reflections of history.

We can conclude from what previously stated that different practices related to distinct instances can also be reduced to one practice which is historical practice. Althusser refused this concept in the light of his own theoretical concept of practice, as every practice is an activity that transforms a raw material (not only material one but also intellectual as the raw materials are more or less the products of other practices; empirical, ideological…etc.) through definitive methods, means and conditions to obtain a specific product (Althusser 1969, 166-167)

And so the unification of practices and their processes in maxim of history can be considered a dissociation of the uniqueness of each practice and its break with other practices in the specificity of production process, i.e. adopting this notion, the ideological practice is then homogenizes with scientific one without a break. So the specific traits of each practice can be designated to other practices, and this appears in Gramscian thought as a general methodological trend (Althusser 2015, 217) as for example, Gramsci sometimes attributes to political practice a deterministic power or ability equivalent to that of economic social relations.

Althusser attributes all these ideas to the theoretical play of Gramscian thought discovered by the analysis of the internal logic of this thought, but we can find the origin in Gramsci's text itself, as he thought that, considering philosophy, politics, and economy, if the three elements adopted the same notion about the world, then they should hold within themselves an ability to transfer the theoretical fundamentals from element to another and to conduct a mutual translation between them (Gramsci 1999, 745 )

Second: Humanism

Man can understand history because s/he who made it. Thus spoke Vico. Here we can distinguish between two roles:

firstly, the making of history or the actor role, that's the role we all familiar with in which man is the obvious actor who leads revolutions, declares war, discovers, Etc. in fact that's the ideological role by which we perceive history.

Secondly, the author of history which is the non-human conditions (and yet not natural) that make history. These are the relations of productions that constitute the economic structure and also the political and ideological relations and structures. these determinants are not human in the sense that although humans are the smallest elements of that system, what should be counted for are the relations between these elements, these relations have a non-human nature because they sublime above  humans as they control and coerce them materially and symbolically. So the relations with their complicated intercalation, are structuring structural positions which humans fit in. we can say that, This role is the real role in history.

According to Althusser, Gramsci wants to make human both the actor and the author of history by his stress on human agency and consciousness as we referred earlier. This should be accompanied by substitution of relations of production with human relations (Althusser 2015, 218), these new relations expand to include knowledge, objectivity, and science, the latter is considered as the human relation with history and nature (the concept of nature presents in history), and so history returns again but this time, it revolves around human and its different relations, and human becomes the inducer of human nature change by his role in making history, accordingly the real conditions that constitute human are eliminated.

Words are possibilities!

We can't doubt the growing importance of Gramsci and Althusser with the development of international and national statuses, the recognition of this importance must be fortified by the discussion between the two in addition to other thinkers. No doubt that Althusser had caught up with Gramsci's literal words, but we shouldn't forget that although theory isn't mere words and language, it is represented by these tools. And we should remember also that theory although it doesn't make the world, it reveals how it is constructed, and accordingly what are the possible strategies to change this construction, so we can say that words have an important weight in determining the scope of potential and our capability.

References 

Althusser, Louis, For Marx, Translated by Ben Brewster, (Paris:  Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1969).

Althusser, Louis, Lenin and philosophy and other essays, translated by Ben Brewster, ( NY and London: Monthly review press, 1971). 

Althusser, Louis, On the reproduction of capitalism: ideology and ideological state apparatuses, preface by Etienne balibar, translated by G.M. Goshgarian (NY and London: verso, 2014).

Althusser, Louis, Reading capital : the complete edition /; introduction by Etienne Balibar ; contributions by Roger Establet ; contributions by Jacques Ranciere ; contributions by Pierre Macherey ; translated by Ben Brewster and David Fernbach, ( NY and London: verso, 2015).

Althusser, Louis, "A Letter from Louis Althusser on Gramsci's thought", Decalages, 2016, Vol.2, iss 1.

 Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from the prison notebooks, Edited and translated by Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, (London: Lawrence & wishart, 1999).   

Simon, Roger, Gramsci's political thought, an introduction (London: Lawrence & wishart, 1999).  

The Man on the Fence Post

[Photograph: Steve Liss/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty]

By AJ Reed

I remember it like it was yesterday. I just sat down to work on my computer project for my vocational class when a breaking story came across the television playing in my class: Man Found on Fence Post, Laramie, Wyoming. The story that broke during their class period addressed a man that was on a fence post outside of Laramie, Wyoming—turning towards the television—listening intently to the news report. The adolescent learned that the story was about the man on the fence post that was left through the night. The story went on to say that two other men were with this particular man, who then beat him, put him in the back of their truck, and propped him up like a scarecrow on the fence post where he spent his final hours. When the man's body was found and taken to the hospital, is when they officially declared him dead after several days in the hospital. The adolescent felt an emptiness. They did not know the man on the news. However, they felt a loss of someone who was part of their community. The adolescent for a moment reflected that they could have been that man on the fence post in the news. The man on the fence was Matthew Shepard, and it was that moment that sparked my queer liberation.

As I began my queer liberation, I could that living in Midwest presented challenges. There were no real outlets or spaces for me to go to when I had questions, no mentors to help guide me. The only places where experiences and information were readily available were house parties thrown by gay men or heading into the bigger metro areas. Living in a rural area also meant that we did not have many figures to look up to when it came to conducting actions that needed to be done. When young people wanted to organize and affect change, there wasn’t a blue print already laid out by more experienced activists. So what do any young and idealistic people do? I joined forces with some friends and our first action just days after Matthew Shepard’s murder was participating in the National Day of Silence. With black electrical tape over our mouths, we walked the halls of our school in silent solidarity with queer students who are often not heard and seen by school systems. School staff did not always respond well to this type of protest. Students lost participation points in class or punished with detention. As the National Day of Silence movement took hold, progressive schools found ways to accommodate students who protested through this medium.

After graduating high school, I dug into the LGBTQ Rights movement. I developed an LGBTQ+ student organization, worked on marriage equality campaigns, and served in LGBTQ+ organizations that pushed for policy change. I also worked in social service and organizing in the own community. The quest to further my queer liberation led me to Christopher Street and the infamous Stonewall Inn. Sitting across the street from the historic space, I closed my eyes and listened to what the past and the present were trying to tell me. I heard the laughing and felt the hugs from my brothers and sisters of 1969. I heard the police sirens that broke into the spirit of what was Stonewall and the increasing desperation for equality that was bubbling out of the Inn. I was brought back to present day with police sirens as they quickly approached where I was sitting. In that moment, I wondered how far have we actually come since June 28, 1969 when the LGBTQ+ community had had enough and took to the streets.

We’ve made great strides since Stonewall. Nearly 20 countries, including the US, have legalized same-sex marriage. Organizations like the American Psychology Association and the World Health Organization dropped "homosexuality" as a mental illness in 1974 and declassified transgender as a mental disorder. The US Supreme Court declared that marriage for LGBTQ+ folx is constitutional and ruled that it is unconstitutional to discriminate against LGBTQ individuals in the workplace.

But what about Matthew Shepard? Or the 49 souls that were taken at Pulse Nightclub? Why are our trans and non-binary brothers and sisters being murdered at an alarming rate? Why is suicide the second leading cause of death among young folx who are queer? Why are we losing so many incredible people when we have all these rights?

Because the reality is that while we have laws in place to protect queer folx, we also have social organizations such as organized religion that are using their platforms to atoll their beliefs that loving someone of the same sex or gender is wrong. Our young people are hearing these messages and internalizing the hate toward themselves. The reality is that while the Supreme Court has acknowledged that marriage is something that everyone should have access to and that discrimination across the board is unconstitutional, there are people within the government ranks that are actively trying to dismantle policies and safeguards that are protecting marginalized communities. The reality is that there are businesses that are using religion and holes in the law to allow them to discriminate.

There will be challenges along the way when reaching towards progress, but we must not forget about the groundwork that has already been laid out for us. As Aristotle once said, “If you would understand anything, observe its beginning and its development.” Look at pride parades today. Pride parades started as an uprising at the Stonewall Inn. An act of expression to demand the rights we need to be visible in mainstream society. It was a rallying cry to remind people of why we stood up to oppression in 1969. Today it is nothing more than corporate sponsorship, political opportunism, and allowing law enforcement to tell us how to run our parade. And when marriage equality became federal law, was when the other rights for our community got put on the backburner. As if marriage equality was the big move to be in a post-queer liberation state. Those that are fighting for queer liberation have not stopped since marriage equality, nor when rainbow capitalists took over pride parades. Our fight is more than marriage equality.

Queer liberation is more than just marriage equality. So many activists left the movement when marriage equality became federal law. Make no mistake, queer liberation means that we must demand a living wage, access to affordable and safe housing, employment, racial justice, access to meaningful healthcare, access to human services, opening the border, and abolishing the prison industrial complex. Veteran activist David Mixner reminds us that we are on the brink of losing our history. Pioneers and trailblazers are disappearing before our eyes. We cannot lose our history as the other side wants to erase our journey. Time is running out. Let us keep the spark for our fight for queer liberation.

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

By Christian Gines

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neoliberalism, Identity, and Class: A Theoretical Re-consideration

By Yanis Iqbal

Ever since the inception of right-wing populism as a dominant political force, the contentious issue of identity politics has re-surfaced. This is mainly due to the fact that right-wing populism actively utilizes identitarian tools to augment its electoral edifice. A right-wing populist usage of identity involves the subjective solidification of a parochial identitarian consciousness and its consequent constitution as a politics of woundedness or ressentiment which proclaims the “triumph of the weak as weak”. According to Wendy Brown, this politics of ressentiment serves a threefold function - ‘it produces an affect (rage, righteousness) that overwhelms the hurt; it produces a culprit responsible for the hurt; and it produces a site of revenge to displace the hurt (a place to inflict hurt as the sufferer has been hurt).’ Through these three steps, right-wing populism is able to fulfill two important tasks:

(1) It is able to exploit and parochially politicize the ontological insecurities of neoliberalism generated due to institutionalized individualization and neoliberal de-communitarianization. This exploitation of ontological insecurities is effectuated through the creation of endogenously enclosed identities which culturally unify the victims of neoliberalization. (2) It is able to artificially separate the sphere of circulation from the sphere of production with a non-hierarchized culturalization of the sphere of circulation. This guarantees the continued existence of capitalism in which the question of the ownership of the means of production has to be insulated from disruptive politicization. 

Right-wing populism, therefore, relies on identity politics to segregate the political from economic formation. In this entire operation of dissociation of the economic and political, the presence of class structures gets completely obfuscated and obscured. As a consequence of the blurring of class distinctions, the overthrow of the Capitalist Social Structure of Accumulation (SSA) becomes more difficult and economic differentiational configurations get culturally cloaked in non-economic encrustations. But instead of countering this identitarian obscuration of class configuration, matters are further complicated by the left-wing camp itself which readily asserts that class too is an identity. This is an ambivalent strategic-theoretical impasse because it conveys that the Left selectively prioritizes class and chooses to ignore other identities. Due to the portrayal of the Left as apathetic towards non-class identities, coalitional opportunities are lost and the possibility of presenting an integrated opposition to capitalism is weakened. In order to move away from this opposition between class identity and non-class identities and correspondingly re-alter leftist political praxis, this article will re-theorize the notion of class within the problematic of anti-capitalist struggle and right-wing populism.

The consideration of class as an identity ignores its role in the construction of capitalism. Rather than being an identity, classes are the constitutive coordinates of capitalism. Within the sphere of the relations of production, classes act as materio-empirical ensembles, structurally embedded in the objective matrix of capitalism. As cardinal components of the system of capitalism, classes facilitate our insertion into the architectural organization of capital accumulation by unequally distributing economic resources. This insertion happens through people’s material objectification/structural determination by the exclusive possession of productive forces by bourgeoisie. The consequence of this structural determination by the prevailing material-economic circumstances of capitalism is our integration into the system of capital accumulation through the pre-existing arrangement of classes. This line of reasoning posits that capitalism pre-supposes the existence of an arrangement of classes and classes pre-exist our insertion into the system of capital accumulation. Accordingly, it is through the pre-established structural arrangement of classes that individuals enter into the regulated totality of capitalism.

Despite the constructural centrality of classes in constituting capitalism, we seldom observe its conspicuous deployment on the political terrain. Moreover, the subjective self-certainty of being a part of class is never fully realized. This indicates a gap between the objective structure of class and its self-conscious subjective awareness among the people belonging to that class. The contributory causal factors behind the absence of the discursive dominance of class can be located within the schema of class and class struggle. Class is politically-electorally unrepresented or poorly represented because it is deliberately disorganized and ideologically invisibilized by the facilitators of capitalism. This is a part of class struggle wherein the ruling class continuously decomposes and recomposes classes to discursively disrupt it and prevent it from subjectively hegemonizing the popular imaginary. The discursive deconstruction of class is necessary for capitalism insofar that it has to prevent the objective structure of capitalist inequality from appearing in the domain of politics and culture.

Systematic origination of a class-blind political and cultural morphology is aided by the concentrated cultural clout and political hegemony which the ruling class possesses. Along with the continuous construction of a non-class matrix, the ruling class also inhibits the development of class politics through the “selectivities” which are embedded in the system of capitalism. Capitalism is arranged in a way that prevents and constricts the emergence of counter-hegemonic class politics. The various modalities through which it selects and retains certain practices are referred to as selectivities. According to the classificatory schema developed by Bob Jessop, there are 4 selectivities i.e. structural, discursive/ideological, technological and agential. Through the criss-crossing interaction between these selectivities, the emergence of class-based counter-hegemonic program is impeded.

In contradistinction to classes, identities are differentiated subject positions which individuals occupy. While identities are constructed to provide us with variegated subject positions and a symbolic world, classes are pre-fabricated structural assemblages which are later ideologically concealed through diverse semiotic techniques. Moreover, despite being shrouded by the ideologists of capitalism, classes don’t disappear and we continue to remain associated with specific classes. This is because of the fundamental fact that as long as capitalism exists, classes will also exist and our locationality within this system of classes will also persist insofar that we cannot transcend the limits of capitalism and remain within its economic confines. Identities, on the other hand, are not materially rooted in the formational processes of capitalism and are negotiable, moldable and de-composable. Their symbolic elasticity derives from the fact that they are not the constitutive-structural components of capitalism. Instead, they are the ramified excrescences of class which acts as a generative core.

The status of class as a generative core can be clarified by using the concept of “generative entrenchment”. Generative entrenchment refers to the creation of dependency networks in which a structure has many things operating on or within it. Class is generatively entrenched due to its qualitative specificity in the constitution of capitalism. It is an omnipresent fundamental feature of capitalism within which polymorphic identities operate. Therefore, different identities aggregate and disaggregate within the spatial bounds of class structure and class acts as the material plexus in which identities are interlarded.

This underlying theoretical explication of class and identity has been mystified by the concept of “intersectionality” which has acquired unprecedented popularity within identitarian theorizations. While it is true that a multiplicity of identities are contemporaneously acting and converging, intersectionality’s depiction of identities as mere descriptive categories leads to the absence of an active interpretation of oppression. According to Myra Marx Ferree, intersectionality theory highlights the ‘infinitely multiple substantive social locations, generates a long list of important intersectional locations to be studied and offers voice to the perspectives of many marginalized groups’. In this description of intersectionality theory, one can clearly observe that there is a complete non-existence of an interpretative-analytical focus on the origins of oppression. This gives rise to the framing of identities as static and freely floating in an undefined atmosphere of interpersonal relations. Classism is a paradigmatic example of a failed intersectional theorization of class in which systemic questions were reduced to questions of interpersonal sensibilities. Classism’s “objection is to the way snotty rich (or middle-class) people treat poor people, not to the system that produces these divisions in the first place”.  In this way, oppression is reduced to personalized inferiorization, inequality is reduced to the snobbishness of the rich and the answer to capitalism’s destructive tendencies becomes a change in attitudinal practices.

As this article is operating within a problematic of anti-capitalism and right-wing populism, it is necessary that a new strategy for strategically deploying the revised understanding of identity and class be crafted. It is clear that polycontextural identities are interpolated in the reticulation of class structure and it is on the generatively entrenched surface of class that identities operate. In present-day circumstances, right-wing populism has synthetically separated identity from class by emptily culturalizing and traumatizing the experience of neoliberal entrepreneurialization and de-communitarianization. This emphasis on cultural wounds has led to the creation of an antagonistic frontier in which antipathy towards neoliberalism has been funneled in the direction of an “excluded other”. Consequently, essentialized identities have solidified and sedimented with the aim of engaging in a moralized politics of revenge. What has led to the essentialization and sedimentation of identities is the ideological concealment of classes. With the conjoint involvement of class and identity, a dynamic politics of revolution is produced which refuses to being tethered to the putative particularity of hollow identity. This happens as a result of the ultimate aim of class-conscious politics which is the comprehensive elimination of class itself. For example, subaltern classes participate in revolutionary class struggle to obliterate their subalternity. Matt Bruenig aptly sums this up when he says that “justice for poor people requires their elimination”.

When the radical universality of revolution is introduced through a class-conscious politics, the specificity of identity gets entwined in the progress towards a “radical humanism”. This radical humanism has to be achieved through a careful movement of the particularity to universality which humanizes and incorporates this closed particularity. The humanization and incorporation of identity into revolutionary universality will yield what can be called “democratic cultural identity”. Democratic cultural identity stresses the need to continuously re-compose identitarian specificity and organically combine the multiplicitous I’s to concretely progress towards a revolutionary “we”. It is only through this concrete and open-textured articulation of I’s that we can achieve a humanized and sonorous democratic cultural identity.  

A High Road for the 21st Century

[Photo credit: Black Socialists in America]

By Russell Weaver

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

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

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

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

The Four Essential Pillars of High Road-21

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

Pillar 1: The High Road is Anti-Racist

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

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

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

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

Pillar 2: The High Road is Restorative and Reparative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pillar 3: The High Road is Cooperative and Solidaristic

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

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

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

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

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

Pillar 4: The High Road is Prefigurative

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

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

High Road-21 and the Dual Power Theory of Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take Action

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

[5] Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[15] Akuno.

[16] Ibid.

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

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

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

Juneteenth and Abolitionist Dreams

By Justin C. Mueller

Republished from the author's blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

By Blake Simons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In struggle.

*

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

What's Next for the Anti-Racist Movement?

By T.R. Whitworth

Republished from Independent Socialist Group.

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

- Malcolm X, 1964

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

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

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

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

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

What we need to win

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to win these demands and more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

False Flags Fail to Derail National Uprising

By Werner Lange

The use of false flag operations designed to crush democracy and create tyranny has a long and sordid history. Arguably the most notorious and effective one took place in Berlin with the burning of the Reichstag on February 27, 1933, less than a month after Hitler was named Chancellor by an anxious capitalist elite threatened with a workers’ revolution. The very next day President von Hindenburg stripped the German people of core freedoms protected under the Weimar Constitution and thereby opened the legal door for the Nazi reign of terror. The empowered Nazis, who were the actual arsonists, successfully laid blame on anti-fascists, particularly Communists, and began a bloody campaign of persecution and extermination of all opponents of Hitler’s Third Reich. Within weeks some 10,000 German anti-fascists were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Yet anti-fascist resistance continued both inside the Third Reich and in exile. Among the most effective of the early anti-fascist organizations was the Paris-based “International Struggle Against War and Fascism” and its widely distributed publication “ANTIFAschisticheFRONT”, which demanded the downfall of the brown-shirt arsonists in its September 1933 edition. That did not happen, and internal Nazi terror systematically degenerated into total war by 1939 when a series of false flag operations along the German-Polish border were used to justify the invasion of Poland.

Since its use in the 1930s as the title for an anti-fascist publication, ANTIFA has gained new notoriety in 2020. So have false flag operations. On May 31, St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square (one block from the White House), also known as “The Church of Presidents,” was damaged by arsonists. It was Pentecost Sunday, a day when the scripture reading for churches everywhere came from the account of the first Pentecost recorded in the Book of Acts which, interestingly enough, makes explicit reference to “tongues of fire.” No reference to Pentecost or anything else was made by President Trump holding a bible during his brief visit to the damaged church the very next day. A path through Lafayette Park was cleared for Trump and his entourage (Attorney General Barr, Secretary of Defense Esper, and Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff Milley) by violently driving out anti-racist protestors with clouds of tear gas and swarms of baton-wielding officers decked out in riot gear. Immediately before this awkwardly staged photo op at the church, Trump issued a short but ominous threat in the Rose Garden to protestors, singling out Anitifa twice by name. Similarly, right-wing media outlets, like Christianpost.com were quick to post tweets blaming the church arson on Antifa and claiming that “earlier in the night, rioters ripped down a U.S. flag displayed outside the church as people chanted, ‘burn that shit.’”

This has all the markings of a false flag operation, but an unsuccessful one. The same holds true for a series of violent attacks, arson fires, organized looting, and wanton property damage perpetrated by a host of agent provocateurs throughout the country who infiltrated Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Memorial Day. Members of scores of violent right-wing groups, some recently minted, emerged from their chambers of hate onto the streets of America to damage the legitimacy of anti-racist protests as much as possible. Though carrying various group identities, several agent provocateurs also carried various assault weapons to demonstrations, and all carried the common goal of inciting violence to such extent that it would ignite a “fascist counterrevolution through accelerationism.” The intent is to accelerate societal collapse, foment civil disorder, foster polarization, and, as one of their leading neo-Nazi ideologues put it, “to fan the flames” against “The System.” That may have literally been the plan in Minneapolis, epicenter for the mass protests, where some 87 fires broke out in a span of five days following the police murder of George Floyd. On the night of May 30 alone, over 40 persons were arrested in Minneapolis and, according to its Safety Commissioner, “some were people linked to white-supremacist groups.”

Among the most vicious and violent of the white-supremacist groups is The Base (in Arabic, al-Qaeda), founded in 2018 and hell-bent on fomenting a race war to create white ethnostates. Its recruiting motto is “save your race, join the base.” In January 2020, three of its members were arrested in Georgia for plotting to murder a married couple affiliated with Antifa.  An older racist group, Alexandria-based Identity Evropa, whose members habitually show up to assault and harass protesters at Trump rallies, recently ran a fake ANTIFA twitter account calling upon members to loot “white hoods.” Rumors about busloads of ANTIFA rioters coming to “fuck up the white hoods” sufficed to get scores of heavy-armed residents onto neighborhood streets in several rural counties. Even the elderly protester who was forcefully shoved to the pavement by Buffalo police officers and left bleeding from his head was called a possible “ANTIFA provocateur” by Trump. ANTIFA was also explicitly identified as a “threat to national security” and its members as “domestic terrorists” in a video recently posted by Three-Percenters, a pro-gun right-wing militia taking its name from the dubious belief that only 3% of American colonists actively fought against the British (one of their members, the leader of the White Rabbit Three Percent Illinois Patriot Freedom Fighters Militia, was arrested for bombing a mosque in Minnesota). The very name of another extreme right-wing outfit, Boogaloo, is a code word for another civil war. Three of its members, all with extensive military experience, were arrested in Nevada for manufacturing explosives to be used at protests in Las Vegas and for urging participants to resort to violence. Another “Boogaloo Boi” was arrested in Texas in April after declaring his intent to kill police officers. Some have a habit of displaying Nazi symbols and all carry assault weapons wherever they appear, as they have at protests in at least six states.

Related in ideology and identify are the Proud Boys, a virulent pro-Trump gang of thugs who plan to hold a “Resist Marxism” rally in Providence in 2020 and pride themselves in their stated desire to “smash commies.” Their affiliate on the West Coast, Patriot Prayer, engaged in violent actions in Los Angeles and Portland. Heavily-armed members of another vigilante gang, New Mexico Civil Guard, showed up at a BLM protest on June 1 to harass and intimidate participants. On the same day, three heavily-armed white men from southern Ohio who identified themselves as “Ohio patriots” menaced peaceful protesters in Warren, in NE Ohio. At least one Boogaloo member, armed with assault weapons, traveled from North Carolina to infiltrate protests in Minneapolis. Two young anti-government agitators who traveled from Pennsylvania to protests in Cleveland were arrested for conspiring to incite violence after police found commercial fire gel, a Glock firearm, ammunition, spray paint, and a hammer in their car; five others carrying fire starters were arrested for trying to break into Progressive Field, home of the Cleveland Indians. At a June 5 news conference, the U.S. Attorney for northern Ohio affirmed the hijacking of peaceful protests: “So let me get out in front of any questions as to whether there were out-of-state agitators who hijacked last weekend’s peaceful protest for their own purposes. The answer is undoubtedly yes, as seen with today’s arrests.” The same can be said for nearly all other protests.

Despite some attempts to show support, unprovoked police violence against protestors remains the norm, often with fatal consequences, as in Columbus and Louisville where protestors were killed by police action; two other protesters were killed in Indianapolis by unknown assailants. Also increasingly common is outright affiliation of law enforcement officers with white supremacist groups. A former Officer of the Month in the Philadelphia Police Department proudly wears a Nazi tattoo on his arm. A current Chicago police officer actively engaged with Proud Boys in a “Fuck Antifa” telegram chat channel. Among the New Mexico Civil Guard harassing protesters was an officer from the ICE prison in Torrance County.  A former sheriff’s deputy in Illinois is an active member of a Three Percenters militia.  A heavily disguised white man who wantonly smashed windows with a hammer at a Minneapolis AutoZone store and sprayed-painted “Free Shit for Everyone Zone” on its wall is alleged to have been a St. Paul police officer.  To facilitate destruction of property, piles of bricks have been strategically placed and left unattended in several U.S. cities hit by major protests. And as happened with the murder of a young woman protesting the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, cars are increasingly being used as weapons against BLM protestors who are commonly labeled “speed bumps” by militias. A black protestor was killed by a white driver in Bakersfield; and, in Seattle, a white man who drove his car menacingly into a BLM crowd shot and wounded a black man upon exiting his car on June 6. On the same day, the president of the state’s KKK plowed his truck into a BLM protest in Virginia. At least 17 such incidents have occurred since Memorial Day, resulting in serious injury to protesters and a few attempted murder charges against their assailants.

A nationwide call from “Team Trump” for direct action against protesters was posted on FaceBook in early June by the “Trump Make America Great Again Committee”: “Dangerous MOBS of far-left groups are running through our streets and causing absolute mayhem. They are DESTROYING our cities and rioting - it’s absolute madness. It’s important that EVERY American comes together at a time like this to send a united message that we will not stand for their radical actions any longer. We’re calling on YOU to make a public statement and add your name to stand with President Trump against ANTIFA. Please add your name IMMEDIATELY to stand with your President and his decision to declare ANTIFA a terrorist organization.” That message, essentially a call to arms, will resonate with millions of pro-Trump Americans, ones who have foolishly forgotten that not so long ago hundreds of thousands of Americans, along with millions of others, gave their lives in an existential struggle against fascism. “Either the United States will destroy ignorance,” prophetically proclaimed W.E.B. Du Bois during another dark period in our history, “or ignorance will destroy the United States.” Team Trump is making sure ignorance wins.

While the full extent and nature of ties between white-supremacist groups inciting the violence and the Trump regime is unknown, it is clear that both share a virulent racist ideology and praxis. The self-identified “President of Law and Order” has no reservations about explicitly calling for looters to be shot; threatening to unleash “vicious dogs and most ominous weapons” against protesters; identifying elected officials who reject violent suppression of protests as “weak liberals”; labeling protesters themselves, such as the ones he terrorized in Lafayette Park, as terrorists; and surrounding himself with avowed racists like Stephen Miller, a senior Trump advisor and ally of a white-supremacist “nativist empire.” White supremacy, a defining feature of fascism, is the tie that binds Trump’s regime to his racist foot soldiers in the streets attempting to accelerate the trajectory toward civil war in America.

Demonization of anti-fascists in particular, and anti-racist protesters in general, as “terrorists” has its consequences, both intended and unintended. For we treat people and situations as we define them. As a classic sociological dictum has it: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” Whether or not the definition is true or accurate is immaterial; false definitions, like false flags, have real consequences. And in this case, to be defined as terrorist is an open invitation for pre-emptive violence, even murder. Also at work here are the dynamics of the self-fulfilling prophecy as articulated by sociologist Robert Merton: “The self-fulfilling prophecy is, in the beginning, a false definition of the situation evoking a new behavior which makes the original false conception come ‘true’. The specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error.” Reign of terror more accurately approaches our current reality. As of today, the 76th anniversary of D-day which marked the beginning of the end of the fascist Third Reich, US military forces are at a near-wartime alert level (Force Protection Condition Charlie) in and around the nation’s capital to stop projected acts of violence by anti-fascists. As proclaimed by Trump on June 1, “I want the organizers of this terror to be on notice that you will face severe criminal penalties and lengthy sentences in jail. This includes Antifa and others who are leading instigators of this violence.” However, an internal FBI report found no evidence of Antifa involvement in this violence but did warn of calls by “far-right provocateurs to attack federal agents” and “use automatic weapons against protesters.”

Masters of deceit are not interested in facts, and the Trump regime has repeatedly demonstrated its utter disdain for truth. Given the dismal track record of this thoroughly racist regime, it is not beyond imagination that a major false flag operation is in the works and will explode in the near future or come as an October surprise. If and when that happens, it will be conducted covertly by criminal fascist gangs in the suites emboldened and empowered by a Trump regime threatened with disempowerment.

Attempted manipulation of anti-racist protests by an assortment of far-right groups to ignite a new civil war through a series of coordinated false flag operations has, so far, failed. By contrast, unlike its largely marginalized status for years, the Black Lives Matter movement has caught fire and carries with it the potential for change – radical, systemic change. For as Marx clearly realized in another historical context pregnant with potential for revolutionary change: “The weapons of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism by weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.” Black Lives Matter is not only an idea whose time has come, but an idea that has clearly gripped the masses of all colors, especially America’s youth. a luta continua vitória é certa.

The Birth of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone

By J. James F.

Republished from Industrial Worker.

In my understanding, an autonomous zone is an area where state authority has been consciously rejected. What makes those blocks on Cap Hill autonomous is that the police have been pushed out, and people are free to self-manage. A big side effect is that folks can just go out there and live unlike the rest of capitalism, which forces us to always be consuming or working, you can just be in an occupation like that, which is incredibly liberating.

- Laura, @anarchomastia, eyewitness

The capitalist class in American society has been in a state of denial over the growing disenfranchisement of the people who live here and create all the wealth. BIPOC communities and the LGBTQ+ community have been mistreated and abused for the entire history of the United States. In doing so, the capitalist class has sold the working class down the river with a worldwide war on the workers, the most recent wave of attacks begins with the founding of the World Trade Organization, and it is here where the story of Capitol Hill picks up.

@SluttyPuppyTown on Twitter

Capitol Hill has been a center for radical action for a long time. Ever since the ’70s, it has had a reputation of being the “queer neighborhood” of Seattle. According to Laura, “back in the ’70s and ’80s it was one of the few places you could just be openly gay and not be at risk of getting bashed for it.” The radical spirit on Cap Hill saw the neighborhood take point and be the center of Seattle’s WTO protest in 1999. Cap Hill has since then been gentrified, though the sense of community was never truly repressed or replaced. Instead, it has been tested and matured by the generations of workers who have been mistreated by the capitalist. All of this has culminated in a breaking point.

On May 25, 2020, the police were recorded killing George Floyd in Minneapolis. This act would set off the United States’ powder keg of injustice and send the whole nation into a state of unrest. Seattle erupted on the fourth day of the protests and demonstrators met the same response of police brutality and repression seen at protests across the country. Tear gas was used liberally, video footage showed entire streets covered in a foggy haze.

@SluttyPuppyTown on Twitter

On June 8, a man drove his car into protesters and shot Daniel Gregory as he attempted to stop the attacker and protect others. In shocking footage released on social media, the cops let the attacker walk to their lines with no issue. The attacker wasn’t even arrested until later that evening. This attack built militancy within the ranks of the protesters with leaders suggesting that those who can, arm themselves and help defend the barricades. After the attack, cops were ordered to abandon the precinct in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, fully expecting the protesters to burn it down so they could have an excuse for a mass arrest. Much to their dismay, that didn’t happen. Instead, the protesters began to build barricades to protect themselves and dig in.

@onedragonhunter on Twitter

Laura explained, “The cops were very clearly expecting folks to try to march into the station or set it on fire. They even put wood boards up all around it and left pallets lying around. The protestors marched straight past it because they wanted to tear down all the fences the police put up. Then, they used those fences and blockades to build staggered barricades at intersections. The barricades are staggered so that crowds can pass through easily but a car would just run into one and be stopped. After the attack yesterday, everyone was very concerned about protecting the protest from any vehicle attacks.”

@SluttyPuppyTown on Twitter

In the moments following the police abandoning the scene at Capitol Hill, a feeling of excitement swept through the air even before the barricades were put up. Knowing the police had withdrawn, the protestors began marching without fear of repression . It was at this moment that the protest transcended into an autonomous zone. The group settled in front of the police station and began the process of establishing a zone of about six blocks.

CHAZ has a feeling of liberation and community described by Laura as “a lot like a local sports game or big potluck, mixed with the feelings of a militant struggle against the police.” At the time of writing, CHAZ has survived over a day and is growing to include the nearby Cal Anderson Park. The community in Capitol Hill is united in a mutual desire to see the autonomous zone grow stronger. Regardless of how long CHAZ lasts, it will spark hope in the hearts of the global working class. It reminds you that no matter the obstacles, the working class will win our freedom from the capitalist class.

The CHAZ continues to grow while cops hide in a supermarket. Map courtesy of Chloe, @basicflowrrr