Society & Culture

The Gathering Storm: Donald Trump and the Hollowed-Out American Heartland

By Sean Posey

During the winter of 2016, the ever-present visage of Donald J. Trump remained burned into television sets and computer screens across America. In the well-manicured lawns of the modest working-class homes of Austintown, Ohio, situated in long-struggling Mahoning County, "Team Trump. Rebuild America" signs began popping up everywhere.

Formerly a sparsely populated farming community, Austintown grew as a working-class suburb in the decades after World War II. Steel and autoworkers could commonly afford vacations and college tuition for their children; the community, in many ways, symbolized the working-class American Dream. By 1970, Austintown, along with the neighboring township of Boardman, was part of the largest unincorporated area in the state. [1] The township's population peaked in 1980 at 33,000. Today, however, it's a very different place. Job losses in the local manufacturing sector and the graying of the population led Forbes to label Austintown as the "fifth-fastest dying town" in the country in the midst of the Great Recession. The township's poverty rate had already reached nearly 14 percent in the year before the meltdown of Wall Street.[2]

The 2016 Ohio Republican primary in Mahoning County witnessed the largest shift of Democratic voters to the Republican Party in decades. "Most of them crossed over to vote for Donald Trump," remarked David Betras, Mahoning County Democratic Party Chairman.[3]

This used to be Democrat country. But like so many other places in America, the brash billionaire's message is remaking the local political landscape. Trump narrowly lost the Ohio primary to incumbent Governor John Kasich. However, he won the majority of Republican primary voters in Mahoning County and in neighboring Trumbull County, home to the city of Warren - one of the most embattled municipalities in the state. Winning his home state should have been a given for Kasich; instead, Trump pushed the twice-elected governor to the brink.

Ohio is not the only place in the heartland the Trump tornado is sweeping through. Scores of America's most insecure communities are joining the once prosperous Buckeye State in flirting with or joining the mogul's camp. Yet, for as much attention as has been paid to Trump and the often controversial movement behind him, far less has been said about the cracking core of a country that is currently looking for a savior, any savior, in such enormously troubled times.

Years before America's most famous real estate and reality television personality descended a gold escalator at Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for president, long-time journalists Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson began a cross-country journey to document America in the wake of the 911 attacks.

"On one trip," Maharidge writes, "I drove from Chicago to Johnstown, Pennsylvania. In places like this, the abandoned shells of factories, all broken windows and rust, make this country look like it was bombed in a war. In other places it's as if an economic neutron bomb hit-with trees and houses intact but lives decimated, gone with good jobs."[4]

Traditionally, this part of the heartland represented the economic engine of industrial America, filled with good-paying jobs in manufacturing. However, the great economic dislocations of the past forty-odd years have rendered much of this landscape a void, one more akin to the developing world than that of the United States. Even for the more outwardly normal communities, as Maharidge mentions, looks can be deceiving. Heroin is hitting the inner core of the country with a hammer force, destroying young lives already beset by economic insecurity and the end of upward mobility.

Perhaps even more disturbing is the declining life expectancy for a large swath of working-class whites, one of Trump's key constituencies. For the past sixteen years, death rates have risen for Caucasians between the ages of 45 and 54 and also for those between the ages of 25 to 34. [5] These are notable exceptions to the overall increase in life expectancy for all groups, regardless of race or ethnicity. While working class whites in Europe continue to experience increases in life expectancy, their counterparts in America are dying from drugs, suicide, and despair.[6]

The relationship between growing white death rates and support for Trump appears in the voting data. "Trump seems to represent a shrinking, in part dying segment of America," writes Jeff Guo in a detailed analysis of election results for the state of Iowa.[7] This holds true for other states as well. Guo goes on to demonstrate that, with the exception of Massachusetts, "the counties with high rates of white mortality were the same counties that turned out to vote for Trump." Many of these same voters are located in former industrial centers which themselves, in many ways, are also dying.

The deindustrialization of America first appeared in the Northeast and then in the former "Industrial Belt" (now dubbed the "Rust Belt" for the region's numerous decaying factories), stretching from Central New York to Illinois and Wisconsin. However, offshoring and free trade agreements have also severely damaged manufacturing centers in the "Right to Work" states of the South. Anger over free trade deals is driving much of Trump's populist economic rhetoric; a similar, though smaller effect, is being felt with Bernie Sanders's campaign on the Democratic side.

Despite regional changes, overall employment in manufacturing remained at a steady level until the end of the 1990s. Free trade agreements like NAFTA and the granting of "most favored nation" status to China (along with China's entry in the WTO in 2001) greatly undermined American manufacturing employment, which has almost continually declined over the past two decades. Aside for the traditional Rust Belt states, Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, and Mississippi are among the top ten states in terms of loss of total share of manufacturing jobs.[8] Trump won all but Kansas during the Republican primaries. His campaign also looks to be pursuing a "Rust Belt strategy" for the general election, which could see the wooing of disaffected former Reagan Democrats and independents who will never embrace the Clinton candidacy. So, if Trump were to falter in states with large Latino populations, he could (in theory) potentially take economically troubled swing states like Ohio (no Republican has won a general election without it) and Michigan. Trump's appeal with working class voters could put traditionally Democratic states such as Wisconsin and Pennsylvania in play as well in November.

Much is being made (rightfully) of the violent clashes at Trump rallies-often connected to the nativist and authoritarian overtones of the campaign itself. Yet far less attention is paid to the outlet Trump is providing by borrowing populist strains from the political left and right. With the exception of Bernie Sanders, who is facing increasing hostility from the party elite, the Democrats appear unwilling to tap into the mounting frustration over inequality, free trade deals, deindustrialization, and stagnant wages.

After their apocalyptic defeat in the 1972 presidential election, the Democratic elite began to push for the transition from a labor-oriented party to one rooted in the professional (upper) middle class. The process greatly accelerated under the auspices of the Democratic Leadership Council and Bill Clinton in the 1990s. It brought the party electoral success, but as the upper 10 percent of the country prospered-including the new elite professional class loyal to the Democrats-economic conditions deteriorated for the party's old base and for the majority of the country at large.

In Thomas Frank's latest book, Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People, the acerbic author takes a painful look at the effect of the unmooring of the Democratic Party from its roots in the working class: "Since 1992, Democrats have won the plurality of votes in every single election except one. For six of those years, they controlled Congress outright. But on matters of inequality they have done vanishingly little: They have stubbornly refused to change course when every signal said stop."[9]

It is indisputable that Republican policies during the same period also greatly increased inequality; however, the old liberal class of Franklin Roosevelt's party should have been the antidote to supply-side poison. They failed. And while the Republicans are paying the price for offering disaffected white workers the wages of identity politics (while advancing policies that destroy their livelihoods) the Democrats are likely next in line for the blowback.

"If you read mainstream coverage of Donald Trump, it's all focused on the bigotry and intolerance," Thomas Franks writes, "but there is another element, which is [he] talks about trade and he talks about it all the time."[10] Where is the Democratic Party on trade? It took the Democrats and Bill Clinton to succeed where George H.W. Bush failed and get NAFTA passed, which devastated whole regions and cost the country 700,000 jobs.[11] President Obama and Hillary Clinton both championed the Trans-Pacific Partnership-which will also cost working class jobs-over the objections of labor. (Clinton has since tried to walk back her initial support.) According to analysis by The Atlantic, "The trade pact will increase the importation of competing goods, which will drive down the cost of U.S.-made goods, putting downward pressure on wages." Even Breitbart News, a stalwart conservative publication, condemns the TPP for its likely effect on the working class, while the Obama Administration relentlessly pushes for its passage:

The question that conservatives must answer in the on-going debate over President Barack Obama's proposal to rewrite the rules for the world's economy through the Trans-Pacific Partnership is whether following General Electric's agenda to flatten the world's regulatory regimes to produce efficiencies in manufacturing and labor is in the interests of the United States? [12]

It is difficult to imagine President Obama ever uttering such words about a free trade deal.

Only Senator Sanders has rallied to the defense of labor and the sections of the country hard-hit by trade; Clinton by contrast is seemingly ready to turn her back on the traditional manufacturing heartland in the Midwest and parts of the South. In reality, the Democratic Party's record over the pasty twenty-five years on everything from trade to protections for labor is a fantastically dismal one.

The best strategy to counter Trump's rise would be to focus on the legitimate grievances of much of his constituency while countering his appeal to identity politics. Democratic elites who view the white working class as hopelessly racist are playing into Trump's hands (while also discounting the racism of the professional class). But while they dither, the thunder of a movement inspired by the storm that is Donald Trump continues to coalesce. And even if Trump disappears from the political radar tomorrow, the backlash he has inspired will live on.

From the crumbling factory walls of the Rust Belt to the shuttered main streets of the Deep South, a revolt is underway. The long forgotten "flyover country" is erupting in a paroxysm of anger and despair over the generations of decline that have battered once solid bastions of white working and lower-middle class America. With progressive voices replaced by neoliberal orthodoxy, no constructive outlets remain to channel the cacophony emerging from the heartland. With a fading Bernie Sanders and a rising Trump, the outcome might already be decided. If both parties fail to come up with economic solutions for decaying sections of the country's interior (and if no radical movements emerge from the grass roots), the potential for the worst possible right-wing backlash will remain. It is certain that America will never right itself until it deals with this crisis; if it does not, the forces of nativism and demagoguery will win the day. And from there, we will all reap the whirlwind.


Notes

[1] Charles Etlinger, "Mahoning Valley Faces 70s Crisis," Youngstown Vindicator, September 27, 1970.

[2] "Austintown 5th-Fastest Dying Town in U.S. Says Forbes," Vindicator, December 20, 2008.

[3] Peter H. Milliken, "The Elephant in the Room," Vindicator, March 20, 2016.

[4] Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson, Homeland (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2004), xlii.

[5] Wonkblog, Jeff Guo, "The Places That Support Trump and Cruz are Suffering. But That's Not True of Rubio," Washington Post, February 8, 2016.

[6] Olga Khazan, "Middle-Aged White Americans are Dying of Despair," The Atlantic, November 4, 2015.

[7] Wonkblog, Jeff Guo, "Death Predicts Whether People Vote for Donald Trump," Washington Post, March 4, 2016.

[8] Economic Policy Institute, "The Manufacturing Footprint and the Importance of U.S. Manufacturing Jobs," January 22, 2015.

[9] Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People? (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2016),9.

[10] CBC Radio, "It's not Bigotry but Bad Trade Deals Driving Trump Voters, Says Author Thomas Frank," CBC online site. http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/the-current-for-march-16-2016-1.3493397/it-s-not-bigotry-but-bad-trade-deals-driving-trump-voters-says-author-thomas-frank-1.3493433 (accessed March 22, 2016).

[11] Economic Policy Institute, "NAFTA's Impact on U.S. Workers," December 9, 2013.

[12] Rick Manning, "A Rebuttal to National Review's Claim that White Working Class Communities Deserve to Die," Bretibart News, March 17, 2016.

The Value of Utopia: The American Tradition of Radical Utopianism

By Nick Partyka

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Introduction

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

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

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


Looking Backwards, on Bellamyism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Political Utopias in Antebellum America

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

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


Owenism

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

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

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

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


Fourierism

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

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

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

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

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


Conclusion

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

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

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


Notes

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

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

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

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

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

By Shane Burley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Questions for Augustus Sol Invictus:


1. Are you a racial or ethnic nationalist?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Spider Webs for the Rich and Mighty": A Libertarian-Socialist Critique of Criminal Law

By Colin Jenkins

As human societies have developed over the course of history, so too have corollary systems of order. In the most basic sense, the often informal development of customs, norms and ethics become inevitable in spaces where groups of human beings come together to interact with another. However, as the scales of human interaction have grown - from tribes to communities to nation-states - these informal codes of conduct have become formal systems of rule and order which have taken on physical identities in the form of states and governments.

In his influential essay, Politics as Vocation, Max Weber provided one of the most important analyses regarding the sociological development of the state. Weber introduced the concept of rational-legal authority in his attempt to explain the rise and justification of the modern bureaucratic nation-state. As a self-described "bourgeois theorist," Weber provided a strong breakdown of the modern state, tended towards justifying its purpose, and recognized the inherently forceful nature of its existence:

"'Every state is founded on force,' said Trotsky at Brest-Litovsk. That is indeed right. If no social institutions existed which knew the use of violence, then the concept of 'state' would be eliminated, and a condition would emerge that could be designated as 'anarchy,' in the specific sense of this word."[1]

Perhaps most crucial was Weber's notion of a "monopoly of violence" for which he viewed as a legitimate power of the state:

"Today, however, we have to say that a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Note that 'territory' is one of the characteristics of the state. Specifically, at the present time, the right to use physical force is ascribed to other institutions or to individuals only to the extent to which the state permits it. The state is considered the sole source of the 'right' to use violence."[2]

Weber's justification is predicated upon two important assumptions: (1) that a distinction between authority and coercion exists, and that authority becomes legitimate when "individuals accept and act upon orders that are given to them because they believe that to do so is right;" [3] and (2) that rational-legal authority itself is legitimized, via the political process, by the people under its rule. Despite the questionable nature of these assumptions, Weber's hierarchical structure has come to dominate our world. The formation of criminal law, while not just a modern phenomenon, has provided further justification for rational-legal authority. And the formidable development of modern criminal justice systems equipped with the means to carry out this "monopoly of violence" on a daily basis has assured the maintenance of Weber's state.

These legitimized systems of violence, authority and coercion have reached a point where they are accepted by most without hesitation: a common acceptance that begs to be questioned.


Law as Morality

"Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them."

- Assata Shakur


There has been an ongoing, centuries-long societal experiment to equate written laws with morality. The historical development of human societies have made laws necessary for reasons that will be discussed below, and the need to house these laws in justifications centered within authority and domination (also discussed below) have relied on an institutional "rebranding" of these hierarchical relations. One of the main tools in this rebranding process has been the inclusion of morality-based conditioning, which exists everywhere from parenting to public education. This is not a new phenomenon, but yet persists as a main tool in shaping customs and norms which are amenable with living under systems of domination. In his 1886 classic, Law and Authority, Peter Kropotkin touches on this deep conditioning process used to create an obedient population:

"We are so perverted by an education which from infancy seeks to kill in us the spirit of revolt, and to develop that of submission to authority; we are so perverted by this existence under the ferule of a law, which regulates every event in life - our birth, our education, our development, our love, our friendship - that, if this state of things continues, we shall lose all initiative, all habit of thinking for ourselves.

Indeed, for some thousands of years, those who govern us have done nothing but ring the changes upon "Respect for law, obedience to authority." This is the moral atmosphere in which parents bring up their children, and school only serves to confirm the impression. Cleverly assorted scraps of spurious science are inculcated upon the children to prove necessity of law; obedience to the law is made a religion; moral goodness and the law of the masters are fused into one and the same divinity. The historical hero of the schoolroom is the man who obeys the law, and defends it against rebels." [4]

This cultural conditioning seeks to establish widespread consent, or at least the appearance of such, through the construction of an artificial system of morality. As opposed to ethics and morals which are innate attributes of the human race - live and let live, treat others as you would expect to be treated, cooperate and co-exist, etc - these artificial systems of morality have been designed to make "rights" synonymous with things like authority, order and obedience, and "wrongs" as being synonymous with any and all dissent from this established order.

Governments play a major role in this cultural process, and modern systems of liberal democracy aid in this construction. In The Individual, Society, and the State, Emma Goldman sheds light on this phenomenon:

"Political government and the State were a much later development, growing out of the desire of the stronger to take advantage of the weaker, of the few against the many. The State, ecclesiastical and secular, served to give an appearance of legality and right to the wrong done by the few to the many. That appearance of right was necessary the easier to rule the people, because no government can exist without the consent of the people, consent open, tacit or assumed. Constitutionalism and democracy are the modern forms of that alleged consent; the consent being inoculated and indoctrinated by what is called "education," at home, in the church, and in every other phase of life.

That consent is the belief in authority, in the necessity for it. At its base is the doctrine that man is evil, vicious, and too incompetent to know what is good for him. On this all government and oppression is built. God and the State exist and are supported by this dogma." [5]

This artificial notion of morality, and the modern creation of "manufactured consent" via systems of "constitutionalism and democracy," is what Howard Zinn aptly referred to as The Conspiracy of Law. In transitioning the deliverance of authority from the "rule of men" to the "rule of law," according to Zinn, the power brokers have not only created their own sets of "Natural law," but have also made such laws nearly impossible to question:

"The modern era, presumably replacing the arbitrary rule of men with the objective, impartial rule of law, has not brought any fundamental change in the facts of unequal wealth and unequal power. What was done before - exploiting men and women, sending the young to war, putting troublesome people into dungeons - is still done, except that this no longer appears as the arbitrary action of the feudal lord or the king; it is now invested with the authority of neutral, impersonal law. Indeed, because of this impersonality, it becomes possible to do far more injustice to people, with a stronger sanction of legitimacy. The rule of law can be more onerous than the divine right of the king, because it was known that the king was really a man, and even in the Middle Ages it was accepted that the king could not violate natural law. (See Otto Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Age, Notes 127-134.) A code of law is more easily defied than a flesh and blood monarchy; in the modern era, the positive law takes on the character of natural law."[6]

The repackaging of authority into morality (written law as natural law), and the arbitrary nature of this new authority, also make it nearly impossible to target:

"Under the rule of men, the enemy was identifiable, and so peasant rebellions hunted out the lords, slaves killed plantation owners, and radicals assassinated monarchs. In the era of the corporation and the representative assembly, the enemy is elusive and unidentifiable; even to radicals the attempted assassination of the industrialist Frick by the anarchist Berkman seemed an aberration. In The Grapes of Wrath, the dispossessed farmer aims his gun confusedly at the tractor driver who is knocking down his house, learns that behind him is the banker in Oklahoma City and behind him a banker in New York, and cries out, 'Then who can I shoot?'" [7]


Law as Authority

"As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy in the special interests that it serves."

- Noam Chomsky


The need for written laws is something that is rarely, if ever, questioned. It is a common belief that such laws are necessary, and that "the need for law lies in the history of the human race."[8] In popular college textbooks like Essentials of Criminal Law, this common acceptance is housed in a rationality that can be summarized by the following: 1) People are individuals, and their desires, needs, and wants differ from those of others; 2) These differences cause conflict; 3) When people began to live in groups, communities, and societies, laws became necessary; and 4) Law became necessary as a means of social control, either to alleviate conflicts or to settle them in a manner most advantageous to the group.[9]

When viewed in this manner, laws are presented as a mechanism designed to serve the community for which they are applied. The assumptions for applying them under this rationale are numerous: for example, we must assume that all individuals within a given community/society are allowed equal access to basic necessities; we must assume that all individuals are treated equally under the law; and we must assume that material conditions (or the base economic system for which society rests) allow for free association among all members. Without this foundation, as summarized by these basic assumptions, the justification widely used in support of written laws becomes null and void.

Therefore, when applied to societies that are shaped by flawed economic systems - systems that disenfranchise members and fail to allow many to fulfill basic needs - laws no longer serve the community, but rather serve the most powerful members of that community. In this instance, laws are transformed from statutes designed to enhance the common good to statutes designed to control the disenfranchised members. When this transformation occurs, laws become weapons of authority, essentially losing their legitimacy within a given community or society. Kropotkin describes this transformation which is based in the need to establish the domination of the minority over the majority:

"The desire to dominate others and impose one's own will upon them; the desire to seize upon the products of the labour of a neighbouring tribe; the desire to surround oneself with comforts without producing anything, whilst slaves provide their master with the means of procuring every sort of pleasure and luxury - these selfish, personal desires give rise to another current of habits and customs. The priest and the warrior, the charlatan who makes a profit out of superstition, and after freeing himself from the fear of the devil, cultivates it in others; and the bully, who procures the invasion and pillage of his neighbours, that he may return laden with booty, and followed by slaves; these two, hand in hand, have succeeded in imposing upon primitive society customs advantageous to both of them, but tending to perpetuate their domination of the masses. Profiting by the indolence, the fears, the inertia of the crowd, and thanks to the continual repetition of the same acts, they have permanently established customs which have become a solid basis for their own domination." [10]

The establishment of authority and domination becomes necessary when a minority section of society decides that it is deserving of owning wealth and land far beyond the purpose of its own use. This development naturally leads to the disenfranchisement of a multitude of members whose size grows in a perpetual manner alongside the constant pursuit of more wealth and land by the elite. As this development continues, laws are reduced to serving this dominant minority. Kropotkin explains:

"But as society became more and more divided into two hostile classes, one seeking to establish its domination, the other struggling to escape, the strife began. Now the conqueror was in a hurry to secure the results of his actions in a permanent form, he tried to place them beyond question, to make them holy and venerable by every means in his power. Law made its appearance under the sanction of the priest, and the warrior's club was placed at its service. Its office was to render immutable such customs as were to the advantage of the dominant minority." [11]

As time goes on, these laws become customs that are widely accepted even by the majority-population for which they are designed to control, and to prevent from accessing basic human needs, through violence and coercion. This gradual process has led to the modern justifications given above, all of which ignore the historical process of minority rule via the disenfranchisement of the majority, to the point where the legitimacy of such laws are no longer questioned. As Kropotkin concludes:

"Such was law; and it has maintained its two-fold character to this day. Its origin is the desire of the ruling class to give permanence to customs imposed by themselves for their own advantage. Its character is the skilful commingling of customs useful to society, customs which have no need of law to insure respect, with other customs useful only to rulers, injurious to the mass of the people, and maintained only by the fear of punishment.

Like individual capital, which was born of fraud and violence, and developed under the auspices of authority, law has no title to the respect of men. Born of violence and superstition, and established in the interests of consumer, priest and rich exploiter, it must be utterly destroyed on the day when the people desire to break their chains."[12]


Criminal Law in a Capitalist System

"Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread."

- Emma Goldman


As with all societies, written laws become the primary mean of maintaining the status quo. The most fundamental purpose of such laws is to create and maintain a minimal degree of stability or at the very least a semblance of stability within certain areas of society. In the modern United States, the status quo has been shaped by a base economic system of capitalism that is characterized by multi-generational poverty, extreme inequality, and high concentrations of wealth and power. Therefore, when applied to this base, criminal laws are essentially statutes that are developed by legislators who either come from or are tied to those concentrations of wealth and power, and are placed upon the at-large population which has already been disenfranchised by the economic system. Because of this, a critical theory of criminal law becomes vital in deconstructing the nature and purpose of such laws.

In his essay Crime Control in Capitalist Society, Richard Quinney provides us with important assertions that must be understood before moving forward with this breakdown:


· American society is based on an advanced capitalist economy.

· The State is organized to serve the interests of the dominant economic class, the capitalist ruling class.

· Criminal law is an instrument of the State and ruling class to maintain and perpetuate the existing social and economic order.

· Crime control in capitalist society is accomplished through a variety of institutions and agencies established and administered by a government elite, representing ruling-class interests, for the purpose of establishing domestic order.

· The contradictions of advanced capitalism - the disjunction between existence and essence require that the subordinate classes remain oppressed by whatever means necessary, especially through the coercion and violence of the legal system.

· Only with the collapse of capitalist society and the creation of a new society, based on socialist principles, will there be a solution of the crime problem.[13]


The process of transforming laws into weapons of authority to be wielded by the wealth and land-owning minority over the disenfranchised majority, as touched on by Kropotkin, has reached its current stage via the promulgation of this "advanced capitalist economy" in the United States. This system, as an economic base, has allowed for the historical continuation of separating the masses from access to basic needs, while also fusing the law-making apparatus (the government) nearly completely with the wealth-owning elite (the former private sector).

When examining criminal justice systems found under capitalism, Marxist gatekeeper theory is invaluable. The most basic application of this Marxian analysis proves helpful in illustrating the positions of those who commit crimes versus those who create and enforce laws. Basic tenets of this theory include:


· Deviance (as determined by the artificial morality described above) is partly the product of unequal power relations and inequality in general.

· Crime, as established by the ruling class (with their own interests in mind) is an understandable response to the situation of poverty and mass disenfranchisement.

· Crime is often the result of offering society demeaning work with little sense of creativity.

· The base (economic system) disenfranchises the working-class majority; the superstructure (government and law creation) serves the ruling-class minority.

· The capitalist class (minority) co-opts the capitalist government to create laws that seek to maintain its power through coercing and controlling the working-class majority.

· "The heart of the capitalist system is the protection of private property, which is, by definition, the cornerstone upon which capitalistic economies function." Thus, written law reflects this fundamental value of property and profit over people. [14]


In the United States, the dominant ideology that espouses "individualism" and "exceptionalism" has been successful in merging manufactured morality and consent to the economic "virtues" of capitalism and patriotism, which are also manufactured in the same ways. Goldman explains the cultural effects of this process:

"This 'rugged individualism' has inevitably resulted in the greatest modern slavery, the crassest class distinctions, driving millions to the breadline. 'Rugged individualism' has meant all the 'individualism' for the masters, while the people are regimented into a slave caste to serve a handful of self-seeking 'supermen.' America is perhaps the best representative of this kind of individualism, in whose name political tyranny and social oppression are defended and held up as virtues; while every aspiration and attempt of man to gain freedom and social opportunity to live is denounced as 'unAmerican' and evil in the name of that same individualism."[15]

This merger serves to not only fortify the justification for written laws as tools of authority and domination over the majority, but also the unquestioned consent of those (in this case, the alienated working-class majority) being controlled and oppressed by such laws.

In direct contrast to a common belief in the need for law to address "natural" conflict in human societies, it is crucial to recognize the manufactured conflicts created by capitalism. The justification presented in the dominant paradigm possesses two fundamental flaws in this regard: the first of which lies in the view that conflict is in fact "natural" within all human societies; and the second being in the exclusion of material conditions as a factor in creating conflict. In order to be legitimized, this justification must rely on basic assumptions related to material conditions, most specifically the presence of an economic system which allows for equal and broad access to basic necessities such as food, clothing, shelter, healthcare, etc. Much like the false assumptions in Weber's analysis of the modern state, any premise that fails to consider the manufactured conflict stemming from the material conditions of a society's mode of production finds itself lacking legitimacy and justification.

In reality, capitalism creates widespread conflict by alienating the majority. Therefore, in such a system, "crime" (especially regarding that which is routinely enforced) represents the actions of people who have become dehumanized, dispossessed, stripped of human creativity, and left without the means to fulfill basic human needs.


Conclusion

"The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

- Audre Lorde


If human beings are in fact individuals with "different desires, needs, and wants," as described even by the dominant criminological paradigm, then we must question the existence of hierarchical societies based in authority and domination. Such societal arrangements persist and have been accepted as "common sense" despite the inherent contradictions they impose. Within these arrangements, written laws have been identified as "social controls" needed to "alleviate natural conflict" and settle such conflict "in a manner most advantageous to the group (society/community)." However, when applied to societies that have been shaped by flawed economic systems (like capitalism) and historical processes that have led to wealth and land-owning minorities "governing" disenfranchised majorities, laws have taken on a different identity, mainly one that serves as a weapon of unquestioned authority.

Authority, in itself, is not a wholly illegitimate concept. Authority as a measure of competence or expertise may be extremely useful when serving society. However, when it becomes a means of social control, of domination by one over another, its legitimacy should come into question. Mikhail Bakunin perhaps explained this best in his treatise, What is Authority:

"Does it follow that I reject all authority? Far from me such a thought. In the matter of boots, I refer to the authority of the boot-maker; concerning houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or the engineer. For such or such special knowledge I apply to such or such a savant. But I allow neither the boot-maker nor the architect nor savant to impose his authority upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and censure. I do not content myself with consulting a single authority in any special branch; I consult several; I compare their opinions, and choose that which seems to me the soundest. But I recognize no infallible authority, even in special questions; consequently, whatever respect I may have for the honesty and the sincerity of such or such individual, I have no absolute faith in any person. Such a faith would be fatal to my reason, to my liberty, and even to the success of my undertakings; it would immediately transform me into a stupid slave, an instrument of the will and interests of others." [16]

Because they are constructed for the purpose of controlling the disenfranchised masses of people, modern laws represent authority of the illegitimate kind. Speaking of such laws, the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon famously proclaimed:

"I recognize none of them: I protest against every order which it may please some power, from pretended necessity, to impose upon my free will. Laws! We know what they are, and what they are worth! Spider webs for the rich and mighty, steel chains for the weak and poor, fishing nets in the hands of the government."[17]

In the modern United States, Proudhon's vision plays out every day. Under capitalism, laws are created by millionaire legislators who are financially supported by billionaire interests, enforced by hired guns of the working class (police), and ruled on by wealthy elites in black robes who are largely detached from their subjects. As capitalism naturally leads to greater concentrations of wealth and power, along with greater numbers of dispossessed citizens, crime and punishment becomes solely directed at the most marginalized of these masses. In the US, this includes the poor, the working poor, and people of color.

This correlation has never been more evident than in the neoliberal era (roughly 1980 until now), which is widely recognized as an intensification of the capitalist system. Since 1980, the total adult correctional population (those in prison/jail and on probation/parole) has increased from two million to seven million.[18] During this time, the prison population itself has increased 470 percent (from 320,000 in 1980) to 1.5 million in 2013.[19] Those scooped up by ruling class "fishing nets" and placed in "steel chains" are disproportionately poor and black.[20]

This scenario that has developed over the course of centuries has delegitimized any attempt to establish state authority, coercion, and its "monopoly of violence" via the criminal justice system. As long as capitalism is used to shape the social relations that are to be monitored and controlled, the state remains as nothing more than a tool to be wielded by the wealth and land-owning minority. And as long as the state remains a coercive extension of these social relations, the notion of criminal law will remain nothing more than a camouflaged totalitarianism designed to keep its boot on the neck of the disenfranchised majority.



References

[1] Weber, Max (1919), "Politics as a Vocation." Accessed online at http://anthropos-lab.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Weber-Politics-as-a-Vocation.pdf

[2] Ibid

[3] Best, Shaun (2002), Introduction to Politics and Society (Sage Publications) Accessed online at https://www.sagepub.com/sites/default/files/upm-binaries/9547_017533ch2.pdf

[4] Kropotkin, Peter (1886), Law and Authority. Accessed online at the Anarchist Library on November 12, 2015 @ http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-law-and-authority

[5] Goldman, Emma (1940), The Individual, Society and the State. Accessed online at the Anarchist Library on November 12, 2015 @ http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-the-individual-society-and-the-state

[6] Zinn, Howard (1971), "The Conspiracy of Law." Appeared in The Rule of Law, edited by Robert Paul Wolff (New York: Simon and Schuster)

[7] Ibid

[8] Chamelin, N. & Thomas, A. (2009) Essentials of Criminal Law, 11th edition (Prentice Hall)

[9] Ibid

[10] Kropotkin (1886)

[11] Ibid

[12] Ibid

[13] Quinney, Richard (1975), "Crime Control in Capitalist Society: A Critical Philosophy of Legal Order." Appeared in Critical Criminology, edited by Ian Taylor (Routledge)

[14] Covington, Jeanette (2000), Marxist Perspective on Crime. Accessed on November 29, 2015 at http://www.sociology.org.uk/

[15] Goldman (1940)

[16] Bakunin, Mikhail (1871), What is Authority? Accessed online at the Anarchist Library on November 12, 2015 @ http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/michail-bakunin-what-is-authority

[17] Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1851), General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century. Republished by Courier (2013)

[18] Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), US Office of Justice Programs (2014). Accessed online at http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p13.pdf

[19] The Sentencing Project: Research for Advocacy and Reform (2014). Accessed online at http://www.sentencingproject.org/template/page.cfm?id=107

[20] BJS (2014)

American Violence in Chicago and Beyond: The Morbid Symptoms of Our Interregnum

By Jim Burns

On November 24th, Chicago police officer Jason van Dyke was indicted on first-degree murder charges for the public execution of 17 year-old Laquan McDonald in October 2014. The same week, the Chicago Police moved to fire police detective Dante Servin for murdering 22 year-old Rekia Boyd in 2012, and on December 1st, Mayor Rahm Emanuel fired Chicago Police Commissioner Garry McCarthy. Those events have shed even greater light on the systematic racist violence woven through the history of the Chicago Police Department and the city government more broadly. That brutal history includes the Department's complicity in the assassination of Chicago Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton and fellow Black Panther Party leader Mark Clark in December 1969.

The most recent stories about police violence in Chicago are occurring at the same time as allegations have surfaced about the Dothan, Alabama Police Department. According to documents leaked by department whistleblowers, a group of narcotics officers planted drugs and weapons on African American men "for years," and the District Attorney covered-up an ensuing internal affairs investigation to protect the officers' careers (see Carroll, 2015). The unit's supervisor, current Police Chief Steve Parrish, Sgt. Andy Hughes, now Alabama's Director of Homeland Security, and other officers involved were reportedly also active in a Neo-Confederate organization, which advocates the return of Blacks to Africa and has called the Civil Rights Movement a "Jewish conspiracy." The actions of those officers could impact hundreds of criminal cases in which African American men were prosecuted and many sent to prison. Those White police officers viewed Black men as nothing more than commodities on which to build their careers, and many have reportedly received promotions and now occupy leadership positions in law enforcement.

Back in Chicago, Emanuel's firing of Police Commissioner McCarthy cannot obfuscate the culpability of Emanuel himself, Cook County Prosecutor Anita Alvarez, and perhaps others in what Columbia Law Professor Bernard Harcourt characterized in the New York Times as a cover-up of Mr. McDonald's murder during Emanuel's re-election campaign. Considering the city government's extensive history of numerous forms of violence against Persons of Color and its willful negligence, abuse of power, and betrayal of the public trust, Harcourt and others are calling for the resignations of Emanuel and Alvarez as well. Further, cover-up allegations must be investigated, and if warranted Emanuel, Alvarez, McCarthy, and any others involved should face criminal prosecution.

In addition to the police murders of Mr. McDonald and Ms. Boyd, the Guardian (see Ackerman, 2015) earlier this year filed a transparency lawsuit and reported an "off-the-books interrogation warehouse" at Homan Square where between August 2004 and June 2015 the Chicago Police "disappeared" more than 7,000 people, nearly 6,000 of whom were Black. The Guardian report indicates that police allowed lawyers to access Homan Square, for only 0.94% of the 7,185 arrests logged during that 11-year period, and reportedly held those arrested for hours or days, denied them phone calls to their families or attorneys, and pressured many to become informants.

Another example of the City of Chicago's institutional violence against communities of Color includes Emanuel's 2013 closure of 49 public schools that served primarily African American and Latino communities, the largest mass closure of public schools in a single city ever, despite massive protests by teachers, led by Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, parents, students, and community members. Speaking on Democracy Now! in 2013, education historian Diane Ravich characterized Emanuel's school closures, also a contentious issue in his re-election bid, as an economic development plan predicated on gentrification and the privatization of public education in the form of charter schools, which will transfer public funds to private edupreneurs. That same racist neoliberal formula has eviscerated public education for poor communities of Color in places like New Orleans and Philadelphia as well.

The contemporary violence perpetrated by the criminal injustice system against communities of Color, exemplified by the murder of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of his murderer, and the police murders of Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Walter Scott, and too many others also brings into sharper focus the long and complex history of multiple forms of institutional violence targeted at African Americans and many Others at the behest of corporate power. In Chicago alone, examples of police violence against African Americans and organized labor include the Haymarket Labor Uprising of 1886, the Pullman Strike of 1894, the 1919 Race Riots, the 1931 Chicago Eviction Riot, and the 1968 police violence directed at anti-war protestors during the Democratic National Convention.


Racist Violence and the History of Public Policing

The recent visibility of violence against African Americans makes clear the long history of institutional racism in policing and the criminal justice system more broadly. Marlese Durr's research traces contemporary police violence against African Americans to the beginning of colonial policing, which in the American South centered on slave patrols, the first publically-funded police departments. As Black Americans migrated to Northern cities from the South due to vicious political, social, and economic repression and violence during early Reconstruction by the military, state militias, and the KKK, which took the place of disbanded slave patrols, Northern police adopted violent tactics similar to Southern slave patrols to control and segregate African Americans from Whites (Durr, 2015). Current aggressive police practices such as racial profiling, stop-and-frisk, and driving while Black, as well as the unjustified use of deadly force continue the slave patrol ethos in modern policing and other judicial and political institutions (Durr, 2015).

Durr's work and scholarship by Michelle Alexander and Bryan Stevenson on the Post-Jim Crow racism underlying our criminal injustice system, the neoliberal prison-industrial complex, and school-to-prison pipeline further illuminate the complexity of institutional and individual racialized, classed, gendered violence ubiquitous in U.S. history.


Individual and Institutional Violence in Broader Historical Context

The history of the U.S. is the history of militarism and violence. In American Violence: A Documentary History, Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace (1970) documented American political, economic, racial, religious, police, and personal violence as well as domestic terrorism, from the violence between Puritans and Pilgrims to the assassinations of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, and Robert F. Kennedy. Hofstadter and Wallace noted that American violence is widely regarded as representative of a history, but not a tradition for two reasons:

"First, our violence lacks both an ideological and geographical center; it lacks cohesion; it has been too various, diffuse, and spontaneous to be forged into a single, sustained, inveterate hatred shared by entire social classes. Second, we have a remarkable lack of memory where violence is concerned and have left most of our excesses a part of our buried history." (p. 3)

While I agree that Americans, particularly White Americans, suffer, as Hofstadter and Wallace put it, a pervasive "historical amnesia" about domestic violence, I disagree somewhat with the contention that American violence lacks cohesion, particularly in the current historical moment. Perhaps this is because Hofstadter and Wallace defined violence purely in terms of physical violence rather than interrogating American violence in both its physical and institutional forms. Their organization of American violence in terms of religious, racial, class, and political violence suggests a cohesive ideological nexus through which acts of individual violence have occurred in the context of institutional support of the corporate state. Over the last five decades particularly, many assumptions that have historically driven classism, racism, gender discrimination, religious intolerance, nativism, militarization, and a hyper-masculine ethos of violence as restorative have coalesced through the enthrallment with neoliberalism into an ideology that rationalizes, celebrates, and markets violence.

Thus, during the same week that Jason van Dyke was indicted for Laquan McDonald's murder, Robert Lewis Dear allegedly murdered three people and wounded nine others at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs. While Dear, a White 57 year-old male, was being taken into custody-a radically different fate than that which befell Mr. McDonald and Ms. Boyd-he reportedly repeated the words "no more baby parts," a reference to an incendiary undercover, heavily edited video created by an anti-abortion group that purports to show Planned Parenthood employees discussing the sale of fetal tissue (see Holpuch, 2015). Evangelical Republican presidential hopeful and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who has long articulated staunch anti-abortion and homophobic rhetoric, called the Colorado Springs attack "domestic terrorism, especially for those of us in the pro-life movement" (see Bobic, 2015). Yet considering the history of outrageously violent rhetoric and actions among many in the "pro-life" movement, Huckabee's condemnation seems more a disingenuous attempt to distance himself from his own violent rhetoric to bolster his failing presidential campaign.

Reflecting further on Huckabee's statement equating the Colorado Springs massacre with domestic terrorism reminds me of a 2013 National Public Radio interview with John Lewis on the 50th anniversary of George Wallace's 1963 inaugural address after being elected Governor of Alabama in which he vowed "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever" (see NPR, 2013). Lewis reflected on the power of words to create a climate in which some rationalize an entitlement to violence:

"My governor, this elected official, was saying in effect, you are not welcome, you are not welcome. Words can be very powerful. Words can be dangerous. Governor Wallace never pulled a trigger. He never fired a gun. But in his speech he created the environment for others to pull the trigger in the days, the weeks, and months to come."

Considering the deep and complex history of multiple, intersected forms of violence in the U.S., is it any wonder that America has descended into a de-socialized milieu marked by fear and the militarization of our social and political institutions? The twisted neoliberal ethos of markets above all else, bereft of any ethic of social responsibility and imbued with voracious selfishness and greed thrives on the manufacture and manipulation of crises through which all forms of wealth are redistributed upward to an oligarchic elite. That elite, who consider democracy itself a disposable excess and an impediment to capitalism, has largely succeeded in reconfiguring the state to serve the interests of corporate power. Corporate power has thus become overwhelming, ubiquitous, invisible, and unaccountable, professes no loyalty to any nation-state, has rendered establishment political parties a joke, and elections a high-priced reality show-like farce. The corporate state has facilitated the concentration of wealth and power into so few hands that the state wields what Max Weber called the monopoly of the use of force solely in service of a corporate oligarchy against a sea of dispensable people.

The lexicon of neoliberalism has functioned similarly to George Wallace's hateful words by dispossessing burgeoning groups of people of any opportunity for a decent life. As Michael Kimmel demonstrated in Angry White Men, the violence and rage we see engulfing America and the world is gendered, raced, and classed. Despite maintaining control of every social, political, and economic institution, White men portray themselves as victims of discrimination because they interpret those social, economic, and political positions of power as their birthright. As women, racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ people, immigrants, and many Others have demanded equality and the breakdown of White, straight, patriarchy, some White men, particularly working-class Whites who have suffered economic dispossession, have turned their simmering rage into what Kimmel calls an aggrieved entitlement to the use violence to restore their thwarted sense of masculinity. Most outrageous, neoliberal elites and political demagogues have carefully cultivated that sense of aggrieved entitlement, and, like George Wallace more than 50 years ago, created a fertile ground for the mindless violence now consuming us.


Safe Spaces, Discomfort, and Transformation in a Death-Saturated Age

Violence against African Americans, Women, Queer Communities, Native Peoples, Immigrants, Organized Labor, and many Others has a long history and has taken many forms in the nexus of corporate-state power: slavery; the violent suppression of civil and political rights; genocide against Native Americans; the proliferation of the militarized carceral state; the poverty created by what Chris Hedges calls capitalist "sacrifice zones" filled with destroyed environmental landscapes and disposable people; massive educational inequities; and union busting to name a few. The concomitant upward redistribution of wealth and power has reached the point at which we find ourselves in what Henry Giroux (2014), quoting Robert Lifton, calls a "death-saturated age" in which "Political authority and power have been transformed into a sovereignty of corporate governance and rule" (p. 183). Giroux (2014) further warns:

"The United States has moved from a market economy to a market society in which all vestiges of the social contract are under attack, and politics is ruled by the irrational notion that casino capitalism should govern not simply the economy but the entirety of social life. Since the new Gilded Age began, not only are democratic values and social protections at risk, but the civic and formative cultures that make such values and protections central to democratic life are in danger or disappearing altogether." (p. 184)

Educator and education researcher Lisa Delpit (2012) has written that "true culture supports its people; it doesn't destroy them" (p. 7). The market society of which Giroux (2014) writes has only hardened ethics of cruelty and violence such as racism, gender discrimination, homophobia, religious intolerance, hyper-nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, etc., which have always existed in the U.S., but have increasingly been mobilized to the extent that they have come to define America. That viciousness and the anti-politics associated with the creation of a market society has spawned a destructive, survival of the fittest anti-culture expressed in Margaret Thatcher's cruel maxim that "there is no such thing as society, only individuals and families" (Giroux, 2014, p. 187). Sadly, Tocqueville saw the darker side of Thatcher's de-socializing hyper-individualism in his 19th Century study of American democracy:

"Individualism is a recent expression arising out of a new idea. Our fathers knew only the word egoism….Individualism is a reflective and tranquil sentiment that disposes each citizen to cut himself off from the mass of his fellow men and withdraw into the circle of family and friends, so that, having created a little society for his own use, he gladly leaves the larger society to take care of itself." (2004, p. 585)

Considering the pervasiveness of the neoliberal marketizing ethos as it seeps into every social and political sphere, is it any wonder that everyone and everything has become commodified with a "market value?" Our environment is valued only to the extent that the "surplus value" can be extracted from its resources. Human value lies in the ability to serve the market society through consumption, debt, and adherence to a cruel ethos of self-interest driven, as Toni Morrison (2015) writes, by a perverse sense of individualism as a taxpayer with no sense of obligation to serve others as a citizen.

My greatest concern as a teacher lies in the cooptation of education, both in formal and informal educational spaces, by neoliberal edupreneurs. Marketized education reframes schools, colleges, universities, and public educational spaces as profit centers for all sorts of "educational" products and envisages education as a reductive, instrumental system of technical training and disciplinary control by which to churn out compliant worker/consumers bereft of the critical conscience to question institutional power or imagine any other future than the present that has been engineered for them. As Giroux (2014) explains:

"Public education has become a site of pedagogical repression, robbing students of the ability to think critically as a result of the two political business parties' emphasis on education as mindless testing, standardization, and the deskilling of teachers….low-income and poor minority students increasingly find themselves in schools in which the line between prison culture and school culture is blurred." (p. 184)

Just as outrageous in the context of a history of institutional violence against Persons of Color are the rants by privileged White anti-public anti-intellectuals like Kathleen Parker, who excoriated "thin-skinned" students and "safe spaces" in a November 24th Washington Post op-ed. Considering the proximity Parker's own "hissy fit" to anti-racism actions at numerous colleges and universities and public mass actions against police violence, Parker's commentary is uninformed, flawed, and racist as well. What Parker and those of her privileged ilk prove incapable of even attempting to understand is that their entire lives, as has mine as a White, straight, cisgender, middle-class American man, have been lived in one continuous safe space in which their Whiteness, class, and culture have been unreflectively affirmed in every textbook they have ever read, every relationship they have been privileged to have chosen, every form of media they have seen, and the very society they have, as Tocqueville wrote, created for themselves. They have never had the courage to confront their partial experiences and flawed assumptions about themselves, their culture, history, and Others, and they have worn their culture and Whiteness as a "neutral norm" against which all else is Other. They have been privileged to live in a safe space described by the late Ronald Takaki as the Master Narrative of American History:

"According to this powerful and popular but inaccurate story, our country was settled by European immigrants, and Americans are white. 'Race,' observed Toni Morrison, has functioned as a 'metaphor' necessary to the 'construction of Americanness': in the creation of our national identity, 'American' has been defined as 'white.' Not to be 'white' is to be designated as 'Other'-different, inferior, and unassimilable." (Takaki, 2008, p. 4)

The Master Narrative derives its power of marginalization through expunging the histories of Others. It is a selective history in which stories that support the Master Narrative are included, while the stories of Others that might trouble the false narrative of a righteous, "exceptional" White Christian nation are selected out. One recent example includes the McGraw-Hill Company's catering to the Texas State Board of Education's historically nativist anti-intellectualism by creating a World Geography textbook that discusses Slavery as part of a pattern of immigration that brought "millions of workers from Africa to the Southern United States to work on agricultural plantations" (see Fernandez & Hauser, 2015). Another is the effort by then Republican Governor Mitch Daniels, who embodies the trend of non-academics running colleges and universities as the current president of Purdue, to ban the use of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States in public universities in Indiana (see Jaschik, 2013a, b). In response to Daniels' anti-intellectual attack on Zinn, John Tirman of MIT noted:

"As to the anti-American canard, I see this as the last refuge of a politician who is quite ignorant of the discourses in many quarters of American intellectual and activist life….Daniels does not understand that a vibrant civil society has many voices, many perspectives. To be contrary to the old mainstream construction of history is not equivalent to being anti-American. That should be obvious, but to a politician who still seems to be campaigning for something, it never will be. His unsuitability to be Purdue's president is glaring." (See Jaschik, 2013b)


The Morbid Symptoms of the Interregnum

The fundamental aims and philosophy of mass education, curriculum, and pedagogy have always been highly contested, and the pendulum has historically swung back and forth between capitalism and democracy, between justice and injustice. Today, however, the anti-politics of the market society created through contemporary neoliberalism have become so de-socialized and democracy itself so eviscerated that formal political mechanisms no longer seem capable of controlling the obscene excesses and multiple forms of violence inherent in unfettered capitalism. As our public institutions, particularly schools, universities and other public educational spaces, succumb to the logic of the market society, they increasingly become complicit in what Paulo Freire in Pedagogy of the Oppressed called the banking concept of education. Banking education suffers a "narration sickness" in which teachers-and I argue anyone in a pedagogical role in formal or informal educational spaces-talk about "reality as if it were motionless, static, compartmentalized, and predictable" and expound "on a topic completely alien to the existential experience of the students" (Freire, 2009, p. 71). Banking pedagogy views human beings as empty vessels to be filled with the knowledge and dispositions to benefit the oppressor, an utterly de-humanizing process.

John Ralston Saul, in The Collapse of Globalism and the Reinvention of the World, quotes Antonio Gramsci, who wrote: "The old is dying, the new struggles to be born, and in the interregnum there are many morbid symptoms" (p. 215). People all over the world are seeing neoliberalism and all its pathologies, which extend far further into history than the neoliberal era itself, for what they are: broken promises that have broken societies, souls, and threaten to break the world. It is, as Saul writes, a dangerous time in which those who cling to power and its accouterments do so with such violence that they are blinded to the inevitable collapse of their system and the beliefs and assumptions on which the system rests. Yet Saul also asserts that we have choices:

"The belief that we do not have choices is a fantasy, an unfortunate indulgence in abdication. And so the curious thing about inevitability is that it tends not to last very long. The more the true believers in a reigning theory of truth insist that its growth is inevitable and therefore eternal, the faster the rest of us, who have a bit of distance, tend to decide that we do have the power of choice. And all things considered, we would rather choose some other approach" (p. 13)

In contrast to the banking concept of education, and our passive acceptance of the inevitable, Freire (2009) proposes a libertarian education as a process of reconciliation. Although Freire's writing in Pedagogy of the Oppressed was contextualized in adult literacy education, his conceptualization of liberating education has implications for all aspects of education, society, the economy, and governance. The key to liberation lies, as Freire wrote decades ago, not in integrating Others into the existing system-the inevitable-but in transforming institutions and structures as radically democratic so that everyone, can become "beings for themselves." Importantly, that transformation requires coalition building among and between some seemingly unlikely partners, who as yet fail to recognize their common interests in transforming the world through breaking hegemonic power and reframing power relations as more just.

In the epilogue of American Violence, Richard Hofstadter referred to the fatalism expressed by Lincoln, who saw the Civil War as divinely ordained as a "terrible but just way" of ridding America of slavery (p. 478). Yet Hofstadter, like Saul, condemns such fatalism as "hardly suitable to those who sense a potential catastrophe that they can still hope to avert," further noting: "The metapolitics of divine judgment are the last resort of those who have failed; the appeal to human judgment must be the first resort of those who expect to succeed" (p. 478). In the last analysis, we are in Gramsci's interregnum filled with morbid symptoms. Proceeding with educated hope and the expectation to succeed requires not a return to some romanticized notion of citizenship, but a fundamental rethinking of what radical democratic citizenship might mean. And this will require all of us to, as the late Dennis Carlson urged, sail from our safe harbors and rethink the world in new ways.



References

Ackerman, S. (2015, October 19). Homan Square revealed: How Chicago police 'disappeared' 7,000 people. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/19/homan-square-chicago-police-disappeared-thousands

Bobic, I. (2015, November 29). Mike Huckabee calls Planned Parenthood shooting 'domestic terrorism.' The Huffington Post. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mike-huckabee-planned-parenthood-shooting-terrorism_565b1c50e4b08e945feb73cc?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000013&section=politics

Carlson, D. (2002). Leaving safe harbors: Toward a new progressivism in American education and public life. New York, NY: RoutledgeFalmer.

Carroll, J. (2015, December 1). Leaked documents reveal Dothan Police Department planted drugs on young Black Men for years. The Henry County Report. Retrieved from http://henrycountyreport.com/blog/2015/12/01/leaked-documents-reveal-dothan-police-department-planted-drugs-on-young-black-men-for-years-district-attorney-doug-valeska-complicit/

Delpit, L. (2012). "Multiplication is for white people:" Raising expectations for other people's children. New York, NY: The New Press.

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Durr, M. (2015). What is the difference between slave patrols and modern day policing? Institutional violence in a community of color. Critical Sociology, 41(6), 873-879.

Fernandez, M., & Hauser, C. (2015, October 5). Texas mother teacher textbook company a lesson on accuracy. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/us/publisher-promises-revisions-after-textbook-refers-to-african-slaves-as-workers.html

Freire, P. (2009). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th Anniversary Ed.). New York, NY: Continuum.

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Hofstadter, R., & Wallace, M. (1970). American violence: A documentary history. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf.

Holpuch, A. (2015, November 28). Planned Parenthood shooting: Suspect was recluse who lived in remote trailer. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/28/colorado-springs-shooting-suspect-planned-parenthood-robert-lewis-dear

Jaschik, S. (2013a). The governor's bad list. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/07/17/e-mails-reveal-mitch-daniels-governor-tried-ban-howard-zinn-book

Jaschik, S. (2013b). Daniels vs. Zinn: Round II. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/07/18/mitch-daniels-renews-criticism-howard-zinn

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Parker, K. (2015, November 24). For thin-skinned students, we have nobody to blame but ourselves. The Washington Post. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/for-thin-skinned-students-we-have-nobody-to-blame-but-ourselves/2015/11/24/613a815c-92e9-11e5-a2d6-f57908580b1f_story.html

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

By Colin Jenkins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Joel Northam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Shane Burley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Justin C. Mueller

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

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

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


The Anatomy of Trump's Fascism

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

After a careful comparative analysis, Paxton defines fascism as

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



This commentary originally appeared on Justin's blog.

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

By Mychal Odom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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