Class, Gender, Race & Colonialism: The ‘Intersectionality’ of Marx

By Kevin B. Anderson

Republished from Monthly Review.

Publisher’s Preface

Marx’s writings have sometimes been misrepresented. Many consider them to be no longer relevant for the 21st century on the mistaken assumption that he was obsessed only with class and had little appreciation of how issues of gender, racism and colonialism inter-related with class and the struggle for human emancipation. But as Kevin Anderson explains in this pamphlet:

It is important to see both [Marx’s] brilliant generalisations about capitalist society and the very concrete ways in which he examined not only class, but also gender, race, and colonialism, and what today would be called the intersectionality of all of these. His underlying revolutionary humanism was the enemy of all forms of abstraction that denied the variety and multiplicity of human experience, especially as his vision extended outward from Western Europe. For these reasons, no thinker speaks to us today with such force and clarity.

The pamphlet is part of a series published by Daraja Press entitled Thinking Freedom. We will be publishing other short, pamphlet-sized publications that address key topics / issues related to current struggles for emancipation, justice, dignity and self-determination targeted at the growing generations of activists, members social movements, and unions. Our aim is to produce short, easy to read, jargon free, pamphlets as print, pdf, ebook and, in some cases, audiobook formats. The pamphlets will aim to stimulate reflection and debate. In some instances, the publications will be accompanied by webinars and podcasts. The  idea is to make popular materials that encourage deeper reflection on the meaning and possibilities for emancipatory politics that does not blindly follow established dogma, but reviews the ‘classics’ and international experiences critically.We have published a series of interviews / podcasts in relation to Organising in the time of Covid-19 that can be accessed at darajapress.com.

If you have suggestions about topics that you think should be included in this series, please get in touch at info [at] darajapress.com.

For a PDF version of this pamphlet, please visit Daraja Press.

—Firoze Manji
Publisher, Daraja Press

Class, Gender, Race & Colonialism: The ‘Intersectionality’ of Marx

It is clear today that the emancipation of labour from capitalist alienation and exploitation is a task that still confronts us. Marx’s concept of the worker is not limited to European white males, but includes Irish and Black super-exploited and therefore doubly revolutionary workers, as well as women of all races and nations. But, his research and his concept of revolution go further, incorporating a wide range of agrarian non-capitalist societies of his time, from India to Russia and from Algeria to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, often emphasising their gender relations. In his last, still partially unpublished writings, he turns his gaze Eastward and Southward. In these regions outside Western Europe, he finds important revolutionary possibilities among peasants and their ancient communistic social structures, even as these are being undermined by their formal subsumption under the rule of capital. In his last published text, he envisions an alliance between these non-working-class strata and the Western European working class.

“Proletarians [Proletarier] of all countries, unite!” It is with these ringing words that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously conclude their Communist Manifesto in 1848.[1] This suggests a broad class struggle involving millions of workers across national and regional boundaries against their collective enemies, capital and landed property. In that same Manifesto, Marx and Engels also write, in another well-known passage, that “the workers have no country,” and further that “national differences and antagonisms between peoples [Völker] are shrinking more and more” with the development of the capitalist world market.[2]

An Abstract, General Theory of Capital and Labour

In the Manifesto, we are presented with large social forces, the proletariat or working class and its opponents, contending with each other on an international scale, where differences of culture, nationality, and geography have been overturned, or are being overturned, as capital is coming to rule the world and the workers are organising their resistance to it. Marx and Engels are writing here at a very high level of generality, abstracting from the specificities of the life experience of Western European and North American workers, and predicting that their lot will soon become that of the world’s working people, at that time mainly peasants labouring in predominantly agrarian societies.

It is in this sense that Marx and Engels also write that capitalism has “through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.” They add: “National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible.”[3] Capital creates a world culture alongside its world market, forcing itself into every corner of the globe. They go so far as to applaud, in terms imbued with Eurocentric condescension, how capitalism “draws even the most barbarian nations into civilisation” as it “batters down all Chinese walls” and forces these “barbarians … to adopt the bourgeois mode of production.”[4]  While pain is produced as old societies are destroyed, capital is carrying out its historic mission, the creation of “more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations put together.”[5]

Two decades later, in the 1867 preface to Capital, Marx writes, with a similar logic emphasising abstraction, that the “value form” that is at the core of capitalist production cannot be studied only empirically with regard to specific commodities produced. He adds: “Why? Because the complete body is easier to study than its cells.” Therefore, to analyse capitalism and its value form properly and fully, one must resort to “the power of abstraction” in order to examine commodity production as a whole.[6]

There is clearly a universalising pull under capitalism, a globalising system whose extension homogenises, regularises, and flattens the world, uprooting and changing it as needed to maximise value production, a quest that forms the soul of a soulless system. That same universalising pull creates a deep contradiction, the revolutionary opposition of the modern working class, “united and organised by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production.”[7]

The experience of the working class is similarly homogenised. Shorn of its means of production (land, tools, etc) and reduced to a group of propertyless wage labourers, prototypically in giant factories, Marx’s working class is both alienated and exploited in ways specific to capitalism. As early as 1844 Manuscripts, he wrote of alienated labour, a concept deepened in Capital in the section of commodity fetishism. In the capitalist production process, human relations are fetishised because the products of labour come to dominate their producers, the workers, in a jarring subject–object reversal. These workers then experience that domination as the impersonal power of capital, which is itself produced by their labour. Capital lords it over them, turning human relations into “relations between things,” with the working class objectified to the extreme.[8]

Raya Dunayevskaya is among the few to emphasise Marx’s additional statement to the effect that these relations “appear [erscheinen] as what they are”.[9] The German verb erscheinen [like the word apparaissent he uses at this point in the French edition] is not a false or “mere” appearance and it differs from scheinen [French: paraissent], which means “appear” in the sense of semblance or even false appearance. Thus, we are not dealing with a false appearance that conceals “true” and humanistic human relations, but a new and unprecedented reality based upon “the necessity of that appearance because, that is, in truth, what relations among people are at the point of production” in a capitalist system.[10] In the long run, of course, such a thing-like human relationship is false in the sense that it will be rejected and uprooted by the working class, which seeks a society controlled not by capital but by free and associated labour. But, it remains utterly real while we are under the sway of the capitalist mode of production.

At the same time, the workers suffer harsh material exploitation, as the surplus value they create in the production process is appropriated by capital, in a system characterised by the greatest gulf in history between the material lot of the dominant classes and those of the working people. This exploitation grows in both absolute and relative terms as capital centralises and develops further technologically, in the process of the greatest quantitative increase in the development of the productive forces in human history.[11]

Marx pulls together these two concepts, exploitation and alienation, in his discussion of capital accumulation, wherein the “capitalist system” turns the labour of the workers into stultifying “torment,” serving to “alienate” from the workers “the intellectual potentialities of the labor process,” while at the same time, the rate of exploitation increases: “the situation of the worker, be his payment high or low, must grow worse” relative to the vertiginous accumulation of surplus value by capital.[12]

Marx’s Concrete Dialectic

The kind of analysis presented above shows Marx as our contemporary, not least his grasp of the limitless quest for surplus value by capital, and the concomitant deep alienation and exploitation that it visits upon the working people, from factories to modern call centres.

At the same time, these kinds of statements, especially when read out of context, have been used for decades by Marx’s critics, both conservative and left-wing, to portray him as a thinker whose abstract model of capital and labour occludes national differences, race, ethnicity, gender, and other crucially important aspects of human society and culture.

On the one hand, these critics are wrong because capitalism is in fact a unique social system that overturns and homogenises all previous social relations, tending towards the reduction of all human relations to that of capital versus labour. Thus, one cannot understand contemporary family and gender relations, ethno-racial and communal conflict, or ecological crisis fully without examining the underlying relationships described above. For the family, the ethnic tableau, and the natural environment are all conditioned by the underlying fact of a capitalist mode of production.

But, on the other hand, these critics pose questions that make us look more carefully at Marx’s theoretical categories. It is very important in this regard to realise, if one truly wants to appreciate Marx’s originality, that his concept of capital and labour was posed not only at a high level of abstraction, but that, at other levels, it encompasses a far wider variety of human experience and culture. As Bertell Ollman[13] has emphasised, Marx operated at varying levels of abstraction.

The present article centres on three related points.

• First, Marx’s working class was not only Western European, white, and male, since from his earliest to his latest writings, he took up the working class in all its human variety.

• Second, Marx was not an economic or class reductionist, for throughout his career, he considered deeply various forms of oppression and resistance to capital and the state that were not based entirely upon class, but also upon nationality, race and ethnicity, and gender.

• Third, by the time of Marx’s later writings, long after the Communist Manifesto, the Western European pathway of industrial capitalist development out of feudalism was no longer a global universal. Alternate pathways of development were indeed possible, and these connected to types of revolutions that did not always fit the model of industrial labour overthrowing capital.

In terms of a concrete dialectic, Marx follows in the wake of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. This is true from his earliest writings to Capital, where he writes of “the Hegelian ‘contradiction,’ which is the source of all dialectics.”[14] One striking feature of Hegel’s dialectical framework, despite its overall universalising thrust, is its rejection of abstract universals, while also avoiding a mere empiricism. No previous philosopher had drawn history and social existence into philosophy in this way, as seen especially in the Phenomenology of Spirit, a book so crucial to our understanding of the present moment that two new translations of it have appeared in 2018. Again and again in this work, Hegel rejects the abstract universal as “the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black.”[15] The concreteness of his universals is also seen in the ascending concrete forms of consciousness that develop along the universal pathway towards the freedom of the human spirit, from ancient Rome to the Reformation and the French Revolution of his own time, each of them limited by their historical, social, and cultural context. Of course, Marx also rejects aspects of Hegel’s idealism, especially his stress on the growth of human consciousness as the most important result of the dialectics of history, as opposed to the actuality of human freedom and healthy development in a society that has been revolutionised from below. In short, Hegel’s dialectic, while social and historical, remains somewhat dehumanised.

Such stress on the concrete universal in no way negates my earlier citation, where Marx writes that one needs the “power of abstraction” to get at what is really crucial about capitalism, its value form and the dehumanised, fetishised existence experienced by those who live under its domination. No, the solution has to be approached from both directions. The abstract rests upon the concrete, but at the same time, the abstract concept has to concretise itself, to become determinate. However, Marx equally rejects what Karel Kosík called the “pseudoconcrete,” a type of concrete that cannot think beyond the immediately given under capitalism. As against such false or distorted forms of consciousness, dialectics “dissolves fetishised artefacts both of the world of things and the world of ideas, in order to penetrate to their reality.”[16]

Thus, Marx is hostile to mere empiricism, embracing a dialectical form of totality. He at the same time castigates, as did Hegel, the abstract universals of traditional idealist philosophy and of modern liberalism, with its human and civil rights that are so often little more than formulaic to those at the bottom of society. Yet, at the same time, he embraces what he and Hegel called the concrete universal, a form of universality that was rooted in social life, and yet pointed beyond the given world of the “pseudoconcrete.”

One example of the concrete universal can be glimpsed in how Marx argues that we cannot adequately measure the world of capitalist exploitation and alienation either in its own terms (the “pseudoconcrete”) or by comparing it to past forms of domination like Western European feudalism, the ancient Greco–Roman world, or the “Asiatic” mode of production. Instead, he measures capitalist society against a different yardstick, the unrealised but potentially realisable horizon of a communist future of free and associated labour, as has been emphasised in two recent studies.[17] But, this is not merely an imagined republic, as Niccolò Machiavelli characterised the abstract and schematic models of the good society found in ancient Greco–Roman thinkers like Socrates. Marx’s vision of the future was based upon the aspirations and struggles of a really existing social class, the proletariat, to which his writings sought to give a more universal and concrete form.

The Working Class in All Its Human Variety

From the outset, Marx saw Britain as the country where the capitalist mode of production was most developed, far ahead of any other country. This can be seen especially in Capital, where British examples of both capital and labour predominate. But the British working class was by no means homogenous. As the industrial revolution surged in Manchester, the cutting-edge city of 19th-century capitalism, it did so by exploiting a working class with deep ethnic divisions between English and Irish workers. Engels discusses this issue at length in his 1845 book, The Condition of the Working Class in England published just after he and Marx began to collaborate. Marx regarded this book as one of Engels’s greatest contributions, citing it more than any other of his friend’s writings in Capital.

Marx himself took up the Irish potato famine of the 1840s as a tragedy rooted in the process of capital accumulation, especially in Capital. He wrote as well about Irish workers in Britain, especially in 1869–70, at a time when the First International was substantially engaged with supporting Irish revolutionaries. While he was able to convince the International to support the Irish, it was a difficult battle. At the same time, this was a battle that needed to be fought and won, because it got to the heart of why, despite its large-scale industrialisation and organised working class, Britain had not seen the level of class struggle predicted in texts written at an abstract level like the Communist Manifesto. He offered an explanation in a “Confidential Communication” of the International issued in early 1870:

[T]he English bourgeoisie has not only exploited Irish poverty to keep down the working class in England by forced immigration of poor Irishmen, but it has also divided the proletariat into two hostile camps … The common English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers wages and the standard of life. He feels national and religious antipathies for him. He views him similarly to how the poor whites of the Southern states of North America viewed black slaves. This antagonism among the proletarians of England is artificially nourished and kept up by the bourgeoisie. It knows that this split is the true secret of the preservation of its power.[18]

Marx also saw this antagonism based upon the double oppression of the Irish workers, as both proletarians and as members of an oppressed minority in dialectical terms. He viewed the Irish as sources of revolutionary ferment that could help spark a British revolution. Thus, we have here the analysis of a really existing working class at a specific point in time, Britain in 1870, as opposed to the more general and abstract manner in which he and Engels conceptualised the working class in the Manifesto.

Marx viewed the racially divided working class of the United States (US) in similar terms. He strongly opposed slavery and advocated abolitionism within the working-class movement, attacking those like Pierre Joseph Proudhon who were more ambiguous on the subject of slavery.

He conceptualised African slavery as central to capitalist development, writing as early as Poverty of Philosophy (1847):

Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry.[19]

During the 1861–65 Civil War in the US, Marx strongly, albeit critically, supported the North against the slave South. He regarded the war as a second American revolution that had created some real possibilities for the working class. He intoned in Capital:

In the US, every independent workers’ movement was paralysed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic. Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin. However, a new life immediately arose from the death of slavery. The first fruit of the American Civil War was the eight hours agitation, which ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California, with the seven-league boots of a locomotive.[20]

At this point, he noted that a large national labour congress took place in 1866, one year after the end of the Civil War, where the demand for the eight-hour day was put forward.

Here, the abolition of slavery is seen as the precondition for a real working-class movement in the racialised capitalism of the US.

If Marx’s working class was not exclusively white, nor was it exclusively male. In her study of Marx and gender, Heather Brown concludes that in the parts of Capital devoted to the life experience of the workers, “Marx not only traces out the changing conditions of the male worker, but also gives significant emphasis to the role of women in this process.” While he sometimes lapsed into “echoing paternalistic or patriarchal assumptions” in his descriptions of female workers, it is hard to argue, as some have, that he ignored working women in his most important book.[21]

This can also be seen in his dialectical discussion of changes to the family and gender relations brought about by capitalist industrialisation, which has “dissolved the old family relationships” among the workers, as women and children were forced into horribly exploitative paid employment outside the home:

However terrible and disgusting the dissolution of the old family ties within the capitalist system may appear, large-scale industry, by assigning an important part in socially organised processes of production, outside the sphere of the domestic economy, to women, young persons, and children of both sexes, does nevertheless create a new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and of relations between the sexes.[22]

Marx returned to gender and the family as a research topic at the end of his life, as seen in his Ethnological Notebooks of 1880–82[23] and other notebooks from that period. In these notebooks, he explored gender relations across a number of societies, from preliterate Native Americans and Homeric Greeks, to precolonial Ireland and contemporary Australian aborigines. Some of these notes became the basis for Engels’s Origin of the Family. Although that work contains many important insights, it treats the rise of gender oppression in an economic and class reductionist manner that was far less subtle than the notes Marx left behind and which Engels used as source material.[24] These notebooks are also concerned deeply with colonialism, an issue discussed below with which Engels did not engage.

Revolutionary Subjectivity Outside the Working Class

It is important to note that Marx’s interest in gender issues was not limited to the study of working class women. From his earliest writings, he pointed to gender oppression as a crucial, foundational form of social hierarchy and domination. In the 1844 Manuscripts, he wrote:

The direct, natural, necessary relationship of human being [Mensch] to human being is the relationship of man [Mann] to woman [Weib]. … Therefore, on the basis of this relationship, we can judge the whole stage of development of the human being. From the character of this relationship it follows to what degree the human being has become and recognised himself or herself as a species being; a human being; the relationship of man to woman is the most natural relationship of human being to human being. Therefore, in it is revealed the degree to which the natural behaviour of the human being has become human.[25]

Here, Marx is concerned not only with working-class women, as discussed above, but with other strata of women as well, and across the full trajectory of human society and culture, not just capitalism. He takes up the oppression of modern women outside the working class in his 1846 text, “Peuchet on Suicide,” where he focuses on middle- and upper-class French women driven to suicide by gender-based oppression from husbands or parents, writing at one point of “social conditions … which permit the jealous husband to fetter his wife in chains, like a miser with his hoard of gold, for she is but part of his inventory.”[26] These concerns did not end with Marx’s youth. In 1858, he wrote movingly in the New York Tribune about Lady Rosina Bulwer Lytton, who had been confined to a mental institution by her politician husband for having attempted to speak out on political issues.[27]

Nor did Marx focus on the industrial working class to the exclusion of the peasantry, which he saw as an oppressed and potentially revolutionary class. Considerable attention has been paid to his characterisation of the French peasantry as somewhat conservative in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852). In other contexts, though, he discussed the revolutionary potential of peasants, for example, during the 16th-century Anabaptist uprising in Germany. Concerning his own time, in the Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), he castigated Ferdinand Lassalle for labelling the “peasants” as inherently conservative, since Lassalle’s organisation had written off “all other classes” besides the working class as “one reactionary mass”.[28]

And, while condemning racist and imperialist forms of nationalism, Marx also strongly supported nationalist movements that exhibited a clear emancipatory content. Long before Vladimir Ilich Lenin articulated a concept of national liberation, in an 1848 speech on Poland, Marx drew a distinction between what he termed “narrowly national [étroitement national]” movements and national revolutions that were “reforming and democratic,” that is, ones that put forth issues like land reform even when it targeted the indigenous upper classes rather than just a foreign enemy or occupying power.[29]

Even in the Communist Manifesto, where, as discussed above, he and Engels had written that national differences were disappearing, this was at a general, abstract level. For, when it came down to concretising the principles in terms of a set of immediate goals and slogans in a final section, “Position of the Communists in Relation to the Existing Opposition Parties,” Polish national emancipation from under Russian, Austrian, and Prussian occupation was nonetheless singled out: “In Poland, they support the party that insists on an agrarian revolution as the prime condition for national emancipation, that party which fomented the insurrection of Cracow in 1846”.[30] Marx continued to support a Polish national revolution until the end of his life. He greeted the Polish uprising of 1863 with enthusiasm and in his writings celebrating the Paris Commune of 1871; he singled out the important contribution of Polish exiles in the military defence of revolutionary Paris. Fittingly, in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the graves of the Communards include that of Polish General Walery Wróblewski, only steps away from those of Marx’s French descendants.

In the 1870 Confidential Communication on Ireland, the peasantry and the national movement were also intertwined as revolutionary elements. An equally prominent point in this text is Marx’s defence of the International’s public support of Irish national emancipation, including appeals to the Queen to stop the execution of Irish militants. On this issue, Marx and the International’s General Council in London had come under attack by the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin’s faction, which took a class-reductionist position, rejecting “any political action that does not have as its immediate and direct aim the triumph of the workers’ cause against capital”.[31] In response, Marx wrote in the Communication:

In the first place, Ireland is the bulwark of English landlordism. If it fell in Ireland, it would fall in England. In Ireland this is a hundred times easier because the economic struggle there is concentrated exclusively on landed property, because this struggle is at the same time national, and because the people there are more revolutionary and angrier than in England. Landlordism in Ireland is maintained solely by the English army. The moment the forced Union between the two countries ends, a social revolution will immediately break out in Ireland.[32]

Moreover, he hinted that such a process could also break the impasse in which British workers were stuck:

Although revolutionary initiative will probably come from France, England alone can serve as the lever for a serious economic Revolution … It is the only country where the vast majority of the population consists of wage laborers … The English have all the material conditions [matière nécessaire] for social revolution. What they lack is a sense of generalisation and revolutionary passion. It is only the General Council that can provide them with this, that can thus accelerate the truly revolutionary movement in this country, and consequently everywhere … If England is the bulwark of landlordism and European capitalism, the only point where official England can be struck a great blow is Ireland.[33]

He conceptualised more explicitly this notion of the Irish struggle for independence as a detonator for a wider British and European working-class revolution in a letter to Engels of 10 December 1869:

For a long time I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working-class ascendancy. I always expressed this point of view in the New York Tribune. Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. That is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.[34]

Here, Marx also acknowledges explicitly a change of position, from an earlier one, where he saw proletarian revolution spreading from the core industrial nations to the periphery. At this point, he is beginning to develop the notion of a transnational communist revolution beginning in the more agrarian, colonised peripheries of capitalism, and then spreading into the core nations. During the last years before his death in 1883, this was to become a major concern with respect to societies outside Western Europe and North America.

Late Marx: India, Russia, and Beyond

In The German Ideology of 1846, Marx and Engels conceptualised several successive stages of historical development in Eurocentric terms, later called modes of production: (i) clan or tribal, (ii) slave-based ancient Greco–Roman, (iii) serf-based feudal, (iv) formally free wage-labour-based bourgeois or capitalist, and, it was implied, (v) freely-associated-labour-based socialist. A decade later, in the Grundrisse of 1857–58, Marx discussed modes of production originating in Asia, especially India (the “Asiatic” mode of production) as a type of pre-capitalist system that did not fall easily under either (ii) or (iii). It represented something qualitatively different, without as much formal slavery, and with communal or collective property and social relations continuing in the villages for a very long time.

For Marx, this constituted a more global and multilinear theory of history, with premodern Asian societies on a somewhat different pathway of development than Western Europe, especially ancient Rome. In Capital, Vol I, he referred to “the ancient Asiatic, Classical-antique, and other such modes of production,” where commodity production “plays a subordinate role” as compared to the modern capitalist mode of production.[35] Marx’s distinction between Asian and European pre-capitalist societies was banned in Stalinist ideology, which clung to the slavery–feudal–bourgeois model of successive modes of production, something that required mental gymnastics to fit societies like Mughal India or Confucian China into the “feudal” or “slave” modes of production. Even as late as the 1970s, the noted anthropologist and Marx scholar Norair Ter-Akopian was dismissed from the Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute in Moscow for having published a book on the Asiatic mode of production.

In notes from his last years not published until after Stalin’s death, Marx summarised and commented upon his young anthropologist friend Maxim Kovalevsky’s Communal Property (1879), especially its treatment of precolonial India. Although appreciative of much of Kovalevsky’s analysis, Marx inveighed against his attempts to treat Mughal India, with its highly centralised state system, as feudal: “Kovalevsky here finds feudalism in the Western European sense. Kovalevsky forgets, among other things, serfdom, which is not in India, and which is an essential moment.” Marx concludes that concerning “feudalism,” “as little is found in India as in Rome”.[36]  These notes, available in English since 1975, did not find their way into the Collected Works of Marx and Engels. Nor can any of the notes on Kovalevsky or other late texts on India be found in the most recent collection of Marx’s India writings.[37] However, Irfan Habib’s comprehensive introduction to this volume does mention briefly the late Marx’s notebooks on India his “objection to any designation of the Indian communities as ‘feudal’.”[38]

All this would be only an academic topic had Marx not tied these issues to the contemporary issues of colonialism and world revolution. In the years 1848–53, Marx tended toward an implicit support of colonialism, whether in forcing a traditionalist China into the world market, as quoted above from the Communist Manifesto, or in his 1853 articles on India, which celebrated what he saw as modernising and progressive aspects of British rule. In 1853, he portrays India as backward in socio-economic terms, incapable of real change from within, and unable to mount serious resistance to foreign invasion due to its social divisions. Therefore, he could write that year in his Tribune article, “British Rule in India,” that British colonialism was carrying in its wake “the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.”[39]To be sure, Edward Said and others have caricatured his 1853 India articles as completely pro-colonialist, ignoring another major one a few weeks later, “The Future Results of British Rule in India,” which attacks the “barbarism” of British colonialism and applauds the possibility of India being able one day “to throw off the English yoke altogether”.[40] Nonetheless, some of Said’s criticisms are on target with regard to the Eurocentrism and ethnocentrism of the 1853 writings.

By the time of the Grundrisse of 1857–58, with its discussion of precolonial India being on a different historical trajectory than ancient Rome, Marx was also coming out publicly, again in the Tribune, in support of both the anti-British sepoy uprising in India and Chinese resistance to the British in the Second Opium War. But, his support for this anti-colonial resistance remained at a rather general level. Marx did not embrace the overall political aims or perspectives of the Chinese or Indians resisting imperialism, which seemed to be neither democratic nor communist.[41] This differs from his late writings on Russia, which saw emancipatory communist movements emerging from that country’s communal villages. Thus, Marx’s thinking on these issues seems to have evolved further after 1858.

Multilinear Pathways of Development and Revolution

During his last years, Marx never finished Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital, although he reworked Vol I painstakingly for the French edition of 1872–75, altering several passages that were seen to imply that societies outside the narrow band of industrialising capitalism would inevitably have to modernise in the Western industrial sense. In the original 1867 edition, he had written: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future”.[42] Even the usually careful scholar Teodor Shanin viewed this passage as an example of “unilinear determinism”.[43] He, therefore, drew a sharp distinction between Capital (determinist) and Marx’s late writings on Russia (open-ended and multilinear). But, Shanin and other scholars who taxed Marx for this passage did not notice that in the subsequent 1872–75 French edition, the last version of the book he himself saw to publication, he recast this passage: “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to those that follow it up the industrial ladder [le suivent sur l’échelle industrielle], the image of its own future.”[44] In this way, he removed any hint of unilinear determinism and, more importantly, suggested that the future of societies outside Western Europe might follow a different pathway.

Marx made a much more explicit statement concerning his multilinear approach to the historical possibilities of agrarian societies outside Western Europe in the draft of an 1877 letter, where he criticised strongly any idea of “transforming my historical sketch [in the “Primitive Accumulation” section of Capital—KA] of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of the general course fatally imposed on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves placed,” a letter in which he also quoted the French edition of Capital.[45]

Marx also returned at length to the subject of India in his above-cited 1879 notes on Kovalevsky[46], his Notes on Indian History[47], and his 1880–82 Ethnological Notebooks.[48] During these last years, he wrote of Russian peasant “primitive communism” as a locus of resistance to capital and of possible linkages to the revolutionary working-class communist movement in the West. This is seen in a famous passage from his last published text, the 1882 preface he and Engels contributed to a new Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto:

If the Russian revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, then the present Russian common ownership [Gemeineigentum] may serve as the point of departure [Ausgungspunkt] for a communist development.[49]

In his late writings on Russia and notebooks on South Asia, North Africa, Latin America, and a number of other agrarian, pastoral, or hunter-gatherer societies, Marx is deeply concerned with the rise of gender and social hierarchy during the decline of communal social formations.[50] It is also very likely that he was interested in South Asian, North African, Latin American villages, like the Russian ones, as possible loci of resistance to capital and therefore potential allies of the working classes of Western Europe and North America.

For example, in Marx’s notes on Kovalevsky’s lengthy discussion of India, he traces in great detail the shift from kin-based communal village organisation to one grounded more in mere residency. At this stage, he has clearly rejected his earlier notion of an unchanging India until the arrival of capitalism via the British. However, as against his writings on Ireland, he never acknowledges this change explicitly, as in his 1869 letter to Engels on Ireland cited above. (Of course, we have less information on Marx’s thinking in his last years. By 1879, Engels, his most regular intellectual interlocutor, was no longer in faraway Manchester receiving Marx’s letters, but a neighbour who visited almost daily but without leaving much of paper trail of their conversations. Marx’s letters to Kovalevsky were also burned by his friends in Russia, who went to his house to do so, out of fear of them falling into the hands the police, which could have endangered the young anthropologist.)

As seen above, as early as the 1857 sepoy uprising, Marx seems to have moved away from his earlier notion of India as a passive civilisation that did not offer much resistance to foreign conquest. He recorded detailed data on Indian resistance in another set of notes taken around 1879, on British colonial official Robert Sewell’s Analytical History of India (1870), published in Moscow as Marx’s Notes on Indian History[51] without awareness that this volume consisted mainly of passages excerpted from Sewell’s book. In these notes, Marx records dozens of examples of Indian resistance to foreign invaders and domestic rulers, from the earliest historical records right up through the sepoy uprising. Moreover, Marx’s notes now view Mughal, British, and other conquests of India as contingent rather than the product of ineluctable social forces.

But, Marx’s main focus in these late notebooks on South Asia, North Africa, and Latin America is the structure and history of communal social relations and property in these regions, and on how colonialism uprooted these earlier social relations. At the same time, as a dialectical thinker, Marx also notes the persistence of remnants of these communal social forms even after they had been greatly undermined by colonialism. Did he come to believe that the Indian, Algerian, or Latin American village could become a locus of resistance to capital, as he had theorised in 1882 concerning the Russian village? That is what I have concluded after years of study of these notebooks.

To be sure, he never said such a thing explicitly. Moreover, in his late writings on Russia, in the drafts of his 1881 letter to Vera Zasulich, he even noted a key difference with India, that Russia had not “fallen prey, like the East Indies, to a conquering foreign power”. [52]

Still, I find it hard to believe that Marx engaged in such a deep and extended study of the communal social formations in precolonial and even colonial South Asia, North Africa, and Latin America without an aim beyond purely historical research. As the Italian Marx scholar Luca Basso notes, Marx was in his late writings on Russia and other non-Western societies, operating on “two planes,” that of “historical-theoretical interpretation” and that of “the feasibility or otherwise of a revolutionary movement” in the context of what he was studying.[53] The fact that he undertook this research in the years just before his clarion call in the 1882 preface to the Manifesto about an uprising in Russia’s communal villages that would link up with the Western proletariat as the “starting point for a communist revolution” suggests the connectedness of all of this research on primitive communism. As Dunayevskaya argued in the first work that linked these notebooks to modern concerns with revolution and women’s liberation: “Marx returns to probe the origin of humanity, not for purposes of discovering new origins, but for perceiving new revolutionary forces, their reason.”[54]

It is important to see both his brilliant generalisations about capitalist society and the very concrete ways in which he examined not only class, but also gender, race, and colonialism, and what today would be called the intersectionality of all of these. His underlying revolutionary humanism was the enemy of all forms of abstraction that denied the variety and multiplicity of human experience, especially as his vision extended outward from Western Europe. For these reasons, no thinker speaks to us today with such force and clarity.

Kevin B. Anderson’s authored books include Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies and Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism. Among his edited books are The Power of Negativity by Raya Dunayevskaya (with Peter Hudis), Karl Marx (with Bertell Ollman), The Rosa Luxemburg Reader (with P. Hudis), and The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence (with Russell Rockwell).

Notes

See Bibliography below.

1. MECW 6: 519; MEW 4: 493, sometimes my translation) ↵

   1. MECW 6: 502–03; MEW 4: 479 ↵

   2. MECW 6: 488 ↵

   3. MECW 6: 488 ↵

   4. MECW 6: 489 ↵

   5. Marx 1976: 90 ↵

   6. Marx 1976: 929 ↵

   7. Marx 1976: 166 ↵

   8. Marx 1976: 166; MEW 23: 86; Marx 1994: 607 ↵

   9. (Dunayevskaya 1958: 100, emphasis in the original) ↵

   10. Marx 1976: 929 ↵

   11. Marx 1976: 799 ↵

   12. Ollman 1993 ↵

   13. Marx 1976: 744 ↵

   14. Hegel 2018: 10 ↵

   15. Kosík 1976: 7 ↵

   16. Hudis 2012; Chattopadhyay 2016 ↵

   17. MECW 21: 120, emphasis in original ↵

   18. MECW 6: 167 ↵

   19. Marx 1976: 414, emphasis added ↵

   20. Brown 2012: 91 ↵

   21. Marx 1976: 620–21 ↵

   22. Krader 1974 ↵

   23. Dunayevskaya 1982; Anderson 2014; Brown 2012 ↵

   24. Quoted in Plaut and Anderson 1999: 6, emphasis in original; see also MECW 3: 295–96 for an earlier translation) ↵

   25. Plaut and Anderson 1999: 58 ↵

   26. Dunayevskaya 1982; Brown 2012 ↵

   27. MECW 24: 88–89 ↵

   28. Marx 1994: 1001, my translation from the French original; see also MECW 6: 549 ↵

   29. MECW 6: 518 ↵

   30. Quoted in MECW 21: 208 ↵

   31. MECW 21: 119–120, translation slightly altered on basis of French original in Marx 1966: 358–59 ↵

   32. MECW 21: 118–19, translation slightly altered on basis of French original in Marx 1966: 356–57 ↵

   33. MECW 43: 398, emphasis in original ↵

   34. Marx 1976: 172 ↵

   35. Krader 1975: 383 ↵

   36. Husain 2006 ↵

   37. Husain 2006: xxxv ↵

   38. MECW 12: 132 ↵

   39. (MECW 12: 221). ↵

   40. Benner 2018 ↵

   41. Marx 1976: 91 ↵

   42. Shanin 1983: 4 ↵

   43. Marx 1976: 91, my translation, see also Anderson 2014 ↵

   44. Shanin 1983: 136. ↵

   45. Krader 1975 ↵

   46. Marx 1960 ↵

   47. Krader 1974 ↵

   48. Shanin 1983: 139, see also MECW 24: 426 and MEW 19: 296, translation slightly altered ↵

   49. Some of these notebooks are still unpublished and will appear in the Marx–Engels Gesamtausgabe or MEGA, but their aspects have been discussed in Brown 2012; Pradella 2015 and Anderson 2016. ↵

   50. Marx 1960 ↵

   51. Shanin 1983: 106 ↵

   52. Basso 2015: 90 ↵

   53. Dunayevskaya 1982: 187 ↵

Bibliography

• Anderson, Kevin B (2014): Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, New Delhi: Pinnacle Learning.

• — (2016): Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, Expanded edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

• Basso, Luca (2015): Marx and the Common: From Capital to the Late Writings, Trans David Broder, Leiden: Brill.

• Benner, Erica (2018): Really Existing Nationalisms: A Post-Communist View from Marx and Engels, Reprint edition, New York: Oxford University Press.

• Brown, Heather (2012): Marx on Gender and the Family, Leiden: Brill.

• Chattopadhyay, Paresh (2016): Marx’s Associated Mode of Production, New York: Palgrave.

• Dunayevskaya, Raya (1958): Marxism and Freedom, New York: Bookman Associates.

• — (1982): Rosa Luxemburg, Women’s Liberation, and Marx’s Philosophy of Revolution, Sussex: Harvester Press.

• Hegel, G W F (2018): Phenomenology of Spirit, Trans Michael Inwood, New York: Oxford University Press.

• Hudis, Peter (2012): Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism, Leiden: Brill.

• Husain, Iqbal (ed) (2006): Karl Marx on India, New Delhi: Tulika Books.

• Kosík, Karel (1976): Dialectics of the Concrete, Trans Karel Kovanda and James Schmidt, Boston: D Reidel.

• Krader, Lawrence (ed) (1974): The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx, Second Edition, Assen: Van Gorcum.

• — (1975): The Asiatic Mode of Production, Assen: Van Gorcum.

• Marx, Karl (1960): Notes on Indian History (664–1858), Moscow: Progress Publishers.

• — (1966): “Le conseil générale au conseil fédérale de la Suisse romande,” General Council of the First International 1868–1870, Minutes, Moscow: Progress Publishers.

• — (1976): Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol 1, Trans Ben Fowkes, New York: Penguin.

• — (1994): Oeuvres IV, Edited by Maximilien Rubel, Paris: Éditions Gallimard.

• [MECW] Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels (1975–2004): Collected Works, Fifty Volumes, New York: International Publishers.

• [MEW] Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels (1968): Werke, Berlin: Dietz Verlag.

• Ollman, Bertell (1993): Dialectical Investigations, New York: Routledge.

• Plaut, Eric A and Kevin B Anderson (1999): Marx on Suicide, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

• Pradella, Lucia (2015): Globalisation and the Critique of Political Economy: New Insights from Marx’s Writings, Milton Park: Routledge.

• Shanin, Teodor (1983): Late Marx and the Russian Road, New York: Monthly Review Press.

How the Media Legitimizes Gentrification

By Noah Streng

Republished from Michigan Specter.

If you’ve ever seen an episode of HGTV’s Good Bones or any other “house-flipping” show, you’ll know that like all reality TV shows they depict dramatized situations as a way of increasing the stakes and encouraging viewers to keep watching. However, when watching these types of shows, it is important to recognize what narratives they are promoting. Whose voices and stories do they center? What underlying assumptions are left unchallenged?

In the strange world of reality TV, there’s an entire genre dedicated to “home improvement” where wealthy individuals will buy homes in “rundown neighborhoods’’ and “make them beautiful again” (all while making a significant profit for themselves, of course). These shows like to promote the idea that the house-flippers are courageous underdogs venturing into an uncharted and dangerous land to save target homes from the scary, filthy people who live in them. Euphemisms like “up and coming” and “transitional” are often used to describe low-income, minority neighborhoods starved for investment.

In a dramatic scene from an episode of HGTV’s Good Bones, the gentrifiers are seen “scouting” a house that they bought and breaking through a window because the doors of the house are locked — a sign that people have been staying there. The scene depicts the gentrifiers as being frightened by the possibility of encountering a squatter and being disgusted by the house’s “filth.” However, what’s never asked or included in these shows is questioning why the person living in that house needed to squat in the first place.

Did the state fail to provide them affordable housing? Are they suffering from a mental health issue and lack insurance? Did they get evicted from their former home? Instead of analyzing the root causes of this person’s housing insecurity and seeking to address it, the squatter is demonized as singularly responsible for their failures. Not only that, but the content of these characterizations is highly racialized, contributing to the white supremacist and colonial themes of the show.

These shows almost never consider the perspective of the tenants evicted by gentrifiers who rip their apartments out from under them. In some cases, there will be depictions of scary, drugged-up squatters who are illegally occupying the gentrifiers’ new passion project. In an article titled ‘We Bought a Crack House,’ house-flippers Catherine Jheon and Julian Humphreys detail their “brave” story of buying a house for $560,000 and encountering the tenants — whose home had just been sold by their landlord without consent — still living in the house when they arrive. Some of the home’s residents are experiencing problems with drug addiction, and are even caught by the gentrifiers using crack in an upstairs room.

What’s not mentioned here is how poverty, and these people’s recent condemnation to homelessness by their landlord, may have influenced their decision to use drugs to cope with the immense hardships they face. When Jheon and Humphreys ask the former tenants to leave the home so that they can start renovating, the tenants refuse, citing that they have nowhere else to go and that this is their rightful home. Jheon writes about her frustration with this, as every day she can’t renovate the home is money lost. In the end, she and Humphreys bribe one of the tenants to leave the house and call the police to forcibly remove the rest of them.

This is a classic example of how law and the media intersect to legitimize the violence of colonization and gentrification which continues in our cities today. The poor are demonized and gentrifiers are portrayed as innocent white saviors who are just trying to make a living — but they are doing so by displacing poor, housing insecure black and brown people. The police advance these projects of colonization by using their monopoly on violence to aid gentrifiers in their mission of displacing community residents so that their house can be fixed up and eventually sold to a rich white family.

While seeming innocent on their face, these shows can have devastating effects on the lives of the millions of people in the United States who experience housing insecurity. Not only do these television networks make money off of stories of tragic displacement of poor people, but they frame these stories in a way that valorizes gentrifiers and legitimizes a landlord’s right to hoard property and force destitute people into homelessness. Oftentimes, the excuse that gentrifiers will use when evicting tenants is “it’s our house now.” However, this statement is highly ideological and reinforces the social dynamic between property owners and the property-less in our capitalist society.

Who controls housing is not something that is natural or written in the stars. It is a power arrangement forged by the deliberate decisions of actors within an economic system that prioritizes profit over human life. House-flipping shows are just one part of the larger media trend of legitimizing societal oppression.

TV companies make political decisions when they choose to only highlight the voices of landlords, realtors, and house-flippers over tenants and the housing insecure. The depiction of low-income, predominately black people as filthy, dangerous, and lazy — rather than victims of a violent, exploitative, and racist economic system — feeds into the narrative that gentrification is good for society at large. How the media depicts people’s interactions with the law and frames which laws are just has real consequences. When the media chooses to center the story of the colonizer over the colonized, it legitimizes the displacement, land theft, and systemic impoverishment that millions of people face every day.

Decolonizing the American Mind: A Review of Matt Sedillo's "Mowing Leaves of Grass"

By Jon Jeter

Had Amiri Baraka been born 50 years later to a Chicano family in Southern California rather than a black family in Newark, he would’ve been Matt Sedillo. 

Present in the work of both poets –the late icon and the relative ingenue respectively –is the rhythmic mixture, una mezcla, of the street, and minds sharpened, like swords, by struggle, and self-enlightenment.

This is not to suggest that Sedillo’s poetry is all fire and brimstone. Like Baraka before him, Sedillo infuses his poetry with a certain knowing, or playfulness, befitting an outsider who is in on the joke, and has seen through the illogic of a handful of Europeans “discovering” 90 million indigenous people. The white settler’s arrogance produces both amusement and blinding, righteous, anger. 

And so it is that Sedillo’s second book of poetry, Mowing Leaves of Grass, reads like a criminal indictment handed up by, well, a poet. In the book’s first poem, entitled Pilgrim, he writes:

See, I come from struggle

And if my story offends you

That is only ‘cause you made the mistake of seeking your

reflection

In my self-portrai

In one of the book’s shorter poems, Pedagogy of the Oppressor, it is made abundantly clear that Sedillo’s poetry is, at its core, an attempt to decolonize the American mind:

And when they read  

They read in conquest 

And when they thought 

They thought of process 

And when they wrote  

Again and again  

It was the word progress 

And when they spoke  

A festival of bayonets 

Impaled the audience  

Line the children  

It’s getting late November  

Teach them Pilgrim  

Teach them Indian  

Speak of gratitude  

Speak of friendship 

Of all the usual suspects perp-walked by Mowing Leaves of Grass, however, the kingpin is Walt Whitman, whose storied 1855 book of poems, Leaves of Grass, is the inspiration of Sedillo’s book title. Widely regarded by ivory-towered elites as the greatest book of poetry in the history of the Republic –or the genre’s Huck Finn – Leaves of Grass is considered a siren song, calling for a young and yearning nation of castoffs and cut-ups to unite in the democratic experiment that is America. 

Sedillo, however, makes no claim to the mantle of poet-laureate but rather dissident laureate, and he finds Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, like the nation itself,  wanting, and in need of a reappraisal. Why, he seems to ask in Mowing Leaves of Grass, is Whitman so fawned over and feted when he fails to account for the suffering, the despair, or the rivers of blood spilled by Native Americans, and blacks, in the making of the nation?

In his poem titled “Oh Say,” Sedillo remixes stanzas from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass,  lyrics to the anthems Star-Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful, and the dirge popularized by Billie Holliday, Strange Fruit.

So we were bound 

To keep singing 

Oh captain 

My captain 

Drunk on blood anthems Blind patriots 

Raised flags 

And fallen veterans 

The myths 

The hymns 

The bitterness 

Of fairy tales 

Best woven into song 

From the dawn’s 

Early light 

To twilight’s last gleaming From Plymouth Rock 

To Dred Scott 

From smallpox 

To church bomb 

From black bodies 

Swinging in the summer breeze To the endless blood 

Of countless wounded knees Old glory 

We are born 

Witness 

To the sins of your soil 

Oh pioneer

I’ve never heard Sedillo recite his poetry live but I am told by those who have that he is electric, inhabiting the words, owning the room,  spitting fire and truth much as Baraka did in his day, but to a rapid-fire, staccato, hip-hop beat rather than Baraka’s jazzy cadence. The writer Greg Palast calls him the best political poet in America, and while I’m not in any position to agree or disagree, I can say that his poems leave me feeling ennobled, and less alone in the world.

Sedillo’s voice is defiant, irreverent, even wrathful, but his metier is championing the cause of the unwashed, and the unloved, be they Chicanos, African Americans, Indonesian sweatshop workers, or Palestinians. And the irony is that what shines through in Mowing the Leaves, more than anything is not of a poet seething at the injustice of it all, but besotted with the people. From his poem, Once:

I have this dream

Every so often

Of people

Beyond borders and prisons

Gathered in the distance

Telling tales of a time

When women feared the evening

When communities were punished by color

And grown men hunted children

Hardly able to believe

People once lived this way

Jon Jeter is a former Washington Post correspondent and the author of Flat Broke in the Free Market: How Globalization Fleeced Working People and the co-author of A Day Late and a Dollar Short: Bright Nights and Dark Days in Obama’s Postracial America.

"We Are Entering a New Totalitarian Era": An Interview with Ajamu Baraka

By Ann Garrison

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

In this interview for Pacifica Radio’s series on “Covid, Race, and Democracy,” Ajamu Baraka warns of a new era of totalitarian neoliberalism.

Ann Garrison: On January 20, we saw Joe Biden carry on about “unity” behind seven-foot fences topped with razor wire and 25,000 plus National Guard troops deployed . One friend of mine said that this pointed to an irony deficiency. Is there anything you'd like to say about it? 

Ajamu Baraka: Well, I think it is ironic, but it's quite understandable that the kinds of activities that the US has been involved in promoting and supporting globally—undermining democracies, subverting states, undermining and destroying any semblance of the rule of law—have basically come back to haunt them. You have a militant movement in the US partially inspired by the inability of the state and the system to address their material interests and to look at their concerns regarding their own understanding of democracy and its deficiencies. They feel like they lack space to articulate those views, and they’ve decided to engage in militant actions to make sure that their voices are heard, and they believe that they are upholding democracy.

And their experience with the state made them feel justified in advancing their concerns about democracy in violent forms. The state has demonstrated to them that the way you defend democracy is through state violence. So they were taking their defense into their own hands and bringing it right back to the center of empire. Some of us call that blowback. 

AG: For the past four years, liberals on the coasts have excoriated the white working class in the middle of the country, whom they perceive to be deplorable Trump supporters. Do you think that this is helpful? 

AB: No. Not only is it not helpful, it is inaccurate and it has helped to create the narrative that many of these forces have embraced; that is the centerpiece of their grievances. They believe that liberals and the liberal order have not addressed their needs, their interests. They believe that the economic elites are only out for themselves and that therefore they needed to rally behind Trump, a billionaire who claimed that he understood their interests and would fight for them because nobody else was.

So this characterization of them as deplorables, and as either Nazis or Nazi-like, is not only not helpful but also contradictory in the sense that those folks who level those charges still have not been able to explain why the Trump presidency happened.

For example, some nine million people who voted for Trump in 2016 had voted for Barack Obama in 2012. Liberals can't explain why, after four years of constant anti-Trump rhetoric, the Trump forces expanded their ranks by another 11 million voters. So this is something in play that's a little bit more sophisticated than these people just being deplorables or Nazis. And that something has to be interrogated. It has to be extracted. It has to be understood if you're going to have a politics to counter it. And right now the liberals have not understood where these elements are coming from because they have basically painted those 75 million people as a monolith of deplorables.

The neoliberals have constructed a politics that is going to result in a continuation of the same conditions, politically and economically, that created what they pretend to be most opposed to—the Trump movement. So this is the failure of imagination, the failure of critical analysis, the embracing of illusions that has characterized much of the politics in the US for a couple of decades now. And we see the consequences of that with us every day. 

AG: In the 48 hours after Biden became president, Israel bombed Syria, killing a family of four, a US convoy of trucks crossed into Syria to steal oil yet again, a double suicide bombing in Baghdad killed 32 people and Foreign Affairs, the journal of the US Council on Foreign Relations, published a piece with the headline “Th e  M yth of a  R esponsible  W ithdrawal from Afghanistan ,” which said, “the Biden administration should accept that there is no feasible middle way for a responsible withdrawal.” What do you think is next? 

AB: The continuation of policies that have resulted in the US being bogged down in Afghanistan for two decades, policies that will ensure that the wars that the US is involved in will continue. There will be a continuation of the commitment to US global full-spectrum dominance. In other words, violence is still at the center of the neoliberal project. And they intend to reintroduce that instrument under the Biden administration.

There were reports leading up to the election that Democratic Party-associated elements were secretly suggesting to the Afghan authorities that they would not have to worry about a peace process being executed once Joe Biden came to power. And they made the argument using some of the same terms and framework that we saw in that article in Foreign Affairs, that the US had a responsibility to remain in Afghanistan. And so they will fully prepare to undermine whatever progress was made for extracting US forces from that territory.

So we're not surprised to see the kind of elements that Biden has brought to his administration. These people were part of the Obama Administration, and they are committed to the US national security strategy, which is attempting to maintain US global hegemony using the instrument that they believe they are dependent on now, which is in fact global violence. 

AG: Yesterday, I signed a petition to Twitter to restore @real Donald Trump , the Twitter account of the 45th president of the United States. I didn't share the petition on my social media pages because I didn't want to have to fend off a lot of cancel culture, but I had enough faith in Pacifica to think I wouldn't get kicked off the air for sharing it in the broadcast version of this conversation. What do you think of Twitter’s suspension of Trump and 70,000  more accounts that they said were linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory? 

AB: I think it was quite troubling. I understand the disgust, the revulsion people have to Donald Trump. We know who Donald Trump is. He's a sociopath, he's a white supremacist. He’s despicable, but Donald Trump is, in fact, America. Donald Trump represents the kind of attitude and the kinds of values that made the US settler state what it is today.

So, this notion on the part of the liberals that he is some kind of aberration is completely ridiculous. In fact, it's ahistorical, but because of the disgust and because of the very serious legitimation crisis the US is facing, and the concern that neoliberal politicians have with the possibility of a return of Donald Trump, they have used the incident on January 6th as their opportunity to not only target Donald Trump as a person, but to target his “movement,” to undermine an above ground, legal political tendency, a tendency that generated 75 million votes.

If they can move against Donald Trump and make a connection between his speech and what occurred on January 6 in order to justify a permanent ban on someone who was the President of the United States with 88 million followers, then arbitrarily take down these other accounts that they say are “conspiratorial,” and if people then cheer because they hate Donald Trump, we are seeing a monumental mistake being made by liberals who think that this state is their friend, and that this state will get rid of Donald Trump, but somehow be able to maintain a commitment to civil liberties.

No, they are in fact conditioning the public to accept the constraints of civil liberties, or to have faith in private capitalist entities to determine what is acceptable speech and information that can be disseminated.

I believe they are, in essence, setting up the kind of dystopia that we see in science fiction movies, where you have corporate interests that have a complete and total control over every aspect of our lives. And of course, complete and total control over the ideals that are disseminated in those kinds of totalitarian society.

So, this is a quite troubling and even more troubling because so many people don't recognize that it’s dangerous. But it's quite slick because, like you said, you don't want to share your petition because you know people would go crazy if you said in public that you believe that Donald Trump's rights have been violated. So, this is a quite dangerous moment because what we see, in my opinion, is the hegemony of irrationality.

AG: Neoliberal militarists are comparing the Capital Riot to 9/11 and using it to justify the further militarization of Washington DC and Biden's domestic terrorism bill . At the same time, he has appointed infamous militarist Susan Rice to a new position, Director of Domestic Policy. Who do you think will become domestic targets during the Biden-Harris years? 

AB: Anyone who is involved in oppositional politics, including those elements that are part of the Black Lives Matter movement, and anyone else who questions US colonial policies. Anyone who will advance sharp analysis of the capitalist state, who will question some of its dominant ideals, who might even suggest that police forces should be withdrawn from certain neighborhoods. And anyone who would advocate better relations with the so-called adversaries of the US, like the Chinese and the Russians.

There’s no telling what is going to be seen as acceptable speech and political practice because we are entering a new totalitarian era. So I think anybody who is in opposition to the hegemony of the neoliberal project is at some point over the next few years going to experience the heavy hand of the state.

Let me just say this about the state that we've been talking about. People say that these Big Tech entities—Twitter, Facebook, Google, YouTube, etcetera—are private corporations, and that therefore they have no obligation to protect free speech rights: We need to make a correction. These entities are of course private, but the essence of neoliberalism is the spinning off of elements of the state that are public to private entities. So what we have with these Big Tech companies is, in fact, the spinning off of the function of speech monitoring and massive surveillance to these private companies.

These companies are in fact, from my point of view, part of the ideological state apparatus. They are part of the state, just like the private corporate media is part of the state. So we have to expand our understanding of what we refer to as the state. 

AG: A lot of people are frightened, particularly Black, Brown, and Jewish people, and most likely Asians now given all the bipartisan China-bashing underway. People, especially in these communities, have good reason to be frightened. And a lot of people are using the word fascist as they have for the past four years. But you've warned that neoliberal fascism will also get worse. Could you tell us what you mean by neoliberal fascism? 

AB: Well, first let me say that it's quite understandable, and we should be quite concerned about some of the more hardcore elements that we associate with the traditional right, who are quite capable and seem to be committed to using various methods to advance their political project. We saw some of those elements in the Capitol on January 6. So it's understandable that we be concerned with that, but I've been warning people also that we should be more concerned with the neoliberal elements that control the state and did even during the time that Donald Trump was occupying the executive branch. We have to remind ourselves, or at least come to the understanding, that neoliberalism is a right-wing ideology. It is a right-wing set of policies, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, so-called free trade, austerity, and reductions in government spending, all to empower the private sector and diminish the public sector. Neoliberalism has to be connected to its essence, which is neoliberal capitalism.

The turn to neoliberalism was born out of an act of violence. A neoliberal capitalist project was imposed on the people of Chile after the assault and the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973. So this is a right-wing, violent phenomenon. Okay? Now it's been able to dress itself up in the garb of state respectability, but it is a rightist tendency. And so that right-wing, neoliberal, totalitarian element is the element that is now constricting the range of acceptable political activity. They are the ones that re-introduced McCarthyism, McCarthyism 2.0. They are the ones that are now moving to smash this political opposition in the form of the Trump movement. They are the  ones that have allowed the FBI to create first, the Black identity extremist category to target us and to modify that with another term but the same objective—to target and undermine Black radical political opposition. So I've been making the argument that while we have been watching the theatrics of Donald Trump, the neoliberal state has been systematically conditioning the people to accept a new kind of totalitarianism. We've always had totalitarianism, but this is a new kind that will, they believe, ensure the continuation of their dominance. 

And I'm suggesting to people that, even though we hate Donald Trump and the traditional right, we are in a position now where we have to defend their traditional bourgeois rights as well as our own, and not allow the acceptable space of political, ideological opposition to be reduced.

We know that the state will reconcile with the right. Their real opposition and the basis for a potential cross class united front is opposition to socialists and communists, those of us on the left. And we on the left we are the real targets of this settler political state. So we've been trying to warn people to be vigilant and not allow themselves to be manipulated by these very powerful forces. And it's very difficult because they control all of the major means of communications and thought dissemination. But we've got to, to the extent that we can, present an alternative perspective so that we can build the kind of opposition we have to build if we're going to survive this critical period. 

AG: So it sounds like you think there's more we can do than duck and cover. 

AB: We have to. Those of us who have been part of the Black Liberation Movement, we have survived because we have resisted, and we also have survived because we know that we have been through the worst. You see, this thing referred to as fascism is nothing new for us, a colonized people, people who have been enslaved. It has typically been called fascism only when white people do certain things to other white people.

When the Nazis were studying, how they were going to construct laws in Germany, they were studying the apartheid system in the US. The Germans practiced building concentration camps in their murderous assault on the territory today referred to as Namibia. So it's when these policies of brutality, of systematic violence, of rape, when they are moved from the periphery, from the colonial periphery to the Global North, that's when they become Hitlerist, the ultimate expression of violence. 

King Leopold II in the Congo? That’s written off. It's not something that’s important, even though 10 million African people lost their lives. And we don't quantify the level of irrational violence, but we do say that we have an experience with this kind of irrational violence. And so we know we have to resist. And so we know that Donald Trump is not the worst US president. We know that things can in fact get worse. And what we do and have done is to prepare our forces, to resist, and to try to provide leadership to other resistors. Because we know even though it will get more difficult, we know that we are still on the right side of history. And there are enough people of conscience in this country who believe that we can build a new, better world. We believe that once we can organize ourselves, even though it may be difficult for a while, we have a real possibility of not only surviving, but also transforming this backward society.

Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016 candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. Baraka serves on the Executive Committee of the U.S. Peace Council and leadership body of the United National Anti-War Coalition (UNAC). He is an editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch. He was recently awarded the US Peace Memorial 2019 Peace Prize and the Serena Shim award for uncompromised integrity in journalism.

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize  for promoting peace through her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes Region. Please help support her work on Patreo n . She can be reached on Twitter @AnnGarrison  and at ann(at)anngarrison(dot)com.

Voting Doesn't Beat the Far Right

Photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta

By Ezra Brain

Republished from Left Voice.

The Far Right, emboldened and egged on by Donald Trump, stormed the U.S. Capitol Building yesterday with little resistance from the police. Their occupation of the Capitol — which came while Congress was in session ratifying the electoral college vote — is a far cry from the tear gas, rubber bullets, and mass arrests which took place during the Black Lives Matter movement last summer. But, this isn’t too surprising: we’ve always known that the cops will treat the Right with kid gloves and even aid and abet them, just like we saw during last year’s anti-lockdown protests and in Charlottesville. What these mobilizations reveal is, once again, that voting and elections won’t defeat the Far Right — especially not when the alternative is the Democratic Party, a capitalist party that helped fuel its rise. 

During the 2020 presidential election, figures from Barack Obama to Noam Chomsky to Angela Davis were telling everyone who would listen that voting for Joe Biden was necessary because it would defeat the Far Right forces that Trump has been stoking for more than four years. Many members of the Left bought into this argument and voted for Biden against their better judgement because they wanted to put a stop to Trump’s authoritarian and right-wing tendencies. In some sense, this is understandable — after all, if Trump is the one emboldening this right-wing movement, why wouldn’t getting rid of him help kill it? The events that transpired over the last few days clearly show that this is mistaken thinking. Whether in the White House or out of it, Donald Trump and his far right-wing base will continue to mobilize and play a role on the political stage. In fact, a staggering 75 percent of Republicans believe that the elections were rigged, highlighting the widespread influence of Trumpism. It is naïve to believe that these folks will just go home on January 20th.

Further, the idea that elections can defeat Trumpism misses  that politicians can’t create movements in a vacuum — they tap into existing sentiments and give political expression to them. The global rise in right-wing extremism is a response to the dire conditions created by the economic crisis. The current spike is a more direct result of the decline in living conditions for ordinary Americans over the past few decades, culminating in the 2008 financial crisis, which the capitalists resolved by implementing devastating austerity that robbed millions of social services, education, job opportunities, and health care. This created a deep polarization which had left- and right-wing populist expressions. 

In this context, right-wing extremism emerged because it spoke to the despair of (typically) white men. By tapping into the racism that capitalism is built on, right-wing extremism channels anger at the establishment and converts material struggles into xenophobia, racism, and neo-fascism. And Donald Trump was the political expression of this right-wing polarization, strengthening, giving voice to it, and, now, mobilizing it on a larger scale. This movement rallied around Trump because it believed that he represented a challenge to the established order and, now that he has been defeated by yet another neoliberal, it is mobilizing to defend him. 

But we should be clear: this rise in right-wing radicalization is a product of the Obama years as well as the escalation in the Trump years. Given this, it is not only incorrect but deeply dangerous to think that Biden’s warmed-over neoliberalism in the midst of a devastating economic crisis will do anything but escalate the problem.

Indeed, the escalations from the right that we saw on Wednesday come less than 24 hours after the Democrats won both senate elections in Georgia and took control of Congress. Trump was defeated at the ballot box in November and then again in January, but the social base of Trumpism is emboldened, not diminished. With Trump out of office, it provides him with a bigger platform to speak to this right-wing base, not smaller, because he will no longer be held back by having to work within the established structures. The “adults in the room” are gone, and full-fledged right-wing populism can reign at Trump rallies, on Trump’s Twitter feed, and the vast network of right-wing media outlets. 

So if the solution to defeating the Right isn’t voting for the Democrats, what is? 

The way to defeat the organized Right is with an organized Left independent of all capitalist parties. There are no shortcuts, no substitutes for the organizing we need to do. We need to build powerful and militant worker organizations in our workplaces and in the streets that can resist the Far Right, all the politicians who cater to them, and the neoliberal austerity that creates them. This resistance will involve both openly confronting the Far Right in the streets but also using our power as workers to resist them. For example, workers in DC could go on strike to protest the Far Right occupation of the Capitol building, forcing the government to evict them from the streets.

Strong Left organizations are also important because they can fight back the ideological advance of the Right. Many young people are drawn to the Far Right because they believe that it offers solutions to their struggles. If there were Left organizations that were putting forward a strong message against both the Far Right and neoliberalism, it could help to prevent some of these people from being drawn into right-wing extremism, thus preventing these movements from growing. It is vital in the fight to defeat the Right that we provide a real and meaningful alternative. And for people who become fascists, we agree with Trotsky when he said, “If you cannot convince a Fascist, acquaint his head with the pavement.”

In this, the failure of leftist leaders like Chomsky and Davis becomes clear: not only were they wrong that defeating Trump at the polls would defeat the Far Right, but they also sewed false illusions in Biden. Chomsky and the other leftist leaders who asked us to support Biden told us that he could keep us safe from the Far Right. He can’t — and he won’t. By funneling the energy of the Black Lives Matter movement into support for Biden, these leaders intentionally or not worked to undermine what could have been the foundations of the type of mass social movement we need to protect against the Far Right. Voting for Biden got us further away from defeating the Right, not closer.

History is littered with examples of this. From Franco in Spain to Hitler in Germany, the liberals always choose to side with the fascists over the socialists because fascism is less of a threat to the capitalist order than socialism is. So we can’t be fooled when liberal politicians wring their hands about the rise of the Far Right — they aren’t on our side, and we cannot support them in their elections, even when they are running against a representative of the Far Right. Liberal victories at the voting booth will not defeat the Right — but class struggle and worker organizing will. And given the right-wing mobilization yesterday, it’s clear that we need independent organizing in the current moment. 

Fascism, and How to Fight It

[PHOTO CREDIT: John Minchillo/AP]

By Peter Fousek

Both the name and the ideology of fascism originated in Italy in the early 20th century, where it arose as a spontaneous mass movement. It relied on a combination of large-scale, militant mobilization of working-class and middle-class people, with organization and financing provided by a wealthy elite. Its leader Benito Mussolini, having learned the power of popular discontent during his socialist days, was elevated to ruling status without any government background, in a time and place where such ascendancy was all but unheard-of.

The present Trumpist movement in the United States is analogous to this origin story of fascism. It is a movement relying on mass support, on a populist appeal to working and middle-class people who are terrified of losing an undue sense of social superiority, itself the product of longstanding practices of systemic racism and discrimination against marginalized minorities. Such practices of bigoted repression serve, more than anything else, to provide that angry and exploited demographic with an enemy based on racial sectarianism, such that they are convinced to direct their anger at the alien other designated thereby, rather than at their true exploiters and oppressors.

Those angry, white, working-class masses are the fuel of the fascist fire. They are not the directors but rather the foundation of the movement; the members of the society convinced that they stand to gain the most from the preservation of the present order. They are privileged by the longstanding system, kept complacent in the belief that they are not an exploited proletariat, but rather members of the ruling class. They are convinced of such a blatant lie (that is, their status as rulers, rather than their systemic privilege, which itself is quite real) only in being elevated above the marginalized minorities who they are told, quite falsely, are the enemy at fault for their own sufferings and shortcomings. In Italy, these masses of the privileged-oppressed were the landed peasantry and the petty-bourgeoisie. It does not take much imagination to locate them in the United States today.

In drawing this parallel, it is important to consider the underlying social and economic currents that lead to the rise of fascism, which provide its appeal as a popular movement. Broadly, fascism becomes possible only when the standard resources of an existing government prove unable to maintain the equilibrium of society. In such times, under such conditions, it is easy for a small contingent of the elite, acting as the agent of fascism, to inflame a group of people already in the throes of desperation on account of economic hardship and poverty within a world where they have been told over and over that their success, or lack thereof, is entirely up to them. When this proves false, when an elite few grow richer while they become more and more destitute, these masses need someone to blame. It is antithetical to the worldview that they have been taught, to consider their suffering a necessary byproduct of market fundamentalism, and it would be suicidal for them to consider it a personal failure.

As Hannah Arendt writes, “men in the midst of social disintegration and atomization will do anything to belong” (Origins of Totalitarianism). Due to their worldview of individualism, the belief that hard work alone necessarily begets success, the financial hardship they experience in times of economic instability (instability and hardship both necessary products of the “free market”) forces them to question their own value as they have come to understand it. Here we must remember that, however obvious it might seem that the exploitative economic system is at fault for their suffering, the ideology of that system forms the basis of their reality. To call that reality into question is a far more difficult task than to assign the blame to some other place or group, however imaginary the link may be. The ingenuity of the fascist is the ability to provide such a scapegoat, coupled with a promise of salvation through the fight against that designated “other”.

In Italy, fascism only filled this role because of the failure of their socialist movement at the time. In the years after the First World War, working-class revolutionaries took power over factories and gained political power, stagnating only due to a lack of organization and progression, and their abandonment by the social democrats. Subsequently, to keep their members out of direct conflict and combat, the worker’s movement made concession after concession, making way for an antithetical mass movement ready to promise ambitious goals and, more importantly, to project a sense of natural aristocracy. Mussolini succeeded by appealing to the historical glory of Rome, by associating his followers with that legendary state. Such an appeal came at the welcome cost of demonizing their enemies as lesser, in so doing providing to the in-group that sense of belonging and superiority that they had lost in the period of instability.

In the United States, Trumpism appeals to the revolutionary movement that founded the nation. We see a parallel appeal to that employed by Mussolini, in response to mirrored crises of economic origin, occurring simultaneously with disorganized left-populism. The noble struggle of the Left in this country, advocating for long-needed alterations to a repressive state apparatus rooted in the slaveholding origins of the nation and its exploitative economic tendencies, have been again and again abandoned by the supposed “left” establishment (Democrats), which exists blatantly as a neoliberal, center-right party dedicated to maintaining the status quo. On top of that abandonment, massive for-profit media machines foment division through overt and omnipotent identity politics, furthering the divides among factions of the working class along sectarian lines.

Thus, the clear and decisive rhetoric of the new American Right has been welcomed with open arms by many frustrated and alienated members of the working class. They have been drawn in by anti-establishment slogans and promises of radical change; worse still is how readily Trumpists have heralded temporary economic upswings (largely ones for which the Right is not responsible) as material evidence of the truth behind their claims. This temporary and false sense of material success is necessary for the fascist to come into power fully. Its mass-movement supporters act as a battering ram, thoroughly destroying political and social obstacles in its path. We have seen this in the Trumpist destruction of the Republican Party, the undermining of the rule of law, and the delegitimization of the most basic truths. A state’s transition to fascism does not mean that the state apparatus itself is dismantled or dissolved; instead, it means that the apparatus is transformed into a tool for the suppression of political opponents, and for the defense and propagation of its own ideology.

These trends have clearly been shockingly evident as products of the Trumpist movement. Trump has put 234 federal judges into office, hand-picked according to ideological leanings. He has appointed three Supreme Court justices, with his party taking unprecedented measures to push them through against popular mandate and in direct hypocrisy to their own procedural convictions. He carried out an unheard-of ten federal executions this year alone, while doling out 92 pardons to partisan criminals as personal favors. He has deployed police and military to violently suppress peaceful protesters, and attempted to enact education reform in order to force a rightist ideological curriculum on public school students; he has suppressed minority voters while actively engaging in the most devastating attempt in history to destroy the democratic processes of the United States. And now, in a final effort to achieve that end, he incited his followers to an act of insurrection, their dogmatic devotion (the direct result of the fascist appeals explained above) making them all too willing to attempt a violent overthrow of the government, for his sake.

All the while, he has used the tools of the state—the police, the military, the courts—to further his fascist ends. The state apparatus, with its own origins deeply intertwined with racist and classist repression, leapt to attack and suppress the marginalized and the left with neither prompt nor justification. With nearly one trillion dollars in federal defense spending (more than the next ten countries combined), and similarly outsized police expenditures dominating local budgets as well, the repressive state apparatuses of the military and police forces have been used abroad as agents of imperialism, and domestically to attack minorities and activists on the left. Nonetheless, when the Trumpist insurrection stormed the Capitol, these state forces all but ushered them in, alleging that they were overwhelmed by the rioters despite the vast resources at their disposal. That hypocrisy, far from accidental, is the foremost symptom of fascism; the willingness of the state to assent to the fascist mob indicates that this trend not only enabled Trump, but will outlive him.

The times of social crisis which facilitate the rise of fascism may alternately be moments of dramatic progressive upheaval. In order to achieve that greater end, though, the lower-middle and working class must unite in the direction of their own liberation. The fascist tendency will win when one contingent or sub-contingent shifts instead towards the Right. Considering the present right-wing terrorism and violence, we can no longer fail to actively address the threat illustrated by the results of the most recent election. Trump lost, yes, and his party lost the house and senate as well. Nonetheless, in the face of the greatest social and economic chaos this country has seen in modern times, nearly 11 million more voters felt compelled to keep Trump in office than had sought to elect him in 2016. The fascist trend is moving definitively upward, and while Trump is an incoherent and unstable loudmouth guided more by hatred and narcissism than any ideology, there are plenty of far more intelligent, ideologically driven, and capable politicians, pundits, and celebrities on the right, willing and able to step into the spotlight and turn an already devastating movement into something from which we will never recover.

But all hope is not lost! It is crucial, if we are to reach a better end, a brighter, just, and egalitarian future, rather than one of despair, that we recognize this fascist movement for what it is, and that we recognize the state apparatus that gave birth to it. We cannot return to the old status quo if we are to be redeemed. Its failings, which not only enabled this fascist Trumpism but made it inevitable, cannot be simply reformed. A system based on market fundamentalism is innately tied to an individualist ideology, to the fundamental belief that one’s prosperity is a reflection of one’s worth, and therefore that exploitation is justified along with obscene excess in the face of terrible poverty and starvation. Such a corrupt moral mandate makes an eventual breakdown unavoidable: the cavalier risks taken by financial institutions for the sake of their own gain will, as we have seen in the past decade, push the exploited masses to the point of demanding change. And the time for change, whether we want to accept it or not, has now arrived—that much is clear.

If we ask ourselves, then, what combination of circumstances can turn the working class towards progress rather than reactionary repression and division, we wouldn’t find a more favorable set of conditions than those facing the USA today: economic instability, vastly inflating the wealth of an increasingly marginal elite while over a fifth of our country goes hungry, the blatant state-sanctioned racism assailing people of color, the disintegration of the rule of law and of sociopolitical norms, the crisis of democratic republicanism made clear by the rise of Trump, and the self-exposure of the Democratic establishment as unwilling to enact radical change. These conditions will only continue to ripen as corporations trend towards legal monopolization, as financial interests dominate more and more of our “representative” politics, as automation eliminates jobs and the effects of climate change wreak more and more devastation and increase resource scarcity. If we, the Left, are to have any hope of winning out, then we must accept the inadequacy of our present party and state institutions to handle the current crises, much less those to come. That basic fact can no longer be denied. Once it has been accepted, we can begin to engage with alternatives that might work better, and to organize with the goal of enacting them. But we must act fast, with the exigency of a people fighting for their very survival, because the Right is well on its way to dragging us down the opposing path.

Tragedy and Resistance: A Brief History of the United States

By Scott Remer

I’ve been thinking a lot the last few months about the concept of tragedy: what it obscures, and what it reveals. The United States and the world have been suffering the natural disaster of Covid-19, but the US is also suffering from the effects of unnatural tragedies, the inevitable results of lethal, racist mechanisms which were designed at the outset of the American experiment.

Three episodes in American history are particularly pertinent for understanding the new movement emerging in the streets and fighting for the freedom of people of color: slavery, the attempted Reconstruction of the rebellious South, including the original Populist movement of the 1880s and 1890s, and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Since, as William Faulkner once put it, the past isn’t ever dead—it isn’t even past—these chapters of American history deserve another look to see what we can learn about these tempestuous times and what lies ahead.

Origins

The United States was founded on stolen soil, watered with the blood of indigenous people, cultivated with the blood of slaves who were brutally uprooted from their African homelands. Their labors, without remuneration or recognition, literally built the United States. Numerous rapacious Wall Street banks—financial institutions which exist to this day—owned slaves or invested in Southern plantations. Centuries of pain and suffering connect present and past in a chain of exploitation. The work and degradation of people of color were and continue to be the engine that generates wealth in the richest, most powerful country in human history.

Slavery was a barbaric, totalitarian system. Families were ripped apart without an afterthought. Slaveowners brutally repressed the slaves’ African culture. Slaveowners abused slaves without shame or legal repercussions. Slaves couldn’t receive an education or even the most fundamental human rights. Of course, contrary to popular textbooks that distort the historical record and submerge the history of resistance, the slaves weren’t merely victims resigned to their unenviable fate. Resistance against the dictatorship of the slaveowners could always be found: according to some research, over 250 rebellions with more than ten participants took place during the era of slavery, including Nat Turner’s famed rebellion. Despite these valiant efforts, slavery was deeply rooted and persisted for over three centuries from its beginnings in the 16th century until the emancipation of the last slaves on June 19, 1865, nowadays commemorated as Juneteenth.

It’s worth emphasizing the bare facts—it’s easy to avoid confronting the full horror of American history by hiding behind the 150+ years that separate us from slavery. Millions and millions of people were born, lived, and died under a regime that was a hell on earth. This system lasted for longer than the time that distances 2020 from the end of slavery in 1865. The evil that this system fed, created, and unleashed changed America’s character irrevocably. Its consequences ramified and multiplied over time. They corrupt the present and threaten our future. Despite all this, many white people still don’t have courage to face the facts. To understand why, we have to delve into how exactly the Civil War concluded.

The Failed Reconstruction of the South

After four long years of internecine bloodshed, on April 9, 1865, the Civil War ended. Over 1.75 million people had died. Large parts of the South, in particular the farms of Georgia, had been devastated. The main cities of the South were destroyed, reduced to ashes. It was an opportune moment for a complete transformation, one which would have realized the unfulfilled dream of freedom for all, especially in a South that was basically feudal.

At the outset, it looked like the Radical Republicans, encouraged by the Union’s victory, would be willing to do everything necessary to impose a revolution on a defeated yet resistant South. The Radical Republicans wanted to bring the full emancipation of former slaves to completion: they wanted people of color to be able to obtain all their civil rights, including the vote, and they were ready to exterminate Confederate racism and chauvinism as soon as possible. They believed in complete equality between the races.

To achieve this program, the Radical Republicans advocated the empowerment of a comparatively weak, underdeveloped federal government. This position was the perfect antithesis of the Confederate philosophy of “states’ rights.” The Republicans created the Freedmen’s Bureau to provide benefits to emancipated people and help them navigate the new world of the labor market now that slavery had been abolished. Some white allies moved to the South to teach and train freed people of color. Congressional Republicans drafted a civil rights law and expected a simple process of approval.

Unfortunately, things wouldn’t prove quite so easy. Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s successor, was highly conservative. He opposed land redistribution to people of color and vetoed the initial, moderate civil rights law, saying that he sympathized with African-Americans but couldn’t accept the expansion of federal power that would be necessary to implement the law. He claimed it was unconstitutional. In the South, an enormous wave of resistance arose—the KKK tried to use a campaign of terrorism and violence to maintain the antebellum racial order, and many people of color perished at the hands of unrepetant white supremacists.

In the end, the Republicans forced the ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment had an enormous, tragic gap—it says “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States”—which nows serves as a legal justification for the system of slavery that exists in prisons and jails. Today, many prisoners are forced to work for less than a dollar per hour. The Republicans also impeached President Johnson. After Johnson’s impeachment, they passed the Acts of Reconstruction, placing the South under military control. 20,000 soldiers were dispatched to the South. The military governors protected the rights of recently freed people—they helped freedpeople exercise their rights by registering Black voters and supervising elections to prevent disenfranchisement. The soldiers also paralyzed the KKK: the military governments prosecuted KKK leaders and frustrated their plots to defend white supremacy. Liberal political coalitions formed in the South, based on the support of the occupying forces, the influx of Northerners who supported racial equality, and the new political role that Black people were playing. Meanwhile, President Grant, a Republican, worked to expand the federal government’s powers to ensure Southern compliance with the law. For a moment, it seemed that this method of securing racial justice might just work.

Sadly, this glimmer of hope didn’t last. With the passage of time, political will in the North diminished; keeping the South under control through military occupation no longer seemed as appealing to many Northern whites. Resistance to Reconstruction wasn’t only a question of Southern opposition: it also stemmed from deep-rooted Northern racism. In the presidential election of 1876, the precarious political coalitions that had kept Reconstruction intact collapsed. The election was very close, and nobody knew who’d truly prevailed. The Democratic Party exploited the opportunity this electoral chaos presented: it agreed to give the presidency to the Republican Party in exchange for the end of Reconstruction and the withdrawal of all federal soldiers from the South.

After federal forces withdrew, Southern whites seized control of state and local governments. In one notable instance in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1898, they staged a coup. Then, exploiting Northern exhaustion and fading interest, they passed discriminatory laws to deprive people of color of their rights. Although Black people enjoyed their legitimate rights for a brief period during Reconstruction, the exercise of those rights was dependent on active protection from the federal government, which had an expiration date. During that short-lived period, people of color were unfortunately unable to take control of the land, tools, and money that they needed to start new lives with true freedom. Because Black people lacked capital and economic power, during the era following Reconstruction, white plantation owners reinstituted a system very similar to slavery. The sharecropping system rivaled slavery in its brutality, and it enjoyed complete legality.

The Original Populist Movement

A new grassroots movement—the Farmers’ Alliance—sprouted up on the Great Plains after the failure of Reconstruction. It represented a revolt against unfettered capitalism and an attempt to rescue American democracy. The farmers suffered from the depredations of the great corporations of the East. They craved an end to monopoly power and Wall Street oligarchy. They developed a clear program with well-defined demands, all based on a major expansion of the regulatory powers of the federal government: land reform, progressive taxation, the nationalization of the banking sector, the nationalization of railways and telecommunications, the establishment of postal banks, and recognition of workers’ right to unionize. To achieve these goals, the Alliance organized demonstrations with bands and parades.

The Alliance’s efforts met with a certain measure of success: at the beginning of 1884, its members numbered 10,000; by 1890, their ranks had blossomed to over a million. The movement began in the Great Plains, but to create a durable coalition in the US, a social movement needs a nationally distributed base of support. Then as now, the American working class and lower classes were multiracial and lived in different parts of the country. To expand their reach, the Alliance had to overcome deep-rooted interethnic and interracial divisions in the South and in the cities of the North. This proved to be particularly problematic, just as difficult as combating corporations’ fierce resistance and smashing corporate control over the political process once and for all.

Take Tom Watson, a leader of the Populist movement in his home state of Georgia, as an example. At first, he ardently defended the civil rights of people of color: he advocated for equality at the ballot box and roundly denounced lynching. But after some electoral defeats in 1896 and a mysterious psychological alteration, Watson reversed course. Around 1900, he began to attack people of color with racist vitriol. Watson’s abrupt shift symbolized the Populists’ predicament. Confronted with irredentist, revanchist politics and a campaign of terror by racist paramilitary groups, the Populist movement hesitated—and that was the definitive end to Reconstruction and the promise of social democracy in the United States at the end of the 19th century.

The 1960s and a Frustrated Mass Movement

Fast forward six decades. The segregation regime in the South had endured, codified in state laws and daily practices. Unionization campaigns in the South in the 1940s and 1950s, including the CIO’s Operation Dixie, had failed, unable to surmount ingrained racism. But finally a well-coordinated movement, with capable leaders; a ready, determined rank and file; and decades of preparation, was on the march.

At first, the civil rights movement encountered resistance in the field of public opinion. In May 1961, 57% of people believed that demonstrations in the South (sit-ins, Freedom Buses, etc.) would harm the cause of desegregation. Even as late as May 1964, after many protests, 74% of people believed that mass demonstrations by people of color would damage racial equality. Only in the end of the 1960s, after five years of marches, and with the specter of violence hanging in the air, did public opinion finally change: in May of 1969, 63% of people believed that nonviolent protests could achieve racial equality.

How this change of heart occurred—and how the civil rights movement evolved during the 1960s—is instructive. Initially, and with good reason, reflecting the most pressing problems, it focused principally on liberal, formal equality: the right to desegregated public facilities, the right to vote without reprisals, the right to attend integrated schools, the right to be protected from labor discrimnation. Public demonstrations unquestionably succeeded, creating the push necessary for the federal government to act: LBJ didn’t have any other option but to take decisive legislative action to make racial equality more than empty words.

But Martin Luther King, Jr., and other leaders of the movement, including the queer democratic socialist Bayard Rustin, recognized that civil rights don’t count for much without complementary economic and social rights. King asked, referring to the sit-ins, “What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can’t afford to buy a hamburger?” In the years before his assassination, King began to pay attention to the need for sweeping structural changes to the economy. He was assassinated in the midst of a visit to Memphis to support a sanitary workers’ strike.

King was organizing a Poor People’s March in 1968 to win universal economic and human rights. King and other leaders of the movement wanted to unify poor whites, Native Americans, Chicanos, Black people, and other marginalized groups into a powerful coalition capable of transforming the United States into a humane nation, with democratic socialism for all and militarism and imperialism for none. The Black Panthers and other radical Black Power organizations emphasized separatist elements of Black empowerment in some cases, but they always underlined the importance of socialism and anti-imperialism in winning genuine liberty. Radical groups like the Black Panthers also operated social programs in their own communities, offering a grassroots model for social change.

Sadly, the spate of assassinations in the middle and late 1960s of leaders on the Left like MLK, RFK, Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton, coupled with the bloody war in Vietnam, conspired to deflate the movement. Although the Poor People’s March still took place, it didn’t receive the attention it deserved, and the dreams of a more just country and world bled nearly to death, victims of the Cold War and violent reaction spearheaded by Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and the Republican Party. Instead of resisting this regression, the Democratic Party establishment united with the Republicans during the 1980s and 1990s to pass laws which spawned a grotesque system of mass incarceration and out-of-control policing, hiding behind anti-crime slogans. Meanwhile, the history of imperialism and interventionism that has destroyed the lives of people of color worldwide continued to unfold.

The Present

What lessons do these episodes of American history suggest for us today?

Firstly, the fight for the right to vote—and for the civic equality that it represents—has always been central in the struggle for racial justice: from the beginning, during Reconstruction, the Populist movement, and the civil rights movement. A common thread that connects American history is the elite attempt to limit the electorate—only by doing so can elites maintain their fidelity to the idea of formal democracy. The moment the electorate turns into a threat against racist and capitalist power, elites have always been willing to jettison their ostensible love for democracy, even going so far as to use terrorist violence to repress people of color.

Secondly, and probably more importantly, Reconstruction never attempted to correct economic injustice and the racial power imbalance. Former slaves were converted—against their will—into workers ready to enter the new labor market that the capitalists had instituted in the “reconstructed” South. Ex-slaves won neither reparations nor control over capital and the economic conditions that structured their lives. Congress didn’t pass land reform. The Thirteenth Amendment didn’t even abolish slavery completely. Reconstruction’s failure to change material conditions in the South and elsewhere was its weakest point. One might even say that the Civil War never truly concluded: we never successfully quashed the Confederacy’s racism and feudalism.

Defeated outright on the battlefield, the Confederacy switched tactics, transferring its hatred and opposition towards American state-building and national consolidation to new vessels: reactionary Republicans and Dixiecrats, paramilitary campaigns of racial terrorism, and white supremacist groups like the KKK. The battle between federal power and “states’ rights” has always had racial implications. “States’ rights” acts as a mask, a euphemistic facade, to preserve white supremacy. Where exactly the conflict between the federal government and local legislatures stands is a good indicator of the status of civil rights nationwide at any given moment in American history, with the shameful history of HUD redlining and the Trump administration’s Department of Justice serving as prominent exceptions to this tendency.

The sad collapse of the Populist movement shows us how racism has functioned as a weapon against grassroots movements. Racial tensions are a major obstacle that discourage unity among oppressed groups, even though marginalized groups share many of the same interests. As the author Isabel Wilkerson suggests in an extraordinary article (and in her new book), we should regard the United States’ racial system as a caste system akin to the one in India.

The civil rights movement’s experience shows us that protests can get results. On their own, they can change public opinion—certainly not overnight, but gradually. More importantly, they can force legislative changes. Those changes tend to persuade people more effectively and efficiently than almost anything else. The civil rights movement’s ultimate collapse in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a question of bad luck: the assassinations of MLK, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy, and Fred Hampton effectively arrested the momentum of the movement’s radical and mainstream wings alike, as did the disaster in Vietnam.

The history of the civil rights and Populist movements also underscores the connection between the struggle for racial equality and the struggle for democratic socialism: a dialectical relationship exists between particular demands and universal demands. For tactical and moral reasons, in a country with a multicultural, multiracial working class, one must construct a coalition that unifies different groups to have the possibility of overthrowing a potent, united corporate elite.

An internationalist analysis is essential: the role that the US has played on the international stage is inseparable from our domestic situation. In other words, America’s racism against its own citizens and its racism against people of color in countries around the world are inextricably linked. Exactly for that reason, before he died, King began to fiercely critique the war in Vietnam, denouncing militarism, materialism, and imperialism as deadly triplets linked with racism, and warning that the United States was risking “spiritual death.” The inevitable consequence of a system that devalues the lives of a large part of its own people is that its disdain for humanity will infect every cell of the body politic, internally and externally.

We’ve seen this truth manifest disturbingly in Portland and other parts of the US, where federal troops have sought to repress protests using violent, illegal tactics. To safeguard white supremacy, Trump and his flunkies have seemed willing to impose all-out authoritarianism on American soil, a marked difference from the history of American imperialism, which ordinarily preserves some degree of separation between conditions in the imperial metropole and conditions in the periphery. If we cross that Rubicon, it won’t be a coincidence that the lurch into outright authoritarianism will have a great deal to do with racism. Nor was it a coincidence that federal troops used the arms and authority that the War on Terrorism, a war which has been a catastrophe for people of color in the global South, has given them.

But there are also some promising signs. The protests we’ve been witnessing have lasted a considerable amount of time, and a broad coalition appears to be forming to support the protesters. Although the vast majority of the protesters’ policy agenda hasn’t been realized yet, popular awareness of the urgent need for racial justice has risen rapidly. The deplorable economic situation in which we find ourselves also offers us an opportunity to mobilize the people to fight for economic justice. Also promising is the energy we felt on the streets this summer. Although it’s tempting to surrender in the face of all the formidable obstacles we face, the protesters appear committed, come what may.

American history is tragic. This chapter isn’t an exception: the extrajudicial execution of George Floyd by the police was particularly horrific. Even so, Floyd’s murder was yet another in an appallingly long list of similar murders. The implication of the term “tragedy” is that we can neither avoid nor change our fate. Fortunately, the protesters have demonstrated, in spite of everything, that they still believe our destiny can be changed.

The Rise and Fall of Trump and What It Means

(PHOTO CREDIT: Gage Skidmore/Flickr)

By Youssef Shawky Magdy

After Donald Trump won 2016 elections, many theorizations emerged about the rise of the right in the capitalist West. This was exacerbated by Boris Johnson's victory in Britain, and the vision became clear that there would be a tug of war between a US-British economic and political alliance against Europe under the leadership of Germany.  In addition to the rise of the right-wing movements in many European countries as Germany itself and France (some expected Marie Le Pen would win or that Le Pen will succeed Macron).  But what does the rise of the right mean basically?

Since the end of the nineteenth century, the period of competitive capitalism ended and capitalism has been entering the framework of monopoly capitalism, which was characterized by the close union of financial and industrial capital.  Lenin wrote about that stage, stressing its close connection with imperialism, and we still live in the highest stage of capitalism with the change of imperialism from a national situation to a globalized one.  The question here is when does "fascism" — or what can be called more broadly the "savior right" — rise?

The savior far right rises as a response to a comprehensive social crisis represented by an economic decline in the rate of capitalist profit that cannot be compensated for by "more foreign imperialism"(imperialism against others),  in addition to a political crisis represented by the dissolution of the ruling-class coalition and the collapse of its hegemony.  Besides the ideological crisis represented in the collapse of the principles and myths supporting the status quo. 

This is accompanied by an increase in the pace of progressive movements of a left-wing nature that offer popular and progressive solutions to the crisis, such as fair wages, a fair distribution of the surplus, and an increase in workers' power and authority within productive enterprises. Perhaps the solutions become more revolutionary that try to change the entire social system.

And when those progressive movements fail for subjective (strategic and tactical) and objective reasons, the fascist right rises up as the representative of the bourgeois class, which is in crisis.  So the right tries to fix the situation in favor of monopoly capitalism, but in a populist fashion.  So, the crisis is emptied of its content and the process of displacement is installed, which projects the problem to any demographic or cultural phenomenon, such as projecting the crisis on immigrants, for example.  The right represents the middle class but in a deceitful manner.

And now, after we knew the conditions and aspects of the savior right, are these conditions and appearances fulfilled in the current capitalist West?

Of course, the capitalist West has been going through an economic crisis since the 1990s, and the Iraq war was a temporary attempt to alleviate the crisis, but the opposite happened.  The goal of securing the oil wells was achieved, but the return was serious economic and political losses.  The crisis reached a dangerous stage in 2008, and with Covid-19 crisis, the severity of the crisis increased in several situations. The profit rate reached very low rates.

Regarding the political crisis, the United States has been suffering since the Iraq war from a decline in its hegemony over the world and the consumption of exorbitant resources in its wars, which has led to Trump's tendency to reduce those interventions and limit the intervention only to very necessary situations such as threatening to intervene in Venezuela or Iran.  In Western countries themselves, liberal democratic governmentality suffers from a deep problem represented in the vulgarization of the meaning of democracy and its focus on the representative type only.  The public’s distrust of that governmentality has been increasing.

Regarding the ideological crisis, liberal democratic values ​​are proving their failure day after day, from their forced application on the third world countries within the framework of pushing them towards economic openness (which is failing for various reasons, the most important of which is that these projects are completely unpopular) to the failure of that values in the West to achieve the desired happiness.

In addition to the neoliberal ideology that fuels religious and ethnic conflicts.

As for the signs that indicate the rise of the right, we find that they are available to a large extent; for example, Trump tells us that he is “the president of the peasants and workers!” Right-wing nationalism is spreading again, in addition to anti-immigrantism.  Racist crimes are increasing day by day.

The question here is whom the rising right represents now?

In the pre-globalization era, the right "truly" represented big monopoly capitalism that was still associated with "nation-state". That link was largely structural. So we find that the laws and rules regulating the economy were related to the framework of the nation.  The economic production cycles were deeply related to the state’s economic cycles, such as the payment of salaries, allowances, official holidays..etc. In addition, industrial capitalism prevailed, not financial capitalism.  The first, of course, needs an organization and a specific context in which to work.  In one word, capitalism was capitalist "statism". Consequently, when fascism escalated, it rose in a context that made it easier for it to perform its rescue tasks, and the statism turned into hyper-statism. The bailout has come in a national context to represent monopoly capital of a national character.

But in our time, the era of globalization, capital divorced from the national context; the globalized economic cycle, in all its complexities, has separated from the national context and Financial capital prevailed.  In fact, the crisis of global monopoly capitalism needs a solution of the same size and level of complexity, that is, it needs a global solution.

The savior right cannot provide solutions but national solutions, and thus its representation in that era is limited to capital, which is not so large as to leave the context of the nation-state.  In general, there is a conflict with those small capitalist strata, and the globalization project led by big capitalism, which seizes and controls the market and has relatively little production costs.  The protectionist measures (of all kinds) promoted by the right contradict the globalization project.

Even if an extremist right-wing project succeeds in a western country, it will be overthrown by the global system, as happened in the Second World War as When the right fails to manage the crisis, it turns to violence that is forcefully defeated.

This is how we should understand Trump's rise and fall.  The rise was a response to the crisis but an inadequate response. The new US administration is more homogenous with the world order.  Therefore, it will participate in the global solution to the crisis.

Biden's victory and the defeat of Trump have not signified the success of any progressive coalition, as some liberals think.

Some believed that Trump's rise would result in a counter-left movement, and that did happen with the rise of Bernie Sanders, but that movement was defeated. Ultimately Biden does the same job as Trump, but in a more understanding and rational way.

Disturbing The Peace: UN Peacekeepers and Sexual Abuse (Part 2: Unabated Horrors)

By Devon Bowers

Author’s Note: This article and series focuses on sexual abuse and assault, with some graphic descriptions of such acts. Reader discretion is advised.

Nearing the end of the 20th century, there was an increase in United Nations peacekeeping missions around the world. While there were positive efforts to maintain and/or create peaceful environments where non-violent solutions could be pursued in war-torn nations, there was also a dark underbelly to these operations. Most prominently that peacekeepers would regularly abuse primarily women and girls, many of them having already fallen victim to government and rebel forces, they were to be victimized yet again but by the very people who should have provided security and stability.

Still worse, the United Nations itself would engage in cover ups of the abuse, hanging victims out to dry and suffer in silence. With the turn of the century, one would hope that there would new efforts would be put forth and sought after to hold abusers accountable, yet the horrors would continue unabated.

Ethiopia and Eritrea

In 1998, violence broke out between the neighboring African nations of Ethiopia and Eritrea regarding a border dispute, with the Organization of African Unity mediating a sort of peace between them, yet clashes occurred again in May 2000, ending with the OAU working out a cessation of hostilities and the UN sending in a peacekeeping mission to monitor the ceasefire and the border dispute in July 2000.[1]

The very next year it was reported that a former member of the Italian contingency had been involved in abuse, specifically the Italian military justice system was investigating them “for allegedly having sex with underage girls while serving in the Mission area.”[2] That same year, three Danish soldiers were sent home and charged with having sex with a thirteen year old Eritrean girl. This, coupled with the Italian story, enraged the local populace, with “diaspora Eritreans [accusing] UNMEE of trying to destroy their country by ‘bringing their sick nature with them.’”[3]

Though there were few reported incidents of abuse throughout the entire mission, it reveals that the cancer that is sexual abuse was still strong in peacekeeping operations.

Liberia

In September 2003, then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan requested that a peacekeeping force be deployed to Liberia to support the transitional government in their attempt to establish order and legitimacy, primarily stemming from the second Liberian civil war, with forces being deployed that month.[4]

The chief of the UN mission, Jacques Paul Klein, a French UN diplomat, emphasized that the zero-tolerance rule for sexual misconduct would be enforced and that anyone caught having sex with minors would be summarily repatriated.[5] Despite these reassurances and even the enforcement of a midnight curfew, abuse still occurred.

An internal UN letter from 2004, written by a UN Children’s Fund representative to the mission’s second-highest ranking official, stated that “girls as young as 12 years of age are engaged in prostitution, forced into sex acts and sometimes photographed by UN peacekeepers in exchange for $10 or food or other commodities,”[6] noted the failure to address several misconduct reports, and that the U.N. Deputy Secretary General, Louise Frechette, was pressuring leadership to crack down on sexual abuse.[7]

This information of the abuse of young girls was made all the worse when the UK branch of the children-oriented humanitarian organization Save The Children published a 2005 report which found that “girls as young as eight were selling sex for items such as food, beer, clothing, perfume or mobile phones [while others] were reported as having sex with adults in return for good school grades, video screenings or rides in cars”[8] and those bribing and raping these girls were primarily UN peacekeepers and agency staff. There was a stark hypocrisy as these same individuals would promote anti-sexual exploitation and abuse narratives, but would partake in that very exploitation on their off hours.

The girls would actively sell themselves to peacekeepers and aid workers as a way to make money, but there was still risk. Beyond getting sexually transmitted infections, if a girl were to become pregnant, they would quickly be disowned and blamed for their situation, despite her parents enjoying the extra funds that were being produced.[9]

The situation was extremely predatory, with “children [being] viewed as potential sexual conquests.” One example is Oretha, 15, and her 16 year old sister Sarah, who “go to the town's [Foya’s] main highway and beg from foreign aid workers in NGO-branded 4x4s who give them the equivalent of 40 pence [$0.54 USD] in exchange for sex.” If the highways were bare, “they go to the base where the UN peacekeepers are stationed and ask for food, but they say the peacekeepers, too, expect sex in return.”[10] The allegations of purchasing sex came up again in 2015 when a report from the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services noted that peacekeepers in Liberia were purchasing sex by offering money, jewelry, and cell phones, among a variety of items used to bribe and lure victims.[11] This effectively created a free-for-all of sorts where peacekeepers can abuse women and girls, with little to no concern in being held responsible for their actions.

While testimonies and reports are useful in examining the level of abuse that occurs, statistics help to create an even fuller picture, however even if one looks at the numbers, it is impossible to get an encompassing analysis.

The Numbers Game

In March 2007, the UN reported some positive changes regarding sexual abuse allegations, namely that the number of assaults in Liberia decreased from 45 to 30, with programs such as “a compulsory induction course for all military and civilian staff members to raise awareness about the effects and consequences of sexual exploitation and abuse”[12] and training local NGOs to spread the message about the UN’s program on preventing such abuse being credited for the decline. However, we have to question the numbers as there are serious problems with how they are calculated. There are two main problems: 1) the sole reliance of reporting of cases as a way of gathering data and the larger issues that stem from that and 2) the actual statistical data being so muddled that it is, at the very least, extremely difficult to get any hard numbers on the matter.

Though the UN touts its zero-tolerance policy, it is extremely important to note that the entire policy depends on people reporting abuse. While there may be actions that are an attempt to mitigate the chances of sexual abuse happening, overall, the ability of the UN to enforce its zero-tolerance policy is extremely difficult[13], as can be seen in the form of patrols. Patrols looking to curb and enforce sexual abuse laws still have difficulties as

situations that may be seen as suspicious with regards to SEA [sexual exploitation and abuse] often end up going unreported and unpunished or, if reported, garnering only a minor punishment. A typical example – and one we witnessed personally – is when a mission staffer is caught with a local person in the car. Because the couple (in this case a male UN employee and female local, in a UN vehicle parked by the side of the road at ten o’clock on a Friday night) was not caught en flagrante and neither admitted any wrongdoing (indeed, the woman slipped out of the car and quickly vanished), the end result was that the employee would only be reported as having an unauthorized personnel in his vehicle. [14]

Rather than deal similar problems through the proper channels, it was dealt with internally, generally resulting only in a peacekeeper losing their driver’s license. Not only does this deprive the victims of justice, but it also helps to skew reported numbers of sexual abuse, making the problem seem less prevalent than it actually is. Just as bad, however, is that even if there are reports from third parties, it’s almost impossible to substantiate the accusations due to the lack of physical evidence or eyewitnesses. Many times, when a victim comes forward, it devolves into a ‘he said, she said’ situation, again making enforcement near impossible.

A secondary problem with relying on reporting as the primary means of enforcing sexual abuse rules is that it assumes that sending up such incidents is a unit priority, that “reporting cases of SEA will trump other priorities – such as loyalty to colleagues or a desire not to get involved in someone else’s private life.”[15] To those ends, it has been found that many peacekeepers have an idea of what is and isn’t ‘legitimate’ sexual abuse and will act on those ideas when deciding whether or not to report.

The situation was looked at in-depth in 2013 when an independent report was conducted which evaluated the sexual abuse prevention efforts in UN missions in Haiti, Liberia, the Congo, and South Sudan, respectively. The team of was composed of General Paban J. Thapa, a retired Force Commander of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan, Dr. Thelma Awori, a retired Assistant Secretary General of UNDP Africa, and Dr. Catherine Lutz, a professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

It was brought to light that there were a number of bureaucratic issues that resulted in a decrease in reports being sent up, such as:

 1) That there were multiple routes for reporting which created problems when attempting to track cases.

2) The lack of information sharing between the Office of Internal Oversight Services, the Conduct and Discipline team, and the military/police.

3) The military police weren’t out in the field, which denied “the Force Commander information about conduct and discipline that could be used to enforce the SEA policy and regulations.”[16]

4) There were poor investigation methods, which creates problems when trying to prosecute a case due to lack of evidence or evidence not meeting a high standard.

5) There was generally “a culture of enforcement avoidance, with managers feeling powerless to enforce anti-SEA rules, a culture of silence around reporting and discussing cases, and a culture of extreme caution with respect to the rights of the accused, and little accorded to the rights of the victim.”[17]

All of the problems reinforce one another, resulting in the victims being thrown away and ignored, while priority is given to abusers whose protection is multi-layered.

The conspiracy of silence even extended to victims, as many peacekeepers would simply pay them off and go about their way while the peacekeepers who would stand up for the protections and rights of victims would be stigmatized by their peers.[18]

Academic Kate Grady conducted a study on UN abuse statistics, which found in part that “the manner in which this data has been collated, presented and explained raises a number of questions as to the reliability of these statistics.”[19] For example, in 2004, statistics were provided on ‘cases,’ however the term itself was never defined and in subsequent UN reports, there was the use of phrases such as ‘allegations’ and ‘cases,’ which still lacked any definition.[20]

In 2007, a sliver of insight was provided regarding these terms, with a footnote explaining that “it should be noted that these numbers do not reflect the number of alleged perpetrators nor victims, as multiple allegations could correspond to one alleged perpetrator” and “conversely, a single allegation may be made in respect of more than one individual.” However, in later years, “the reports explain that ‘each allegation may involve more than one possible victim,’ but do not say whether any allegations cover more than one perpetrator.”[21] The lack of definitive definitions and explanations as to the details of each case or allegation and if they involve one peacekeeper and one victim or multiple peacekeepers with a single or multiple victims results in not only a dearth of understanding regarding sexual abuse, but also an inability to get a full view of the amount of abuse that is occurring.

The situation seems to be that the UN isn’t even attempting to measure the amount of abuse, but is rather “measuring the number of communications it receives about incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse.” Yet that leads to a different problem altogether, as it could mean that the measuring methods of these communications could result in having “incidents involving multiple victims or multiple perpetrators are masked since they are treated as only one allegation.”[22] This situation is made all the worse as the UN doesn’t say if it is able to account for cases that have been doubly reported and adjust accordingly.

On some level, there was an attempt to remedy this as UN Secretary General, António Guterres, stated that he would seek support in establishing a centralized repository of cases, which would be under the Special Coordinator on Improving the United Nations Response to Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, with the goals of “[accelerating] the provision of appropriate aid to victims, [helping] to regularize the initiation of appropriate administrative and criminal investigations, and [providing] system-wide empirical data for more in-depth analysis of events to aid in understanding patterns of misconduct, in order to devise more effective preventive measures.”[23] However, the overall bureaucratic and linguistic problems still majorly contribute to the underreporting of abuse cases.

Burundi

In 2004, UN peacekeepers were sent to Burundi to aid in a national reconciliation attempt to end the civil war between Hutus and Tutsis.[24]

From the outset, the UN was adamant about preventing sexual abuse, with head of the mission and Canadian diplomat, Carolyn McAskie stating in an interview that the UN was enacting plans to curb the chances of abuse happening, such as having certain areas of a town be considered off limits and the threat of dismissal being used for troops who attempt to solicit prostitutes.[25]

This was followed up by discussions with battalion commanders on the issue and creating some level of accountability by having commanders face increased scrutiny as greater training and accountability was implemented. There was also a policy change which required that members report abuse, even if it was only suspect.[26]

Unfortunately, abuse still took place, with two peacekeepers being found guilty of having sex with prostitutes, one of whom was a minor.[27] Thankfully, that was the only reported case and the UN departed in 2007.

Ivory Coast

UN peacekeepers deployed to the Ivory Coast in 2004 to aid in ending the nation’s civil war and guiding it to have free and fair presidential elections.[28]

In 2007, the UN began to investigate serious accusations of abuse involving Moroccan soldiers having sex with “a large number of underage girls,”[29] which resulted in an entire battalion being confined to their barracks.

More information on the amount of abuse that was going on was brought to light via Save The Children with their 2008 report entitled No One To Turn To: The Under-reporting of Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by Aid Workers and Peacekeepers.

Based on field work done in Southern Sudan, Côte d’Ivoire and Haiti, it was found that “children as young as six [were] trading sex with aid workers and peacekeepers in exchange for food, money, soap and, in a very few cases, luxury items such as mobile phones.”[30] There was even testimony from Ivory Coast children who discussed what went on in their respective towns. One boy stated that the peacekeepers “[asked] them for various types of favors,” while others went into more detail:

Sometimes they ask us to find them girls. They especially ask us for girls of our age. Often it will be between eight and ten men who will share two or three girls. When I suggest an older girl, they say that they want a young girl, the same age as us.

[…]

For us, we said to ourselves that even if it is bad, we are gaining something from it too. So we continue because we then get the benefits, such as money, new t-shirts, souvenirs, watches and tennis shoes. They also used their mobile phones to film the girls.[31]

The utter lack of morality in these peacekeepers is truly revealed here in that they are literally using children as middle men in order to abuse and denigrate other children, going about and bribing people who are in desperate need of bare necessities and preying upon them. The worst aspect is that local authorities weren’t able to unable to prosecute the perpetrators, in spite of knowing their identities, due to insufficient evidence and lack of cooperation.[32]

The use of bribing underage girls for sex was further confirmed in 2011 when a U.S. Embassy cable was released by Wikileaks. The cable focused on peacekeepers from Benin that were in the town of Toulepleu, where it was found that “parents were encouraging their daughters to sleep with the peacekeepers so they would provide for them.”[33] This only reveals the extent to which the abuse had been normalized, to the point that parents would encourage their children to sleep with UN troops. A total of 16 Beninese peacekeepers were subsequently barred.[34]

Still, some were never punished, such as in 2008, when it was reported that that ten UN peacekeepers gang-raped a 13 year old girl, with her saying that they grabbed her, threw her on the ground, and raped her. ‘Elizabeth’ stated “I was terrified. Then they just left me there bleeding.”[35] Yet no action was taken against the soldiers and worse, it was found that aid workers had been sexually abusing children, both boys and girls. There was also the case of fourteen Moroccan soldiers, where information “including DNA evidence showing that some had fathered children” [36] was considered inconclusive and so the Moroccan government dropped all charges against the soldiers.

The mission came to a close in 2017.

Haiti

During February 2004, among the US-motivated and deeply controversial[37] departure of Haitian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the UN moved in to clamp down on the fighting that sparked up in multiple cities around the country.[38]

At the start of the operation, it seemed that the zero-tolerance policy was taken seriously, with one high level military commander saying that he was “very concerned about sexual exploitation” with a senior police official adding that its wrongness “[needed] be drummed into people. It has to be reinforced all the time.”[39] Despite these strong assertions of zero tolerance, many Haitians were not convinced that the UN took the issue seriously.

In February 2005, two UN soldiers were suspended after having sex with a prostitute[40], however, this was only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the interactions between prostitutes and UN forces. The humanitarian organization Refugees International issued a report where it was stated that “prostitutes haunt the streets every evening and hang out in many of the bars frequented by UN staff,”[41] with one Haitian man saying that such establishments actively fed into the increase in prostitution and that the police were even involved.

Bolstering the argument that the UN presence aided in the proliferation of prostitution, a Haitian women’s group stated: “We’ve seen an increase in prostitution since MINUSTAH came. In 1994, we had a lot of problems with the Multinational Forces. The [peacekeepers] bring their bad habits with them to Haiti, but they do not bring change.”[42]

Interestingly enough, the ‘zero contact’ policy that was enacted in Haiti led to “increased complaints of sexual harassment by UN female personnel, both local and international,”[43] which when added onto the reluctance of victims to come forward, created a de facto wall of silence which restricted the UN’s ability to investigate allegations and get a full understanding of the problem.

The peacekeepers often contributed to larger, ongoing problems in Haiti. Violence, both physical and sexual, already came from criminals and the Haitian National Police. So the UN peacekeepers, primarily the ones from Brazil and Jordan[44], simply added on yet another layer of destruction, pain, and misery for a populace that was already bearing massive political and economic burden. This was made all the worse when those peacekeepers were the ones who would supposedly bring protection and stability but delivered the opposite.

In late 2006, the BBC revealed the amount of sexual abuse that was ongoing in Haiti, with one 11 year old girl reporting sexual abuse by peacekeepers. Another 14 year old girl described her personal horror of having been abducted and raped inside a UN naval base two years prior, where “despite detailed medical and circumstantial evidence, the allegation was dismissed by the UN for lack of evidence”[45] and the attacker was repatriated to their nation of origin.

There were peacekeepers who would regularly take advantage of the cash-strapped and desperate population for their own depraved ends, with one incident occurring of a “14-year-old girl who told of the peacekeeper who offered her jelly, sweets and a few dollars for sex with her and her friend - a child of just 11 years.”[46] BBC reporter Mike Williams told of one especially horrific story.

Sarah (not her real name) is a fragile looking girl of 16. She says that two years ago, she was raped by a Brazilian soldier serving with the UN mission there.

She stared at the ground while we talked and, almost in a whisper, she explained what happened: "He held me down by the arms and held both my wrists, twisting them back and we struggled together. And then he raped me."

Her mother cried while she recalled that day: "When I found her I didn't recognize my own child," she says. "She had the face of a dead person - I started to cry out, she couldn't tell me what had happened."[47]

Once again, there was insufficient evidence to find the perpetrator guilty of any crimes. This was a regular occurrence unfortunately.

In some cases, there would be problems due to relatives, such as with ‘Natasha,’ who was raped by a Sri Lankan peacekeeper in 2004, but whose mother forbade her from making a complaint for two years due to the stigma attached to rape.[48] Such actions only helped to muddy the waters with regards to testimony and evidence, effectively aiding the offending party in avoiding justice. Though one of the UN’s biggest miscarriages of justice would happen in 2011.

In September 2011, a video began circulating on the internet which showed a Haitian man being sexually assaulted by a group of Uruguayan peacekeepers. Eventually it was found that the assault had occurred in July, but the video, which showed four UN troops attacking Johnny Jean, only surfaced in the following months.

Two young Haitian men had come across the video while looking at a peacekeeper’s cell phone when they were exchanging music and one of the men recognized Jean and transferred the video to his own personal device, turning the video over to a local journalist soon after. The two men later met with a UN official who immediately denied any allegations, but was then shown the video.[49]

A preliminary investigation done by the UN “found that the men did not sexually abuse the Haitian teen but that they committed misconduct by allowing a civilian into their barrack and could face severe penalties,”[50] however, this is in direct conflict with information provided by medical professionals which proved that Jean “had sustained injuries consistent with having been sexually assaulted,”[51] as well as the video itself being sexual in nature. It should be emphasized, though, that there was evidence of sexual assault not just in the immediate aftermath, but could still be found five weeks after the incident.[52] From the beginning of the situation, not only do we see the immediate denial by UN officials, but then further rejection of something that is crystal clear.

Eventually, the accused soldiers were freed due to the case having stalled,[53] the details of which are rather intriguing. Jean was scheduled to testify against his attackers, with a UN spokesperson stating that the soldiers would be free until Jean could be located to provide his testimony, however he had to actually be in Uruguay to testify. [54] Actions such as these simply reinforce an observation made by the US Institute of Peace, which noted that there was a need to create effective programs to assist victims, especially when they themselves nor the UN were unable to hold abusers accountable. [55]

Another travesty of justice would take place in 2012 when Pakistani peacekeepers were accused of sexually assaulting a 14 year old boy. UN spokesperson Martin Nesirky stated that Pakistani authorities had said that the guilty individuals would be punished, “including through dishonorable discharge from service with loss of benefits and imprisonment, the latter sentence to be served immediately on return to Pakistan.”[56] Unfortunately, the punishment was laughable, as the perpetrators only served a single year in prison.[57] Even worse, was how the UN dealt with it. They agreed to have the soldiers tried in a closed trial at a Pakistani military court and took at face value assurances that there would be financial compensation for the victims. Unsurprisingly, no compensation occurred, the troops were essentially given a slap on the wrist, and Pakistani soldiers still continued going over to Haiti, unabated.

UN Assistant Secretary for Field Support, Anthony Banbury, gave some major insight when he spoke to the New York Times about the case: “People can always say punishment was too light or whatever, but the system worked as it should.”[58] (emphasis added) In doing so, he reveals that the manner in which the system works is that the UN plays dumb and pretends that national militaries will try their soldiers fairly, while making no effort to hold them accountable, and willingly leaves victims out to dry.

Similarly to Liberia and the Ivory Coast, peacekeepers in Haiti were found to have transactional sex with women in exchange for basic needs like cash, food, medication, and more. The UN’s Office of Internal Oversight stated in the aforementioned draft report that there was “significant underreporting” of abuse and noted further problems, most prominently how “a third of alleged sexual abuse involves people younger than 18, [assistance] to victims is ‘severely deficient,”[59] and that investigations regularly took over a year to complete.

The year 2015 actually saw an increase in sexual abuse cases, with a total of 99 compared to 80 in 2014.[60] A UN report stated that the Secretary General would work within his authority to ensure that abusers would be held responsible “through disciplinary actions or criminal accountability measures when so warranted” and that the Secretary General “was determined to take measures to prevent misconduct.”[61] To those ends, a number of new initiatives were to be launched, including a mandatory e-learning program on sexual abuse, asking that troop contributing nations’ pre-deployment training be up to UN standards, and the development of a complaint reception mechanism to encourage people to come forward.[62]

In the following years, there was also a change to policy as António Guterres, a Portuguese politician and diplomat, took over from Ban Ki-Moon in 2017. The new Secretary General wanted all personnel to have written statements saying that they understood and would abide by the UN’s policy against sexual exploitation and abuse.[63]

New ideas were being put into place, senior leaders were to issue management letters to “their governing bodies certifying that all allegations have been reported and appropriate action is taken on them,” screening mechanisms would work to ensure that abusers weren’t able to leave one element of the UN only to be hired in another, and anyone involved in field activities would “be required to carry the ‘no excuses’ pocket card that restates our rules and spell out how to report allegations,”[64] among other reforms.

On the topic of aiding victims, little was done. The UN Field Support Chief, Atul Khare, an Indian diplomat, spoke of the creation of a trust fund to get victims the psychological, medical, and legal help they needed, though he did note “It would be funded voluntarily, but also from the salaries withheld from those who face significant allegations which have been substantiated.”[65] This simply hearkens back to the problem that victims are not prioritized in the process of seeking justice. Unfortunately, these changes would not be enough to prevent some of the most egregious abuse that was to occur during the mission.

In 2007, it was uncovered that over 100 Sri Lankan peacekeepers were alleged to have engaged in sexual abuse and were sent packing. More specifically they were accused of transactional sex, with UN spokeswoman Michele Montas adding that “there is the question of some underage girls.”[66] More horrors were to come though, as these allegations didn’t stop other Sri Lankans from coming over to aid in operations. The Associated Press broke the story in 2017, in which they found a child sex ring was ongoing, where young girls were regularly abused.

The Sri Lankan peacekeepers wanted sex from girls and boys as young as 12. “I did not even have breasts,” said a girl, known as V01 — Victim No. 1. She told U.N. investigators that over the next three years, from ages 12 to 15, she had sex with nearly 50 peacekeepers, including a “Commandant” who gave her 75 cents.[67]

It was found that between 2004 and 2007, 134 Sri Lankan peacekeepers, at minimum, exploited nine children. Not a single person was imprisoned.

Interestingly enough, the UN data, which draws information focused on sexual abuse over a 12 year period, was found to be incomplete, varying in the amount of details especially for cases before 2010, and that “hundreds of cases were closed with little or no explanation.”[68] (emphasis added) While the soldiers involved in the sex ring were sent home, they were” still in the Sri Lankan military as of [2016]”[69] and the UN still took soldiers from Sri Lanka and sent them to Haiti in spite of the child sex ring.

A Sri Lankan general, Major General Jagath Dias, was sent in 2013 to investigate the matter, though he may not have been the best person for the job due to the fact that he was most likely a war criminal, who stood “accused of attacking civilians and bombing a church, a hospital and other humanitarian outposts in 2009, during the fierce last months of Sri Lanka’s civil war.”[70] The AP found that “Sri Lanka has never prosecuted a single soldier for sexual assault or sexual misconduct while serving in a peacekeeping mission abroad.” (emphasis added) Undeterred by the accusations against the general and the lack of discipline in the Sri Lankan army, the U.N. still accepted Dias as the investigator and said they were “working with the Sri Lankan government on enhanced screening for prospective peacekeepers,”[71] such as providing a backlog for all soldiers they send over so they could be screened by the UN.

While the mission ended in 2017[72], there were still lingering effects, especially for the children who had been fathered by peacekeepers. Haitians created new terms to describe them, “bébés casques bleus (blue helmet babies) or ‘les enfants abandonnés par la MINUSTAH’ (the children who are abandoned by the MINUSTAH),”[73] something that denotes how they were ‘othered’ in a way and a group distinct from average Haitians.

The peacekeepers created major rifts in Haiti, as they would make lavish promises to girls, “they would say that they are going to pay for their school, allow them to go to the university”[74] but nothing would materialize.

These false promises would lead to frustration later on for women who wound up birthing these peacekeeper’s children, where the mother would be the sole provider. Many of these girls were under the age of 18 at the time of their relationships with UN troops and when they had children with them, which caused a rift in not only their familial relations, as was expounded upon by one woman:

Now, the child is 4 years old and I haven’t ever received support from an NGO, from the Brazilians, from the Haitian state. It’s only me that’s giving to the child to eat because I can’t pay for school for the child… When I was with the Brazilian, I was 14 years old. I went to school at a Christian school. When I became pregnant, my father kicked me out of the house. And now I do work for someone who gives me 25 gourdes [about $0.35 USD] so that me and my child can eat.[75]

While the soldiers left, the scars of abuse echoed and lingered, casting a dark, haunting shadow over the island nation.

Sudan

In 2005, following the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which formally ended Sudan’s 21 year civil war, the UN dispatched soldiers in order to aid in its implementation, demine areas, and help repatriate refugees.[76]

Within two years, the UN was already sending soldiers back home. January 2007 saw four Bangladeshi soldiers being sent home for alleged sexual abuse.[77] That same month, it was reported that “peacekeeping and civilian staff based in Juba are accused of picking up young children and forcing them to have sex,”[78] with peacekeepers raping and abusing children as young as 12, with it having begun in 2005 and indications emerging within months of international troops initially arriving. Due to the economic disparities, some people who were abused want to continue the situation in order to have at least some money, such as was with one 14 year old boy by the name of Jonas who told of his own abuse.

"A man in a white car drove past and asked me if I wanted to get into the car with him. I saw that the car was a UN car because it was white with the black letters on it. The man had a badge on his clothes. When he stopped the car, we got out, he put a blindfold on me and started to abuse me. It was painful and went on for a long time. When it was over we went back to the place we had been, and he pushed me out of the car and left."

Jonas now returns to the same place regularly in the hope of being picked up and paid something for his services. "I know it is a terrible thing to do but I see the UN cars around late at night by the drinking places and I sit there in the hope of being picked up. If I get 1000 SD ($3) a day then that is a good day."[79]

Not much abuse was reported, but the fact that something like this was going on for two years coupled with there being known cases of under-reporting, only shows that abuse was occurring, but not reported on in the media. The very fact that victims would continue their own abuse to have money highlights the desperation and depravity of the situation.

While the UN Sudan mission ended in 2011, when South Sudan became its own nation[80], forces remained in Darfur until 2020.[81] Still, another mission was set up immediately in the new nation of South Sudan. The UN still has ongoing missions and in those can be seen an echo of cold and uncaring environment for victims that has been perpetuated for three decades.

Notes

[1] United Nations Peacekeeping, Ethiopia and Eritrea - UNMEE – Background, https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/mission/past/unmee/background.html

[2] United Nations, UN Mission in Ethiopia, Eritrea to probe misconduct charges against former peacekeeper, https://news.un.org/en/story/2001/08/11652-un-mission-ethiopia-eritrea-probe-misconduct-charges-against-former-peacekeeper (August 27, 2001)

[3] Elise Fredrikke Barth, Karen Hostens, Louise Olsson, Inger Skjelsbæk, Gender Aspects of Conflict Interventions: Intended and Unintended Consequences, Peace Research Institute Oslo Center on Gender, Peace, and Security, https://gps.prio.org/utility/DownloadFile.ashx?id=1133&type=publicationfile, pg 13

[4] The New Humanitarian, Annan asks for 15,000 UN peacekeepers for Liberia, https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/report/46188/liberia-annan-asks-15000-un-peacekeepers-liberia (September 16, 2003)

[5] Relief Web, Sexual exploitation in Liberia: Are the conditions ripe for another scandal? https://reliefweb.int/report/liberia/sexual-exploitation-liberia-are-conditions-ripe-another-scandal (April 20, 2004)

[6] The New Humanitarian, UNMIL investigating alleged sexual misconduct by peacekeepers in four incidents, https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2005/05/03/unmil-investigating-alleged-sexual-misconduct-peacekeepers-four-incidents (May 3, 2005)

[7] Colum Lynch, “U.N. Faces More Accusations of Sexual Misconduct,” Washington Post, March 13, 2005 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30286-2005Mar12.html)

[8] David Fickling, “Aid staff abusing Liberian children, charity says,” The Guardian, May 8, 2006 (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/may/08/westafrica.davidfickling)

[9] Ibid

[10] Jenny Kleeman, “Liberia’s childhood horror,” The Guardian, October 16, 2009 (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/oct/16/liberia-rape)

[11] James Butty, “UN Peacekeepers in Liberia Accused of Buying Sex,” Voice of America News, June 12, 2015 (https://www.voanews.com/africa/un-peacekeepers-liberia-accused-buying-sex)

[12] UN News, UN in Liberia report shows decline in sex abuse allegations; envoy says some progress, https://news.un.org/en/story/2007/03/211582-un-liberia-report-shows-decline-sex-abuse-allegations-envoy-says-some-progress (March 9, 2007)

[13] Kathleen M. Jennings, Protecting Whom? Approaches to Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in UN Peacekeeping Operations, Fafo Research Foundation, http://lastradainternational.org/lsidocs/fafo_approaches_abuse_0309.pdf (2008), pg 25

[14] Ibid, pg 26

[15] Ibid, pg 28

[16] Thelma Awori, Catherine Lutz, Paban J. Thapa, Final Report: Expert Mission to Evaluate Risks to SEA Prevention Efforts  in MINUSTAH, UNMIL, MONUSCO, and UNMISS, https://web.archive.org/web/20150709034934/http://www.aidsfreeworld.org/Newsroom/Press-Releases/2015/~/media/Files/Peacekeeping/2013%20Expert%20Team%20Report%20FINAL.pdf (November 3, 2013), pg 3

[17] Ibid

[18] Ibid, pg 7

[19] Kate Grady, “Sex, Statistics, Peacekeepers and Power: UN Data on Sexual Exploitation and Abuse and the Quest for Legal Reform,” Modern Law Review 79:6 (November 2016), pg 936

[20] Ibid

[21] Ibid, pg 937

[22] Ibid

[23] United Nations, General Assembly, Special measures for protection from sexual exploitation and abuse: a new approach, A/71/818, February 28, 2017 (https://peacekeeping.un.org/sites/default/files/sg_report_a_71_818_special_measures_for_protection_from_sexual_exploitation_and_abuse.pdf), pg 11

[24] UN Peacekeeping, The United Nations in Burundi: Peacekeeping Mission Completes its Mandate, https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/mission/past/onub/photos.pdf (December 31, 2006)

[25] Relief Web, IRIN interview with Carolyn McAskie, head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Burundi, https://reliefweb.int/report/burundi/irin-interview-carolyn-mcaskie-head-un-peacekeeping-mission-burundi (November 5, 2004)

[26] Global Policy Forum, UN Reforms Aim to End Sexual Abuse by Peacekeepers, https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/199/40951.html (May 25, 2005)

[27] BBC, UN sex abuse sackings in Burundi, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4697465.stm (July 19, 2005)

[28] Joe Bavier, "U.N. closes Ivory Coast mission, security remains fragile," Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ivorycoast-un-peacekeepers-idUSKBN19L1VK (June 30, 2017)

[29] Claudia Parson, “Moroccan UN troops accused of abuse in Ivory Coast,” Reuters, July 20, 2007 (https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=https://jp.reuters.com/article/idUSN20327686&prev=search&pto=aue)

[30] Corinna Csáky, Save The Children UK, No One To Turn To: The Under-reporting of Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by Aid Workers and Peacekeepers, https://www.savethechildren.org.uk/content/dam/global/reports/education-and-child-protection/no-one-to-turn-to.pdf (March 2008), pg 5

[31] Ibid, pg 6

[32] Ibid, pg 16

[33] Daily Mail, UN peacekeepers 'traded food for sex with underage girls' in west Africa, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2032951/WikiLeaks-releases-U-S-diplomatic-cable-exposing-scandal-U-N-peacekeepers-traded-sex-food-underage-girls.html (September 2, 2011)

[34] Defence Web, United Nations bars 16 peacekeepers from Benin following Ivory Coast sex abuse claims, https://www.defenceweb.co.za/joint/diplomacy-a-peace/united-nations-bars-16-peacekeepers-from-benin-following-ivory-coast-sex-abuse-claims/ (September 6, 2011)

[35] BBC, Peacekeepers 'abusing children,’ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7420798.stm (May 27, 2008)

[36] Carla Ferstman, Criminalizing Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by Peacekeepers, United States Institute of Peace, https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/SR335-Criminalizing%20Sexual%20Exploitation%20and%20Abuse%20by%20Peacekeepers.pdf (2013), pg 4

[37] Scott Cooper, Annals of American Imperialism: The 1991 Coup in Haiti, Left Voice, https://www.leftvoice.org/annals-of-american-imperialism-the-1991-coup-in-haiti (September 29, 2020)

See also: Ansel Herz, Kim Ives, “WikiLeaks Haiti: The Aristide Files,” The Nation, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/wikileaks-haiti-aristide-files/ (August 5, 2011)

[38] UN Peacekeeping, MINUSTAH Fact Sheet, https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/mission/minustah

[39] Relief Web, Haiti: Sexual exploitation by peacekeepers likely to be a problem, https://reliefweb.int/report/haiti/haiti-sexual-exploitation-peacekeepers-likely-be-problem (May 7, 2005)

[40] Haiti Democracy Project, U.N. Soldiers Suspended in Prostitution Incident, https://haitipolicy.org/2005/02/u-n-soldiers-suspended-in-prostitution-incident (February 24, 2005)

[41] Sarah Martin, Must Boys Be Boys? Ending Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in U.N. Peacekeeping, Refugees International, https://web.archive.org/web/20051023224811/http://www.refugeesinternational.org/files/6976_file_FINAL_MustBoys.pdf (October 2005), pg 5

[42] Ibid, pg 6

[43] Ibid, pg 7

[44] Royce A. Hutson, Athena R. Kolbe, “Human rights abuse and other criminal violations in Port-au-Prince, Haiti: a random survey of households,” The Lancet 368:9538 (2006), pg 872

[45] BBC, UN troops face child abuse claims, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6195830.stm (November 30, 2006)

[46] BBC News, Fears Over Haiti Child ‘Abuse,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6159923.stm (November 30, 2006)

[47] Ibid

[48] Reed Lindsay, “U.N. effort dogged by sex claims / Peacekeepers based in Haiti the latest accused of abuse,” SF Gate, https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/U-N-effort-dogged-by-sex-claims-Peacekeepers-2481908.php (December 22, 2006)

[49] Democracy Now, Video of U.N. Peacekeepers’ Sexual Assault of Haitian Prompts Calls to Focus on Post-Quake Rebuilding, https://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/6/video_of_un_peacekeepers_sexual_assault (September 6, 2011)

[50] Trenton Daniel, Raul O. Garces, “Haiti: Boy Who Claims Sexual Assault By Uruguay Peacekeepers Supported By Demonstrators,” Huffington Post, September 6, 2011 (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/haiti-sexual-assault-un-peacekeepers_n_950159)

[51] Ansel Hertz, Matthew Mosk, Rym Momtaz, “U.N. Peacekeepers Accused of Sexually Assaulting Haitian Teen,” ABC News, September 2, 2011 (https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/peacekeepers-accused-sexually-assaulting-haitian-teen/story?id=14437122)

[52] Huffington Post, September 6, 2011

[53] Ansel Herz, Matthew Mosk, Brian Ross, “Haiti Outrage: UN Soldiers from Sex Assault Video Freed,” ABC News, January 6, 2012 (https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/soldiers-held-sex-assault-freed/story?id=15306826)

[54] Maha Hilal, Fawwaz Mustafa, Michelle Seyler, Zoe Walden, Tipping The Scales: Is The United Nations Justice System Promoting Accountability in the Peacekeeping Missions or Undermining It? Government Accountability Project, https://web.archive.org/web/20140418010726/https://whistleblower.org/sites/default/files/FinalTippingTheScales.pdf (September 2012)

[55] Ibid

[56] UN News, Haiti: Three UN peacekeepers repatriated for sexual abuse, https://news.un.org/en/story/2012/03/406312-haiti-three-un-peacekeepers-repatriated-sexual-abuse (March 13, 2012)

[57] Amnesty International, Convictions Against UN Peacekeepers in Haiti Do Not Serve Justice, https://www.amnesty.org/en/press-releases/2012/03/convictions-against-un-peacekeepers-haiti-do-not-serve-justice/ (March 15, 2012)

[58] Jake Johnston, UN Points to MINUSTAH as “Model of Accountability” for Sexual Abuse Cases, Center For Economic and Policy Research, https://cepr.net/un-points-to-minustah-as-model-of-accountability-for-sexual-abuse-cases/ (May 27, 2015)

[59] Justin Moyer, “Report: U.N. peacekeepers in Haiti had ‘transactional sex’ with hundreds of poor women,” Washington Post, June 11, 2015 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/11/report-u-n-peacekeepers-in-haiti-had-transactional-sex-with-hundreds-of-poor-women/)

[60] United Nations, General Assembly, Special measures for protection from sexual exploitation and sexual abuse, A/70/729, February 26, 2016 (https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/a_70_729.pdf), pg 2

[61] Ibid, pg 7

[62] Ibid, pgs 15-16

[63] Somini Sengupta, “U.N. Plans Reforms to Stamp Out Sexual Abuse by Peacekeepers,” New York Times, March 8, 2017 (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/world/americas/united-nations-antonio-guterres-peackeepers.html)

[64] UN Permanent Missions, SG launches new strategy to fight Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, https://www.un.int/news/sg-launches-new-strategy-fight-sexual-exploitation-and-abuse (March 9, 2017)

[65] UN News, ‘We must not allow protectors to become predators’ – UN field support chief, https://news.un.org/en/story/2016/03/523592-we-must-not-allow-protectors-become-predators-un-field-support-chief (March 4, 2016)

[66] Reuters, Peacekeepers Accused of Abuse in Haiti, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-un-abuse-srilanka/peacekeepers-accused-of-abuse-in-haiti-idUKN0259118620071102 (November 2, 2007)

[67] Paisley Dodds, “UN child sex ring left victims but no arrests,” Associated Press, April 12, 2017 (https://apnews.com/article/e6ebc331460345c5abd4f57d77f535c1)

[68] Ibid

[69] Ibid

[70] Katy Daigle, Paisley Dodds, “UN Peacekeepers: How a Haiti child sex ring was whitewashed,” Associated Press, May 26, 2017 (https://apnews.com/article/96f9ff66b7b34d9f971edf0e92e2082c)

[71] Ibid

[72] Somini Sengupta, “U.N. Votes Unanimously to End Peacekeeping Mission in Haiti,” New York Times, April 13, 2017 (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/world/americas/un-peacekeeping-haiti-cholera.html)

[73] Susan Bartels, Sabine Lee, “They Put a Few Coins in Your Hand to Drop a Baby in You: A Study of Peacekeeper-fathered Children in Haiti,” International Peacekeeping 27:2 (December 2019), pg 182

[74] Ibid, pg 190

[75] Ibid, pg 192

[76] United Nations, Security Council, Security Council Establishes UN Mission in Sudan for Initial Period of Six Months Unanimously Adopting Resolution 1590, SC/8343, March 24, 2005 (https://www.un.org/press/en/2005/sc8343.doc.htm)

[77] ReliefWeb, Sudan: Four peacekeepers accused of sex abuse already repatriated - UN mission in Sudan, https://reliefweb.int/report/sudan/sudan-four-peacekeepers-accused-sex-abuse-already-repatriated-un-mission-sudan (January 4, 2007)

[78] Kate Holt, Sarah Hughes, “UN staff accused of raping children in Sudan,” The Telegraph, January 4, 2007 (https://web.archive.org/web/20080608090750/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1538476/UN-staff-accused-of-raping-children-in-Sudan.html)

[79] Ibid

[80] UN Peacekeeping, UNMIS: United Nations Mission in Sudan, https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/mission/past/unmis/

[81] Michelle Nichols, “U.N., African Union peacekeeping mission in Sudan's Darfur to end Dec. 31,” Reuters, December 23, 2020 (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/un-african-union-peacekeeping-mission-in-sudans-darfur-to-end-dec-31/ar-BB1caayO)

Uprising, Counterinsurgency, and Civil War: Understanding the Rise of the Paramilitary Right

By Tom Nomad

Republished from Crimethinc.

In this analysis, Tom Nomad presents an account of the rise of the contemporary far right, tracing the emergence of a worldview based in conspiracy theories and white grievance politics and scrutinizing the function that it serves protecting the state. Along the way, he describes how liberal counterinsurgency strategies function alongside the heavy-handed “law and order” strategies, concluding with a discussion of what the far right mean by civil war.

Tom Nomad is an organizer based in the Rust Belt and the author of The Master’s Tools: Warfare and Insurgent Possibility and Toward an Army of Ghosts.

The bulk of this text was composed in September and October 2020, when the George Floyd uprising was still unfolding and many people feared that Trump would try to hold on to the presidency by any means necessary. Since then, the uprising has lost momentum and the Trump administration has failed to organize a seizure of power.

Yet the dynamics described herein persist. The uprising remains latent, waiting to re-emerge onto the streets, while the formation of a new MAGA coalition is underway. Since the election, a constellation including the pro-Trump right, conspiracy theorists, the remnants of the alt-right, and traditional white nationalist groups has formed around a belated attempt to keep Trump in power.

This coalition is motivated by conspiracy theories and narratives about Democrats “stealing” the election. An additional segment of the American voting population has connected with the far right, openly calling for their opponents to be eliminated by violent means. This is not just a new right-wing coalition, but a force with the ability to leverage AM radio, cable news, and elected officials to spread racism, xenophobia, and weaponized disinformation.

Trump and his supporters will be removed from office shortly, but this coalition will persist for years to come. While centrist media outlets described Trump as seeking to seize power, his supporters see themselves as acting to defend the “real” America. In response to Trump’s removal from power, they aim to work with the “loyal” elements of the state—chiefly right-wing politicians and police—to eliminate what they consider an internal threat to the US political project. At its foundation, the right remains a force of counterinsurgency.

Introduction

The events of the George Floyd uprising represent something fundamentally different from the convulsions of the preceding twenty years. The normalities of activism, the structures of discursive engagement premised on dialogue with the state, gave way; their hegemony over political action began to crumble before our eyes. The mass mobilizations—with their staid, boring formats, their pacifist actions with no plan for escalation, their constant repetition of the same faces in the same groups—were replaced by a young, radical crowd largely comprised of people of color, willing not only to challenge the state, but also to fight back. Over a period of months, the previous barriers of political identity evaporated—the constructs that distinguished “activism” from “normal life.” This new force ripped open the streets themselves, leaving the shells of burned police cars in its wake.

For some of us, this was a long time coming. The global influence of the US has been in decline since the end of the Cold War; the post-political era that Fukuyama and Clinton proclaimed so confidently has given way to a history that continues to unfold unstoppably. The war that the police wage against us every day finally became a struggle with more than one antagonist. The long anticipated uprising, the moment of reckoning with the bloody past of the American political project, seemed to be at hand. We saw the state beginning to fray at the edges, losing its capacity to maintain control. While we cannot yet see a light at the end, we have at least finally entered the tunnel—the trajectory that will lead us towards the conflicts that will prove decisive.

But, just as quickly as this new momentum emerged, we were immediately beset on all sides by the forces of counterinsurgency. The logic of the revolt is constantly under attack, sometimes by those we had counted as allies. Some insist that we must present clear reformist demands, while others aim simply to eliminate us. All the techniques at the disposal of the state and its attendant political classes—including those within the so-called movement—are engaged as our adversaries endeavor to capture the energy of the struggle or exploit it for their own gain.

From the first days, liberal organizers played a core role in this attempt to bring the revolt back within the structures of governance. Caught off guard, they immediately began a campaign to delegitimize the violence expressed in the streets by framing it as the work of provocateurs and “outside agitators.” They progressed to trying to capture the momentum and discourse of the movement, forcing the discussion about how to destroy the police back into a discussion about budgets and electoral politics. Now, as Joe Biden gets his footing, liberals have completed this trajectory, arguing that rioting is not a form of “protest” and that the full weight of the state should be brought to bear on those who stepped outside of the limits of state-mediated politics.

The truth is that the revolts of 2020 represent a direct response to the failures of former attempts at liberal capture. During the uprisings of 2014 and 2015, liberals were able to seize control and force the discussion back to the subject of police reform. Consent decrees were implemented across the country; so-called community policing (a euphemism for using the community to assist the police in attacking it) and promises of legislative reform effectively drove a wedge between militants and activists. These attempts delayed the inevitable explosions that we have witnessed since the murder of George Floyd, but they were stopgap measures bound to fail. The current revolt confirms that reformism has not addressed the problem of policing. The areas of the country that have seen the most violent clashes are almost all cities run by Democrats, in which reform was tried and failed. In some ways, the narrative advanced by the Trump campaign that cities are in revolt due to Democratic administrations is true—but it is not as a consequence of their permissiveness, but rather of the failure of their attempt to co-opt the energy of revolt.

At the same time, we are experiencing a new attempt to supplement state forces with the forces of the far right. Militia groups that previously claimed to be opposed to government repression are now mobilizing their own informal counterinsurgency campaigns. This is not surprising, given that these militias were always grounded in preserving white supremacy. It is also unsurprising that more traditional Republicans have allowed themselves to be pulled in this direction—ever since September 11, 2001, their entire ethos has been built around the idea that they are the only people willing to defend the “homeland” from outside threats.

Yet it is surprising the lengths to which the state is willing to go to accomplish this goal. Traditionally, the basis of the state has been a set of logistical forces able to impose the will of a sovereign; in America, that sovereign is liberal democracy itself. The continuation of this project is directly tied to the state’s ability to function in space, logistically and tactically; this requires spaces to be “smooth,” predictable, and without resistance or escalation, both of which can cause contingent effects that disrupt state actors’ ability to predict dynamics and deploy accordingly. In calling for para-state forces to confront the forces of revolt in the street, Trump and his colleagues are setting the stage for a conflagration that—if all sides embrace it—could lead to large-scale social conflict. Their willingness to embrace such a risky strategy suggests how near the state has been pushed to losing control. It also indicates the ways that they are willing to modify their counterinsurgency strategy.

The revolt is now under siege. The official state forces—the police, federal forces, National Guard, and the like—are employing a strategy of consistent escalation, which functions both as retaliation and repression. The forces of liberal capture have showed which side they are on, affirming Biden’s promise to crush the militant sectors of the uprising and reward the moderate elements. The forces of the right have received approval to generalize the “strategy of tension” approach that they developed in Portland in the years since 2016. When these newly anointed forces of right-wing reactionary para-militarism are incorporated into an already existing patchwork of counterinsurgency-based approaches, the scene is set for a scenario that can only end in mass repression or mass resistance, and likely both.

The emergence of these converging counterinsurgency strategies has coincided with a rising discourse of civil war. This is not the sort of civil war discussed in texts like Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War, which describes, in hyperbolic terms, a conflict between different “forms of life.” Civil war, as understood in the modern US context, is a widespread frontal conflict between social forces that involves the participation of the state but also takes place apart from it. The idea that this could somehow resolve the core social and political differences emerges from a millenarian vision structured around American civilian militarization, which has emerged in response to the so-called “War on Terrorism,” the realities of social division within the US, and the rising perception of threats, whether real (people of color dealing with the police) or imaginary (“rioters are coming to burn the suburbs”). Though many on all sides embrace this concept, this fundamentally shifts our understandings of strategy, politics, and the conflict itself.

We should be cautious about embracing this concept of civil war; we should seek to understand the implications first. The framework of civil war might feel like an accurate way to describe our situation. It can feel cathartic to use this term to describe a situation that has become so tense. But embracing this concept and basing our mode of engagement on it could unleash dynamics that would not only put us in a profoundly disadvantageous situation, tactically speaking, but could also threaten to destroy the gains of the uprising itself.

Before we can delve into why this is the case, we must review how the framework itself emerged. To do so, we need to go back to the middle of the 20th century.

The Origins of the Push towards Civil War

To consider what civil war could mean in contemporary America, we have to understand how we got here. We have to tell the story of how white supremacy shifted from being identical with the functioning of the state itself to become a quality that distinguishes the vigilante from the state, on a formal level, while operating directly in concert with the state. What we are tracing here is not a history, in the sense of a chronicle of past events, but rather a sort of genealogy of concepts and frameworks.

We’ll start with the shift in political and social dynamics that took place in the late 1950s and early 1960s in response to the Civil Rights Movement. Resistance to hegemonic white power began to impact two fundamental elements of white American life during this period: the concept of American exceptionalism—the idea that America is a uniquely just expression of universal human values—and the notion of a hegemonic white power structure. This led to a shift in the ways that white, conservative groups viewed the world. They felt their hegemony to be newly under threat, not only in regard to their control of political institutions, but also in ways that could erode their economic and social power.

Previously, in many places, police had worked hand in hand with vigilante groups like the KKK to maintain racial apartheid. The day-to-day work of maintaining this political structure was largely carried out by official forces, with the underlying social and economic support of a large part of the white population. For example, during the racist massacre that took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, many of the white assailants were deputized and given weapons by city officials.

During the fight for civil rights in the 1960s, when the role of the state in the enforcement of white supremacy began to shift in some places, many white residents adopted an active rather than passive posture in supporting the racist aspects of the social order. As resistance reached a critical mass, the issue of racial segregation became openly political, rather than unspoken and implicit, with entire political platforms structured around positions regarding it. In response to the challenge to the hegemony of the white apartheid state, the structure of apartheid came to the surface, and white Southerners enlisted in openly racist political forces on a scale not seen since at least the 1930s. These shifts and the subsequent widespread social response created the political and social conditions for the dynamics we see today.

During that period, the discourse of white supremacy also changed form. As oppressed populations rose up with increasing militancy, the narrative of unchallenged white supremacy gave way to a new narrative grounded in an idyllic portrayal of white Christian America and a promise to construct racial and economic unity around an effort to regain power and restore the “lost” America. This narrative, articulated by politicians like George Wallace, Barry Goldwater, Pat Buchanan, and later Ronald Reagan (and distilled today in Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again”), was not just a call to preserve white supremacy. Rather, it described an ontological conflict in which the attempt to overthrow Jim Crow and bring an end to structural disparities represented a threat not only to an economic and social structure, but also to white America itself. Further, it proposed that this threat necessitated a response employing informal violence, mobilized across a wide swath of society, with the consent of the state. This narrative portrayed the emerging social conflict, not as a conflict about race and politics, but as an existential struggle, a matter of life and death.

In some circles, the demand for a political and social unity for white America was framed in terms of “civilization”—this is the current from which the contemporary far right emerged. As Leonard Zeskind argues, this shift involved embracing the concepts of “Western civilization,” the need to defend it, and the incorporation of fascist and Nazi tropes into the thinking of the far right. Many of the personalities who were to drive a militant shift in the far right—David Duke, Willis Carto, William Pierce, and others like them—began to publish newsletters and books, finding a home in the world of gun shows and obscure radio programs. This shift, from white populations taking their political and social domination for granted to white populations reacting to a perceived loss of hegemony, also contributed to the rise of armed right-wing groups. The idea of defending Western civilization provided a moralistic framework and a justification for violence, leading to groups like The Order carrying out armed robberies and assassinations during the 1970s and 1980s.

In more mainstream Republican circles, these ideas of the idyllic America and its civilizational superiority became policy positions, though they were expressed only in coded terms. By the time of the 1992 George HW Bush re-election campaign, it was no longer possible to leverage overt racism within polite society the way it had previously been. As a result, the right began to frame this discourse in new terms, speaking of “Western” values and civilization, describing a “real” America defending the world against Communism and disorder, which were implicitly associated with racial and political difference. In place of people like Duke or Wallace articulating overt calls for racial segregation, the right began to use a different discourse to call for separation on the basis of the concepts of purity and deviance and the language of law and order.

This served to define a cultural and political space and also the areas of exclusion—not on the basis of overt concepts of race, but around the idea of a civilizational difference. The terms of division were sometimes framed through the lens of religious differences, other times through the lens of a gulf between a rural and an “urban” America. Some within the right at this time, like Lee Atwater, discussed this shift overtly with their supporters (though behind closed doors), articulating how “dog whistle” policies on tax, housing, and crime could serve as replacements for the overt racism of the past. This concept of a Western civilization under threat fused with the fervor against “communism” that was revived under Reagan in the 1980s, along with rising conspiracy theory discourse—a toxic mixture that would explode, literally and figuratively, in the late 1980s.

Meanwhile, the rise of the religious right as a political force added another element to this fusion of conspiracy theories, anti-communist paranoia, and the increasingly armed politics of white grievance. Prior to the Reagan campaign in 1980, the religious right had largely approached politics with suspicion, with some pastors telling their parishioners not to participate in a political system that was dirty and sinful. The Reagan campaign intentionally reached out to this segment of the population, shifting its campaign rhetoric to attract their support and elevating their concerns into the realm of policy. Consequently, anti-choice campaigns and the like became a powerful means to mobilize people. This gave the narrative of social polarization an additional moral and religious angle, using rhetoric about sin and preventing “depravity.” The result was an escalation into armed violence, with the Army of God murdering doctors and bombing abortion clinics around the US.

In this move toward armed violence, right-wing terrorist discourse underwent a few modifications. The first of these was an expansion of the terrain where they saw the “war” being fought. The tendency towards armed violence expanded from focusing on civil rights initiatives and the question of whether marginalized groups should be able to participate in society to sectors that had traditionally considered themselves distinct from overt fascism. As the mainstream right increasingly embraced the concept of the culture wars, they also adopted the implication that there was a fundamental existential conflict. By framing the conflict in terms of purity and deviance, coupled with the idea of civilizational conflict that was already emerging in the right, the construction of an absolute social division around political power came to justify a rising discourse of armed politics. Right-wing attention was concentrated on those who did not share right-wing moral codes; this was framed as a justification to use state violence (in the form of legal restrictions, such as abortion bans) and armed force (in the form of far-right terrorism) to eliminate all groups perceived as threats to moral American life.

In addition to targeting people who were pro-choice, who had different religious affiliations, or who expressed themselves outside of the cis-hetero normative construct, these perceived threats were also directed at non-white people, though this was framed in the language of responding to social and political deviance. The idea of an armed cultural conflict, the targets of which now included everyone outside of white Christian conservatism, began to spread throughout the right wing, as some of the more moderate factions embraced or at least explained away anti-choice violence or the formation of militia groups. However, as the violence became a more significant political liability, conservative politicians began to modify the extremist rhetoric of armed factions into policy, embracing the culture of these political circles while rejecting armed violence, at least in public. This was evident in anti-choice politics, in which politicians embraced groups like Right to Life but rejected groups like the Army of God even as they incorporated their political rhetoric into policy.

The development of this broad political identity based in white Christianity and the attempt to restore and protect an idyllic America from all “outside forces” brought the discourse of far-right organizations into increasingly mainstream contexts starting in the early 1990s. However, while their ideas were becoming more and more generalized, armed far-right groups became increasingly isolated, especially as the Gulf War precipitated rising mainstream patriotism. As allegiance to the state became a default politics on the right, armed violence was increasingly seen as fringe terrorism. In some ways, during this period, the right no longer needed the armed groups, since it held almost unchallenged power, and could implement far-right visions incrementally through policy.

During this period of right-wing ascendancy and lasting until the election of Clinton in 1992, the armed far right became publicly ostracized from the mainstream right, which increasingly saw the indiscretion of the far-right as a liability. Increasingly marginalized, far-right fringe elements kept to themselves, breeding an ecosystem of conspiracy theories dispersed via newsletters, pamphlets, books, and radio. However, with the rise of the Clinton administration and the loss of Republican power in Congress, far-right beliefs were slowly reintegrated into the mainstream right. Publications like American Spectator magazine picked up fringe conspiracy theories from the far right about the Clintons’ financial dealings, the deaths of their former friends and business associates, and Bill Clinton’s supposed ties to moderate left-wing activists during the Vietnam War (never mind that he was an informant while at Oxford). This process accelerated after the government raids at Waco, which were portrayed by many on the right as an attack against a religious community over gun ownership issues, and at Ruby Ridge, portrayed as a state assault on a rural family minding their own business.

The events that played out at Waco and Ruby Ridge, early in the Clinton administration, began to play a role of being points of condensation around which conspiracy theories could form. The efforts to establish global unity under American political norms, which arose at the end of the Cold War, accelerated the emergence of narratives about a purported New World Order—a superficially modified version of some of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories that the Nazis had previously advanced. Combined with the narrative of an absolute cultural and political division, this fueled perceptions that the “traditional” America that the right wing held up as an ideal was collapsing. Elements of the racist far-right used these conspiracy theories as openings to enter mainstream right wing circles. Mainstream Republican discourse integrated the former fringes—a move propelled by Newt Gingrich and Thomas DeLay for the purposes of creating a permanent Republican voting block; by pushing the narrative of permanent division and existential threat, they could demonize the Democrats, guaranteeing loyalty among their voters. The popularization of these narratives extended the Overton window to the right in ways that the far-right subsequently exploited to extend its influence and recruitment. Many of these tendencies fuel present-day Trumpism.

Concurrently, in the 1990s, militia movements that had previously been viewed as fringe elements increasingly came to be regarded as necessary to defend America from internal and external enemies. As right-wing conspiracy theories reached a fever pitch and increasingly mainstream Republicans embraced these politics, the militias grew in size. This tendency, coupled with the right’s historic fervor for gun culture, popularized the notion of the “patriot” standing up against “tyranny” to preserve “freedom” and an American (read: white-dominated) way of life. This language was continuously weaponized over the following decades, pulling more moderate conservatives into contact with extreme right-wing ideas, which became less and less divergent from the language of mainstream Republican activists.

Understandings of “freedom” as the preservation of white domination and Christian supremacy continued to infiltrate the mainstream right, fueled by the conspiracy theories about how Clinton was going to destroy the white Christian way of life in America. In this mutation, the concept of “freedom” was modified to represent a rigid set of social norms. For example, Christian groups began to declare that it was a violation of their “freedom” for the state to allow non-hetero couples to marry, or not to force children to pray in school. In the past 30 years, this dynamic has been repeatedly applied to exclude people from society based on sexual orientation or gender identity and to further integrate the language of Christianity into government documents. This notion of “freedom” as the “preservation” of a “way of life” has become so popular with the right-wing that it barely requires repeating when politicians employ it to push policies of exclusion. Combined with the desire to eliminate difference and to preserve social and political inequality, disempowerment, and racial apartheid, the notion of “freedom” has been stripped of any actual meaning. This has set the stage for an increasingly authoritarian posture across the right.

The concept of a culture war, which had become common parlance within the religious right, fused with the widespread conspiracy theory narrative describing the rise of a tyrannical elite. In its attempts to undercut Clinton, the Republican Party created the conditions for a concept of total cultural warfare, which became increasingly militarized and seeped back into the more moderate factions of the Republican Party. Some of these factions still embraced policy-centric positions, but the narratives they utilized to motivate voters were all based on this notion of an absolute cultural threat. Voters were presented en masse with the image of an American culture threatened with extinction, led to believe that they were the only forces that could mobilize against a tyrannical “liberal elite” in order to preserve their “freedom.” As this mentality generalized, the idea of civil war as a horizontal conflict between social factions came to be widely accepted among the right.

The Mentality of Defending the “Homeland”

With the advent of the second Bush administration and the September 11 attacks, the relationship between the state and the fringe far right changed dramatically. The state’s response focused on constructing a national consensus around the “War on Terrorism”—a consensus which was exploited to justify systematic violations of civil liberties, to target entire communities, and to channel trillions into overseas military occupations. The core of this campaign was the construction of a narrative of two elements in conflict (“with us or against us”)—a binary distinction grounded in unquestioning loyalty to the state—and the drafting of the “public” into the intelligence and counter-terrorism apparatuses. The attacks themselves and the rhetoric around them helped to popularize the concept of a conflict of civilizations; the idea of defending the “homeland” from foreign threats that sought to “destroy the American way of life” was increasingly adopted across the American political landscape. A sort of renaissance occurred in the militia movement: no longer alienated from the state, the militia movement started to become a cultural phenomenon. The concept of the citizen defender of the “homeland” entered popular culture, becoming a widespread cultural archetype within mainstream conservatism.

The embrace of the tenets that formed the foundations of the militia movement in the decade leading up to September 11 had profound effects.

First, an ecosystem of conspiracy theories developed around September 11, propelling Alex Jones from the fringe towards mainstream conservative circles. This was bolstered by state efforts to spread the narrative that hidden enemies within the US were waiting for a time to attack. This posture lends itself to justifying social exclusion and validating conspiracy theories; the threat is not apparent but hidden, associated with elements of society that diverge from supposed social norms. As a result, the narrative on the far-right shifted from a framework that was at odds with the state to a framework in which the right targeted others based on race, religion, and politics in order to defend the state itself. Conspiracy theorists were able to exploit increasing Internet use, using online media and the newly formed mass social media platforms—chiefly Facebook—to spread conspiracy theories to new social circles.

Second, the incorporation of far-right ideas and personalities into mainstream conservative discourse brought more traditional conservatives into increasingly close contact with extreme racism and Islamophobia. Before the rise of social media and the right-wing idea of the civilian soldier, many people saw these conspiracy theories as marginal and lacking credibility, or else did not encounter them in the first place. But now, these fringe elements gained an audience within more mainstream circles, hiding their intentions within the parlance of counter-terrorism. As the field of counter-terrorism studies emerged, many of those who initially populated that world hailed from the Islamophobic far right; they were able to pass themselves off as “terrorism experts” simply by presenting themselves as a “think tank” and making business cards. As the right came to adopt the concept of an absolute threat and to identify that threat with otherness in general, the fear of an immediate terrorist threat that politicians had propagated bled over into cultural and political divisions, conveying the sense that the enemy represented an immediate and physical threat to health and safety. The more this mentality spread throughout the right, and the more that this was leveraged to demonize difference, the more the conditions were created for these divisions to be characterized with a narrative of overt warfare.

For more and more Republicans, inclusion in society became conditional, depending on political beliefs; protest activity was enough to identify a person as an external enemy. This is ironic, insofar as the right wing has dishonestly sought to rebrand itself as defending free speech.

Within the right, as the idea of a militarized defense of the state against enemies both internal and external took shape, the definition of “enemy” expanded to include not just those of different cultural, ethnic, or religious backgrounds, but also immigrants, Muslims, and “liberals.” As the Bush era wore on, this newly empowered militia movement, increasingly aligned with the white nationalist agenda, began to engage in semi-sanctioned activity, such as the Minutemen patrols along the Mexican border. Republican politicians incorporated the ideals of these militarized groups into GOP policy, both nationally and locally in places like Arizona, where white nationalists played critical roles in drafting SB1070, and later helped to popularize a narrative about the need for a border wall. Following the patterns of past social conflicts, this narrative served to create political conditions that could render increasingly invasive state policies more acceptable and successful—including the expansion of the surveillance state, the militarization of the police, and the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

As militarism took hold on the right, the foundations of the contemporary conservative position were laid. The right came to see themselves as defenders of the state, and the state as the force that defends their “freedom”—understanding “freedom” as the preservation of a white Christian conservative society. Consequently, formerly anti-government militias shifted to openly supporting repressive government intervention, and even the supposedly “libertarian” elements of the right embraced the police and the forces of the state.

When Obama took office, the stage was set for the final act, in which the politics of white grievance, the violent preservation of white supremacy, and what would become a state strategy of counterinsurgency came together in a volatile cocktail. Just as they had during the Clinton era, Republican politicians began to capitalize on racism and conspiracy theories as political strategies to regain power—but this time, these conspiracy theories took on overtly racial and religious tones. What had been implicit in the 1990s was now explicit.

The prevalence of conspiracy theories within the Republican Party reinforced the notion of a “real America” protecting the state from internal enemies—which, according to this narrative, had managed to take control of the state itself in the form of the Obama administration. The necessity of portraying the threat as Other, external to a “real America,” is obvious enough in the rise of the “birther” conspiracy. The right merged everything they opposed into a singular force attempting to destroy America: recall the infamous Glenn Beck conspiracy board, according to which the Service Employees International Union was selling copies of The Coming Insurrection to help Obama institute Islamo-Fascist Leninism. This completed the process via which the right had begun to view all who disagreed with their doctrines as the enemy and to consider themselves a distinct political project based around the defense of America.

Paranoia took over in the mainstream right. All sources of information that did not reinforce their views, all policies that could be portrayed as part of a “liberal conspiracy,” all efforts to promote social tolerance were seen as direct attacks against America itself. The conspiratorial tendency that Republicans had incorporated into the party in the late 1990s had metastasized into a belief that Republicans were constantly under assault by enemies that must be destroyed. The entirety of society and politics were viewed as the terrain of an ongoing civil war, conceptualized in increasingly millenarian terms. To those outside the right, this narrative seemed completely divorced from reality—but within these circles, these theories were the result of years of social polarization and burgeoning ideas about cultural warfare, promoted by Republican politicians. Departing from the idea of a lifestyle under threat, moving through the concept of cultural warfare into conspiracy theories and the framework of civilizational warfare, an overtly racist call to “protect Western civilization” became the cornerstone of contemporary right wing politics.

The open embracing of conspiracy theory generated several mutations within right-wing discourse, two of which became prominent.

The first mutation took the form of the Tea Party and the birther conspiracy—from which Donald Trump’s candidacy ultimately emerged. In these circles, conspiracy theories fueled by Facebook and online right-wing platforms spread at an unprecedented pace, generating theories about everything from “death panels” to undocumented immigration and eventually culminating in QAnon. The rapid pace at which these theories proliferated and were adopted by the Republican Party and their attendant media organizations, such as Fox News, created the conditions for these narratives to grow increasingly divergent from demonstrable and observable fact. In these circles, the acceptance of information had less to do with its veracity than with the declared politics of the communicator. This backlash against “liberal media”—i.e., any media organization that did not valorize right-wing narratives—formed the basis of the “fake news” narrative later pushed by Trump.

The second mutation was the emergence of newly empowered militia and white nationalist movements, which had come to exist in close proximity with one another twenty years earlier when they were relatively isolated during the Clinton era. These organizations capitalized on their newfound access to people in positions of power. Narratives about defending the state against “outsiders” continued to spread online, enabling militia groups to capitalize on populist discontent in the waning years of the Obama administration. These elements began to organize through several different channels, including attempts to carry out attacks against immigrants and Muslims, the emergence of “citizen’s militias” in places like Ferguson, Missouri in response to the uprising against racist police violence, and direct standoffs with state forces such as the one at the Bundy Ranch in 2014. These confrontations provided a point of condensation, while right-wing media pointed to them as examples of “resistance” to the supposed internal threat.

Concurrent with the acceleration of activity within conspiracy theory and militia circles was the rise of the “Alt-Right,” which emerged during “Gamer Gate” in 2014. Largely driven by the Internet and misogynist white grievance, this element introduced a new and well-funded influence into the right-wing ecosystem. The Alt-Right is rooted in the white-collar racist right-wing, populated by figures like Jared Taylor and Peter Brimlow who were often seen as soft and bourgeois by other elements of the far-right. Taylor, Brimlow, and similar figures are situated in the universities and think tanks of Washington, DC; they had always operated in a space between the official Republican Party and the Nazi skinheads and racist militias that had dominated the far-right fringe for decades. Flush with cash from tech and financial industry funders and armed with a logic of strategic deception, the Alt-Right gained widespread attention through online harassment campaigns, which they justified by disingenuously leveraging the rhetoric of free speech. Thanks to the developments of the preceding years, the Alt-Right was able to traffic openly in conspiracy theories and disinformation while portraying anyone who opposed them as part of the “liberal establishment”—the groups that the right had convinced their adherents represented an internal threat.

As the online presence of the Alt-Right grew, they gained entry into influential Republican circles by teaming up with older, more traditional racist conservatives who had attained positions from which they could shape policy. This influence was amplified by publications like Breitbart, run by Trump’s confidant Steve Bannon, and funded by the Mercer family, who made billions running hedge funds. For Republicans like the Mercers, embracing the Alt-Right was a strategy to gain power within conservative circles and overcome the power networks of more traditional funders like the Koch brothers. Others recognized the power that they could wield by tapping into the online forces assembling around the Alt-Right. This online presence was supplemented by the mobilization of older conservatives through the Tea Party, rising far-right activist energy, and the construction of a culture around the militia movement.

Many conservative politicians began to embrace this new formation, despite its outright racism and the ways it used confrontational tactics to achieve its goals. In many ways, as with Gingrich and DeLay in past decades, Republican politicians saw this new element of the right wing as a possible source from which they could draw grassroots energy. They hoped to use this energy to compensate for the fact that the Republican Party was becoming a minoritarian party with a voter base that was slowly dying out—just as they used gerrymandering and voter suppression to counteract this disadvantage. They saw an opportunity to construct a voting block that was completely loyal to them and isolated from any other perspectives, beginning with the demonization of the “liberal media” and eventually encompassing every aspect of everyday life—where people buy food and clothes, what kind of cars they drive, the music they listen to, the books they read. The social “bubble” that the right had spent years building crystalized, enabling them to mobilize rage and reactionary anger almost at will. Though this allowed the Republicans to leverage parliamentary procedure to limit much of the Obama agenda, it also created the conditions that led to the old guard of the party losing control over the party itself.

Out of this moment arose Donald Trump, who ran a campaign that was as openly racist as it was nationalistic, as blatantly grounded in disinformation as it was in a politics of social division and white grievance. Even though his candidacy was openly rejected by traditional Republican power circles, they quickly came to understand that their attempts to build a grassroots conservativism had caused them to lose control over the force that they had helped call into being. The Overton Window in the US had shifted so far right by this point that the politics of Pat Buchanan, which the Republican base of the 1990s had rejected as racist, were now firmly entrenched as core Republican beliefs. The Trump campaign set about tearing down the remaining elements of the right that resisted his overt politics of racial division; in the process, it empowered the overtly racist elements within the right that had been gaining influence for years. Many commentators attributed this shift to the rise of the Alt-Right and its internet disinformation and trolling campaigns. In fact, the stage had been set for Trump long before, when the narrative of white communities at risk of destruction gained currency in the years following the Civil Rights Movement.

Thanks to the overt articulation of racist politics, the isolation of the right in a media bubble, and the construction of an absolute conflict between the right and all other political and social groups, the Trump campaign found a ready group of supporters. This mobilization invoked the idea of being under attack by “others,” but it also invited this base to serve as a force in offensive street action. The forces of militarization and social polarization that had been gaining ground on the right for years were unleashed in the street. All around the US, Trump supporters attacked immigrants, vandalized stores and places of worship, carried out mass shootings in the name of ethnic cleansing, and organized rallies and marches during which participants often attacked everyone from organized opposition to random passersby.

This mobilization enabled Trump not only to win the nomination and the presidency, but to marginalize practically all other factions of the Republican Party. This, in turn, created a situation in which normal conservatives were willing to consider taking on counterinsurgency roles on behalf of the state to defend the “homeland” against opposition to Trump, who has become synonymous with the rise of the white Christian “true America” to power.

This popularization of formerly fringe ideas has been widespread and terrifying. On the level of society, this manifests as a sort of cultural warfare, instilling inescapable and constant fear: immigrants fear being rounded up, dissidents fear being targeted by the state or right-wing vigilantes, targeted groups fear discrimination and police racism. Over the past four years, elements of the overtly racist right have openly mobilized in the streets, causing a massive social crisis—yet this has also driven elements of the left and left-adjacent circles to mobilize against rising fascist activity, and they have largely succeeded in driving the far right off the streets again, or at least limiting their gains.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has not hesitated to use the mechanisms of the state to crack down on dissidents and harass populations considered to threaten the re-establishment of white hegemony, while continuously spreading disinformation to construct a parallel reality. The justification for targeting dissidents is descended directly from the concept of defending “real America” from attack by secretive internal enemies. Narratives that reinforce this portrayal of the scenario are promoted, regardless of verifiability, by an entire universe of right-wing media. Trump has positioned himself and the media outlets that support him as the sole sources of truth for his supporters. Consequently, he has been able to frame any opposition—even simple fact checking—as an attack against himself and his vision of America, separating his adherents from all other sectors of the American public.

What emerged is a sort of final act, a culminating move in the construction of the concept of civil war on the right. The right transformed from a force opposing everyone they considered immoral or un-American, including the state, depending on who was in power, to a force that was completely loyal to the state. In this transformation, the concept of civil war also underwent a fundamental shift from a notion of social or cultural conflict between defined social factions, as it was for the religious right, to a strategy of defending the state against oppositional forces. In this transformation, the concept of civil war acquired a central paradox, in which the term came to mean something wholly other than its initial connotations within right-wing rhetoric. It no longer denotes a conflict that occurs between social factions outside of formal state power; now it describes a conflict in which one political or social faction becomes a force operating alongside the state within a framework of counterinsurgency.

The Concept of Civil War

The concept of civil war, in its traditional sense, presumes that there are two or more political factions competing for state power, or else, a horizontal conflict between social factions that are otherwise understood as part of the same larger political or social category. In this framework, the factions that enter into conflict are either doing so directly, with the intention of eliminating each other, or in a situation in which the control of the state is in question, with different factions fighting to gain that control. The horizontality of civil war distinguishes it from concepts like revolution or insurgency, in which people struggle against the state or a similar structure such as a colonial regime or occupying army. To say that a conflict is “horizontal” does not mean that the factions involved wield equal political, economic, or social power—that is almost never the case. Rather, in this sense, “horizontality” is a concept used in the study of insurgencies to describe a conflict as taking place across a society, without necessarily being focused on the logistics or manifestations of the state. In shifting the focus of struggle away from the operational manifestations of the state, this understanding of civil war tends to isolate the terrain of engagement. Rather than centering the struggle in everyday life—in the dynamics of our day-to-day economic and political activities—this understanding of civil war engenders a series of mutations.

First, it forces a sort of calcifying of the way the conflict is understood. Rather than the dynamic, kinetic conflicts that typify contemporary insurgencies, in which conflict manifests as a result of and in relation to everyday life, this way of seeing approaches social divisions as rigid forms. If we begin by assuming the existence of a fundamental social division preceding any questions about contextual political dynamics—as in the concept of cultural warfare embraced by the right—this will cause us to identify both the enemy and our “friends” as permanent and static entities. In this conceptual framework, these identities necessarily precede the conflict—they form the basis of the conflict within the original category of unity—and remain static throughout the conflict, as they are the terms that define the conflict itself. Consequently, partisanship becomes a sort of ideological rigidity in which actions are driven by a purely abstract definition of friendship and enmity.

There are clearly elements of the aforementioned “horizontality” in the current uprising and the reaction to it, and concepts of identity have played a key role in the way that the conflict has emerged, but the reality is more complex. If the social struggle that exploded into the streets in 2020 had simply been a conflict between right-wing social and political factions and their anti-fascist opposition, then the characterization of civil war might have been apt, just as it would have been if it were simply a conflict over who controls the state. But the actual scenario is profoundly more frightening than the clashes we have seen in Charlottesville, Berkeley, and Portland since 2016. In 2020, we have seen political factions functioning as para-state forces aligned with the state, working in concert with the police and openly engaging in counterinsurgency measures employing extralegal violence. The state is no longer simply refusing to act in response to violence between fascists and anti-fascists, as it had since 2016. Starting in summer 2020, factions within the state actively began to call these right-wing forces out into the street, while at the same time promoting conspiracy theories to legitimize militias and expand their reach within the moderate right, modifying DHS intelligence reports to justify the violence, and using the Department of Justice as a legal enforcement arm. Between August and November, all this took place in coordination with the messaging of Trump’s reelection campaign.

The traditional understanding of civil war implies a conflict between two distinct factions within a wider unity that defines both, as argued by Carl Schmitt. For example, a civil war would be an apt description of an open fight between fascists and anti-fascists over control of the state. The current scenario does not match that narrative. One element of the conflict is openly identifying as an element of the state itself, however unofficially; the perceived legitimacy of the right-wing position derives from their claim to be working in the interests of “America,” even if that involving opposing certain elements of the state. Describing the defense of the state as civil war creates the illusion of a horizontal social conflict, when in fact what we are describing is nothing more than informal policing.

This explains how the contemporary right wing embraces the police, soldiers, and murderers like Kyle Rittenhouse in the same breath. They understand themselves as fighting alongside the state to preserve it. It is not just that Trump has leveraged them for this purpose; their entire narrative propels them in this direction, rendering them willing participants in the establishment of authoritarianism under the banner of “freedom.” All the state has to do to mobilize them is to conjure an enemy and legitimize extra-legal action.

In calling them forward and sanctioning their actions, the state has employed a strategy with two clear objectives. First, to compensate for the state’s failure or hesitance to mobilize enough force to contain the uprising. Giving leeway to vigilante forces, the state enters a zone of exception that allows for violence not subject to the constraints that ordinarily limit what the state can do by force. Second, to construct the uprising as a threat. Taking advantage of widespread xenophobia, racism, and citizen militia mentality on the right, the state presented the uprising as something outside of America, posing a threat to America. This mentality is clearly confined to one segment of the American population, but that segment is all that is necessary for the operation to succeed.

For these moves to be effective, it was necessary to construct a threat that was both outside and internal. The narrative of “outside agitators” was mobilized to delegitimize Black resistance by denying that it ever actually occurred, insinuating that “outside agitators” drove the local rebellions. This narrative has been deployed across the political spectrum, from conservative Republicans to progressive Democrats, in a flagrant attempt to decenter the idea of direct, localized resistance. This served a number of different agendas. In cities governed by Democrats, it enabled local administrations to deny the failures of reformism; in more conservative areas, politicians used it to deny the profound racism at the core of the American project and to preserve the narrative of American exceptionalism. This effort to conceal Black resistance was easily debunked, as arrestee statistics around the country repeatedly showed that the majority of people arrested in local protests were from the immediate area and were hardly all “white anarchists.”

When the falsehood about “outside agitators” collapsed, Trump turned to defining whole cities as outside the realm of American legitimacy. This included threatening local officials, declaring that they had lost control of cities, and ultimately designating those cities as “anarchist jurisdictions.” This successfully mobilized right-wing groups to go into some of these cities and start conflicts, but ultimately, the reach of this ploy was limited. For counterinsurgency to succeed, it needs to employ narratives that are widely accepted—and uncontrolled “anarchist jurisdictions” failed this test. This narrative has been most effective when it focuses specifically on “anarchists,” defining the term as anyone involved in any sort of direct resistance, including marches. By promoting the idea that Americans face a dangerous adversary bent on evil, the Trump administration tried to construct the terms of a horizontal social conflict in which elements of the right could play a direct role in fighting the “anarchists.”

Calling the militia movement into the streets via a narrative of total conflict shifted the terrain of conflict itself. Where previously, the unrest emerging throughout society was directed at the state, suddenly those in revolt were compelled to contend with two forces, the state and the paramilitaries. In this mobilization of social conflict, the state was able to not only gain force in the streets, often leveraged through threats and direct political violence, but was also able to decenter the focus of resistance away from the state, and into the realm of social conflict.

In mobilizing paramilitaries, the state both leveraged and incorporated the social polarization of the past decades. This provided the state with a mechanism outside of the structure of law through which repression may take place. In embracing this informal force, the state adopted a strategy similar to the approach seen in Egypt and then Syria during the so-called Arab Spring, in which reactionary social forces were mobilized to attack uprisings.

When this took place in Egypt in 2011, the rebels in the streets did not allow this strategem to divert them from focusing on bringing down the Mubarak regime. But in Syria, the introduction of paramilitaries into the conflict not only hampered the uprising from focusing on the state, but also restructured the conflict along ethnic and religious lines, diverting the uprising into sectarian warfare and enabling the state to ride out the ensuing bloodbath. These scenarios were similar in that forces outside of the state were mobilized for the purpose of counterinsurgency, even if the kinds of force involved were different. As in Egypt and Syria, the struggle in the US could be diverted into sectarian violence. If this takes place, it will be the consequence of a fundamental misunderstanding of how the state functions and what the role of paramilitary forces is.

Though these situations differ in many ways from the one we find ourselves in, there is one common thread that ties them together. In Egypt, Syria, and in the current American context, the narrative of civil war initially developed specifically in communities that were aligned with the state. These communities conceive of civil war in paradoxical terms. On the one hand, there is a narrative describing a conflict between social factions, a “with us or against us” mentality. On the other hand, these social divisions are drawn along the same lines that define loyalty within the political space. The factions that see themselves as aligned with the state shape their identity largely around some sort of ideological project (such as right-wing Christianity in the US, for example) that they seek to implement through the state, leading them to see all opponents of the state as social enemies. In this framework, the concept of civil war becomes an analogue for a fundamentally different phenomenon, the voluntary involvement of those outside the state in its operations as paramilitary forces.

So the question confronting us is not whether to engage in civil war. Rather, the concept of civil war, as popularly understood in the contemporary United States, is a misnomer.

Law and Liberal Counterinsurgency

The emergence of this paramilitary phenomenon must be understood in the wider context of the development of counterinsurgency strategies as a response to the George Floyd uprising. Counterinsurgency theory is a vast field, emerging from colonial powers’ attempts to maintain imperialism in the wake of World War II. Beginning with British tactics during the Malayan Emergency in the 1950s, the model provided by those attempts to maintain colonial power came to exert profound influence on subsequent military and policing theory. Both “community policing” and the approach that the US military took during the later phase of the occupation of Iraq derive from thinking that originally emerged at that time. The primary goal of contemporary counterinsurgency, at its most basic, is to separate the insurgents from the population, and to enlist, as much as possible, this same population in initiatives to eliminate the insurgency. As French military thinker David Galula wrote in the 1950s, “The population becomes the objective for the counterinsurgent as it was for his enemy.”

Unlike the traditional understanding of warfare, which assumes a frontal conflict between identifiable, organized forces and the control of territory, counterinsurgency engages at the level of everyday life, where material action is taken and politics occurs. The terrain of the conflict is not space, necessarily, but rather security—the participants seek the ability to contain crisis in a given area, and then to expand that area. This has taken many forms—from the British brutally relocating entire populations to camps and the Americans napalm-bombing Vietnam to the softer approach of buying loyalty seen in the Sons of Iraq program during the Iraq War. However, the core of this approach is always a system that creates incentives for loyalty and negative consequences for disobedience, resistance, and insurgency. As many historians of US policing have pointed out, there is a cycle in which tactics developed in foreign conflicts are integrated into American policing and vice versa. Counterinsurgency is no exception; the earliest domestic appropriations of this approach were used to provide political victories for the moderate elements of political movements in the 1960s, followed by the emergence of so-called “community policing.”

The important thing here is to understand how this approach has been modified during the uprising that began in May 2020. In some ways, the response to the George Floyd uprising employed longstanding techniques—for example, the attempt to recuperate moderate elements. In other ways, we have seen a dramatic break with the techniques that the state relied upon until recently. To understand these differences, we can begin by tracing where they originate.

The discourse of law and order has formed the foundation of the contemporary prison-industrial complex and the explosive rise in prison populations—paving the way for “broken windows” policing, the militarization of police forces, mandatory minimum sentences, and the expansion of the prison system. This discourse relies on two fundamental elements: the state and the law. Following Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, we can describe the state as a formation through which the will of sovereignty is expressed, with the primary goals being the projection of sovereignty and the continuation of that projection. Within this construction of the state, law exists as an expression of sovereignty—but it is not the only possible expression. The state can suspend law, or supersede law, in an attempt to perpetuate itself.

We saw this play out during the George Floyd uprising, as elements of the state abandoned the framework of a police force limited by law, along with the idea that laws against assault, threats, and brandishing weapons apply equally to everyone. Though we often think of the state and law as phenomena that imply each another, the state exceeds the structure of law. When liberal activists wonder why cops appear to be above the law, it is because they literally are. The state is not premised on the construction and maintenance of laws—Stalin’s regime, for example, was often utterly arbitrary. The construction of laws necessitates the existence of the state, but the converse is not true.

Philosophically, the structure of law functions to the extent that there cannot be exceptions to the law—in other words, to the degree that the law is enforceable and that there are no moments outside of law. Yet laws—or, to be precise, the dictates of a sovereign structure—do not function simply through declaration; a Bill in Congress is just a piece of paper. Both the law and extra-legal impositions of sovereign will only take force via mechanisms that can impose them upon everyday life. The police are one such mechanism.

Understood thus, law exists as a sort of aspirational totality intended to cover all time and space and to regulate the actions of all citizens. Within this construct, any attack against the police is in some sense an attack upon the state itself. Attacking police, building barricades, and other such disorderly actions all serve to prevent the police from projecting force into an area. Even outside the framework of law, in a state of emergency and in open warfare, the structure of the occupying force and the ability of that force to impose the will of the occupiers functions only to the degree that they can crush resistance within that space. Accordingly, any illegal activity, from unpermitted street marches to open rioting and looting, must be stopped at all costs—otherwise the hegemony of law will degrade, eventually leading to the disorganization of the police and the breakdown of the state.

The narrative of “law and order” presents this concept of law as the absolute definition of life and existence. The formal argument in the US political context is that law must apply to all people in the same way all the time, though we all know that this is never the reality and that in fact, the administration itself does not adhere to the law. Under the Trump administration, the state takes the form of a traditional extra-legal sovereignty structure, via which the will of the sovereign imposed through force and law serves as a convenient mechanism to criminalize any form of resistance.

This tendency to employ the state as an extra-legal apparatus for imposing sovereignty has manifested itself in a variety of forms—including the argument that people who attack property should spend decades in jail, the use of federal law enforcement to protect buildings from graffiti, and the use of federal charges against protesters, often for actions that local officials would not have deemed worth prosecuting. The goal is clear: to suppress the uprising in its entirety, rather than to regulate or channel its energy. This approach largely failed, often provoking severe reactions in places like Portland, where the presence of federal law enforcement on the streets energized the uprising and inspired some interesting tactical innovations.

The other side of this counterinsurgency puzzle is an emerging form of liberal counterinsurgency. Liberal counterinsurgency is nothing new. We can trace it to the attempt to moderate the labor movement after World War II and subsequent efforts to contain the Civil Rights Movement; the current strategies are familiar from the later days of the Iraq occupation. The fundamental move here is to provide an access point through which elements of a political faction or movement can get involved in the state. Sometimes this is through the mechanism of voting and the channeling of resistance into electoralism. If that fails, or if the crisis is acute enough, the state will attempt to incorporate these moderate elements directly by appointing them to government positions, including them in committees and in the constructing of policy. Arguably, the beneficiaries of previous applications of this technique form the core of the contemporary Democratic Party, which is comprised of the moderate wings of various political initiatives, all of whom were given access to some element of power. The final move in this strategy is to delegitimize or crush the ungovernable elements that refuse to compromise.

At its core, liberal counterinsurgency relies on fracturing political initiatives, uprisings, and organizations, sorting the participants into those who can be recuperated and those who must be eliminated. We saw elements of the state and various aspiring state actors employ this strategy in response to the George Floyd uprising. Early on, this took the form of conspiracy theories about outside agitators and agent provocateurs; eventually, it progressed into discourse about the importance of peaceful protest, a focus on defunding the police rather than abolishing them, and calls for people to follow the leadership of community organizers who were attempting to pacify the movement.

Liberals have attempted to completely reframe what has occurred in the United States since May within the context of acceptable politics. They have worked tirelessly to produce studies showing that the majority of the demonstrations were “peaceful.” They have spoken in the media in support of the uprising, but only mentioning elements adjacent to the uprising who were already associated with the electoral system, such as the various candidates and politicians who got tear gassed for the cameras. They have condemned the actions of the police, but only as violence perpetuated against the “innocent.” The move to glorify peaceful protest implicitly excludes and condemns those who do not fit this narrative of legitimate resistance.

Once the most radical elements are delegitimized and excluded, liberals move to criminalize them, even going so far as to justify police force against ”rioters,” often in the same cities where politicians started by condemning police violence. To hear them tell it, legitimate “peaceful” protests were hijacked by violent elements and outside agitators: illegitimate participants undermining the goals of the protests. Those of us who were in the streets at the end of May know that this narrative is absurd—people were fighting back from the moment that the cops shot the first tear gas—yet it has gained favor in liberal circles. This narrative is an attempt to hijack the uprising, to draw what was an ungovernable, uncontrollable element in direct conflict with the state back into electoral discourse.

Regarding the narrative that focuses on defunding the police—a proposal that means different things to different people—the liberal political class immediately began to insist on articulating demands that could be addressed to the state. This follows a pattern familiar from the Occupy movement and the rioting after police murdered Michael Brown in Ferguson in 2014. Structurally, the act of formulating demands suggests that the state is a legitimate interlocutor; it frames an uprising as a sort of militant lobbying directed at the state. By insisting on a model that centers demands, liberals position the state as the chief mechanism through which “change” occurs, ruling out the possibility of fighting against the state and the police themselves. The purpose of the demand is not so much to “win concessions” as it is to force potential uprisings back within the bounds of “acceptable” politics mediated by the state; this is why politicians always insist that movements must articulate clear demands.

By framing the discussion around demands to defund the police rather than attempts to abolish or eliminate them, liberals shifted the discussion to the less threatening arena of policies and budgets. This also enabled them to provide the moderate elements involved in the uprising with access to political power, in order to channel that energy into the formal legislative process. The irony is that the George Floyd uprising is a result not only of the long history of racism in the United States, but also the ways that prior attempts at liberal reform have failed.

This liberal counterinsurgency led to an inevitable conclusion: in August, Joe Biden directly declared that riots are not “protests,” essentially asserting that only attempts to engage in dialogue with the state are acceptable and that the full force of the state should be used to crush whatever ungovernable elements of the uprising remain. Biden combined both approaches—both repressing and coopting—by separating “peaceful” protesters from “rioters” and “anarchists,” then speaking directly to the most moderate demands for police reform.

Biden expresses the other element of the core paradox within state strategy: the state will allow protests, but redefines protesting to eliminate resistant elements. The goal is to provide an outlet, to allow people the opportunity to express complaints about particular state actions as long as no one challenges the state itself or the bureaucracies and parties that interface with it. This approach is fundamentally grounded in the concept of containment, according to which the state does not necessarily attempt to eliminate crisis, but rather aims to keep whatever happens under control via management and maintenance.

In the response to the George Floyd uprising, these differing approaches to law and security functioned to undermine each other; this is what set the stage for the emergence of para-state forces in response to the uprising. The “law and order” approach, based around imposing sovereignty through force, created a situation in which the forces of the state were empowered to employ increasing levels of violence to suppress the uprising. As we have seen in the streets, the use of impact munitions, beatings, arrests, and tear gas in 2020 has far outstripped any precedent in recent protest history. In response to these tactics, we saw an escalation on the part of the rebels in the streets, increasing numbers of whom began to form shield walls, bring gas masks, throw stones, and set fires, occasionally even employing firearms or Molotov cocktails. These were not aberrations, but common tactics emerging across a wide geographical area, fundamentally endangering a liberal counterinsurgency strategy based around containment.

As conflict escalates, containment-based approaches encounter two difficulties. First, it becomes increasingly challenging to identify more moderate or “innocent” elements and to isolate them from rebellious elements. Likewise, as state violence intensifies, it becomes harder to make the argument that reformism is valid or effective. Rebels on the street became more uncompromising as the uprising stretched on, seeing how increasing police violence indicates the failures of reformist approaches. Second, containment-based approaches reveal a fundamental contradiction. These approaches necessitate legitimizing some element of the uprising, which means acknowledging the legitimacy of the critique of the American political project it articulates. Yet as an uprising becomes increasingly uncontrollable, legitimizing these criticisms is tantamount to legitimizing the violence of the uprising itself.

As the liberal approach to counterinsurgency contributed to legitimizing the narrative of the uprising, it came into conflict with the law-and-order approach. The law-and-order approach drove militancy in the street, which in turn drove increasingly egregious police responses, rendering it increasingly difficult to contain the crisis. At the same time, because liberals took the position of supporting the core criticisms articulated via the uprising, they could not easily abandon those assertions, even as it became difficult to find elements that would abandon those who remained active in the street. This is what created the situation in which elements of the state were compelled to exceed the bounds of the law. In this context, the state resumed its essential nature as an imposition of sovereign force, in which law is only one of several possible manifestations, but at the same time, it also began to make space for extralegal para-state forces. This, in turn, created the conditions for far-right elements to receive leeway to operate outside of the law.

The inclusion of social forces from outside of the formal state structure in counterinsurgency strategies contains in microcosm several dynamics that have always been latent in US politics. It is from this perspective, in view of the contradictions latent in the counterinsurgency strategies deployed against the uprising, that we should understand the emerging discourse of civil war.

Social War, Not Civil War

The mobilization of paramilitary forces outside the limitations of the law points to a core element that is essential to this specific counterinsurgency operation as well as to the state in general. Throughout the Trump administration, we have seen the norms that formed the foundations of the perceived legitimacy of the democratic state erode. As this veneer has worn away, the state has also lost the ability to confine conflict within the bounds of the legislative process. Over the past three years, the relationship between the state and society has become increasingly characterized by material conflict. The Trump administration has used executive edict and raw violence to impose an image of America derived from the far right. This is the state as material force, pure and simple. Under Obama, repression was associated with failed compromise or the surgical precision of surveillance and drone strikes; under Trump, the naked repressive force of the state is laid bare for all to see.

Inherent in the functioning of the state is the defining of what is inside it and what is outside of it. According to the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, for example, what is outside of the state is described as the “state of nature” in which life is allegedly “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” This account of the “outside” justifies the existence of the state as a mechanism to prevent what is outside from manifesting itself. Inside the state, the sovereignty of the state is considered to be total, while the outside is understood as any situation in which the sovereignty of the state is absent, or at least threatened. In US political theory, the concepts underlying the state are held to be universal, supposedly applicable to all humans. Therefore, anything outside of the state—even if that outside is geographically internal—is considered an absolute other that must be destroyed.

Consequently, in the US, the paramilitary is constructed both as a force in social conflict with any geographically internal enemy defined as outside of the American project, and as a force inherently tied to the preservation of the state and the prevention of change. Until recently, the concept of the enemy was tempered by self-imposed limitations, which served to reintegrate rebels through liberal counterinsurgency methods or to concentrate state action chiefly within the legal system. Today, these limitations have outlived their usefulness and right-wing militias are eager to eliminate the “outside.”

Now that the state has dispensed with the niceties that served to conceal its core as a logistics of raw force, a few things have become clear. First, the structure of law as a concept that theoretically applies to all people equally was based in the assertion of a sort of universal inside that included all within the purview of the state. Dispensing with law except insofar as it can be manipulated to serve as a weapon, the administration has opened up a space outside of law, a terrain formed by the state of emergency. Second, the paramilitary is no longer a force separate from the state. From the perspective of the uprising, there is no distinction between struggle against the far right and struggle against the state. This is not a horizontal conflict on the level of society—that would assume that all the forces involved were part of the “inside.” Rather, this is a material conflict between the state and all those defined as outside and against it.

With the elimination of the universality of law, framed through the concept of equal protection, and the overt incorporation of the paramilitary into state counterinsurgency strategy, the language of civil war loses its usefulness. Civil war is fundamentally a conflict between social factions, but that is not what is occurring here. That framework actually distorts the current dynamics of engagement. We are not experiencing a conflict between social factions, regardless of how the right conceives of the conflict. Rather, by incorporating the defense of the state into paramilitary doctrine and framing this around a rigid set of ideological commitments (termed “freedom,” but which really represent forms of social control), the right wing has given rise to a political conflict about the state, its role, and the structure of state and police power.

If we embrace the concept of civil war as it has been constructed in the contemporary US context, we will find that this generates tactical problems. Embracing civil war as a strategic posture could cause us to neglect the terrain of everyday life, where the state actually operates and most conflicts play out. If we understand ourselves as contending in a civil war, we will likely look for a linear conflict between two identifiable forces fighting each other without regard to the material terrain.

What is at stake here is not just a conceptual distinction or a question of semantics. The core of the distinction is important to how we think of conflict in relation to the wider anarchist project.

Structures of law and capital always function to regulate and channel actions toward specific ends according to the will of those who wield sovereignty. Resistance is a concrete question of how to act to disrupt the operational logistics of the state—i.e., the police, in the broadest possible sense of the term, which is to say, all those who regulate behavior according to these dictates. If we embrace the posture of civil war, the conflict becomes conceptually displaced from the terrain of everyday life, in which the state and capital operate, into a zone of abstract opposition.

To frame the current conflict as a civil war is to describe the state as a secondary element, rather than the focus of action, and to conceptualize the conflict as a linear struggle between two rigidly identified factions, both of which are defined prior to the opening of hostilities. This approach would produce a social conflict in which the state will inevitably play a role, but in which we will fundamentally misunderstand the terms. Rather than seeking to understand the shifts that have occurred on the level of society and the ways in which the uprising has been successfully defined as an “outside” by the state, we would end up concentrating on only one element of the collaboration between the state and para-state forces. Essentially, we would replace a struggle for everything—for the whole of life itself—with a far less ambitious struggle against other elements in the social terrain.

Seeing things that way would end up limiting our tactical options. If we base our understanding of the terms of conflict around broad conceptual categories, it will be harder for us to strategize for a kinetic conflict with the state that is in a constant process of change. In fact, adopting a framework of rigid linear conflict tends to produce conditions in which popular resistance becomes impossible. Contagious popular resistance presupposes the breakdown of the limits of the political; it manifests at the moment that the distinction breaks down between those who define themselves and their actions “politically” and those who do not. This was what made the uprising so powerful, unpredictable, and transformative, enabling it to exceed the state’s capacity to impose control. Constructing a linear conflict between predefined factions according to the framework of civil war, we would reduce those currently outside of the self-identified political movement to bystanders, lacking agency in the conflict yet still suffering its side effects. Reducing our understanding of the social terrain to the task of identifying who is “us” and who is “them” would ultimately distract us from everyone who is not already tied to an identifiable faction and from all the ways that we could act to transform that terrain itself.

The George Floyd uprising has shown us the power latent in this concept of popular resistance, understood as a dynamic resistance. Over the past several months, the limits of the political have fundamentally ruptured, as popular understandings of the possibilities of political action have expanded to include all the elements of everyday life alongside traditional forms of activism. In this rupture, we can glimpse the dynamics of successful uprisings: the breaking down of the limitations that confine conflict within particular bounds, the generalization of this expanded sense of political conflict throughout everyday life, and the abolishing of the distinction between political spaces and other spaces of life. To embrace the framework of civil war in this context, in the ways that this concept has been defined and manifested by the right, would be to abandon the possibility unleashed by the uprising. It would mean turning away from a dynamic conflict that has been opaque in its sheer complexity and awe-inspiring in its scale. It would mean abandoning the social terrain, and, as a result, the dynamic, kinetic possibilities of popular resistance.