What to the African American is the Fourth of July?

[PHOTO CREDIT: BOSTON GLOBE]

By Christian Gines

I. Every time a firecracker pops I think of every pop of a whip that cracked a back of my ancestor
An uncle or aunt
A cousin
A best friend

Every whip that drove my people
Deeper
*Whip*
Deeper
*Whip*
Deeper
Into oppression
Every whip that moved my parents
One step farther from their homeland
And closer to their new land
A land that’s not really theirs
Where they are a troublesome presence
A land where they are 3/5 of a person
“A slave”
“A nigger”
“A coon”
“A boy”
“A negro”
“A convict”
“A drug dealer”
“A thug”
A
ME

II. Every time a firecracker pops I can hear their fingers pop
The blood seeping out
A paper cut
But from thorns
The same color of the white stuff that they make out of trees 
But the white that makes the white people a lot of money 
The pop that makes me want to complain and get Band-Aid 
But the pop that if they didn’t keep picking then they would be DEAD
I think of the crackling heat of that day
Gleaming on their flared backs
“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

III. Every time a firecracker pops I think of the popped naps
The naps from the black panther party that uncurled into an Afro
The naps of my people that remains
Un kept
Un picked
Un bothered
To reflect that we are from our homeland Africa
To reflect that we belong here in America
To show that we shouldn’t be defined by our haircuts or our skin color
To show that when we pick our hair it is a symbol of black power
And that power doesn’t have to infringe on anyone else
For some reason I have to say that
But when you’re accustomed to privilege
Equality feels like oppression
When I pop my knuckles I think of all the black women that struggle with their natural hair 
That need to pop their naps to fit into what society preaches
So they can seem intelligent and smart
So they can be accepted into a society that stresses how they can and should look

IV. Every time a firecracker pops I think of the hanging nooses
The nooses that have my brothers head hanging in them 
That pop
One piece of rope at a time it pops
Waiting on the limb to break
POP
There it goes again
Another black boy dead
When I pop my knuckles I think of the gunshots that go off unexpectedly
One that didn’t have to happen
One that makes another black boy disappear from this earth like nothing ever happens
And when I pop my knuckles I think of
99% percent of those gavels that leave those officers convicted of nothing
And how this criminal justice system fails us
Time and time again
And when I pop my knuckles I think of the moment when that time will stop
And a pop will sound but
It will be a firework of equality and justice
Spreading across the world one by one
On a path that will stop only when that pop is a firework on June 19th not July 4th

V. Every time a firecracker pops I think of Thurgood Marshall and his fight for equality
I think of him hitting his gavel as the first black on the Supreme Court of the United States of America
When I pop my knuckles I think of the jails locked forever
The mass incarceration of African Americans
I think of the closing of MLK’s jail cell and the letters he sent from there
I think of the killings of 
Medgar Evers
Malcolm X

Fred Hampton

Patrice Lumumba
Laquon McDonald
Eric Garner
Sandra Bland
Freddie Gray

Trayvon Martin
Stephon Clark

Sandra Bland
Kaleif Browner

Ahmaud Arbery

George Floyd

Breonna Taylor

Oluwatoyin Salau

 VI. Every time a firecracker pops I think of the last poll closing on election night in 2008 
Black people were lynched for this right
I think of the opening of the White House door
And the hope that came with it
The dream that we could become a better America

VII. Every time a firecracker pops I think of Crispus Attucks
The first person killed in the Revolutionary war
A black person
Not even fighting for his own freedom
We have fought in every American war
We are more likely to join the army than any other race
But we're still not seen as American
Yet you still hate us
You brought us over here yet you hate us
We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never be American.
But like Langston Hughes said
“They’ll see how beautiful I am/And be ashamed —/I, too, am America.”

Art Without a Place, Labour Without an End

By Petar Jandrić

New roads and old milestones

When the coronavirus hit the world, many of us dusted our high-school or college sciences. What is a virus? What are the main differences between linear and logarithmic curves? What does it mean to flatten the curve? We also remembered our history. Spanish Flu, Black Death… how did our ancestors deal with these threats? We suddenly rediscovered movies such as Contagion, and ‘relaxed’ ourselves from horrifying news reports with equally (and often more) horrifying fiction. Those locked in their homes, without access to work, found themselves thinking how to pay the next rent. Those who could transfer their work online, such as teachers and computer programmers, faced various challenges pertaining to working from home. Those whose work was deemed necessary, such as doctors and firemen, found themselves working 24/7 while isolated from their families. We all discovered how to home-school our children, and we all faced the challenge of retaining our sanity locked between our four walls in an increasingly insecure world. We re-learned how to wash our hands. The world, according to social networks and news reports, seemed to breathe as one.   

While we collectively discovered new realities pertaining to our specific positions within the society, an ‘old’ reality just waited to be rediscovered. Those working from lush homes have it much better than those working from cramped apartments. Those working in companies with strong social provisions have it much better than freelancers. Those working in Third Wold countries face dilemmas such as ‘corona or hunger’ (Sanjai and Naqvi 2020). Class matters. Property ownership matters. Social provisions matter. Race matters. On our brand-new road towards discovering what is now popularly termed as ‘a new normal’, we found a good old milestone – Karl Marx.

The coronavirus has created the biggest social science experiment in our lifetimes (and I do hope that it will not be replaced by an even bigger one in near future). Diverse, contextual, and nuanced global experiences of lockdown will surely be described, classified, and neatly foldered in journals, book, project reports, and other academic formats. Together with this painstaking analytic breakdown of the pandemic into it smallest detail, we also need some ‘grand’ over-arching theories to help us make sense of all this. And here I don’t aim at old-concepts-new-clothes semi-prepared attempts such as Žižek’s (2020) Pandemic! Covid-19 shakes the world, but something along the lines of Struggle in a Pandemic: A Collection of Contributions on the COVID-19 Crisis (Workers Inquiry Network 2020). Of course, the latter “collection of short summaries and critical reflections of the policies taken in different countries to deal with the coronavirus pandemic that affect workers and the unemployed” (dВЕРСИЯ 2020) is just an initial take on the problematic. Yet we do need a combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches and theories; it is only at their intersections, that we can make sense out of this global pandemic mess.  

Canary in a coal mine

I am an academic researcher in a transdisciplinary field which is hard to pin-down, epistemologically and practically. Yet my transdisciplinary approaches, just like many others, still pretend towards ‘science’ – while many of us understand that the arts are just as important as the sciences, it is a well-hidden fact that even the most open transdisciplinary approaches often do not give enough importance to the arts (Jandrić and Kuzmanić 2020). At a very personal level, however, I am blessed with a partner who is an active artist. We share our ideas, topics, and interests; our works often intersect at some level which is invisible to our audience but formative for our works. At the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic I wrote an urgent editorial for Postdigital Science and Education (Jandrić 2020) and invited post-digital scholars to engage with our present crisis. I issued calls for 500-word testimonies, for shorter commentary articles, for full-length original articles… And at the same time, Ana Kuzmanić issued her own call. She had a previously signed contract to do an artist book for her forthcoming exhibition, and she decided to base her book on testimonies by artists, curators, and cultural workers about the future of the cultural sector after Covid-19. Her call, entitled Art Without Place, starts with following words:   

While the Covid-19 pandemic spreads all over the world, the ban of public gatherings has drastic consequences to many occupations including arts and culture. This is a frightening situation; our lives are endangered directly, but also our material and political existence has quickly become uncertain. Reality has become more fiction than fiction, and the idea of the arts in concert halls, cinemas, and white cubes, has become uncertain. Our profession as artists and cultural workers face major challenges. The idea of radical change in the political economy of the arts is no longer merely a utopian construction; it has become a real and urgent question. In this collective project, we would like to hear about the ways in which you—artists, curators, art critics and all workers in the cultural sector—experience this shift in the moment here and now. (Kuzmanić 2020)

Reading the call, one cannot help but recall conditions in the cultural sector before the pandemic. Artists in precarious positions, moving from one project to another, mostly without permanent employment or social security. Curators, some institutionalized and some not, fighting at the battlefield of commodified ‘cultural industry’. Steep winning curve, in which only a few can make a living from their work. Already before the pandemic, workers in cultural sector were amongst the most exposed to global capitalism. To add insult to injury, some of the strongest sources of income for these people, such as live performances (theatre, music…), exhibitions and showings (visual arts, film), and so on, are heavily place-based. Immediately after lockdown, many of these precarious workers have been left without income. While it is impossible to speak of exact numbers at this stage, global lockdown has put a large percent of the cultural sector on its knees. This can be depicted in a very simple equation:

No music, film, exhibition + no social security = quick bankruptcy   

Ana, and other workers in the cultural sector, are personally interested in their own futures. But for the rest of us working in other fields, it would be foolish to think that we are exempt from their fate – our world is too global, too connected, too intertwined. With their extremely high level of exposure to corona-related disruptions, workers in the cultural sector are not merely an unlucky group to be pitied. More importantly, for all of us, they are canaries in the corona-mines – when the artists stop singing, that means that breathing air for the rest of us is getting thinner and thinner.

Art without a place, labour without an end

All over the Internet, those who are lucky to still have access to paid labour report unimaginable levels of stress, fatigue, and overwork. Artists frantically polish their funding bids; researchers publish more than ever, teachers’ workloads have gone over the roof. While we do all that in our homes, using often inadequate equipment in often inadequate workplaces, employers – who admittedly suffer from significant drops in income – are paying less and less. Only few months into the pandemic, it has become clear that the ‘new normal’ for most of us consists of more work for less pay. For those interested in social justice, the pandemic is an opportunity to rethink our society towards more social solidarity. For those interested in profits, the pandemic is an opportunity to add even more to their already unbelievably large piles of money. Unfortunately, this is not my paranoia but our global reality – as the likes of Amazon now see their profits increase at an incredible speed (Evelyn 2020), billions of people lose their sleep over paying next months’ rent and groceries.

While we try to imagine the new post-corona normal, social sciences should finally expand its scope to take the arts seriously. Our friends and family from cultural industries are more than victims of collateral damage from the coronavirus pandemic – they are also the corona-mine canaries who clearly point towards our global future. There is some truth in these social media memes that we are all in the same social, political, and economic storm of the coronavirus pandemic – and this is where this naïve truism ends. Some of us ride fancy new boats which can sail the current storm smoothly, while others ride old rickety barges suitable for ship scrap-yards. But the sea is always stronger from the strongest boat, and effects of our current crisis are stronger than any protection offered by luckier labour niches (such as tenured positions at state universities). Taking care of cultural industries is taking care of all of us. So let us hear our canary friends’ song, and let us join together in a struggle against those who want to turn word’s increased misery into their profits.

Submissions to Arts Without Place project will be open by the end of May 2020. Please click here to leave your submission: http://artwithoutplace.com/.

References

dВЕРСИЯ (2020). Covid-19: Workers archive. https://dversia.net/5757/covid-19-workers-archive/. Accessed 11 May 2020. 

Evelyn, K. (2020). Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos grows fortune by $24bn amid coronavirus pandemic. The Guardian, 15 April. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/15/amazon-jeff-bezos-gains-24bn-coronavirus-pandemic. Accessed 11 May 2020. 

Jandrić, P. (2020). Postdigital research in the time of Covid-19. Postdigital Science and Education, 2(2), 233–238. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00113-8.

Jandrić, P., & Kuzmanić, A. (2020). Uncanny. Postdigital Science and Education, 2(2), 239-       244. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-020-00108-5.

Kuzmanić, A. (2020). Art Without Place. http://artwithoutplace.com/. Accessed 11 May 2020. 

Sanjai, P.R., & Naqvi, M. (2020). ‘We will starve here’: Why coronavirus has India’s poor fleeing the cities. The Independent, 3 April. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/coronavirus-india-poor-fleeing-cities-starvation-a9438401.html. Accessed 28 April 2020.

Workers Inquiry Network (2020). Struggle in a Pandemic: A Collection of Contributions on the COVID-19 Crisis. Workers Inquiry Network.

Žižek, S. (2020). Pandemic! Covid-19 shakes the world. New York: OR Books.

Join in the Grand Industrial Band: Contextualizing Contemporary IWW Cultural Initiatives

By Jackson Mann

“The laboring of American culture” is how historian Michael Denning described the aesthetic effects that Popular Front cultural organizing had on mainstream U.S. performing, visual, and media arts in his sweeping 1997 history of U.S. left-wing culture in the 1930s and 40s. According to Denning, these were the first decades in which the experience, ideas, and language of the working classes came to be represented in mainstream U.S. culture, which was “labored” as a result. This cultural victory was achieved through a coalition of workers’ arts organizations, associations of socialist and communist émigré artists fleeing Fascism in Europe, and industrial unions of creative laborers in the newly-developing Hollywood film industry, all of which were grouped around the then-ascendent labor movement, specifically the political bloc formed by the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (CIO) association with the American Communist Party. Denning shows that this coalition understood itself as a “cultural front” within the broader Popular Front movement. 

But while “the age of the CIO” may have been the first time the US working class was able to enter mainstream cultural production and discourse, subaltern, working-class culture in the US had been developing for much longer. The organization that contributed the most, perhaps, to the development of pre-CIO, subaltern working-class culture was the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a militant industrial labor union founded in 1905 by a coalition of labor movement leaders that included Lucy Parsons, Eugene Debs, Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, Daniel De Leon, Thomas Hagerty, and William “Big Bill” Haywood, who represented the union’s original institutional backbone, the Western Federation of Miners. Over the next three decades, the IWW became famous for producing an extensive roster of what Daniel Gross calls “worker-scholar-poets,” rank-and-file organizers who doubled as theorists, songwriters, poets, authors, playwrights, and cartoonists. The IWW cultivated this milieu by operating a nationwide cultural-production apparatus that included dozens of newspapers, journals, and the extensive publication and distribution of sheet music and songbooks. Music was the spearhead of the IWW’s own cultural front, and it is through music that the IWW made its most durable impact on Leftist culture in the United States. Songs written by its organizers and members, and produced by the IWW cultural apparatus through its publications, became anthems of the US labor movement, and remain so to this day. Joe Hill, the Swedish-American IWW organizer, songwriter, cartoonist, and theorist, who was executed by the state of Utah under dubious circumstances in 1915, has become a revered icon in even the most conservative circles of US labor. His songs, written or commissioned for specific strikes or actions undertaken by the IWW, continue to resonate with left-wing labor activists today. Without the IWW, what Denning would later call the laboring of US culture in the 1930s and 40s would not have been possible.

In the popular imagination, the IWW has become the stuff of legend. The distance of history has transformed it into mythology, a process which has been exacerbated by the fact that most scholarship on the union has been conducted by folklorists. And indeed, by 1937, a little over 30 years after its founding, the IWW had become “a shell of an organization…” One would not be wrong to assume that soon after this the IWW disintegrated entirely, hastening its entrance into folklore. 

However, like its music, the IWW persisted, albeit mostly in the form of a perpetual rump organization. In 2016, the IWW had a membership of just under 4,000. Given that at its height it could boast a membership of 100,000, this may be seen as representative of the union’s complete marginality. Due to its legacy of cultural organizing, the IWW transformed from a militant industrial labor union into a small, left-wing cultural organization as its ability to organize workers at an industrial scale declined. 

The IWW’s most recent cultural initiative was the Greater Chicago chapter’s curation and release of a punk and hardcore music compilation, titled We Don’t Work May 1st, on May 1st, 2019. Because IWW music is the most enduring aspect of its labor culture, this release is a particularly interesting nodal point for analysis. In fact, this cultural commodity, i.e. this compilation of new original music, represents the possibility of a transformation in the cultural strategy of the contemporary IWW. While the IWW has, for the past several decades, been an organization concerned with re-interpreting and preserving its early-20th-century cultural legacy, the release of We Don’t Work May 1st, an album of contemporary, popular music, might be speculatively connected to the union’s renewed commitment to involvement in long-term labor organizing campaigns, and speak to the resulting changes in the structure, size, and make-up of its membership given the nature of these campaigns, themselves. To show this transformation, however, necessitates a brief overview of IWW cultural history, particularly its music, after the union’s first period.

IWW’s First Period & Second Period Folklorization

In 1948, the CIO had just experienced a disastrous electoral failure in its support for Henry Wallace and the collapse of its organizing initiatives in the South. It was also under increasing pressure due to the “Non-Communist Affidavit Requirement” of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, and the growing right-wing radicalism of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Moderate elements in the CIO leadership responded to this political climate by initiating a massive anti-socialist and anti-communist purge of CIO leadership, staff, and rank-and-file members. Over the next two years, one million members were expelled from the organization.

While the CIO remained a powerful force even after this self-imposed blow, the IWW was almost entirely obliterated by the same events. Beginning in the 1920s, when the union’s first generation of leaders were either exiled, imprisoned, forced underground, or murdered, the IWW gradually lost strength and the organization seemed doomed to obsolescence by the 1930s. In 1946, however, the union still had a membership of over 20,000, most of whom were metalworkers concentrated in Cleveland, Ohio. But, between 1947, when the national leadership refused to sign the Non-Communist Affidavit, and 1950, the IWW’s remaining locals all voted to leave the union, fearing that the national leadership’s refusal to comply with Taft-Hartley would lead to a crackdown on their ability to organize. In 1955, the IWW “celebrated its fiftieth anniversary unable to engage in collective bargaining anywhere.” 

While it is tempting to see the end of the IWW’s first period as occurring  in the 1920s, when its original leadership was destroyed, it is more helpful to see 1947-50 as marking the end of this period. At this time, the IWW was transformed from a militant, industrial labor union with  a mass-membership, into a left-wing cultural organization. Without the institutional backbone of a working class mass-membership, all that remained of the IWW was its cultural apparatus. And without a mass-membership, even this infrastructure had withered to almost nothing. This distinction is important to understanding second period IWW music because without a mass-membership, the IWW represented no-one and, more importantly, produced culture for nobody in particular. This change in the nature of the organization left the cultural legacy of the IWW open to re-interpretation.

According to Franklin Rosemont, it was not until the 1960s that the IWW saw even a minimal resurgence in membership due to the interest it held for a subset of the youth counterculture movements of the era.  Even with this influx it remained a small, cadre organization. At this time, the IWW leadership began to push these newcomers to compose new songs for the Little Red Songbook, which had grown stale with an “overall lack of contemporary relevance.” Following precedent, attempts were made to write new lyrics to the melodies of contemporary popular songs, though these failed to achieve the mass appeal of the songs produced by previous generations of songwriters.

It was also during this period that the ‘folklorization’ of IWW culture began in both the academic and popular spheres. As a result of the work of prominent re-interpreters of IWW history, particularly folklorist Archie Green and singer-songwriter-activist Utah Phillips,IWW culture became associated with an academic definition of folklore that emphasized pre-industrial, non-economic musical production and oral transmission across generations.

The leaders and members of the IWW’s first period, according to Green, “paid little attention to academic issues in defining their music” which signaled its proximity to a form of extra-institutional cultural production that he would term “laborlore.” Though he never defines the meaning and scope of this designation, Green's insistence on the status of IWW musical production, and its cultural production more generally, as 'lore' paradoxically aligns it with the pre-industrial past.

This project was simultaneously carried out in the popular sphere by Phillips, who recorded or was featured on IWW repertoire records and wrote original songs in the stripped-down style of Woody Guthrie, the Popular Front songwriter-turned-folk-hero whose image would be iconic for the 1960s folk-revival movement from which Phillips emerged. Over the course of his life, Phillips became the most popular outwardly-facing representative of the IWW and its cultural legacy. His emphasis on working within the semblance of an oral folk tradition where he and his collaborators “can’t or won’t read music” had the effect of aesthetically-framing first period IWW music, itself, as folklore. In his reinterpretation of early IWW songs, Phillips also cast the strategy of contrafactum in IWW songs as universal, ignoring numerous songs that had both original lyrics and music. In doing so, Phillips misinterpreted the function that contrafactum originally performed. In his afterword to The Big Red Songbook, Phillips quotes a rank-and-file member who states that first period IWW songwriters “used common tunes that you might have heard in a church or in a bar.” From this quote it might seem obvious that IWW contrafactum should be understood as a use of then-contemporary popular standards as a building block in forging a militant left-wing subculture. However, by interpreting contrafactum as naive, unschooled creativity, Phillips comes to an entirely different conclusion. IWW songwriters were not engaging with the popular culture of the time, but were instead tapping into a pre-existing oral tradition. Therefore, according to Phillips, today’s activist-songwriters and activist-musicians should “learn these songs. Use them. Change them. Put them to work,” referring to a mostly-static repertoire of first period IWW music, itself conceived of as oral tradition.

One particular strategy that both Green and Phillips utilize to bolster this way of framing IWW music is to universalize the experience of one particular subset of the IWW’s mass membership during the height of the first period: the American “hobo.” Hoboes, migrant laborers that were common in the 1910s, were one of the “unorganizable” groups that the IWW worked with and they made up a large chunk of the IWW membership during the union’s most successful period (1910-1920). Much of Hobo culture, which should not be conflated with IWW labor culture, could indeed be described as folkloric owing to the oral nature of its transmission.

While labor leader and early member of the IWW Elizabeth Gurley-Flynn did once refer to Joe Hill’s music as “folk songs,” this was probably in reference to its mass-appeal among working-class audiences rather than the nature of its production, distribution, and transmission. Both Green and Phillips obscure the IWW’s modernist, world-building project by mapping folkloric notions, such as oral transmission, onto music that was semi-professionally composed and professionally published and distributed with the intention of creating a cohesive militant working-class subculture that could contest for subaltern economic power. The IWW music of the second period, then, is marked by the absence of this large-scale production and distribution of new music. Rather, the figures of the second period were engaged in an anti-materialist project of folklorization, which sought to transform the modernist, subaltern culture of the IWW into an oral tradition of folklore. With this historical context regarding the history of IWW music, how it has been framed, and how it has functioned in the popular imagination, in mind, it is possible to see the Greater Chicago IWW chapter’s release of We Don’t Work May 1st as a pivot away from the folkloric project of the past 60 years.

Contextualizing We Don’t Work May 1st

On May 1st, 2019, the Greater Chicago IWW released a 25-song compilation of local Chicago punk and hardcore bands titled We Don’t Work May 1st. The project was spearheaded by Paul Scanty, the Greater Chicago IWW’s Director of Education and Outreach, and Danny “Cheap Date,” the founder of Don’t Panic Records & Distro and a rank-and-file member of the IWW. The compilation was sold through the music distribution website Bandcamp.com and profits from the sales went directly towards a strike fund on reserve for future industrial actions by the Greater Chicago IWW. During an interview with Scanty and Cheap Date conducted by the author of this article, however, Scanty traced the genesis of the project to a period before either he or Cheap Date were IWW members. In fact, Cheap Date had been developing the idea of a Chicago punk and hardcore compilation, to be released by his record label, for several years prior to his joining the union and had mentioned the idea to Scanty at the time. In February 2019, Scanty, who by that point had joined the union, “approached [Cheap Date] about doing the comp [sic] for the IWW.” 

Cheap Date had already designated a number of bands for the compilation before it had transformed into an IWW-affiliated project. After deciding to make it an IWW initiative, however, Scanty and Cheap Date focused on contacting groups whose music was politically-aligned with the IWW’s beliefs. According to Cheap Date: 

“when we [Scanty and Cheap Date] first discussed this it was definitely… well, we want all these songs to be labor songs or, like, political songs or something that’s going to be left-leaning but… we really didn’t have time to ask bands to record songs specifically for this so the guidelines were… we want this to be new music and… we were reaching out to bands that had political songs.”

The majority of the songs do contain explicitly-political themes. These range from topics such as feminist empowerment (Underwire’s ‘Not Dating’ and Payasa’s ‘Muñeca’), anti-fascism (La Armada’s ‘Fire’), anti-racism, and LGBTQ+ inclusion (2Minute Minor’s ‘Unite the Crew’). There is even a song, ‘Written in Red’ by The Ableist, a band in which Scanty sings, written as a tribute to anarchist activist Voltairine de Cleyre, whose writings and oratory were in dialogue with the ideas of other turn-of-the-20th-century leftists, including the first period IWW.

Many of the songs also contain themes specific to labor. For example, pop-punk singer-songwriter Davey Dynamite’s ‘380 Times’ deals with the disparity between the wages of average employees and the giant sums given to corporate CEOs and shareholders:

Well I think this is going too far, I think they are getting away

with our future, our past, everything that we once had

And I work, and I like it, I haven’t had it bad so far

but my degree seems to be worth less than the paper it was printed on

And my friends, and my family, stuck working dead end jobs

what did they do to deserve it, a minimum wage barely helping at all?

Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps, is what they always say

they always forget to tell you, just how the boots get made

They are products of thievery, of telling the poor to be grateful

they are fine with you starving, as long as you’re willing and able

to work, three hundred and eighty times more than they do

to know, three hundred and eighty times more than they do

to starve, three hundred and eighty times more than they do

to make, three hundred and eighty times less than they do

Other songs deal with specific labor rights violations endured on contemporary job sites. For instance, The Just Luckies ‘Bossman’ deals with sexual harassment of workers by management:

Why do you think that you own me

and know me enough to touch my hair?

Creepy bossman with your ancient, ancient hands

creepy bossman with your ancient, ancient hands, oh

Don’t fucking touch me

don’t fucking touch me

keep your hands off my body

don’t fucking touch me

Cheap Date’s own group, The Cheap Dates, are also featured on the compilation. Their contribution, like Dynamite’s song, deals with the poverty wages earned by today’s working class, focusing specifically on the health issues that result.

Aspects of this initiative reveal a break from the folkloric framework that has dominated conversations about IWW music, and its culture generally, since the 1960s. Certain elements of this break represent a return to the modernist project of the first period, which sought to appropriate contemporaneous popular culture for political ends, while others break from it entirely. This is most obviously shown in the formal aesthetic qualities of the music itself. In his press release in the newly-reconstituted version of the IWW’s flagship publication, the Industrial Worker, Cheap Date claims that there “are bands of nearly every style of punk on here. Ska bands, hardcore bands, pop bands, folk bands, and crust bands.” In fact, Cheap Date understates the stylistic diversity of the compilation, which spans the numerous post-punk and -hardcore styles that have proliferated since the early 1980s, most of which remain culturally relevant today. The project’s engagement with culturally relevant musical styles signals a return to the goals of the first period. While we cannot be sure how, exactly, first period songs were performed in terms of instrumentation and performance arrangements, we can be sure that IWW songwriters of this era were attempting to work in contemporary and culturally-relevant styles since IWW contrafactum was “almost all… set to popular song hits of the 1900-1915 period, or to familiar gospel and revival hymns…”

The cultural relevance of the styles represented on We Don’t Work May 1st is the project’s most obvious break with the second period’s folkloric notions of repertoire and the resulting predilection for a historical performance practice that maintained anachronistic stylistic elements. However, while this focus on contemporaneity creates a bridge between We Don’t Work May 1st and first period IWW songwriters and composers, it also produces an element that is entirely novel. While contrafactum was an enormously popular trend in the first period, all of the songs on We Don’t Work May 1st (except for Shots Fired Shots Fired’s cover of Life Sentence’s ‘Problem’) are entirely original. This break in IWW tradition (though it must be stated that this tradition was never an institutionalized facet of the IWW cultural apparatus and was only articulated as such during the second period) can be attributed to the nature of post-World War II musical culture up until the present day, in which the popularity of original musical compositions over “standard” songs has increased.

These breaks were not conscious decisions made by Scanty and Cheap Date. When asked about how the IWW tradition of songwriting and musical composition, with all of its folkloric baggage, had influenced this initiative, Scanty stated that neither he nor Cheap Date had thought about this at all: 

“Did we see it in the context of, like, you know, new songs, or, a future generation of songs for the Little Red Songbook? No… Did our heads even go to a place of, like, ‘Oh, hey, this is a part of the history of making music that’s such a big part of the IWW…’ continuing that tradition? No.”

For Scanty and Cheap Date, it was not loyalty to continuing an organizational tradition, but their general knowledge of the IWW’s history of cultural production that led to their decision to transform what began as a general punk and hardcore compilation CD into an IWW initiative. In fact, the only other function of the compilation that was explicitly mentioned by Scanty and Cheap Date, besides raising money for the IWW’s strike fund, was to grow the Greater Chicago IWW’s roster of musically- and artistically-inclined members and organizers. 

Scanty and Cheap Date were not consciously deciding to break with precedent, but the idea that these changes in the cultural framing of IWW musical production were mere chance is unconvincing. A stronger theory pivots back to the earlier argument for placing the transition from the first- to the second-period IWW at the 1947-50 mark: it is changes in organizational activity and membership size and demographics that might be seen as initiating the re-evaluation of the function of cultural production in labor organizing by the IWW. 

Indeed, the past 5 years have seen the IWW actively organize workers for the first time in decades. As recently as October 2019, the IWW-affiliated Burgerville Workers Union, made up of employees of a large Pacific Northwest fast food chain, went on a four-day strike over failed wage negotiations. In addition to organizing workers in the fast-food industry, the IWW, through its Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee (IWOC), was instrumental in supporting and publicizing attempts by incarcerated workers within the United States’ gargantuan (and now significantly privatized) prison system to go on strike in 2018.

It remains speculative to connect the IWW’s current, renewed commitment to industrial labor organizing campaigns with the reframing of its musical tradition evidenced by the We Don’t Work May 1st project. However, if the IWW begins to transform, through its organizing, from the cadre organization it has been for almost 60 years to a mass-membership, working class organization, it seems logical to assume that new attempts to reframe the IWW's cultural legacy in light of both contemporary political projects and the specificity of contemporary cultural production, consumption, and distribution will arise from within the ranks of the IWW's membership.

Conclusion

IWW culture, its framing, production, and the way it has functioned strategically in the union’s activities has changed immensely over time. This was due to changes in both the size and demographic composition of its membership, going from a 100,000 strong mass-membership working class institution at its height in the 1910s, to a regionally-bound but still robust labor union in the 1940s, to an isolated cadre organization which for decades had, at most, a few thousand members. 

As we have seen, two major cultural frameworks resulted from these periods. From the mass-membership industrial labor union there emerged a modernist project of culture-building which resulted in an enormous alternative cultural apparatus that produced newspapers, journals, and songbooks to disseminate a wealth of literature, visual art, and music produced by rank-and-file members, organizers, and union leaders across the country. From the cadre organization emerged a project of folklorization and invented tradition, where the artifacts of IWW culture were collected and transformed into static repertoires.

What makes We Don’t Work May 1st such an exciting release is that it represents the possibility of a third period of the IWW. The possibility of the IWW’s re-building itself as a mass-membership, working class organization committed to the labor struggle in the long term contains the further possibility for a reframing of its cultural tradition and a change in its contemporary cultural production strategy. Within these changes exists the potential for an entirely new type of militant, working class culture. The particular musical style, content, and formal qualities of first period IWW music were the result of IWW songwriters’ engagement in contemporaneous popular culture. Subaltern intervention into mainstream US culture today, which has changed considerably since the IWW’s heyday, may produce entirely novel results. If the We Don’t Work May 1st project is any indication, this culture has already begun to emerge. 

Bibliography

Blush, Steven. American Hardcore: A Tribal History. (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2001).

Briggs, Shea, Diavolo, Lucy, Greene, Noam, & Weldon, KC. “Bossman.” Track 25 on We Don’t Work May 1st. Don’t Panic Record & Distro/Greater Chicago IWW, 2019, streaming audio, Bandcamp. https://dontpanicitsadistro.bandcamp.com/album/we-dont-work-may-1st.

Brown, Dalvin. “Prisoners strike: Protest, hunger strike against modern slavery.” USA Today. August 21st, 2018. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/08/21/prisoners-strike-protest-attica-lee-correctional/1045008002/. (Accessed October 27th, 2019).

Cheap Date, Danny. “We Don’t Work May 1st: A Compilation to Benefit the Greater Chicago IWW.” Industrial Worker. August 9th, 2019. https://industrialworker.iww.org/?p=566 (Accessed October 23rd, 2019). 

Cheap Date, Danny & Scanty, Paul. Interview by Jackson Albert Mann. Phone Interview. Boston, MA/Chicago, IL. August 6th, 2019.

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front. (London, UK: Verso, 1997).

Dynamite, Davey. “380 Times.” Track 5 on We Don’t Work May 1st. Don’t Panic Record & Distro/Greater Chicago IWW, 2019, streaming audio, Bandcamp. https://dontpanicitsadistro.bandcamp.com/album/we-dont-work-may-1st.

Foner, Philip S. The Letters of Joe Hill. (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2015)

— — — . The Case of Joe Hill. (New York City, NY: International Publishers, 1965).

Garon, Paul, Khatib, Kate, & Roediger, David. “The Surreal Life of Franklin Rosemont”. Counterpunch. April 16th, 2009. https://www.counterpunch.org/2009/04/16/the-surreal-life-of-franklin-rosemont/. (Accessed October 24th, 2019).

Green, Archie, Roediger, David, Rosemont, Franklin & Salerno, Salvatore. The Big Red Songbook. (Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 2007)

Kilgore, James. “The Myth of Prison Slave Labor Camps in the U.S.” Counterpunch. August 9th, 2013. https://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/09/the-myth-of-prison-slave-labor-camps-in-the-u-s/. (Accessed November 7th, 2019).

Kornbluh, Joyce. Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology. (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011).

Lissaman, Doris. “The Taft-Hartley Non-Communist Affidavit Provision.” Labor Law Journal, 5 no. 10 (1954): 697-707.

Milburn, George. The Hobo’s Hornbook. (New York City, NY: Washburn, 1930)

Phillips, Utah. “Songbook Introduction.” Track 1 on Starlight on the Rails: A Songbook. PM Press/Free Dirt Records, 2014, streaming audio, Spotify, https://open.spotify.com/track/0beaaNe3vQIuNvSySwoWQn.

Solomon, Molly. “In Historic Election, Portland Burgerville Workers Vote to Unionize.” Oregon Public Broadcasting News. April 24th, 2018. https://www.opb.org/news/article/fast-food-burgerville-portland-oregon-union/ (Accessed October 23rd, 2019).

“Burgerville workers end strike, more negotiations to come.” KOIN 6 News. October 27th, 2019. https://www.koin.com/local/burgerville-workers-end-strike-more-negotiations-to-come/. (Accessed October 27th, 2019). Editorial.

U.S. Department of Labor, Labor Organization Annual Report. Report # 070-232. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Labor, 2016.  https://olms.dol-esa.gov/query/orgReport.do?rptId=627901&rptForm=LM2Form (Accessed October 17th, 2019). 

Sorry to Bother You with Twelve Theses on Boots Riley's "Sorry to Bother You": Lessons for the Left

By Bryant William Sculos

Originally published in 2019 in Class, Race and Corporate Power.

1.   Films thus far have merely interpreted the world; the point however is to change it….

This would be more appropriate as thesis eleven, but it is a crucial starting point for what follows. No matter how radical, no matter how popular, a critical film is, a film by itself, not even one as prescient and valuable as Sorry to Bother You is, is enough to change the world. Not that anyone would suggest that it could be, but radical films can serve important purposes in the struggle against capitalism and various forms of oppression. A good radical film can inspire and even simply entertain those engaged in struggle—or those thinking about becoming more active. Sorry to Bother You will not change the world, but it can be an important basis for motivation, critical conversation, and necessary enjoyment for those in struggling to do just that.

2.   Tactics should always be informed by an organized strategy.

Sorry to Bother You highlights the difference between pure subversive tactics and an organized strategy for resistance. In the film there is a group of anarchist-types, of what size or of what degree of organization the audience never sees, whose primary role in the film is to highlight the impotence of pure tactics (in this film, this amounts to clever vandalism) disconnected from a coherent strategy for organized opposition. Juxtaposed to these tactics we see the hard work of organizing a workplace and an eventual strike. While the strike may not have heralded the end of capitalism, the audience bears witness to the clear difference in results (including both the response of the capitalist class and their police force as well as the ability of the strike to bring new layers of people into struggle).

3.   As important as the superiority of tactics informed by an organized strategy is, it is perhaps as important how those on the left address their internal disagreements about strategies and tactics.

There is a subtle scene between Squeeze (the labor activist attempting to organize the workers at the telemarketing firm, played by Steven Yeun) and Detroit (perhaps the best radical feminist of color ever seen in a popular US film, played superbly by Tessa Thompson). Squeeze becomes aware that Detroit is part of the anarchist group doing the anticapitalist vandalism and instead of criticizing Detroit’s tactics, Squeeze takes the opportunity to appreciate that they are both on the same side of the struggle. This solidaristic interaction serves as the basis to build deeper, more active solidarity in the future (some of which we see later in the film). It is often difficult for those on the left to ignore or at least put aside disagreements over tactics and strategy, and sometimes it is important that the Left not leave disagreements unaddressed, but Sorry to Bother You provides some insight into how the Left can deal with internal, and interpersonal, disagreements in ways that do not further alienate us from one another. After all, the Left needs all the comrades it can get. What makes someone a comrade is a contentious issue to be sure, but it is an important one that the Left should continue to reflect on.

4.   Solidarity across identities is crucial.

Perhaps one of the most obvious—though no less important—lessons from Sorry to Bother You, with its awesome diverse cast and characters, is that class has colors and genders and a variety of other identities that come with their own unique oppressions that condition the experience of class in diverse ways. Not only does the film illuminate the intersections of racism and capitalism (the “white voices” are the stuff of film legend here), but we also see cross-racial, cross-gender, and even cross- (fictional) species solidarity. If Sorry to Bother You does one thing well (and it does way more than just one thing well), it is expressing the importance of building this kind of intersectional solidarity, as well as how the variable experiences of class can be navigated without chauvinism or exclusion. While the treatment of non-fictional racial and gender solidarity is powerful in its own right, Boots Riley’s use of the (for now…) fictional equisapiens drives the point home. Ending the exploitation of some group at the expense of others can never be an acceptable Left position.

5.   Art can be radical, but not all subversive art is radical, at least not on its own.

Detroit, in addition to her day job as a sign twirler and then as a telemarketer, is an artist. Beyond the politics of Sorry to Bother You, the film also delves into the difficulty of being a subversive artist within the confines of capitalism, which demands that all art be commodifiable in order to be of any value. Despite Detroit’s best efforts to resist this pressure, we see her engage in a powerful and uncomfortable piece of performance art where her audience is asked to throw things at her, including broken electronics and blood-filled balloons. The scene is a bit of a parody of ostensibly “radical” art that is consumed by a primarily bourgeois audience. Subversive art that challenges the commodity-form can itself become commodified, but it can still be useful as a foundation to challenge artistic norms and social conventions, break down the barrier between performer and audience. However, even at its best there is no guarantee that anything will fundamentally change because of these dissensual elements. Sorry to Bother You is a better example of what radical, subversive art can be than the artistic performances it portrays—though neither one is the basis for revolutionary activity. While the critical theorists and postmodernists of the late twentieth century are right to emphasize the importance of aesthetics in radical politics and resist the temptation, embodied most noticeably in socialist realism, to use art strictly instrumentally, art disconnected from organized struggle is bound to be as ineffective as any tactic disconnected from organized struggle. Sorry to Bother You does not provide a clear alternative, but it does provide a powerful basis to think through the question of how art can relate to radical politics, and radical politics to art, effectively.

6.   Material conditions are shaped by ideological conditions, which in turn affect our psychologies.

As the protagonist Cassius “Cash” Green (portrayed by Lakeith Stanfield with incredible complexity and skill to make the audience cringe in every instance they are supposed to) moves up the ladder at the telemarketing company, after living in poverty for years, his perspective on poverty and the plight of workers shifts in perverse but predictable directions. Consciousness is never one-to-one with class position, something that is perhaps still too obvious for the Left to effectively grapple with, but the radical beauty of Sorry to Bother You is how well Boots Riley is able to show how consciousness changes as wealth (though not always identical to class position) increases. Capitalism as a whole dehumanizes even those who benefit from it, though workers and the poor and oppressed should have little patience or sympathy for those who benefit unequally from the exploitation they reproduce. As difficult as it is, it is important to remember this, that even as capitalists and the defenders of capitalism come to personify the evils of capitalism, they too are driven by the heinous psycho-social incentives of the system. While this is, in itself, important to be cognizant of, it is more important to be aware of the process through which this happens to middle class people, and even workers fortunate enough to escape the dregs of poverty wages.

7.   Contacting your elected officials is not nearly enough and can actually be demoralizing and demobilizing.

One of the best scenes in the film, enhanced by the speed with which is begins and ends, is when Cash decides to make public the genetic alteration plans of Steve Lift (CEO of the Amazon-like WorryFree, played by Armie Hammer). Cash goes on an absurd reality TV show and various news programs to tell the world about the equisapien experiments and implores people to contact their elected officials. The montage ends with WorryFree’s stock rising and the general public excited about the new technological developments. Nothing changes. The lesson here is that Cash was relying on the representatives of the system that encourages the kinds of perversity that Steve Lift represents to solve the problem. Cash encouraged people to place their hope in decrepit politicians. The audience experiences the results too quickly. The montage is powerful as it stands, but it is worth questioning whether the full range of critical points here might be lost on even a well-focused self-reflective audience (though I noticed so perhaps I’m the one being too cynical). Cash placed his hope in the automatic negative reactions of people—people who have been conditioned by capitalism to view all technological developments as progressive and liberating—to resist those changes. Back in the real world, while there are some instances where outrage may seem (or even actually be) more or less automatic, there is often unseen or unacknowledged organizing and propagandistic work being done to produce an effective public reaction. The best recent example of this is from the 2017 airport protests/occupations in reaction to President Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. While some of the people showed up at the airports spontaneously, there were also a number of left-wing groups, of diverse politics, working to make these actions effective. It is likely we would not have witnessed the positive results we saw from these actions had it not been for the quick, organized work of activists on the ground. And yet, it all appeared rather spontaneous.

8.  The truth is not enough, and it will not set us free. Truth is not irrelevant, but it is not enough for the Left simply to be “right.”

Related to thesis 7, Cash relies on his exposing the truth to the world to be the catalyst for widespread resistance to the practices of WorryFree. Mind you, this is all taking place in a world where all of the other dehumanizing practices of WorryFree, such as: lifetime contracts for workers, with all room and board provided but without pay, are deemed acceptable. Why would artificially producing human-horse hybrid workers be any different? While there is a vital educational role for the Left to play in providing the factual basis for the need for organized resistance and building an alternative to racist, patriarchal, imperialist capitalism, these facts are not enough. Facts can be interpreted in various ways and perverted by the mouthpieces of capitalism, often most egregiously by the ostensibly liberal vanguard of “progressive” capitalism. The Left needs to not only be “right” but it also needs to provide deeper context and present viable options to pursue. Put differently, in addition to having the truth on its side, the Left needs to be persuasive.

9.   Automation is complicated and likely will not take the forms or have the effects the public are often led to believe it will have.

The world has been browbeaten into thinking that the worst consequences of increased automation in the twenty-first century will be mass unemployment. Sorry to Bother You, believe it or not, provides a glimpse at one more realistic alternative—as well as a basis for a more honest look at the effects of automation. First, as we have seen throughout the history of capitalism, workers themselves, both physically and psychologically, are made into automatons. Second, the worst consequences of automation is not joblessness but deskilling. Part of the automation of human beings is the decreased cognitive and creative labor that more and more jobs will require or allow. Companies, whether it is WorryFree or Amazon, would much prefer the less expensive route of encouraging society, primarily through culture and schooling, to produce less thoughtful, more compliant workers, rather than spend huge sums of money on automation technologies that could become obsolete within a few years. Automation technology under capitalism is expensive. On the flipside, people under capitalism have been made to be quite inexpensive. Maybe we all will not be turned into human-horse hybrids, but given the trajectory of undemocratic automatic in the early years of the twenty-first century, we will not likely be looking at a Jetsons-esque lifestyle for everyone. People will likely continue to be subjected to intense pressures to physically, psychologically, and chemically alter themselves in order to acquire even slightly higher wages.

10.  People, especially workers within capitalism, are willing to accept very little money or benefits in exchange for their labor and even their lives.

Capitalist exploitation and oppressions degrade people. Capitalist ideology convinces people that they are merely worth whatever some boss is willing to pay them—and they are fortunate to have what little they have. After all, there are plenty of people with less. This reality puts impoverished workers in a terrible situation when bosses try to buy them off to undermine labor organizing or threaten a worker with firing for talking about politics at work. This reality is also part of the root cause of conservative labor union practices, which often sacrifice anything beyond moderate gains in wages and benefits for worker compliance. The promise of a more lavish lifestyle, new clothes and a new car (or really just a car that is reliable) is what motivates Cash to sell-out. Scabs may indeed be the scum of the Earth from a labor organizing perspective (and there’s no reason to think otherwise), but they are motivated by the very same things that motivate workers to sell their labor for a wage in the first place. So really, besides the immediacy of the betrayal, what is the difference between a scab and worker who refuses to join their union or a worker who does not vote to support a strike? The results and the motivations are fundamentally identical. This is not a defense of scabbing (as if such a defense were actually possible), but it is a lesson that needs to be learned. Capitalist ideology is extremely powerful, and it compels us all in various ways to become subjects of our exploitation and the exploitation of others. Scabs and other types of non-class-conscious workers are as much a product of capitalism as the credit card is.

11.  Sorry to bother—and even betray—you, but apologies and forgiveness matter.

Even after Cash betrays his fellow-workers and friends by crossing their picket lines multiple times, once he realizes his grave error and is determined to join them in struggle, his friends forgive him. They accept his apology. The apology does not change what Cash did, but it reflects his commitment to doing the right things moving forward. This might be one of the hardest lessons for the Left to learn from this movie. How does one forgive someone who has betrayed them, especially when it was not just a friendship that was betrayed but an entire movement? However, put differently, how can the Left ever be successful moving forward without the capacity to forgive and work alongside those who have actively worked against the Left in their past? Where is the place for former liberals (or even former conservatives or reactionaries)? Where is the place for former scabs? Sorry to Bother You argues that despite the awfulness of one’s past positions and actions, the answer to these two preceding questions is: among the Left. Very few people are born into radical politics, and almost no one holds the right views from the start, and so people need time to learn and grow. Sometimes it is a very longtime filled with egregious beliefs and behaviors—but if the Left is to ever be effective, it will be populated mainly by these kinds of people.[1]

12.  The first win (or loss) is only a beginning…

Sorry to Bother You ends with a victory of sorts. A small one. Without spoiling too much, the lesson here is that strikes, whether successful or not, can only ever be the start of a revolutionary movement. Same for protests. Protests in and of themselves are not going to bring down a government or a political-economic system. Strikes will not either. There is plenty of debate on the Left about whether a mass general strike could do that, but even with something as powerful as a general strike (which is really only practically imaginable with preliminary strikes and protests preceding it) it would be unlikely on its own to replace capitalism with socialism (or whatever your preferred label for a democratic, egalitarian form of postcapitalism is). Revolutionary transformation is not something that can be won or lost overnight, with one victory—nor can it be lost with one loss, by one strike that fails or never happens, by one protest that has low turnout or fails to motivate further actions. Hope is crucial, but it must be tempered by a realistic pessimism regarding the struggle ahead. There will be many loses and hopefully many more wins—but the struggle continues. Even if capitalism were successfully dismantled, what replaces it will also be an object of struggle, one that will require that we learn as much as we can from all the struggles that precedes it.

Bryant William Sculos, Ph.D. is Visiting Assistant Professor of global politics and theory at Worcester State University. He was formerly a Mellon-Sawyer postdoctoral fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and 2019 Summer Fellow at the Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at the New School for Social Research. Bryant is the Politics of Culture section editor for the open-access journal Class, Race and Corporate Power and contributing editor for the Hampton Institute. Beyond his work for the aforementioned outlets, his work has also appeared in New Politics, Dissident Voice, Truthout, Constellations, Capitalism, Communication, & Critique (tripleC), New Political Science, and Public Seminar. He is also the co-editor (with Prof. Mary Caputi) of Teaching Marx & Critical Theory in the 21st Century (Brill, 2019; paperback forthcoming July 2020 with Haymarket Books).

Notes

[1] Although she was writing about how socialists should deal with liberals at Women’s Marches, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s writings served as crucial inspiration for this point. See: “Don’t Shame the First Steps of a Resistance” in Socialist Worker, Jan. 24, 2017. Available online at: https://socialistworker.org/2017/01/24/dont-shame-the-first-steps-of-a-resistance.

Decolonial Resistance in Hip Hop: Re-Colonial Resistances, Love, and Wayward Self-Determination

By Joe Hinton

Although many forms of black expressive culture contain elements of political resistance, hip hop is a form that has been recognized by numerous scholars for its unique, complex, and nuanced forms of offering political discourse. As Damon Sajnani notes, the origins of hip hop are inherently political, specifically rooted in the politics of the "decolonization of local urban space". Hip Hop today, the most popular genre in the United States (if not the world), is quite disconnected from these political roots in a radical anti-colonial politic built through creating livelihood out of structure-based psychological pain.

What is the nature of resistance in hip hop, and what do scholars have to say about its current status? Many note that hip hop has been co-opted by a white-controlled market and has been manipulated so as to promote limited narratives of Blackness, many of which are derived from minstrel tropes. Sometimes, these tropes can be manifested as partial resistances to white-supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal settler-colonialism. Sometimes, when they rely on European notions of political resistance that are either inherently capitalistic or statist/nationalist, they reify colonial structures and are thus re-colonial. Sometimes they flip the narrative of oppression or expose it for what it is, as Tricia Rose notes, but do so in a way that constitutes a solid first step to resistance but does not completely answer the question of how one wants to exist and live in a world beyond the reality of this oppression.

In my eyes, the only types of resistant expressive culture that can actually spur Black liberation must create alternative visions that denounce resistances that rely on other closely related forms of oppression and toxic psychologies. Building off the ideas of Cornel West, Zoe Samudzi, and William C. Anderson, these visions must be centered in both collective love and individualist, wayward, and deviant lifestyle choices. By wayward and deviant, I mean prone to reject the boxes imposed by American culture and its depictions of Blackness. I draw on the idea that Black and indigenous people in the United States exist liminally, not as citizens. This means that as the state is functioned to precipitate our extinction and/or suffering and to prevent our full integration into the benefits of society, and that our existence as colonial subjects, regardless of socioeconomic advancement, renders our status perpetually ambiguous and subject to a constantly uncertain chaos and threat of violence that reinforces a spiritual feeling of collective subordination. This chaos can be overcome by a moment of creation and establishment of what the state deprives us of and excludes us from: self-love. Hip Hop originally sought to achieve this, but it has been co-opted by the market and the limited narratives it promotes, with some notable exceptions. Once based in love, and dedicated to the creation of love-based communities, these forms of culture can help spur mobilization against white-supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal settler-colonialism (WSCPSC) to defend ourselves against it and eventually overthrow it; or, more immediately, find a way to create communities that employ social rules and customs that promote Black and indigenous love, rather than relying on the false promises of liberal reformism and partial resistances.

Although it remains true that hip hop has been co-opted by a powerful white media establishment, it also remains true that hip hop is an inherently resistant genre in that it constantly engages with the "politics of having fun," a framework that can be perceived as seemingly apolitical, but is actually quite focused on the psychological effects of socio-political hierarchies. Where songs can be differentiated in their political efficacy is the degree to which they promote a liberational Black politic. As Cornel West notes, a truly liberational Black politic is committed to fighting racism at its root: capitalism. And is also determined to end all associated forms of oppression that result from capitalism and colonialism: homophobia, sexism, ableism, and transphobia. Within hip hop, although the 80s and 90s featured a number of artists for whom the legacy of Black Power reigned eminent, the modern mainstream genre is primarily full of either market-driven resistances, partial resistances, or their associated re-colonial resistances.

Partial resistances vary as to the terms to which they reify colonial resistances, but most do to one extent or another. N.W.A's "Fuck tha Police" emphatically decries the historically biased and anti-Black prosecuting tendencies of the City of Los Angeles quite creatively while also reifying the colonial oppression of gay people by using homophobic slurs. The sexual domination narratives promoted by Cardi B and Nicki Minaj take a step towards a less subordinate position for Black women and do promote positive narratives that Black women can be proud of their sexuality, but also reify the objectification and exploitation of the Black female body by offering limited options for how a famous Black women is to present herself and her body. This is not to say that other options are not presented by other Black females; to do so would be myopic. I am rather emphasizing that the female rappers with the most prominence do not fit these narrow images, coincidentally; they are approved by a white-controlled media elite that has never shied away from aligning Black female exploitation and lucrative profits. In the wake of the death of Nipsey Hussle, an LA rapper known for his generosity and devotion to community uplift, Jay Z exclaimed that Black people should look to gentrify their own neighborhoods before white people can. Given that gentrification is fundamentally aligned with the same ideologies of settler-colonialism and economic exploitation that hip hop was founded on alleviating and eliminating, suggesting such a notion is especially re-colonial. All of these are examples of when artists in hip hop use their platforms to promote the advancement of an oppressed group, but somehow reify a hierarchy that exists to make Black people and Black women suffer.

Then how can hip hop be completely resistant and neither partial nor re-colonial? As Sajnani notes, the diasporic nature of Black nationalism is an effective liberational alternative to the pain of WSPCSC, a nationalism distinct from its European analog. This nationalism has been referred to vaguely by scholars such as Bakari Kitwana, specifically to his conception of a Hip-Hop Generation, and was cited positively by West in his analysis of Morrison's Beloved. Many arguments regarding Black self-determination usually rely on this statist conception. Sajnani's analysis of the Black national bourgeoisie, of which Jay Z is a prominent member, is particularly revealing. He claims that partial resistances are often performed by prominent Blacks as a means to receive compensation from the white cultural gatekeepers while Black exploitation is upheld by the national order. To Sajnani, to support the American Dream is to ignore economic stratification, which in the US is always a racial topic. Black capitalists, especially in hip hop, engage in the rhetoric of the American Dream quite regularly, relying on a misguided bootstraps ideology. But even if Black capitalism can't be a true form of resistance to WSPCSC, can diasporic nationalism constitute a more complete resistance? As Zoé Samudzi and William C. Anderson propose in their powerful novel on the anarchism of Blackness as Black as Resistance,

"attempting to reclaim and repurpose the settler state will not lead to liberation, and it will not provide the kind of urgent material relief so many people desperately need, though electing empathetic officials sometimes can arguably mitigate against harm. Only through a material disruption of these geographies, through the cultivation of Black autonomy, can Black liberation begin to be actualized."

As such, a legitimate response to WSPCSC must not consider the future of Blackness as reliant on a statist solution. Although Sajnani's support of a somewhat re-colonial nationalism, no matter if distinct from European nationalism, is misguided, his emphasis on "resisting the appropriation of Hip Hop and elaborating its original mission" (I would replace appropriation with misappropriation) is quite relevant to establishing a liberatory Black politic through hip hop. What is the next step?

While resistance in Black politics today often calls for criminal justice reform instead of radical restructuring of the industrial-prison complex, 2018 saw some powerful forms of resistance enter the mainstream, most notably Childish Gambino's "This is America." Gambino's Grammy-award-winning song and video effectively criticizes the current state of hip hop and minstrel tropes. As Frank Guan notes, "It's a tribute to the cultural dominance of trap music and a reflection on the ludicrous social logic that made the environment from which trap emerges, the logic where money makes the man, and every black man is a criminal." Gambino's work helped bring a critical element of reflection into the mainstream of pop and hip hop: that the limited, minstrel-reproducing narratives of Blackness in popular culture contribute to past and present forms of social subordination. It is a crucial step towards finding a liberatory politic and is quite close to a complete form of resistance. Where it falls short however is along two fronts: an explicit embrace of a collective love ethic, and a moment of creation that accepts the reality of Black liminality and becomes devoted to a deviant determination of one's self that allows for the complexity of Blackness to live freely and waywardly, away from the psychological boxes imposed on us by WSCPSC.

I have come to learn that hip hop has an extremely high potential for being politically resistant to WSCPSC, but it is going to take a lot of work to return it to what it once accomplished. Very few forms of hip hop are directly engaged with a love ethic nor with an explicitly deviant rejection of WSCPSC based in self-determination. Two legacies of Black expressive culture will serve as my examples for such a cultural politic in this section: Toni Morrison's Beloved, as cited and analyzed by West, and the work of Prince, a genre-less Black artist whose influence on and connections to hip hop are understated. These forms of culture are committed to examining how Black people can create their own worlds under oppression, and even as they strive for radical changes, they are pragmatic and understand that a complete rejection of WSCPSC would constitute a violent revolution. As such, they utilize Black art as a means of peaceful resistance and alleviation of colonial pain, as hip hop once did. West noted that Morrison's Beloved was an active buffer against the pain of Black nihilism derived from WSCPSC, stressing that "Self-love and love of others are both modes toward increasing self-valuation and encouraging political resistance in one's community."

Black literature's emphasis on self-love and reflection must be replicated in hip hop. Prince understood that "Transcending categories however is not synonymous with abandoning ones' roots." After his death, Alicia Garza, a BLM founder noted that he "was from a world where Black was not only beautiful, but it was nuanced and complex and shifting and unapologetic and wise." Prince does not allow the chaos of Blackness (as constructed by WSCPSC) to render him a slave to reifying some form of colonial oppression, rather he recognizes that "it's about being comfortable in an unfixed state while improvising the topography of your life and music as you go along." Such a mindset and perspective are directly derivative of African religious culture. Thus, a liberational politic must be Afrofuturist. It must avoid the categorical labels offered by WSCPSC because of how much they limit us and function to constrict us. Perhaps a contemporary example of such a wayward, liberational politic comes in Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives: Beautiful Experiments, in which she reimagines the deviant and radical lifestyles and love-ethics of early 20th century upper-middle-class Black women. When Black people have the socioeconomic privilege to be able to transcend the limits of WSCPSC's social construction of race using a collective Black love ethic and staying true to the root cause of Black uplift, a promotion of a more plentiful array of types of Black existence can proliferate. And the commodification of Black art can start to dissipate, pushing more and more colonial subjects to reimagine their humanity away from internal colonialism.

This is the future I see for hip hop, one that returns it to its political roots. I understand that the pull of the market is strong, and that hip hop's decolonial future will require some serious changes in cultural discourse. Hip hop must return to its basis as a means of cultural self-defense, of engaging with the politics of having fun in a way that is more cognizant of decolonial motives. Taking down WSCPSC will require both explicit and implicit resistance, most of which will be anti-capitalist. Black expressive culture and its dynamism, specifically with regard to hip hop, have extreme potential for creating radical Black communities in the United States that are neither re-colonial nor based in the European need to monopolize violence, and embrace the duality of Black liminality, the complex nuances of double consciousness, and consider Blackness on one's own determined set of terms.

Notes

Berman, Judy. "'This Is America' 8 Things to Read about Chidish Gambino's New Music Video." New York Times, May 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/08/arts/music/childish-gambino-this-is-america-roundup.html.

Gordon Williams, James. "Black Muse 4 U: Liminality, Self-Determination, and Racial Uplift in the Music of Prince." Journal of African American Studies, vol. 21, no. 3, Sept. 2017.

Rose, Tricia. Black Noise Rap Music and Black Culture In Contemporary America. Wesleyan University Press, 1994.

Sajnani, Damon. "Hip Hop's Origins as Organic Decolonization." Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society, 2015, https://decolonization.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/hiphops-origins-as-organic-decolonization/ .

Samudzi, Zoe, and William C. Anderson. As Black as Resistance. AK Press, 2018.

Sehgal, Parul. "An Exhilarating Work of History About Daring Adventures in Love." New York Times, Feb. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/19/books/wayward-lives-beautiful-experiments-saidiya-hartman.html.

West, Cornel. "Nihilism in Black America." Race Matters, Beacon, 1994.

Black Feminism and the Rap/Hip-Hop Culture: I Don't Want the "D"

By Asha Layne

"I was born to flex (Yes)
Diamonds on my neck
I like boardin' jets, I like mornin' sex (Woo!)
But nothing in this world that I like more than checks (Money)
All I really wanna see is the (Money)
I don't really need the D, I need the (Money)
All a bad bitch need is the (Money)"

- Cardi B

With the advancement of technology, more specifically social media platforms, the plight of women of color has been widely discussed thanks to the Me Too and Say Her Name movements which challenged and revolutionized the thinking of dominant culture. Of profound importance, the inclusion of Black women and women of color in these social movements contested the sweeping generalizations of 'traditional' feminism. This would later lead to a widespread rejection of popular feminism ideologies, thus making way for a new wave of neo non-conservative ideologies on feminism.

This deviation between traditional and non-traditional feminism can be traced back to the Women's Liberation Movement in the late 1960s. During this period, the conditions and concerns of White middle-class women took center stage and addressed issues that inhibited their (White women) ability to live fully free lives rid from patriarchal oppression. This perspective would continue to serve as the backdrop on a series of feminine-related issues such as equal pay, sexual harassment, sexual violence, and violence against women. Not surprisingly, given the US's racially contentious history, it (Women's Liberation Movement) shamelessly ignored the different culturally-significant spaces that Black women (and women of color) occupied, leaving Black feminists to repeat Sojourner Truth's riveting question: "Ain't I a woman?" This essay explores the evolution of Black feminism through the lens of female rappers, who I argue add to the discourse of feminism, and more specifically Black feminism.

As a theoretical construct, feminist theory claims of being woman-centered historically has ignored the narratives and standpoints of women of color. Despite the popular question, "What about the women?" that has long served as the impetus behind the development of feminist theory, the answers to this question have traditionally focused their attention solely on the experiences of White women. Anchoring this sentiment is the emergence of Black feminism and Black feminist thought, which both sought to place the experiences of Black women at the center of its analysis, therefore offering a starkly different knowledge from that of mainstream feminism. According to Collins (2000), Black women in the United States can stimulate a distinctive consciousness concerning their own experiences. Collins, like other Black feminist scholars, understood that this knowledge produced by the narratives of Black women would transform how feminism is defined and understood by Black women (and women of color). Similarly, Kimberle Crenshaw also understood that the experiences of Black women could not be explained by race and gender alone but should also include the intersecting identities that shape their identity as a Black woman. This is best demonstrated by Black women (and women of color) in the rap/hip-hop industry.

Female rappers have (and continue) to take a melodic stance to verbally disseminate information on social issues and struggles that women of color face, such as: white supremacy, sexism, self-esteem, misogyny, patriarchy, sexual harassment, and gender-based violence. One can hear this in the music of both contemporary and non-contemporary female artists, who by applying Collins's theoretical framework share their narrative through standpoint theorizing. Standpoint theorizing is a sociological feminist framework which explains that knowledge of women's experiences is best understood from their social positions in society. In Yo-Yo's 1991 debut hit, You Can't Play with my Yo-Yo she explores what it means to be a woman in a male-dominated environment. She raps:

"If you touch, you livin in a coffin (word to mother)

I'm in the 90s, you're still in the 80s right

I rock the mic, they say I'm not lady like

But I'ma lady, who will pull a stunt though

I kill suckas, and even hit the block

So what you want to do?"

In listening to the words of female rap/hip-hop artists, the audience is able to recognize the nonconventional form of activism which has added to both the discourse of Black feminism and the music industry. In the above lyrics, Yo-Yo also explains that as a female in a male-dominated industry, gender often takes precedence over race and consequently adds to negative experiences Black female MCs in the industry often grapple with. Women of color in the rap/hip-hop industry have inarguably exemplify Collins's concepts of: standpoint theory, outsider-within, and matrix of domination, sidestepping any mention of scholastic sources or prominent experts in the field. One can easily identify these acts of black female activism in the rap/hip-hop industry in the work of contemporary artist, Cardi B. This is particularly well exemplified in Cardi B's debut album, Invasion of Privacy. In her song Be Careful, which explicitly examines infidelity and the double-standard concerns it raises, she raps, "I could've did what you did to me to you a few times. But if I did decide to slide, find a nigga fuck him, suck his dick, you would've been pissed." In Money, Cardi B colorfully explains that money and not a man's penis will meet her needs. She raps, "I got a baby, I need some money, yeah I need cheese for my egg." This album unapologetically proclaims that despite her (un)popular gender non-normative approach that she will be heard and respected regardless of anyone else's opinion. Therefore, demonstrating that, just like her female rap/hip-hop predecessors, she too unconventionally exemplifies black feminist activism.

Patricia Hill Collins's Black Feminist Thought explains that race, gender, and class are oppressive factors that are bound together. In relation to rappers, the commodification of female rappers in the industry and the hypersexual images of Black female rappers speaks to not only this intersection of race, class, and gender but also to the systemic cultural nature of exploitation that is inherent not only to the industry but also within dominant American culture. In both spaces (the industry and American culture), masculinity is directly related to power and violence, and reminds us of the pervasiveness of the White perspective in social institutions. In White-Washing Race, Brown et al. (2003) explains that the White perspective is not the product of salient characteristics, such as skin color, but of culture and experiences. The lyrical narratives shared by female rap/hip-hop artists demonstrates how women of color actively grapple with the many issues, concerns, and questions they experience culturally, socially, and politically.

Is the emergence of the outspoken, gender-bending, highly independent, and sexy female artist a new phenomenon for women of color? Collins highlights how the role of Black women always contradicted the traditional role of women in mainstream society. Collin states, "if women are allegedly passive and fragile, then why are Black women treated as "mules" and assigned heavy cleaning chores" (2000, p.11)? The placement of Black women as 'objects' and 'tools' for production under capitalism is intrinsic to the social, political, and economic arrangements of power in the United States. Black feminism deconstructs the established systems of knowledge and arrangements of power by showing the masculinist bias that frames these arrangements of power from a cultural lens.

The radical changes exhibited in the bodies of work of contemporary female rappers engenders the thesis of Black feminism through frequent displays of gender non-conforming behaviors while embracing the beauty of being uniquely deviant. No longer are women of color minimizing or editing their unique experiences, behaving in gender-conforming ways, or are ashamed of being labelled a 'bitch' for the sake of being accepted by mainstream culture and appeasing their male counterparts. Contemporary Black female rappers, similar to classic rappers such as MC Lyte, Queen Latifah, and Roxeanne Shante, continue to redefine not only gender identity but Black female identity in patriarchal structures.

Both gender identity and Black female identity are socially constructed through interaction and socialization. Following the tenets of symbolic interaction, gender and racial identities emerge out of social interactions which helps to define an individual's self. The formation of self is unique to women of color because of the location and situation they occupy in many faces of oppression. The marginalization, exploitation, and feelings of powerlessness are all too common in the tropes of women of color. Therefore, the gender-social identification of women of color does not examine solely "doing gender" but instead considers key factors that obfuscates women of color from "doing gender."

Women of color in the rap/hip-hop industry continue to demonstrate the spirit of Black feminism through nonconventional methods. Today, Black female artists (and women of color) have changed the way we define women's empowerment. The popularity of female MCs embodying androgenic characteristics through feminine appeal supports the narratives of many women who have mastered the proverbial quote, "think like a man." To condemn the hypersexual behaviors and language used by Black female artists is to ignore the historical truth that Black women (and women of color) were never defined by the traditional standards of being a 'woman.' Black female MCs have and will always continue to redefine what 'doing gender' is from a cultural standpoint, therefore adding to the Black feminism discourse.

Bibliography

B, Cardi. (2018). The invasion of privacy. CD. New York: New York. Atlantic Records.

Brown, Michael K., Carnoy, Martin, Currie, Elliott, Duster, Troy, Oppenheimer, David. B., Schultz, Marjorie, M., and Wellman, David. 2003. White-washing race: The myth of a color-blind society. Berkley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press.

Collins, Patricia Hill. (2000). Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Yo-Yo. (1991). Make way for the Motherlode. CD. New York: New York. EastWest Records America.

Challenging the Music Industry's Commodity Complex: An Interview with Punk-Rock Guerilla, Justin Pearson

By Mimi Soltysik

This interview originally appeared at The Socialist , the official publication of the Socialist Party USA.

"Would the owner of an ounce of dignity please contact the mall security?"

- The Locust

What Justin Pearson has done and continues to do as an artist isn't going to be for everyone. It's a challenge. Perhaps it's a threat. Notes and shrieks spray like bullets through the speakers. Our attention, so thoroughly bombarded by the mass marketing of apathy, pacification, and complacency, is the target. While critics fawn over his work with The Locust, Dead Cross, and RETOX, Justin's resume reads (and sounds) like a massive "fuck you" to a dying music industry's lowest-common-denominator commodity complex. As a longtime fan, I'm here for it. A passive discussion with Justin Pearson might be possible. But when you have a minute with a punk rock guerrilla, why go passive?

Mimi : The first time I saw you perform was with the Locust back in 2000 at the Smell in L.A. At the time, it sounded to me like the audio companion to systems collapse. I mean no offense when I say that. It felt like a storm was brewing and the Locust was going to be the soundtrack. Eighteen years later, it seems to have been somewhat prophetic. Since then, we've had the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the financial crisis, incredibly bleak news about climate change, and of course, Donald Trump. And all of this happening at a point where, with social media, we're seeing the collapse in real time. I'm wondering what you were feeling, as an artist, that led to that sound? What was your environment like? Was there a relationship between the socio-political environment and what you were creating musically? How does an album like "Plague Soundscapes" fit today?

Justin : Thanks for the analogy of our sound. I think you are pretty accurate in that description. I think that music in a much broader platform, perhaps addressed just as art in general, can draw from non-musical aspects. Where one would ask a band what their musical influences are to understand what pushes them to do what they do, it might be just as important, or maybe even more important to address the things outside of music that are influential. Of course, what we do is subjective and anyone can interpret it how one wants to. And even with that being said, most of the time, for me at least, I am not even aware of what might have influenced something I was part of when it's coming to life. So with The Locust and probably a lot of stuff I'm part of, influences come from social politics, culture, economics, and then it also brings in science fiction, absurdity, subversion, and probably a million other elements that helped shape what we do. I do feel, unfortunately in 2018, something like The Locust's "Plague Soundscapes" is relevant, both musically and lyrically. Perhaps even aesthetically still relevant too. I grew up thinking that it's the job of artists to reflect what the world that they live in consists of, and with that, it's also their job to change it or influence change. But with all that being said, it's just music, or just art. It's not like we are great revolutionaries in the world. However, it is music that transcends certain things such as age, gender, language, geography, etc. It speaks to people, it enables people to do certain things, and at times, keeps people alive. But a lot of the stuff you mentioned, such as the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as stuff like climate change and possibly the overall destruction of the planet, were already on our radar. Those were things that we were aware of at the time, so I wouldn't call it prophetic, but more accurately just being aware of the world as a whole. Sure, before Rump managed to get into office, it seemed impossible and extremely absurd. But if you were to consider a lot that has happened previous to that, such as Vietnam, the assassination of Kennedy, the Nixon administration and Water Gate, even Reagan, a crappy actor, becoming President, it all seemed unimaginable.

On a basic musical level, I have always been drawn to what some might see as non-traditional musical elements. I grew up with stuff like PIL, Septic Death, This Heat, and even more known artists like Cecil Taylor, or maybe even Sigue Sigue Sputnik. So stuff like that coupled with not having a proper musical education possibly translated into the general realm of what I have been part of. And with those musical influences, they all seem to have depth to what they did. It wasn't the run-of-the-mill lowest common denominator music that is often what is marketed on a larger level. I grew up really resonating with stuff that people thought was garbage.

Mimi : I think that the piece about the impact that outside influences can have on songwriting might be overlooked a bit. I'm glad you brought that up. Would it be safe to say that, with something like the new Dead Cross EP, we're hearing that impact, or is there a concerted effort to put something together that has a specific sound? And shit, how are you feeling in 2018? I don't know that I see many cases where artists are asked how they might be holding up emotionally. It's such a big consideration within organizing and activism circles. How are we taking care of ourselves? Are we supporting another? Seriously, how are you?

Justin : I wish there was an easy answer. For me, what I end up doing, or being part of, usually stems from my subconscious, or comes from something that might include elements that I am not initially aware of. It's the retrospect where I can fully study the outcome of something that I was part of. I can breathe and dissect it with ease and in peace (with myself). I think over the years, while everything that happened, tons of weird energy was exchanged and moved. It made sense to some degree, but it took time to really see the broader picture or possible understand the magnitude of something. I'm not sure if that makes sense or not. I suppose, the simplistic way to answer that part of this question would be that fortunately things seem to come organically, for the most part. However with that being said, organically doesn't mean that it's a simplistic way, or a peaceful experience, or that it comes from a natural space. So moving into the later part of your question, about the era that we are in, it's grim in many respects. It's more and more absurd. I feel a great deal more anxiety than what I felt in recent years. It seems that time might be running out. I can feel the tension in the air, and smell the shit that is lingering. But with that being said, I can see new ideas, I feel rad power from people, and change is being birthed and evoked in a lot of creative and powerful stuff. Man, this is a massive, massive topic to try to articulate and nail down in a simple answer. I guess over all, I see things being polarized. I do think that might be what was and is needed, to avoid the stagnation that seemed to keep everything at bay. For so long, I could see that nasty band-aid on everything was gonna fall off eventually. It sure seems to have fallen.

Mimi : The band-aid metaphor really strikes a chord, no pun intended. From where folks on the radical left stand, capitalism is a cancer that is consistently growing. Reforms are essentially band aids, providing some minor relief and perhaps offer a veneer of progress. But with each band aid applied, the cancer grows. It seems like we're getting to a place where the band aids no longer offer that veneer, that hope. I mean, for so many oppressed communities throughout the world, there's been no band aid. And I'm seeing little hints here and there that some are in the U.S. are becoming aware of that. In that context, do you have feelings about the potential impact of your music, whether it be RETOX or Dead Cross? Your audiences are living in that context. Do you feel any sense of responsibility to play a role in how we move forward? To how your audience perceives your output and where they might go with that perception? And I do acknowledge that, when I'm asking this, I know that this is some heavy shit. I know of very, very few artists who would be willing to engage in this kind of dialogue and I have tremendous respect for you in agreeing to participate.

Justin : It's so interesting to do this interview. I'm also doing some press for the Dead Cross EP that just came out and to be honest, most of the questions I get are garbage, have no substance, and are not challenging aside from challenging me to figure out how to write something interesting to a vague irrelevant inquiry. So thank you for providing the opposite of that stuff.

As for the concept of responsibility, you are correct, that is a massive topic. I'm not trying to take the easy way out, but I don't feel that I'm responsible for anyone aside from myself. When someone creats art that is in the public sector, it can reach one other person, or a million other people and I still don't think that the artist is responsible for anyone outside of themselves. Maybe that is the part of me who identifies with the concept of anarchy. But for me, I feel I have aligned myself with people to communicate certain things, or even just one certain general thing. We then say what we have to say, maybe over and over each time we play, or with each album, and so on. We are calculated, educated, and aware, for the most part. Once we create that art, we can also learn from it, and adjust it, for the next attempt. Then we grow on our own, and hold ourselves responsible for our own actions and words. Or perhaps we adjust that thing being communicated and see if we can speak differently, and possibly set things straight outside of ourselves. A song is something that might not be linear, it's not physical. It's energy and that energy at times goes beyond language, class, race, geography, gender, etc. I think I might be going down a wormhole here, trying to figure out how to address the responsibility on an artist, but it might be the artist who are reflecting the world that they live in. It could be the world's voice. At least it is for myself. So maybe the responsibility could be placed on the world that we live in, which is what created the art.

Mimi : Why do you think that questions posed to artists are frequently garbage? What do you think fans lose as a result? I mean, I know there are probably many who feel that's "just the way it is" or that "it's the nature of the beast", but does it have to be that way? I also wanted to ask you, as someone who has been involved with the music business for quite some time, albeit not necessarily in the employ of the major labels, how do you think the music business might be different if it was run on a socialist model, where the workers owned and controlled production, where they had democratic control over process, and where the full value of their labor couldn't be exploited from above?

Justin : I assume there are a few reason why interviews are garbage. For one, the person conducting the interview isn't always invested in it. Perhaps there is some sort of need to get a piece about a band's new album, so the publication just assigns the interview to whoever works there. I really don't care to talk about how Dead Cross started, or what the date was when we put the band together, or why we play hardcore. You can Google those answers. And with questions like that, it's void of conversation and substance. You can tell, even out of ten or so questions, where there isn't one thing that is unique or specific to the band, that they are just uninterested. It's almost like it makes more work for the band to come up with a way to spin something that won't come off as boring and general just to locate some sort of substance. I'm not sure that socialism would play into making an interview be better for a certain publication. I think more so, it's just people being lazy, or being told what to do, or people being uneducated, or perhaps it's part of some facet of a broken industry. I have done way too many fill-in-the-blank interviews over time to really understand why they even still exist. You'd assume with the internet, and blogs, that people would be able to create new things and communicate about genuine things by people who are genuine. There are really awesome publications out there and great interviews do exist. But at the end of the day, I'm not in a place to pass up interviews, since they could help with a show, or a tour, or perhaps equate to at least one new listener.

Mimi : When did Dead Cross start? Just kidding. At the end of the day, while what you do is art, it's also how you make a living. Do you feel that artists, and you specifically, are treated fairly for the work they do? And how do you think a broken music industry can repair? Is it possible? If Justin Pearson was tasked with fixing the music industry, what would he do?

Justin : Good one! Make a living? Another good one. You are on a roll here. I often reference this thing that John Waters once said to me, something like, if you want to make art that is legit and by your own standards, you have to intern for yourself for roughly forty years before you make money. So I'm half way there by those guidelines. But as far as fixing something like the music industry, shit. If I had an answer to that I wouldn't be doing this interview. I'd be a wealthy philanthropist and my intern could answer this for me. But maybe there is no need to fix the industry, or at least no need for me to come up with a way to do so. It's done a great job at killing itself over the past few decades. It's been rude and arrogant. But with that being said, to me, the industry as it's perceived, is becoming more and more irrelevant. I see music in a much larger picture. Music is more than sound for me. It's part of something bigger that fits under the umbrella of art. There are aspects that are part of music, such as intellect, chance, aesthetic, and so on, that are never the industry focal point. Making profit was never an objective. And with that, we can take it a bit further. It wasn't something that was done for fun. It was a necessity in our lives. It still is that very same thing.

Mimi : You wrote on your label's website that you "started Three One G in hopes to better the quality and creativity of stuff that I was part of, as well as the music culture that I am part of - something obtainable, tangible, and real." Would you say that, to achieve that goal, that hope, ownership (not in some sort of greedy "it's mine, asshole!" way, but in a direct involvement way) of the process is necessary? And as possible advice for artists who might have an interest in taking a similar approach, what are you doing to realize that vision? Are there artists that may have forged a path that you've been following?

Justin : I mean, the creator of something is the owner. Or we could use a different term I suppose. Something less capitalistic, ha! But nonetheless, we own what we create in my opinion. Nonetheless, the concept of obtainable, tangible, and real is basically something that my ethics are derived from. You know, the basic ideals behind what "punk" was born out of, and what later became known as DIY. We all can do this stuff. I'm not special. We can all own our creations. We can also give that stuff away for $8.99 or for gas money, or a floor to sleep on, or whatever it is that we need to survive. Whatever we feel is suitable. As for artists who steered me on a path, I would say that Dischord was easily one of the biggest influences on my early life in the world of music. Then Ebullition, which I ended up releasing records on. And then later, perhaps Gravity. I think those tree labels are what have collectively made Three One G what it is.

Mimi : Dischord was probably the first time I'd seen some sort of ethics introduced on what might be called the "business" side of things. I still look at what Dischord's done - frequently - and find inspiration. It's like Ian MacKaye found a way to say "fuck you," in a really empowering way, to the gross excess of corporate music. You mentioned a bit ago that you see these glimpses of power coming from the people. Are you seeing those glimpses in the music community? Are there things you might be seeing from your side of things that the rest of us aren't quite yet? Where do you think music might be headed? Where might the industry overall be headed? I hear arena rock artists like KISS (fuck Gene Simmons, by the way) say that they might not make full-length albums any longer because there's no money in it, that they won't be paid fairly for their work.

Justin : My reference to power might be misconstrued. Power definitely has a negative or oppressive element to it. But I think I meant power more along the lines of energy that humans exchange, and sometime though music, and therefore, a positive concept. I suppose my terminology comes from stuff like The Stooges "Raw Power," other than some bullshit spewed out by Ian Stewart. As for the music community, just like the music industry, I'm not sure I have answers there. I think outside of those guidelines. And again, if I knew where things were headed, I would prepare myself. I just have no idea where most things on this planet are headed.

Mimi : I just gotta ask. What does "punk" mean to you? Is punk inherently an expression of resistance or rebellion? If it is, do you think it's a good sign when a band like Motley Crue covers a Sex Pistols song?

Justin : Awe, the "what is the meaning of life" question. I can certainly tell you what punk doesn't mean to me, which is Sid Vicious, or the commercialized image of nihilism. To me, it's cultural, political, social, progressive, and a million other things. Punk is James Chance deciding to wear a suit and play a sax since punk was said to be the opposite. Punk is The Weather Underground, pet rescues, re-purposing the bourgeoisie's trash, the Me Too movement, sustainable living, Planned Parenthood - it's everywhere.

Mimi : There's been a lot that you've said that would be fairly-well in alignment with what we might call "radical." The interesting thing about radical ideas, to me, is that when you say them out loud, they appear to be common sense, like they are just expressions of care and support. Yet, in the U.S., those ideas are packaged as being subversive or worse. Do you think we'll see the day in this country where we'll penetrate the propaganda surrounding radical/revolutionary politics and shift toward models that see people, not profit, as the priority? I mean, I think we can understand why the rich would have an interest in protecting their power and systems of exploitation and oppression. Do you feel like it's a foregone conclusion that they will maintain that power? You're going to have fans that will read this. What message would you have for them about the roles they might play in fighting that oppression and exploitation?

Justin : I do think ideas that were once looked at as radical are the norm now. It just takes times. Unfortunately too much time though. It's like that saying, change comes one funeral at a time. When I was fifteen, and had to stick up for LBGTQ+ friends as well as myself, or when I decided to have a plant based diet, or even when I started playing music, all of that stuff was so out there, and people thought it was crazy. Now, all of it seems normal. Homophobia is not acceptable by any means, you can get vegan food just about anywhere now, and my first band sounds like stuff you hear on the radio or on TV now. It just takes a lot of time, but it will change. I'm not sure it's necessarily a class thing though. I do feel that there are wealthy progressive people, who do good for the people. However, it's the oppressive forces in charge who use the idea of having people hate downwards to keep others oppressed. We've seen it first hand, in our faces recently, with the white middle class hating the poor. But as far as a message to send, in relation to oppression and exploitation, I'm not sure. That is a massive space to try to fill with one's ideas. I do think, no matter what class one falls into, it's extremely important to pay attention where you spend your money and what it's going to. That is the real way to vote, by how you spend, or don't spend your money. We can bring down corporations by being smart and funding progressive entities and not the garbage ones out there.

Mimi : Before we wrap up, I want to thank you for doing this interview. I've seen very, very few artists agree to engage with a radical publication. Why do you think that is? And why did you agree to do this?

Justin : Perhaps a lot of artists are scared to make not be known where they stand on things. Or they don't care to discuss such topics. I agreed for a couple reasons. I'll pretty much do any interview that someone wants to do with me. I'm grateful for that in itself, being aware that someone cares to some extent about the stuff I am part of. But with you, I was pretty psyched to get into an interesting conversation. If anything, it's a honor to have you want to talk with me about the stuff we have covered.

Mimi : Again - many, many thanks. I really appreciate that you've taken the time to do this. In parting, I think there are going to be a lot of radicals/revolutionaries reading this who are just learning about what you've done. What about you, as an artist, do you feel is the most important piece or takeaway that folks walk away with? Any parting words you might have for the comrades?

Justin : Speaking of how interviews pan out, the parting ways last words part is so fucked. Especially to fellow comrades. Ha! There is a lot that we should be discussing, and a lot that I could, or should say, but where do I start or what is punctual enough to wrap this up? I guess I can leave it with a quote that I reference almost daily.

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference" - Elie Wiesel

Thank you for taking the time to talk to me.

The Question of Art: An Interview

By Devon Bowers

In a written portion of my series "The Question of Art," I talk to artists Johnny Bentanamo and Kelly Ann Gonzales Boyle about art and its importance to society. Part 1 is can audio portion and can be listened to here .

What kind(s) of art do you do? What/who got you into art in the first place?

Johnny: I specialize in musical recording & performance art as well as mixed media visual arts.

Essentially, I write music on an acoustic guitar as well as accompanying lyrics that I perform live as a soloist, I also compose noise records {that I refer to as "grind-pop"} which I release online. As far as the visual arts go, I mostly use found items to create impressionistic & abstract paintings.

When I was 8 years old, I was downstairs at my Grandparents house & put on the MTV where I saw the music video for Guns N' Roses "Welcome to the Jungle"...that was the moment when I knew what I wanted to do with my life & it's been a struggle ever since. Besides that important moment in my life, I've had many great friends that have doubled as teachers over the years & I own to them much thanks.

Kelly: I am a writer. I have been a writer since I first learned to read and write. Since I was a child, I loved nothing more than curling up and getting lost in a great book, and when you get lost, you often find yourself. My father always encouraged me to be an avid reader, writer, and lover of art. Each time he got me a book, he'd sign it, "Never stop leaning. Love, Papa."

I grew up in New Jersey, and my dad grew up in NYC, and he always wanted me to experience the city by bringing me to art museums. I tried my hand at drawing and painting, but while it's a medium I love and appreciate, I never quite honed my talent into it unlike writing which came much more naturally.

Why do you think that people nowadays seem to devalue art? We seem to live in this paradox where people will argue that art isn't important, yet they enjoy music, movies, theater, and the like.

Johnny: I think art is largely devalued by many because they don't see the most popular mediums as art. Things like that popular tv show, big budget films, & major label musical releases are made to make money & have little to no artistic value because they lack the intention to invoke emotion or challenge contemporary ways of thinking. The people that seek out art for the sake of art can find it, but it takes research & I think that that's a little bit too much work for the common person who is consumed w/ work, school, family, etc.

Kelly: Art is a series of contradictions. It's like life. Moving, terrifying, strange, and sometimes just downright boring. Art, like life, is misunderstood. We can hate art like we can hate our lives, but we can choose to say, "You know what? Not for me today. Not for me right now. Let me try again tomorrow." The same art I may have passed by in a museum ten, five, maybe even one year ago, can have a totally different impact on me today. Just based on new experiences or my mood for the day.

I don't think that people devalue art. I think people value and crave art more than ever before. People want to be connected and to feel something. The advent of social media is an example of this. We can sit here and lament the dehumanizing aspects of social media, or we can appreciate its ability to teach us something about each other, even if it's just parts of each other.

We all make choices each day to say to others and to ourselves whether or not we want to live our lives to the fullest. Art helps to enrich our lives through music, movies, theater, and so forth.

What does art do for you, if anything, on a emotional and psychological level?

Johnny: For me, art is therapy, plain & simple. If I didn't have a creative outlet I would be a miserable person to be around. I grew up in a physically & emotionally abusive house so I have some "demons" that I battle on a daily basis & whenever I'm feeling lost or overwhelmed I can just pick up my guitar or paint brushes to wash away those negative feelings...I've become a much calmer & centered person since I began creating more consistently about 7 years ago. Art is also a way to supplement my income since working a full-time job is not conducive to my medical disabilities, which are extensive.

Kelly: We are all part of a grand universe, and art is a means of connecting our selves to the world around us. Whether it's a fresco painting on the ceiling of a chapel or a black square on a large, white canvas, art speaks. It can speak a loud and grandiose volume for all to know its behemoth presence, or it can simply murmur and let its nearest passerby know that it's standing on the corner, too.

Art makes me feel everything. It has made me laugh and cry. It has angered me and plainly disgusted me. It keeps me begging for more and I find myself seeking out stranger and grander things. To better myself. To learn. To be a part of something greater than myself.

What is the most fun and most difficult part of being an artist?

Johnny: The most difficult part of arting for me is also the most fun part...performance. I give everything I have in me during a live performance, it's like some otherworldly entity is channeled through me. It is the most cathartic thing I have ever experienced but w/ that said, afterwards I hurt & usually need to sit or lay down for a hour or more. The most rewarding part of performing is not what it does for me though, it is what it does for others. I'm a naturally open & overtly expressive person, which most people are not, so when attendees approach me after I'm off stage & express to me how the things I did or said spoke to them or made them feel like they weren't alone, I know I did something good...even if it comes from a place of selfishness as I do not make art for anybody but myself.

Kelly: I once argued with someone I dated--and I suppose you can already guess that the brief relationship ended quite rapidly--about whether or not writing was an art. He believed writing was simply a skill that could be taught and refined. I believe it was both an art and a skill. You learn the skills of the grammar, punctuation, and the nuisances of the language. The art of writing is a different and impatient beast.

The most difficult part of being a writer is like exercising. To get up each day and committing yourself to doing it continuously. You can write or exercise in private and no one will know the wiser, but eventually you may find yourself stepping out into the world where a stranger may glance at your open notebook or laptop. You coworker will comment on your new weight loss. You are flattered.

Then you are also terrified. You want the compliments, but with compliments come expectation and criticism. The opportunity and the realization that there is more. There is always more.

The fun part is also the terrifying part. Recognizing the difficulty of putting yourself out there and keeping up that momentum. The thrill of jumping out of a plane at 30,000 feet only to hurtle downwards with a parachute. That is writing. That is art. It's all part of the process.

In your opinion, what is the purpose of art, if any?

Johnny: Art has many purposes & can mean different things to many different people. For me, as I stated earlier, art is therapeutic. I create so that I can tolerate living but for many others it is simply something to decorate your house with or wear out to a fancy restaurant.

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde says "We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless." Now I don't agree w/ this sentiment but that's not the point, the point is that, what art is or what it does is completely up to the observer, it's relative to the person that is beholding the creation. In summation I would say that the purpose of art is to create something that was never there so that all of existence can become a richer & more evolved place. Art is life & just like all things, the individual works eventually cease to be.

Kelly: The purpose is to exist. The definition is up to the artist. Same thing with life. Don't think too hard about it.

Examine life in its present moment, but then move on. Don't overthink it. Just do. Keep going. Don't stop. Go live your life. Stop reading this and go make some art.

Mr. Bentanamo's art can be viewed here and here .

Mrs. Gonzales Boyle is the author of the novel Video Games and is readying a forthcoming novel tentatively titled, Through An Opaque Window.

Young, Gifted, and Black: Art's Power for the People

By Corinna Lotz

Outside the door opening up to the Soul of a Nation exhibition at Tate Modern screens offer vintage news footage of Black leaders Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, James Baldwin, Malcolm X and Angela Davis.

These men and women - two of whom were assassinated - shaped the political landscape of the 1960s and 1970s. The echo of their voices lends resonance to Nina Simone's call for artists to reflect their times.

In the wake of white supremacist brutality in Ferguson and Charlottesville, revisiting the Black power movement in America has gained a new urgency.

Soul of a Nation shows how artists were swept up in the struggle against the oppression of the institutionally racist US state. Through determined resistance, self-organisation, self-education and study of revolutionary theory, the movement and its artists asserted the possibility of a non-racist and revolutionary culture.

Support for Black power arose out of frustration with the pacifist orientation of the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King. Leaders like Malcolm X called for justice "by any means necessary".

Bobby Seale and Huey Newton founded the Black Panther Party in October 1966 to defend victims of police violence. The party championed Black self-determination. At the same time, its 10-point programme was distinctly anti-capitalist and socialist. It appealed to all oppressed and working class people to unite against the ruling classes and the state.

But the US state struck back. Under its chief, J Edgar Hoover, the FBI's counter intelligence programme (COINTELPRO) targeted Black Panther leaders. Police backed by FBI agents murdered Black Panther leaders around the country. Amongst the first to be killed in this way was the BPP's 21-year-old deputy chair, the talented and popular organiser, Fred Hampton. After being drugged by an FBI agent, Hampton was shot whilst asleep in his bed. It was an act of extreme brutality commemorated by artist Dana C Chandler in his reconstruction Fred Hampton's Door.

David Hammons' multi-media Injustice Case (1970) leaps out of the wall: shadowy body marks move around like ghostly x-rays on a white background, framed by the Stars and Stripes. Hammons used imprints of his own body on paper in this cry of anger against the treatment of Black Panther Party co-founder Bobby Seale. Seale was bound and gagged by the trial judge when he was accused of conspiracy after anti-war demonstrations during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

Emory Douglas became the Panthers' Minister of Culture designing a remarkable series of propaganda posters and back covers for The Black Panther newspaper. Large-scale outdoor murals gave artists a chance to reach out to large numbers of people. The famous Wall of Respect, which 14 artists painted on a derelict building in Chicago's South Side in 1967, commemorated Black heroes and heroines including Muhammad Ali, Aretha Franklin and Martin Luther King. It was part of a nation-wide mural movement.

Black and Asian photographers made a special contribution. They celebrated the streets and inhabitants of Harlem as well as engaging in more abstract and lyrical subjects - musicians and singers in performance, still lives and nudes. Just waiting to be re-discovered is a 1955 photo book, The Sweet Flypaper of Life. It is a miniature gem of a story by Langston Hughes accompanied by Roy DeCarava's photographs.

Controversies arose about whether Black art had to be figurative or openly propagandist or whether the artist could work in an abstract idiom. Some like Jack Whitten used abstraction to pay homage to Malcolm X and African American history. British-Guyanese painter, Frank Bowling, took part in these debates. His magisterial Middle Passage features in the second to last space. A superb display of his work is currently at Munich's Haus der Kunst .

The last space at Tate Modern takes on a new spirit of joy in the inventiveness of Lorraine Grady who involved hundreds of people on a parade celebrating Harlem's African American Day Parade.

This is a knock-out show. Go and see it.

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power will be on display at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas at the beginning of 2018 and at the Brooklyn Museum in New York from September 18, 2018.

This article was originally published at the Real Democracy Movement

The Pedagogy of Hip Hop: Underground Soundtracks for Dissecting and Confronting the Power Structure

By Colin Jenkins

Disclaimer: The language expressed in this article is an uncensored reflection of the views of the artists as they so chose to speak and express themselves. Censoring their words would do injustice to the freedom of expression and political content this article intends to explore. Therefore, some of the language appearing below may be offensive to personal, cultural, or political sensibilities.

On the 16th track of Immortal Technique's Revolutionary, Volume 2, Mumia Abu-Jamal theorizes on the inherent contradictions between the lived reality of many Americans and the notion of homeland [in]security. In doing so, he explains how the musical phenomenon of hip hop captures these contradictions by displaying "gritty roots" that are bound up in systemic injustice and deep feelings of fear and hatred. These feelings, according to Mumia, engulf entire generations of children who have been betrayed by systems of capitalism and white supremacy, and their intricately constructed school-to-prison pipeline:

"To think about the origins of hip hop in this culture, and also about homeland security, is to see that there are at the very least two worlds in America. One of the well-to-do and another of the struggling. For if ever there was the absence of homeland security, it is seen in the gritty roots of hip hop. For the music arises from a generation that feels, with some justice, that they have been betrayed by those who came before them. That they are at best tolerated in schools, feared on the streets, and almost inevitably destined for the hell holes of prison. They grew up hungry, hated, and unloved. And this is the psychic fuel that generates the anger that seems endemic in much of the music and poetry. One senses very little hope above the personal goals of wealth to climb above the pit of poverty. In the broader society, the opposite is true. For here, more than any other place on earth, wealth is more widespread and so bountiful, that what passes for the middle class in America could pass for the upper class in most of the rest of the world. Their very opulent and relative wealth makes them insecure. And homeland security is a governmental phrase that is as oxymoronic, as crazy as saying military intelligence, or the U.S Department of Justice. They're just words that have very little relationship to reality. And do you feel safer now? Do you think you will anytime soon? Do you think duct tape and Kleenex and color codes will make you safe?"

In his short commentary, Mumia refers specifically to the Black community in the US - a community that has been ravaged from every angle through America's relatively short history: two and a half centuries of chattel slavery followed by various forms of legalized systems of servitude and second-class citizenship, including sharecropping , convict leasing , Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. A history consumed with betrayal after betrayal, complex layers of institutional racism carried out under the guise of legality, and a systematic ghettoization supported by both " white flight" and widespread discriminatory housing and employment practices. Mumia juxtaposes this unique experience to the "broader society," one that is riddled with insecurities stemming from "opulent and relative" wealth, to expose the irony of "homeland security," a term that he views as oxymoronic.

Mumia is correct in characterizing the reactionary temperament of both the American middle and upper classes - sects that both determine and maintain dominant culture. Broader society is molded by this temperament, which is buoyed by small pockets of socioeconomic comfort floating in a vast sea of instability that not only plagues the Black community in its never-ending struggle against both white supremacy and capitalism, but also poor and working-class white communities that have been similarly doomed by their forced reliance on wage labor. Despite what he describes as "bountiful wealth," American society has always been propped up on this hidden base of despair, felt by a majority of the population that exists below the façade. Since the 1980s, this façade has been slowly chiseled away as neoliberalism has successfully funneled wealth to the few at the top while creating a race to the bottom for everyone else, including those once deemed "middle class."

This race to the bottom has exposed the underbelly of instability through its attack on a fast-eroding, mostly-white middle class that now finds itself desperately seeking reasons for its newfound despair. While those of us at the bottom may welcome the company, in hopes that it will bring the critical mass needed to finally confront and bring down the capitalist system, it also signals trying times ahead. In being consistent with similar erosions of "relative and bountiful wealth" throughout history, the American demise brings with it a fairly high probability of a fascist tide. In fact, this tide has already begun to form, largely through millions of white tears dropping from the Tea Party, its Reaganite forerunners, the "alt-right," a surge of neo-Nazism and white nationalism, and Donald Trump's pied piper-like rhetoric that has pooled it all together.

While middle-class America comes crashing down along with the empire, the Black community remains steadfast in its centuries-long defensive posture. Despite facing an acute, structural oppression that is unparalleled in any other modern "industrialized" setting, and in spite of Mumia's sobering analysis, the Black community has in many ways survived and thrived like no other. This survival in the face of intense hatred has been expressed through many musical forms , from the early roots of rock n roll, Blues, and American Jazz to the hip-hop phenomenon that Mumia speaks of. This collective survival is perfectly captured in Tupac's poem,The Rose that Grew from Concrete, which tells the story of

…the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete
Proving nature's laws wrong, it learned how to walk without havin feet
Funny it seems but by keepin its dreams
It learned to breathe fresh air
Long live the rose that grew from concrete
When no one else even cared.

In explaining the meaning of the poem, Pac summed up much of the African-American experience, as well as the reactionary temperament often directed at it from those in more privileged positions:

"You try to plant somethin in the concrete. If it grows, and the rose petal got all kind of scratches and marks, you not gonna say, "Damn, look at all the scratches and marks on the rose that grew from concrete." You gonna be like, "Damn! A rose grew from the concrete?!" Same thing with me… I grew out of all of this. Instead of sayin, "Damn, he did this, he did this," just be like, "Damn! He grew out of that? He came out of that?" That's what they should say… All the trouble to survive and make good out of the dirty, nasty, unbelievable lifestyle they gave me. I'm just tryin to make somethin."

Pac's story also describes that of the entire American working class, as a collection of former slaves, indentured servants, peasants, and poor immigrants set up for failure by a capitalist system designed to exploit us all, collectively. The working-class struggle is tightly intertwined with the Black struggle. The Communist Party knew this long ago. The Industrial Workers of the World did as well. The original Black Panther Party also knew this, as did all those coming from the Black Radical Tradition in America: W.E.B. DuBois, the African Blood Brotherhood, Harry Haywood, the Revolutionary Action Movement, Frances M. Beal, Angela Davis, C.L.R. James, the Combahee River Collective, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, the Congress of African People, and so many others.

As this struggle commences and intensifies during what appear to be the end days of American Empire, underground hip hop provides us with a soundtrack that is laced with historical context, deep analysis, and valuable knowledge - all of which should be applied while moving forward. The "psychic fuel" that Mumia points to in his brief commentary, which "generates the anger that seems endemic in much of the music and poetry" is far from misguided, and extends far beyond cathartic release. While in the mainstream, the Black Radical Tradition continues to be tragically mocked by identity politics , activist-celebrity tweeters pimping corporate brands , black liberation-themed credit cards , high-dollar-plate events, non-profit organizations, and the Democratic Party, its torch remains lit through the lyrics burning on underground hip-hop tracks. And this underground reflects the pulse of the streets, where tens of millions experience daily life in the underbelly of instability - not on Twitter, Facebook, or fundraising dinners at the Marriott.

Structural Oppression Under Capitalism

As resistance movements gain momentum in the days of Trump, an understanding of the disastrous effects of capitalism is necessary. Party politics are, as John Dewey once explained, the "shadow cast on society by big business (capitalism)." Politicians from both parties work within this shadow, delivering rhetoric to the masses before and after taking orders from their donors, sponsors, and corporate overlords. Regardless of who is in the highest office, whether it's an eloquent black President or a blustering billionaire, "the attenuation does not change the substance." As a popular Internet meme recently noted, the 'hood under Trump is the same as the 'hood under Obama, which was the same as the 'hood under Bush, which was the same as the 'hood under Clinton. Sadly, this sentiment could go on for as long as Presidents have occupied the white house. Politicians and presidents come and go, and nothing changes for most of us; because, quite frankly, it is not supposed to. Politics serve capitalism; and capitalism does not serve us.

"It's like an open-air prison and it remained packed"

Hip hop serves as historiography in this sense, documenting the conditions of neighborhoods throughout the US for the past four decades, examining the histories behind multi-generational poverty, and seeking ways to address the dire situations many find themselves in. Ironically, the rise of hip hop paralleled the rise of the neoliberal era, a period that has been marked by an intensification of the capitalist system. During this time, things for most have at best remained stagnant, and at worst become increasingly disastrous. The hook in Erykah Badu's The Cell (2008) captures this lived experience in sobering fashion:

We're not well
We're not well
We can't tell

Brenda done died with no name
Nickel bag coke to the brain
Will they ever find the vaccine?
Shitty-damn-damn-baby-bang
Rich man got the double barrel
Po' man got his back to the door
Code white stands for trouble
Shots from the po-po (blah blah)

Jean Grae's Block Party , the 4th track on her 2002 album Attack of the Attacking Things, provides an intimate glimpse into the state of Black communities during this time:

I don't wanna preach or come off bitter, this is a commentary auditory
Editorial, about the state of things, state of mind and state of being
What the fuck is goin on? How the fuck we gonna make it out?
It's hectic, from asbestos filled classrooms
To the stench of death that's still in New York
The air is thick with it, but it reaches further
Like the world murder rate

While illustrating the chronic conditions found in many communities, Grae immediately offers insight into possible solutions rooted in consciousness. Without actually saying it, her lyrics brilliantly dip into a structural analysis that calls for abandoning capitalist culture and realizing the tragic ironies in seeking individual materialistic goals. In doing so, there is an underlying theme to escape values that have been implanted into not only predominantly Black communities, but also working-class communities as a whole:

We need to globalize, further spread on this earth
To appreciate the full value of individual worth
To realize how ridiculous the thought of ownership is
And protectin your turf - that's bullshit man
That's how we got colonized
Missionaries create foreign schools and change the native way & thinkin
So in ten years, we can have a foreign Columbine
In some small village in the Amazon, c'mon man

Grae's second verse masterfully ties together a narrative based in seeking a collective consciousness while avoiding a house-slave mentality that aims to, as she puts it, "chill with rich white folks." Again, while directed toward members of the Black community, Grae's commentary is undeniably relative to the working-class struggle in its entirety, especially in terms of how the "rags-to-riches," so-called "American Dream" is framed strictly within individual pursuits of wealth and hyper-consumerism. Ultimately, as Grae suggests, this mentality must be shed through deeper calls for knowledge, community, and shared struggle:

It's every man for himself
That's why the black community is lackin in wealth, there's no unity
We soon to be chillin with rich white folk
And that means that we made it
Let our kids go hungry before our wardrobe is outdated

…If the system's corrupt, then change it
Fought for the right to vote, don't even use it
Forget electoral winnin
The way the world's goin, we in the ninth inning
Heh, and we still aren't up to bat
Niggas is happy just to have the rights to sit on the bench
Like floor seats is alright, and that's as far as we reach
Materialistic values, not morals, that's what we teach
I see it in the youth, hungry for fame and money
Not for knowledge and pursuit of the truth
Pick up a book or a newspaper
Take a free class in politics or human behavior

Talib Kweli and Rapsody's Every Ghetto , the 2nd track on Kweli's 2015 album Indie 500, echoes Grae's track in addressing the systematic ghettoization of the Black community under the intertwined tandem of capitalism and white supremacy. Crucially, the track challenges the often-mistaken attempt to characterize ghetto life as a monolithic existence, seemingly warning against the fetishization of the black struggle while reflecting Pac's poem of the concrete rose and highlighting the unique struggle and persistence of the Black working class. Kweli's bridge builds on Grae's Block Party narrative, celebrating the communal potential of struggling communities:

I'm good walkin' in every ghetto around the world
The hood often embrace ya when you profound with words
I say the shit they relate to, I keep it down to Earth
Other rappers sound like they hate you, them niggas sound absurd
So when they walk through the ghetto they get their chain snatched
They gotta talk to the ghetto to get their chain back
It's like an open-air prison and it remain packed
Nothin' but straight facts

Kweli's initial verse jumps directly into a layered analysis, with the first bar alone touching on chronic malnourishment, poor education, smothering crime, gentrification, and a culture of anti-consciousness:

Every ghetto, every city, like Ms. Hill
They way too used to the missed meals
Hard to concentrate, hard to sit still
Murder rate permanent place in the top 10
We live here, these hipsters drop in
You hear them barrels cockin'
They say consciousness mean a nigga ain't rugged
Until they get beat within an inch of it

Rapsody closes the track with a powerful verse, filled with structural and cultural critiques all tied to capitalism and white supremacy. Her verse is laced with innuendo in a masterful play on words as she illustrates the lived reality of generations of Black Americans who have been systematically targeted by America's settler-colonial project, pointing to everything from police terror and the destruction of the Black family unit to the false promises of individualized pursuits of wealth.

Indie 5, for the people by the people
Ya-ya, giddy up, who got the juice now?
Snatch it out your kiddies cups
The shit you gave us watered down
This one's for Basquiat
They be brushin' with death, uh
Is this The Art Of War for cops?
We double-dutchin' duckin' shots
Every home ain't got a Pops
Every man ain't sellin' rocks
A different will to win here
Different from switchin' cars
They pray that we switch our bars
To a fiend from a metaphor
Worldstar, Worldstar
Lotta love and this life hard
Keep us prayin' like "oh God"
Illegally thievery think us peelin' off easily
Frustrated we hate it
That's why we scream out "nigga we made it"
It's an odd future they ain't know we was all some creators
Somethin' from nothin' was told Kings walk and man you frontin'
For the people and by the people but them over money
I'm on my Viola Davis here, workin' for justice
How you get away with murder? Be a cop and just kill us
How we supposed to not catch feelings?
Innocent lives, boy we got kids in these buildings
I'm on my Viola Davis, it's what you call a defense
For all the drama they gave us I'm spittin' Shonda Rhimes wit
Too high for you like ganja, that's what Shonda rhyme with
I holla back in the Hamptons, you still black if you rich
Spread love ain't just the Brooklyn way, it's universal
360 and the nine lives, whoa, what a circle

"Keep it movin' on"

While systemic oppression has plagued many generations of working-class Americans, especially non-white (as noted by Grae, Kweli and Rapsody), the middle class has only begun to feel the pressure of the capitalist system. The American middle class is an anomaly in history. Its formation defied the internal mechanics of capitalism, a system that is designed to favor the privileged few who have access to enough capital to own the means of production. This anomaly was beneficial for America's capitalist class, in that it allowed for a slick rebranding of capitalism as a system of "freedom" and "liberty." For decades, the American middle class was held up as the ultimate advertisement for a system that we were told allowed for social mobility through "hard work." These fables became so strong that an entire century was spent trying to shape a benevolent form of capitalism through government intervention (Keynesianism) and a robust Welfare State. Because of its relative success, mainly due to US imperial endeavors abroad, the capitalist system was not only propped up, but it was even sold to the masses as "the only alternative." The era of neoliberalism ended all of that. As capitalism's internal mechanics were unleashed during this period, so too were its natural consequences - capital accumulation for the elites, and mass dispossession for the people.

While mainstream media outlets continue to push a tired narrative, hip hop has shed some light on the real effects of capitalism. Vinnie Paz's 2010 track Keep Movin' On provides insight into these effects, and especially how they relate to the American worker. The first verse informs us in two ways. First, Paz illustrates the workers' role in the capitalist system, which is merely to serve as a tool to be used and exploited until no longer needed. In this role, we are not considered as human beings with families, needs, and inherent rights; we are only valuable as long as we provide owners with an avenue of extracting surplus labor from us for their profit. Second, the verse specifically describes the plight of the American manufacturing worker and the demise of middle-class jobs over the past 40 years due to globalization, corporate offshoring, and free trade agreements - all elements of the proliferation of capitalism in the neoliberal era:

I lost my job at the factory and that's disastrous
They said it's due to regulation and higher taxes
They ain't give me no notice. They knocked me off my axis
I can't pay the electric bill. It's total blackness
I suggested some incentives for innovation
But that was met with resistance like it's a sin of Satan
I'm losing my patience over here. I'm sick of waiting
And I ain't never expect to be in this situation
And the manufacturing jobs are fading fast (Damn)
Can't do nothing else. I should've stayed in class
I have to wait till summertime to cut the blades of grass
I have this little bit of money. Have to make it last
I have children to feed. I have a loving wife
I had a hard time coming that was nothing nice
I keep asking myself what am I doing wrong
And they just look at me and tell me "Keep it movin' on"

"Kill my landlord"

Along with massive unemployment and underemployment, the working class is also constantly faced with insecure housing situations. Landlordism is a natural byproduct of a capitalist system which seeks to commodify basic human needs such as food, clothing, housing, and healthcare for profit. Under this system, the few who can afford to own multiple properties are allowed to exploit the many who can barely afford basic shelter for themselves and their families. Because of this, many of us go our entire lives without ever establishing a stable home environment.

As of 2017, this natural housing crisis has reached a point where it's being labeled an epidemic even by mainstream sources. As rent continues to soar , so do evictions. " As of 2015 , more than 20 million renters-more than half of all renters in the U.S.-were cost burdened, meaning they spent at least at least 30 percent of their income on rent. That's up from almost 15 million in 2001. And while rents have risen 66 percent since 2000, household incomes have only risen 35 percent." In 2015, an estimated 2.7 million Americans faced eviction. Median rent has increased by more than 70% since 1995, while wages have stagnated for almost 30 years, and jobs that pay a living wage have disappeared during this same period. Landlords will go to great lengths to throw families and children out in the streets, sometimes even for falling behind one month on rent. "A landlord can evict tenants through a formal court process," explains Matthew Desmond , "or they can choose cheaper and quicker ways" to boot the families, such as "paying them a couple of hundred dollars to vacate by the end of the week" or even by removing the front door of the home. In order to protect this for-profit housing system from total collapse, the federal government uses numerous programs to assist people, including public housing, rental assistance, and even massive tax subsidies for homeowners. Despite this, many families are cold-heartedly exploited and discarded by landlords who want nothing more than to profit off this forced, human desperation. After living such an existence, The Coup's 1993 track Kill My Landlord , which featured the less-known rap duo Elements of Change, is surely to serve as a long-standing anthem for many:

Overlord of the concrete jungle but I'm humble
As I witness my opponent crumble
Like the shack that I live in the house that I rent from him
Roach infested I'm sure that the rats are nesting
The heat doesn't work he still hasn't checked it
Disrespected me for the last time
I loaded up the nine stepping double time
Bullseye, Another point scored
Right between the eyes of my landlord

All who have relied on rental property to live can certainly relate to the undignified relationship between landlord and tenant. Like bosses, landlords exploit us as resources. And the capitalist system not only allows them the power to do this on mass scale, it actually supports their rights with force if necessary. Our collective desperation is their individual gain. And our forced dependency on them leaves us with no leverage against their power. The second verse of The Coup's classic track reflects on this slave-like existence brought on by capitalism and landlordism:

So me I'm chilling at the table with my family
Hypothetically trying hard to keep my mind off the economy
Yeah I know the reason I find it hard to pass the test
Call me a victim cause I'm another brother jobless
Every day it seems like I'm moving closer to the streets
PG&E repo'ed the lights and my fucking heat
The situation's getting hard for me to handle
Had to trade my Nike's to the store to buy some candles
Last to first and I'm a-hunted and a ho I know
The man is going to come and throw me in the cold
Tears in my eye as I'm thinking of place to stay
While I'm staring at the freebie cheese up in my plate
I heard a bang bang bang knocking at my door
I looked up it was my motherfucking landlord, let him in quick
Followed by the sheriff deputy trying to come in
Every po on my property, staring me down
Mugging hard up in my family's face
While they're sitting at the table trying to say grace
But before I make this one my last meal
Any moves, yeah I'm looking for the damn kill
I said it twice in case he didn't hear me though
Sucker made a move evidently when he hit the floor
So now I'm in cuffs for the crimes I've committed
Maybe I'll go to jail, heh, or maybe I'll get acquitted
But the fact still stands I killed my landlord dead
Now I've got three meals and a roof over my head

In the third verse, Boots Riley connects the inherent injustices of landlordism to not only capitalism, but also to European conquest and the process of primitive accumulation that allowed settler-colonists to create wealth from the Atlantic Slave Trade and Indigenous holocaust. There is an overt racial component to this process, as descendants of former slaves are still forced to depend on descendants of former slave-owners for basic needs. Recognizing the injustices and illegitimacy of this system, and seeking revolutionary change, is crucial. Boots delivers knowledge:

Cash is made in lump sums as street bums eat crumbs
So I defeat scum as I beat drums
Rum-tiddy-tum like the little drummer boy song
Here comes the landlord at the door, ding dong
Is it wrong that my momma sticks a fat-ass thong
Up his anal cavity cause he causes gravity to my family
Says we gotta pay a fee so we can stay and eat
In a house with light and heat
The bastard could get beat, stole the land from Chief Littlefeet
House is built on deceit, got no rent receipt
So I'm living in the street and I'm down now
Don't you know to not fuck with the Mau Mau?
Notice of eviction, four knuckle dental affliction
Friction, oh did I mention
You'll be finger licking as I handicap your diction
And you say you're not a criminal like Tricky Dick Nixon?
While we're fixing to impose rent control
We didn't vote on it, this land wasn't bought or sold
It was stole by your great granddaddy's ganking
Osagyefo said they call it primitive accumulation
Plantations, TV stations wealth is very stationary
I learned the game and I became a revolutionary
Scaring the corporate asses cause the masses are a loaded gun
Killing the world banking and international monetary fund
I'm done, we're done with what you've done
For twenty-five score we've got a battle cry
Kill my, kill my, kill my, kill my
Kill my, kill my, kill my, kill my landlord

While representing a main staple of capitalism, landlordism also mimics the dynamics of settler societies in that settlers gain a disproportionate amount of land ownership at the expense of the mass dispossession of native populations. In many ways, modern landlords in the US represent the traditional colonizer, often buying up property in "foreign" communities for the sole purpose of exploiting masses of renters through dispossession and forced reliance. As in the process of gentrification, landlords dispossess thousands of poor and working-class people in their never-ending pursuit for more and more property to commodify. E-Roc finishes the track strong, calling on a figurative Mau Mau rebellion to "kill" the modern version of colonizers.

I need six hundred dollars by the end of the week
My body is cold, dirty socks on my feet
Not a black sheep, but who's the creep
Trying to put me on the street while I'm trying to sleep?
I wanna kill my landlord, murder in the first degree
If there's something wrong he wants to blame me
Wants to be a threat so he carries a gun
Well I pack a 9 cause I can't trust 911
Son of a gun, I'm the one who cuts the grass
Wash the windows and he still wants me to kiss his ass
But I laugh cause America's not my home
My landlord took me away from where I belong
But it's a sad song so I face reality now
Pick up the phone and now here comes the Mau Mau
To the rescue, down with The Coup
Yo landlord, I've got a little message for you
I'm going cuckoo, fuck a machete or sword
E-Roc is on a mission to kill my landlord

How the Capitalist/Imperialist War Machine Works Against Us

On Track 7 of Immortal Technique's 2005 Bin Laden remix album, Mumia Abu-Jamal once again spits knowledge, this time providing brilliantly poetic commentary framing capitalism and imperialism as " a war versus us all ":

The war against us all
This war in Iraq isn't the end; it's the beginning of Wars to come
All around the world at the whim of the Neo-Cons in the White House
This is the Bush Doctrine come to life; War, war and more war!
War brought to you by the big corporate-masters who run the show
This isn't just a War on Iraqis or Afghanis or Arabs, or even Muslims
It is ultimately a War on us all.
That's because the billions and billions that are being spent on this War
The cost of tanks, rocketry, bullets and yes even salaries
For the 125, 000 plus troops, is money that will never be spent on;
Education, on healthcare, on the reconstruction of crumbling public housing
Or to train and place the millions of workers
Who have lost manufacturing jobs in the past three years alone
The War in Iraq is in reality; a war against the nations' workers and the poor
Who are getting less and less
While the big Defense industries and making a killing, literally.
What's next Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela?
We've already seen the corporate media
Play megaphone to the White House, to build and promote a War based on lies
War is utilized by the imperialists first and foremost, to crush internal enemies
We're seeing the truth of its insight
When we see the sad state of American education
The rush of seniors to buy affordable medications from the Canadians
Because American drugs are just too expensive
The threat of privatization of Social Security
And the wave of repression that comes with an increasing Militarized Police;
This is a War on all of us
And the struggle against War is really a struggle for a better life
For the millions of folks who are in need here in this country!
The fight against the War is really to fight for your own interest
Not the false interests of the Defense Industry
Or the corporate media or the White House
Down with the Wars for empire.

Immortal Technique's subsequent track, Bin Laden , is a masterful critique of US imperialism and the corollary effects of government control on American citizens. Written during the W. Bush administration and the Iraq War, the track touches on the fear-mongering that led to the Patriot Act, the hypocrisy of American politicians, and the CIA's dealings in the Middle East during the 1980s, which created and strengthened groups like the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Tech begins by contrasting the lived realities of most American citizens with the artificial realities disseminated from the power structure and its calls for blind patriotic loyalty:

I pledge no allegiance, fuck the President's speeches!
I'm baptized by America and covered in leeches.
The dirty water that bleaches your soul, and your facial features.
Drowning you in propaganda that they spit through the speakers.
And if you speak about the evil that the government does.
The Patriot Act will track you to the type of your blood.
They try to frame you and say you was trying sell drugs.
And throw a federal indictment on niggas to show you love.
This shit is run by fake Christians, fake politicians.
Look at they mansions, then look at the conditions you live in.

He wraps up the first verse by summarizing US foreign policy during the 1980s, specifically referring to the substantial financial and military aid provided to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan during their prolonged war against the Soviet Union. During this time, Osama Bin Laden was a US ally who was a beneficiary of much of this aid, as was Saddam.

All they talk about is terrorism on television.
They tell you to listen.
But they don't really tell you they mission.
They funded al-Qaeda.
And now they blame the Muslim religion.
Even though Bin Laden was a CIA tactician.
They gave him billions of dollars and they funded his purpose.
Fahrenheit 9/11? That's just scratching the surface!

…And of course Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons.
We sold him that shit after Ronald Reagan's election.
Mercenary contractors fighting in a new era
Corporate military banking off the war on terror.

The fact that the US government once supported and funded Bin Laden, the Taliban, and Saddam Hussein is not the main point in Tech's lyrical thesis, but rather the context that leads us into deeper analysis on US foreign policy, the military industrial complex, and the rise of Islamophobia and the War on Terror. By showing how loyalties easily sway, Tech is showing us how the purpose of US interventions abroad are not really about "protecting freedom" or "defending us." Rather, US foreign policy is a chess game played by the capitalist ruling class for the purpose of engineering and maintaining the US Empire , which in essence is serving as the forerunner and protector of the global capitalist system. So-called terrorism and "Muslim extremism" are nothing more than a manufactured fears designed to scare a sizable portion of the American public into supporting these destructive efforts abroad. Samuel Huntington's 1996 book Clash of Civilizations is often looked to as the main driver in this farce of a cultural/religious global war. In supporting Tech's message, Noam Chomsky talks about the obvious contradictions of Huntington's thesis here , as Edward Said further discredits it here . A simple search of stock reports for major weapons manufacturers over the past decade shows how profitable the "war on terror" has been. Understanding geopolitics is often as easy as following the money.

Part of Tech's second verse includes a brilliant critique of state nationalism and patriotism, illustrating how and why government and capitalist interests are not the same as the peoples' interests, despite being advertised as such. While these wars spread and intensify, most of us continue to struggle.

They say the rebels in Iraq still fight for Saddam
But that's bullshit, I'll show you why it's totally wrong
'Cause if another country invaded the hood tonight
It'd be warfare through Harlem and Washington Heights
I wouldn't be fighting for Bush or White America's dream
I'd be fighting for my people's survival and self-esteem
I wouldn't fight for racist churches from the South, my nigga
I'd be fighting to keep the occupation out, my nigga

…. 'Cause innocent people get murdered in the struggle daily
And poor people never get shit and struggle daily

In a remixed version of this track that includes hip-hop vets Chuck D and KRS-One, Tech tweaks the lyrics to this verse in order to show how the "clash of religions" narrative, as highlighted by Chomsky and Said, is falsely perpetrated:

They say that terrorism revolves around the Qur'an
But that's stupid, I'll show you why it's totally wrong
Cause if this country was invaded and crumbled
I'd turn Harlem into a Columbian jungle
And I wouldn't be fighting for a Christian nation
I'd be fighting for survival from extermination
I wouldn't fight for Fox News, them racist niggas
I'd be fighting for the hood, for the faceless niggas

Tech also addresses the hypocrisy of America's fundamentalist Christian sect, which strongly supports the Republican Party, the clash of civilizations/religion narrative, the Israeli Apartheid state, and military interventions abroad. Christian fundamentalism in the US plays an important role as a conduit to white supremacy and class warfare, as seen in its common stance against the interests of both the Black community and the immigrant community, as well as the poor and working-class communities altogether. This conduit has shown itself in the Republican Party's four-decade-long Southern Strategy and the rise of Donald Trump's presidency, which has brought with it overt elements of white supremacy, or as Tech puts it, "devils that run America like 'Birth of a Nation,' a popular white-supremacist propaganda film from 1915:

Government front religious, but their heart is empty
Like a televangelist preaching out of his Bentley
Calling abortion murder in a medical building
But don't give a fuck about bombing Iraqi children
Talking like units in the fucking libretto
Look at their mansions and look at your suburban ghetto
The gulag, the new hood where they send us to live
Cause they don't give a fuck about none of our kids
That's why Blacks and Latinos get the worst education
While devils run America like "Birth of a Nation"
Affirmative action ain't reverse discrimination
That shit is a pathetic excuse for reparations

Fake News, Structural Misinformation, and How the Ruling Class Control Politics

The notion of "fake news" has become a prominent theme in American politics due to Donald Trump's constant use of the term to explain what he views as his unfair treatment and misinterpretation by some media outlets. Ironically, the term is also being used by liberal opponents of Trump to claim that Russia had influenced the Presidential election in Trump's favor. The Washington Post even went as far as publishing a report citing "anonymous groups" to list dozens of online news sources that allegedly served as "instruments of Russian propaganda" during the 2016 Presidential race. Despite some backpedaling on the initial article (to include an editor's note and the removal of some websites from the list), liberal-leaning media outlets like the Washington Post and MSNBC have persisted with this seemingly hysterical and bizarre Russophobic angle to attempt to discredit Trump's presidency. As if Trump's personal history, business dealings, fascist rhetoric, narcissism, constant lies, and hyper-capitalist policy platform are not bad enough.

There are some very interesting points to take from this liberal narrative. One is regarding the corporate media itself, which has both perpetuated the allegations of "fake news" and been accused of delivering it. Ironically, Trump is correct in referring to these news sources as fake. But they are not fake for the reasons he claims they are fake - which is only regarding how they portray things related to him. They are fake because they ceased being news agencies decades ago. They are now part of the entertainment industry. They are concerned with ratings and advertising profit, not with delivering information to the public. Information does not sell, sensationalism does. Fox News knows this just as much as MSNBC and CNN know this. To earn profit, you need ratings. To get ratings, you need people to tune into your channel. To get people to tune into your channel, you need drama, controversy, fear, sex, shock, sensationalism; in other words, entertainment.

Another point is regarding corporate news as a de facto fourth branch of government. Often referred to throughout history as the fourth estate, media and press journalism have long been relied on to provide a valuable fourth branch of checks and balances in the US. However, as time has gone on, rather than uncovering conflicts of interest, exposing backroom deals, and delivering investigative journalism, the media in the US has become both complicit and indifferent in and to government corruption. This was never more evident than in the months leading up to the Iraq War, which according to Australian journalist John Pilger , may have never happened if journalists had done their job of uncovering truths in the face of, and in spite of, power:

"…had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous Islamic State might not now exist."

Media collusion with the power structure has been a central theme to the work of Pilger, who has consistently tied the media's full institutional compliance to what is properly referred to as "the deep state" or "invisible government" through the proliferation of propaganda . This was also the main theme of Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman's 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, as well as the subsequent 1992 documentary by the same name. According to Chomsky and Herman, mass media in the US "are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship , and without overt coercion." Which is to say that profit-driven news not only seeks to appease popular narratives, but also will toe the government line in return for continued access or exclusive scoops, all of which are determined by government officials.

Immortal Technique's 2003 track, The 4th Branch , fortifies the work of Pilger, Chomsky, and Herman by illustrating how the media and its propaganda serve the ruling-class narrative. Released in the aftermath of 9-11 and during the beginnings of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Tech weaves multiple theses into a central theme of propaganda versus reality. The hook sums up the track:

It's like MK-ULTRA, controllin' your brain
Suggestive thinking, causing your perspective to change
They wanna rearrange the whole point of view of the ghetto
The fourth branch of the government, want us to settle
A bandanna full of glittering, generality
Fightin' for freedom and fightin' terror, but what's reality
Read about the history of the place that we live in
And stop letting corporate news tell lies to your children

The opening verse introduces us once again to Huntington's clash-of-civilizations narrative and the role of Evangelical Christians in pushing forth this narrative. Tech focuses on the moral bankruptcy of Christian fundamentalism in the US and how US foreign policy is continuously designed on a base of hypocrisy and misinformation, carried out by agents of the capitalist class:

The voice of racism preachin' the gospel is devilish
A fake church called the prophet Muhammad a terrorist
Forgetting God is not a religion, but a spiritual bond
And Jesus is the most quoted prophet in the Qu'ran
They bombed innocent people, tryin' to murder Saddam
When you gave him those chemical weapons to go to war with Iran
This is the information that they hold back from Peter Jennings
Cause Condoleezza Rice is just a new age Sally Hemings

The remainder of the first verse continues the critique on conservative ideology and Christian fundamentalism, tying them into the ultimate hypocrisies perpetrated in the founding of the United States. The miseducation that most of us are subjected to through years of formal education interplay with Tech's exposure of the public misinformation that disseminates from media sources, all of which combine to produce a hidden history of the US that is a perfectly pliable tool firmly in the hands of the ruling class:

I break it down with critical language and spiritual anguish
The Judas I hang with, the guilt of betraying Christ
You murdered and stole his religion, and painting him white
Translated in psychologically tainted philosophy
Conservative political right wing, ideology
Glued together sloppily, the blasphemy of a nation
Got my back to the wall, cause I'm facin' assassination
Guantanamo Bay, federal incarceration
How could this be, the land of the free, home of the brave
Indigenous holocaust and the home of the slaves
Corporate America, dancin' offbeat to the rhythm
You really think this country, never sponsored terrorism
Human rights violations, we continue the saga
El Savador and the contras in Nicaragua
And on top of that, you still wanna take me to prison
Just cause I won't trade humanity for patriotism

Returning to Vinnie Paz's track, Keep Movin' On, we see the experiences and views of an American soldier, handpicked from the working class to serve in illegal and immoral wars and occupations abroad. The verse touches on everything from the recruitment process and the brainwashing effects of patriotism to the gruesome effects of serving as tools of war for the capitalist ruling class :

I signed up cause they promised me some college money
I ain't the smartest motherfucker but I'm not a dummy
They told me I would be stationed in places hot and sunny
I had a lot of pride. Motherfuckers got it from me
These people over here innocent. They never harmed me
My sergeant tried to convince me that they would try to bomb me
I feel like an outsider stuck inside this army
Everybody brainwashed. American zombies
I ain't realized how much it set me back
Until I lost my leg and then they sent me back
I don't have anything now. I'm left with scraps
From a government who created AIDS, invented crack
People told me not to join. I tried to prove 'em wrong
Now I'm homeless and I'm cold without no food thas' warm
I keep asking myself, "What did I do that's wrong?"
And the government telling me, "Keep it movin' on"

Tech's closing comments on the 4th Branch summarizes the class-component that shapes the military industrial complex, a system designed to create, maintain, and protect private profit. Echoing Paz's verse on the experience of soldiers, Tech illustrates our role in this system while touching on the constant propaganda we are bombarded with, which pushes this narrative of "we," as if "we" have anything in common with the American ruling/capitalist class and their servants in mass media.

The fourth branch of the government AKA the media
Seems to now have a retirement plan for ex-military officials
As if their opinion was at all unbiased
A machine shouldn't speak for men
So shut the fuck up you mindless drone
And you know it's serious
When these same media outfits are spending millions of dollars on a PR campaign
To try to convince you they're fair and balanced
When they're some of the most ignorant, and racist people
Giving that type of mentality a safe haven
We act like we share in the spoils of war that they do
We die in wars, we don't get the contracts to make money off 'em afterwards
We don't get weapons contracts, nigga
We don't get cheap labor for our companies, nigga
We are cheap labor, nigga
Turn off the news and read, nigga
Read... read... read

Tech's final verse is powerfully connected to liberation movements of the past, echoing among other the great Irish socialist, James Connolly, and his call for international, working-class solidarity during the beginnings of World War I. In his A Continental Revolution (1914) , Connolly sums up the profit motive and class-basis of war:

"… [in war] the working class are to be sacrificed that a small clique of rulers and armament makers may sate their lust for power and their greed for wealth. Nations are to be obliterated, progress stopped, and international hatreds erected into deities to be worshipped.

… against the patriotism of capitalism - the patriotism which makes the interest of the capitalist class the supreme test of duty and right - I place the patriotism of the working class, the patriotism which judges every public act by its effect upon the fortunes of those who toil.

To me, therefore, the socialist of another country is a fellow-patriot, as the capitalist of my own country is a natural enemy."

"Fake news" is simply propaganda constructed through ruling-class channels to boost systems and cultures that support the power structure. In other words, it is the status quo. It is nothing new. It happens rather naturally, flowing from concentrations of money and power. Regarding the newfound liberal version of "fake news," the final point to consider relates to the idea of an outside influence on American politics. Long before the Russia hysteria surfaced, the American political system had been bought and sold numerous times over. To suggest that politicians from either major party ever represented the interests of American people is incredibly naïve. Campaign financing and corporate lobbying determine who wins political races and which legislation is introduced and passed in Congress. Long before Russia was accused of influencing elections, Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms were proven to influence elections. Long before Trump supposedly got a boost from Putin, official US policy had been directly shaped by Israeli interests in the Middle East.

Access to oil has always determined foreign policy, access to capital for big business has always determined economic policy, and the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision has ensured that the Kochs', Soros', Gates', and Buffetts' of the world will always hold more political weight within the electoral system than 100 million voters combined, if they so choose. Whether it's Goldman Sachs, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Koch brothers, George Soros, or Putin, the American people have never had a say in what the political machine does or doesn't do. This fact renders the Trump-Russia hysteria as moot. Any real sense of US national interests has long been replaced by the global capitalist order, if they ever truly existed at all. In terms of political empowerment and self-determination for the working-class majority within the US, a foreign president is no different than any number of nameless American millionaire hedge-fund donors.

The Seamless Political Machine and the Failures of Identity Politics: From Reagan to Trump

Within electoral politics, lesser-evilism has become the dominant stance for at least half of the American population. For individual voters, the 2-party duopoly has been mostly abandoned as identifications with either party have reached near-historic lows . As of 2015, nearly half of registered voters identify as something other than Republican or Democrat. However, despite this overwhelming rejection of the 2-party system, many of these voters continue to choose what they view as the "lesser evil" in voting for candidates from one of the two major parties.

Since the Reagan administration and introduction of a seamless political machine based in neoliberalism (an intensification of capitalism), presidential administrations regardless of party have been almost indistinguishable. Despite this seamless identity that's emerged, many voters still insist on claiming differences between the two corporate parties, even if it means choosing what they view as the lesser-evil. The fact that some public radical intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Angela Davis have proposed lesser-evilism lends this direction some undue credence. However, when we step back and analyze the big picture, away from the emotions that often emerge in the heat of electoral moments, it is easy to see that lesser-evilism, as an electoral tactic embraced by the Left, has pushed the entire political system to the right over the past 40 years. Clear evidence of this shift can be seen in both the Clinton and Obama administrations, which carried forth Reagan-esque economic policy, while also gutting welfare (Clinton), facilitating mass incarceration of the Black community (Clinton), escalating US bombing campaigns (Obama), pushing historical levels of deportation of immigrants (Obama), and maintaining the attack on civil liberties that began under W. Bush (Obama). Even more evidence is the emergence of Bernie Sanders as a candidate who is viewed as being an outlier of the Democratic Party, despite an ideological identity that is consistent with run-of-the-mill liberalism of old. Yet, when compared to a Democratic Party that has clearly shifted rightward, toward more hard-line capitalist-friendly policies that have characterized the neoliberal era started by Reagan, as well as highly-destructive imperialist missions abroad, Sanders looks like a radical.

Killer Mike's 2012 track, Reagan, brings us to the start of the neoliberal era. In a social context, specifically regarding the treatment of Black communities throughout the country, the Reagan era merely picked up on hundreds of years of oppression. By implementing an official "war on drugs," this era provided the basis for what Michelle Alexander termed The New Jim Crow , in her book with the same title. It also created a new wing of the military industrial complex through the construction of an extensive for-profit prison system and widespread militarization of domestic police forces. Mike's second verse introduces us to the Reagan environment, as experienced by the Black community:

The end of the Reagan Era, I'm like 'leven, twelve, or
Old enough to understand the shit'll change forever
They declared the war on drugs like a war on terror
But what it really did was let the police terrorize whoever
But mostly black boys, but they would call us "niggers"
And lay us on our belly, while they fingers on they triggers
They boots was on our head, they dogs was on our crotches
And they would beat us up if we had diamonds on our watches
And they would take our drugs and money, as they pick our pockets
I guess that that's the privilege of policing for some profit

The intensification of American policing in poor communities of color served a bigger purpose. As Mike explains in the same verse, it bolstered the cornerstone of US economics and capitalism: free labor. As per the 13th amendment of the US Constitution , "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." In other words, the forced free labor of convicts in the US prison system is still legal. And the "war on drugs" helped to create nearly 1.3 million free laborers for mainstream corporations , as the prison population in the US grew from roughly 300,000 in 1980 to over 1.5 million in 2015 . Killer Mike touches on this:

But thanks to Reaganomics, prisons turned to profits
Cause free labor is the cornerstone of US economics
Cause slavery was abolished, unless you are in prison
You think I am bullshitting, then read the 13th Amendment
Involuntary servitude and slavery it prohibits
That's why they giving drug offenders time in double digits

Mike closes the track by moving the focus from Reagan to the system, telling us that Presidents (and most politicians, for that matter) are nothing more than "employees of the country's real masters," serving capitalist interests rather than the masses of people:

Ronald Reagan was an actor, not at all a factor
Just an employee of the country's real masters
Just like the Bushes, Clinton and Obama
Just another talking head telling lies on teleprompters
If you don't believe the theory, then argue with this logic
Why did Reagan and Obama both go after Gaddafi
We invaded sovereign soil, going after oil
Taking countries is a hobby paid for by the oil lobby
Same as in Iraq, and Afghanistan
And Ahmadinejad say they coming for Iran
They only love the rich, and how they loathe the poor
If I say any more they might be at my door
(Shh..) Who the fuck is that staring in my window
Doing that surveillance on Mr. Michael Render
I'm dropping off the grid before they pump the lead
I leave you with four words: I'm glad Reagan dead

Reagan the man may be dead, but his spirit has survived in symbolic terms through the perpetuation of neoliberalism's capitalist/imperialist order. The actions of our last President, Obama, who may appear to be the polar opposite of Reagan in any superficial analysis, confirms this perpetuation. The 2015 remix, Obamanation 4 , hammers this truth home in magnificent fashion. Opening with excerpts of speeches from Malcolm X, the track sets up a premise of systemic analysis as Malcolm rails against the "international Western power structure (capitalism)," calling upon "anyone, I don't care what color you are, as long as you want to change the miserable conditions on this earth."

Echoing Killer Mike's track, M-1 (from Dead Prez) uses his verse in Obamanation 4 to expose the systemic nature of our political system, illustrating how not only the Democratic Party, but also the first Black President, equal nothing more than cogs in an imperialist machine. His analysis begins by disregarding the propaganda stemming from right-wing sources like Fox News and syndicated radio, all of which claimed Obama represented a diversion from politics-as-usual by having some mythological "radical-left-wing agenda." In reality, Obama's administration continued, and even escalated in some cases, America's imperialist endeavors abroad. M-1 flips this "right-wing propaganda" and puts it back on progressives, rhetorically asking "who you gonna blame" now that the man in charge is no longer a white Republican named Bush:

After you divorce yourself from the right wing propaganda campaign, it's all simple and plain.
America customed the game.
Your President got an African name, now who you gonna blame?
When they drop them bombs out of them planes.
Using depleted uranium, babies looking like two-headed aliens.
Follow the money trail, it leads to the criminal.
Ain't nothing subliminal to it, that's how they do it.

Continuing on this theme, M-1 pinpoints Obama as the new head of the US' global imperialist agenda, even touching on the irony of a Black man carrying out neo-colonialism with white-supremacist underpinnings. M-1's verse is not only insightful in its blanket condemnation of the 2-party machine, but also in its inherent warning about the dangers of a brand of identity politics that seeks to plug folks from historically marginalized groups into the power structure. Ultimately, to M-1, as to all radicals and revolutionaries, it's the system that drives our injustices, not the figureheads chosen to facilitate the system:

See the game they run.
Give a fuck if he's cunning, articulate, and handsome.
Afghanistan held for ransom.
By the hand of this black man, neo-colonial puppet.
White power with a black face, he said fuck it I'll do it.
…. Last stage of imperialism, I ain't kiddin.
In the immortal words of Marvin Gaye 'This ain't living.'

On the same track, Black the Ripper picks up on M-1's analysis, keeping the focus on Obama as nothing more than a figurehead of a system that must be opposed. This particular verse includes a harsh critique, deploying the house-slave mentality in describing Black figures in power, as well as their accomplices:

See it's not where you're from, it's where you're at.
He's sitting in the White House, so who cares if he's black?
And why's there still soldiers out there in Iraq?
Natural resources ain't yours, it's theirs, give it back!
You're just another puppet, but I'm not surprised
Look at Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.
They didn't change shit, house nigga's fresh off the slave ship.

The Obamanation remix includes a verse from Lupe Fiasco's track, Words I Never Said. The verse fits the overall narrative perfectly, keeping focus on systemic operations. Lupe takes the analysis even further, touching on various social aspects stemming from capitalism and imperialism, most notably those which keep the American public in line, agreeable, and ignorant through a process of devalued education, fear-mongering, and mind-numbing celebrity gossip. All of this, Lupe suggests, leads to what Chomsky has referred to as "manufactured consent," which he strongly rejects:

I really think the war on terror is a bunch of bullshit.
Just a poor excuse for you to use up all your bullets.
How much money does it take to really make a full clip?
9/11, building 7, did they really pull it?
Uh, and a bunch of other coverups.
Your child's future was the first to go with budget cuts.
If you think that hurts, then wait, here comes the uppercut.
The school was garbage in the first place, that's on the up and up.
Keep you at the bottom but tease you with the upper crust.
You get it, then they move it, so you never keeping up enough.
If you turn on TV, all you see's a bunch of "what the fucks."
Dude is dating so and so, blabbering 'bout such and such.
And that ain't Jersey Shore, homey, that's the news.
And these the same people supposedly telling us the truth.
Limbaugh is a racist, Glenn Beck is a racist.
Gaza strip was getting bombed, Obama didn't say shit.
That's why I ain't vote for him, next one either.
I'm a part of the problem, my problem is I'm peaceful.
And I believe in the people.

Lowkey concludes the remix with a strong verse on American imperialism, an agenda that has become indistinguishable between various Presidents and both corporate parties. He points to specific missions carried out under the Obama administration, seemingly calling to attention those who continue to portray Obama as a separation from the Bush administration. The verse serves as a prophetic warning about Syria, and nails home M-1's earlier reduction of Obama as just another "neo-colonial puppet" doing the job that every American President is called upon to do, including bombing an African country (Libya) and disposing of a leader (Gaddafi) known for promoting pan-Africanism throughout the continent:

Was the bigger threat from Osama or from Obama?
Military bases from Chagos to Okinawa.
I say things that other rappers won't say.
Cause my mind never closed like Guantanamo Bay.
Hope you didn't build a statue or tattoo your arm.
Cause the drones are still flying over Pashtunistan.
Did he defend the war? No! He extended more.
He even had the time to attempt a coup in Ecuador.
Morales and Chavez, the state's are on a hunt for ya.
Military now stationed on bases in Columbia.
Take a trip to the past and tell em I was right.
Ask Ali Abunimah or Jeremiah Wright.
Drones over Pakistan, Yemen, and Libya.
Is Obama the bomber getting ready for Syria?
First black president, the masses were hungry.
But the same president just bombed an African country.

The false hopes placed in the first Black President highlight the failures and pitfalls of identity politics, a political approach that is grounded in assimilation. This approach to social justice attempts to mold a multicultural, multi-sex, non-gender-descript power elite by simply placing individuals who identify with these hyper-marginalized groups into the existing power structure. Thus, the ultimate goal is more Black bankers, more gay landlords, more transgender politicians, more women Senators, and so on. This approach has led to the creation of what the left-wing publication Black Agenda Report (BAR) has deemed the black misleadership class in the US. Obama was the ultimate product of this class, but not the totality of it. For as long as identity politics seek to assimilate into the power structure, this class will persist, as will the formation of other such classes: the gay misleadership class, the transgender misleadership class, the women's misleadership class (Hillary), etc..., because, ultimately, the power structure does not exist to serve the people, no matter how diverse it is. Nas touches on this in his 1999 track, I Want to Talk to You , which addresses the frustrations of living under a government that does not represent:

Step up to the White House, let me in
What's my reason for being, I'm ya next of kin
And we built this motherfucker
You wanna kill me because my hunger?
Mr. America, young black niggas want ya
I wanna talk to the man, understand?
Understand this motherfuckin G-pack in my hand
Look what happened to San Fran
Young girl hit by policeman
Twelve shots up in her dome, damn
….Dissin us, discrimination different races
Tax payers pay for more jail for Black Latin faces

Coming full circle, Nas closes the track by delivering a prophetic warning against identity politics, characterizing BAR's "black misleadership class" as nothing more than "fake black leaders [who] are puppets, always talking 'bout the city budget (rather than addressing problems that plague their communities)."

What y'all waitin for the world to blow up
Before you hear this rewind this 4 minutes before we timeless
Let y'all niggas bang my shit before Saddam hits
Let Nastradamus tell us what time it is
They try to buy us with doe
Fake black leaders are puppets, always talking 'bout the city budget
The news got it all confused lyin to the public
They eyes watchin stay wise move above it
Water floods predicted, hurricanes, twisters
Its all signs of the Armageddon, three sixes
People reverse the system, politics vs. religion
Holy war, Muslim vs. Christians
Niggas in high places, they don't got the balls for this
People in power sit back and watch them slaughter us
Mr. President I assume it was negligence
The streets upside down, I'm here to represent this

Confronting the Power Structure

Modern working-class resistance is still rooted in Marx's class war analysis, whereas the proletariat (those of us who are forced to depend on our labor to survive) finds itself fighting for its collective life against the bourgeoisie (the owners of the means of production) and the layered power structure created by this economic realtionship. It is also crucially intertwined in the fights against other forms of structural oppression, including white supremacy, patriarchy, and misogyny; because, quite frankly, all forms of oppression that splinter the working class must be effectively destroyed if the working class has any hopes of overcoming the capitalist system.

In echoing Malcolm X's famous "the ballot or the bullet" speech from 1964, working-class resistance must include "action on all fronts by whatever means necessary." Since the police represent the front lines of a criminal justice system inherently designed to enforce class oppression, as well as structural white supremacy, working-class resistance must include a firm stance against not only police brutality and mass incarceration, but also against the very foundation of modern policing, which is rooted in "slave-catching" and strike-breaking. This means standing in blanket opposition to policing as an institution designed to "serve and protect" capitalist property and enforce laws created by a capitalist ruling class with capitalist interests in mind. Reflecting on the Black community's especially intense history of oppression at the hands of police, hip hop has delivered a proper analysis and call to action. From NWA's seminal track Fuck tha Police (1988) to David Banner and Tito Lo's Black Fist (2016), the armed extension of the capitalist state is consistently exposed, as it has left countless Black lives lying in its tracks with no signs of slowing. Banner and Lo's track captures the sheer anger and frustration stemming from this reality:

[Banner]

These crackers got drones. They are flying their saucers
Keep your white jesus, don't pray to your crosses
They are burning our churches, K.R.I.T. pass me the UZI
I know how to work it; I know how to Squirt it
No Martin, No Luther, No King, No Marching No choirs don't sing
The same christian lovers that raped our GrandMothers and hung our GrandFathers from trees
They are enemies!
Blood on the leaves, blood on the streets, blood on our feet
I'm sick of walking, I'm sick of dogs getting sicced on us, I'm sick of barking
I'm sick of spitting written sentences listeners don't get
Don't get, don't get, don't get!
Because they got Chains on their brains and that is not a diss

[Lo]

… I'm staying religious, cause we stay in the trenches
And gotta play where they lynch us, done came to my senses
I bet them crackas never came through my fences
Ya burn up ya cross, and I'll burn up ya corpse
Then I turn and bang and do the same to the witness
Hang 'em and dangle 'em in the street looking up at his feet
So you never forget this we did this for Martin and Malcolm, even Mandela
Jimmie Lee Jackson and then Medgar Evers
For Clyde Kennard, hard labor slaving in the yard
For Huey, for Hampton, for Bobby we GODLY
For Jordan Davis we gon' play this, for Sandra Bland we gon' stand
I'm still out here stomping, for Janaya Thompson, from the Coast to Compton

The video for Black Fist shows a series of events that encapsulate what working-class justice would look like outside the parameters of capitalism and white supremacy. This includes a people's arrest, people's trial, and subsequent execution of a police officer who was acquitted of murdering a Black teenager. The fact that this hypothetical scenario could be remotely controversial illustrates how strong we've been conditioned to equate our current system with any real sense of justice, of which there is very little if any. The environment of injustice that is bred under so-called legalities is masterfully summed up in Lauryn Hill's Mystery of Iniquity (2002):

Ya'll can't handle the truth in a courtroom of lies
Perjures the jurors
Witness despised
Crooked lawyers
False Indictments publicized
Its entertainment the arraignments
The subpoenas
High profile gladiators in bloodthirsty arenas
Enter the Dragon
Black-robe crooked-balance
Souls bought and sold and paroled for thirty talents
Court reporter catch the surface on the paper
File it in the system not acknowledged by the Maker
Swearing by the bible blatantly blasphemous
Publicly perpetrating that "In God We Trust"
Cross-examined by a master manipulator
The faster intimidator
Receiving the judge's favor
Deceiving sabers doing injury to they neighbors
For status, gratis, apparatus and legal waivers
See the bailiff
Representing security
Holding the word of God soliciting perjury
The prosecution
Political prostitution
The more money you pay.. the further away solution

…Blind leading the blind
Guilty never defined
Filthy as swine
A generation purin it's own mind
Legal extortion
Blown out of proportion
In vein deceit
The truth is obsolete
Only two positions:
Victimizer or Victim
Both end up in destruction trusting this crooked system

Running hand in hand with capitalism's version of "justice" is the underlying dominance of white supremacy. In the formation of the United States as a nation, as well as the customs, cultures, and systems we've become accustomed to during this process, white supremacy has played a formidable role. It has created an all-powerful wedge among the working class, rendering its potential limited. Its divisive message is often hidden in powerfully emotional rhetoric regarding "American values" and patriotism, all of which secretly (or not so secretly in the era of Trump) call for protecting the Eurocentrism that has systematically devalued black skin in dominant American culture. In an old-school track from 1991, Ice Cube uses brilliant analogy and powerful lyrics while condemning America's history of white supremacy and challenging the toxicity of patriotic rhetoric, concluding with the need to " kill Sam":

I wanna kill him, cause he tried to play me like the trick
But you see, I'm the wrong nigga to fuck with
I got the A to the motherfuckin K, and it's ready to rip
Slapped in my banana clip
And I'm lookin.. (lookin..)
Is he in watts, oakland, philly or brooklyn?
It seems like he got the whole country behind him
So it's sort of hard to find him
But when I do, gotta put my gat in his mouth
Pump seventeen rounds make his brains hang out
Cause the shit he did was uncalled for
Tried to fuck a brother up the ass like a small whore
And that shit ain't fly
So now I'm settin up, the ultimate drive-by
And when you hear this shit
It make the world say "damn! I wanna kill sam"

…Here's why I wanna kill the punk
Cause he tried to take a motherfuckin chunk of the funk
He came to my house, I let 'em bail in
Cause he said he was down with the l.m
He gave up a little dap
Then turned around, and pulled out a gat
I knew it was a caper
I said, "please don't kill my mother, " so he raped her
Tied me up, took me outside
And I was thrown in a big truck
And it was packed like sardines
Full of niggas, who fell for the same scheme
Took us to a place and made us work
All day and we couldn't have shit to say
Broke up the families forever
And to this day black folks can't stick together
And it's odd..
Broke us down, made us pray - to his god
And when I think about it
It make me say "damn! I wanna kill sam"

…Now in ninety-one, he wanna tax me
I remember, the son of a bitch used to axe me
And hang me by a rope til my neck snapped
Now the sneaky motherfucker wanna ban rap
And put me under dirt or concrete
But god, can see through a white sheet
Cause you the devil in drag
You can burn your cross well I'll burn your flag
Try to give me the h-I-v
So I can stop makin babies like me
And you're givin dope to my people chump
Just wait til we get over that hump
Cause yo' ass is grass cause I'mma blast
Can't bury rap, like you buried jazz
Cause we stopped bein whores, stop doin floors
So bitch you can fight your own wars
So if you see a man in red white and blue
Gettin chased by the lench mob crew
It's a man who deserves to buckle
I wanna kill sam cause he ain't my motherfuckin uncle!

Ultimately, resistance in the 21st century must focus on the inherent inequities created by the capitalist system and the corrollary social hierarchies that support these inequities. There simply is no choice but to destroy and replace this system. Gang Starr's 1998 track Robbin' Hood Theory hammers this home, urging us to "squeeze the juice out of all the suckers with power, and pour some back out so as to water the flowers." Just as reparations are needed to begin to address the history of Black enslavement in America, so too is mass working-class expropriation of the capitalist class. In realizing the illegitimacies of the wealth accumulated under this system , we must formulate bold moves toward recuperating it for all of society. Guru preaches, leaving us with our battle cry:

Now that we're getting somewhere, you know we got to give back
For the youth is the future no doubt that's right and exact
Squeeze the juice out, of all the suckers with power
And pour some back out, so as to water the flowers
This world is ours, that's why the demons are leery
It's our inheritance; this is my Robin Hood Theory... Robin Hood Theory

… They innocent, they know not what they face
While politicians save face genius minds lay to waste
If I wasn't kickin rhymes I'd be kickin down doors
Creatin social change and defendin the poor
The God's always been militant, and ready for war
We're gonna snatch up the ringleaders send em home in they drawers
But first where's the safe at? Let's make em show us
And tell em hurry up, give up the loot that they owe us
We bringin it back, around the way to our peeps
Cause times are way too deep, we know the Code of the Streets
Meet your defeat; this is my Robin Hood Theory... my Robin Hood Theory

…Necessary by all means, sort of like Malcolm
Before it's too late; I create, the best outcome
So I take this opportunity, yes to ruin the
Devilish forces fucking up my black community
And we ain't doing no more interviews
Til we get paid out the frame, like motherfucking Donahue
We're taking over radio, and wack media
Cause systematically they getting greedier and greedier
Conquering turfs with my ill organization
Takin out the man while we scan the information
You wanna rhyme you best await son
You can't even come near, if you ain't got our share
You front on us this year, consider yourself blown out of here
Yeah... by my Robin Hood Theory