The Short, Tragic, and Instructive Life of Anarcho-Punk

By Jackson Albert Mann

“I don’t think that the politics of anarcho-punk had that much to do with anarchism anyway… more like militant liberalism.”[1]

This is how Ramsey Kanaan, ex-vocalist of the Scottish punk band Political Asylum and founder of left-wing publishing houses AK Press and PM Press, characterized the politics of anarcho-punk, the wave of anarchist punk rock bands that washed over the United Kingdom in the early 1980s. His reflection comes from the final section of Ian Glasper’s colossal anarcho-punk oral history, within which similar sentiments are expressed by many former anarcho-punk musicians. They are right to feel ambivalent. In the first years of Thatcher’s rule, anarcho-punk developed into a surprisingly dynamic politico-cultural movement. Yet, by the end of the decade the movement had disappeared just as quickly as it had emerged, leaving behind a few catchy hooks, some memorable graphic design, but virtually no coherent political culture. For all of its bluster about political commitment, anarcho-punk was a spectacular failure.

Reading through Glasper’s numerous interviews, one is tempted to locate the origins of anarcho-punk’s aimless demise within the movement itself. Indeed, this is what many participants, fans, and scholars believe. According to Punk graphic design scholar Ana Raposo, it was competing “claims for authenticity” within the movement that generated the “cliquey, insular, and negative” attitudes which led to its downfall.[2][3] I would argue, however, that anarcho-punk’s eventual anticlimactic decline was a symptom of something external to the movement; the dire position of left-wing politics in the 1980s UK. To dismiss anarcho-punk without a proper analysis of its full politico-historical context is to do the contemporary Left a great disservice. An exploration of the movement’s rise and collapse holds important lessons for socialist cultural activists now aiming to construct what William Harris recently called “working-class cultural institutions.”[4]

A Political Economic Perspective

Alastair Gordon is one of the very few punk scholars to have analyzed the anarcho-punk movement from a political-economic perspective. In his short monograph on legendary anarcho-punk band Crass, Gordon proposes that the historical material foundation of anarcho-punk’s emergence was the UK’s rising youth unemployment rate combined with the effects of the country’s still comparatively generous welfare state.[5] At the turn of the decade, the UK unemployment rate doubled from six to about thirteen percent and remained around this level until 1987.[6] Lack of jobs created a state of enforced idleness for tens of thousands of young people and due to the welfare state’s material support, they had no compelling reason to protest or change their condition. This produced a social environment in which large numbers of youth began to pursue full-time their interests in a whole host of cultural activities, including music-making. It was this free time and disposable income, more than anything else, that formed the foundation of anarcho-punk’s most compelling structural feature; its economic independence from the UK music industry. Accordingly, the nature of anarcho-punk’s opposition to the music industry went far beyond the rhetorically subversive gestures of its first-wave predecessors such as the Sex Pistols or the Clash, who were branded as sell-outs by anarcho-punks for signing major label deals.

The early 1980s saw an explosion of anarchist-flavored independent, often band-run record labels, venues, and recording studios, as well numerous band- and fan-edited magazines. Punk scholars are correct to attribute much of the impetus for this explosion to Crass. Using the financial resources they gained from their unexpectedly successful 1978 debut album, Feeding of the 5000, the band established their own record label and press at Dial House, an informal artist colony and collective living space north of London, which drummer Penny Rimbaud had been running for almost a decade. It goes without saying that Crass’ do-it-yourself approach to cultural production was an inspiration to many young people in the UK. But, what made the early 1980s unique was the material reality of mass youth unemployment. It was these conditions that allowed the widespread replication of the Crass model by hundreds of young Punk musicians.

Indeed, Crass Records became merely the first in a vast patronage network of loosely-affiliated band-run record labels independent of the music industry proper. Anarcho-punk groups such as Conflict, Flux of Pink Indians, The Mob, Poison Girls, and Chumbawamba, all of which got their start on Crass, went on to form their own labels. Despite the excessive amount of ink that has been spilled to interrogate anarcho-punk’s subversive aesthetics, it was the sustained economic independence of this expanding patronage network that was the truly defining feature of anarcho-punk as an oppositional politico-cultural movement. The movement’s emphasis on its structural-economic autonomy and hostility to the capitalist music industry as the primary elements of its authenticity were in fact its most salient connections to anarchist ideologies, resembling a form of cultural syndicalism. These were advantageous conditions for an emerging oppositional movement of politically committed musicians. So why did nothing much come of anarcho-punk?

The Patronage Network Needs a Patron

In a recent article I co-authored with art historian Patricia Manos on Nueva Canción Chilena, the political folk music revival that swept Chile during Salvador Allende’s tumultuous socialist administration, I claim that for a politically committed culture to blossom, it must be actively mobilized by political groups.[7] In the case of Nueva Canción Chilena, a musical movement that already possessed a certain level of internal organization was actively courted, supported, and finally incorporated into the structure of the Communist Party of Chile (PCCh) and later on, into Allende’s Unidad Popular (UP) socialist coalition government. In both instances this was done through the establishment of political record labels run semi-autonomously by members of socialist and Communist youth organizations.

Anarcho-punk emerged in very different circumstances. The early 1980s were a disastrous moment for left-wing politics in the UK and no militant left-wing organization capable of courting, supporting, and absorbing this wave of young, politically committed musicians existed. The Labour Party, never a bastion of radical leftism, was, nevertheless, entering the first years of a decades-long crisis, a catastrophic period during which the Party was thoroughly neoliberalized by a hegemonic, Thatcherist Toryism. Despite this, individual anarcho-punk musicians and bands did attempt to forge formal connections with issue-based political organizations such as the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), and numerous anti-fascist and anarchist splinter groups. However, these organizations found themselves in a similar position to anarcho-punk: that is, the lack of an ascendant progressive movement left them atomized, often ineffective, and in no position to be the patrons of a nationwide cultural movement.

Attempts were made to mobilize the anarcho-punk movement for political action independent of organizations. Working through the structure of environmentalist NGO Greenpeace’s London office, a coalition of anarcho-punk musicians and fans organized the Stop The City (STC) protest of September 29th, 1983, during which several thousand activists occupied London’s financial district and severely impacted its normal operations. A second STC took place on March 29th, 1984. Notably, while a large trade union demonstration in support of the 1984 Miners’ Strike was held in London on the same day, no effort was made to integrate the two events. Punk scholar Rich Cross believes that anarcho-punk’s inability to develop a meaningful relationship with a trade union movement in the midst of a historic strike “highlighted not only the weaknesses in the culture’s ability to broker alliances, but also… its lack of interest [in] a wider common cause.”[8]

A Lesson In Tragedy

Cross may be right that by 1984 anarcho-punk musicians' interest in building coalitions with left-wing organizations was waning rapidly. A deeper analysis, however, reveals this developing apathy as a consequence of external factors. It was the declining UK Left’s inability to court this musical movement, a clear expression of general political, economic, and cultural discontent within the mass of young people, that led to anarcho-punk’s inward turn. Without the patronage and momentum of an ascendant Left, anarcho-punk became an insular world and its most negative aspects, such as competing claims of ideological purity, fracturing cliques, and anti-political apathy, became its defining features.

Reduced to its angry rhetoric and subversive aesthetic, anarcho-punk may appear as a utopian farce, in which masses of idealistic youths screamed truth to power over crunching chords and pounding drums, but took little interest in real political action. In context, however, the anarcho-punk movement represents something very different; a cultural expression of mass discontent emerging just as the political forces necessary for its development were entering full retreat. Anarcho-punk’s very lack of direction constitutes yet another profound tragedy that took place during a period of British history already filled with bitter setbacks for the working class. In the dark Thatcherist years following the National Union of Mineworkers’ devastating defeat in the 1984 strike, anarcho-punk’s cohesion as a unified politico-cultural movement disintegrated, and what could have been the soundtrack of a heroic left-wing resurgence became the last thing the British working class heard before lapsing into a decades-long neoliberal coma.

Notes

[1] Ian Glasper, The Day The Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk 1980-1984 (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2014), 446.

[2] Ana Raposo, “Rival Tribal Rebel Revel: The Anarcho-Punk Movement and Sub-cultural Internecine Rivalries,” in The Aesthetic of Our Anger: Anarcho-Punk, Politics and Music. Edited by Mike Dines and Matthew Worley (New York, NY: Minor Compositions, 2016), 89.

[3] Glasper, The Day The Country Died, 410.

[4] William Harris, “Why We Need Working-Class Cultural Institutions,” Jacobin Magazine, July 18th, 2020, https://jacobinmag.com/2020/07/social-poetics-working-class-culture.

[5] Alastair Gordon, Crass Reflections (London, UK: Active Distribution, 2016), 89-90.

[6] James Denman and Paul McDonald. “Unemployment Statistics from 1881 to the Present Day.” Labor Market Trends 104, no. 15-18 (Winter 1996).

[7] Jackson Albert Mann and Patricia Manos, “The Case for a Culture International: Learning from the 20th Century Latin American Left,” Socialist Forum 2, no. 1 (Winter 2020).

[8] Rich Cross, “‘Stop The City Showed Another Possibility’: Mobilization and Movement in Anarcho-Punk,” in The Aesthetic of Our Anger: Anarcho-Punk, Politics and Music. Edited by Mike Dines and Matthew Worley (New York, NY: Minor Compositions, 2016), 143.

Further Reading

Berger, George. The Story of Crass. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2009.

Beastly, Russ; Binns, Rebecca. “The Evolution of an Anarcho-Punk Narrative, 1978-1984.” In Ripped, Torn, and Cut: Pop, Politics, and Punk Fanzines from 1976. Edited by the Subcultures Network, 129-149. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2018.

Cross, Rich. “‘There Is No Authority But Yourself’: The Individual and the Collective in British Anarcho-Punk.” Music & Politics 4, no. 2 (Summer 2010).

Donaghey, Jim. “Bakunin Brand Vodka: An Exploration in the Anarchist-punk and Punk-anarchism.” Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 1 (2013): 138-170.

Gosling, Tim. “‘Not For Sale’: The Underground Network of Anarcho-Punk.” In Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual. Edited by Andy Bennett and Richard A. Peterson, 168-183. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004.

Ignorant, Steve; Pottinger, Steve. The Rest Is Propaganda. London, UK: Southern Records, 2010.

Lake, Steve. Zounds Demystified. London, UK: Active Distribution Publishers, 2013.

Robb, John. Punk Rock: An Oral History. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2012.

Rimbaud, Penny. Shibboleth: My Revolting Life. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 1998.

Rimbaud, Penny. The Diamond Signature & The Death of Imagination. Oakland, CA: AK Press, 1999.

Rimbaud, Penny. The Last of the Hippies. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2015.

Savage, John. England’s Dreaming: The Sex Pistols and Punk Rock. London, UK: Faber & Faber, 1991.

John Stuart Mill’s Socialist Side

By Ezra Pugh

While one cannot label John Stuart Mill a socialist, his sympathy and openness to some socialist ideas may surprise modern readers. While regarded today as a patriarch of free market classical liberalism, in a series of articles originally published in The Fortnightly Review between February and April 1879 – later included in the edited volume Socialism (1891) – Mill provides a critical but surprisingly sympathetic assessment of the socialist ideas of his day. While the first volume of Capital by Karl Marx had been published by the time of Mill’s writing, he makes no reference to the work or Marx, and his analysis is limited to pre-Marxian socialist thinkers. While Mill dismisses the great majority of the arguments of the socialists, he acknowledges the validity of many of their frustrations with capitalism, and even goes so far as to endorse some schemes that would be decried as socialism by the modern free marketeer.

The timing of Mill’s analysis was no accident. At the time of his writing in 1879, the Western world was deeply embroiled in the Long Depression of 1873-1896, the worst economic crisis to that point since the advent of industrialization. As the crisis dragged on, doubt in the supremacy of private property as the best form social relation had become widespread throughout the working classes of the Western world. Misery and poverty were rampant, even in the most advanced cities of the most advanced nations. The industrial revolution fundamentally changed society, and new problems required new solutions. As a result, Mill wrote, “the working classes are entitled to claim that the whole field of social institutions should be re-examined, and every question considered as if it now arose for the first time” (Mill, 1891, p. 68). Mill attempts to compare the established idea of private property to the new ideas of socialism and deduce which would be the better fit for society going forward.

Mill divides his analysis of socialism into two main parts. “There is first,” Mill writes, “the judgement of Socialism on existing institutions and practices and on their results; and secondly, the various plans which it has propounded for doing better” (Mill, 1891, p. 69). Socialism – or any movement which seeks to change a society’s status quo – must both make a negative case, diagnosing the ills of society as it exists, and also lay out a positive vision of how society should be changed – along with a plan for getting there. According to Mill, all the various schools of Socialism agree on the first count – their diagnosis of existing society. There is a divergence of thought on the second count, however, and he divides socialists into two camps: Communal and Revolutionary. He separates these issues and considers them in turn.

Mill begins his appraisal of socialism by listing a litany of complaints socialist thinkers had levied against the contemporary economic order. Despite the complaints being “so various…that the only difficulty is to make any approach to an exhaustive catalogue,” Mill divides the arguments into two main categories (Mill, 1891, p. 70). The first main category of argument is that the institution of private property in industrial society generates poverty and an unjust distribution of wealth, ruining the great majority of people financially. The second main category of argument is that individualistic competition, upon which the market economy is founded, ruins people morally and makes them anti-social. Thus, modern society ruins people materially and spiritually. Mill, to a degree, is willing to accept both of these arguments.

Mill agrees with the argument that the private property relation had generated poverty and unfair distribution. He writes, “Suffice it to say that the condition of numbers in civilized Europe, and even in England and France, is more wretched than that of most tribes of savages who are known to us” (Mill, 1891, p. 72). He acknowledges the observation that the higher the degree of industrialization, the higher the degree of immiseration of the working class of Europe. Immense wealth is created, but the distribution of that wealth isn’t necessarily fair or moral. “Those who receive the least, labor and abstain the most,” he notes (Mill, 1891, p.73). Going further, “the most powerful of all the determining circumstances is birth… next to birth the chief cause of success in life is accident and opportunity” (Mill, 1891, pp. 73-74). For Mill, market outcomes are by no mean guaranteed to be optimal or fiar. He acknowledges a legitimate and necessary role for the state to play in interceding in the market to achieve a greater degree of fairness in outcomes.

Mill also agrees to a large extent with the second argument, that the system of private property with individualistic competition ruins people morally. He identifies the tendency for competition to reward deceit and fraud on the part of merchants. The lowest cost producers tend to win out, and there emerges a pattern whereby sellers artificially lower their costs by  “resort[ing] to any of the modes of fraud, such as adulteration, giving short measure, etc.…the temptation is immense on [the merchants] to adopt the fraudulent practices…for the public are aware of the low prices fallaciously produced by the frauds, but do not find out at first, if ever, that the article is not worth the lower price” (Mill, 1891, pp. 99-100). Thus, by an evolutionary process, the honest merchants are weeded out and the frauds survive. Mill suggests the remedy to this trend is increased regulation and a public prosecutor charged, again, advocating for state intervention in the market to correct endogenous flaws.

Perhaps Mill’s most surprising endorsement reformisis of what he terms industrial partnerships, what we call today worker cooperatives. He observes that this form of organization where “the admission of the whole body of laborers to a participation in the profits, by distributing among all who share in the work, in the form of a percentage on their earnings, the whole or a fixed portion of the gains after a certain remuneration has been allowed to the capitalist…has been found of admirable efficacy, both in this country and abroad” (Mill, 1891, p. 120). He notes that such organizations promote efficiency and exertion on the part of workers, reduce waste, and raise worker compensation. He goes to far as to speculate that over time, many businesses could pass into purely cooperative forms once their chiefs retire or pass away – hardly the prediction one might expect from a classical liberal.

But Mill also lists reasons why socialism couldn’t, and in many cases shouldn’t, become the norm of society. Mill is generally open to what he terms communal socialism – the socialism of Owen and Fourier – gradual experimental changes that do not upset the order of society too fundamentally all at once. The other type of socialism which he calls Revolutionary (a foreign import from “The Continent”), seeks to “forcibly deprive all who have now a comfortable physical existence of their only present means of preserving it,” and he predicts “frightful bloodshed and misery would ensue” from such a transition (Mill, 1891, p. 110). Common to both types, Mill foresees a problem motivating people “to do their very best” because men are driven by selfish motives (Mill, 1891, p. 114). Because of the lack of incentive, the persons most qualified for the management would be likely very often to hang back from undertaking it” (Mill, 1891, p. 117). Some highly cultivated individuals may be able to make such a system work, but “before these exceptions can grow into a majority, or even into a very large minority, much time will be required” to socially condition people to be ready for such a system (Mill, 1891, p. 115).

While Mill expresses views in these articles that might have gotten him expelled from the Cato institute today, he stops well short of becoming an advocate of socialism. He observes that while “the evils and injustices suffered under the present system are great…they are not increasing; on the contrary the general tendency is toward their slow diminution” (Mill, 1891, 107). He thinks that with time and the right state intervention, these ills can eventually be eliminated without resorting to any drastic measures. While he does not want to upend the system, he boldly writes that “society is fully entitled to abrogate or alter any particular right of property which on sufficient consideration it judges to stand in the way of the public good” (Mill, 1891, p. 137). Property rights are not in and of themselves sacrosanct, and their form must be in service of generating maximum social welfare. In a surprisingly dialectical observation, he writes, “the idea of property is not some one thing identical throughout history and incapable of alteration but is variable like all other creations of the human mind” (Mill, 1891, p. 136). While one cannot call Mill a socialist, it is clear he is open to considerably more radical market intervention than he is usually given credit. 

Mill, J. Stuart. Bliss, W. Dwight Porter. (1891). Socialism. New York: The Humboldt Publishing Co.

Capitalist Immiseration, the Trump/Biden Effect, and the Fascist Tide

By Colin Jenkins

Things under Trump were not good for most of us. Same can be said for Obama and the Bushs, Clinton and Reagan, and so on. Things under Biden will not be good for most of us. Why? Because capitalism is not designed to be good for most of us. We are its commodities. Our lives are bought, sold, used, abused, disregarded, and discarded when no longer needed. We are not only alienated “appendages” of productive machinery, as Marx once brilliantly noted, but we are all-encompassing conduits for the upward flow of profit. Our labor, our existence, our lives, our actions, every move we make are all geared in a way to direct money to a minority class that sits at the top – the capitalists. This has never been more evident than with the advent of social media, where even our basic social interactions with one another are now monetized for the benefit of tech industry executives and their shareholders.

In the current era of neoliberalism, globalization, financialization, and automation, our lives have only become more expendable. Our labor is not needed as much anymore. Machines are filling that void. A fully globalized labor pool has, once and for all, put the international proletariat on the same track. We are now all in a race to the bottom. This isn’t to say the global South no longer falls victim to colonialism and imperialism (because it still does), but rather that a fully globalized economy has now set the former industrialized working classes in the imperial core on the same path as the super-exploited working classes of the global South. It is only a matter of time before this total immersion is realized. The combination of a broadening labor pool and rapid increase in technology has made machines (Marx’s “constant capital”) more prevalent and, in turn, human labor (Marx’s “variable capital”) obsolete in many industries. In a humane system, this would be something to celebrate, as people would be increasingly liberated from tasks that can be done by machines, thus freeing us up to spend more time with our families, communities, and to explore our creative and productive capacities away from capitalist coercion. Unfortunately, in an inhumane system like capitalism, which recognizes us as nothing more than commodities, it leaves us in a state of desperation – as “appendages” desperately seeking productive machinery to attach ourselves to so that we can properly serve our capitalist overlords.

Many of us are aware of the Oxfam reports that have come out over the past decade, especially those which highlight global inequality. A glance at their yearly analyses shows us the disastrous effects of a global capitalist system that has run its course, and in doing so has gone from the “predatory phase of human development,” as Thorstein Veblen once referred to it, to a seemingly full-blown cannibalistic stage of human regression:

• In 2010, the 388 richest individuals in the world owned more wealth than half of the entire human population on Earth.

• By 2015, this number was reduced to only 62 individuals.[1]

• In 2018, it was the 42 richest individuals.

• In 2019, it was down to only 26 individuals who own more wealth than 3.8 billion people.[2]

These numbers paint a damning picture, but do not necessarily illustrate the most important point: that Marx’s theory of immiseration is being realized. In other words, at a closer look, we can see the claim that “capitalism has lifted people out of poverty” is simply not true. Rather, as inequality has risen due to unfathomable amounts of wealth being funneled to the top, the lives of billions of people worldwide have worsened. Proponents of capitalism would like us to believe this is not a zero-sum game, or even worse that “a rising tide lifts all boats,” but in an era dominated by fiat currency, where wealth is represented by mere numbers in a computer program, created arbitrarily by capitalist governments, it is the wealthiest individuals who determine the value of that currency. And when a handful of individual capitalists command wealth in the hundreds of billions, it is clear that the 4.2 billion members of the global proletariat who must survive on less than $7.40 a day exist in a state of extreme poverty. In true zero-sum fashion, as more wealth has concentrated at the top, more poverty has developed among the bottom. In fact, between 1980 and 2015, the number of people living in this state of poverty increased by one billion.[3] And this does not begin to assess the new realities of the working classes within the imperial core, such as the United States, which have been artificially buoyed by unsustainable credit and debt schemes for the past three decades, all while real wages have stagnated, living-wage jobs have plummeted, and costs of living have skyrocketed. It is only a matter of time before this entire house of cards, which has been constructed and maintained to keep capitalism and extreme wealth inequality in place, comes crumbling down. This fragile arrangement is being tested like never before, as 40 million Americans are facing eviction, food pantries are being strained, and anywhere from a third to a half of working people in the US cannot pay their bills. The capitalist class knows their system is on the brink — not because of the pandemic but more precisely due to its historical trajectory and limitations — and are now tasked with maintaining their cushy positions at the top in the aftermath. In other words, as capitalism comes to its inevitable conclusion, they prefer a controlled demolition.

Governments, politicians, and international agencies have been put in place during the post-WW II era to maintain the global capitalist system and force it on peoples everywhere, whether through resource extraction or by opening new markets. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, capital has run roughshod over the world. Now, as we move toward the middle of the 21st century, it has run its course.  In the US, Presidents, Senators, Congresspeople, Supreme Court justices, politicians, and technocrats have one primary purpose in the system: to maintain the status quo by serving capital. Or, as James Madison once said, “to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority.” In these times, this means stomping anticipated unrest. It means overseeing this process of immiseration and degradation, and ensuring it takes place in an orderly way. Tangible examples of this are the US government (via the Federal Reserve) giving capitalist institutions upwards of twenty trillion dollars under the guise of “quantitative easing” and “stimuli” over the past decade, while at the same time pushing austerity measures, militarizing domestic police forces, and brutalizing working-class folks in the streets. Joe Biden has spent his life serving capital with this blueprint. He is a known commodity to capitalists and has served them well. And, as expected, he has already begun stacking his administration with corporate lackeys who have dedicated their lives to serving power by making the rich richer and the poor poorer (because the latter is required for the former). 

As bad as Trump was, especially regarding his rhetoric that emboldened millions of white supremacists nationwide, he was a bit of a wildcard to the capitalist ruling class (despite being a member of it). He was driven primarily by ego and has spent his entire life on the other end of this relationship between capital and the state, feeding politicians from both parties to serve his interests. He was unpredictable. He got into pissing matches with anyone and everyone, bucked military advisers, challenged media, and kept people guessing. He has no ideology, no belief system, no substantial opinions on anything. He loves himself, his money, his power, and anyone who loves him back; and he has learned over the course of his uber-privileged life (which was literally handed to him on a silver platter) that manipulation is the key to all of this. If there's one skill that he has, it's the ability to persuade others without really saying much. So, he built up a loyal following, especially among the petty bourgeoisie, a sector of society that has historically served as the embryo for fascism. In the US, this demographic is dominated by middle-aged white men who similarly had privileged lives handed to them upon birth. Granted, many have used this privilege to actually work their ways to increased financial success (unlike Trump, who has never had to work), but also many who are feeling the increased pressures being brought down on them from the same era that has catalyzed Trump’s rise – the neoliberal, globalized, late stage of capitalism, which has created unprecedented instabilities throughout the socioeconomic spectrum, especially in regards to race and class inequities. Trump spoke to these people as a last line of defense for that “great white America” in their heads. However, he did not instill the same amount of trust in the bourgeoisie. So, while the transition from capitalism to fascism is already here in many respects, the capitalist class is still not fully prepared to cement the move. To them, Trump was both ahead of the game and too loose to oversee the final transition. That — with the help of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Democrats — will come in the relatively near future, as a more polished version of Trump waits in the wings to accept the torch in this perpetual, right-wing slide of lesser-evilism that has dominated bourgeois politics for the past four decades.

Thus, the focus on Trump as some sort of aberration has always been dangerous. Because he was not created in a vacuum. He was created through four decades of neoliberalism – which has been characterized most importantly by a fusion of corporate governance, the very ingredient that Mussolini once referred to as a prerequisite to fascism – corporatism. This is the final stage of capitalism, and it is upon us. Both political parties are facilitators of this transition, with Democrats serving as a center-right buffer to obstruct any significant formations of socialism from the left, and Republicans as the forerunners of this fascist realization. Like any process, it is happening gradually, with mistakes, mishaps, regenerations, improvements, and steadying mechanisms. Both parties interplay in this process, learning from one another (often unknowingly), giving and taking in a reciprocal unity that represents capital and their class interests, which must be guaranteed a place at the table when the transition is fully realized. This takes time. And unseating Trump, with all of his liabilities, was part of this process. A Biden-Harris administration will bring more stability to the transition, allowing the capitalist class time to regroup and steady the ship, and allowing the army of petty-bourgeois white supremacists time to foment in the shadows, patiently awaiting the new and improved Trump to follow. The next Trump will be more grounded in ideology, more strategic, more under the control of the capitalist class as it continues to perfect corporate governance. And with Biden and the Democrats running interference for their far-right counterparts, by obstructing and repressing socialist movements from below, the transition will continue. Because the only two possible outcomes from capitalism are socialism or fascism, and the capitalist class will do everything in its power to avoid the former, thus embracing the latter.

The fact that a record number of Americans turned out for this latest presidential election is concerning because it suggests that not enough people understand the path we are currently set upon is a one-way street. We can not and will not be steered in a safe direction, no matter which politicians or presidents we choose. And while a few credible arguments can still be made for participating in bourgeois elections, especially within certain localities, this collective delusion that places a premium on voting remains a formidable obstruction to systemic change. Quite simply, the change we need will not come from voting. If anything, our continued faith in a system that was designed to fail us only delays our collective liberation. The fact that wealthy people, billion-dollar corporations, entertainers, athletes, mass media, and politicians themselves go out of their way to push massive “get-out-and-vote” marketing campaigns on us should give pause to anyone. This delusion benefits them. And it harms us. It will take a critical mass of proletarians to take a stand and push for systemic change. This means confronting the capitalist power structure, its immense wealth, and formidable death squads head on. This will require a significant increase in class consciousness, which in turn will lead to wholesale divestment from bourgeois politics, elections, and all politicians from the two capitalist parties, even those described as “progressive.” Shedding this delusion is crucial. And we are running out of time.

Notes

[1] January 18th, 2016. An Economy for the 1%. Oxfam. Boston, Massachusetts: Oxfam America. (https://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam.org/files/fileattachments/bp210-economy-one-percent-tax-havens-180116-summ-en_0.pdf).

[2] Elliot, Larry. January 20th, 2019. “World’s 26 richest people own as much as poorest 50%, says Oxfam.” The Guardian, March 5th.

[3] Hickel, Jason. 2015. “Could you live on $1.90 a day? That’s the international poverty line.” The Guardian, March 5th

Why a Biden Presidency Will Not Solve the Global Crisis of Democracy and Capitalism

By Joshua Lew McDermott

70 million Americans voted for the re-election of Donald Trump. Racist and misogynistic sentiment, both implicit and overt, undoubtedly explain part of why so many Americans are willing to embrace Trumpism. Yet, liberal analysts parroting the claim that Trump voters, including a shockingly large number of minority voters, are solely or primarily motivated by racism are blinded by their own refusal to acknowledge the failure of the neoliberal politics of the past three decades that have paved the way for Trumpism, and other authoritarian far-right leaders, taking power around the world over the past decade.

Far-right strong men such as Trump, Erdogan, and Bolsonaro are inherently at odds with the working class. They promote the further enrichment of the historically mega-wealthy with regressive tax policies and enable corruption among the elite by gutting regulation. They slash social spending and dampen consumer, worker, and environmental protections.

Like the fascist movements of the 1920s and 1930s, the middle and upper classes remain the classes most supportive of, and critical to manufacturing, reactionary politics. And the reasons for middle class support of Trumpism is perhaps unsurprising: material benefits in the form of tax breaks are one obvious example. 

But it is ignorant to assume that the new wave of far-right leaders lack mass support among the working class. Take Trump’s success, relative to other Republican candidates, in drawing the Latino vote this year. The major question we must ask is: despite anti-poor and working-class policies, why do Trumpist figures retain so much support among working people?

First, the failure of mainstream neoliberalism has led to a mass rejection of the establishment policies and institutions which have dominated the world since the shift away from Keynesianism and social democracy starting in the 1970s, institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations itself. The 2008 crash represented a major crisis of legitimacy for the neoliberal world order. The breakdown of traditional cultural and social bonds and identities, and the continued rise in inequality has ignited a backlash against the system and the values it is assumed to embody.  

As has always been the case when the capitalist system faces crisis, illiberal politics and nefarious nationalism offer an alternative for alienated and disenfranchised workers. The re-birth of the far-right is the outcome of the failure of the neoliberalism of the late 20th century.

Second, the liberal left, unlike the authoritarian right, has failed to offer a real and viable alternative to the neoliberal crisis that got us to this point. There is a reason both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden underperformed at the ballot box. Both candidates promised, essentially, a continuation (or, in Biden’s case, a return) of the status quo. Indeed, Trump’s most successful populist appeals, despite being largely symbolic in nature (he still largely embraced neoliberal economic policies) have been the ones attacking the hallmarks of neoliberalism, such as the repeal of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (only to essentially replace it with an identical agreement). 

Liberals’ failure to engage with class politics will continue to undermine their ability to win elections, successfully govern, or, most crucially, combat the systemic crises facing the capitalist system. Writing off Trump voters as merely ignorant or racist is not only self-defeating, but also disconnected from the reality.

Lastly, the right, leveraged by hugely successful propaganda efforts and buoyed by the wallets of billionaires such as the Koch Brothers, has succeeded to an unbelievable extent in convincing workers that Trump and conservative capitalists, despite all indications to the contrary, care about and empower workers. So long as American workers continue to believe the lie, originated by neoliberal ideological warriors from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush, and emboldened by major propaganda outlets such as libertarian think tanks or Prager U, that tax cuts for the rich will ultimately benefit the working class, the left has lost the messaging war. No amount of appeals to decency and liberal values can combat what workers view as their concrete material interests.

Indeed, the appeal of racism, patriarchy, and nationalism has always been material prosperity and dignity (at the expense of the mistreatment of vulnerable populations). Trump and the far-right have succeeded in convincing many workers that the problem is not capitalism nor the economic policies of neoliberalism, but the liberal pillars of equality, cosmopolitanism, and secularism. As has always been the case in history, appeals to religious fundamentalism, racism, and nationalism have been forwarded as the solution to what are, in reality, the failures of capitalist globalization. This was the primary appeal of fascism in the 1920s. It remains the primary appeal of the right-wing authoritarian neoliberalism pedaled by Trump today. Just as Hitler provided the illusion of economic sustainability and empowerment to German workers via imperialist expansion and war, Trump and the far-right provide the illusion of providing for workers via imperialist plunder and unsustainable economic growth driven by tax breaks and a booming rogue financial sector which has little connection to the actual economy.

This is why, unless Biden is able to structurally alter not only the American political and economic landscape, but also the dynamics of underdevelopment and crises – of inequality, of ecology, of democracy – around the world, the conditions which have driven so many workers into the arms of the far right will persist and likely worsen. Unfortunately, it seems unlikely a Biden administration will have the necessary will nor power to right the sinking ship. So long as liberals continue to hail the capitalist market as the paramount foundation for global society, people will continue to search for alternatives and worldviews that can explain why they lack healthcare, why their forests are on fire, why their jobs don’t pay enough for them to survive with dignity. So far, the right has done better than the left at offering that alternative vision.

If Unions Had Organized the South, Could Trump Have Been Avoided?

By Chris Wright

At a time when activists and commentators are puzzling over the United States’ enduring conservatism, Michael Goldfield’s new book The Southern Key: Class, Race, and Radicalism in the 1930s and 1940s (Oxford University Press, 2020) provides some perspective. Goldfield argues that the old question “Why no socialism in the U.S.?” reduces to “Why no liberalism in the South?”, which itself is answered, in large part, by unions’ failure to organize the region in the early and middle twentieth century. The book consists of case-studies defending this thesis and exploring what went wrong and how things might have turned out differently. Chris Wright interviewed Goldfield in early November about his arguments and his thoughts on the labor movement today.

One of the major theses of your book is that the failure of the CIO in the 1930s and 1940s to organize certain key industries in the South, such as woodworkers and textile workers, has shaped U.S. politics and society up to the present. For example, the “liberal”—as opposed to laborite—character of the civil rights movement, Republicans’ racist “Southern Strategy” (influenced by George Wallace’s presidential campaigns in 1964 and 1968), businesses’ relocation to the South in the postwar and neoliberal periods, and in general the conservative ascendancy of the last fifty years were all made possible by the CIO’s earlier missteps. How did these failures to organize a few industries have such far-reaching effects?

Underlying my argument is the unique ability of workers organized at the workplace to engage in what I call civil rights unionism, including demands inside the workplace for more hiring and upgrading of non-whites, especially women, desegregation of facilities, etc. Secondly, this involves broader struggles for desegregation, access, and other issues, in the community at large. Of special importance here is the ability of workers at the workplace to resist and successfully fight against right-wing, racist repression, something that was so successful in silencing and destroying individual white liberals in the South. I discuss a number of such examples in the book, including the Farm Equipment Workers (FE) at International Harvester in Louisville and Local 10 of the ILWU in San Francisco. These instances, though vitally important in their limited impact and providing clear templates for future struggles, were too isolated to affect the general course of events.

There is a clear contrast here with the UAW and the NAACP, the liberal civil rights organization. By 1945-46, the autoworkers union with Walter Reuther at the head had become very bureaucratic. They were on record as supporting civil rights, and Reuther was allied with the NAACP. But what did they actually do? In Detroit, for instance, there were restaurants and bars around auto plants that were segregated, not allowing Blacks in. Reuther and the NAACP sent letters to all the bars and restaurants saying that they should integrate—and of course nobody did anything. At left-wing locals, on the other hand, workers organized. Interracial picket lines went up around the restaurants and bars; the workers told the owners that if they didn’t allow Blacks in, they would have no business from anybody in the union. Instantly, owners changed their policy—thus demonstrating the effectiveness of civil rights unionism.

I can give you an example from my own experience, when I worked at an International Harvester plant outside Chicago. We had a Black worker in our plant who bought a house in a racist all-white community; his house was firebombed twice. Our group controlled the Fair Practices Committee, and we got the union local to vote to support a round-the-clock picket line at the house. Immediately, all the violence stopped. Our plant was about a third African-American, and there were probably quite a few workers who were not sympathetic to what we were doing. But if any of us had been attacked, the whole local would have gone berserk. That type of strength that unions had when they were fighting for civil rights was different from most of what existed across the South.

The organizing, then, of over 300,000 woodworkers (an industry that existed across the deep South, 50% of whose workers were African-American) had the potential to make a tremendous difference. And if the USWA and other unions had maintained their civil rights focus, the course of the civil rights struggle and of history might have been altered.

You’re very critical of the leadership of both the CIO and the Communist Party in the 1930s–40s. Briefly, what mistakes did they make? Why did organizations that, for a time, showed such militancy and effectiveness in organizing particular industries (such as steel, automobiles, and meatpacking, among many others) fail so dismally to organize large swathes of the South?

This is discussed extensively in the book. I analyze in detail how the Stalinization of the Comintern and the U.S. Communist Party undermined many of their laudatory efforts. I also agree with Nick Fischer’s argument in Spider Web, that liberal anti-communism, as practiced by the UAW under Reuther and the USWA under Philip Murray, aligned itself with racists and fascists. In order to defeat the CP leadership of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, Murray and the USWA allied themselves de facto with the KKK in Birmingham, destroying a progressive civil rights unionism (or at least weakening and limiting its influence) in Alabama. The CIO did the same in destroying the Winston-Salem Food, Tobacco, Agricultural and Allied Workers local. The United Packinghouse Workers did not do this and continued to be a civil rights union. Auto, steel, and meatpacking actually were organized in the South. As Matt Nichter’s forthcoming article in Labor shows (entitled “Did Emmett Till Die in Vain? Organized Labor Says No!”), the UAW and USWA had no rank-and-file civil rights presence, while the UPWA sent an interracial male and female southern delegation to the Emmitt Till trial in Mississippi.

Broadly speaking, the failure of interracial unionism in the South is attributable to three primary causes. First, the right-wing leadership of the CIO—the forefathers of the leadership of the contemporary labor movement—refused to seriously confront white supremacy in the South, squandering golden opportunities to organize Black workers in a number of large southern industries. Second, the left-wing of the labor movement—which had been the major goad behind interracial class unity in the first place—liquidated itself at the behest of the Soviet Union, which demanded labor peace during WWII, then limited their civil rights activity during the Cold War. Third, the postwar red scare—including the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act—dealt a crippling blow.

You argue that in order for workforces to successfully organize, they generally need either “structural power” or “associative power” (or both). For instance, coal miners during the period you write about had immense structural power and therefore tended to serve as a “vanguard” of the labor movement. Textile workers, by contrast, lacked structural power, so they had to rely—or should have relied more than they did—on associative power, making alliances with other organizations and social forces. Today, do you see any industries that have notable structural power and should be a prime target for organizers? Or do you think most workers now are compelled to rely primarily on associative power, on making connections with other groups and social movements?

Miners had structural power in part because they were providing the main fuel to the economy, which they don’t anymore. There are hardly any coal miners left in the United States, despite all the rhetoric. But other people have the power to bring the economy to a halt, like truck drivers and others in the transportation industry. Airline workers could potentially—they could have done it during the air traffic controllers’ strike, but of course the unions wouldn’t have considered that.  It’s interesting that workers in the food production industry and the warehouse and logistics industries are suddenly realizing how important they are, given the pandemic, and are mobilizing around their terrible treatment. There have been 44,000 cases of Covid-19 in the hundred-plus meat processing plants and over two hundred deaths. People are not happy about this. In Detroit, where I am, bus drivers have struck over the lack of safety. It seems to be a generalized phenomenon that’s taking place, but I don’t know how to gauge it. I read Labor Notes and I subscribe to it, but its reporters are always seeing a new upsurge taking place. The United States is a big country and there are always strikes happening somewhere, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that a large movement is in the offing.

Still, we’re seeing people in places that were historically difficult to organize getting more upset and taking action. Many of the logistics hubs, for instance, are in the South. One of the biggest in the country is in Memphis, there’s a big one in Louisville, etc. These are urban, interracial workforces. The South, of course, is very different now than it was in the 1930s and 1940s: it has much more economic dynamism, including a significant percentage of the auto industry, particularly transplants (foreign plants that have their production facility in the U.S.). While Detroit still has more auto production and more parts, there are huge parts corridors in states across the South.

Public service workers, too, are getting screwed really badly. The reason we had so many teachers’ strikes in so-called red states is that the budget cuts were much more severe there. When these people struck, they had broad associative power and huge amounts of public sympathy. The Chicago Teachers Union organized parents and others in the community to support them, which hadn’t previously been done as much by teachers’ unions. In West Virginia, a state that overwhelmingly voted both in 2016 and 2020 for Trump, schoolteachers were militant and had broad support throughout the state. The same was true in Oklahoma, and some of these same things happened in Mississippi. So I think that the possibilities for a Southern upsurge, as well as in the country as a whole, are real. On the other hand, there isn’t the same insurgent, radical leadership that there was in the 1930s.

It’s obviously hard to generalize over the labor movement, but are you concerned that unions today too often adhere to the same earlier, self-defeating trends of centrism and collaborationism? Or do you see cause for hope that the kinds of errors the CIO made in its Southern campaigns—and that the AFL-CIO continued to make for decades thereafter—are finally being overcome? Do you think organized labor is starting to turn the corner?

No. While there are insurgent parts of the organized labor movement, including those who had threatened a general strike if Trump tried to steal the election, the AFL-CIO and its major unions, short of insurgencies and new leadership, are too sclerotic to lead the next wave of struggle.

Racism and white supremacy are central to your analysis. The CIO’s inability to organize the South made possible the extremes of white supremacy we saw in the postwar era and we’re seeing today, which have catastrophically undermined class solidarity. What do you think of the current Black Lives Matter movement? Is it wise to place the dominant emphasis on police brutality and defunding the police, or are there more effective ways to challenge white supremacy? Should activists organize around shared class interests with allegedly racist whites rather than the divisive issue of abolition of the police?

The police were established to play the role of repressing labor and communities, as much recent literature documents. This is central to capitalist rule and its function should be abolished. As such, police unions are not unions and do not belong in the labor movement. On the other hand, the demand to abolish the police needs to be sharpened. As many have noted, lots of things the police do, including responding to disturbed people, should be delegated to others, and removed from policing. On the other hand, there are certain types of protective services for which there should be an organization that serves. What to do about rape and violence against women? Who do you go to when your car is stolen? This whole range of concerns and demands needs to be delineated clearly so that people can be sure that we get rid of the police in their anti-labor, racist functioning, but still have necessary services so that we do not merely exist in an anarchic state of chaos, which is the impression that opponents of our demands give.

Many left-wing unions and some others as well combined broad class issues, interracial solidarity, with racial egalitarian demands (I discuss these questions also in The Color of Politics). The examples I give of certain civil rights-oriented unions (such as FE and ILWU Local 10) were successful at doing this, too.

Encoding Anti-Blackness: Castration In the Digital Age

By Kahlil Martin

Like the Senegalese street vendors that sell heart pins imprinted with all the common Spanish names, El Negro de WhatsApp has become available for any cause. Like the cards aisle at Safeway, better yet, you can customize him yourself. A single Google images search will provide you with a daily ration of his infinite reconfigurations. When the meme first emerged, I belonged to several WhatsApp groups (classmates, football team, etc.), in which I was usually the only non-Spaniard, and always the only person who claimed any Black ancestry. It began as a Bait and Switch prank; you receive an innocent URL pertaining to something of interest (the bait), then as soon you bite, the link redirects you to El Negro de WhatsApp (the switch).  The bait could also be an image, cropped in such a way that he is hidden until you scroll down. In the original prank, he stands before a dirt road in front of several crumbling cinder block structures. His wiry frame supports only three articles of clothing: a plaid bucket hat that shadows his eyes, a blue towel draped over his shoulders and a green fishnet tank top. His left hand is supporting his 18-inch, flaccid, veiny penis. In fact, the penis is not his at all, it was created thanks to photoshop, a quality of the image that is often overlooked. From coffee mug to Christmas cheer, El Negro de WhatsApp outgrew the category of prank before its first birthday to become “the biggest meme produced by social media culture in our country” [1].

One street vendor’s name was Ousmane. Like so many other Senegalese men, he sent money home to his family, whom he only saw once every several years. As he is the prototypical African immigrant in Spain, it is not a stretch to suggest a representational correspondence between Ousmane and El Negro de WhatsApp, cached in the phones of so many Spaniards. Might we ask; Who is the true butt of the joke, the Spaniard who takes the bait? Or the object of humor, standing before the recipient with a basket full of trinkets and a fake smile? Ousmane’s inventory ranged from lighters and chewing gum to exotic keepsakes such as carved elephants and cowry shell jewelry.  He always said “perfecto” when asked “como estás?”. It would appear that the Spaniards who pass him by are trafficking a keepsake of their own; the photoshopped African body.

When this image startles the pranked individual, a scramble ensues to exit the page - the circumstances hardly provide time for reflection. Whether or not it’s real is beside the point. As far as Fanon’s prelogical thought is concerned, The Negro of WhatsApp stands for the African immigrant, invader from the south, an external threat to Spanish national integrity. Hordes of young Africans are swimming north, across the Strait of Gibraltar. Mothers hide their daughters, bishops cross themselves, the newspapers cry rape. The province I was living in at the time is glorified as the place where the Christian Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula began. This, as well as its being the only region not conquered by the Moors, is a source of great micronationalistic pride for the local Asturians. “Asturias es España, lo demás es tierra conquistada” [Asturias is Spain, the rest is conquered land] goes the saying. They even claim celtic ancestry, along with lighter hair and eyes, than their lazy southern counterparts. It is said that Rey Pelayo, blessed by the Our Lady of Covadonga, started throwing rocks at the Moors in 718 ad. Pelayo remains one of the most common names in Asturias to this day. He might have to start throwing rocks again.

Upon my return to the United States a parallel fantasy was waiting for me, only differing from El Negro in that it was molded to North American representations of Blackness. You may know him as Wood Sitting on a Bed, or Huge Penis Guy. Vice Magazine describes him as “The Man Bigger than the Meme”[2]. The big Black American athlete, three hundred pounds of muscle staring at you, legs open. Dubbed the “hero of the pandemic” by Know-Your-Meme[3]. This time, the bait was often an irresistible yet unbelievable coronavirus update. The man in the image is the late Wardy G. Joubert III, now available on Covid-19 masks and Christmas socks.

The meme, in this case a symbolic instrument of white culture, exists for only a fraction of a second on the viewer’s screen. By its very ephemeral nature it defies contextualization, but white people didn’t start collecting Black nudes today. A chronology was needed to rescue these memes from the retrograde amnesia of cyberspace. How do you anchor something in time if most people only see it for half a second?  The first two chapters of David Marriott’s treatise On Black Men offer themselves as an eclectic meditation on the history of Black male genitalia in photography. A macabre genealogy threaded through three seemingly isolated events; the use of kodaks at the lynching scene, the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe, and the souvenirs of Jeffery Dahmer’s homoerotic, cannablist, murderous exploits.  Sufficiently eclectic to beckon the meme.

Marriott links these events by suggesting that “looking is a form of incorporation, of taking something inside”[4],  and draws from Otto Fenichel’s psychoanalytic interpretation of the ocular system; “‘the eye’ Fenichel writes, ‘is conceived as an organ that robs and bites’”[5]. I intend to stretch this reading to include El Negro and Wood, symbols which are too crudely phallic to refrain from dabbling in the itineraries of classic psychoanalysis. Having agreed to humor this aspect of Marriott’s work, my intention is not so much to directly entertain psychoanalysis as to engage with said interpretation as a guiding metaphor, or ancestry test of sorts, in order to contextualize these memes. My reluctance to rely or dwell on the shock value of On Black Men’s content should also be admitted. In any case I hope the blood splatter will speckle the ahistorical and humorous scaffolds of the meme, as you will see it is not I who has worked the initial connection between art and assault, but Marriott himself.

Insofar as El Negro and Wood, prior to the incisions of Adobe Photoshop, were photographs, and as such, faithful to certain constricts of the real, it is only fitting to touch ground with the first turn-of-the-century mass-produced roll-film camera. In this regard, the ubiquity of Kodaks at the lynching scene attests to the predilection of the camera for the ravaged Black body. ”The photograph is there to be gazed at, and fingered, over and over again: Look at me, I was there”[6] infers Marriott, who italicizes the lynching scene as a site of castration; “White men, and women, demand a keepsake, a memento mori: toes, fingers, or - most highly prized - a black penis”[7]. The tradition of collecting these keepsakes, mutilated and transformed, has weathered the test of time. Lest we forget that El Negro de WhatsApp is the handiwork of a skilled digital surgeon. But why collect these keepsakes at all? Marriott meditates on the function that looking upon the Black body in such a way has for the white psyche as he likens the camera lens to a prosthetic organ - a peculiar means of self-fashioning by embedding oneself in the flesh.

Now we turn from the gala of the lynching scene to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the year is 1989. You stand before Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio, a photograph of “a man, clad in leather, urinating into the mouth of another man” disrupts your field of vision[8]. Next you are confronted with images of a “trussed-up, lacerated scrotum and penis”[9]. Finally, you come across Mapplethorpe’s Black male nudes. “Sullen and heavy like the trunk of an elephant” muses a critic[10], as he describes Man in Polyester Suit; a photograph of a man’s waist, the Black penis “hanging, ‘veiny and pulpy’” from the pant zipper[11]. “So exotically weird” ...” inhuman, like some parasite species that has managed to graft itself on to the human form... The penis looks like an elephant's trunk, not really human at all, certainly not civilized.” writes a different observer[12]. These descriptions share an uncanny resemblance with those of El Negro de WhatsApp, whose fictitious genitalia were also dubbed elephantine - “un pene elefantiásico”- by El Confidencial[13]. The Museum goer (and prank recipient) suddenly finds that repulsion and attraction are not mutually exclusive. “How do you start to tell the difference between the two?” asks Marriott of the spectator struggling to separate disgust from desire[14].

This interplay is reminiscent of the pranked Spaniards and (white) Americans attempting to reconcile their homophobic values with a deep curiosity and intrigue in the Black body. How do we account for heterosexual men in two deeply homophobic cultures obsessing over artificially enlarged male genitalia? El Negro and Wood, two of the most circulated visual tropes today, happen to be stimuli few would admit to wanting to see. Does the recipient exit the page? Or does he inspect the goods? For Marriott, gazing intensely at an object implies an element of castration; “to incorporate, to eat, through the eyes; to want to look, and look again, in the name of appreciating and destroying, loving and hating.” are all part of the same process[15]. Exploiting this analogy to its fullest permits an interpretation of the photograph as the site at which this process of devouring and spitting out is recorded. The question that I intend to revisit is: what does this particular interpretation connote for software with the capacity to imperceptibly edit an image? But for now, what of Mapplethorpe “as a (white) man who cuts up bodies in the name of art”[16]? And of these photoshop specialists (presumably white) who cut up Black bodies in the name of humor? In this regard, On Black Men calls forth the violent history of the Black body and film; “‘the camera cuts away’” writes Marriott,” ‘like a knife, allowing the spectator to inspect the goods’”[17]. The reader cannot help but be reminded of the lynching spectator, to whom the camera offers itself as a means to cut something away and save it for later.

From this point on, whatever stood between figurative devouring of human flesh and actual cannibalism is thoroughly shaken, as the (white) serial killer, rapist, cannibal, and photographer Jeffery Dahmer is incorporated into our genealogy, an addition that Marriot admits, may appear to be outrageous. When a cache of Polaroids hidden in a drawer depicting “bodies naked and abed, ripped open and dismembered”, “images of scattered remains -- lungs, intestines, penises, livers and hearts”  was discovered by the Milwaukie Police Department of Wisconsin, it took the officers at hand several moments to conclude that the images were, in fact, real[18]. Dahmer’s surgical expertise in both photography and human anatomy, which he acquired in the military, lent a deeply unsettling, meticulous quality to his ineffably revolting obsession with the Black body. Marriott notes how his “bizarre ‘enshrinement and desecration’ also marks the aura of photographic memorabilia at lynching scenes” and, in considering the photographed bodies as “sliced open to the cruel yet determined gaze of a man”, he pushes us to consider how the perpetrator’s hands were no more guilty than his eyes[19]. “But was the best way of killing them to take their pictures; or the best way of picturing them to see them dead?”[20]. 

The chronicle of events developed by Marriott is somewhat at odds with Sadiya Hartman’s inclination to “illuminate the terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the shocking spectacle”[21]. While these distinct emphases are not incompatible, it would nonetheless appear that targeting an everyday artifact of internet culture aligns itself with a quotidian-oriented approach. In light of this concession it would be Marriott’s inclusion of Robert Mapplethorpe’s art that warrants any cross examination (or jumps) from his genealogy to our objects of concern. On this subject I should add that my account of On Black Men cannot possibly have done justice to Marriott’s synthesis of art, lynch mobs and serial killers. The point not to be missed here is that in all the events in which we have centered the Black man, the same organ is under siege, in much the same way.

The Well-Endowed Man and El Negro de WhatsApp images were first posted by the accounts misterflyy and aquastorm427, respectively. Assuming that the individuals behind these accounts are also the creators and editors of the original image, what can we say, for example, of aquastorm427 as they sat before the unedited original photo, freshly imported into Adobe Photoshop, mouse in hand, ready to cut and slice? Or of misterflyy, gazing, full of ideas at the original image with Photoshop’s surgical tool kit, prepared to sever and disfigure? As I asked before, where do these cyberspace anonymities laboring under the guise of humor, stand in comparison to Mapplethorpe as a man who slices bodies to produce art? If the camera is analogous to the eye, insofar as it “robs and bites and cuts into people” and the photograph to a relic on which this process is inscribed, then anatomically to which organs do we link Photoshop[22]?  Perhaps the mouth and hands that disembowel, transform and redetermine? The creation of these memes requires that the original image be castrated, the penis traced and staked out, then removed from the body and set aside in order to be enlarged and manipulated. The Black groin, in an act that reaches back centuries, is digitally castrated and helplessly returned, oversexed and rapacious, to the public eye, as fact.

It should be repeated that after the original bait and switch pranks began to circulate massively, the images have been subject to even more modifications and edits. In other words, the inflated Black penis, has since been extirpated from the already edited meme and inserted into an innumerable, and ever growing, amount of spin-off memes, similar pranks and merchandise. In this sense, the oversexed phallus of the captive body, now doubly castrated, has undergone a continuous process of distillation and abstraction. Fanon’s critique of Michel Cournot could equally have been meant for El Negro de WhatsApp. ”No longer do we see the black man; we see the penis: the black man has been occulted” he wrote[23]. Recalling how the bucket hat eclipses El Negro’s face, we see the Black man occulted once more.

“The object status of Blackness means that it can be placed and displaced with limitless frequency and across untold territories”[24]. Wood and El Negro are radio waves, bouncing off satellites just to make you squirm. I believe this has something to do with what Afropessimists have coined the fungibility of the Black; while being “substitutively dead”, it is also “passionately enabling”[25]. This helps to explain how the caricatured Black penis, now understood as “property of enjoyment”[26],  can be used to feel so many things; be it in its capacity to enable the avant-garde spectator of Mapplethorpe’s photography to be artistically pushed out of their comfort zone, to permitting Jeffery Dahmer to feel “oddly and humanly loved and alive.”[27], or to shock a friend with a text. In this line of thought, Matamoros-Fernández comments on how the “black male body in this meme is often transformed to humorously convey different emotions in everyday conversations on WhatsApp. White people can photoshop “El Negro de WhatsApp” with a shrunken penis and share the meme to express that the weather is cold, or commodify the same black body as an exaggerated reaction to the latest breaking news”[28]. Accordingly, the “limitless frequency” and “untold territories” that Wilderson writes of are even more relevant when we factor in the nature of cyberspace and the intensity with which these images are being modified and circulated. By anyone with a computer, they can be edited, cut, captioned and projected through space at light speed, eternally cached in the vast repository of the internet. “Liberated from time and space, belonging nowhere and to no one, simply there for the taking”[29].

To suggest that the operations, or mental behavior, that discern honesty from everything else occur at more than one level of consciousness bespeaks no allegiance to psychoanalysis. Photography presents itself as “preeminently a world of fact, not of dispute about facts or of conclusions to be drawn from them”[30]. The medium appears not to have been meddled with, an attribute that editing software subverts.  Assuming that a select few will consciously recognize these images as edits, it would be unwise to allege this recognition to all levels of consciousness. Afterall, how does fictitious photography fit into our previous representational schemata? The skilled Photoshop technician harnesses the polarized distinction between fictitious fabrication and photographic evidence. I find it timely to add that these two memes were not confirmed as edits until their metadata was run through Fotoforensics and their originals tracked down. In other words, there are no remnants of the operation that betray Wood or El Negro’s claim to the darkroom of evidence. Such software has the potential to be a smuggling route for dreams to enter the social imaginary as fact, a means to hide the creative process.  This sleight of hand universally disguises fantasies with unparalleled sophistication. After centuries of refining the act of disfiguring the Black man’s groin, European and American culture can sew him back together without leaving a trace of deadly fetishistic investment and compulsive fascination in, and with, the rhythm of Black physiology that lurks beneath the innocent facade of meticulously rearranged pixels. This helps to illuminate the violent element inherent to distorted representations in other mediums. When Black masculinity is hypersexualized by the orator, the writer, or the painter, the Black body still passes through the meat processor of cultural fantasy as these attributes are grafted onto the captive body. Here however, in the case of photoshop, this step is far more tangible as it is easily observed on the screen. 

The consequences for Black men of a rendezvous with a phobic image of themselves has as of yet been largely ignored, a question that sits as the primary concern of the introduction to On Black Men. Here Marriott engages at length with Baldwin and Fanon to remind us of how the Black man at grasp with these pranks is “both victim and spectator- spectator as victim” and signals the perils of surrendering to the screen[31]. If we pay heed to Fanon’s depiction of the Black psyche as “violently intruded upon and displaced by racial hatred and phobia” when considering the pranked Black individual[32], the situation of violent intrusion garners an additional layer. His guard is down, intrusion is then both literal (on the screen), and psychic. The reasons for which I have delayed addressing the dangers of the screen for Black people, as forewarned by Baldwin, is that said critique is primarily concerned with cinema, suffice to say a public viewing space. It is worth pointing out that while cyberspace offers a platform unprecedented in its capacity to harbor and disperse material of any kind, most Black people have no means of accessing, never mind negotiating, the content of non-Black chat rooms, or (WhatsApp) group chats.  Insofar as I have considered the ubiquitous utility of these memes a manifestation of fungibility, Frank Wilderson III comments on how “There is nothing real Black people can do to either check or direct this process”[33]. This could be aptly used to reflect on the safe-from-scrutiny quality of non-Black virtual spaces. This would make el Negro and Wood slightly more akin to an inside joke than a publicly displayed stereotype of white culture, a distinction that in no way intends to disregard the experiences of the many Black people who have been (and will be) ambushed by the switch.

Yet another question laid down by Fanon is nabbingly relevant; “Is the Negro’s [sexual superiority] real? Everyone knows that it is not. But that is not what matters. The prelogical thought of the phobic has decided that such is the case”[34]. The capacity of editing software to refurbish rumor as fact renders Fanon’s argument somewhat dated, as he does not factor in (nor could he have) the malleability of the digital. His reflections on representations of Black men describe a time when the imago was reproduced through folklore, oral tradition, literature and cinema. Today the genital power of the Black man, “out of reach of morals and taboos”[35], is perjured by distorted pixels, sustained by photographic documentation, no longer relegated to the plane of prelogical phobia. 

While these pranks do point to the imperative of implementing regulatory, internal, digital platform policies, it would be nothing other than disrespectful to thinkers such as Fanon and Wilderson to suggest that the sexual demonization of Black men could be curtailed through a gesture as abstract as coded policy. Nonetheless, understanding how these representations are molded to the limitations and possibilities imposed by technology aids in paying heed to the “tremendous capacity for reconfiguration in the service of continued dominance” of anti-Blackness[36].  The bulk of the literature made use of here to examine these images operates within the premise that the libidinal economy of non-Black life and the biological vilification of the Black man are inextricable. Acknowledging an endorsement of the demise, however fabled it may be, of American and European culture as we know it is the only scenario that permits a meaningful condemnation of these particular representations, while still faithfully engaging with the aforementioned authors.

Notes

[1] AS, Por fin sabemos de dónde surgió el “Negro del Whatsapp.” (May 15th, 2019), https://as.com/epik/2019/05/15/portada/1557912221_652932.html, (accessed August 20, 2020).

[2] Zaragoza, A. (2020b, June 9). The Untold Story of Wood, the Well-Endowed Man From Those Coronavirus Texts. Vice. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxeywy/the-untold-story-of-wood-the-well-endowed-man-from-those-coronavirus-texts,

[3] Know Your Meme, Bait and Switch Videos / Pictures. (August 17th, 2020), https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/bait-and-switch-videos-pictures, (accessed August 20, 2020).

[4] David Marriott, On Black Men, 1st ed., Vol. 1, (Columbia University Press, 2000b), 25.

[5] Ibid, 27

[6] Ibid, 9

[7] Ibid, 9

[8] Ibid, 23

[9] Ibid, 23

[10] Ibid, 25

[11] Ibid, 25

[12] Ibid, 25

[13] Antonio Villarreal, La auténtica historia del “negro de WhatsApp.” (El Confidencial, December 31st, 2019) https://www.elconfidencial.com/tecnologia/2019-05-10/meme-negro-whatsapp-historia-nsfw-123_1991262/#:%7E:text=En%20Italia%20circula%20el%20bulo,de%20WhatsApp’%20es%20John%20Umweto

[14] Marriott, On Black Men, 27

[15] Ibid, 27

[16] Ibid, 24

[17] Ibid, 28

[18] Ibid, 35

[19] Ibid, 36

[20] Ibid, 36

 [21] Sadiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Race and American Culture), 1st ed., (Oxford University Press, 1997), 4

[22] Marriott, On Black Men, 27

[23] Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, Revised ed., Vol. 1. (Grove Press, 1952), 147.

[24] Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms, 1st ed., (Duke University Press Books, 2010), 235.

[25] Ibid, 234

[26] Ibid, 89

[27] Marriott, On Black Men, 39

[28] Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, ’El Negro de WhatsApp’ meme, digital blackface, and racism on social media. First Monday, 25(12), 2020 https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v25i12.10420 (accessed August, 8th, 2020).

[29] Wilderson III, Red, White & Black, 235.

[30] Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, (Penguin Group, 1985), 73.

[31] Marriott, On Black Men, 4.

[32] Ibid, 10

[33] Wilderson III, Red, White & Black, 235.

[34] Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks,137.

[35] Ibid., 154

[36] Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes, 1st ed., (Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2008), 133.

A Brutal History: Slave Patrols and Building a Racist System with Political Power

By Kaity Baril

In the US, the modern context of ruthless policing or oppressive social control originated as far back as the 1790s. The Charleston City Watch and Guard controlled the movement of the slave population at the time. The Guard was armed with swords and pistols, and it imposed a nine o’clock curfew for Black residents of the city. White slave owners wanted to prevent uprisings and revolts. Patrols closely monitored those in captivity, especially when they were working outside of the sight or the control of the enslaver. 

The creation of the first publicly funded police force, in Boston, was in the 1830s. By the 1890s, every major city in the United States had a police presence, born from racist, slave patrols in the era of slavery and relied on through  Black Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow era. 

Now, rather than upholding slavery, cops enforce laws and policies similarly meant to control the lives and movement of Black people. The late 1960s and early 1970s was a period of enormous social turmoil that raised the possibility of revolution. All fundamental institutions of society—the government, the “free” market, the military and war, the police, the nuclear family, white supremacy and others—were challenged. The elite, white, ruling class responded to these direct challenges to their power with Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Crime,” followed by Nixon’s “War on Drugs,” which were jumping off points for subsequent administrations to maintain their preferred social order. The “War on Drugs,” renewed with vigor by Ronald Reagan, still rages, and the U.S. has had the highest incarceration rate in the world since at least 2010. The increase of law enforcement in schools creates a “school to prison pipeline,” in which out-of-school suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests are increasingly used to deal with student misbehavior, especially for minor incidents, and huge numbers of children and youth are pushed out of school and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Not surprisingly, children of color (as well as children with disabilities and children from other vulnerable populations) are disproportionately targeted with these punitive measures.

During the 1980s, the ideology of “zero tolerance” school discipline originates from the “get tough on drugs and crime” policies of that era. This was also the dawn of mandatory minimum sentencing laws — fixed sentences for individuals convicted of a drug crime, with no judicial leniency allowed.  More than 1.6 million people are arrested, prosecuted, incarcerated, placed under criminal justice supervision, and/or deported each year on a drug law violation. “Three-strikes” laws, now in place in 28 states after first appearing in 1994, require anyone previously convicted of two or more violent crimes or serious felonies to receive a life sentence upon a third felony conviction,, regardless of the circumstances or, as in California, sometimes even the severity of the offense (e.g. felony petty theft).  

The Clinton Administration’s Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 was the largest crime bill in the history of the country. It provided 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons, and $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs.

The “War on Terror,” following the September 11, 2001 attacks, was a catalyst for the use of military grade weapons on protestors, most conspicuously in Ferguson in 2014, following the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown. So began the Black Lives Matter movement. 

Cops are Tools of Class Oppression and Mass Incarceration

For decades, starting in 1966, school districts across the country employed the “Officer Friendly” program that brought cops into local Elementary classrooms. Their goal was to indoctrinate children with the belief that the police are an indispensable part of society, who not only uphold the law but protect them. Perhaps this is because the police were established to protect the interests of the wealthy. Racial violence has always been a part of the mission to protect private, crooked institutions.

The institutions that the State has endowed with the most direct power over people’s lives, and a disproportionate share of tax dollars, are the police, prisons, courts, and the military. These enact forms of legalized punishment and repression under the guise of neutrality by being “bound to laws.” In reality, the laws primarily serve one class: the wealthy. Cops are the primary line of defense for a small fraction of the U.S. population – a handful of private corporate owners. A clear example of this is the role police played in the housing crisis. 

The number of empty, unsellable homes far exceeds the number of homeless. Based on currently available numbers, there are about 31 vacant housing units for every homeless person in the U.S. If policing served the people, cops would have arrested the bankers and the white collar criminals who made enormous profits by manipulating the housing market, even after their schemes created a massive global recession in 2008, and a spike in homelessness. Cops would be helping to seize homes to end, not create, homelessness. Yet evictions continue on a daily basis.

Who does policing target? Police are typically deployed to criminalize poverty, concentrating their efforts on criminalizing those with dark skin, forcing millions of people – primarily people of color, people with mental illness, and those in poverty – into the prison system, depriving them of voting and employment rights, and thereby preserving privileged access to housing, jobs, land, credit, and education for whites. Police are used to break strikes and assault picket lines, where workers are struggling for basic human rights and better conditions. Protests and uprisings during the Black Lives Matter movement have resulted in the use of military crowd control techniques. The political aim of the police is seemingly to silence the demonstrators and curtail their constitutional right to free speech and freedom of assembly, especially Black, Brown, Indigenous folks, and communities of color.

The Violent Military Industrial Complex Leaks into the U.S. Police State

The Military Industrial Complex is directly connected to policing and the Prison Industrial Complex in this country. American policing has become unnecessarily and dangerously militarized, in large part through federal programs that have armed state and local law enforcement agencies with the weapons and tactics of war, with almost no public discussion or oversight. The U.S. already acts as the police force of the world, enforcing authority through drone wars, proxy battles, and meddling. Black liberation is a global struggle, and there is a link between racial oppression internationally and domestically. A militarized police is only equipped to escalate situations.

Throughout US history, the police (including federal policing agencies like the FBI) have attacked and undermined social justice organizations and efforts, at home and abroad, through various forms of surveillance, infiltration, sabotage, and assassination. The political function of the police destroys any form of revolution, so it’s no surprise that in the 10 years of anti-establishment social unrest between 1965 and 1975, the number of police officers grew by roughly 40 percent nationally. In 1974, $15 billion was spent on criminal justice, 57 percent going directly to police expenditures4. With this increase of spending, the FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO “neutralized” political dissidents and threats, like the Black Panther Party, through subterfuge and extreme violence. In league with local police units, the FBI declared war on radicals and groups from nationally oppressed communities. Then, the Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams were first formed in Los Angeles in 1968. Fifty years later, the US still holds these political prisoners captive, like Mumia Abu-Jamal. The Free Them All Campaign continues to advocate for their release, even as the police continue to use these tactics against protestors today

Using federal funds, state and local law enforcement agencies have amassed military arsenals to wage the failed “War on Drugs,” disproportionately in communities of color. Aggressive enforcement of this mandate from decades ago has lost its public mandate, as 67 percent of Americans think the government should focus more on treatment than on policing and prosecuting drug users. Aggressive drug arrests and prosecution has impacted millions of lives , disproportionately in communities of color, though drug use rates are quite similar across race and class. Law enforcement agencies’ routine use of heavily armed SWAT teams to search people’s homes for drugs is the same hyper-aggressive form of domestic policing that killed Breonna Taylor.  

The militarization of American policing is evident in police officer training, which encourages them to adopt a “warrior” mentality and view the people they are supposed to serve as enemies. It’s also evident in the equipment they use, such as battering rams, flashbang grenades, and APCs. The 1033 Program transferred surplus military equipment to civilian police departments. Only 45 days after the September 11, 2001 attacks, Congress effortlessly passed the Patriot Act , which George W. Bush signed less than a month after the United States invaded Afghanistan, as part of the “War on Terror”. It broadly expanded law enforcement powers to search, surveil, investigate and indefinitely detain people. Among its effects, the Patriot Act has been used to expand the racist war on drugs. 

Additionally, the Department of Homeland Security, created in 2002 to coordinate government intelligence gathering in order to improve counterterrorism efforts,  has set up centers with the FBI and local police that have been used to spy on protest movements, from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter. More than 7,000 people were arrested during the Occupy movement over the course of just a few months. These arrests, alongside incidents of police brutality, were intended to stamp out a movement that took aim at the face of class oppression from the rich, elite of Wall Street.

Since May 2020, the uprising spurred by the police lynching of George Floyd, has intensified the militarized mobilization of law enforcement. The police forces are equipped in full riot gear and use weapons designed for war. Black and Brown activists in the United States, especially during the Ferguson protests, have described domestic police departments as “occupying forces,” much like those in Afghanistan or Yemen or Palestine. In fact, allowing Israeli forces and U.S. participants to learn from each others’ violent practices and tactics results in the violation of the human rights of Black and Palestinian people, but there are efforts to end this through a campaign called, “End the Deadly Exchange.” Our police, at the behest of local government, wield not only military arms, but what they’ve learned from the military’s formal joint training, tactics (both street combat and psychological operations), and other means of  suppression. At least 200 cities in the U.S. had imposed curfews by early June, while more than 31 states and Washington, D.C. activated over 75,000 National Guard personnel, arresting over 10,000 people. Yet widespread police brutality and the mobilization of military law enforcement tactics, like kidnapping protestors, have only furthered massive civil unrest. 

The Case for Revolutionary Optimism: A Path towards Abolition

So, how do we fight an institution doing what it has been designed to do, one that’s protected by government leaders and employment contracts, and is therefore incapable of reform?  The problems of punitive, racist policing are cultural — ingrained in our society — and cannot be solved by merely identifying a couple murderers or “bad apples,” if you will. 

Given how corrosive policing has historically been and continues to be, it shouldn’t be surprising that with alternatives, our society could flourish without cops. Policing could, and should, be defunded and abolished.

A society that prioritizes human needs ahead of profit means communities that have sufficient housing, food, health care workers, prisoner re-entry services, and community practices that hold all of its members accountable for any harm and enact restorative justice. Mutual aid, rather than one-time giving events, would allow us to share our skills collectively and all contribute. 

It may seem implausible or unreachable. It requires divesting from police, prisons, and the military, and instead, investing in communities of color and supporting the public policies that encourage, not inhibit, family-sustaining wages, job development, education, and the equitable distribution of resources. We cannot accept corporate, private interests to define our way of living. The ruling, capitalist class is in power, controls our government policies, and we must not capitulate to the world they want us to live in. It is one with an illegal slave system that is the Prison Industrial Complex. A society with an abolitionist as a focus will not be built on the violence of a capitalist state designed to defend property and capital, but one in which the people are empowered to provide for each other. 

We must build class unity and solidarity through organizing within our communities to protect one another. There are few tools within the system to fight the State’s abuse politically and legally, but we can ask for the immediate release of inmates in this country’s tortuous prison system; the end of three strikes and overly harsh sentencing guidelines; changing the 13th Amendment to eliminate the clauses that allow for slavery and “involuntary servitude” for people who are convicted; the end of qualified immunity for officers; the repeal of federal programs that send military equipment to local police; the end of “Broken Windows” policing tactics, including stop-and-frisk and other police harassment tactics; the prohibition of no-knock entry; and laws that make it harder for the police to obstruct free speech activity. 

While these are only reforms, we can also strengthen community accountability models that critique punitive systems that maintain repressive, colonial ideology.  Together, we can connect movements, groups, and individuals to transgress the boundaries of institutions. These alternatives must include continuing critiques to improve social conditions, as well as provide accessible, sustainable levels of resources that are consistent with anti-capitalism, anti-racism, and anti-colonialism principles. This is how we can transform and empower communities towards justice and abolition.

Challenging Neoliberal Complacency: The Future of Leftist Organizing

By Mahnoor Imran

Republished from Michigan Specter.

The lesser evil has prevailed. President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have defeated the demagogic megalomaniac in the White House otherwise known as Donald Trump. However, in the middle of a mismanaged pandemic that has cost hundreds of thousands of lives, nationwide protests against the epidemic of police brutality, and the looming threat of climate change, Biden’s insipid promise of returning to some semblance of normalcy feels uninspiring. A return to the pre-Trump status quo will not actively transform the material conditions of the working class, and a massive shift in the political paradigm is desperately needed.

Although their win has prompted celebration, there is something to be said about the failure of establishment Democrats to provide compelling narratives that take on Wall Street, insurance companies, and the fossil fuel industry. Though progressives and leftists are frequently vilified for expressing concerns about the incoming Biden-Harris administration, both Biden and Harris have problematic records that warrant criticism about their vision for the future.

Last year, Biden assured his wealthy donors that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he were elected, once more reminding us that elite centrists will always prioritize the interests of the ruling class. Despite having an atrocious record of racist tough-on-crime policies, Biden operated his campaign under the assumption that people of color were obligated to vote for him simply because he was not Trump. In addition to these things, many resistance liberals have conveniently forgotten about him leading support for the Iraq War, the Obama-Biden administration carrying out mass deportations that ripped families apart, his inappropriate displays of unwanted affection toward women, and credible sexual assault allegations against him. As Attorney General of California, Harris fought hard to keep the wrongfully convicted in prison, withheld evidence that would have freed incarcerated people, criminalized and imprisoned parents because their children were truant, and received criticism from the transgender community for denying gender-affirming healthcare and banning forums that sex workers use to protect themselves.

In the next four years, the Biden-Harris administration will continue to champion neoliberal governance and imperialist interests. Their transition team is filled with wealthy corporate executives and lobbyists from companies like Uber and Amazon who are entirely disconnected from the struggles of the working class. The team also comprises Obama administration alumni like Cecilia Muñoz, President Obama’s top immigration advisor who continually justified harsh immigration enforcement policies and rationalized the separation of parents from their children.

Though centrism may have won at the top of the ticket, it proved to be electorally shaky. In fact, many moderates lost their seats or came dangerously close to losing their seats. Although Democrats tried to blame the Left for their own shortcomings, progressive organizers, many of whom were people of color, were the ones who helped secure Biden’s win in swing states. Black communities, indigenous communities, and Hispanic communities did the heavy lifting for a democracy that never worked in their favor. Representative Rashida Tlaib, who represents one of the most impoverished districts in the country, recently told Politico that “If [voters] can walk past blighted homes and school closures and pollution to vote for Biden-Harris, when they feel like they don’t have anything else, they deserve to be heard.” Instead of paying lip service to social issues and defaulting to vague bromides about unity, the incoming Biden administration owes these communities more than just a nod of thanks. They deserve a bold vision for the future of America.

The reality is that our nation’s current modality of political and economic operation is committed to half-hearted incrementalism and assumes that anything other than that is impossible. This concession to pragmatism inhibits real progress. The pursuance of middle-ground politics paves the way for excessive globalization at the expense of developing countries, corporate tax breaks paid for through austerity, and rhetoric about civility at the expense of communities of color.

Neoliberalism is degenerative. It allows for oligarchs to dictate our political agenda and influence our political process. It launches wars based on lies and makes billions in profits by selling arms to repressive regimes. It tries to convince us that the levers of the capitalist market are capable of producing equity and sustainability. It fuels a for-profit healthcare system that burdens people with thousands of dollars in medical debt. It maintains an egregious carceral system that disproportionately harms and kills black, indigenous, Hispanic, immigrant, mentally ill, and disabled communities. It deceives us into believing that individual hard work is the key to amassing wealth and achieving the American Dream. It generates cult-like infatuations with billionaires who would be nothing without government subsidies and the workers whom they underpay and exploit.

When governments abandon their obligation to transform socioeconomic outcomes for the better, political efficacy diminishes. This points to the inextricable link between neoliberalism and the triumph of Trumpism. In four years, we may have hard-right candidates try to take the presidency again. In that terrifying prospect, the pullback might be stronger than the push forward. The only way to prevent this is for the Democratic Party to muster the moral and political courage to get behind popular movements and policies like the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and defunding the police.

Unfortunately, both Biden and Harris have spent a considerable amount of energy contemptuously distancing themselves from progressivism and denouncing socialism. Although the word “socialist” is used pejoratively by Republicans to lambaste any Democrat with a pulse, the more that Democrats try to distance themselves from progressivism and socialism as if they were inherently bad, the more it legitimizes GOP framing.

Instead of waiting out an interregnum in our political history, we must continue to fight for progressive policies that are actually popular among rural, urban, and suburban voters. The future for leftist organizing and movement building is far from bleak. In fact, 67% of Americans support increasing the minimum wage to $15, 69% support Medicare for All, and 63% support free public college.

Furthermore, 26 out of 30 of the Democratic Socialists of America’s nationally endorsed candidates won their races. All four members of “The Squad” — Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ayanna Presley, and Ilhan Omar — have won their reelections and will be joined by progressive insurgents Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. Every single swing-seat House Democrat who endorsed Medicare for All won their race and 99% of Green New Deal co-sponsors won their races in this cycle.

Although Biden’s win has undoubtedly exacerbated neoliberal complacency, this is a critical moment to push for an unapologetic agenda that promotes justice, challenges structural racism, combats climate change, increases political accountability, dismantles institutions of oppression, and radically redistributes wealth. We can continue to organize by supporting indigenous sovereignty, fighting for police and prison abolition, developing ecosocialist frameworks for promoting environmental justice, and creating mutual aid networks. When we build community power and cultivate solidarity, we can rise above the forces of oppression, marginalization, and vituperation that threaten to destroy us. The horizon of a liberated future is within our line of sight. We just have to keep moving forward and pushing left.

Black American Apathy and Internationalism

By Erica Caines

Republished from Hood Communist.

“…There is no “American dilemma” because Black people in this country form a colony, and it is not in the interest of the colonial power to liberate them. Black people are legal citizens of the United States with, for the most part, the same legal rights as other citizens. Yet they stand as colonial subjects concerning the white society. Thus institutional racism has another name: colonialism.”

-Black Power: Politics of Liberation.

For those organizing African people towards Revolutionary Pan-African Socialism, a Joe Biden presidency is not a win. It’s a detriment. Understanding neoliberalism breeds fascism would mean that it is a mistake for anyone alleged to be of a “radical politic” to celebrate Biden becoming the president-elect and, by extension, celebrating his running mate, Kamala Harris. Unfortunately, many Africans in the US have strapped themselves in willingly for a presidency that will attempt to be even more hawkish than the Barack Obama administration in every warmongering, drone-dropping, coup-backing, militarized-policing way.

Much of the issues around internationalism stems from a communal lack of political maturity, which helps one analyze their material conditions as they are. Furthermore, a lack of political education obstructs international solidarity with Africans and oppressed people globally. African people in the US make up a colonized nation not dissimilar to colonized nations always under attack by the strongarm of US imperialism and their western allies.

The US military and its 400 bases worldwide serve as occupiers in the same way the (overt) police state does in our neighborhoods. What is the difference between the US African Command (AFRICOM), which is said to “combat the War on Terror,” and militarized policing units like Operation Relentless Pursuit and Operation LeGend, both used in multiple cities across the country to “combat crime and domestic terrorism”? What is the difference between the murderous Israeli occupation of Palestine and the occupation of a colonized neighborhood in the US using IDF trained police units?

There is no difference.

The primary contradictions of imperialism have been distorted by dishonest conversations around “anti- Blackness,” as well as a new sense of American ‘pride’ found in Black Americans that assists in framing all geopolitical issues from an ‘us vs. them’ lens. Global and domestic imperialism are counterparts. African people’s allegiance to the US, and military enlistment, has always existed as a contradiction within the community. While it may be true historically African people were the least favorable to war, Obama’s presidency set the stage for a bold backing of US imperialism by way of patriotism from ‘Black America.’

Although most unite under hating Trump, many earnestly believe the US is worth saving. Mass “get out the vote” mobilizations across the country ensued to “stop full-blown fascism” by asserting a false sense of power in electing a majority unfavorable democratic candidate. The mainstream media announcement of Biden as the 46th president has caused a mass reactionary hysteria and sighs “of relief” that things may return to normal.

As the celebrations have been going on, despite Donald Trump not formally conceding, Biden’s team has been busy, too. Names for potential cabinet members who range from the center to the right have been circling the internet. Jim Clyburn and other democratic centrist moderates are currently vowing to protect the country from going “socialist” by pushing back against the messaging of “defund the police.” 

Benjamin Netanyahu and Narendra Modi have congratulated the presumed  president-elect and madame vice president-elect, promising even closer ties and relations. Both Netanyahu and Modi are fascists, in their own right, and part of a more extensive global expansion of fascist leadership, yet neither Biden nor Harris find an issue in continuing the existing relationships despite the very real murderous actions of both men in their prospective countries against Muslims. Coincidentally, alleged crimes against Muslims is the same propaganda use to be actively aggressive towards China and President Xi Jinping that Biden intends to continue with through the Indo-Pacific Command. 

Reactionary Internationalism: Fascists Narendra Modi and Benjamin Netanyahu congratulate Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on their presumed electoral victory.

With rumors of Dick Cheney potentially being an advisor to Biden on foreign policy, a majority conservative Supreme Court and a majority GOP senate would be a convenient cover for Biden’s actual geopolitics and non-plan for the poor working-class. Biden has built a career in the US government on criminalizing Africans and other colonized people in the US with the racialized “War on Drugs” through policy measures like the crime bill (domestically) and Plan Colombia (globally).

The “open-letter left,” which includes characters like Noam Chomsky and Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK, has decided, as a predominately white and economically stable coalition of signatures, to ignore historical materialism for the sake of ousting Trump. They have agreed that any policies that will place colonized people the most at risk, here and abroad, would be worth it so long as it’s not policies signed off on by Trump. Just like during the Obama era, the US left is proving itself useless in not only helping the masses comprehend imperialism but fighting against it by not voting for the man who has never seen a war he disapproved.

“Imperialism, which is the highest stage of capitalism, will continue to flourish in different forms as long as conditions permit it.  Though its end is certain, it can only come about under pressure of nationalist awakening and an alliance of progressive forces which hasten its end and destroy its conditions of existence.”  

- Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism

‘Black American’ apathy through American exceptionalism creates that “sigh of relief” people express now. The indifference to wars and occupation is the result of a rupture in the ability for African people to make the connections between a man promising more policing as a campaign strategy during the height of mass uprisings against the police to his aggressive rhetoric towards nations like Venezuela, China, Iran, etc. Nor the US’ role in establishing brutal neocolonial leadership in the Global South and on the Continent.

It is becoming more and more evident that despite the strengthening calls to ‘Free Palestine’ and more recent actions to ‘End Sars,’ internationalism will again become a backburner issue. How will Africans in the US combat this and re-establish the anti-war internationalism politics that cemented the Black Radical Tradition and politics of the past?

First, we must ruthlessly attack the aversion to political education. The lack of understanding of the Third World struggles adjacent to the struggles of Africans in the US has resulted in liberal reactionary responses to anti-imperialism. Imperialism can not continue to be a vacuum issue by Africans living within the empire of the US. This isolated framing of the world prevents the practice of revolutionary internationalism – international solidarity against the same white supremacist forces that oppress Africans domestically. We are witnessing the frantic reactionary calls to “let people enjoy things” for the sake of identity reductionism.

A #BlackLivesMatter solidarity action in occupied Palestine drawing connections between the murders of George Floyd and autistic Palestinian youth, Eyad Al-Hallaq

Online discourse centered around anti-imperialism is met with push back primarily because people do not possess the political maturity to comprehend the ways imperialism materially affects their everyday lives and the importance of internationalism. Once Africans in the US understand themselves as colonized people on stolen land, there will be a more precise analysis of how liberation is sought and gained through tactics not tied to revolutionary internationalism – not to continuously voting for one’s demise.

For colonized people within the imperial core, there should be no allegiance to America.

"Forcible Hindrances": On the Structural Violence of Capitalism and How People Respond To It

By Yanis Iqbal

In his 1845 book “The Condition of the Working Class in England”, Friedrich Engels wrote:

“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessities of life, places them in conditions in which they cannot live,—forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence—knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual.”

Engel’s abovementioned remarks remain as pertinent today as they were when he wrote them. The Poverty and Shared Prosperity Report 2020 (PSPR2020) estimates that Covid-19 will likely push between 88 and 115 million people into extreme poverty i.e. those living under $1.90 a day. It is important to remember that the International Poverty Line (IPL) of $1.90 a day is ridiculously low — in 2011 in the US, $1.90 would have just been sufficient to buy a cup of coffee. Therefore, the magnitude of the process of existential erosion unleashed by the pandemic is likely greater than those being predicted by various financial institutions. The impoverishment of the majority is not solely due to the negative effects of the pandemic. It is closely linked to the brutal logic of neoliberalism capitalism which has instituted austerity-ravaged health infrastructures, precarized the everyday lives of workers through “flexible” jobs and detached itself from productive economic sectors through frenzied financialization. While innumerable people get mired in the vortex of poverty and endless suffering, billionaires are amassing unprecedented amounts of wealth, creating lagoons of affluence and privilege surrounded by oceans of mass misery.

What is happening today because of the fusion of epidemiological and economic crises is merely a stark manifestation of the endless murders being committed by capitalism for hundreds of years. Through accelerated capital accumulation and expanded exploitation, capitalism has cold-bloodedly reduced the state of existence to a process of rotting whose final destination is a harrowing death. This “structural violence” of capitalism is not an inadvertent byproduct of a perfectly functioning economic regime; it is an inseparable internal mechanism with the help of which capital satisfies its insatiable reproductive needs. Under neoliberalism, capital’s economic exigencies have displayed themselves in ever more acute forms like permanent unemployment, job insecurity, cuts in public spending and dispossession as a socially ravaged system desperately attempts to stave off economic crises. 

When confronted by the massive structural violence of capitalism, the subalterns inevitably search for alternative ways of living which would shield them from the ruination wreaked by the existing system. This conscious experience of the objective oppressiveness of capitalism leads to social conflicts between classes generated by antagonistic relations of production. These instances of class struggle act as subjective interventions in the structural conflict between forces and relations of production. As the forces of production develop, the relations of production, which once had facilitated their expansion, slowly began to impede further development. Through the direct action of subaltern subjects, the contradiction between the centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor is finally solved, leading to a revolution.

Understanding Bourgeois Democracy

While a revolution need not necessarily be violent, historical circumstances under capitalism have operated in such a way as to render violence the only viable method to overthrow the ruling class. Even after the establishment of parliamentary institutions and a “democratic” state, revolutionary violence has continued to act as a last resort for those who are the victims of globalization and necropolitical neoliberalism. In an 1878 article written by Karl Marx on the Anti-Socialist Law in Germany, we can find rough explanations regarding the conflictual presence of revolutionary violence and bourgeois democracy:

“An historical development can remain “peaceful” only so long as no forcible hindrances are placed in its path by those holding power in society at the time…the peaceful movement could become a "violent" one on encountering the resistance of those interested in the old state of affairs…In fact the government tries to crush by force development which is inimical to it although legally invulnerable.”

The “forcible hindrances” are constituted by the state under capitalism. The capitalist state is not an autonomous entity working outside the logic of accumulation; it a highly complex terrain of class struggle embodying the conflict between accumulation and legitimacy. On the one hand, the political power of state is incapable of independently organizing production — property is private and the productive sectors of the economy are in the hands of private companies to whose activities the state has to continually react. In so far as the state is unable to construct a self-supporting productive base and depends on revenues from surplus extraction, its capacities are indirectly determined through private productivity and profitability. This means that politicians and officials have to strengthen capital accumulation to be able to exist within the state. On the other hand, the ruling dispensation brought to power through electoral means has to maintain hegemony within the citizenry if it does not want a crisis of legitimacy to destabilize its tenure.

The conflict between accumulation and legitimacy is maintained and balanced by using coercive power against those political forces which raise issues that cannot be structurally accommodated within the limits of capitalistic democracy that only allows for insufficient and gradual changes. When the subalterns become cognizant of this structural limitation of bourgeois democracy, they are compelled to utilize revolutionary violence to regain agency and put forth their demands in a visible way.

In the current conjuncture, the internal disjunctions of bourgeois democracy are increasingly coming under stress under as the subalterns articulate new demands which are opposed to the murderous mechanisms of capitalism. In the US, for example, the George Floyd uprising — one of the largest movement in US history — highlighted the racist veins of capitalism and explicitly foregrounded the structural violence of capitalism. Since the American rebellion expressed demands which transcended the delimited area of bourgeois democracy, it was met with heavy state repression. Apart from the US, sustained protests have also occurred in Colombia where the concentrated anger of the subalterns against neoliberalism coalesced around the issue of police brutality — identified as one of the constitutive components of a wider picture of injustice. Like the Black rebellion in America, the Colombian protests, too, were violently subdued through the sheer use of force.

Revolutionary Violence: The Ethical Dimension

As class struggle continues to intensify across the world, a theory of revolutionary violence which is able to build the foundations of politico-ethical hegemony for the Left will likely form. If a coherent theory of revolutionary violence is formed, leftist forces worldwide will get access to a tool which is capable of breaking the cycle of parliamentary violence and consolidating a new constellation of social forces. The application of revolutionary violence against class enemies has always acted as an addendum to politics and has historically been invariably interwoven with and subordinated to careful efforts aimed at forming ideological bases of counter-hegemony within the womb of capitalist society.

In the last instance, revolutionary ideology acts as the primary factor behind the overthrow of capitalism. To use the words of Fidel Castro,

“Just ideas have greater power than all the reactionary forces put together… ideas are and always will be the most important weapon of all…There is no weapon more powerful than a profound conviction and clear idea of what must be done. It is with these kinds of weapons, which do not require enormous sums of money, but only the capacity to create and transmit just ideas and values, that our people will be increasingly armed. The world will be conquered by ideas, not by force”.

While giving a speech to the Hanover Congress of the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1899, Rosa Luxemburg had remarked that the proponents of revolution “are the last to take up violent means, the last to wish a brutal, violent revolution on ourselves…such matters do not depend on us, they depend on our opponents”. Violence, therefore, has been a tactical necessity forced upon the proletariat by counter-revolutionary offensives throughout modern history. And while violence has certainly been one functional aspect of revolution, it is also a mode of struggle having ethical ramifications i.e. it is itself constitutive of the new humans that emerge from the revolutionary process. In so far that revolutionary violence has an ethical dimension, a moral framework has often been provided for its exercise. The basic structure of this moral framework can be outlined through two points.

Firstly, revolutionary violence has been performed strictly in keeping with the moral goal of destroying capitalism and correspondingly cleansing the world of structural violence and gratuitous deaths. This means that violence itself is ethically molded by the goal of revolution and is exercised to prevent further violence. In the concluding sentences of his essay “Tactics and Ethics”, Georg Lukacs had expressed this point eloquently: “only he who acknowledges unflinchingly and without any reservations that murder is under no circumstances to be sanctioned can commit the murderous deed that is truly - and tragically - moral.” From this statement, it is quite clear that revolutionary violence can be carried out only when individuals realize that the brutalization and degradation of human life under capitalism has to end. When revolutionary violence is conceived as such, it becomes an endeavor to replace moral narcissism —preservation of the purity of one’s soul at the expense of humanity as a whole — with a collectivist struggle for the destruction of a social order which constantly violates the right to life of an individual.

Secondly, since revolutionary violence has been guided and regulated by the moral ideals of socialism, it also has an internal code of ethics which balances the ends (socialism) with the means (violence). The unification of means and ends has been necessary in so far that revolutionary violence has a direct bearing on the subjectivities of the individuals produced through class struggle. Furthermore, if violence is not mediated by ethical codes consonant with the goals of socialism, the process of struggle is emptied of its political meaning and deforms the goal itself. As Herbert Marcuse has said:

“No matter how rationally one may justify revolutionary means in terms of the demonstrable chance of obtaining freedom and happiness for future generations, and thereby justify violating existing rights and liberties and life itself, there are forms of violence and suppression which no revolutionary situation can justify because they negate the very end for which the revolution is a means. Such are arbitrary violence, cruelty, and indiscriminate terror.”

In order to understand the historical, ethical edifice of revolutionary violence, we need to differentiate between specific types of destruction. In Albert Camus’ play “The Just Assassins”, a leading character, Dora, asserts: “even in destruction there is a right way and a wrong way – and there are limits”. The right way is constituted by prefigurative methods of violence which act as embryonic expressions of the future. Through these prefigurative practices, a politico-ethical fabric of hegemony is woven which allows the subalterns to struggle in the present and at the same time experience the socialist future. Slavoj Zizek accurately outlines the contours of such a prefigurative struggle:

“Revolution is experienced not as a hardship over which the future happiness and freedom already cast their shadow – in it, we are already free even as we fight for freedom; we are already happy even as we fight for happiness, no matter how difficult the circumstances. Revolution is…its own ontological proof, an immediate index of its own truth.”

According to Norman Geras, ethical practices within the field of revolutionary violence comprise primarily of (1) the distinction between direct agents of class oppression and everybody else and (2) a notion of minimum force: “one's weapons must be capable of stopping enemy combatants, which in the given circumstances involves killing them; but they should not, beyond this, seek gratuitously to accentuate suffering.” Camilo Guevara — Che Guevara’s son — reiterates similar points and writes that “revolutionaries, even if they are being massacred sadistically, should invoke the use of force only when absolutely necessary, and even then, should never accompany it with cruelty. This idea is directly proportional to the condition of being a revolutionary”. When these kinds of ethical arrangements are integrated into revolutionary violence, a form of class struggle is produced which contributes towards the development of a subjectively enriching process of socialist humanization.

With the exacerbation of material conditions and rising subaltern resistance, the legitimacy of bourgeois democracy is constantly coming under threat. This tense period of disequilibrium is similar to past times, when revolution through the politically circumscribed use of violence has been one among the many tactics of revolution. The rationale behind the tactical use of violence was explained by Marx as thus: “the governments are opposed to us: we must answer them with all the means that are at our disposal…We must declare to the governments: we will proceed against you peaceably where it is possible and by force of arms when it may be necessary.” While revolutionary violence is underway in many parts of the world, it has not typically made its way into the imperial core. However, as capitalism’s contradictions come to a head, we are seeing more and more people flooding the streets, even within the US. Though revolutionary violence has historically functioned as a tactic, it also has moral aspects which need to be ethically structured to construct socialist hegemony among the subaltern classes. In the contemporary period, if it is to come about organically in response to capitalism’s structural violence, it can be visceral in nature (and thus misplaced at times) or ethically-informed, and thus utilized as a part of a broader organized movement to replace capitalism with socialism.