Outside Agitators

US liberals are now aghast that a foreign country could interfere in some capacity with their right to run their own elections. While that may have been the case in some limited capability, local electoral riggings and voter disenfranchisement—as well as the wholly undemocratic process of the electoral college, which, for the second time in 16 years stole an election from the popular vote—were without a doubt the overwhelming factors. Yet MSNBC is not running nonstop coverage on the inequities in the US electoral system. And while the gears of war are churning among both the Right and the Center, the idea of payback being a mother never sits well. The US often and continually interferes in the elections of nearly every other country and directly or indirectly tries to overthrow the democratically elected (sometimes not, admittedly) leaders of other nations (most recently Venezuela  and Nicaragua), which disrupts their development and kills countless civilians. Liberals will sometimes acknowledge that while this may be true, two wrongs don’t make a right—yet no one is trying to dismantle the CIA or the ironically-named National Endowment for Democracy, the backdoor “humanitarian agency” USAID, the John Bolton-led and fiercely undemocratic NSA, NATO, or the IMF; instead, liberals are more likely to trust them now than before. But there’s more to this narrative, a deeply embedded American Exceptionalism that insists that America is united and ultimately good, and that any claims to the contrary are Whatabouttisms meant to divide us.

There are some notable similarities between the controversy surrounding Russiagate and the Civil Rights Movement: the accusation that agitation is not natural; that division and struggle is alien and therefore wrong; that America is an exceptional land where people are happy and know their place. This becomes exceptionally clear when we talk about many of the posts supposedly created by Kremlin-backed Russian bots or hackers that highlight racial strife. These tend to be in themselves based on anti-blackness, such as the palpable fear in this CNN shit-piece on black men taking self-defense classes. Or an Atlanta-based NPR reporter warning about a Black activist having done guest spots on Russia’s state-funded Sputnik Radio (which airs in DC[1]). The fact that NPR is also state-funded is apparently immaterial. On NPR’s Morning Talk, a reporter dismisses Black leftists and activists such as Anoa Changa and Eugene Puryear as agents of Russian influence:

Like RT, U.S. national security agencies say Sputnik [Radio] is part of Russia’s propaganda machine. The network gives Changa another platform to get her message out. She denounces what she calls racial injustice and oppression. These concerns fall in line with what experts call a key message of Russian propaganda – amplifying existing political and social divisions. [Emphasis mine]

Notice the terminology: “Russia’s propaganda machine”; “what she calls”; “Russian propaganda: amplifying… divisions”.

In the space of half a minute, this nationally-aired and revered National Public Radio show twice calls Black American activist Anoa Changa an agent of Russian propaganda.

Changa sees this tactic as erasure and harmfully racist:

As you can imagine, there isn’t much appetite for this kind of work in mainstream media. So I have my own podcast, and when I’m invited to speak to larger platforms, I do so, gratefully.

Recently, I took such an invitation and appeared as a guest on “By Any Means Necessary,” a radio show hosted by Eugene Puryear and Sean A. Blackmon on Radio Sputnik. Sputnik is a news agency established by the Russian government-controlled news agency Rossiya Segodnya. And yet Eugene, Sean, and their producer maintain editorial freedom in developing and producing their content.

I certainly maintain my independence when I go on their show, talking about the issues that matter to me. I do not consult with the Russian government before I speak my mind, nor do I care what they think about what I say. There aren’t a lot of mainstream platforms that give voice to left-wing Black activists, and Puryear and Blackmon do. On the most recent interview we discussed the glaring issues with Trump’s Economic Executive Order…

In four minutes, Kauffman [the NPR reporter] destroyed my credibility and my reputation, for the crime of not having access to the kinds of American state funded media that he, a white man, is freely given access to.

Fortunately, according to her own report, local activists and (somewhat surprisingly) more mainstream non-profits did not distance themselves from her, which is a testament of her own work as others have been harassed and blackballed for similar accusations.

For liberals to call for the return of Joe McCarthy is disgusting. This redbaiting and red scare has real, practical implications and harm. What’s telling about this new Red Scare is the connections between it and the anti-Black stench of “outside agitators”. It is an ethos that argues that Black people and other oppressed populations are and have been satisfied with a status quo that alienates, suppresses, and oppresses them. Further, the underlying assumption is that Black people could never think of organizing and taking action against their oppressors and would not think of defending themselves were it not for an alien and sinister force stirring up trouble.

Product of outside interference? Russiabot?

Of course these accusations of outside agitation sound familiar to anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the Civil Rights Movement. I would assume most liberals are familiar with the charges laid against the likes of not just King, SNCC, and the SCLC, but the local, often unheralded leaders, marchers, singers, corps. Which suggests that liberals are aware of what they’re doing, but just don’t care. Why else would they accuse Black and other oppressed and poor people of being idiotic and essentially satisfied with their positions, besides being shot down on the sidewalks while running away from cops, being denied basic protections while working, being run over by cars while marching in the streets? They would rather capitulate to regressive, anti-black standards and appease reactionaries in order to align against a supposed enemy[2] that they believe assisted a common enemy—a behemoth of horror, surely, but one who is primarily aided and abetted by these same standards of racism and status quo protection that the accused “Russian agents” are protesting against.

As long as liberals continue to individualize their resistance—fighting against personalities rather than against a pathological ideology which causes material harm—they will continue to cause rather than alleviate suffering. It’s almost like they do not seek liberation, but only softer chains.

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[1] Disclaimer for what it’s worth: I have begun listening to Eugene Puryear’s By Any Means Necessary show via podcast. It’s good stuff, imo.

[2] Can we sometime talk about how Russia is a supposed enemy while Saudi Arabia actually had a part in attacking us? Russia wasn’t an official enemy at the time, nor is it now, strictly speaking. For that matter, how are Iran or Cuba enemies as they do not pose a threat to us and, if we’re counting human rights violations, that’s just fucking laughable coming from the United States.

When the Man Censors the Man from Talking about the Man

Several months back, I posted a variant on a joke that trolls White Supremacists who refer to multicultural representation as “White Genocide.” I don’t remember the version I said, but the original is, “All I want for Christmas is White Genocide.” Yes, I happen to think it’s a knee-slapper, but also, both the original and my variant were created and disseminated by fellow people from European heritage (3 of my grandparents have roots going back to Northern Europe). Somebody on my friend’s list was offended enough to report it, so Facebook took it down and gave me a stern lecture about why I should abide by their “community standards.”

Which I always thought was weird, because when I’ve reported pages for being racist against Puerto Ricans, pointing out their explicit stereotypes that paint Boriquenxs (the other grandparent is Puerto Rican) as lazy and dumb thugs from the perspective of gentrifiers, it takes several weeks and multiple reports from many people (residents and allies) before Facebook even admits that the page is violating Community Standards. Recently, I reported a man for threatening sending his family after me to cause me physical harm. Community Standards were apparently silent then as they’ve never gotten back to that issue.

A white man making a joke about a white supremacist talking point, however, violates the Community Standards? And while some of my FB friends did initially find the joke  insensitive, I was able to explain its context to them. Facebook, however, does not have such a dialogue. The people who supposedly uphold standards for community living don’t have open, two-way dialog, the most essential element of creating and sustaining a community.

Community is difficult, dynamic, multifaceted, and living. Paradoxically, while every community needs boundaries and guidelines, to strictly enforce them unilaterally (read: Zero Tolerance) leads to the death of the community. What rises instead gravitates toward racist, sexist, ableist, and classist hegemony. A network should stop pretending to be social when it is unwilling or unable to bend, when orders merely come from the top (from people who tend to navigate towards anti-social tendencies in the first place).

I reached the butt-end of this zero-tolerance policy when I made another swipe at The Whites. This time, a friend alerted me that he was censored on one of my posts for saying (appropriately) the phrase “White Devils” in response to some messed up story I shared about White people acting very… White people. When I found out he was reported and his statement taken down I reacted and said that anybody outraged by the phrase White Devil is either a White Devil or a White Devil Ally, and as such, should not be my friend.

I was then booted off of Facebook for 24 hours (more like 26, but I’m not bitter or anything). When I asked that they revise their finding (I ‘violated Facebook Community standards’ again, for hate speech), I added that I, myself as a White person*, could not have been invoking hate speech because I do not hate myself.

At this point, it may be necessary to remind readers that White Nativists believe that White people can be race-traitors for aligning with Black and Brown people. It is a capital offense to the KKK and Nazis.

Two weeks after that stint, I was sent back to Facebook Rikers Island for a sentence of three days for saying Settler Colonialists are violent and murderers. Where was the lie? Tha is what settler colonialism is: It is cultural and bodily genocide that takes land. Facebook apparently agreed with me for a minute because it censored the Declaration of Independence for hate speech, until it backtracked and realized who was doing the talking and about whom.

See, Founding Fathers and other powerful bigots like US presidents, other politicians, and even (White) pundits get to make tremendous threats against the lives of millions of people on social media and all of a sudden the Community Standards Police are mum. These are people with tremendous influence and power, with fingers on the pulse of the movers and shakers if not the movers and shakers, THE button-pushers themselves.

After the first-third of my jail sentence, the judge/jury/executioner came back to me and acknowledged that they made a mistake and sent me on my merry way. But there was no transparency as into what the decision-making process was like in the first place nor why there was a reversal. I do not know if I can talk about Christians or Evangelicals (as a present Christian and former Evangelical, I feel inclined to) in a critical light without again getting booted for “hate speech”.

However, my sentencing was light compared to women and others outside of cisgender maleness, and especially of those of color. Many of my friends have had extended periods in Facebook or Twitter Pokie or have lost their social media accounts for declaring “men are trash” despite the accuracy of this statement and the context of their own harassment by men, who are socially conditioned to feel ownership. This silencing tactic, directed by men, only adds to the veracity of the statement. Furthermore, Twitter and Facebook punish black and brown people–heavily victimized by this racist, sexist nation-state–for saying “Death to America.” Even though, unlike Donald Trump, they have no actual power* to enact any semblance of such a threat. Such as when the POTUS literally threatened genocide of the entire Korean population. And yet his account remains unchallenged.

Every successful enterprise within White Supremacist Patriarchal Capitalism is set up to protect White Supremacist Patriarchal Capitalism; that includes the internet.

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*yet. Lord hasten the day.

On James Cone and “Racial Reconciliation”

In hearing about the passing of the good Dr James Cone, founder of Black Liberation Theology and an all-around important figure in latter 20th/early 21st Century Christianity, I ran across this older article from The Gospel Coalition (TGC), that bastion of White Conservative Evangelicalism. I in fact have several Black and POC friends and family adjacent to John Piper and TGC (and once was an adherent), largely because Piper puts out an aura of intellectualism that is attractive to young urban Christians who do not see much intellectual engagement in other church life, and because Piper and TGC also at least tend to talk about racial justice.

But whereas Cone talked about God siding with and identifying with the oppressed (ie, Black people) and thus allying against the very White Christianity that supports oppression (ie, White Supremacy, anti-blackness, reactionary politics), TGC and other White Evangelicals (including those who align with the White Theological/Political project) call for racial reconciliation. The author quotes from Black theologian J. Deotis Roberts:

Christians are called to be agents of reconciliation. We have been able to love and forgive . . . The assertion that all are ‘one in Christ Jesus’ must henceforth mean that all slave-master, servant-boss, inferior-superior frames of reference between blacks and whites have been abolished.

But the meaning in a spiritualized sense does not mean in an earthly sense, so to say. To declare that we are free is merely to say it; and while imagination and declaration are important steps in the realization,  they are not sufficient. To suggest that they are is to not just to say that a dream is reality, but to keep the dream from being worked out and actualized.

Racism is a device and creation of Whiteness, of which White people have primarily benefited–and that works itself out in class and sexual/gender approaches as well. The conditions of Blackness and Whiteness were created by Whites and those identified as White have been the benefactors of this distinction. So the idea that there is something to reconcile between the two without eradicating the White-created racism in all its material and psychological processes is both absurd and obscene.

And while it is the work of White people to eradicate material racism–as they currently control the means of materialism under White Supremacist Imperialist Monopoly–it is not the worth of White people to also devise the conditions upon which this reconciliation should be made right. How can you trust the people who benefit from Whiteness and who believe wholeheartedly in their innocence to purge their benefits, even if and when they mean well?

I do not trust capitalists to give us the means of production. We should not trust White people to eradicate racism on their terms.

That is why it is important that God is on the side of the oppressed. Because it assists in creating a space where it becomes psychologically and socially possible, which leads to material matters. Anything less is an immaterial, and thus hopeless, religion. And what good is religion if it does not offer hope?

The Education of the Secretary of Education

I was watching that train wreck that was Betsy DeVos on 60 Minutes and it struck me that not only is DeVos not bright but how her lack of curiosity (fitting for a Dept of Education head) is tied to and propelled by both her class status and to her deeply abiding and troubling allegiance to a broken, quasi-religious dogma.

Being born and then marrying into filthy rich status as a white person, she has never had to work a real day in her life and (like her boss) never gets told no. While she’s a philanthropist, she has no need to come in contact with the real world outside of superficial photo ops with black children. She can have her perch and live there comfortably unbothered by the effects of poverty, racism, ableism, or the messy masses.

The other point is her faithfulness to an ideology that can be be broken down into two words: Individual & Choice. DeVos has taken Margaret Thatcher’s catchphrase “There is no society, only individuals” and declared it her life verse, a suitable model to run the entire educational system upon. Doing such allows her to not take seriously nor really consider systemic injustice: whether that be sexism, racism, ableism, transphobia, or classism, it doesn’t really matter because we’re all *just* people.

DeVos believes in the neoliberal maxim that the free market is the solution for each and every ailment. In this market framing, the consumer is allowed to make choices between various brands, types, sizes, smells, flavors. The more choices a consumer has, the more likely the consumer can make a better choice to fit their individualist and highly-unique branded lifestyle. It follows from this that the more choices one has, the more likely that person will make the right, fully-informed decision. Herein lies the importance of allowing Nazis to have a platform as it gives another choice for the citizen to accept or reject. It goes without saying that there is no actual solution proffered, just variations.

As if a choice between Frosted Flakes with Extra Fibre (TM) or Granola Raisin Bran can truly offer life. Its ridiculousness should be evident to anyone who isn’t a fanatic, but Free Marketism is a very profitable and dynamic fundamentalist religion with strong in-roads into Christianity. It’s pretty obvious that Betsy DeVos is a true believer in Christian Free Marketism.

Put these two factors together, this unearthed class status and strict dogma along with a general incuriosity of the world and how it works, and who needs data or findings? Who could possibly question this notion that school choice is always preferable to public schooling? Like when she called Historically Black Colleges & Universities “pioneers of school choice.” It’s so self-evidently obvious that there can be no questioning, right? Who needs to study whether it works, because it has to work. And who needs to study the issues and come prepared to an interview with, say, a nationally-televised news magazine or the entire senate chambers, when you have dogmatic soundbites to repeat. Soundbites such as:

• “Empowering… to make choices” – Except that choices in and of themselves aren’t empowering. Why not “empowering… with resources, with money, with access, with direct connections to power”? Why is the only option to remove individual children “stuck” in “poor-performing” schools (or “bad schools”) rather than improve the actual school itself through funding and access to resources?
• “We should be invested and funding in students, not in… institutions.” – What is it you think institutions are? If you honestly believe that institutions don’t serve individuals, please get the fuck out of the public life and certainly out of government.
• “Government overreach.” – Being a neoliberal adherent and a Trumpist, it should be no surprise that one of DeVos’s principal jobs is to oversee deregulation. Somehow, protecting vulnerable students is seen as an error on the side of Big Government, rather than a truly positive aspect.
• “All students [should] have an opportunity to learn in a safe and nurturing environment.” – She repeats this mantra three times. And it works, except for black, trans, disabled, and sexual-assault survival students I guess? In a system where only white, straight, cis-male, wealthy students (and investors) count…

On another note, DeVos is often talked about as the most-hated member of Trump’s cabinet. And while she is bad (and I wouldn’t want to rule out misogyny as a factor in the degree of criticism against her), I have to wonder why this same light isn’t directed at the KKKeebler Klansman, Jeff Sessions, or the Captain Planet Villain in charge of the EPA, Scott Pruitt. Why her? And I think a large part is because she is directly opposing a largely mobilized sector of public employees and that she appears in public spaces much more frequently than her counterparts, so there are more opportunities for direct confrontation. But I don’t think that we should kid ourselves that DeVos isn’t a more intensely evil (if not less equipped) form of an enemy to public schools and the children and adults they serve than Chicago’s own Arne Duncan, her predecessor under Obama.

March for Whose Lives?

I think it’s good to be proud of these Parkland student activists; not only are they young people organizing and inspiring hundreds of thousands of fellow young people and adults (largely parents and teachers), they are also standing up to the death industries and their asshole lackeys who would dare threaten children. However, despite their alleged wokeness, their Manifesto makes it clear that their solutions to gun violence are those modeled by White, Middle Class generations before them. And this is troubling because their solutions are more of the same retrograde ones that honestly exacerbate the violence in certain communities and among certain marginalized people groups.

In this White, Middle Class vision, it is perfectly fine to argue for imperialist violence, such as when they say: “Civilians shouldn’t have access to the same weapons that soldiers do… their availability puts us into the kind of danger faced by men and women trapped in war zones”; and, “With the exception of those who are serving the United States in the military, the age to obtain any firearm must be raised to 21.” This Veterans for Gun Control perspective (which they also openly support) allows that these weapons are perfectly fine, only when they’re used to hunt down black and brown people in the Global South. Or, in the case of the police, in urban areas (and wherever else black and brown people are found).

There is also the factor of blaming mental health issues (and bullied victimization) for these mass murders: “Many of those who commit mass shootings suffer from (PTSD, depression, and other debilitating illnesses).” While this statement is verifiably false, that fact hasn’t aided in this ableist, stigmatizing, and harmful narrative. The manifesto also opens the doors for police to perform surveillance on people with mental health issues. To wit: “Change privacy laws to allow mental healthcare providers to communicate with law enforcement.” This only assists a police force that targets rather than assists people with disabilities and mental health issues. (Helpful discussion here.) Doing such puts already-marginalized people in harm’s way and keeps other people (specifically black and brown people) who need that service from seeking it.

Finally, these students are asking for even more police presence in and near the schools. “We believe that schools should be given sufficient funds for school security and resource officers to protect and secure the entire campus.” This does nothing to protect black and brown students nor those with disabilities but instead strengthens the School-to-Prison Pipeline.

As we talked about earlier this month, these harmful would-be solutions come about, at least partly, from an inadequate (but useful-to-capitalism) diagnosis of the problem, which itself stems from a feeling that this violent society is functioning. The truth is, it functions for some but at the expense of others.

However, I have hope for these students. It’s not as if they don’t have useful models in front of them, delivered by people who’ve experienced life from a different perspective, which these same students say they want to honor. The Movement for Black Lives and tons of aligned black-youth-led organizations (such as this list of demands by a group of Chicago high school and elementary school students) as well as anti-war movements have been laying down alternative, holistic responses for years. To reduce access to guns, it is necessary to reduce the amount of guns manufactured and distributed; thus, we need to look at who the largest buyers and marketers/dealers of these weapons are. The answer, in case you need a refresher, is the US military, CIA, FBI, and district and state police, the very ones that the Parkland and liberal gun control agencies believe should be armed to the hilt.

Here’s to hoping these young people will take notes from the right people as they have the ears of the nation right now.

laws, guns, & money, Pt. 2: The causes are coming from within the house

A couple of weeks ago, we took a look at the proposed solutions for mass random killings[1] in the States and how the would-be solutions can actually lead to worse conditions for the marginalized. What we found is that it would be a better use of time and energy to look at systemic causes and then try to seek solutions from there. Looking at such may even save us from other problems.

For the United States, the root of our mass shootings may be traced to the lack of accounting for the fundamental exploitation of violence which continues in an intractable pull towards violence, death, and destruction as the key component of our way of life. Like George W Bush, we may talk about our way of life being freedom—which *THEY* hate us for. But that is only true in a strictly consumerist perspective, which depends on spendable and gathered capital of both the society and of the individual. In America, unlike the East Germany of the 1980’s, we are free to buy Jordache Jeans, but only if we have enough money. We can buy our health, but only if we have enough money. We can buy elections, but only if we have enough money. We can buy enough tasty food, but only if we have money.

In a country founded on guaranteeing negative rights[2], primarily shoring up the livelihood of slavers and land-usurpers, we cannot expect much more than what we have now: A few are made rich on the backs of the poor, the workers, the enslaved, the racialized, the indigenous. And none of this capitalist concentration of wealth and inequality is sustainable without extensive and sustained violence and containment.

To understand random violence here (and, I’d argue, abroad), we must look to the militarization of our society. It is this militarism that guarantees that those who amass resources and wealth can maintain and keep what they’ve stolen. Dole, United Fruit, Exxon, Boeing, Walmart, Raytheon, Nike, etc, rely on the 800 military bases in over 70 countries under the United States’ direct control in order to extract resources and make a killing (what pun?). Those forces exert pressure on would-be sovereign nations to also keep working conditions at a disposable level, optimal for capitalist extraction. This partnership is strengthened by the Wars on Terror and Drugs as well as through more apparently benevolent strategies such as monetary aid and NGO’s. If the governments were to get out of hand, there’s always the CIA.

The violence that the US exerts throughout the world is necessary to keep peasants and workers from effectively demanding their own economic and workplace freedom. The answer to both civil and personal unrest and unease is breaking bones and breaking wills.

And this violence comes home through various policing strategies. The priorities of the local police and criminal justice system are to protect private property—to protect capital. As such, they are generally in opposition to the needs and often the safety of marginalized and oppressed people, among whom are the Working Class, People of Color, People experiencing homelessness, and those with mental health issues. That there is a large overlap is not incidental. The police and justice system in capitalism resolve the internal conflicts of capitalism through violence and escalation.

Capitalism at its height needs waste. Waste is what the Free Market resides in, how it operates. Its nature is to mine, alter, consume, and discard. The US, with 1/20th of the world’s population, consumes 1/5th of its resources. Yet it has the audacity to throw out a third of its own food[3] and judge other nations for not being able to properly feed their own, even as it embargoes them. This waste expands to the wider economy and to other precious resources, such as fossil fuels, innovation, and labor. The waste is considered beneficial because it illuminates both plenty-as-reward and scarcity-as-punishment, the carrot and stick of the Meritocracy Myth. Labor in this system is deprived of meaning because it is wasteful; it doesn’t build to anything that has any value. The Free Market ideology does not lead to anywhere but capital gain for its own benefit; it does not lead to truth or beauty or value or health but to monetization and only to monetization.

So Capitalism also disposes of people—not just the Working Class who toil to survive with the minimum means and relationships to survive—but even the Petty Bourgeois and the Bourgeoisie themselves as their lives are filled with the meaninglessness, the nihilism, of monetization. All relationships become monetized under Neoliberalism, and the United States is at the height of this contradiction as we citizens spend our days worrying about either not having enough money or worrying about holding onto money. Indeed, as with cash, private property rules everything around me.

Other violent enforcers of American capitalism include Immigration and Border Patrol agents—ICE allows conglomerates to hire immigrant workers at a small price and then run them out when they begin to mobilize—the feds—despite the FBI’s celebrity status among the #Resistance, it continues to upend movements of actual resistance—and of course the CIA—which along with the DOD works to destabilize international resistance to US and capitalist hegemony.

This violence is state-led for the purpose of maintaining a destructive way of life. It is proof that capitalism is destructive externally and internally, for the world, the community, the family, the body, and the soul.

As King suggested before his assassination (yet another touchstone of American capitalist violence), we can’t point fingers at instances of seemingly-random violence done by Americans without considering the extent and depth of the violence of the bourgeois state upon the world and upon our own. White Americans wreak havoc in public spaces of  innocence because that is what they know, what they see, how they experience the body politic of their country and identification. How else to explain our involvement in Vietnam, in naked attempts to overturn the will of the people in state after state  (including our own, where the choices are already breathtakingly narrow), in the militarized police occupation of Black communities during protest, in the extrajudicial choking of Eric Garner and the seventeen shots into Laquan McDonald’s body? It is how vigilantes have dealt with encroaching threats and kept populations in line, from the post-Reformation lynchings to subway “heroes” who shoot teens like they’re Dirty Harry (and are elevated to that status) or have a Death Wish, to George Zimmerman in Florida and Theodore Wafer in the Detroit ‘burbs.

Lastly and most importantly, we cannot ignore the connections between mass random violence and intimate partner abuse. Not only are many of these shooters cisgender men, but they have made it clear that they feel entitled to enact violence onto the women in their lives. What is practiced at home is a practiced enactment of ownership and brutality. This is tried in the private and semi-private, and then carried out in large scale. From intimate and gendered to public and indiscriminate.

The only viable solution for potentially-lethal problems in violent capitalism is escalation; the solution for fear and foreboding nihilism is lethality. We must cut out the heart of the problem.

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[1] Mass random shootings need to be understood within its many contexts as distinct from yet also familiar to intimate partner violence (and the mass shootings that are extensions of that) and neighborhood violence in underground economies. More on the connections between MRS and IPV later. For more on VIUE, read here.

[2] I have been working on this connection for a while and hope to have something up on it soon.

[3] According to the USDA, this also leads to tremendous pollution in the making and wasting of unused food. To wit: “Food waste, which is the single largest component going into municipal landfills, quickly generates methane, helping to make landfills the third largest source of methane in the United States.”

laws, guns, and money, pt 1

In the light of horrendous massacres, those who have a heart cry out to “do something” to prevent further atrocities. However, a narrow focus on gun control—or worse, mental health—at best only treats symptoms. Homicides are not merely a fact of weapons (which is to say tools) but of will, of psychological possibility, and apparent necessity. As we see in other contexts around the world, semiautomatics are but one efficient way to kill a group of people, but far from the only. So, we need to not just look at the tools of homicide, but the motives as well. Not just the how but the why are important. I’m convinced that in the context of the United States, it’s helpful to look at how state violence is carried out here and abroad on behalf of corporations and that violence becoming internalized. Digging further, the fact that the US leads the world in energy and food consumption (and waste) is not unrelated to the fact that its military dwarfs all other militaries. Combined with its repressive and militarized police and incarceral system and extreme income inequality, this helps explain why we have a more abundant gun and violence culture than other rich countries.[1] We will cover more of the why’s later, but for now I want to highlight how this concentration on the how is problematic, perhaps futile, and often worse.

Much is made in liberal circles of the over-abundance of guns. The United States leads the world in terms of firearm ownership with just slightly more guns than people (101:100 ratio). However, it rates low in terms of the guns to gun-death ratio, with several countries tacking upwards of 70 to 1000 times the number. Clearly, someone is stockpiling these weapons,[2] so the overabundance isn’t the only factor. And while this may sound insipid, perhaps there is something to the conservative argument that taking away guns merely means those who seek to commit mass murders will find other ways to do so. Lethal retaliation against random members of targeted populations (otherwise known as terrorism) takes the form of knives, homemade bombs, vehicles, and, hell, planes. However, reactionaries are always looking for distractions and scapegoats to continue the perpetuation of massive violence. On the other hand, liberalism avoids searching systemic causes. But a nation and world in such dire straits as ours must radically cut to the roots of the problem, particularly if the proposed solutions may garner more problems than solutions.

And the problems are many. On the one hand is the gun control debate where we question how to regulate the flow of weapons. A waiting period is reasonable and should not be discounted, but most of these mass random killings had been planned for months and the weapons bought well in advance. We must also take a hard look as to how historically and presently such laws have been used to criminalize Black and Brown citizens, much as anti-drug laws have done to racialized people. In fact, gun laws have the double effect of targeting black people for contact with law enforcement (and thus increasing the likelihood of death and prison) and of stripping black people of self-defense (as seen in the Reformation era, Jim Crow, and the Black Power movement). Despite much crowing from self-appointed– if not self-righteous–ministers of non-violence (who tend to be White and have little skin in the game), it was the Deacons of Defense and other armed revolutionary Black Southerners who kept the Civil Rights Movement safe in the hyper-violent Jim Crow South as witnesses such as This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed testify. Notice that there are two different standards in the application of gun laws and in how it works in relation to encounters with law enforcement: One is for White people and those connected to Whiteness and the other is for Black people and those connected to Blackness. Playing with toys did not save John Crawford or Tamir Rice. Being lawfully compliant and polite did not save Philando Castile. Carrying a phone and not a gun did not save Cedrick Chatman nor countless other Black youth and adults framed for their own murder by police who are supported by liberal fear of Black power.

If the liberal answer is to look at the tools as flawed, the conservative answer is to look at the people as such–not to seek solutions but to further alienate and oppress specific populations. Targeted here are racial and religious minorities and people facing mental health issues. While liberals tend to indirectly indict these same groups,[3] reactionaries like to go for the jugular. This can lead to travel bans, more militarized policing and crackdowns on protest, and of course ableist rhetoric that blames violence on mental health and stigmatizes mental illness. Not only are these not solutions and detrimental to the targeted populations, but they involve implementing and releasing more violence. Stigmatizing mental health, for instance, leads those facing mhi to resist assistance and therapy. This undergrounding of mental health leads to victimization for the person with the disability. By now we should all be aware that those who suffer mental health problems are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. Further, going underground and not seeking help or voicing needs leads to a higher likelihood of being preyed upon.

Not that mental health access isn’t necessary, but the US doesn’t have more people facing mental health issues than anywhere else. We need to disentangle talking about mental health and mass shootings or we risk combining the two and trapping many of us into a villainized victimization.

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[1] It’s important to note that the US does not lead the world in gun-related deaths, and even less so with firearm-related homicides. In fact, it is around 15^th place depending on how metrics are measured. But it does lead in so-called developed countries. What this reinforces is that poverty kills. And as the US leads rich nations in wealth inequality and gun ownership, so it leads rich nations in homicides and suicides.

[2] Apparently, half of the weapons are owned by 3% of the population, with an average of 17 guns per owner at that top tier. Thanks to ___ for pointing this out.

[3] By supporting anti-crime bills and deportations as well as malignant rhetoric about “Muslim extremists/terrorists” and stigmatizing mental health problems

Seize the Bonuses

After the massive Trump Tax Cut Cut Cut Cuts, a headline from the print edition of the pro-business Chicago Tribune crowed, “Workers Pleased with Big Bonuses.” I can speak from personal experience as last year I received two bonus checks. Neither of which sufficed for anything but a little extra survival money, but still… nice, right? On the overall, I was pleased with the bonuses. Who would be upset to learn they got a few extra hundred dollars lining their pockets, especially if their bank account isn’t big enough to hurdle the minimums at Bank of America?

After several layoffs and a-bottom-barrel-chase restructure to Mexico which slashed its US workforce by 6/7ths, the sweets bakery Hostess gave  a one-time surplus of up to $1,250; 500 in the form of retirement funds, of course. Employees were also gifted with some Twinkies, I guess. Other generous companies giving $1K bonuses include BoA, Starbucks (which now lets its sick employees take the day off instead of infecting your Unicorn Frappes), American Airlines, AT&T, and Home Depot. (Is it conspiratorial to suggest that the Trump administration pushed for these bonuses as a way of storing up good favor with the Working Class for the tax cuts? No, not really.)

These are good companies, right? I can no longer call them Evil Corporations if they’re so nice, right? And we should be pleased.

Nah. Freak this ploy. We deserve so much more.

Recall that the only way Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, the Waltons, the Kochs, the Gates, the Carnegies, the Prince/DeVos’s, and the Trumps can get so goddamned rich is from extracting excess labor from workers and from the commodification of the public goods through exploitation. Is through colonialism and worker exploitation. Add in the fact that the capitalists and their corporations are tremendously under-taxed despite the fact that the largest government expenses are geared towards their needs. These expenses include the costs for a super-military needed for material extraction, market conquering, and other imperialist purposes;  for an infrastructure that makes doing Free Market business possible (and we see upfront evidence of this in how the new infrastructure plan will directly benefit the most wealthy); and for a welfare structure that, while presently being gutted as much as possible, is necessary so that capitalists can afford to underpay their workers (cf, Bezos’s Amazon and the Waltons’ Walmart).

The deregulation of the welfare system, the dismantling of union power, and the privatization of the public sector under the post-Cold War Neoliberalism led by Thatcher, Reagan, the Bushes, Blair, the Clintons, and Obama has led to a stagnation in wages. Part of this stagnation is due not only to a loss of gains in minimum wage, but also to the reliance of benefits packages. This is where employers get to gloat for providing what the state should guarantee. Essentials such as sick time, maternity leave, retirement funding, and health insurance function as deterrents to raising wages, as funnels for tax shelters, as anchors to keep workers indebted, and as excessive points of contention for union negotiations. If the union is too busy hammering out deals for insurance, it loses leverage fighting for fairer hours, cash raises, and safer working conditions.

Of course, this same package is altogether missing in the Gig Economy. Whether driving for Lyft, freelance writing, or teaching as an adjunct, so-called independent agents not only have no working rights, their wages are still depressed. So setting up full-time employment as the means towards these necessities rather than the state means that an increasing component of the working American society does not even have access to these bare necessities. That’s even if they have enough money to survive every month’s living and transportation expenses with a little left over for emergencies.

But the benefits package also serves another important function for these stank-dirty corporations: To make you feel grateful. Even if the feeling doesn’t last or is particularly conscious, it’s still a factor. And that factor increases when we consider these seemingly random or regularly-occurring gifts. They are presented to us as something above and beyond what we earned. And when you get a gift–whether it be coffee and doughnuts or cash bonuses–you instinctively feel you should return the favor.

But that’s just it, right? You’ve already earned much more than those doughnuts are worth. That cash bonus is but a mere fraction of the profit you’ve made for that company in the past few months, above your wages and other benefits.

You’ve been cheated out of tens of thousands of dollars every year, but yet you’re made to feel that your bosses are generous with your own money? That generosity emotionally tethers you to companies and bosses who exploit you, steal your labor, give you meaningless cog work, put you to work before you clock in and after you clock out, block you from organizing, and deny you workplace safety and rights as often as they can. But we should feel grateful for a $500 check once a decade or so.

Right.

Add to this the fact that the tax breaks enriching these corporations by billions of dollars are also coming out of your pocket! Not just in the form of increased taxes (which will happen soon) but also in the face of a decreased welfare state and an increased bourgeois military state. A military that protects corporate interests does not protect the people, and the US military has always been about that corporate interest. The Department of Defense is functionally a publicly-funded private paramilitary.

In every conceivable way imaginable, the working class is paying the expenses for the Bezos’s of the world. Maybe we should be mad that we’re getting these crumbs.

Tweet from Representative Paul Ryan, Idiot. In it, he quotes from a story about the bonuses: “I have heard time and again that the middle class is getting crumbs, but I’ll take it.”

Seize the means and settle for nothing less.

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The Axioms of Evil

It’s been sixteen years since George W Bush and David Frum introduced to the neocon play action Axis of Evil speech¹ pointing out the three major powers that the US wanted to overthrow and colonize liberate from any semblance of self-rule: Iraq, Iran, and North Korea (DPRK). These were three nations that supposedly sponsored terrorism and were thus linked to the 9/11 attacks on US soil. An attack by a network not affiliated by any of these countries but instead by one of the US’s closest allies, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Since Iraq has already been dealt with, to put it crudely, and the Gears of War are turning on the other two due to either some protest or escalating nuclear tensions, it’s time for a some disjointed thoughts:

• First, let’s dispel the false notion that there were millions of protesters in Iran calling for the overthrow of the government (and certainly that they want the United States to overthrow it). Several pictures of Brown-People-Protesting did go viral, but one of those was in Buenos Aires and another in Bahrain–two large-scale protests that Americans did not care about.
• One of the main driving factors for the Iranian protests, as they are, has been economic. People protesting in the hundreds to thousands for a better standard of living, and against cuts to the social safety net, such as reductions in cash subsidies to the bottom 90%. How familiar does that sound to Americans? But in this case, we’re supposed to believe that Donald Trump and reactionary American elites are on the side of the protesters?
• No one dared to raise the possibility of regime change during the millions-led Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration, a clear (but respectable) sign of dissatisfaction with the current regime by a significant percentage of the population.
• No one dared suggest toppling DC after the #J20 protesters on the day of the Inauguration for protesting a little more loudly. In fact, the police kettled and arrested 200 such under false pretenses and have pressured most to either take a plea bargain (granting them a criminal record for either protesting or being adjacent to a protest) or face up to 80 years in prison. Some are still in jail or awaiting trial.
• What country raised the possibility of invading the US during any of the Fight for $15 minimum wage demonstrations? These were longer, and involved tens of thousands of people, many literally leaving their work place during hours. And while several municipalities raised their minimum wages (after decades of stagnation), several states made it impossible for cities and counties to increase the minimum wage–despite the fact that cost-of-living substantially rise in urban areas and thus states should not be in charge of determining what is and is not livable. Missouri Republicans, for instance, forced St Louis to reduce the minimum wage by 20%! This was clearly a repressive state action. But again, silence.
• Speaking of St Louis, where were the regime change callers when the Black Lives Matter protests kicked off? Thousands of oppressed people took to the streets demanding justice in the criminal justice system and its attendant policing. While the justice system started making minor accommodations to their demands, the current administration has worked overtime to turn back those concessions and several states have introduced bills that make it perfectly legal to run over protesters. Clearly, Black Lives do not matter to this regime.
• But, if anything, the US is ignoring long-standing protests in South Korea against the US’s military presence and impending war.
• Meanwhile, the US has given millions of dollars to support the right-wing government in Honduras, which killed dozens of protesters recently. When the Washington-backed President Juan Orlando Hernández was accused of rigging the elections in his favor, thousands took to the street. Dozens were killed, most directly by the narco military police units. In one scene, a group of unarmed protesters were shot down by the police who would tell the world that their victims were shooting back at them and thus they had no choice.

Relatives of the dead say they fear that there will be no justice over post-election violence: some say they have been threatened by troops; others point out that human rights prosecutions involving security forces are overseen by the same task force that helps coordinate [military police] operations.

• North Korea at least is acting in a defensive position. Who does the US have to prove itself to? Who is threatening to destroy our entire country? What nation in the world has ever wiped off one-fifth of our people? (Not counting the original inhabitants because then the answer would be the United States.)
• Who knew our president would use classic Orientalist tropes about Asian male sexuality IN A FUCKING TWEET?
• South Korea (the Republic of Korea) began negotiating talks with the DPRK without US input. This angered Trump and Nikki Haley because it’s important for US interests (including Abe’s Japan) to make it look like Kim and the DPRK are unhinged and would never compromise; as if North Korea were the one making threats, despite all evidence to the contrary.
• When the negotiations between North and South Korea to start talks began leaking, all of the US media focused on how divisive this would be, how it will end badly (for who?), and how Trump is taking credit (despite the fact that Nikki Haley just yesterday distanced the administration from the talks).
• The United States’ two biggest allies in the Middle East do not allow for protests. It is illegal in Israel to display the Palestinian flag, and a group of more than five protesters is also violently prohibited. And we all know about the extensive human rights abuses in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Israel prevents movement in Gaza and shoots Palestinians trying to get away on boats. But you never hear of politicians condemning Israel or the KSA the way they do the DPRK and Iran.
• If, however (and hear me out, please), Iran had a nuclear arsenal, the Trump administration would be much more likely to heed caution as they’re doing irt: North Korea.
• There are some times when I truly wish that Trump actually was a stooge for Putin and Russia.
• Meanwhile, in a country we’ve already conquered (my ancestral homeland): So far, at least one thousand Puerto Ricans have died and millions more at still at high-risk, without regular clean water or electricity as a result of Hurricane Maria and the US’s abysmal response. Clearly, we do not have a good track record of supporting our colonies², so why should we have a right to talk to or about Iran or Korea?

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¹ In what the Washington Post dubbed the Fourth Best State of the Union Address ever.

² Yes, that is the point of colonialism, after all….

Suppression, Revolution, and Commodification: On Baby Boomers and Millennials

The ongoing flame wars between Greedy Baby Boomers and Entitled Millennials is not only  tiring (its roots lay some 25 years ago when mainstream media dubbed us Gen X’ers “Slackers”), it lacks deeper analysis in need of some old fashioned dialectical materialism. Because the problem isn’t so much the people, but the conditions.

Let’s start with the coming-of-age of Boomers. The Post-War years brought along unheralded prosperity due in no small part to added productivity in the global economy (what with the US sitting out most of this war between Empires only to clean out on top at the tail end) and a large swath of the population missing. Semi-skilled labor, due to the work or threats of unionization, finally delivered living wages and a level of comfort unknown for the Working Class. Or, shall we say, the White Working Class, as Black and other non-White populations were denied entrance to many of the mechanizations of prosperity–such as drastically increased wages, accessible higher education, and the expansion of home ownership in the sprawling suburbs. The fact that the suburbs were sprawling and that home ownership there was so available was the work of a federal government once again expanding the terms of settler-colonialism through the mechanisms of the nation-state including reduced fuel prices and expanded interstate projects coupled with a new form of Homestead Act.

The benefits of the White Working Class mediated a distinction brought about by commerce and the bourgeois government that would lead to the creation of a large and placated White Middle Class to buffer against dispirited Working Class people. Higher social mobility through the GI Bill coupled with geometric mobility, allowing a large White Flight from the urban areas, where the new White Middle Class and industries were able to transport wealth gotten through wage theft of the working class Black and White people of the city. The same remnant working class people were stagnated in urban ghettos such as, in Chicago, Uptown or Bronzeville. Meanwhile, higher-paid White WC and Black Entrepreneurs moved to their own racially and class-segregated neighborhoods to act as yet another buffer. Because White Supremacist Capitalism thrives on buffers and interruptions. And so it’s important to note that any critique of the Baby Boomer generation as a whole is woefully inadequate, as it misses many of those purposefully left behind in this new ecology.

This social and capital mobilization was imprinted for the benefit of welcoming a White Baby Boom for the manufacturing and consumption of consumptive goods, the bread and butter of American capitalism. The rising Middle Class Baby Boomers were raised in this atmosphere, but globally and locally something else was happening: revolution was in the air. While many people give White hippies (the children of the rising White Middle Class in the US) credit for the burgeoning revolutionary spirit of the 1960’s, the reductionism is particularly nationalistic and racist. Revolutions against imperialist capitalism were happening throughout the under-developed world and were finally coming to a head in the 1950’s. Whether China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, or India and the entirety of the European colonized in Africa, people of color throughout the world were unshackling themselves from Western hegemony, often at great cost. The Washington, Belgian, and corporate influence could be felt at the peak of the bullet and bomb through Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Black America in the US South and Urban North. Other formerly-colonized began to rise up and stand their ground, including the Chicano and American Indian Movements while women (famously-but-not-solely White women in the US) were simultaneously struggling for social, economic, and sexual liberation (as all three are interconnected).

It was in this frame of the liberatory organizing of the Black and Brown proletariat that the occasional White ally would arise and, due to the power of Whiteness, would somehow amass a substantial amount of the credit. While not in the same vein as the FBI taking credit for dismantling lynching White Supremacist vigilante groups during the Civil Rights Movement, it’s clear that dues owed White allies such as the Weathermen during this time may be overrepresented.

Yet, the rise of radicalism in White Middle Class Baby Boomers was an effect of the times that were a-changing. Being White and affluent, they had more direct influence and it was harder to ignore these would-be class-and-race-traitors (in the most complimentary of tones). The way they would be silenced would be different from the silencing of Black and Brown radicals throughout the world and domestically. Key leaders of the Black civil rights, anti-war, and liberation movements were assassinated and the movements as a whole underwent severe repression on all fronts that the full lethal force of the federal and local police (and aiding vigilantes) and judicial system as well as economic depression, psychological and social warfare. It’s increasingly easy to argue that they had a hand in flooding our neighborhoods with illicit drugs and guns (while maintaining .the strict prison industry that severely punishes Black and Brown communities for obtaining or holding such).

The White Middle Class retreated back to the life they were raised to occupy, to take over the mechanizations of industry. To further expand the unsustainable economic growth they sought, they helped to usher in Ronald Reagan’s Neoliberal state (aka, the Final Stage of Capitalism).  They commodified public works and turned stable and previously accessible goods into get-rich schemes. They dismantled the welfare state, the collective organizing, and the infrastructure which had enabled their transition into the comfortable Middle Class. They also helped to dismantle Affirmative Action which had temporarily expanded a Black Middle Class.

So this exponential growth necessitated the dismantling of the means to that growth. Once the capitalist class established enough buffers and re-stole all the wealth they could (in a time of tremendous economic growth, the top ten percent came away with 99% of it, leaving the working and middle class with one percent) while exponentially increasing the cost of living.  The very stolen wealth has become its own buffer. And the Petty Bourgeois White Baby Boomers, who have already entered into a comfortable retirement, seem blissfully unaware that the next generation faces the void of the disparity between the standards of living of the Baby Boomer generation and the cost of living in the new millennium.

You see, a dialectical materialism will tell you that it’s not Boomers or Millennials you should be angry with, it’s Capitalism and Whiteness.

Thanksgiving, the National Myth-Making

Thanksgiving is a collective remembering of a national myth. National myths are ahistorical stories that we retell over and over to and about ourselves as a people.

While they may be ahistorical, as though they didn’t happen in a specific time and date and place, national myths are important. They help preserve culture, connections, and kinship and help guard against those things that tear us apart. They can be a bulwark against oppression and suppression, ways of remembering the best of ourselves when the world and empire strike against us. The Torah, for example, is a national myth about Hebrew and Jewish people and their identity that often sets them apart and unique, even as many of the stories are adapted from local myths and legends and then reframed for a different context, a people who imagined themselves differently. Indigenous people throughout the world celebrate and remember national myths. The Iroquois had myths that the Puritans considered dangerous in their encounters. Schools were established to “Kill the Indian and save the Man” by driving out Hopi, Sioux, and other indigenous languages, customs and myths. So recalling those myths are important resistance to white settler colonialism.

We’re very familiar with the dangerous side of national myths, however, such as Hitler’s regurgitation the National Myth of Germany through Wagner, Nietzsche, and antisemitic and racist tropes. And the National Myth of the United States being founded as a paragon of freedom and liberty is especially pernicious in the face that its Founding Fathers denied women the right to vote and held black people as literal pieces of property.

But it is more important what we do with our national myths and whether we are willing to interrogate them, especially if, like in the States, it is one of genocide and chattel slavery disguised as kindness and civilization.

Thanksgiving as a whole has its moments. It is a time to spend with family–whether biological or chosen or a mix of both–and a time to practice gratitude, which can be revolutionary in an atmosphere of consumption. But then it’s followed by a day expressly for the purpose of hyper-consumptive capitalism. It’s no mistake then that the main mythos narrative of Thanksgiving is of settler colonialism.

The narrative of a friendly dinner with the natives is a ritualized hand-off of the land and its bounties from the original occupants to the settlers, who now rightfully belong. How fitting that dinner is situated around a land-occupying sport like American football with one of the teams named the Cowboys–another powerful settler-colonial myth about the rugged Anglo individual who tames the Wild West and vanquishes the savage American Indian. It’s also telling that next week, the Cowboys will be playing the Redsk*ns, a specifically genocidal slur against American Indians.

I would argue it is time to confront, rather than run from, what this national remembrance means. To interrogate it as Jewish people do the Torah. To recognize the role it has played in our society and how we use it to erase and murder Native peoples here. And then to set about to make corrections.

Whattaboutism & Chicago

“What About Chicago” is a widely-used bait/distraction from rightwingers and racists whenever the topics of systemic, codified racism and legalized murder of Black people is brought up. It’s also brought up when we talk about gun control, but we’ll get to that issue later. While the Whataboutism is a derailment meant to throw off the stinging critique of racist state and corporate violence, I see the two issues as intricately connected. Those who ask what Black Lives Matter activists and those of us concerned about systemic violence are doing about Chicago interpersonal violence don’t really care, but I’ll answer anyway: We’re tackling systemic, state-sponsored and economic violence as a means of tackling interpersonal violence. For me, that includes mass political education about socialism—and its localized counterpart, reparations—which is a means to achieve justice in my and other communities on Chicago’s West and South Sides.

Socialism is the owning of the means of production of labor by the workers. Capitalism, what we live under now, is the owning of the means of production by the investors and industrialists (aka, the non-workers) and managed by the managerial class, including bosses, politicians, and police. Since White Supremacy was invented to stabilize, further, and enforce capitalism, the system is by nature racist[1] and sexist. Socialism is, thus, a fundamentally democratic economic and political system that leaves more room to antagonize and confront racism and sexism.

Interpersonal violence is often a manifestation of a lack of holistic actualization and purpose[2] and thus seeks purpose through domestic and street violence, through acts of hyper-masculinity, and through escalation of conflicts. It is severely impacted by living with untreated trauma, such as that of experiencing and witnessing violence up-close and not having the tools to deal with it. This helps create a perpetual cycle of internalized violence and the dealing of it necessitates a strategic restructuring of resources, education, and organization of society. To trust the police and jails to carry the heavy load is counterproductive as they are the first to teach the lesson that violence is a solution to conflict. I suggest that this reorganizing is best done through a socialist prism.

Socialism is broad but pliable and must be applied differently in different contexts through time. It would, by necessity, look different in the context of African Americans within Northern cities than it would for those in rural communities, and both would operate distinct than it would for white people in most of the world. Each region would have to both apply it to its location—its social, economic, and political realities and where the oppressed operate there—to the oppressed and marginalized, and connect it to wider, not just national but international struggles.

In the case of these communities in Chicago, the need for both socialism and a distinct version of socialism are necessitated by a context where the people have relied on underground economies due to racist blocking of conventional economics, have and continue to lose wealth and security through the ravages of anti-black racist subjugation and wage theft, and have been under severe police occupation. African American, Latinx and Indigenous communities are all due a hefty amount of reparations for the heavy monetary, physical, and psychological toll that racialized police enforcement, caging, and generational wage-theft have left. And it is the work of those on-the-ground opposed to interpersonal gun violence to point out these injustices as a means of repairing them.

There are other things that we do, of course. In several neighborhoods, mothers occupy heavy corners so that the police and gangs do not. We have regular walks for peace in the hard-hit areas. And we grieve and we plead. We grieve heavily and we plead hard. The care, the concern, the comforting are never reported on mass media, but poor people and people of color come together in ways that the hyper-individualized WASP culture can never comprehend. But we can only do so much alleviating the symptoms when the disease is all-consuming. We need justice, not band aids. And we certainly don’t need to make it worse by further disrupting communities through more and tougher incarcerations and deportations.

One of the biggest ironies is, however, this notion that policing has nothing to do with interpersonal violence, but when the law breaks down or just doesn’t work for you, you go outside of the law to deal with glitches. Sometimes you have the tools to deal with conflict in reasonable ways, but sometimes you don’t. Developmentally speaking, young people are less likely to have those tools, so it is up to society to ingrain them, to teach them, and to nurture and protect them. Restorative justice is a means of dealing with these conflicts maturely and without throwing away lives for foolish mistakes. So, we must work towards having a restorative justice framework throughout the school and community experience to give students tools and to work away from the prison industrial complex that begins for black and brown children at a very young age, often through the school system.

What we need now, what a locational socialism can give us are full employment and a guaranteed income; fully-invested schools and community hubs; the collectivization of private property into public and personal property as the community and individuals within the community need; free and full access and control of medical care; an end to food disparities and hunger; the decriminalization of people of color which includes the abolition of violent policing, the release of prisoners, and a complete restructuring of the justice and immigration system; the end of colonial and settler colonial wars and a complete destruction of the military industrial complex, out of which the seeds can be utilized for rebuilding areas ravaged by the dogs of war; the fruits of our labor; and a labor system that invests in rather than robs from the material, social, economic, bodily and psychological needs of our communities. If these points sound familiar, it’s because the Black Panther Party outlined these 51 years ago in its Ten Point Platform.

May we give it the time and attention it–and we–so radically deserve.

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[1] This is not to say that socialism is an automatic solution to racism, but that it contains tools and has space to institute anti-racist measurements more effectively and fully than capitalism. This post will try to give a brief run-down of some of the ways that socialism intersects with anti-racism, largely through the imagination of anti-racist socialists, leftists, and radicals.

[2] Often those involved in state or privatized violent policing of private property (police, security guards, military, paramilitary, and gang enforcers, for instance) find their purpose in personalized violence and are thus employed by those with private property interests to protect their property first and foremost, at the cost of lives.

Note: This post originally appeared on my Patreon page one month ago. If you support my work through there you can receive tons of exclusive and bonus content, as well as early previews such as this piece and chapters for upcoming books.