Thousands Of Students Walk Out Of Classes In Philly

Posted on May 21, 2013

On May 17th thousands of high school students from various schools across the city walked out of their classes and took the streets of Philadelphia. This walk-out was organized by the students themselves in direct opposition to impending budget cuts which will close dozens of schools, lay off thousands of teachers and school employees, cut funding for school libraries, sports, after- school programs, summer school, counselling services, and other services that students rely on. Unlike the first walk-out which took place on May 9th, this walk-out occurred during school hours and without permission from school administrations. West Philly High locked its doors so that students couldn’t leave, but the students figured out how to get out of the school anyway. Some students even organized sit-down occupations of the schools. It is clear that the students are becoming more willing to break the rules and that this is scaring the school administrations. At the same time, the students have a very long way to go if they want to stop the budget cuts and take control of their lives–sending petitions and letters to Mayor Nutter and Governor Corbet wont do this. Below is a flyer that members of FNT distributed to hundreds of students during the walk-outs to encourage them to consider a revolutionary strategy.

Congratulations to the Students Who Walked Out of School Today!!!

The students who walked out of classes today have the power to change the future of Philadelphia. Today they defied a system that sees them as nothing but disposable. The city and state government are closing schools, cutting funding, but they have money for a Youth Jail at 48th and Haverford and $200 million has been set aside for a new Police Roundhouse at 46th and Market. They are replacing schools and libraries with more prisons and police! They are throwing a whole generation into the trash!

The question is: Are you going to let them get away with this? Sending letters and emails to the mayor and the governor wont change this situation. We will still be trapped in poor neighborhoods and in bullshit schools, stuck with no jobs or bullshit jobs, and constantly threatened by the police. Crews will continue fighting each other over petty beef. You have our full support, but it is going to take much more than voting and signing petitions to change this situation. We need to build a united revolutionary movement against the forces that keep us all down: the government, the police, the rich. Will you work with us to build this movement?

There will be a Meeting in the center of Malcolm X Park on Saturday May 25th at 5pm

Check us out @ facebook.com/FREETHASTREETS

Reflections on Care Work

Posted on April 21, 2013

The following piece offers notes on the place of care work in revolutionary organizing, compiled after a brief group study on care work, reproductive labor and prefigurative politics.

Reflections on Care Work
By Ba Jin

When militants talk about “care work,” the term is often left broad, vague, or undefined. It can mean many different things: talking about emotional stress with comrades, preparing meals for hundreds of people at a demonstration, changing a someone’s bedpan, taking your kid to the park, or taking someone else’s kid there for ten bucks an hour. I would define “care work” as labor that serves other human beings, and helps them survive and sustain themselves physically and emotionally. It can be done in private or in public, paid or unpaid. This piece offers a few thoughts on the role of care work in revolutionary organizing.

Part of a strategy, but not a substitute for one

Activists usually affirm the importance of care work in social movements. Without care work, they say, people burn out, and only the people with the resources/ability to get care elsewhere will join the movement. This is true. But if we stop the conversation there, we simply affirm the importance of care work in a general, moral sense. We still need to evaluate how care work can be performed within specific types of groups, and how caring can be best integrated with the other tactics a group does in the course of its activity. We need to go beyond asserting that “care work is revolutionary,” and start outlining how it can be revolutionary.

Take the example of food preparation: do small groups of activists cooking at their meetings help bring revolution about? How, concretely? If the answer is that it allows activists to sustain themselves and keep doing other work, then what is their other work? If it provides a model of new social relations that others can replicate, then how will the group judge if the model is spreading, and evaluate why it is or isn’t? And so on. In my experience, when groups don’t have clear answers to questions like these, it means they don’t have a strategy, and they’re substituting care work in place of one.

By “strategy” I mean the group’s best guess about its goal, what it will do to get there, and how it will evaluate its work along the way. As with any set of tactics, carrying out particular kinds of care work does not amount to a strategy. Simply feeding people every week can be just as aimless as smashing windows every time there is a demonstration. Groups that substitute care work for strategy can end up spinning their wheels, creating welcoming spaces and taking care of each other very compassionately, but with little effect in broader society. Because of this, I don’t think care work is inherently revolutionary by its very nature. Instead, I think it’s only revolutionary inasmuch as it contributes to a profound transformation of society (one aspect of which, for sure, is establishing new caring social institutions).

If we agree on this, then we are provided two different ways to think about, and implement, care work in revolutionary groups. First, care work is part of a group’s internal political culture, the manner in which it develops strategies and cooperates to carry them out. Care is part of how the group makes decisions, handles interpersonal conflicts, and keeps its members in good physical and emotional shape to keep doing political activity. Second, care work is also part of the group’s external political work, a component of the strategy that the group is testing in practice. Here care is integrated with other tactics, as part of the agitation, actions and events the group organizes in broader society. These two realms are closely related, but distinguishable.

Care within groups

Care is an integral part of how any group sustains itself. When you check in with another member emotionally after contentious discussions, or help a member overcome his/her insecurities about writing or public speaking, you’re doing care work that sustains and develops the group. Without basic practices such as these, no revolutionary group would be able to survive. However, internal care work always takes place with certain limitations and challenges.

First, there are always concrete limits to what kinds of care a given group can provide. Most revolutionary groups in the U.S. today are pretty small, and revolutionaries must have a realistic assessment of the capacity of their group to care for its members. In some cases, members will have to accept sacrifices, like eating crappy snacks at meetings because nobody has time to cook or money to buy good stuff. In other cases, the group may have to send its members to outside resources that the group can’t provide itself, like connecting a member with a work injury to a cheap physical therapist. This doesn’t mean the group is discounting care work. It just means the group is providing care within the scope of its size and resources. Revolutionary groups should regularly evaluate what kinds of care are needed in order for the group to serve its purpose, compare this with the group’s capacity, and provide as much as possible to its members.

Second, much internal care work is part of intangible group “culture,” and is difficult to implement mechanically. When a member is absent for a while, is there another member who has a personal relationship with him/her, who can check in with him/her by phone or in person? Are all members developing a relationship with members’ kids, so everyone can take turns entertaining them when they get restless at meetings? These qualitative relationships can be nudged forward by group decisions, but they can’t be imposed by fiat. Sometimes specialized groups are appropriate for implementing care work—say, forming a committee to cook for meetings—but sometimes this can be awkward or bureaucratic. It can even be cultish, if it devolves into collectively managing member’s personal lives and emotions. A light-handed approach, such as pairing new members with a “mentor,” or making time for social hangouts after meetings, may help important relationships develop organically.

Third, groups must somehow strike a balance between rigorous and principled debate, and consideration for members’ emotional wellbeing. To evaluate and decide on strategies is an emotionally-charged, high stakes process. This is unavoidable. In order to develop a coherent analysis and strategy as a group, it’s necessary for members to challenge the holes in each other’s arguments, and highlight disagreements in order to resolve them. This process can be very challenging interpersonally—say, if two members have a romantic history with one another, or if a new member feels smacked down in the course of discussion by more experienced members.

Finding a way to manage this dynamic is one of the major challenges social movements face today. The left typically swings between the revolutionary party tradition, exemplified by Mao’s “Combat Liberalism,” and the consensus practices inherited from the 1980s. The former is an excellent guide to principled debate, but has almost nothing to say about feelings. The latter provides great ways to manage group dynamics, but often brushes over political differences for the sake of shallow consensus, and blurs together feelings and arguments in the course of discussion. Somewhere between these poles lies a new form of group praxis, which revolutionaries today must discover.

Women’s Liberation and Dialectics: One Divides Into Two

Posted on April 13, 2013

by Nat Winn

An important debate has developed that began with questions around women, liberation, and capitalism. It has landed us in the field of methodology, dialectics, and revolutionary strategy. What a great start and what a great destination!

Eve Mitchell and Tyler Zimmerman have written a response to my thoughts on a discussion around Marxist feminism which was started on the Fire Next Time blog by Zora B’Al Sk’a and Ba Jin. They have cited my criticisms regarding the lack of their discussion to engage politics (or better said: my criticism that they conflate all political potentials as developing rigidly from the point of production or capitalist reproduction). They argue that the criticisms which I extended to the larger body of Marxist feminist thought are indicative of a major difference in method.

I think that they are correct.

There is a real difference in method and understanding of dialectics. I appreciate the chance to delve into that further.

So let’s dig in.

Communist Stand

In our epoch, the oppression of women is being challenged globally and in fundamental ways that have never before been seen in history. Arranged marriage is being defied and politically targeted all over the world. Wife beating (and all similar forms of partner abuse, including date rape) are no longer considered acceptable or tolerable by hundreds of millions of people. In a truly world historic way, the female sex is claiming the right and means to reproductive freedom (birth control, abortion, and the right to say “no”).

We communists do not stand aside from this. We are not just nodding in verbal agreement. We see these profound changes (and more) as integral to what we call “the communist road” — which is not just the resolution of capitalism’s fundamental contradiction (socialized production and private ownership), but the ending of all oppression.

We communists are against all oppression. We are (as Lenin said) tribunes of the people — active militant opponents of all the ways that oppression appears. We are seeking to make a giant torrent of revolution out of the many rivulets that arise against oppression.

The struggle over the oppression of women is not a distraction from the resolution of capitalism’s fundamental contradiction. It is not some side issue. It is not even some “special” oppression (which implies it is subordinate and subsidiary, or off-in-a-corner). In this sense we agree with Eve and Tyler.

To put it another way: the great conflict of the fundamental contradiction drives socialist revolution to the fore. But what the socialist revolution accomplishes (and takes as its goals) are far more than just resolving that fundamental contradiction. We want to liberate humanity and end all the intolerable oppressions that have marked class society itself and the lives of the vast majority suffering in class society.

On the Claim of Dualism

Eve and Tyler criticize my claim of the failure of Marxist Feminism on the following basis:

In Nat’s comments, we observe an unnecessary antagonism being drawn between two completely valid arenas of struggle; the content and form of reproductive labor on the one side and reproductive freedom on the other (there is no coincidence in the double use of “reproduction” here which we’ll expound further down). The origin of this antagonism is located between a splitting of the subject and object. This is done through a dualistic reading of ”economics” and “politics,” or, to use the terms Marx employed in the “Preface” to A Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, “base” and “superstructure.” But there is an immanent unity between subject and object as well as between base and superstructure and what Marxism represents is precisely the unification of these categories. The tragedy of orthodox Marxism is that it represents a reification of them; that is, regarding an abstract duality of the subject and object as a real thing that plays out in the real world in terms of forms of organizing and concrete political orientations.

This criticism goes deeper into questions of dialectics when it is posited:

The base/superstructure concept adapted by orthodox Marxism has reified the subject-object split. It sees the “base,” or economy, in a structuralist/sociological manner that exists independently of human initiative and which determines all activity and thinking. So capital, wages, and money are mere objects. On the other hand, “superstructure,” or politics, is understood as subjective and confined to ideas or an abstract kind of activity that isn’t metabolic with nature but divorced from it and determined by the base.

Marx never had a dualistic understanding of these categories and posited quite conversely that “economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social relations of production.” (Poverty of Philosophy, MECW 6, 165)

When Eve and Tyler say I am creating an abstract duality between reproductive labor and reproductive freedom or between base and superstructure, I understand them to be saying that I am creating a sort of absolute division between them and neglecting their relationship to one another.

This criticism is a misinterpretation, though it does reflect real differences in how we look at reality in motion (or dialectics).

The notion of dialectics being put forward by Eve and Tyler is a closed dialectic. It emphasizes the unity of a process while failing to speak to the most important aspect of dialectics, which is contradiction and struggle. For example Eve and Tyler say:

For Marx, capital, wages and money are the various phenomenological forms of alienated labor; they are subjective and objective social relations in disguise, not ahistoric things as political economy conceives. The economy and politics, or capital, wages and money can only be separated logically because concretely and in the real world they exist as a social and dialectical whole…

The splitting of the intrinsic unity of the subject-object and the dualistic reading of base/superstructure creates a dynamic where struggles around work are seen as narrow and economistic.

This approach fails to grasp the central role of contradiction within dialectics and the many-sidedness of complex phenomena and thus attempts to combine things that are necessarily in the process of division and thus resolution and transformation.

On the Responses to the Ten Theses, Part 2

Posted on April 5, 2013

The following is the second part of a response to the many replies FNT received to Ten Theses on the U.S. Racial Order. You can view Part 1 here.

On the Responses to the Ten Theses, Part 2
By Ba Jin

Critiques of method from Noel Ignatiev

Two lengthy responses, from Noel Ignatiev on the FNT site and Neftali on the Signalfire blog, critiqued the method I used to try to analyze the racial order. To get Noel’s views across, I will reproduce my summary of his argument here, which I believe he felt was pretty adequate:

I understand Noel’s critique to be about what methods revolutionaries should use to analyze society and develop strategies. Noel writes: “racial oppression, like gender and national oppression, is a specific form of oppression; its hallmark is the reduction of all members—not some or even most but all—members of the subordinate group to a status beneath that of the most degraded member of the dominant group.” If I’m reading his comment right, Noel upholds this definition of racial oppression, and believes no oppression in the U.S. today conforms to this definition; he thus thinks that if we try to understand oppression and resistance in terms of the racial categories we’ve inherited from the past, we will end up confusing ourselves and failing to develop a good strategy, because the racial categories we use will fail to map onto material reality. Instead, Noel suggests that we “start at the other end” and undertake a class analysis to identify, say, the stratum of the proletariat that we think has revolutionary potential. Once we’ve identified a stratum, we can then examine how different parts of that stratum have different racial or national labels for historical reasons, what strengths and weaknesses they bring to the table due to this history, and how to work with them. He believes this method is better than “reading” the present reality with racial categories that have become fairly incoherent.

I responded to Noel’s comment (one of the first to come in) on the original post on the FNT site, so I won’t duplicate it here. One thing I definitely take from Noel’s response, however, is that it is certainly essential to base any analysis of race on a fairly robust understanding of where class composition is at, and what the dynamics of class struggle are, in the U.S. Without this, it’s possible you will guess at the material forces reshaping the racial categories at work in society, but have an inaccurate understanding of these forces based on your own limited, individual impression of them.

Critiques of method in the Maoist Response

Neftali’s post on the Signalfire blog is by far the lengthiest response, and the one that most strongly questions the place of nations and nationhood in the Theses. I will respond to Neftali’s piece, but first I have to deal with his insinuation that I am engaged in “‘identity politics’ of a Brown/Yellow guilt type in relationship to Black oppression.”

This seemed the only part of Neftali’s piece that was truly uncomradely. Nowhere in my piece did I use the term “yellow,” but Neftali inserts it because he knows that I am Asian (yes, some militants on the internet know each other in real life.) His use of the term could imply two things: either the politics put forward in the Theses will instill guilt among “brown/yellow” people, or, more damningly, my analysis is ultimately driven by some guilt I feel as an Asian person toward black people.

In my experience, comments such as this, which insinuate that the argument one puts forward is actually a manifestation of a deep psychological need / hangup / guilt (etc) is a cheap shot. It’s a way to undercut the validity of an argument without addressing its content, by placing doubt in the reader’s mind as to the impetus behind it. After all, if an argument is really the product of individual guilt, why argue with it? Why bother engaging with an argument that has no rational basis? This is why Neftali inserts this barb early in his piece. However, for this jab to have any substance Neftali would have to do more than insinuate it; he would have to prove it. First, he would have to prove that my argument in the Theses is without substance. Then he would have to prove, using examples from my past writing and practice, that I display a lot of guilt toward black people. Short of this, Neftali’s insinuation remains petty slander, which has no place in principled political debate.

With that caveat, I can now address Neftali’s argument in his Maoist Response.

The main thrust of Neftali’s argument is that my Theses are fundamentally misguided, because I seek to understand race and not nation. Race, for Neftali, is part of the “superstructure” of society, while nation is part of its “base” or “structure.” In Marx’s terms, the “base” of a society is made of the social relations people enter into in order to produce the wealth of society, and the forces of production set in motion through those relations. The “superstructure” is comprised of things like religious, political and cultural organizations and ideas. While each influences the other, the base determines the superstructure in the long run. Marx offers a much fuller description of these terms in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and The German Ideology.

For Neftali, “race” refers to ideology, the superstructural ideas about racial difference that people have in their heads, and which disguise reality. “Nation,” by contrast, refers to a distinct entity within the base of society that really exists, and which is obscured by ideology. When I seek to understand the U.S. in terms of the former rather than the latter, I draw misguided conclusions, like a physician analyzing a patient’s condition in terms of “bad humors” instead of viruses and infections.

Thoughts on Mental-Health and Revolution

Posted on March 29, 2013

The following dialogue explores the exploitation and alienation of youth within the mental health industry.

…

Arturo: Based on conversations we’ve had, it seems like you place a lot of value on the role of mental-health work within radical struggle. You are also a behavioral therapist. Can you describe what that job entails?

Iresha: I work for a behavioral health company in Philadelphia. My job is two fold. I’m a lead clinician in the therapeutic treatment program of a school. I work there from 8 to 3. 5 days a week. The other part is family therapy, or what is called “mobile therapy,” where I leave the school and go into the homes of the kids and their parents to work around issues that have been identified in the home. I do that after school, 4 days a week. At the school the students I work with are identified as having “behavioral problems.” The school refers the child to the company I work for. We assess the child’s behavior and recommend what level of services they need, like if they should see a psychologist. As a lead clinician, I do direct observations in class settings, group therapy, and one-on-one therapy.

Arturo: How old are your clients?

Iresha: They’re in K through 4th in the school. But in the community they’re anywhere from 5 to 18.

Arturo: That’s a big range of people. What’s the area like where you work?

Iresha: When I go to the student’s homes, they’re all in the proximity of the school. Its in the Frankford, Juniata, Kensington area of the city. It’s a very poverty stricken area. Most of all the parents of the kids I’ve worked with are single mothers, single heads of households, or there’s no parent in the household and it’s the grandmother or auntie raising the kids. I’d say that in roughly 90 percent of all the clients that I’ve had, the father is incarcerated. Or if the father is around, he is back and forth into prison. Some of the kids are going in and out of different foster homes too.

Arturo: What are some of the problems you see in your job?

Iresha: One, they refer a child for one or two incidents of what is deemed “aggressive behavior.” So if a child comes to school and throws a chair or curses out the teacher, he’s labeled as a behavioral problem. He or she could easily be labeled for ADHD or Autism, which follows the kids around for the rest of their lives—

Arturo: Like a criminal record…

Iresha: Yea. Thats fucked up. The child gets refereed to us and seen by the psychologist where a diagnosis is made. Even though there are home problems, problems from society—like a lot of my kids are displaced or homeless—the school and the company I work for doesn’t consider those factors. They just see a child having effects of trauma, some of it physical, sexual or take for instance; I have many children whose parents work all the time, so the child comes to school and engages in attention seeking behaviors. The system just sees the child as a problem. They don’t investigate what is happening to the child.

Arturo: Does money get made off the child with “behavioral problems”?

Iresha: The school actually gets money for the diagnosis. I’ve heard it’s in the thousands per child. The mental institutions that many students are sent to get money too. Those who provide the medication also get paid. So do the parents. If their child has a diagnosis, the parents can receive 700 to 800 dollars from SSI. Do I think some parents exploit this? Yes. But is that their fault? No. If I am a single mother with children, and I have no income, and SSI is telling me that they will give me 700 to 800 dollars if my child has this diagnosis, I might take it. I see it all the time. And parents will ask me if I can evaluate their other children too, and the question following this one is always, “will I get an increase in my SSI?” Its a fucked up situation, because in the end it hurts the child, but I blame the system for putting parents in that position.

Pamphlet on the Flatbush Rebellion

Posted on March 25, 2013

A new pamphlet entitled The Flatbush Rebellion is currently being distributed in Flatbush following the events of the past two weeks. It includes a brief account of the murder of Kimani Gray, the rebellion that occurred, and the social causes contributing to such rebellions. You can download it from the image on the left or the link above.

The pamphlet opens with an a quote from Frederick Douglass, from a speech in 1857:

“If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.”

East Flatbush Rebellion: Jocelyn and James Respond

Posted on March 17, 2013

The following piece by Jocelyn Cohn and James Frey was recently published by Unity and Struggle, in response to Will’s account of events in East Flatbush in “The Rebellion Contained: The Empire Strikes Back”.

This past Thursday in Flatbush Brooklyn we witnessed the events which Will describes in his excellent piece, and find his account to be consistent and the analysis superb. We have a few assorted thoughts to add and will try not to overlap Will’s account. Our piece assumes familiarity’s with Will’s, and the latter should be read first.

First, although this is absolutely implicit in Will’s piece, we wanted to point out that the activities of FAITH (Fathers Alive In The Hood) and Williams were the result of the loss of the ideological battle by Williams and by the peace-loving non-profits in general. Because Williams so clearly lost the ideological battle against anti-cop militancy, he had to resort to physical force, distraction, and intimidation to disrupt the activity–and still he was not successful in getting people to stop marching. Since they were defeated in the ideological battle, FAITH and Williams used their enormous bodies, bull horns, and aggression to literally drown out the voices of anti-cop militants, primarily women. FAITH aggressively tried to get people to stop the march to the precinct and literally commanded people to get into the church. Jumaane and FAITH were there to give the white media something to cling to, NOT to support the black militants and everyday people who are pursuing freedom.

This somewhat successful use of tactical force seems like a defeat for us but really it is a victory. Finally the non profits and politicians cannot hide their structural role and their relationship to the cops. Jumaane Williams had to resort to using physical force to try to stop people from fighting the cops. He has forever showed his role, and the hope is the antagonism between politicians/non profits and the working class has shown itself strongly enough to spread to other arenas of struggle. As Will so eloquently said, the enemy is bigger than the NYPD.

What this belies is a much larger break with the forms of organization that have held back militant political activity, especially among black and brown militants, for the last few decades. There is an emerging coalition around this issue and general anti-NYPD and hopefully anti-capitalist themes, with which many of our comrades desire to link up. How last night played out is forcing us to confront our obvious deficiencies in organizing, and our more general racial homogeneity. Many were frustrated by this experience because of the obstacles it presented, but these obstacles of course didn’t arise last week, and they point to concrete tasks facing NYC revolutionaries.

Though by no means a monolithic white crowd, the anarchists/communists Will describes were very much “the white people”. This is due in part to the severe segregation in Southeast Brooklyn, under which any white faces are very remarkable. By the time the story was written on the event’s Facebook page, all the non-black participants had just become “Occupy Wall St” and we were being lambasted for a variety of idiotic things said and done at Zuccotti Park. But it is also due to the literally centuries worth of work that has gone into creating the myth that the revolutionary class struggle and the black struggle are divergent.

Despite the numbers of both black and non-black revolutionaries who have made it their work to undo this myth and to instead reveal the intrinsic nature of the class struggle and struggle against white supremacy, the history and remnants of slavery and Jim Crow; the institutionalism of radicalism in the mostly white and white-washed university; the billions of dollars spent on incarceration and harassment of mostly black and immigrant men; and the enormous pressure to work several jobs AND work at home for black, latina, asian, and poor white women has done much to serve the still present divide. On top of the institutional forces that attempt to create a separation between the struggle against white supremacy, the struggle against patriarchy, and the struggle against capitalism, these objective elements of the capitalist state take on subjective and interpersonal expressions, which make unity and class-wide struggle all the more difficult and at times downright awkward.

Along these lines, Will’s denunciation of Sgt Thomas and FAITH is spot on and much-deserved. One important element missing is a gender analysis. FAITH was spouting rhetoric akin to the Promise Keepers, smuggling patriarchy into a discussion of male responsibility. The way they engaged with women, including a prominent organizer of the event, was horrendously sexist and condescending. They had one woman, their “PR rep”, running around trying to talk to talk to women on their behalf, who they were silencing with a megaphone they alone were allowed to use. This was hidden under a discourse of who’s “from the neighborhood”.

Additionally, in a tantrum that seemed to be staged in advance, Sgt Thomas was incredibly physical with a small woman who allegedly yelled “kill the pigs” (which, if she even said it, she was hardly introducing this fantasy into anyone’s mind for the first time). When a white man came to her aid, Thomas instantly made it a racial issue, making for what you can imagine to be a very uncomfortable situation for white militants trying to walk softly but nonetheless intercede in a violent act against a woman comrade. The gender dynamic was completely obscured by the race-baiting discourse which Jumaane Williams had been setting in place all day regarding “outsiders”, and the aggressive men he brought in only reinforced this. This is the kind of thing we have to be more prepared for, uncomfortable though it may be.

Another issue we must point out, and which we feel is related to the minor success FAITH and Thomas had in distracting from political issues through race-baiting, is the casual homophobia and misogyny among organizers and participants. It was “faggot” this and “bitch” that, especially with regards to those who they most hated: the cops in general, but primarily Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg. (We find this objectionable for a number of reasons, never mind that of the two lines we heard, “Ray Kelly, you’re a racist, and your son is a rapist!” flows much more naturally than “Ray Kelly you’re a faggot and your son is a rapist!”)

We are not shocked or morally outraged to hear this kind of talk from young working class people of any color. However it represents a serious practical issue which the struggle has to face. Instead of being able to confront the patriarchy inherent in the city government and police, organizers passively contributed to this atmosphere. Instead of being able to call out FAITH for being patriarchal and very homophobic as well as heteronormative (their m.o. is preserving “family values” and the male head of household), organizers are left with only calling them out for being not militant enough. Non-profits such as FAITH are then able to strike back by saying “we’re from the neighborhood, these (both white and non-white anarchists/communists) are not (regardless of whether they are)”. A more powerful analysis, and also basis for bringing together the class, would be to show how patriarchy, white supremacy, the institution of the police, capitalism, and heteronormativity are in fact deeply connected.

We are not trying to simply be language police; the reality is equating the most hated individuals in the city with “faggots” in an otherwise militant speech itself can cause unnecessary division. Queer people and women, especially black and latinx, face intense police harassment based on gender and gender expression and furthermore have literally been leading the battle against the police not just in the last week, but historically. Therefore, the attitudes described above are not inherent to the working class but represent a division under capitalism which must be overcome in our praxis.

These are a few thoughts toward what will hopefully be a dialogue in the coming weeks. A few comrades are trying to set up a discussion forum about last night, and we’re reaching out to the organizers to engage on questions of strategy, ideology, finding common ground, etc. If you’re local and you’re interested, get in touch.

-Jocelyn Cohn and James Frey

The Rebellion Contained: The Empire Strikes Back

Posted on March 15, 2013

Last night the Empire struck back. It is too simple to say that the NYPD is what I am referring to. No doubt the NYPD came out in greater force and presence than the night of the rebellion. Cops were not only in the air, on horse, but on top of the buildings. There was virtually no escaping the eyes of the law last night. Rebellion in this situation could have only occurred if the size of the crowd was possibly nearing in the thousands. Instead less than one hundred came out. Most noticeably the number of young Black militants was much smaller, although still very noticeable.

However the Empire is not only the NYPD. The different tentacles of the Empire made a powerful appearance, revealing the complexities of the moment. The Black establishment of the likes of Council Member Jumanee Williams made an appearance. A group called Fathers Alive in the Hood (FAITH) made an appearance and Shamar Thomas [1] who made a name for himself during Occupy Wall Street’s heyday. While other players were involved, these were the most obvious.

Jumanee Williams has been at the forefront of attacking the rebellion which occurred on March 13^th. I wrote earlier that it was a Black led rebellion with no outside agitation. Williams made an appearance again on March 14^th , playing a two faced game. Do the young Black militants know that this man has been running around New York City saying that the brave struggles waged by Black militants have actually been controlled by white outsiders? I can only wonder what the Black militants would say to Williams if they knew of his treachery.

As the night opened up FAITH and Shamar Thomas stood across the street. The class divide could not have been clearer. Across the street were mostly older, well dressed Black people and an occasional youngster. On the other side were the Black militants from the neighborhood, sections of the Black left, and large sections of the Brooklyn anarchist and (ultra-left) communist scene. Also on this side was white and Black protesters standing together in one sense, but still internally divided, which I will explain later.

Eventually Thomas and FAITH crossed the street and came over to the vigil. While bull horns are illegal without a permit, somehow they managed to have a bullhorn. How did this happen? The three points made by this crew of reformists were: a) Black on Black violence needs to be our focus b) We need to keep things peaceful c) We should go to the church to have a dialogue.

This was challenged by a section of the Black left, most prominently, Fatimah Shakur [2]. As soon as she raised the idea of marching to the precinct the standard attacks on her came: she is not from the community; she is putting young people at risk; she is playing into outside agitators. Eventually, the crowd started moving in the direction of the precinct.

Thank God for the Failing Public Education System

While one of the great disasters of America today is the failure of public education, perhaps last night one of its failures turned out to be the reason for the small victories which did occur. To survive in school one of the great skills students develop is to ignore what teachers have to say. Sometimes the best defense against the stupidity of public education is to shut yourself down and create a mental barrier against the filth spewed by teachers. This skill was crucial last night as far as I could tell. What seems clear from last night is that regardless of skin color or politics, the young Black militants from East Flatbush seemed not to listen to anyone.

Great amounts of time were spent by Shamar Thomas, Jumanee Williams, and FAITH in convincing the young militants of their failure. Great time was spent discussing the need to go to church that very night and have a dialogue. The young militants just stared at the misleaders. No one knows what was going through their minds. Perhaps for now what they did is more important than what they thought. Sister Fatimah Shakur and others eventually helped spur a march towards the precinct. Through all of this, the question was: where would the young Black militants go? Into the church or with the white crowd of anarchists and (ultra-left) communists?

When we finally reached the church, after much yelling and shouting, the crowd filtered past the church. It was not clear what was occurring. It was clear that the anarchist and (ultra-left) communists were not going to the church. It was unclear, besides a few Black militants, what they were doing. Would the march be split along racial lines?

For obvious reasons I decided to go to the precinct. But walking a couple blocks, curiosity got the better of me and I wanted to check out what was going on at the church. I ran back and went into the church. I went inside and found a church that was empty. Instead of the presence of God, the fifteen senior citizens inside were sitting in the presence of awkwardness. There were no young Black militants inside. Instead Shamar Thomas was awkwardly commenting that those in the church did not reflect the community—dare I say that those in the church were the outside agitators! Of course, Thomas’s comment caused the group to be rather upset. I did not stay any longer. The next question on my mind was, where are the militants from East Flatbush? That now became the important question of the night.

A Window into the Black Vanguard

For a few minutes last night, it was possible to see what the Black revolution, what the Black vanguard might look like. Ultimately what last night was about was the following: for FAITH, Jumannee Williams, and Shamar Thomas it was about containing the insurgency and channeling it into reformist circles; for the revolutionary left, it was about seeing how they can interact with the Black militants to foment a healthy rebellion and collaboration. Many times the crowd moved in the direction of the Black militants through the streets. Where they went, the rest of the crowd had to go. There was no choice. It was clear who the potential leadership was.

Understanding the situation we face is crucial. Since The LA Rebellion of 1992, countless rebellions have occurred across the United States. Virtually all of them led by Black or Latino militants, but occasionally including Asians and whites as well. What is important to understand is why these cycles of rebellions have not regenerated a new revolutionary Black left or left in general. This is in contrast to the rebellions of the 1960s, which radicalized Black militants and were directly tied to the formation of the Black Panther Party, League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and many other groups. What explains the lack of a Black revolutionary left in this day and age?

There are many complex reasons for this, ranging from de-industrialization, to mass incarceration, to the formation of a powerful Black middle class. However, one that needs to be understood is the immense powers brought forth to contain and limit the imagination of young Black people by those like Shamar Thomas, Jumanee Williams, and FAITH. Instead of congratulating the young Black militants, instead of saying that now it is time to read “Wretched of the Earth” or “Mass Strike” or “Black Boy” and to plan and expand the rebellion, the only solutions offered were crumbs off the scraps from our Black and white masters in New York City. Community centers, play grounds, etc. is what is offered. That is nothing short of a bribe to fix a gigantic problem looming in America. When millions are in prisons, basketball courts and community centers are the solution according to these people.

The question remains. The rebellions have occurred under immense anger and frustration. But will organic leaders from the militants in East Flatbush emerge who cannot be baited for being an outsider, who cannot be baited for being white, and who have the connections to the poor and working classes of East Flatbush? The politics of Shamar, Williams, and FAITH are about making sure this never happens. The task of anarchists and (ultra-left) communists of all colors is to help this development occur. This is a gigantic task worth much study, conversations, and actual practice.

The Ending of the Night

What eventually came together was that larger groups of Black militants from Flatbush came to the march at the precinct. One could hear and see some of the debates occurring amongst the militants. While at its height maybe 50% of the protest was Black from East Flatbush, at times there were questions raised by some of the militants. They made fun of their friends for marching with white people.

At another more serious moment, I cannot exactly remember when, Shamar Thomas punched a white anarchist and started yelling that nobody was going to kill anybody. He claimed that he saw/heard an anarchist whisper into the ear of a young Black militant, that cops should be killed. Seconds later, one or two young Black militants started asking Thomas why he hit “the white nigga”. In that small moment, normalized categories of race were blurred. The white man who was hit became a “white nigga” and Shamar Thomas’s loyalty was under question. However, Thomas is a powerful speaker with a commanding presence that can rival anyone in the movement. He quickly turned the point into white people telling young Black people to do something illegal. Whether this is true or not, I will admit this is poor advice to be giving anyone at this moment. Individual hit jobs are not the answer.

More important is what Shamar Thomas did. I do not know Shamar Thomas. But after what I have seen, I cannot, with good conscious have any working relationship with this person. I saw him hit another protester. When this happened we were at the back end of the protest with maybe ten people around. Most of the people were white and physically much smaller than Thomas. Thomas is a well built Black soldier. It would have taken many of us to physically confront Thomas. However, with most of the other people being white, the racial situation contained everyone from reacting. A couple people of color communists had to be held back from confronting Shamar.

Nor can Shamar Thomas ever imagine that there were Black and Brown communists who were talking about the need for armed struggle. Is he going to sock them too? Perhaps Thomas is not aware about the Maoist tradition of People’s Liberation Army which, no matter what disagreements I have with it, has been an inspiration to tens of millions of people of color across the world, and thousands of people of color in the United States. What world is Thomas living in? I can take a small guess. Thomas sees the Black militants from Flatbush only as victims who can never take the great risks that their brothers in sisters in Haiti, South Africa, and/or Watts have taken. For Thomas, his viewpoint is not necessarily of the white man any longer, but of the Black middle class which tries to manage the Black working class and poor.

While I do not think we should have fought back at that moment, anarchists and (ultra-left) communists need to prepare for the next engagement, in larger settings. There is no point in fighting Thomas when no one is looking. However, anarchists and (ultra-left) communists cannot let racial pimps like Thomas bully them with reformists politics. As long as that occurs, non-Black militants will never get respect in the hood (it should be pointed out that Thomas clearly has no respect in the hood either). Anarchist and (ultra-left) communists have a proud tradition of being against all middle classes and rulers, regardless of color. We need to figure out how to put that into practice in such difficult situations as Thomas will present. This will not be the last time.

Thomas has used his Iraq war Veteran status for a long time in the movement. It is time he is called out for this. Ironically, he is against outside agitators, but has he ever thought that he was an outside agitator in Iraq, putting down righteous insurgencies against US Empire? Has anyone questioned him on what he has done in Iraq? Was he a glorified toilet cleaner in the country or was he hunting down Iraqi militants and killing them? The hypocrisy and opportunism of Thomas could not be more glaring. He preaches non-violence and I could only imagine what he has done in Iraq. He hit another protester.

Anarchists, (ultra-left) communists, and left-nationalists of all colors need to wage a serious political struggle against the likes of Shamar Thomas. Thomas has existed inside the movement for too long. But no white militants are willing to stand up to Shamar because of the race question. Thomas hides behind the color of his skin. And no Black militant is willing to stand up to Thomas because of betraying ranks or just calling out another Black person. I am not white or Black. I am a South Asian Muslim immigrant. And for now, I will stand up to this clown who pimps his US military experience, hides behind the color of his skin, and intimidates people with violence while advocating non-violence. I look forward to meeting Shamar Thomas. I believe he should not be seen as part of the movement under any circumstances.

Questions Which Remain

I passed out a flyer to maybe 30-40 young militants. I usually said to them, “Congratulations on whoever took part in last night’s rebellion. Victory to East Flatbush,” or some variation of that. I usually got a smile and an acknowledgement of thanks and that was it. But that is exactly the point. I saw no conversations of worth taking place between the young militants from East Flatbush and anyone. They were not talking to politicians, not talking to the Black left, not talking to mostly white anarchists or ultra left communists. The point is that it is not clear what the young militants think.

What did they make of all the white people in the protest? Did they know that most of the white people in the protest were anarchists and (ultra-left) communists? Did they know that there were Black and Brown anarchists and (ultra-left) communists?

Do the militants from East Flatbush know that Williams, Thomas and FAITH are saying their rebellion was caused by Machiavellian white people from the outside?

Why did the militants decide not to go to church and instead march with the white crowd, turning it into a clearly multi-racial march? Do the militants think that the white people are soft? Do the militants know that some of the white militants have fought very bravely in rebellions and in many other parts of the world?

Ironically, why has the presence of “outside agitators” actually led to peaceful demonstrations. The two nights of rebellions were when no “outside agitators” were present. What does this mean? When the revolutionary left shows up, nothing happens. This is something to think about.

Concluding Thoughts…

It is clear that Thomas, Williams, and FAITH are just as scared of the young Black militants as the police and white racists are. This is something which has to be said loud and clear. However, that analysis leaves little for serious revolutionaries to act upon other than calling them out.

I often hear from all kinds of revolutionaries and liberals that our youth today are misguided and have low consciousness. I am well aware of the many political problems in the community. However, young people are trying under the most difficult of circumstances to figure the way out of capitalism’s mess. The problem remains that a fundamentally different vision does not exist at this moment even with the young Black militants. How an anti-capitalist and liberatory vision emerges is a serious question. To simply say it will emerge or already exists does not explain precisely the lack of such a vision.

In a period when capitalism and racialism knows no categories of outside agitators, when they send Shamar Thomas to Iraq to kill Iraqis, we should not recognize the category of outside agitator. Everyone knows the anti-communist and racist origins of that argument. There is no need to go into the history of it here. It only exposes what side Thomas is on. Furthermore, the outside agitator argument hides the makers of history and politics today: poor and working class people. Another question which remains is, does the outside agitator argument help build multi-racial struggle? Are white workers, are transit workers, are nurses, are Latino poor and working class people from the Bronx, or Bangladeshi in Jackson Heights who have gone through deportations, arrests, stop and frisks and much more, outside agitators if they show up at these protests? What the outside agitator argument fears is what will happen when oppressed people who often distrust each other realize that their freedom lies in common liberation against the middle classes and rulers of their respective communities. Those who make the outside agitator argument fear the masses. After all, think of all the great revolutionaries in our past in the USA: Harriet Tubman, Malcolm X, Ricardo Flores Magon, or Elizabeth Gurley Flynn. Were these people not outside agitators at some point in their lives?

-By WILL

Footnotes:

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmEHcOc0Sys

[2] Not clear if she is in a group, but certainly has well defined Black nationalist politics.

East Flatbush Rebellion, Not “Outside Agitators”

Posted on March 14, 2013

The following is a brief reportback from Will, a member of FNT who witnessed two of the last three nights of protests in East Flatbush following the police killing of 16-year old Kimani “Kiki” Gray.

The “outside agitators” are back!

The legend of the outside agitator has returned. Clowns like city councilman Jumanee Williams and the leadership of Occupy the Hood are fueling the myth that last night’s rebellions was led / caused by white people or outside agitators. I was there at last night’s rebellion, and let me tell you: there were fewer then 10 white people involved in a rebellion of hundreds of young Black militants. Last night was led by young Black militants. Period.

For hours, Black politicians and activists–many of them veterans of, or influenced by, the 1968 generation–yelled and berated the young people to keep the “peace” and “respect.” The NYC Black establishment brought its best efforts to bear in hopes of keeping the affair civil. Crowds of Black men and women listened for almost two hours. They were told that the keepers of the peace felt their pain, that they understood. There was silence from the crowd of angry faces. The tension could be felt. The crowd had selected no spokesperson to respond, and none emerged organically in the moment. Will one emerge tonight?

At some point at night, the Black militants decided to march. No white people told them to march. As the march moved through the streets of Flatbush, it was Black militants who picked up bricks, cinder blocks, and beer bottles and threw them at the police. There were almost no white and Latino or African American faces involved in this. It was largely a Jamaican and Afro-Caribbean rebellion.

Outside agitators?

And perhaps that is the problem. We need to flip the script of the outside agigator. Are brothers and sisters from the Bronx outside agitators? The same people who are stopped and frisked in the Bronx become outside agitators to Jumanee Williams and his friends. It is time for the rest of the NYC working class to jump in and get involved. If the divisions of racialization are going to be broken down, white, Brown, and Black working class people must face the cops and go to jail together. New solidarities must be built. Now is the time for everyone who has felt the pain of the police to converge in Flatbush. Bring presents, bring your anger, and bring your running shoes.

The target has been the 67th Precinct all week, but we have not had enough forces to take it on. All the crews across New York should converge in Flatbush and then march towards the 67th precinct.

Outside agitators?

Clowns like Jumanee Williams and Charles Barron are part of the system. They are spreading lies about who led the rebellion. Soon Williams and Barron will say the Haitian Revolution was caused by outside agitators, that Watts in 1965 was cuz of outside agitators, and the Montgommery Bus Boycott was orchestrated by white outside agitators. These clowns are in the way of revolution.

During Occupy, hundreds of people joined up with Occupy the Hood in hopes of building movement in working class black and brown neighborhoods. Now the opportunity is here. Will those who identify with these goals come down on the side of the people in the streets, or toe the line of the politicians? Only they can decide.

Outside agitators?

On Liberal Racism: A Response to ‘Being White In Philly’

Posted on March 12, 2013

Ron, a member of FNT, as well as of Free the Streets (Philadelphia based radical group), picks apart an article recently published by Philadelphia Magazine entitled ‘Being White In Philly.’ Ron argues that the liberal racism in the article is not exceptional but is instead reflective of the overall white supremacist configuration.

Robert Huber’s front page Philadelphia Magazine article entitled ‘Being White In Philly’ says a lot about the values and sensibilities of the bourgeois press in this city. Some might wonder how such a spiteful and ugly article made its way not only through the editing process but onto the very front page of a “prestigious” Philadelphia magazine. We should, however, not be surprised by this. We must recognize that this article fits perfectly into a pattern of color-blind racism which has become the dominant form of racism in our so-called post racial society.

Huber claims that “white people never talk about it” – the “it” being race. Will simply talking about race solve deeply entrenched social problems? Of course not, but in actuality, white people are in fact already engaging in tough and necessary conversations about race amongst themselves and with people of color as well. Those who are having these conversations usually understand that the issues often attributed to culture and superficial physical characteristics have more to do with class and power dynamics, something Huber totally fails to grasp. Despite his claim, thoughtful discussions on this topic are taking place all the time, but because they do not seem to be occurring in his social circles we’re meant to believe that these conversations are not happening at all.

‘Being White In Philly’ begins on a decidedly sour note which sets the tone for the entire piece. Huber uses the opening paragraph to bemoan the “dangerous” and “predominantly African-American” neighborhood near his son’s campus. He notices that there are “a lot of men milling around doing absolutely nothing” but he never asks the important question – “why?” What is being implied is that black people “milling around” is scary. In reality, Huber has no idea what those people were doing. White people socializing in groups is fine, but when black people living in poor neighborhoods do it, it’s scary. Granted, crime may be a problem in that neighborhood, but it’s all to easy to see the surface manifestations of problems and assign blame; if we’re serious about addressing problems we will look for their root causes.

The reasons for high levels of unemployment in poor and working class black neighborhoods are multifaceted, but let’s take a look at one explanation for the current situation that directly involves Temple university, the school Huber’s son goes to.

Temple university is rapidly expanding its campus; as of February 2012 planned construction projects were estimated to be at least $400 million. Most of these construction jobs are going to out of state unions comprised mostly of white men. Regular protests have been held by women union organizers and union members of various ethnic groups in an attempt to pressure Temple University to end its unfair labor practices. I’m sure many of the men Huber saw “milling around” near his son’s apartment building would love to have one of those construction jobs. Unfortunately, the system has been set up to exclude them while favoring men like Huber.

Not too far from Temple University we have the Fairmount section of Philadelphia. Huber’s decision to conduct the bulk of the interviews in this area of the city was an interesting one given its current struggle with the forces of gentrification. For people living in urban centers with substantial populations of people of color, gentrification is one of the most pressing, complex and contentious issues of our day – but not for Huber.

Gentrification is presented as the de facto solution to the damage poor blacks have inflicted upon themselves and their own communities. To drive home the point of how poor blacks brought it all upon themselves Huber enlists the help of an elderly racist man who refers to an alleged home intruder as a “nigger boy”. Shocking, yes, but Huber’s extremely unflattering portrait of poor black people up until that point basically legitimizes the words of the man he’s interviewing. According to the N-word dropping old man, “blacks from the South with chips on their shoulders…moved North.” Huber continues: “They moved into great brownstones above Girard [avenue] and trashed them, using banisters and doors to stoke their furnaces instead of buying coal. Before long it looked like Berlin after the war. Whites moved out.”

So there you have it. Angry black people moved north, trashed a once beautiful neighborhood and forced whites to move out.

By the time Huber declares that “the inner city needs to get its act together” naïve readers would probably wholeheartedly agree after being barraged with one unflattering stereotype after another. A Russian immigrant going to law school here in Philadelphia comes to the brink of basically calling black people porch monkey’s with no comment from Huber except remarks about how physically attractive he finds her.

Near the end of his article, in what may be an effort at mitigating some of the earlier damage, there’s a clumsy attempt at showing a neighborhood’s racial harmony. Instead what happens is Huber accidentally gives us a chilling glimpse into how gentrification works. A middle class couple decides to send their child to a majority black school in their neighborhood despite the fact that their neighbors send their children to a more prestigious school in the nearby money drenched Rittenhouse section of Philadelphia. Ignoring reservations about their choice, these trail blazers pressed ahead and insisted on keeping their child at the mostly black school; eventually they convinced ten other families to take a chance and enroll their kids there as well. Heartwarming.

We learn a bit later on the real reason for the sudden interest in the mostly black neighborhood school: the prestigious school in Rittenhouse is in fact becoming crowded; spots are limited. As Huber explains, “the city is naturally expanding outward”. Jen, the woman being held up as a sort of reverse Harriet Tubman admits, “People in the neighborhood are now getting nervous whether there’s a spot for them here.” Who exactly these nervous people are is not made clear, but it’s fair to assume that Jen, her architect husband and their fellow well to do neighbors are not one of them.

In a city with so many social issues that need resolving, one wonders why the feelings and emotions of white people warrant a front page spread on the cover of Philadelphia Magazine. Or, too be more clear, the thoughts and feelings of specifically middle to upper middle class white people. From the article it appears that white people in Philadelphia are overall doing quite well, though this could be misleading since Huber did not bother to interview people living in predominantly white poor and working class neighborhoods.

The dynamics between whites and non-black ethnic groups were not even important enough to merit a passing mention. An article about race where only middle class white people and police officers are interviewed leaves much to be desired. The truly frightening thing is that perhaps Philadelphia Magazine knows its audience; perhaps they are telling their privileged, bourgeois readers exactly what they want to hear.

One cannot talk about race without addressing the realities of class, privilege and white supremacy, things Huber barely mentions in his article. This is unfortunately not very surprising. Liberals often view attitudes and beliefs as sources of oppression rather than taking the radical view which tends to focus much more on dismantling concrete systems of power. Financial assets and easy access to opportunities have accrued disproportionately to those populations who have historically been closest to systems of power. We cannot talk about race relations in an urban environment like Philadelphia without acknowledging and exploring the implications of this imbalance.

Easy access to centers of power and material resources allow the privileged to create their own realities, and as Huber shows us, those with privilege often resist having their carefully constructed world views threatened by pesky little things like facts. Huber essentially does what many people of his class do all the time: he enables a process of selective blindness by choosing to downplay history and the enduring historical structures of white supremacy. He eschews historical context and essentially tells his readers that white people need to muster the gumption to “tell it like it is”, i.e., tell poor black people that the problems they face are all their own fault. This is one of the main reasons why his article is at its core quite troubling and why it needs to be addressed and strongly denounced.
Huber’s claim that middle class white people in Philadelphia need to be more outspoken about their grievances with poor black people is utterly ridiculous. Unless gentrifiers are calling for abolishing capitalism and reparations to long neglected communities, I’m not sure what they could have to say that poor blacks would need to hear.

Liberal solutions to social problems often involve personal lifestyle changes, dialogue for the sake of dialogue and copious amounts of soul searching, but rarely do they strike at the structural core of the issues they claim to want to address. Huber’s analysis of the white person’s dilemma in Philadelphia is no different. Institutional racism and the effects of capitalism on vulnerable populations received very little and no mention respectively. At no point does Huber suggest that his readers question a system that fosters and promotes criminal behavior, poverty and inequality within certain populations. Instead, his presumably white audience is called upon to be more vocal in expressing their moral outrage, and to not shrink from giving those wayward Negroes a good tongue lashing if necessary. Liberal racism may be less virulent than the Rush Limbaugh/Glen Beck variety, but at their core lies one major theme: the oppressed are always to blame, and it’s up to white people to somehow save the day.

We should, however, perhaps thank Huber for putting on display what many of us have known all along to be true: to get beyond race we must work harder towards building a classless society. The bourgeois, capitalist classes created and sustained our current (scientifically debunked) notion of race and they continue to perpetuate these fantasies. For the privileged classes, worrying about the color of someone’s skin is much easier than questioning the very foundations of a system that benefits them.

On the Responses to the Ten Theses, Part 1

Posted on March 7, 2013

The following is the first part of a response to the many replies FNT received to Ten Theses on the U.S. Racial Order. Part 2 will be coming out soon.

By Ba Jin

I was surprised and pleased by the thoughtful engagements Ten Theses on the U.S. Racial Order received on the FNT site, and on reblogs on other sites. Not only were there responses from the different tendencies within FNT, but members of Miami Autonomy and Solidarity, May First Anarchist Alliance and the Kasama network offered critiques, as did the Signalfire and Northstar blogs. Thanks to all who shared their insights.

The critiques I received have pushed my thinking further that it would’ve gone otherwise, forcing me to discard elements I can’t uphold, and deepen my understanding of the parts I think are defensible. The critiques have also spurred me to continue studying theories of race and nation in the revolutionary left tradition and academic social science. At this point, I can offer some initial responses to the range of critiques the Ten Theses received. I’ve included these below, organized thematically.

It should become clear below that I accept many of the critiques leveled at the Ten Theses, but also refuse to discard the effort wholesale. I still think revolutionaries need to grapple with the changing racial order in the U.S—even if my first attempt to do so fell short—and I hope we can use parts of the Ten Theses as kindling for an adequate theory of race. I believe such a theory must do the following:

Examine “race” as a particular configuration of base and superstructure, which goes through periods of decomposition and recomposition;
Examine “nation” in the same terms, and describe how these configurations relate to one another (in other words, we need a unified theory of race and nation);
Describe how racial formation is affected by inter- and intra-class dynamics (racial conflict within the proletariat, proletarian solidarity across existing racial categories, conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie within racial categories, and cross-class alliances within racial categories);
Account for the necessary incongruity between base and superstructure throughout the process of racial formation (how the superstructure lags behind the base, while old categories from the former are always taken up to express new changes in latter);
Account for how racial formation influences, and is influenced by, the formation of gender in a given period;
Determine if / how the reproduction of capital necessitates the continual reproduction of what we experience as race and gender.

With this in mind, I’ll now respond to the critiques of the Ten Theses.

Reflecting on #F23 – Time to Break with Routine

Posted on March 1, 2013

Below is a critique of a recent anti-police march held in the South Bronx and Harlem; written by FNT members Madeleine and Nat Winn.

By Madeleine and Nat Winn

Last Sunday just over 100 activists gathered in the South Bronx to participate in an anti-police brutality march that eventually crossed over into Manhattan and later ended on 125th street in Harlem. We were told that this march, which was organized mainly by the The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), was supposed to be a more militant alternative to Al Sharpton’s “silent march” through Manhattan’s East Side last fall.

Not for herself alone: beyond the limits of Marxist Feminism

Posted on February 27, 2013

The following piece was written by Nat Winn, a member of FNT, as part of an ongoing discussion on the forms of feminism that are relevant today.

By Nat Winn

The liberation of humanity, the aim of our communist goal and vision is impossible without the liberation of women. Millions and ultimately billions of women must emerge as fierce fighters against male supremacy and for a radical egalitarian society. Communists, both women and men, need to investigate where the cracks are in society that may lead to the eruption of a powerful women’s movement with its eyes set on emancipation for all women and all humanity.

I recently had a chance to read through a blog exchange between Zora and Ba Jin on the Fire Next Time blog and Eve Mitchell on the Unity & Struggle blog over debates within a trend called Marxist Feminism, including such figures as Selma James and Sylvia Federici. I felt the discussion was suffocated in its scope because of its confinement within in a certain “workerist” conception of how to look at women, sexuality, reproduction, and liberation. I found the discussion confined to questions placed narrowly at the relations of production in the society, reducing the oppression of women to relations of work that is waged or unwaged, while ignoring the question of the superstructure and how the oppression of women has actually broken into the realm of politics.

I thought to myself that women’s liberation has to do with radically transforming the social relations of all spheres of society and that this went far beyond a discussion about waged and unwaged labor and an economic struggle for wages for housework.

Let me try to spell this out a bit.

Part 2 of Developing Militants: the Left’s Minstrel Show and How College Educated Revolutionaries of all Colors Keep the Working Class Shucking and Jiving

Posted on February 20, 2013

The following piece was written by Will, a member of FNT. It examines the race, gender and authenticity dynamics on college campuses and in the left, especially in regard to study and theory, and grapples with the implications of these dynamics for working class people of color militants.

Part 2 of Developing Militants:
The Left’s Minstrel Show and How College Educated Revolutionaries of all Colors Keep the Working Class Shucking and Jiving

Introduction

The White revolutionary left is largely college educated young people. Whether they work at a cafe, wash dishes, teach in public schools, or drive trains, they share the common experience of a college education. Their experiences in college have profoundly shaped their politics in a variety of ways. Two particular sets of politics are race relations and relationship to revolutionary theory. These White College Educated Revolutionaries (WCER) have never broken from the experiences in college. Worst of all they unknowingly impose their particular college experiences on the revolutionary movement and particularly the working class whites and working class People of Color (POC)[1]. Lastly, People of Color College Educated Revolutionaries (POCCER) have played a crucial role in working with WCER in unknowingly preventing any working class leadership from developing.

This has resulted in a devastating consequence for potential POC working class revolutionaries. They are denied the very intellectual benefits which WCER have received. While WCER have all the best intentions, this is objectively white supremacy in motion. This results in the control of most organizations by WCER. The POCCER in particular are rarely in genuine leadership because of this dynamic and their own contradictory relationship to education and revolutionary theory. This results in a minstrel show where authenticity is defined by lack of knowledge of the past and the romanticization of someone’s experience. Fundamentally it says that theory, writing, and education is not for POC. White college educated revolutionaries control the movement and usually forefront only their experiences and expect POC and white working class people to conform to them.

I will expand on these points in this essay. This is one of the many crises of the revolutionary left today. Sadly, much of what I describe is done under the best of intentions. While it might sound like it at times, I do not believe there is a coordinated and evil plot to keep down working class people in the revolutionary left. I do not believe any of these WCER are white supremacists. They are serious revolutionaries. But they are revolutionaries who are the product of the general historical moment and their particular life experiences. Regardless of what they say and think, I am most interested in the objective results and process of their actions.

The White College Educated Revolutionary (WCER)

The category of WCER is very broad and needs some political refinement. While I cannot draw extremely sharp demarcations, some minimal ones will be helpful. I have noticed that WCER in Trotskyist and Maoist organizations do not display this problem. If anything the Maoists are the most serious about developing well rounded revolutionaries as far as their tradition understands it. WCER Trotskysts also display a fair amount of seriousness and fall outside the critiques I am making.

I have noticed Anarchists are some of the poorest in this sense. While there are exceptions, those who I can point out are exactly that, exceptions. Then there are those coming out of the Johnson-Forest tradition which have most in common with the problems of the white Anarchists and WCER. Lastly, there are the independent activists who are radicals or revolutionaries, but most importantly have not joined any revolutionary organizational form. The core of my critique is centered around independent activists, those influenced by the Johnson-Forest tradition, and Anarchists, with all of them having in common their college education. When using WCER, I will tend to refer to this layer as a general rule.

Most of the WCER left has had minimal contact with POC working class and unemployed. They come out of the suburbs or small towns and go to fairly elite private or public university. They rightly developed a moral anger against the white supremacy geared towards many communities in the USA and around the world. They learned about Marxism in the university and often it was discussed as Stalinism. Marxism was paraded around as completely male, Euro-centric etc. What was missing was any mention of Walter Rodney, Rosa Luxemburg, Grace Lee Boggs etc. Or how many movements in Asia, Latin America, and Africa were marxist/ communist, although of highly Stalinist-Maoist varieties. Nor do they study in college the Grundrisse, Johnson-Forest Tendency, Socialism or Barbarism, etc.

What first developed for these WCER as a critique of Marxism, led to a criticism of theory and universal ideas as destroying oppressed groups’ particular experiences. Theory and universalism became a stand-in for the white straight man. While there is a strain of truth to it, it does not explain any of the women and POC militants and movements I have mentioned so far. What stood in its place was the romanticism of the individual experience of Queers, women of color, Trans-people, men of color, etc. The class dimensions of these identities were usually hallowed out because class also became the bogey man for Marxism. Sociological academic words like intersectionality, privilege, and positionality came to fill in for the revolutionary past. Bourgeois thought had once again defanged revolutionary theory.

If revolutionary theory was not totally hollowed out, what was learned at best was an incomprehensible academic Marxism. Giving certain insights to many WCERs, it also left them unable to speak plainly to anyone outside of academia. As soon as WCERs stepped out of school, they discovered no one understood a word they spoke unless they spoke plain. This further deepened the idea that revolutionary theory was not for the working classes. This created a private versus public distinction of where revolutionary ideas are discussed.

Back on the college campuses, the WCER did some organizing where the only POC they encountered were their class counterparts. The political experiences and relationship developed on college campuses had a definitive impact on how both of these groups imagine politics, organizing and race relations to be. And these POC had been waiting their entire life to give it to the man and they found a group of WCER who were only too happy to oblige their POC counterparts. Both the WCER and the POC revolutionaries had a sickness of revenge, guilt and an inner cowardice.

Authenticity + Representation: Attack on Revolutionary Theory

Everyone on college campuses recognized that there was a profound difference between their class reality and what people outside the campus were experiencing. Usually this was understood in some shallow-sociological form of class. That no one was able to make deeper connections with those outside college campuses was a reality no one could ignore. This is part of the material basis of the politics of representation which came to fill such a role in the contemporary revolutionary left. WCERs needed representatives to play a fill-in role since none could be found outside of college campuses. These representatives were almost always POCCERs.

But to be representative of something, you need some claim to authenticity. No discussion of authenticity can happen without discussing the problems of race which are inherent to the concept. We can expose the problem by framing it in terms of a question. Who is an authentic POC? What kind of music does an authentic POC listen to? How does an authentic POC talk? How does an authentic POC dress? Where does an authentic POC live? What does an authentic POC eat? What are the politics of an authentic POC? The list is endless. But this line of questions exposes the racialist/ white supremacist thinking which are the very foundations of the questions themselves.

No one in the WCER would openly ask such questions. Their white skin prevents such public statements. But the way WCER behave in college, exposes their method of thinking. This is where the POCCER enters. I will not forget when I recently heard a POCCER claim that he sagged his pants low so he could make a political statement, connect with the hood, and remind others of his true origins. This is a classic moment of authentic representation. The WCER sees someone who they believe has an accurate understanding of the POC working class.

The authentic representation combination leads to an attack on revolutionary theory. The authentic representative is someone who hates revolutionary theory. The following things are essential for this authentic representative to say: a) people in the hood do not read or care about books; b) people in the hood worry about the police, wages, or rent; c) people in the hoods’ experiences are enough to politicize them.

Marxist-Feminism vs. Subjectivism: A Response to Fire Next Time

Posted on February 19, 2013

In the following piece, Eve Mitchell, a comrade from Unity and Struggle, responds to a recent FNT post about Marxist feminism and black feminism. Mitchell’s response can also be found on the Gathering Forces blog.

The East Coast network Fire Next Time recently posted this dialogue between two of their members, Zora and Ba Jin, contrasting Silvia Federici and Selma James. The post argues that Federici’s Marxist-Feminist understanding of primitive accumulation in her book, Caliban and the Witch, forefronts global migration, colonization, and international connections among women and people of color. On the other hand, the post asserts, James’ Marxist-Feminist analysis centers on the U.S.-centric housewife role and only secondarily takes up the question of waged women’s work and Third World and Black Feminism. The post further critiques Wages for Housework as a liberal feminist goal, arguing that “it seems like a weird coexistence with capitalism.” In response to this post, I feel the need to clear a few things up and ask some questions in the spirit of comradely debate.

1. Why force a wedge between Federici and James?

Federici and James are a part of the same Marxist-Feminist tendency. A third person I would put in this longstanding tendency is Mariarosa Dalla Costa, who co-wrote “The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community” with James, and still writes alongside Federici for The Commoner journal. In fact, in the “Preface” to Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, she writes:

“The thesis which inspired this research was first articulated by Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, as well as other activists in the Wages for Housework Movement, in a set of documents in the 1970s that were very controversial, but eventually reshaped the discourse on women, reproduction, and capitalism [7].”

Furthermore, Federici wrote pamphlets in support of Wages for Housework in the 1970s. In addition to their theoretical contributions, Dalla Costa, Federici, and James have done similar organizing through the years, for example with sex workers and in communities in the third world.

It is not clear what James’ and Federici’s relationship is today, but in discussing their contributions between (roughly) 1950 and 1980, their arguments (both historically and theoretically) strengthen and uphold one another. The following will explain why.

2. James’ analysis of the housewife and reproductive work under capitalism.

First, I would like to look more closely at James’ discussion of the housewife. At face value, the housewife is a one-sided experience at best, and a dated concept at worst. As Zora describes,

“The whole wages for housework thing seems alienating for me, because it’s not applicable to that many people in the U.S. There is a history here of women of color being pushed into waged domestic work, in which you weren’t paid that much, and your worker’s rights weren’t protected. So it has already been capitalized on. You pushed multiple groups of people, who were not white women, into this domestic work to take care of white women’s children. And the wages for housework thing makes me think, “Well is that your end goal? To be co-opted by capitalism, and to make your work legitimate under capitalism?” It seems like a weird coexistence with capitalism instead of addressing how capitalism is reaching all the way down into reproduction, and developing a strategy to combat that, beyond just demanding wages.”

However, James’ methodology (along with Federici’s) is much more complex than Zora acknowledges. James discusses the particular, or one-sided expression of the division of labour under capitalism, in conversation with the totality of social relations. James explicitly acknowledges that the experience of the unwaged domestic labourer is one particular experience of the many different types of labour due to the capitalist division of labour. For example, consider the following quote from James’ pamphlet, “Sex, Race and Class:”

[James quoting Marx’s Capital] “‘Manufacture…develops a hierarchy of labour powers, to which there corresponds a scale of wages. If on the one hand, the individual laborers are appropriated and annexed for life by a limited function; on the other hand, the various operations of the hierarchy are parceled out among the laborers according to both their natural and their acquired abilities.’

“In two sentences is laid out the deep material connection between racism, sexism, national chauvinism and the chauvinism of the generations who are working for wages against children and pensioners who are wageless, who are ‘dependents.’

“A hierarchy of labor powers and a scale of wages to correspond. Racism and sexism training us to develop and acquire certain capabilities at the expense of all others. Then these acquired capabilities are taken to be our nature, fixture our functions for life, and fixing also the quality of our mutual relations. So planting cane or tea is not a job for white people and changing nappies is not a job for men and beating children is not violence. Race, sex, nation, each an indispensable element of the international division of labour.” [Sex, Race and Class p. 96].

Under the capitalist division of labour, we become our jobs. We are relegated into one form of work (we are teachers, bus drivers, call center workers, etc.) that we are to perform over and over again. Marx calls this alienation. Capitalism has a gendered and racialized hierarchical division of labour, where certain kinds of work, as James points out, are “naturalized,” to people of color, women, and children.
will-work-for-free-april-fools-300x224These forms of work are historically de-valued under capital, and therefore women’s labour power is de-valued, a point that Federici explains in her account of primitive accumulation. Further, the appearance of the value of labour power is the wage, and so women’s work is unwaged and/or underwaged. This means that the housewife’s position in the division of labour as an unwaged worker, is tied to an immigrant domestic worker’s low-waged position, and a school teacher’s position, etc.

James’ work in this area was an important step for challenging Orthodox Marxism’s assertion that class struggle only took place in the factory. These arguments could be extended to feudal peasantry, for example, arguing that the peasantry in countries who had not yet been colonized by capitalism had their own unique communist potential.

3. Wages for Housework and reformism.

As noted above, Zora and Ba Jin question whether Wages for Housework is a revolutionary demand, hinting that it echos liberal feminist assimilation/”equality” politics. While I do think it’s important to question the relevance of Wages for Housework (a point taken up below in section 4), I disagree that it can be chalked up to liberal feminism so easily.

The first reason is that Wages for Housework must be placed in its historical context. It was a demand made between the 1950s and 1970s in the US and Europe. It is the absolutely correct approach to make demands appropriate to your time and location. We cannot criticize James for not making international demands when there is not a strong international women’s movement. We cannot put form before content.

Furthermore, the Wages for Housework campaign existed at the height of the women’s liberation movement, which demanded “Equal Wages for Equal Work,” and an opportunity to enter into the workforce. This was a purely economic demand that the Marxist-Feminism tendency (including James) fiercely argued against. According to the Marxist-Feminists, such a strategy would allow capital to absorb the feminist movement by creating additional labour power. The alternative, Wages for Housework, would have caused increased devastation to capital by forcing profit concessions for unwaged domestic labour. In other words, James argued that equality politics would add labour to women’s plates instead of forcing capital to relinquish profits for work already being done.

Wages for Housework demanded wages, yes, but its effort to explode the division between productive and reproductive labour extended beyond economic reformism.

This anti-capitalist strategy was placed alongside the Marxist-Feminist goal of breaking down the patriarchy of the wage; women’s existence would no longer be mediated by their husband’s wage. When viewed in this context, Wages for Housework was a political demand, not purely economic.

4. Is the housewife/unwaged reproductive labour relevant today?

This brings us to the question of whether Wages for Housework as a demand is relevant today. Zora and Ba Jin argue, as many others have, that because women of color have for a long time received wages for domestic work performed in white women’s homes, and in the service industry, Wages for Housework does not apply to them. However, this argument ignores the material reality that most unwaged domestic labour is still done by women in the home; this is on top of the waged work performed outside the home. Consider the following quote from The Monthly Review, citing the Bureau of Labor Time Use Survey:

“Women are still primarily responsible for raising children and taking care of the house. Although there has been an increase in the number of single-father-headed households and the amount of child care done by fathers in general, there continues to be a large gap between the average hours that mothers and fathers devote to raising children. Contrary to the popular view that many young fathers are leaving the labor force to care for their children, the labor force participation rate for fathers with children under three years old is 95 percent: higher than any other group. Even when both parents work outside the home and fathers share in child-care tasks, mothers are more likely to take jobs with flexible hours that allow them to drop off and pick up children from school or take the day off when the children are sick. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, working women with small children spend more than twice the hours per day doing primary child-care activity than their spouses. Husbands do a slightly greater share of household tasks but still average only about half of the work done by their wives.”

Researchers in Britain are drawing similar conclusions. We can couple these comments with anecdotes about generations of children of color being raised by single mothers, sisters, aunties, and abuelas. This is compounded by material conditions such as the hyper-incarceration of men of color, as Zora notes: men of color are oftentimes physically unable to contribute to unwaged domestic labour in the home.
In essence, Wages for Housework is actually more relevant for women of color and immigrant women than the white women who do not do domestic labour in their own homes.

Many have questioned the relevancy of Wages for Housework based on the fact that women of color have always worked as waged labourers. This argument ignores the feminized and racialized division of labour, the wage division between production and reproduction, and the value hierarchy that follows suit.

However, women of color accessing waged work does complicate James’ and Federici’s arguments about the patriarchy of the wage. Under these conditions, patriarchy does not appear as a wage-relationship between a man and woman in the home (i.e. her existence is not mediated by her husband’s wage). But one could counter that since the gendered wage gap exists among people of color, women of color in some ways still mediate their existence through men’s wages. Furthermore, this problem only complicates Wages for Housework as a strategy to break down the patriarchy of the wage; it does not upset its potential to impare capital, while winning material gains for the class as a whole.

5. For the last 60 years, James has forefronted third world women and women of color in her analysis.

Putting the housewife and Wages for Housework aside, James is now over 60 years deep into her work as a Marxist-Feminist theorist and organizer. It is not enough to look at one aspect of her work and assume it is the end-all/be-all of her politics. As an alternative, I encourage Zora and Ba Jin to check out James’ recently released anthology, Sex, Race and Class and note that a majority of the pieces forefront women of color and the third world, tackling women’s interest in topics such and Israeli Apartheid, the U.S. Coup in Haiti, State Capitalism in Venezuela, etc.

In addition, James explicitly acknowledges the links between the housewife figure and unwaged/underwaged feminized labour in the global division of labor in her pieces, “The Global Kitchen,” and “Strangers and Sisters: Women, Race and Immigration.” And finally, these politics are most impressively filled out, in conversation with defending the subjectivity of the peasantry in the essay, “Wageless of the World.”

6. Second Wave Feminism’s Subjectivist Methodology.

Finally, I want to clarify what I see as the flaws of second wave feminism, how successive feminist currents have not only failed to rectify those flaws, but actually replicated them. I am unclear whether Zora and Ba Jin would agree with this assessment because the post does not go into detail on what they mean by “Black Feminism” and how it overcomes the limitations of second wave feminism. I would like to hear more from them on this.

For me, the pitfall of second wave feminism is that it was rooted in subjectivist identity politics, which overemphasized the individual one-sided expression of capitalism, conflating the particular with the totality. This was characterized by consciousness-raising circles, for example, which encouraged women to find their voices and express their experiences. These were (and are) an essential part of building up women and oppressed people as revolutionary leaders, but it cannot replace a political program for organization. The downfall of such a method, as has been pointed out by many, is that an objectively white feminist movement conflated their experience under the capitalist division of labour with ALL women’s experiences, or the totality of experiences. However, the response has generally been to replicate second wave feminism’s subjectivism, by relying on “intersectionality theory,” which seeks to merely add on one-sided expressions of capitalism to white women’s expressions, again conflating the particular with the totality. More specifically, intersectionality theory creates a list of one-sided expressions of the division of labour (being Black, disabled, queer, etc.), treating these identities as static and universal. Instead of focusing on what is the historical unity between these identities, intersectionality theory is trapped in the logic of identity, which replicates the individualism and alienation of capitalism, and conflates the particular with the totality. A person is then a queer, Black bus driver, instead of those three aspects being different expressions, or sides, of the totality of relations under capitalism.

Marx, on the other hand, offers the concept of “moments of expression,” which place a particular one side of capitalism in conversation with the totality of social relations. He writes, in the Grundrisse:

“When we consider bourgeois society in the long view and as a whole, then the final result of the process of social production always appears as the society itself, i.e. the human being itself in its social relations. Everything that has a fixed form, such as the product etc., appears as merely a moment, a vanishing moment, in this movement. The direct production process itself here appears only as a moment. The conditions and objectifications of the process are themselves equally moments of it, and its only subjects are the individuals, but individuals in mutual relationships, which they equally reproduce and produce anew. The constant process of their own movement, in which they renew themselves even as they renew the world of wealth they create” (712).

This is the methodology that James, Dalla Costa, Federici, and other Marxist-Feminists sought to expand. An entire post could be written on the bankruptcy of intersectionality theory, but the goal here is to identify and dissect the Marxist-Feminist methodology and how it differs from the subjectivist methodology of second wave feminism. Further, I aim to dispute the counterposition of James and Federici, and to facilitate further conversation about the Marxist-Feminist tendency. I welcome comments from Zora, Ba Jin, others in Fire Next Time, and anyone else, in the hopes of fleshing this out more.

On The Execution of Christopher Dorner

Posted on February 12, 2013

The following was written by some members of Fire Next Time.

As we write, Christopher Dorner is most likely dying or dead, as the cabin in which he was trapped burns around him. A huge manhunt involving local, state and federal officials has culminated in what can only be described as an extrajudicial execution. We condemn Dorner’s murder at the hands of the state.

People cheer Dorner because, whatever his motivations, he exposed the workings of a vicious white supremacist system that goes quietly unacknowledged most of the time. He declared war on a system that has waged an undeclared war on us, every day, for years; a system that holds millions of poor people and people of color in prisons, and guns them down in the street. He did what every young person of color in Los Angeles dreams of, when he or she comes home after getting fucked with by the cops, and starts a shootout on GTA V. He was celebrated for doing what many of us could not.

Christopher Dorner was a contradictory figure. He served the system in the U.S. military and LAPD, but then waged armed struggle against the blatant corruption, brutality and racism of the police force. He lauded ex-president Bush and Colin Powell in his manifesto, but also wished death on George Zimmerman. He targeted lesbian officers for belittling men, and killed the family members of his enemies; but he also shot and killed two members of a police force that terrorizes thousands of young people every day. Via twitter hashtags, his last stand is being compared with the bombing of the black militant #MOVE house in Philadelphia in 1985, as well as the assault on the Branch Dividian compound in #Waco in 1993.

Despite these contradictions, many people across the U.S. cheer Dorner on, and are no doubt doing so now even as the state moves to kill him. And they are right to do so.

It will take more than isolated rebels to defeat the police force and overthrow capitalism. It will take a mass revolutionary movement declaring unceasing struggle against the state, not in ones and twos, but by the millions. We see the potential for such a movement in the popular opinion that welled up around the Dorner case. Had such a movement existed not only in aspiration but also in the streets, Christopher Dorner might have joined it and been transformed by it, another Geronimo Pratt. Let us commit ourselves to building this movement, starting today.

Thoughts on Christopher Dorner

Posted on February 9, 2013

FNT is debating the significance of the Dorner moment, what do readers think?

“Blood on the leaves of liberty”:

Analysis of an ex. LAPD officer’s rampage

By ZoRa B’Al Sk’a

The story of the ex. LAPD officer Christopher Jordan Dorner continues to unfold. As a former member of the police force, Dorner’s individual resistance to the LAPD displays a very contradictory consciousness. Dorner is resisting part of the state, while retaining a sense of fealty to the overall ideology of the state. Dorner’s actions are reactionary in nature and represent a particular kind of violence that thrives under the conditions of neoliberal capitalism in the United States.

Dorner is not revolutionary and it should not be expected that his actions will contribute to a revolutionary process. Nonetheless, Dorner’s autonomous actions have opened up discussions of political violence, challenging the taboo idea of openly waging warfare upon the police. Although Dorner’s actions are legitimate in that they strike terror into the white supremacist LAPD, Dorner himself is not divorced from white supremacy.

As made clear by his manifesto, Dorner’s motive for waging ultra-violent warfare is to “reveal” the corrupt nature of the LAPD and it’s racist practices. Yet there is something that is unique to Dorner’s declaration of warfare. Dorner intimately understands the white supremacist violence that the police wage upon civilians, but isolates his anger solely to the LAPD. This is a narrow scope of how the state and white supremacy work. Thus it makes sense why Dorner pledges his allegiance to the U.S. government, stating:

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants-TJ. This quote is not directed toward the US government which I fully support 100%. This is toward the LAPD who can not monitor itself. The consent decree should not have been lifted, ever.”(Dorner, 2013)