INTRODUCTION

“The whole truth is that even Marx’s CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM, which remains the ground for organization today, was written 112 years ago. What is demanded is not mere “updating,” after all the aborted revolutions of the post-World War II world, “Ground” will not suffice alone; we have to finish the building the roof and its contents.”

 -Raya Duayevskaya, 1987 in “On political divides and philosophic new beginnings,” her last theory/practice column.^[1]

Gramsci’s well-known phrase about us being in a time of monsters resonates among the masses and is oft-quoted across movement spaces. Where are we in our current struggle for a new world, one where human emancipation (while not guaranteed) emerges and becomes a concrete possibility? As we face brutal blows of global racial- gendered-capitalist domination, we are also witnessing others be ground down even worse, experiencing wide-scale degradation of life and multiple genocides, all of which are live-streamed to us daily.

The United States-enabled genocide in Gaza in particular has been met with a (re)emergence of movements against imperialism, white supremacy, Western chauvinism, and gender domination. The most recent actions of the United States and Israel further if not all completely shatter illusions of liberal concepts of “international law”, “human rights”, and “rule of law”. The facade is not holding together and cracks are showing through. Feminists, student groups, housing justice advocates, abolitionists, labor organizers, queer collectives and others on the left are all organizing against the genocide connecting their local struggles to U.S. imperialism with calls such as “No pride in genocide”, “Homes not bombs” and “Palestine is a feminist issue”.

Other anti-imperialist movements for self-determination and against death-making, each with their own particularities are being fought in Haiti, Sudan, Congo, Kanaky, Tigray, Armenia, Western Sahara, Ukraine, Iran, and U.S. outposts like Hawaii and Puerto Rico. These struggles should also be included in our anti-imperialist politics and analyses.

This report will explore issues of race, imperialism, and organization within a U.S. context; each movement fighting its own monsters, fast in the clutches of a new world struggling to be born.

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BLACK: U.S. BLACK MOVEMENTS, ABOLITION, AND WHITELASH

“The people fight and accept the sacrifices demanded by the struggle in order to gain material advantages, to live better and in peace, to benefit from progress, and for the better future of their children. National liberation, the struggle against colonialism, the construction of peace, progress and independence are hollow words devoid of any significance unless they can be translated into a real improvement of living conditions.”

“We must walk rapidly but not run. We must not be opportunists, nor allow our enthusiasms to make us lose the vision of concrete reality.”

― Amílcar Cabral, Return to the Source: Selected Speeches of Amílcar Cabral

The struggle against police and prisons, where are we now?

Four years after the George Floyd rebellion have not brought the progressive changes, the movement for Black Lives was fighting for. Although public confidence in policing remains low, ^[2] and more people are informed about the role of police in their communities, cities, and municipalities across the United States continue to give large portions of their budgets to police without any increased accountability demands.

A recent report from the civil liberties organization analyzed over 130 lawsuits filed over injuries, wrongful arrests, First Amendment violations, and other abuses protestors experienced during the 2020 uprising. The report, Defending Rights to Dissent, The Cost of Police Violence and Mayhem: A Report on Police Misconduct during the George Floyd Protests ^[3] found that cities paid out $150 million in settlements associated with the lawsuits. Unsurprisingly, most cities chose to settle with complainants because they could not defend police actions in court. To date, over 3000 protestors who filed lawsuits have won settlements. Many others are still waiting for their day in court.

Such large payouts may offer some relief and address harm done to protestors by police but do little to change policing itself. The settlements are paid out by cities and not police departments or individual officers and as such, there are no incentives for policing to change-there are no accountability mechanisms. Furthermore, cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Oakland, and Seattle are still recovering from the pandemic and have resorted to austerity measures such as defunding libraries, and schools as well as imposing hiring freezes across essential social services to balance their budgets. With that being said, there have been some modest gains in the defund movement. Cities like Minneapolis partially met their constituents’ demands for city resources to be invested in social services and divested from their police department. Notably, the Minneapolis Police Department 3rd precinct was set aflame by protestors 3 days after George Floyd’s murder igniting the 2020 Black Lives Matter movement. Today that department’s uniformed staff has dropped by more than a third and the city has instituted several new prevention and response models to address mental health crises and violence.^[4]

The police and the cities that empower them have however not changed their ways. This can be evidenced by the new uprising for Palestinian lives surging on our public streets and college campuses. We continue to see police brutalize, dehumanize, and arrest Pro-Palestinian protestors with impunity. It is no wonder that many who are calling for a Free Palestine also demand a society free of not only police brutality but policing altogether.

The struggle for the abolition of policing, militarism, and carcerality, would not be complete without the prison movement. The 2020 George Floyd revolt occurred in tandem with multiple prison strikes across the United States. Prisoners and their co-strugglers on the outside fought for better conditions, early release of inmates, and labor conditions that can be categorized as modern-day slavery^[5]. Today abolitionists both inside and outside of prisons continue to engage in hunger strikes, work stoppages, and other forms of revolt.

The abolitionist movement has been growing steadily over the past decade and many of the collectives and organizations that were formed continue to advocate for non-reformist reforms with wins in certain areas. These include: abolishing cash bail systems, critiquing police “reforms” that involve technology such as robot dogs, overturning cannabis convictions, and creating emergency systems that don’t involve police during mental health and other crises.

White supremacist grievance

White supremacist grievance and an array of ever-changing cultural war politics continue to dominate the landscape across the United States. The U.S. right-wing (with the acquiescence of liberals) continues to engage in ever-shifting moral panics. In addition to fighting Critical Race Theory in schools (which is not taught at the k12 level), comprehensive sex education, drag queens, and trans people, they’ve now manufactured and intensified a war against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. In August 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down affirmative action admissions policies in higher education citing the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which broadly prohibits discrimination based on race. This cynical application of the Constitution has implications for institutions outside of the academy with many private employers rolling back any racial justice commitments they made in 2020.

Fascinatingly, DEI initiatives across institutions have led to little progress in achieving racial equity and white women have been the biggest benefactors of such programs^[6]. The whitelash against any attempt toward racial parity is usually framed as a mechanism of dispossession for hardworking white people. Beyond being used as a divide-and-conquer tool, white grievance politics are closely connected to dangerous movements that perpetuate white replacement theory, xenophobia, and fascism as any initiative to achieve racial parity is framed as a socialist takeover of the country that must be repressed. Charisse Burden-Stelly who explores this in her book Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States (2024) writes, “Whereas in the context of U.S. capitalist political economy, race demarcates social status, structural location describes a material relationship inextricable from imperialism and sustained through a combination of political economic and discursive processes to which any challenge is configured as destructive to U.S. Society”. ^[7]

Those on a quest for total freedom should struggle alongside BIPOC folks and their accomplices embroiled in curriculum wars and white moral panics. While some of these cultural struggles seem to be distractions in our work towards liberation and may not have an obvious class character, it is our directive to defend those losing jobs, facing school disciplinary action, being denied access to healthcare, being smeared and dispossessed in the current climate.

EVERY RIVER TO EVERY SEA: U.S.-BASED MOVEMENTS FOR A FREE PALESTINE

The 8-month ongoing genocide on the people of Gaza has sparked a new anti-imperialist movement for Palestine. Nowhere is this movement more vibrant than the Student Intifada being waged on university campuses. Students worldwide are setting up encampments in defiance to and to the dismay of their institutions. These direct actions have been met with heavy police brutality, surveillance, and disciplinary actions from universities. To date, over 3000 students have been arrested for their activism.

The repression of Pro-Palestinian activists is occurring at all institutional levels and with collusion between private zionist interests and the state. We’ve witnessed zio-fascist groups and reactionaries like the Proud Boys attacking student protesters at universities like UCLA and the Univesity of Chicago^[8]. These attacks also go beyond street-level assaults. Several weeks ago, a leaked WhatsApp group chat with New York business magnates and the mayor of New York City revealed a plan to forcibly dismantle student encampments at Columbia University. At least one person from that chat donated to the mayor’s re-election campaign. ^[9]Another recent WhatsApp leak from a 400-member group run by the founder of the military contractor Blackwater, Erick Prince exposed the openly fascistic yearnings of the far-right. In one post, Prince’s business partner writes, “I would burn all those bastards, and have everything above ground, everything left of Gaza, collapse into this fiery hell pit and burn!”. These are not harmless chats as they are populated by former and current U.S. lawmakers, business elites, military contractors, right-wing pundits with large platforms, and even journalists. Their shocking revelations extend beyond the issue of the genocide in Gaza with posts about the white supremacist great replacement conspiracy, praise for authoritarians like Milei and Orban, and a desire for Trump to be re-elected so they can enact their far-right fantasies. Indeed one poster wrote, “It’s Trump or revolution”. ^[10]

With such consorted and well-funded efforts from state and non-state actors to completely decimate Gaza and squash any dissent, the emerging movements for Palestine are employing creative courageous direct actions to not only change U.S. policy but struggle for concrete Palestinian liberation. Furthermore, the far-right has categorized pro-Palestinian activists as terrorists, Islamists, godless Marxists, and Black Lives Matter (BLM) thugs. While there are shared struggles and connections among the implicated movements, the smearing and lumping together of these groups has forced many to think and organize together with the understanding, that the struggle for a Free Palestine is a struggle for a world free of fascism, racism, and imperialism.

Part of the political education happening at encampments involved students connecting issues of political economy to the issue of the genocide in Gaza. The question of whether the university is a hedge fund, a landlord, the local gentrifier,  a research hub for weapons contractors, or an extension of the carceral state more than it is an institution of learning is also now at the fore. As such, student protestors are making stronger than before demands for universities to disclose their ties to Israel and divest from weapons manufacturers. Students’ demands also include “ no cops on campus” and full amnesty for all student activists. As Ben-Chachem and Eggert (2024) note, “We cannot build movements for solidarity and abundance if we do not fight against the carceral state—it will always stand against us. In tandem with the Israel Defense Forces, police crush dissent and uphold the racial capitalist system. If we do not escalate against them, we will not survive. To flourish and to build a world beyond the nationalist death drive requires us to reject the illusion that cops and prisons provide safety or serve the public, to stop their ever-growing plunder of public resources—and to abolish the police entirely.”^[11]

Since the support of Gaza is one of the self-determination of Palestinian people and Palestinian nation/statehood, one of the prevailing questions often discussed at encampment teach-ins is that of the nature of the U. S. state as it aids and abets the Gaza genocide both materially and ideologically while its citizens face increasing poverty, inaccessible health care, housing insecurity, crumbling infrastructure, and the consequences of climate breakdown. There is a prevailing understanding that institutions use state power to repress students all while parading liberal values like “civil liberties” and “First Amendment rights”. There are also ongoing discussions on how our internationalism should connect to local concerns as many college students are themselves living in precarity also under U.S. settler -colonialist- capitalist domination. This might be an area we can develop further in Marxist-humanism while inviting other leftists to enter into dialogue with us.

CONCLUSION

 As the marxist left continues to struggle when it comes to issues of race and gender and as identity-based intersectional theories continue to be relevant we are also noticing a liberatory politics emerge from below as people try to make sense of their everyday experiences. Our task as revolutionaries is to project better alternatives that take the everyday material conditions of folks seriously and to “recognize that there is a movement from practice — from the actual struggles of the day — to theory; and, second, to work out the method whereby the movement from theory can meet it” (Dunayevskaya [1965] 2012:73). (Ndindi K. Convention report conclusion 2020)

Even with ever-creeping fascism, the ongoing elite capture of our radical energies, an encroaching police state, an increase in white supremacist and misogynistic violence against us, daily dehumanization under capital there is an energy and optimism in our Black movements. Those of us who fight dehumanization at its core are also struggling against our own alienation under capitalist domination, otherwise our work might dead -end in representational bourgeois politics. Ultimately there is no through-going emancipation through reformism or a capitalist feminism or a capitalist anti-racism. Organizations like ours can/should offer philosophical insights as we collectively find our way out of our predicament. In the past two years many of our members have engaged with marxism and the dialectics of race, gender, sexuality and ability. I urge us to continue developing an intersectional marxism, one that is a philosophy of liberation that can meet the moment. (Ndindi K. Convention report conclusion 2022)

The subjective and objective situations and the contradictions they bear need to be analyzed and acted upon collectively and with clarity. These include ongoing genocides, climate breakdown, increased state repression, the fascist creep, degraded socioeconomics, intensified structural violence across many racialized and oppressed people, and other multiple compounding crises.

I’ve included my 2020 and 2022 conclusions to my final thoughts of this 2024 report so that I and the comrades can track my thinking on the role of Marxist-Humanist thought over this half-decade.

On being/becoming an organization

‘On political divides and philosophic new beginnings’ which was Dunayeskaya’s last writing in 1987 (Featured in In The Power of Negativity: Selected Writings on the Dialectic in Hegel and Marx) encapsulates some of the same quandaries we find ourselves in today.

There is a further challenge to the form of organization which we have worked out as the committee-form rather than the ‘party-to-lead.’ But, though committee-form and ‘party-to-lead’ are opposites, they are not absolute opposites. At the point when the theoretic-form reaches philosophy, the challenge demands that we synthesize not only the new relations of theory to practice, and all the forces of revolution, but philosophy’s ‘suffering, patience and labor of the negative,’ i.e. experiencing absolute negativity. THEN AND ONLY THEN will we succeed in a revolution that will achieve a class-less, non-racist, non-sexist, truly human, truly new society. That which Hegel judged to be the synthesis of the ‘Self-Thinking Idea’ and the ‘Self-Bringing-Forth of Liberty,’ Marxist-Humanism holds, is what Marx had called the new society. The many paths to get there are not easy to work out.

Later in the piece, Dunayevsakaya invites us to develop our thinking beyond Marx’s theorizations in The Critique of the Gotha Program in his effort to move beyond the abstract universal to concrete wholeness. Over the past few years since re-issuing this text and hosting important discussions around it, we’ve examined the role of the revolutionary organizations, debated the transitional phases towards socialism, as well as addressed matters of racialized and gendered capital. Those discussions continue to be necessary in our quest to articulate a theory of organization that meets the moment. Here I suggest a return to bare-bones questions that have challenged the left for decades.

Below is a list of questions that keep emerging from current student movements and the queer/BIPOC leftist collectives where most of my work is situated.

1. Will these new and ongoing movements/forces bring us to revolution?
2. What is revolution? Who are the revolutionary subjects of the day?
3. What is the state and our ideal relationship to it?
4. How can anti-imperialist internationalists uphold an emancipatory vision and center the movements at the front lines of Western imperialism without ceding space to authoritarian or reactionary forces in those contexts?
5. How do we mount popular and united fronts against fascism while understanding how racism, gender domination, queerphobia, islamophobia, and elitism are impediments to achieving those goals?

It is twilight. United States liberal democracy is hanging by a thread. In the past few years, we’ve witnessed an attempted coup, contested elections, voter disfranchisement, loss of free speech protections, loss of bodily autonomy, and a relentless war on the civil rights of trans persons, youth, migrants, and racialized communities.

We can draw insights from Black radical politics. Black revolutionaries, Too Black and Rasul A Mowatt note that what should be fought for and defended must supersede representational politics or non-revolutionary reforms whose only effect is to capture and launder our collective rage. As they note, “Black Rage and suffering in America are promoted as a badge of honor—a “justice claim” made because “we built this country”. Black people are “the Soul of the Nation” who “saved American democracy”.^{[12] [13]}  To move beyond this, they suggest what they call reverse laundering.

Reverse Laundering

Reverse laundering by definition means to take what is considered legitimate to fund something illegitimate. From the vantage point of the State, Black Rage is illegitimate. Instead of using the fronts to legitimize Black Rage through bribery, we should flip the bribes of the capitalist State and fund the anti‑colonial, anti‑imperial measures it so religiously outlaws. The instructions for such acts lie beyond the mission statement of a White liberal non‑profit front, the “decolonizing” syllabus of a bromidic academic, and even the pages inside this book. We cannot formalize what is illegal. The answers rest in our collective Black Rage, the conspiring Rage of every conquered and oppressed people, and our ability to organize it all toward a life‑affirming post‑Western communist world. Anything less is a reconstruction of fronts, a reconstruction of our oppression. Know one, free one. (Laundering Black Rage: The Washing of Black Death, People, Property, and Profits by Too Black and Rassul A. Mowatt, 2024)

From Black and Mowatt’s analysis, we have not exploited every liberatory tool that we can partly because the” spaces we occupy and the cities we breathe all bribe us with a lifestyle that compels us to carry on the laundering of conquest. And, “For many, survival is dependent upon it.”. We are indispensable to the very systems that dominate us. As such, that very contradiction and the rage emanating from it must be sharpened and weaponized into revolt. Indeed the recent multiple uprisings across labor in the form of strikes, anti-racist/climate/housing/healthcare justice activism, and Pro-Palestinian student movements reveal the depth of our crises and the reach of mass refusal under a decaying liberal democracy.

Black, Brown, disabled, minoritized, colonized, and oppressed people in the United States have never experienced the full benefits of liberal democracy but many recognize, that it is better to organize and fight within sham bourgeois “democracy” than it is under complete totalitarianism. What then is to be done under an ever-encroaching fascist takeover of all institutions as the far-right in many cases is out-organizing us?^[14]

Hudis notes that, as incomplete and unsatisfactory as it is, “political democracy is not a gift created by and/or handed down from the bourgeoisie to fool the masses. On the contrary, it is a product of the self-activity of the masses”^[15]. He also makes the astute point that the right-wing agendas must be pushed through as they otherwise don’t represent the will of the people even with the limited rights people have. Questions around what electoral (if any) politics to engage in and tactics to against state repression, need to be addressed with this query in mind. If “fascism is the racialized relation of the boss to worker extended to the whole of society”, that suggests that struggles against domination must see the culmination of their emancipation into democratic people-centered non-hierarchical forms. Moreover with the limitations and with deepening fascist norms in the Western world and elsewhere tactics such as the use of lawfare within the current conditions and building systems of safety and defense are important elements. As such, having clarity about what activities are possible within different state formations is extremely important. Distinguishing the forms of democracy we are willing to struggle for over the flimsy versions we currently have is also vital to this discussion. The seeds of any future aspirational democratic humanist new society are already in germination. Embracing Marx’s concept of Revolution in Permanence, we should be eager students of movements that support such a vision.

I conclude with the thoughts of Too Black and Mowatt in their response to the potential of elite capture of our movements, the propensity to assign mythical powers to the state or systems of domination we experience and the ratcheting up of death and destruction, “We must build in relationship to the real”.

^[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130821165844/http://newsandletters.org/issues/2001/Dec/fta_Dec01.htm

^[2] https://theappeal.org/police-recruitment-low-accoutability/

^[3]https://www.rightsanddissent.org/news/the-cost-of-police-violence-and-mayhem-a-report-on-police-misconduct-during-the-george-floyd-protests/

^[4] https://newrepublic.com/article/181832/minneapolis-police-department-dismantling?utm_campaign=SF_TNR&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social

^[5] https://www.al.com/news/2024/06/alabama-inmates-fight-dismissal-of-lawsuit-accusing-prisons-of-using-them-as-slave-labor.html

^[6] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/06/29/affirmative-action-who-benefits-white-women/70371219007/

^[7] Burden-Stelly, Charisse. 2023. Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States. The University of Chicago Press,22.

^[8] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/palestinian-liberation-police-abolition/

^[9] https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/05/16/business-leaders-chat-group-eric-adams-columbia-protesters/

^[10] https://newrepublic.com/article/182008/erik-prince-secret-global-group-chat-off-leash?utm_campaign=SF_TNR&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=social

^[11] https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/palestinian-liberation-police-abolition/

^[12] Nikole Hannah‑Jones, “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True”, The New York Times Magazine, August 14, 2019. https://nyti.ms/2OUT4ae.

^[13] https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:VA6C2:5db1ab97-c221-4774-8c99-087f347fd7a9

^[14] https://imhojournal.org/articles/why-todays-attack-on-democracy-matters/

^[15]  https://imhojournal.org/articles/why-todays-attack-on-democracy-matters/