Introduction

“Blacks and other minorities, youth, women and the working class in fact form the powerful unified resistance to inspire a new society”. Raya Dunayevskaya

Two years have passed since we witnessed and participated in the George Floyd Rebellion. The righteous rage over the murders of Floyd and Taylor sparked the second iteration of the Black Lives Matter Movement and this time around it was more pronounced with polls estimating between 15 million and 26 million marched during the summer of 2020 making them the largest protests in U.S. history^[1]. This rage spilled into the streets for weeks with Black folks and their supporters across the world making demands for racial justice. During that time new solidarities were formed and old ones re-established. Not only did we see calls to address systemic racism but also demands to dismantle the carceral state (prisons, police, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement architecture, the surveillance state, etc.) to build non-violent humanizing alternatives. We also witnessed the creative organizing by multi-racial, youth, and women-led movements demanding housing for all, calling for bold actions to address climate breakdown, working towards the unionization of workers, fighting for queer (particularly trans) rights, and movements expressing solidarity with Palestine.  The pandemic and the U.S. government response to it demonstrated how disposable poor, female, BIPOC^[2], disabled folks, and immigrants are despite making up what is called “essential workers”. And therein lies an important contradiction, capital is vampire-like. It dominates and extracts from the living labor that it requires to sustain itself. Hence, we are both essential and disposable at the same time.

While this report focuses on Black and to some extent other BIPOC movements mostly within the U.S. context, we must pay attention to our co-strugglers across the global south. There is an active Black Lives Matter movement in Brazil, a country where police kill over 6000 every year, most of them Black, Indigenous, and poor. The recent police murder by asphyxiation of Genivaldo de Jesus Santos, a Black man with schizophrenia,^[3] has prompted feminist collectives to make demands for anti-capitalist human-centered solutions to poverty and mental illness over the reliance on police, an institution that has grown more violent under the repressive Bolsonaro regime. In places like Kenya, queer people are organizing against their own oppression. A most recent case of the brutal rape and murder of Sheila Lumumba^[4]outraged many on the continent pushing socialist queer organizations to not only demand an end to the daily violence but to question all systemic violence they experience as workers, women and poor queer people living under neo-colonialism. Indigenous women like Quechua ecofeminist Tania Pariona Tarqui^[5] are organizing with women in Peru. This group and others like it are connecting their struggles against environmental racism to their fights as exploited rural working people, their work to end the prevalent femicide they face, and to their demands for self-determination as a people.

These are but a few examples of movements racialized and colonized folks are involved in outside of the United States, which tends to dominate in our discussions about racialized and gendered capital. We would be remiss to not engage with the theorizing and organizing work occurring across global south contexts.

Were the police defunded? On current U.S. Black movements, theorizing, and organizing

A. Electoralism and Black Folks

The police were never defunded^[6]. The ruling elite warned their bases against embracing the “defund the police” slogan. However, they cannot escape its effectiveness, or how observable and actionable it is. Calls for police to be defunded are not monolithic. There are those who have more redistributionary politics and seek to shrink police departments and place public funds in institutions like schools and mental health services. Others see defunding as a demand to invest in social programs, while working towards the eventual abolishment of policing as we know it, with the subsequent creation of new systems of safety and accountability. And while demands to defund the police in the United States are not popular (only 28% of the population are defunders), there is widespread support for redirecting funds from police budgets to community development programs^[7].

In an article titled, Did Last Summer’s Black Lives Matter Protests Change Anything? Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor describes how the conversations around policing, race, and racism has changed. According to them “there is now widespread agreement that racism has been embedded in the public and private institutions that govern our lives and dictate our access to services, justifying the demands for specific actions to undo the harmful results…”.

The Democratic establishment and private corporations responded to calls for systemic change with symbolism and promises to address issues of diversity and representation in mainstream institutions while investing in Black communities. Despite the popularity of racial justice platforms, progressive climate policy, canceling student debt, relief for working people, more COVID protections, and public health guidance, the Democratic establishment has insisted on centrist politics with hopes of attracting conservatives who are alienated from a Republican party that is increasingly fascistic and right-wing. Several states have had primary elections this spring, and while there have been some disappointments, progressive grassroots campaigns have fared well with voters supporting progressive policies and “defund the police candidates”^[8]. As Taylor notes, “[although] public officials favored symbolic gestures over policy reforms, the country is still dramatically different than it was a year ago”. They end that piece with a warning for the left, “unrealized demands for change can turn into cynicism, despair, and detachment, leaving the forces of reaction intact and on the offensive. Our moment is full of promise and also peril.”

While Black progressive and even outspoken socialists are winning local elections, we must contend with the Black misleadership class. Among them are Mayor Eric Adams from New York, Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot and San Francisco’s London Breed. These mayors are consistently confronted by progressives and leftists in their cities. They often claim their regressive policies are in the service of the “Black community” despite evidence that they are not widely embraced by Black folks, and their donor bases are not from working class BIPOC communities. Their influence and work reveal a real class divide among Black establishment leaders and their working-class Black constituents.

With Breed, Lightfoot, Adams, and other Black elites of this misleadership class, their approach to addressing racial and socioeconomic disparities is to punish the victims of racialized capital. Their ascendancy (and that of others among the Black bourgeoisie) reveal a class/race divide that requires our analysis. This class more generally relies on more assimilationist politics which pathologize Black people, insisting that their suffering is based on poor individual choices instead of their systematic dispossession and exploitation. As a result, they have a punitive orientation towards their own people. These mayors are often used as political tools to shield non-Black politicians from accusations of racism when they institute similar cruel policies. From a liberal establishment position, Adams, Lightfoot, and Breed are the “good and reasonable Blacks” who should be let into politics because they are not questioning the white-supremacist settler-colonial capitalist foundations that the U.S. was built on. They are in fact reinforcing these systems while paternalistically claiming that they know what’s best for Black people.  To maintain their positions, they have to appeal to white supremacist institutions, and their solidarity is with capitalists and not with the Black working classes they claim to protect. Meanwhile, Black wealth is declining. A stunning 2017 report by the Institute of Policy Studies reveals that African American wealth will be a median of net zero by 2053 if things keep going as they are. Latin@s, who are also experiencing a downward wealth slide, will hit $0 in the 2070s^[9].

The rise of the Black misleader demonstrates the limits of representational and reactionary identity politics. Not all Black people share the same interests or as we say “not all skin folk are kin folk”.

B. Black Movements, Housing, Houselessness, and Abolition

Even as Black movements have been dampened over the past two years, the politics of abolition remain popular as a mobilizing framework for many in our current time of socioeconomic precarity. While abolition has grown in popularity, we must acknowledge that not all abolitionisms are the same. Some of its adherents focus their political work on non-reformist reforms^[10] through local electoralism, and others on dual power. And others yet concentrate on theorizing, experimenting and creating revolutionary alternatives. Those in favor of a dual power approach are organizing cooperatives for activities like farming, housing, and education while still participating in local politics. Dual power abolitionists are also creating their own alternatives rooted in transformative justice principles and a humanist philosophy and are already having successes in preventing their community members from encountering police and ending up in cages. For example, Don’t Call the Police^[11]  is a network of care offering community-based alternatives to police across several dozen cities.

Carceral logics suggest that social, political, economic, and even moral questions should be addressed through policing, surveillance, cages, and social control. To illustrate how carceral capitalist logics apply, I will offer examples from Black movements involved in struggles against houselessness, eviction, displacement and dispossession facing many BIPOC folks living in U.S. urban cities.

Market-based solutions to the housing crisis have been failing for decades. They remain a significant way of reproducing racial, gender, class, and other disparities. But the housing crisis is not primarily perpetuated by private capital. The state bolsters neoliberal capitalism through every crisis by making massive investments in private capital at the expense of the working classes. Under the current conditions, there is no great incentive (other than our rage and our organizing) to solve the housing crisis and houselessness outside of the market.

The response to a lack of affordable housing, and in many cases, a lack of housing at all, is with evictions, displacements, punitive fines, incarceration, and surveillance. The police function as agents of the state and in the service of capitalists to carry out this violence. The police brutality we are protesting is then merely one form of the ongoing state violence our communities experience.

For instance, there are four evictions every minute in the United States. More and more people are becoming unhoused in our cities.^[12] Most evictions in the U.S. occur in Black-majority neighborhoods. Black and Brown families are most likely to be behind on rent and be facing eviction within the next two months^[13]. Needless to say, BIPOC women, youth, immigrants, and people with disabilities are disproportionately affected by the current housing crisis, and in fact having children is the single greatest predictor of whether someone will face eviction.^[14] Police, jails, prisons, courts, and surveillance technologies are the sum parts of the carceral machine necessary to evict folks and criminalize the shelterless. Persistent homelessness is now not only inevitable under this current iteration of capitalism, but remains a normal and enduring structure of it.

 The abolitionist position and approach to the question of the state’s role might be best understood through what scholars like Ruth Wilson Gilmore call the anti-state state. She says “we are faced with the ascendance of anti-state state actors: people and parties who gain state power by denouncing state power. Once they have achieved an elected or appointed position in government, they have to make what they do seem transparently legitimate, and if budgets are any indication, they spend a lot of money even as they claim they’re “shrinking government.” Prison, policing, courts, and the military enjoy such legitimacy, and nowadays it seems to many observers as though there was never a time things were different. Thus, normalization slips into naturalization, and people imagine that locking folks in cages or bombing civilians or sending generation after generation off to kill somebody else’s children is all part of “human nature.”

To describe the role of nonprofits, think tanks, and foundations directly involved in the social service sector, Gilmore borrows the concept of the shadow state^[15] from Jennifer Wolch. The shadow state includes entities that generally contract with cities, states, and the federal government to provide services (such as health care services, casework, educational programs etc.) the state cannot meet. These organizations reinforce the anti-state state and are not likely to be the site of revolutionary praxis.

The hope then lies in the work being done by those in the shadow of the shadow state^[16]. This is the grassroots work carried out by movement groups and organizers. These groups are not established non-profits, nor do they generally receive government contracts to address issues in their communities. Instead, the main “focus of their energies is ordinary people whom they wish fervently to organize against their own abandonment.” In these collectives, the contradictions of appealing to the anti-state state or colluding with the shadow state are revealed, forcing organizers to struggle for solutions that go beyond merely getting better state services.

Currently, housing advocates have been vigorously and consistently agitating against the system. Many are going after corporate landlords, engaging in anti-gentrification struggles, pushing for extensions on rent moratoria that were instituted during the pandemic, demanding rent cancellation, and questioning racist zoning ordinances. They view the housing crisis as an economic, racial, and gender justice issue and while they do get behind policy reforms that serve the working classes, they’re also attempting to re-conceptualize a vision of the future that goes beyond housing reforms and shadow state solutions, a future with permanent, supportive, non-punitive housing for all.

Some organizers are taking even more militant actions to address their housing needs. Just before the pandemic, a group of Black mothers in Oakland calling themselves the Moms 4 Housing refused to leave a vacant home they had occupied and repaired, declaring that housing is “a human right^[17].” Sheriffs with AR-15s and riot gear removed them, but the group later negotiated the sale of the home and ignited a national conversation about the right to housing.^[18] Those mothers—Sameerah Karim, Tolani King, Sharena Thomas, and Dominique Walker—are now advising others on how to defend their families against eviction.

Anti-democratic movements, Anti-intellectualism, and the School Wars

They want to discredit and bankrupt us. That’s their actual goal, to destabilize us, to take us backwards, to distract us, to hurt Black and Brown children

 —L.C.C (Chicana teacher being sued based on her “CRT” curriculum)

A majority of people in the U.S. support public schools. They want federal and local governments to take on a more active role in addressing the teacher shortage, making college free or affordable, and fighting disparities in schools.^[19] Public schools prepare students to assume their roles as workers under capitalism while reproducing racism, sexism, and other antagonisms. Even so they can be very important sites of struggle and politicization. The right generally opposes secular public education but the continual rise in anti-democratic, anti-intellectual, and fascistic movements across the United States has taken this enmity to a new level.

The right’s stated goals are to protect children from Critical Race Theory (CRT), which is a catch-all for general anti-racist curriculum and is far removed from Kimberlé Crenshaw’s legal framework. They are organizing toward their “anti-CRT” and “anti-gender ideology” agenda through electoral politics, lawsuits, and harassment of educators and policymakers. As of January of 2021, 42 states had introduced laws to limit what educators could teach about race, gender, systemic oppression, or in certain cases basic historical facts^[20]. The proposed laws are far-reaching and absurd. One proposed bill from New Hampshire would prevent teachers from discussing “any doctrine or theory promoting a negative account or representation of the founding and history of the United States of America” and another from Indiana would have teachers submit every lesson for parental review. The push against CRT has resulted in the repression of educators with frivolous lawsuits, challenges to their work, verbal abuse, and calls for them to be terminated from their jobs.^[21] Some educators are even resigning over death threats.^[22] Some of these attacks have been organized at the grassroots level but many are being waged by large right-wing think tanks and well-financed campaigns. So far, unions like the American Federation of Teachers, which is one of the largest in the U.S., have set up a legal defense fund for educators being sued over CRT issues. Progressive and leftist grassroots organizations are also strategizing not only how to confront being sued or terminated but also how to raise community support for their work.

The fight against CRT extends to the right’s targeting of trans and non-gender conforming youth using the same means. The proposed bills not only reinforces cishetereopatriarchy and the oppression of youth but they do so under the guise of guarding parental rights, protecting children from grooming and countering medical experimentation as well as upholding Title IX protections for women in sports.^[23] These attacks and subsequent laws harm queer youth who are already more likely to struggle with their mental health, lack of healthcare, and experience more hate-based violence than their cis-het counterparts.^[24] The anti-intellectual, anti-democratic school wars are also being waged on curriculum on evolution, comprehensive sex education, and climate science.

 Care work, Survival work, and Mutual Aid

The debates have moved on from ones about care work as domestic slavery to ones about demystifying the category of “care” that is conscripted to women. Women’s work in the care economy has intensified over the course of the pandemic. Care work in this context means the everyday work done for social reproduction. Globally women and girls are responsible for 75% of unpaid care and domestic work in homes and communities every day^[25].

Women are also burdened with care work in their political organizing and are often leading in activities that require the emotional labor necessary to sustain these socialist organizations. BIPOC working class women in our movements are especially burdened with care work, as they cannot pay other women to do their child and elder care. Women are also the ones mostly conscripted to the “third shift” or what Heejung Chung^[26] describes as a time at the end of the day spent on “ensuring the emotional wellbeing of not only…children but also parents and other family members. In other words, they are in charge of the mental load of worrying about the family.” These responsibilities are being borne at a time where many in the U.S. don’t have healthcare, sick pay or personal leave.

Even so, women are still organizing in horizontal democratic collectives with many leftist projects engaging in mutual aid work and creating large networks of care to address the economic, political and healthcare crises we find ourselves in.  While the term “mutual aid” is now used by many leftists as shorthand for (re)distributive activities, there is value in critically thinking through the term. Mutual aid can certainly address communities’ survival needs, but it should serve another purpose, i.e., to undermine the reification of transactional human relations under capitalism. As the desire for capital returns subsumes all aspects of our lives, the very institutions of care which this system relies upon begin to decay. This presents an opportunity for new forms of care-taking institutions to emerge, including those not based in patriarchal social relations. These systems cannot be addressed through voluntaristic distribution that doesn’t simultaneously seek to rewrite transactional relations. Rather, mutual aid requires both (re)distribution and solidarity work that “hinges upon the recognition of our deep interconnectedness and suggests ways of relating to one another that might begin to dissolve the transactional attitudes inculcated by capitalism” ^[27].

Certainly, mutual aid should seek to address and change material conditions and not restrain itself to transforming interpersonal or communal relations. Many mutual aid organizations are grappling with these issues and engage in survival work while organizing against the dehumanizing systems that create the need to survive.

As someone heavily involved in mutual aid and care work, some ongoing questions for us have been: 1) How are mutual aid networks reproducing classist, hetero-patriarchal, and racist structures even as organizers intentionally attempt to subvert these systems, and what is to be done? 2) What aspects of our mutual aid efforts have the potential to move beyond survival work and advocacy? 3) Can our work as a collective and in collaboration with others offer insights towards upending dehumanizing systems and transforming our communities?

Apart from class tensions in our feminist movements, there are racial tensions based on the amount of care work and other labor women of color, in particular, are tasked with.  From our perspective, current-day movements are drawing on frameworks from the early abolitionist movements along with new theoretical insights articulated by the PIC (Prison Industrial Complex) abolitionist scholar-activists of the 1990s and the early 2000s. These movements are also developing their own creative organizing practices based on knowledge co-produced and shared across BIPOC and feminist collectives who’ve been doing this work for over decades. At the same time, the largest well-resourced mutual aid groups across the U.S. have members who are predominantly white, middle class, able-bodied and college-educated. These groups are not often engaging with Black and Brown organizations.

Here are reflections from B.N. on care work and developing multi-racial solidarity in mutual aid and survival work.

In the face of increased enforcement and policing and after my arrest, the rest of my affinity group, who is white, stopped showing up to do weekly outreach/organizing. Even though they knew my case was pending, and I had been advised to stay away from the camp by a legal aide, the rest of the crew didn’t show up for three weeks. I was feeling castrated and frustrated, by the state but also with them. When I raised the issue someone from the group messaged me and said they felt hurt by my comments. I had to console him instead of tell him how frustrated I was, and assure him I still wanted to work with the group.

Conflict is normal and natural and inevitable and being unable to sit in it is a facet of white supremacy.

I didn’t realize my frustrations with my white co-organizers stemmed from my sensing their lack of collectivism until another nonwhite organizer pointed it out—they kept backing me up in meetings and we amplified each other’s opinions in the meeting, without explicit agreement beforehand—because we understand collectivism as we grew up in nonwhite families practicing it, it becomes a very different framework to do mutual aid work from than whatever white people are doing.

B.N. is a working-class BIPOC femme mutual aid organizer in Los Angeles who was arrested for defending an unhoused person from police harassment. She runs a small mutual aid group that supports unhoused people. Their mutual aid group is subverting some of the transactional ways in which mutual aid organizers relate to vulnerable communities they support. So much so that their unhoused community is well on its way to unionizing and taking bold actions against the city. B.N’s white middle-class counterparts did not step up to support her after her arrest. In her absence, they realized how much she and other BIPOC femmes were doing both in the organization and the care work they have outside of organizational responsibilities.  The group would later on go on to admit that they assumed B.N. had more supports in her life (financial, emotional, etc.) and didn’t need mutual aid herself. This particular tension revealed the limits of relying on voluntarism to build community and make demands of the system as well as the challenges of building multi-racial multi-class organizations. Despite these tensions, we have strong left political movements rooted in communities of color and led by women of color.

Our Task as Marxist-Humanists 

[Marxist-Humanism] checks before and after each movement from practice also the movement from theory, and measures how we anticipated some of the events as well as created the fabric – the single dialectic in both subjectivity and objectivity (Dunayevskaya, 1984)^[28].

Philosopher Raya Dunayevskaya reminds us that “humanism gives Marx’s magnum opus [Capital] its force and direction”^[29]. In Capital and the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx explains how the capitalist mode of production obscures human relations making them relations between things. At the center of this mode of production is alienation, the alienation of humans from their work, the alienation of humans from nature, and the alienation of humans from each other and themselves. For persons of color, this alienation occurs doubly, as workers and as racialized beings^[30]. Without this understanding, we are left with a class reductionism that suggests overthrowing capitalism without addressing other systems of domination will create a classless, democratic, and free society. What then would it mean to develop a Marxist-Humanism for our times …one that strives not only for all to have freely associated labor but one that can address dehumanization in all of its dimensions? And by that I mean one that articulates a total philosophy—from the psycho-affective dimensions of domination to material conditions and is for the total overthrowing of all subjugations for the creation of a new human.

Dunayevskaya projects a dialectical understanding of the relationship of philosophy to practice writing, “but the practice of philosophy is itself theoretical. It is the critique that measures the individual existence by the essence, the particular reality by the Idea”. As such we should be seeking out the revolutionary subjects of this time, recognizing their experimentations and activities as forms of philosophy and liberation-making in real-time.

Other points of consideration for our Marxist-Humanist organization:

1. Many were politicized during the George Floyd rebellion and amid the pandemic depression. More youth identify as socialists than have over the past decade^[31]. We are also witnessing an upsurge in the growth of socialist organizations, collectives, leftist study groups, and electoralisms. At a time when many are interested in socialism, we need to develop and project a human alternative to capitalism to the greater left that goes beyond redistributionist politics. The redistribution of resources in and of itself is not the endpoint in our quest for full human liberation. Perhaps real notions of freedom are embedded in these politics but we should emphasize the role of dialectics, the concept of alienation, and the need for emancipatory humanism in our Marxism when we engage with others on the left.
2. Organizations on the left of all varieties (social democrats, revolutionary Marxists, abolitionists, socialist feminists) are attempting to deal with conflict and harm from a non-punitive orientation without involving police or other state agents. Conflict is inevitable but can also be generative. With new opportunities for organizing come new points of tension as each group struggles to articulate the values and philosophies of the organization. The issues being addressed range from difficult political arguments to serious instances of assault, retaliation, and exposing members to racist, sexist or homophobic abuse.

In a recent conflict with a group I organize with, I articulated my ideas on the interconnection between interpersonal and systemic harms and the potential for inspiring new ways. I wrote:

As I understand abolition, not only are we attempting to abolish systems of domination while we build new humanizing ones, we are also in a process of transforming ourselves. That means to me that people can change and that organizations can/should be environments where these transformational changes can occur. It is my hope that those at the heart of the conflicts are willing to be called into accountability and that their comrades can adopt an attitude of forbearance and love.

As Marxist-Humanists developing our own philosophy and affirming practices around communication, of being together in an organization as well as managing conflicts should be taken on with the same seriousness with which we theorize around other issues. Ours is a struggle against capital in its racialized, gendered, ableist, cisheteropatriarchal forms along with all other forms of domination. With this understanding, a transformative justice approach to communication and conflict would need to consider how these systems are reproduced in our own organizations in all of their intra-, inter-, cultural and structural dimensions without flattening our individual differences with each other. One new development at the IMHO is the formation of the Transformative Justice team. This team is developing a Marxist-Humanist approach to addressing conflict and creating more humanizing spaces within our organization. I encourage all of our members toengage with and contribute to these critical discussions.

Women of color revolutionaries with their critique of mainstream pro-criminalization feminism have always led in this work by shifting the focus of violence from individual actors to communities. From this framework, communities and our own organizations can be important sites for prevention, intervention, and transformation, and places where alternatives can be imagined and attempted. ^[32]The emphasis on the level of community is also posed as an alternative and challenge to the authority of the criminal justice system, child welfare system, or even nonprofit organizations. We should engage with their theorizations and practices as we develop our own since they’ve been conceptualizing feminisms that are interested not only in dismantling state violence but also everyday interpersonal harms. Critical Resistance^[33] articulates this in one of their early statements. Critical Resistance is coalition of Black and Brown feminists often credited with developing frameworks for the current iteration of abolition feminist politics.

“We call on social justice movements to develop strategies and analysis that address both state and interpersonal violence, particularly violence against women. Currently, activists/movements that address state violence (such as anti-prison, anti-police brutality groups) often work in isolation from activists/movements that address domestic and sexual violence. The result is that women of color, who suffer disproportionately from both state and interpersonal violence, have become marginalized within these movements. It is critical that we develop responses to gender violence that do not depend on a sexist, racist, classist, and homophobic criminal justice system. It is also important that we develop strategies that challenge the criminal justice system and that also provide safety for survivors of sexual and domestic violence. To live violence-free lives, we must develop holistic strategies for addressing violence that speak to the intersection of all forms of oppression.”.

While BIPOC socialist feminist groups like Critical Resistance, INCITE!, Survived and Punished, Project NIA specifically work on gender based violence in the United States, their work has provided insights to socialist feminist groups around the world and have been influential in what is now understood as the Global Prison Abolition Movement.^[34] Furthermore, women in the global south are developing their own abolitionisms, ones grappling with the hyper-violence they experience. As per Dunayevskaya’s assertion, women remain “force and reason” as theoreticians and practitioners working towards their own liberation and we should look to their approaches as we develop our own praxis.

 3) Our organization has very few Black members. How are we engaging with Black and other BIPOC communities and movements across all contexts but especially in the global south where people are creatively working out their contradictions even under the most brutal blows of racialized capital?

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 and 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 thorough-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.

 

Footnotes

^[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html

^[2] BIPOC stands for acronym for Black, Indigenous, and people of color.

^[3]https://www.democracynow.org/2022/6/2/headlines/protests_erupt_after_video_shows_brazilian_police_gassing_man_to_death

^[4] https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/sheila-lumumba-lesbian-murder-rape-kenyan-police/

^[5] https://www.iwgia.org/images/publications/new-publications/Indigenous_Women_and_Climate_Change_IWGIA.pdf

^[6] https://therealnews.com/nobody-defunded-the-police-a-study

^[7] https://morningconsult.com/2020/06/17/defund-the-police-community-programs-polling/

^[8] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/24/us-progressive-democrats-primaries-wins-congress

^[9] https://ips-dc.org/report-the-road-to-zero-wealth/

^[10] https://abolitionistfutures.com/defund-the-police

^[11] https://dontcallthepolice.com/

^[12] https://endhomelessness.org/homelessness-in-america/homelessness-statistics/state-of-homelessness-2021/

^[13] https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/black-and-hispanic-renters-face-greatest-threat-eviction-pandemic

^[14] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mdesmond/files/social_forces-2013-desmond-303-27.pdf

^[15] https://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/ruth-wilson-gilmore-in-the-shadow-of-the-shadow-state/#footnote_5_2239

^[16] https://sfonline.barnard.edu/navigating-neoliberalism-in-the-academy-nonprofits-and-beyond/ruth-wilson-gilmore-in-the-shadow-of-the-shadow-state/#footnote_5_2239

^[17] https://www.kqed.org/news/11787750/two-homeless-moms-occupy-vacant-house-to-protest-oakland-housing-crisis

^[18] https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/20/us/moms-4-housing-homeless-evicted-oakland-home-purchase/index.html

^[19] https://www.nea.org/advocating-for-change/new-from-nea/poll-majority-public-wants-greater-federal-support-education

^[20] https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/map-where-critical-race-theory-is-under-attack/2021/06

^[21] https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/map-where-critical-race-theory-is-under-attack/2021/06

^[22] https://www.newsweek.com/death-threats-fights-over-critical-race-theory-have-driven-least-six-educators-resign-1609461

^[23] https://freedomforallamericans.org/legislative-tracker/medical-care-bans/

^[24] https://www.thetrevorproject.org/survey-2021/

^[25] Moreira da Silva, J. 2019. “Why You Should Care About Unpaid Care Work.” OECD Development Matters, March 18. https://oecd-development-matters.org/2019/03/18/why-you-should-care-about-unpaid-care-work

^[26] Chung, H. 2020. “Return of the 1950s Housewife? How to Stop Coronavirus Lockdown Reinforcing Sexist Gender Roles.” The Conversation, March 30. https://theconversation.com/return-of-the-1950s-housewife-how-to-stop-coronavirus-lockdown-reinforcing-sexist-gender-roles-134851

^[27] Sparrow, Josie (2020). Mutual Aid, Incorporated. https://newsocialist.org.uk/mutual-aid-incorporated/

^[28] Dunayevskaya, Raya. “Marxist Humanist Perspectives, 1984-1985”. News and Letters,

July 1984. https://rayadunayevskaya.org/ArchivePDFs/8193.pdf.

^[29] https://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1965/marx-humanism.htm

^[30] Hudis, Peter. “How is an Intersectional Historical Materialism Possible?: The Dialectic of Race and Class Reconsidered”. Paper presented at. Toronto, April, 2019.

^[31] https://www.newsweek.com/majority-gen-z-americans-hold-negative-views-capitalism-poll-1604334

^[32] https://transformharm.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Kim-2018-FromCarceralFeminismtoTransformativeJustice.pdf

^[33] https://incite-national.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/toolkitrev-cr-incite.pdf

^[34] https://www.worldwithoutprisons.org/31-2/