WHAT IS A PIG?
A low natured beast that has no regard for law, justice, or the rights of the people; a creature that bites the hand that feeds it; a foul depraved traducer, usually found masquerading as the victim of an unprovoked attack.

On May 2nd, Rodney Hinton got into his car, struck a sheriff’s deputy, and killed him. This hits our moment like a body through a windshield. At Rodney’s first court hearing, cops filled the room to sneer at the man who had delivered such a monumental blow. The courtroom was a reverse slaughterhouse, pigs lined up to butcher the man.  Rodney walked by without flinching. He wore the wounds on his head from the windshield glass like a crown. 

We celebrate Rodney’s corrective and instructive action. The father of a murdered son has rejected the idea that the murderers stand above us, untouchable, and has dragged them down squealing from on high back into the dirt where they keep the rest of us. Here they become recognizable as an enemy we can fight. Here, at eye level, it is clear just how vulnerable they are.

There is a war raging in this country, and it has been raging for centuries. The current form of the police are the armed-to-the-teeth descendants of the slave catchers and “Indian” killers. Killing children is what cops do. If the dead pig Rodney hit didn’t, he trained the pig who did; they chugged beers over barbecue. “An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind” only works if all the world shares the same vision. What we have are eyes glaring across established lines on a battlefield. When an enemy takes something from you, you better at least take as much back so the fight becomes winnable again. We celebrate this radical act of resistance, the same way we celebrated the eradication of every Nazi from Soviet soil, the triumph of the Vietnamese army over the U.S. imperialists, and the repulsion and humiliation of IOF ground troops by Palestinian freedom fighters. Each casualty of the enemy mortifies and terrifies them, because they only know how to wage a one-sided war. They don’t have the stomach for a real fight.

The pigs who filled the courtroom of Rodney’s first hearing and all the others who wear their uniform on this land feel this. The beasts huddle together, licking their wounds, offering themselves reassurances and prayers. They fear what it will mean if they don’t successfully crush Rodney for his defiance. They will continue to try to hide their vulnerability behind inflated budgets and military-grade equipment. They will mask their fear as rage and strike back on the oppressed with even greater fury. This is a call to everyone invested and sympathetic to the call of justice and liberation, we cannot let the pigs strike Rodney down and make him into a symbol. We must rise for him, demand his release, and fight for it! Celebrate it in the street, let every cop quake  knowing their enemies are everywhere and see them for what they are.

In this country-wide graveyard of the silenced and oppressed, we say, “Let a million Rodney’s bloom!” 

All above you dangling were your wise men. I recognized none of them personally. All I knew was from a hundred black and white photographs, all presenting unflattering, villainous angles. A couple, like yours, with faces purpled by pressure, blood massing, riots at the skin. Many more with bullet wounds, taken from executions elsewhere when the idea for this display had struck. Some were decorated with nooses properly tied, though many hung from limbs, and others still from hooks. No doubt from a nearby packing plant. Too far to have been the one your father worked. In the paper I’d read they celebrated this as the return of the Christmas tree, because the year prior that same paper said you’d banned Christmas. 

I moved closer and grabbed what was left of your leg all at once: a strong breeze had shaken you and I couldn’t take the sight. Something primal in me suppressed all disgust. You reminded me of a flag. Perhaps that was what you were meant to be, why the clothes they dressed you in were at first white. 

Remember when we last spoke? I was in your house. You brought me a tray of coffee and sugar. Your daughter listened to the radio, your son left to check the night. That was when they were calling you a despot for arresting your would-be assassins. There were daily papers scattered saying as much, your dog on the couch, a pistol empty on the cushion beside him. The moon swung by its black noose upside down over the house. Your windows had been open when I arrived, and I locked them when you went to the kitchen to fetch me a spoon. You hadn’t noticed, I think. We had dinner, rations mostly, a bag of dried peach halves for dessert, good wine you saved from our university days. We drank our inhibitions and spoke of how hard it was to govern. There was no end to your problems, and limited patience for my solutions. Eventually, I’d torn one of your many newspapers apart — this was the wine — and demanded you censor its lies. I spoke of the necessity of a Red Terror until you, my dear friend, seemed afraid. 

I swept the dried peaches to the floor with my arm. I am tired of your fooling around, I’d said. As for the rights of anyone, of fascists, tell your people they can fuck themselves. Your dog sat up and barked. Your daughter stared. The moon had dug deep bright wells in her eyes. I was shamed into silence. The dried peach halves on the floor, listening to this, in the dark they looked like…

They removed your ears. On both sides of your head there is only  hair that looks caught in the rain, wet. Any idiot can guess this brutal poetry. Retributive justice for an invented crime. Deafen the paranoiac organs of Big Brother. Finally, the snakes are free. Closer now, I see your self. Remembering what you were, piece by piece, becomes how I breathe through the stench. Once two whole wandering legs. Once ten poet’s fingers. Eyes warm as the earth. I see hanging you so low was not just symbolic — you’ve become a tree trunk for carving initials and complaints, nothing romantic. I cut the noose with a hunting knife I found in you. You nearly knock us both over. I lay you in the street. For now everyone is busy, preoccupied with a new, realer terror. Your supporters, the wretched of the earth, either shipped away to some barbed place or filled my nose with their stench. With the handkerchief you once gave me and then forgot, I massage the blood from your face. I do this slowly, while I hold your hand. You won’t be here alone. Now your favorite color, I return the cloth to your breast pocket. I kiss your swollen lips. 

Beside us, the courthouse you so loved burns, casting strange shadows on your tired flesh. If I decide that the flickering of light over your face is the ghost of a smile, I’ll cremate you in that flame, I swear. I won’t tolerate satisfaction, or personal peace. I hope your soul was worth it, it’s Hell for the rest of us. At home, my new home, some of the papers are already calling you an inspiration. All the bastard scholars who never spoke of you while you lived now eulogize you. A nation where all the rebels are losers, they’ll grant sainthood to anyone who fails this spectacularly. Now that you are dead, you are safe for them to worship. I say I’ll burn you, but my face rains on you instead. I have enough fingers to shield yours remaining wholly from the night. Your hands vanish in mine like an infant’s. I wish you’d been half the monster they said you were.

Many are describing these acts as a “protest” of the horrific conditions at Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison. That is a mistake. It was a protest when Demetrius Wallace, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, and 12 other imprisoned people organized a food strike that lasted nearly two weeks for Wallace and 71 days for Rashid. In retaliation, the prison punished Wallace by revoking his right to see friends and had guards threaten, stalk, and harass said friends. Wallace himself was already suffering additional punishment for attempting to use the “proper” channels to defend himself — for daring to bring a lawsuit against guards who had ruthlessly beaten, sprayed, and stomped on him while he was restrained. 

Such are the conditions at the Red Onion prison. Suffering intolerable abuse, beaten away from legal means, and exiled for peaceful protest, men are now setting themselves on fire. These are no longer acts of protest, or even individual defiance. These are calculated acts of desperation. Conditions in the prison are so bad its victims would rather self-immolate and roll the dice that they could be transferred elsewhere than continue their horrific routine. And what happens to those men that are transferred? They are sent right back. Wallace, the self-immolater of late summer, said that when he returned to Red Onion after two weeks in a hospital, his harassment continued, he was thrown in solitary, and his email and phone privileges were still revoked — an ongoing retaliation for his earlier lawsuit. These are just the men we know of. Wallace says five others were at the hospital with him in Richmond, Virginia, where he was being treated for his burns. If this is just the overlap of when he arrived, it’s safe to assume there are many more cases we aren’t allowed to know about. 

There is a widespread myth, one even those sympathetic to the legacy of the Black Panther Party (BPP) fall prey to: that somehow life in prisons has gotten better since the mass struggles to end racial apartheid in the United States. The myth that things have improved for imprisoned people within the vast penal colonies of the United States, in spite of everything we know about the continued abuses of the police state on our streets and in our homes, that their ruthless behavior will have gotten even an iota better behind closed doors and with complete impunity. 

Rashid Johnson describes an atmosphere of extreme paranoia and oppression, where every day prison guards try to pressure and barter Johnson’s fellow abductees into assassinating him. We might as well be describing the 1960’s conditions of the BPP theorist George Jackson, who wrote of having to constantly be prepared to divert a stabbing and wrestle his way out of assassination. Conditions at Red Onion, and, let’s face it, supermax prisons in general, mirror what Huey Newton described with his greatly radicalizing exposure to the U.S. prison colony — lying in a tiny cell with a hole in the middle, slowly filled with his own excrement. Dogs, classically used by fascist police during the Civil Rights era to assault and intimidate protestors, are used in Red Onion. Rashid Johnson describes systematic use of attack dogs to terrorize and brutalize prison populations. 

The imagery of the brutality of the war on U.S. apartheid is alive still, cordoned off behind cement and barbed wire, beyond photography and video. It would be wrong to say, “all that is old is new again,” since for the oppressed and imprisoned, such horrors never ceased. Everyday, hundreds of atrocities that might have sparked the fires of another George Floyd uprising occur, beyond where we can see or hear them, and are then denied by fascists like the head of Virginia’s Department of Corrections, who say that those lighting themselves aflame are ‘manipulative’ and ‘misbehaving’. Here stands naked the depravity of colonial capitalism. To accurately assess the current reality of our so-called republic, we need only turn toward the prisons, and not flinch at what we see, hear, or smell. First you see smoke, then fire. Hundreds of thousands of people are choking on the smoke. 

The week of the fire, Georgia’s health advisories had recommended nearby populations stay indoors from the evenings to early mornings, until Friday, as the plume has been shifting based on “weather conditions.” How considerate of the giant cloud of toxic gas to abide by our 9-5 work week. Maybe we should take the Nietzschean doomsday sentiment further (no, not the fascism) and accept that not only is God dead and we have killed him, but he’s been replaced by the factory foreman. Expect medical updates from the same sources to be as follows: “Best cure for long covid is unpaid overtime.” 

At best, our public health is a joke — a carnival run by careerist clowns who toss their pies, honk their horns, and make the very notion that we should care about our communities seem silly. At worst, it’s a lure — reassure those who might have otherwise still taken public advisories seriously that it’s safe to lose the mask, cough in coworkers’ mouths, dig trenches through the chlorine miasma, for heaven’s sake, just get back to work! It’s a bit of both, tragedy and farce. For many of the people of Conyers this most recent negligence is hardly a surprise, since when it comes to community-endangering negligence, the company responsible, BioLab, is a repeat offender. This isn’t even their first chlorine gas leak. Most notably, in 2020, a Louisiana BioLab facility leaked waves of hazardous gas over Interstate 10, forcing an evacuation and road closure for 28 hours. The initial cause of that leak? A hurricane, which BioLab refused to prepare for in line with a national extreme weather preparation policy implemented in response to a 2017 leak caused by another hurricane. This most recent, specific plant in Georgia has been “held accountable” five times over the last ten years, five of which are citations on their record, four of which came with fines — amounting to a sum of $29,322 (most of it had been settled for much cheaper than initially charged). This isn’t punishment, or accountability; it’s a business expense, and a paltry one at that, the extent of “justice” under capitalism. This is the new normal in the age of climate catastrophe. All our infrastructure, cheapened and sold off and deregulated for years, caving in on itself, whether under a weak breeze, a derailed train car, or Biblical floods. 

“I been fighting and been saying that that company was gone explode… no one listened. $850 million of our taxes went to this company to kill us.” These are the words of Kenny Johnson, a member of the Rockdale County’s Soil and Water Conservation board, described as an official actually committed to the preservation of life and health in his community. He actually did argue and politic and debate for our rights, in just the way we’re all told this system is supposed to work. A public servant, utilizing a public forum for its supposed intended purpose. He died minutes later, collapsed out in the hall from a respiratory attack. 

Although his death is under investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, we won’t imply that there’s someone putting hits out on county soil and water experts. Far more likely, and tragically relevant, is that Kenny Johnson succumbed to a compounding of public health failures, like, for example, repeated infections from COVID-19, a cardiovascular illness; like, for example, the air filled with poison; like, for example, massive health disparities destroying Black people on a cellular level, due to stress, environment — a million closed doors and barbed wire fences to health and opportunity. As stated above, this is how the world ends: not with a bang, a bullet through the window, but a series of cracks, all connecting and overlapping until what separates us from the abyss is fully disintegrated. This is how the capitalist ruling class wants it, they want us tired and sick, if we’re not immediately dead. To those who stuff their wallets with our work, our death is acceptable at any speed, just so long as we die off-site so they don’t have to waste time having our bodies swept.

As we just covered, in 2017 and 2020, this isn’t the first disaster BioLab has caused through negligence and greed. And this is just one of many recent toxic leaks that won’t result in accountability, change, or the recovery of the devastated community. What we saw in East Palestine, Ohio will be repeated in Georgia. This is because what these disasters represent is not a failure of capitalism for its ruling classes, but a success. How far can they push us, how many can they abandon to die? All of society is an experiment social classes perform on their opponents, the classes opposed to them. Just as within dictatorships of socialism, where communists conduct living, mass experiments to chart the path forward to liberation and development, within dictatorships of capitalism our enemies perform mass experiments on all of us to dam progress and restrain the future. They think they can get away with it again, because they have proven, empirically, to do so in the past. 

We must break that pattern and prove them wrong. 

“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”

Khaliifah ibn Rayford Daniels’ Abdul-Qudduus, aka Marcellus Williams, has been murdered. After over twenty-three years spent living in a cage, under the constant threat of execution — after the thirty years before his formal sentence living in the open-air prison we call the United States of America — the last of Khaliifah’s life was finally stolen. Apparently, death row inmates get to “choose” how the state will execute them, whether it’s death by lethal injection, or death by gassing. Capitalist freedom as its most honest binary: Coca-Cola or Pepsi; exploitation or starvation; knee or noose; the needle or the gas chamber.

Khaliifah elected the needle. Might someone have asked him, in his death throes: “Mr. Williams, is this harm reduction?” Tell me, is this a lesser evil? 

For those who knew in the years before Khaliifah’s murder— 
For those who knew in the weeks before Khaliifah’s murder—
For those who knew in the minutes before Khaliifah’s murder, many have decried the injustice of his impending execution and insisted on his innocence. As his body cools, this insistence continues like the cries of the bereaved. As the days of his passing shift to months, this clamor will repeat like a seance. (In decades, if we let it, the wailing of ghosts. All of us haunted.) Nothing makes more sense than this: Khaliifah’s murder represents not just the apathetic killing of a human being, but necessarily as well the defamation of his memory. Since the U.S. government refused to spend the time and money to stay Khaliifah’s execution, release him from prison, and investigate the process that pushed things so far, the state elected to do the more practical thing. They must not only kill a man, they must make it the “moral” thing to do. This is the logic of the lynch mob. 

All of us who oppose this repugnancy feel compelled to refute every accusation to defend a good man’s legacy. This is understandable. Necessary, even. But it must be stated and restated just as much, if not more, that there is no sort of person the U.S. government has the right to kill. There is no person this horrific regime has the right to imprison. No person it has the right to beat or abduct or shackle or tailgate or ticket. Its laws are fundamentally unjust, not merely by their content, but the fact that the dictatorship of white supremacy, of the capitalist, is antithetical to the safety of the vast majority of life on this earth. If we argue that there is an unjust imprisonment by the court’s metric of “innocence” or “guilt,” we are ceding ground to our enemy, an empire that tirelessly builds itself on countless Khaliifah’s — a hundred million dead, billions of butchered half-lives. 

We would not find it worth celebrating if every red-handed viper responsible for Khaliifah’s murder was dragged into the light, handcuffed, charged, and sentenced by the bourgeois state.  We would not consider it justice or a victory if they were executed, held for life, or fully reformed. Any action the bourgeois state takes is for its own preservation and the continued safety of the ruling classes. The bourgeois state cannot bring us justice. We saw that with the charging of Derek Chauvin, when the dictatorship of white capital used one hand to toss its servant into a cell to sooth public rage, while, with the other, flooded the same murderous police with ever more funding and arms. If Khaliifah’s execution had been stayed again, and he’d been allowed to rot longer in jail, that would be nothing worth celebrating. Even his full freedom from the prison industrial complex would not be true freedom, for he would have walked from one prison to another, a different kind of captivity. True justice will only be taken by us. This is the foundation for a Communist abolition. Not opposition to imprisonment as a concept wholly, but that we must always oppose the use of weapons in our enemies’ hands. A recognition that within this country, for the oppressed, everywhere is a prison — that to die under capitalism is to have been killed by it.

the silhouettes of their bond visible still at the last glow of the sun
they experience each other and the life of the night as it begins to stir
standing there in silence holding hands
no rush to go back inside
there is so much beauty and comfort in being in love and just being…
–amidst sounds of buzzing
chirps
crickets
the pleasant but irregular blowing of the wind
fireflies dancing in step with the light of the moon
how strange it is to become aware of another’s heartbeat but forget one’s own –
finally love.

Khaliifah, At Last…Another’s heartbeat

This is every night for Maura Todd and the other survivors of the incident in East Palestine, Ohio. It’s a new nightmare, one created by the malfeasance and thirst for profit of the Norfolk Southern Railroad, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Norfolk Southern Corporation. It’s a night any one of us might have, thanks to Norfolk Southern. And, you know what? Their stock is up.

It’s been over a year since the catastrophe: a thirty-eight-car train derailment, due to what Railroad Workers United (RWU) called a “hedge fund initiated operating model” of overwork and cut corners. A disaster made magnitudes worse when the chemicals within certain cars were intentionally set ablaze, unleashing a toxic smoke cloud that could be seen for miles. Residents of East Palestine and the surrounding area were forced to flee under threat of imprisonment, even while they  suffered the immediate effects of contamination.  As is typical with crimes of capitalism, the perpetrators have been let off with a slap on the wrist while the countless victims are left to fend for themselves. 

The victims in this case are truly countless. The contamination of the botched clean-up has spread to sixteen  U.S. States and parts of southern Canada. As a study conducted by researchers for the National Atmospheric Deposition Program (NADP), the largest network focused on recording precipitation chemistry in the United States, attests: “Observations showed the expected high chloride concentrations, but also unexpectedly high pH (basic) and exceptionally elevated levels of base cations exceeding 99th percentiles versus the historic record.” Base cations are positively charged ions that affect the alkalinity of surface soil, water, etc. Excesses in these and in pH levels will tip the scales of ecosystems and agriculture in ways that are difficult to predict. Although this pollution won’t cause death and destruction in surrounding areas, experts say it will have wide-reaching environmental damage. Basically, in order to avoid the fallout of a small leak, Norfolk Southern’s contractors created a massive plume of poison that rained down on a third of the country. 

RWU released a statement condemning Norfolk Southern. The statement  describes the combination of factors that make such disasters inevitable, such as ever longer and heavier trains, cuts to maintenance workers, limited training with high turnover, and crushingly long hours leading to rampant fatigue — all symptoms of a greater sickness that is the profit motive. 

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) also criticized Norfolk Southern for its atrocious handling of the chemical leak. Five of the scattered cars contained vinyl chloride, a substance that is not only carcinogenic, but causes neurological damage, behavioral issues, and permanently alters liver function. Essentially, while the liver and kidneys can process vinyl chloride, the toxic byproducts of the process remain in the body much longer, creating unpredictable harm. However, vinyl chloride has a low exothermic rate – it doesn’t give off much heat. The possibility of that vinyl chloride exploding after the crash was extremely low. The already small chance of an explosive chemical reaction can be mitigated further by the introduction of several different “free radical stabilizers,” the most common of which is 4-tert-butylcatechol. This would have made the small chance of explosion a non-existent one, but by skimping on these simple preventative measures,  Norfolk Southern and its contractors decided to take a serious albeit manageable spill and transform it into an apocalyptic event. 

According to testimony emerging from the NTSB hearings, in the immediate aftermath of the derailment, Norfolk Southern refused to share vital information first responders needed to appropriately address the crisis. They refused to disclose what was in the cars, even while they set them on fire. Norfolk representatives ducked phone calls. They refused multiple alternatives, like the aforementioned free radical stabilizers, or waiting for the train cars to cool. The company even consulted with Oxy Vinyls, the manufacturer of the chemicals in question, and they were told not to vent and burn the vinyl chloride. They ignored the advice, then claimed the call never occurred. By throttling the flow of information, they created a condition of confused panic. Once this was achieved, they presented the “choice” to local responders: vent and burn, or potentially let the cars explode. The East Palestine fire chief said he was given thirteen minutes to decide. 

Capitalists created this crisis because they are motivated by a need for ever-expanding profit, they simply must pursue cutting corners, increasing exploitation, and deregulation. It isn’t a matter of individual greed — it is the necessary dynamic of capitalism. Capitalists then worsened this crisis for the same reason, as they’ve now been accused of enough times for them to issue threats to stop it. As Senator . J.D. Vance asked during a hearing in March: “A lot of people, including me, are wondering: did they do this not because it was necessary, but because it allowed them to move traffic and freight more quickly?” 

This is the reason thousands of people fled their homes, only half of which have been able to return after a year. This is why people’s pets and livestock coughed up blood and died; why peoples’ health worsened and health complications returned; why black clouds filled the sky, made up of the gas used to kill soldiers in WWI, which was then rained back down upon the soil, waterways, crops of a hundred million people. 

Combine the safety board’s criticism with the rail workers’ union statement, that the initial cause of the crash was a “19th-century-style mechanical failure” — an overheated bearing on one of the axles — something that should never occur in the 21st century, except for a callous disregard for public safety, and it is clear that our current political-economic regime is one of systemic arrogance and callousness. They make disaster inevitable because it is in their interest to do so, then they kill the chance of solutions because those suffering the consequences aren’t of their class. 

Officially, Norfolk Southern will have to pay $1 billion as consequence:

• A $600 million settlement in the class-action lawsuit that encompassed 31 individual claims and may likely preclude anyone within 10 miles of the crash from making any future claims.
• $235 million for all past and future clean-up costs.
• $30 million for groundwater and private drinking water monitoring.
• $25 million for a 20-year community health program.
• $15 million for a civic penalty.

Assuming that “affected area” means those in the immediate vicinity of the fallout, and not the sixteen states as well as Southern Canada, this is still a spit in the face of the people of East Palestine. People like Maura Todd, who had won a battle with cancer prior to the derailment, which, in its wake, has returned. Norfolk Southern will pay for Maura’s check-up, if they don’t manage to weasel their way out of that one. Her life-destroying treatment, on the other hand, is her individual responsibility. 

Throughout all of these detestable revelations, Norfolk Southern has maintained its PR campaign. The webpage they set up in damage control, “Norfolk Southern: Making it Right” promises: “We’re staying in East Palestine as long as it takes. As we move forward, we will continue to listen to the community, and we will continue our work to help the area recover and thrive.” Predictably, the true intentions of the capitalists lay beyond their hopeful press releases and social media. At every point in the NTSB investigation into the derailment and vent and burn, Norfolk Southern tried to hide the truth. Hiding records they claimed not to have kept about train car temperatures; ignoring demands for access to locomotive and event records until they could comb and erase all but 20 minutes of footage; even manufacturing evidence of chemical reactions using off-the-shelf vinyl chloride, which Norfolk Southern then demanded NTSB include in the investigation, and circumventing them and trying to pressure government officials — NTSB’s bosses — when investigators refused. The capitalists lied, threatened, and threw tantrums when the state officials didn’t do what they expect them to: heel and roll over. 

Of course, despite facing the public and promising to ensure this sort of tragedy never happens again, Norfolk Southern’s lobbyists and pet politicians have done all they can to ensure all regulations responding to this disaster are gutted or die outright. Politicians who used the derailment to attack Biden for the sake of their polling have forgotten such righteous anger the second their pockets got a bit heavier. The railroad companies closed ranks, the capitalists marshaled all their discipline, and Norfolk and its competitors joined forces to lobby and weaken the incoming railway regulation as much as they could. As executives celebrated the possibility of “real bipartisan change,” their cronies warned in private against “micromanaging” railroads, against “proposals motivate[d] by politics”. “I want a response from Norfolk Southern that we can look back five years from now, ten years from now, [and] we can be proud,” said CEO Alan Shaw to local reporters in January. What Shaw means is, “If we can get away with all of this, we’ll look back with a lot of pride!”  You can practically hear Shaw chuckling when you read this. You can hear the ice in his glass as he laughs over drinks, as he laughs all the way to the bank.

But even if he doesn’t, even if the most far-reaching and robust railroad regulations could, by some miracle, pass, it wouldn’t be enough. If somehow a class movement of railroad workers and East Palestine residents were to organize and rally, and every demand they made was met by policy and then implemented, it wouldn’t ensure this sort of disaster never occurs again. Corporations like Norfolk — all corporations — as we have covered, are motivated by profit, not greed. It’s not human sin that determines the fabric of our society, it’s material reality. Dynamics like these are ensured by material conditions. If one capitalist doesn’t pursue maximum profit by any means they can get away with, they will be outperformed by another capitalist that will. Our kind capitalist gets as a reward their worst nightmare: becoming a worker. Norfolk Southern has failed to meet profit projections for the last year. Within 2023, they had a revenue of $12.2 billion and operating costs of $9.3 billion (of that, the East Palestine expenses account for $1.1 billion, or just under 12%), leaving them with a profit of $2.9 billion dollars for that year, down 41% from the last. Despite this, Norfolk’s stock is rising. This doesn’t indicate the value of the company in any strict sense regarding profitability, but the confidence shareholders have in it, its value as a corporation. 

Where is this confidence coming from? It comes straight from Norfolk Southern’s willingness and ability to crush attempts at regulation, while putting on a nice face for the public.

Even if, by some miracle, laws are passed to protect populations and railroad workers, before such robust regulations could even be implemented, the railroad corporations would yet again pool all their might towards planning its destruction. We have the whole late half of the 20th century to look to for examples. While we should appreciate any regulations that might save lives and reduce suffering in the meantime, real victories can only be won by the organization of the very working masses who toil beneath the black clouds. The only way to ensure disasters like the one in East Palestine don’t happen in the future is for the working masses to win political power, and build a world that acts in the interests of humanity, rather than the profit motive.

It makes a certain sense to see people place their hope in international institutions. After all, we’re told they’re above the settler butchers (the zionists and their handler, the U.S.). We’re told it’s their job to hold everyone accountable. Most recently, the International Criminal Court (ICC) sparked a wave of this sort of hope on May 20 when its prosecutor, Karim A.A. Khan, applied for the arrest warrants of the zionist Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, for seven violations of international law. 

On Tuesday, June 4, the U.S. House passed a bill to sanction the ICC for investigating “protected persons” and allies of the U.S.. The bill implicates anyone on the court’s staff, anyone who “assisted” investigations, even witnesses. All would be subject to economic and political repression. And though the White House and the Democrats mostly opposed the Republican-drafted bill (aside from the 42 blue fascists who crossed imaginary party lines to support it), they’ve stressed their own desires to retaliate against the ICC for “overstepping.” The partisan bill is merely too aggressive for their liking. To the Democrats, sanctioning an international criminal court is much like the U.S. resolution to invade the Hague: good to have up your sleeve, but best not to wave around. 

Despite the indignation of both factions of the ruling party, and likely because of it, people sympathetic to the Palestinian cause may find themselves invested in the ICC case. It is validating after months of being gaslit about the most blatant, irrefutable atrocities to feel that such a prestigious organization is on the side of justice. The zionist colonizers will finally be held accountable. Finally, someone could seize the blood soaked hands.

But this is a mistake.

In the official application for the warrants of arrest, the condemnations of Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant which list their seven charges for violations against international law, are buried. They are buried beneath the warrants of arrest of three Hamas leaders — Yahya Sinwar, head of Hamas; Mohammed Diab Ibrahim Al-Masri, commander-in-chief of Al-Qassam Brigades; and Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas Political Bureau — charged with eight violations of international law. The application for arrest is aimed at the “situation in the State of Palestine,” in which, according to the ICC, the Palestinians are the worst criminals. This is how the statement by the ICC Prosecutor opens. Condemning Hamas. The only thing worse than committing a genocide is resisting one. It is the position of this prestigious order of international justice that the Palestinians have committed greater crimes in attempting to break their chains than the fascist settlers have in butchering them for it. 

We’ve quoted the Palestinian writer, Mourid Barghoutti, elsewhere, but it bears repeating: “A killer can strangle you with a silk scarf or can smash your head in with an axe; in both cases you are dead.” The genocide has been going on for 76 years, beginning with the smashing of an axe into the head of the Palestinian people with the Nakba, and continued for intermittent periods of the silk scarf. Always broken by the axe. Always followed by the scarf, with the expectation that the nation bleeding from its head must be grateful for such gentler suffocation. What the ICC really opposes, what the international order of capitalist countries really condemn, is that this period of axe massacre has gone on too long. It has made the simplistic, undeniable reality of genocidal apartheid naked to the world. And the ICC and other similarly useless organizations resent that their impotence is made equally undeniable by such uncontested crimes. 

ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan revealed that, in response to his meek arrest warrants for the zionists, a U.S. senior advisor threatened him, bluntly stating: “This Court is built for Africa and for thugs like Putin,” not Western leaders. Khan was offended to hear this, which is by all accounts the ugly truth — international institutions like the ICC do not resist the atrocities of imperialism, they serve imperialism. They are built, staffed, and funded by imperialist countries. The ICC provides another layer of legitimacy for global oppression. It has never been the case that the extremes of colonial violence have been stopped or brought to justice by its beneficiaries. The zionist settler colony is U.S. imperialism’s most vital outpost in West Asia. These warrants are part of a larger effort to pin the blame of zionism’s intrinsic reality on a couple of “rogue actors,” who can be shuffled out and replaced with identical butchers. Wipe off the blood. Sheath the axe. Bring that scarf out with a kind smile. 

The ICC doesn’t exist to abolish zionism. It exists to save it. 

Nonetheless, liberals are broadly treating the verdict announcement as a holiday — practically christened by the fact that it’s already been used as cover for imperialist war crimes, as the U.S. and U.K. empires bombed the Yemeni capital Sanaa during the same news cycle, hiding in the shadow of the verdict, and killing at least 16 and wounding 30, with more expected to die from critical condition. The capitalist mass media is flooded with inane updates on all things Trump, with virtually all social media sites replacing trending topics of Rafah, Palestine, Sudan, or Yemen (if they were ever even trending) with “TRUMP IS GUILTY” or “TRUMP IS NOT GUILTY.” Both sides have committed to the belief that whether Trump was found guilty or not, whether this represents an overdue triumph of justice, or a cynical sham, the trial and its consequences are very important. 

But we can’t accept this at face value. The question is: is this true? Will this alter the course of life for the millions of working class people within this country, the millions of colonized and imprisoned trapped in this prisonhouse of nations, and the billions more held at gunpoint by the same empire where such absurd soap operas play out? The answer is, of course, no.

What is this trial? It is the spillover of a protracted fight between factions in the ruling class. It is the brawl in the country’s high-end country club that has just happened to spill out onto the street. Yes, they often bicker over the little details of which method to use to maintain their power. What’s different about yesterday’s display? Merely that they’re using the very public machinery of the state, rather than backroom double-dealing. The faction of our enemy that currently holds power is the side that emphasizes decorum and state legitimacy, and is excited to give Trump his slap on the wrist and claim it as a symbolic victory. Extra emphasis on symbolic, as Justice Juan Merchan, the judge in charge of Trump’s sentence, has already admitted he won’t deliver any sentence that could impact the former president’s ability to run a campaign, like travel bans, house arrest, or a prison sentence. It’s more likely that Trump will receive a fine (the maximum amount he could be charged with is $170,000, or $5,000 for each charge) and be barred from voting for himself — though even that remains to be seen. 

The figurehead of the “Democratic” faction, Joe Biden, is likely to hammer the fact that his opponent is a “criminal” in the upcoming election. Yes, one becomes a criminal for embarrassing the “sanctity” of this country by financially silencing a porn star, but the gleeful commission of genocide goes unpunished by bourgeois law. That makes sense, as it is only the latter that is the sworn duty of all true presidents of this country. 

With all this in mind, what do we do? Ignore the pageantry of our enemies. Focus all attention and energy on what really matters. Condemn and organize against the imperialist war machine that such pointless noise exists to distract us from. Fortify the ranks of the student movement this summer, join it to the growing militant labor movement, form organizations of community awareness and education, and know now and forever that our salvation will not be won through an election between two fascists. 

Fight real battles. 

Seize real justice.  

“The first is the right to free speech and for people to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard. The second is the rule of law. Both must be upheld. We are not an authoritarian nation where we silence people or squash dissent.”

All freedoms under capitalism are either by concession, or they are the flexing of a confident class in power —  symbolizing that their right to rule is thoroughly uncontested. Freedom of expression is no different. “Have your freedoms,” they say, “it will not hurt us.” 

That is, of course, until it does. 

On May 5, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu closed all Al-Jazeera offices within the zionist occupied territories. It had been voted unanimously by his cabinet, and announced through Twitter. This is capitalist freedom.

This declaration comes on the eve of the fascist state’s invasion of Rafah, the last remaining bastion for the Palestinian people in Gaza. As they threaten to slaughter everyone who remains in Rafah, the zionist genocidaires have seized control of the only real exit — the Rafah crossing. There is nowhere to go. They plan to bury Rafah and declare over the smoldering graves of hundreds of thousands, “We gave them a choice.” When the occupation brutalizes the Palestinians and systematically exterminates journalists, they want their cheers, their gloating and justifications, to be the only record left. This is capitalist freedom. 

Let us  imagine, for a moment, the ruling classes of a country as the owners of a pet — the classes they dominate. Imagine that the tight collar around that pet’s throat, that leash held so dearly in the ruling classes’ hand, is the state. The length of this leash represents the degree of freedoms conditionally extended from the ruling classes to their subordinates. If the pet — us, in other words — is docile and complacent, the ruling classes will give that leash lots of slack. The minute we threaten to “make use” of the slack, zip!, they tighten it again. The length of our chain depends on how secure our masters feel.

At home, the U.S.-Canadian Empire’s ruling classes continue to support the genocide. More money, bombs, and most recently, in another bold exercise of capitalist “freedom” of the press, bi-partisan legislation to ban TikTok. While the capitalist legislature claims a ban on TikTok from all U.S. channels by 2025, part of the on-going campaign to seize the platform from China, is for the purposes of “national security,” a recent panel between Secretary of State Blinken and former Presidential candidate Mitt Romney explains what the legislation is really about:

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming [bipartisan] support for us to shut down potentially TikTok […]” Romney said to Blinken at a McCain Institute keynote conversation. “If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts. I know that’s of real interest, and the President will get a chance to take action in that regard.” 

Yank that collar. This is capitalist freedom.

Whether it’s the shaky, grassroots coverage by victims of the genocide filmed and uploaded to TikTok, or — what these ghouls claim to prefer — the mediated, professional reporting by groups like Al-Jazeera, everything that exposes the settler-colonial genocide for what it is will be silenced. This is the short leash, the extent of capitalist freedom. What this legislation, as well as the ongoing student movement, is proving beyond a doubt, is that to play by the rules created by our ruling classes is an exercise in futility. Organize, agitate, escalate. By legal means at first, until your numbers and organized militancy are at the point when only adhering to the law of the mass murderers is a hindrance. Defend yourselves from arrest and legal prosecution by all means. Cease all crying when our enemy does not play by their own rules — this is a fight for humanity, our world, not some game. Know that our oppressors will tighten freedom until it is but a hand clenching our throat — we must use the length of leash they’ve given us to strangle them instead! 

The people have made clear their desire for the truth, it is now our job to provide it. Struggle and fight for the expansion of the radical people’s presses, across all mediums and channels, for our own words and message!

At 1:53 PM on the 27th, two NYPD officers responded to a mental distress call made by Win Rozario himself. Soon after police arrived, Rozario felt threatened and grabbed a pair of kitchen scissors. Officers responded by shooting the teenager with tasers. According to the police narrative, Rozario’s mother then knocked the taser’s prong from her son while trying to hold him still. The officers drew their guns and, while his terrified mother and brother screamed and begged them not to fire, shot Rozario to death. Police maintain that this extreme escalation was necessary, that wielding scissors against armed and body armored officers is reasonable grounds for the summary execution of a teenager. They maintain that they feared for their lives, even after deploying their tasers.

The body camera footage reveals this to be a hollow lie.  It shows what is now a sickeningly familiar scene — that police entered Rozario’s home and immediately escalated the situation to lethal violence. Rozario had called for help during a time of intense mental distress. The responders were armed thugs who only spoke to shout orders and only raised their hands to pull triggers. This didn’t happen due to a lack of officer training on mental health calls or by some mistake. The police were adhering to their prime directive, and carrying out their true social role: violent suppression of the colonized, and execution of those capitalism deems “mentally unfit” for production. 

The purpose of a system is made clear by what it does. What police do reveals what police exist to do. There’s no mistaking it: U.S. police exist to brutalize the colonized, the poor, the mentally or socially “abnormal,” placed behind bars or within padded rooms, to keep them too battered and traumatized to resist the function of capitalism. 

This is the reason the President of Columbia University unleashed this same department on her students. The same occupying force for which Biden recently reaffirmed his plans to raise the national funding by 37 billion dollars and increase the ranks by 100,000. He calls it “My Safer America Plan.” Here, we must congratulate the President on his honesty. It certainly will be safer for him and every member of his class, the settler-colonial capitalists. Because in order for them to sit so high, it must be on a mountain of beaten and incarcerated students and marginalized people, with swift execution awaiting all who show even the slightest resistance.