Iraq was bombed into desolation — its electricity grid, water systems, hospitals, roads, bridges, and even sewage systems were reduced to rubble. Their bloodlust still unquenched, the U.S. used depleted uranium rounds, poisoning the land and condemning generations to birth defects and cancer. Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, when asked whether she regretted the slaughter of over half a million Iraqi children, calmly declared on 60 Minutes that it was “worth it”  (Twaij, 2022). A personal memory, I recall once watching a lecture by Arundhati Roy who remarked on the U.S. justification of the bombing of Iraq, “We are expected to believe that the U.S. Marines were sent on a feminist mission.” One truly has to applaud the audacity of the lie. However, this kind of propaganda is hardly uncommon in the history of U.S. imperialism; it is very much par for the course that they hide behind the language of human rights and progressive Western feminism to justify their carte blanche bombing campaigns that eviscerate women, men, and children alike. The hypocrisy cannot be ignored — a woman in a position of senior leadership in the U.S. actively contributed to a campaign that resulted in the catastrophic rollback of women’s rights, safety, and security.

In Syria, America waged a relentless crusade to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, once again cloaking itself in the rhetoric of “democracy and human rights” — not unlike Iraq (and countless other cases throughout the 20th century). As a result, the nation that was once called the cradle of civilization is today a blood-soaked nightmare of unimaginable human tragedy, all because the U.S. demanded a regime change in favor of someone more amenable to their investor and business class interests (Naiman, 2015).

To add to the ensuing horror even further, America continues its crusade of calamity in Yemen, where its bombs continue to shred civilian infrastructure, while American money and weapons fuel Saudi aggression. Meanwhile, Israel, armed to the teeth with U.S. military aid, carries out daily atrocities with impunity, trampling human rights as the world watches in silence (Saleh, 2025). And I have only scratched the surface of American imperialism — and only over the last few decades, in just one part of the world — all while it claims to act under the moral mission of civilization and humanitarianism.

Is it reasonable, then, to expect nations broken and shattered by such wars and foreign intervention to function in any democratic manner? We do not — and cannot — know what these nations might look like today had they been allowed to develop on their own terms, guided by the specific and unique cultural, material, and economic practices democratically determined by their own citizens. The argument is often made that West Asian nations remain undeveloped because Islam is a backward religion that breeds terrorism and oppression — as if religious belief alone determines the course of a nation’s progress. But progress is not born of ideology; it comes from the democratic participation of the masses and the historical and material conditions in which they live and struggle. The idea that faith in a particular god sets the limits of development is not only wrong — it is ahistorical and frankly, absurd. The Western Liberal Democracies, dripping with a colonial arrogance so vast and insatiable it eclipses all of history, lecture such nations on “Progressive Politics.” Yet was it not these same nations that razed to the ground even the tiniest sliver of hope and institutional framework required to achieve such a thing?

Furthermore, if the Western model of development is so superior — if the ideals of the Enlightenment were truly as revolutionary as they are claimed to be – then why did it take centuries for women, Black people, people of color, Indigenous peoples, minorities, Queer communities, and immigrants to even begin to be treated with dignity and granted equal rights? And that struggle, I should add, is still far from over. As a glaring example, just four years of Donald Trump was enough to destabilize the American “Democratic” system so thoroughly that the federal right to abortion — Roe v. Wade — was overturned. Just four years of one reactionary leader. Now imagine decades of that, layered with war, foreign occupation, sabotage, and poverty, with not a single institution left standing to hold back the worst instincts of violence and repression. That is — and has been — the reality for much of West Asia, and far beyond.

Not only has Western liberalism failed to deliver on these rights and promises throughout its historical development, but it continues to fail — with equal, if not greater, force — even today. On this, I offer both historical and contemporary evidence. Consider first what the famed liberal hero Alexis de Tocqueville had to say about the workers’ revolt of the June Days Uprising in 1848: “After the outbreak of the workers’ revolt, de Tocqueville was not only in favor of conferring emergency powers on Cavaignac but recommended shooting on sight anyone caught ‘in a posture of defense’” (Losurdo, 2011, ch. 10).

Now consider Joe Biden, the self-proclaimed champion of the working class, who calls himself the “most pro-union president” and has been hailed by historians as the greatest advocate for workers since Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Loomis, 2024). Yet this same president blocked a bill that would have granted sick leave to railroad workers, denying the demands of more than 115,000 workers who had gone on strike in 2022. And this was not some anomaly or failing of character — it is the function of liberalism itself, which gives with one hand and takes with the other, only retreating when popular movements threaten its order. Even on the rare occasions when liberals do offer concessions, they are steadily eroded into nothing by one reformist negation after another. As Losurdo (2011) writes, “At issue was canceling, or more or less drastically reducing, the democratic concessions won from liberal society by the popular movement.” And as de Tocqueville made clear, when that fails, the gun will do. As the old saying goes: scratch a liberal, and a fascist bleeds.

If we are indeed asked to believe that liberalism is an ideology adorned with glitter and gold, then we must confront an unavoidable question: how can such ideas give rise to some of the most depraved acts of horror ever known to humanity? The contradiction between liberalism’s glittering promises and its reality is precisely the primordial force that necessitates its overwhelming need to oppress.

To further emphasize: as we have already demonstrated, these liberal ideas were never inherently superior; they were not even exclusively European. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment — pillars of so-called “Western thought” — emerged only through a deep engagement with earlier Greek and Roman texts, which in turn drew heavily on the scholarly achievements of Egyptians, Persians, Indians, and Mesopotamians (modern-day Iraq) (Davidson, 2006). Yet today, many of these regions are dismissed by the West as “uncivilized” or “underdeveloped.” The irony would almost be laughable, were it not so tragically real. As Michael Parenti observed, “The third world is not underdeveloped, they are overexploited.”

Moreover, even in their European form, these ideas were never truly progressive; they were always fundamentally Hobbesian and Machiavellian in their outlook on human nature. It was only the emergence of genuinely revolutionary ideas that forced liberals to concede to democratic ideals. The liberal framework, as we have discussed, can only muster reforms that preserve the existing state machinery, whereas revolutionary thought dares to transcend it. Consider the institution of slavery: a liberal might express shock at the slave’s plight and propose marginal improvements — better clothing or food — while the revolutionary would cry out, “Come, comrade, let us shatter the chains of slavery!” That is precisely the kind of transformative progress that followed the Bolshevik Revolution when peasants gained literacy and women secured equal pay, voting rights, and the opportunity to hold office (Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, 1983). Throughout history, liberals have consistently resisted the sweeping democratic changes championed by revolutionary movements.

Is it any wonder, then, that nations devastated by Western colonial and imperial ambitions remain broken beyond comprehension? Those of us in the West who are not members of racially or economically privileged groups did not receive our rights out of benevolence; rather, we were forced, for the first time in history, to compete with a rival political system that was materially superior and genuinely progressive. It was this competitive drive — fueled by the extraordinary social and human progress of the Soviet Union, combined with decades of development untainted by colonial or imperial interference — that enabled Western societies to evolve into what they are today.

If these same conditions were systematically denied to nations in the Global South through neocolonial exploitation, debt entrapment, illegal coups, and invasions, then it is not only unfair but intellectually dishonest to blame them solely for their own lack of progress.

If we were to allow these nations to develop according to their own histories — if we were to let their people prosper on their own terms, and if the forces of production, labor, and industry were free to drive genuine democratic participation — then, just as in every other society, the rights of minorities, women, and other oppressed groups would naturally flourish over time. Not out of moral charity, but because the conditions of their growth would make progress inevitable. We are told to measure progress by the standards of those who denied it to others. But given the chance — given peace, sovereignty, and the right to chart their own course — these nations would not need lectures from the West. They would show us what real progress looks like.

Citations:

1. Al-Shammari, M. (2023), “Women’s Education: Cultural and Religious Solutions from the Heart of Afghanistan”, Middle East Council on Global Affairs, https://mecouncil.org/publication/womens-education-cultural-and-religious-solutions-from-the-heart-of-afghanistan/
2. Twaij, A (2022), “Let’s remember Madeleine Albright for who she really was”, Al Jazeera, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/3/25/lets-remember-madeleine-albright-as-who-she-really-was
3. Naiman, R (2015), “WikiLeaks Reveals How the US Aggressively Pursued Regime Change in Syria, Igniting a Bloodbath”, Truthout, https://truthout.org/articles/wikileaks-reveals-how-the-us-aggressively-pursued-regime-change-in-syria-igniting-a-bloodbath/
4. Davidson, N (2006), “Islam and the Enlightenment”, Socialist Worker, https://socialistworker.co.uk/socialist-review-archive/islam-and-enlightenment/
5. Saleh, A. (2025), “Yemen dismantles UK-Saudi espionage network and continues to attack strategic US and Israeli targets”, Peoples Dispatch, https://peoplesdispatch.org/2025/01/08/yemen-dismantles-uk-saudi-espionage-network-and-continues-to-attack-strategic-us-and-israeli-targets/
6. Loomis, E. (2024), “Biden’s labor report card: Historian gives ‘Union Joe’ a higher grade than any president since FDR” Government Executive, https://www.govexec.com/management/2024/05/bidens-labor-report-card-historian-gives-union-joe-higher-grade-any-president-fdr/397002/
7. Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (1983), United Nations, https://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/cedaw25years/content/english/CONCLUDING_COMMENTS/Russian_Federation/Union_of_Soviet_Socialist_Republic-CO-1.pdf

Forgive this short introduction for there is much to cover; Hawai’i’s nature is certainly one of the most beautiful on Earth. If we want to keep it that way, we must do everything in our power to decolonize the Hawaiian islands that have been under U.S. occupation since 1893. But let’s start with some history. Let’s talk about the illegal occupation and annexation of Hawai’i.

While we should rightly begin where history begins — that is, from the initial Polynesian settlement of the islands to the establishment of the unified Kingdom of Hawai’i in 1795, this is not a history I would be able to tell, because it is not mine to communicate. I could not do justice to the millennia of Hawaiian history and  its language, culture and people. For that, I would instead point to Indigenous Hawaiian sources, such as the Ka Mooolelo Hawai’i — the first history of Hawai’i written by Native students in 1838 — or the Papaliko database which hosts a collection of data on historically and culturally significant events, curated by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, If you know more Indigenous resources, feel free to post them in the comments for our readers.

We will begin shortly before the pivotal event that cemented Hawai’i’s status to the United States: the overthrow of queen Lili’uokalani.

In January of 1893, the queen of the independent and sovereign kingdom of Hawai’i (which had been united by King Kamehameha I in 1795, putting all the islands under one monarch) was overthrown at gunpoint by U.S. Marines. She had ascended to the throne only two years earlier after the untimely death of her brother Kalakaua, and quickly set out to restore power to the monarchy and native Hawaiians with a new constitution after one had been forcefully passed just four years earlier. This effort, however, was quickly opposed by a group of U.S. and European businessmen and lawyers, known as the “Committee of Safety”, who favored annexation with the United States.

We have to understand the context surrounding the United States in 1893 to understand why the U.S. were interested in Hawai’i. By that time, most of the territory that now forms the continental United States had been settled and attached to the Union. In 1846, just half a century earlier, settlers had stolen Texas from Mexico, which led to a war in which Mexico relinquished control of what now forms the southwestern quarter of the United States territory, including California. With this, coast-to-coast imperial ambitions were  achieved.

The following years would be marked by rapid settler expansion to the west, and with it came industrialization — including the building of the transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869 and of which 90% of the workforce was Chinese (on the western portion). They would later be expelled by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 passed by Congress. In Hawai’i, Chinese immigrants were instead welcomed (alongside Japanese immigrants) by Native Hawaiians, though plantation owners instituted a blanket 10-hour work day on plantations under harsh conditions.

This rapid industrialization didn’t please slaveowners in the south who saw their privileges threatened, and led to a civil war that marked the 1860s. The industrialized Union won, and with it came what is called the Reconstruction era: the final rupture of the slaveowning mode of production that remained in the South and towards a proletarianization of the labor force, which allowed manufacturing to become even more productive.

This laid the final brick in the foundation of the American Empire’s hegemonic ambitions, and they could start to look outwards. In 1898, the U.S. declared war against Spain and, in the peace deal, took the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam — the final colonies of the declining Spanish monarchy.

But the Philippines are far away, especially in the age of the steamboat. To pave the way to Asia, a base of operations was thus required in the Pacific, and Hawai’i was perfectly suited for it. In 1898, President McKinley declared “We must have Hawai’i to get our share of China.”

On top of that, Hawai’i’s climate made it perfect for growing cash crops — prior to annexation, U.S. businessmen had already established large sugar plantations on the island chain. And of course, Hawai’i also formed a shield against attacks from the west, seen as recently as the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

All of this leads us to the reasons the U.S. wanted to annex Hawai’i.

When queen Lili’uokalani took the throne in 1891, she had her work cut out for her. A few years earlier, the so-called Bayonet Constitution had been passed in the kingdom, imposed on King Kalākaua on July 6, 1887 by the aforementioned plantation owners. They called themselves the Hawaiian League (despite none of them being Hawaiian) and, through arms, forced the new constitution that they had drafted for the king. This constitution allowed foreign residents to vote — which, to this day, no country offers — and denied over two-thirds of Native Hawaiians from voting.

In 1892, the Legislature of the Kingdom of Hawai’i passed the Highways Act to protect public lands from privatization. At the same time, the monarchy was also trying to push forward a new constitution that would undo the Bayonet Constitution.

As we’ve already seen, all of this came crashing down in 1893. Shortly after the new year, queen Lili’uokalani made her intentions to push the new constitution clear. Immediately, the Annexation Club — composed of six citizens of the Kingdom (specifically not recorded as being Native Hawaiian) and seven U.S. and European foreigners — carried out their counter-plan: with help from the U.S. government, a fully armed warship anchored in Honolulu harbor (a tactic that the U.S. would use several more times in the future, including in 1974 in Portugal). This move initially scared the legislature who withdrew their support for the new constitution.

Lili’uokalani tried to ease tensions by walking back some of the changes she wanted to make, but it was too late and annexation was within reach for plantation owners. On January 16, 162 U.S. sailors and marines landed in Hawai’i and illegally occupied the sovereign and independent nation.

On January 17, the Committee of Safety — the descendent to the Annexation Club — announced martial law and the deposing of the queen. Specifically, they also declared a provisional government until a union with the United States could be achieved.

Queen Lili’uokalani surrendered to the U.S. government and thus came the end of the long-standing Kingdom of Hawai’i.

Before we continue with this important piece of history, we should take some time to understand what life in Hawai’i was like prior to the coup.

The imperial core’s own institutions recognized Hawai’i as a sovereign nation. By 1843, Hawai’i became the first non-Western nation to receive full recognition as an independent state by Western powers. By 1893, the kingdom maintained over ninety consulates and legations (which served the functions of an embassy) worldwide, including in the United States. Only sovereign states maintain embassies abroad to serve as their representatives on foreign soil.

This fact cements that prior to the deposing of the monarchy (and arguably even prior to the Bayonet Constitution), Hawai’i was a fully sovereign nation in the eyes of the imperialists. Thus, logically, the occupation by U.S. Marines on January 16 was an illegal invasion by a foreign state, and annexation by the U.S. was a coup.

By the mid-19th century, Hawai’i had achieved a 95% literacy rate, the highest in the world. The Constitutional Monarchy established in 1840 guaranteed equal voting rights regardless of race, gender or wealth — the first of its kind in the modern world; at the time, most Western countries were still limiting voting rights to landowning males, if they had any at all. The constitution came about on the impulse of king Kamehameha III himself (also known as Kauikeaouli), as part of efforts to modernize the kingdom.

In 1859, the Queen’s Hospital was established and provided free healthcare to all native Hawaiians. Electric public lightning came to the streets of Honolulu in 1888 — before even the White House had electric lightning. Laws on land distribution made by the Declaration of Rights (1839) guaranteed virtually no homelessness. Affordable mass-transit made travel between islands possible for everyone.

All of these achievements were instantly reversed after the foreign coup in 1893, which turned Hawai’i into a plantation colony for the United States.

Hawai’i became the 50th state of the “Union” in 1959. What happened between 1893 and then?

Immediately after the queen was deposed, a provisional government was set up. This government immediately sent envoys to Washington to seek a treaty of annexation — manifesting their desire for the complete destruction of an independent Hawai’i into an occupied colony of the United States. The treaty was delayed by the inauguration of Grover Cleveland as U.S. president however, and stalled there. Because of this, the Republic of Hawai’i was proclaimed by the Committee of Safety in 1894. Sanford B. Dole, a white man born in Honolulu, became its president. He was approved for a six-year term and if the name Dole is familiar, that is because his cousin James D. Dole is the one who started the Dole fruit company (then called the Hawaiian Pineapple Company). James Dole came to Hawai’i in 1899 and developed the pineapple industry which he had started there in 1851 — pineapple, which is used on “Hawaiian Pizza”, is not native to Hawai’i.

The new constitution accompanying this puppet temporary state required voters to swear allegiance to the republic. Strict property requirements prevented most Hawaiians from voting. The U.S. quickly recognized the coup government, despite president Cleveland publicly criticizing the involvement of U.S. Marines, as is usual — to this day we see the same performative criticism of the particular forms brutal occupation takes, but not its end result.

A counter-rebellion was attempted in 1895 to restore the sovereign kingdom, but failed. In 1898, the situation had stabilized sufficiently that then-president McKinley signed the Newlands Resolution, which annexed Hawai’i to the United States. A petition signed by over half the Hawaiian population was presented to the U.S. government protesting the move, but was ignored.

In 1900, Hawai’i became a territory of the United States — the same status that Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands, the Northern Mariana Islands, and ‘American’ Samoa have today. Stanford Dole, previously the president of the coup republic, was named governor of Hawai’i.

At that point, everything that existed under the late constitutional monarchy was broken and rebuilt. There was no more President or king in Hawai’i, but a U.S. governor — and with it, the laws of the occupier came along too, which is illegal under U.N. Occupation Law.

During that time, sugar production expanded from 289,500 short tons in 1900 to 939,300 short tons in 1930 in plantations owned by white Americans and toiled by native Hawaiians. Pineapple grew from 2000 cases in 1903 to 12 million cases in 1931. Tourism, which plagues Hawai’i to this day, started in 1901 with the opening of the Moana hotel. By 1958, tourists amounted to 171 thousand in one year compared to 25 thousand in 1940. All the while political control remained largely in the hands of the Haole — non-Native Hawaiian, specifically white.

In 1896, the Hawaiian language was banned in public schools — that ban remained in place for 100 years, until 1986. Today, UNESCO still classifies the language as critically endangered.

U.S. businessmen were not the only ones scrambling to the newly-acquired territory, of course. The government immediately set out to fulfill its ambitions and established a dozen military bases in Hawai’i between 1898 and 1922. Since it now considers Hawai’i part of their territory, military presence has only increased, and with it came many scandals and destruction. The military occupies 6% of Hawai’i’s land (illegally), and these bases have displaced many Indigenous Hawaiians and destroyed sacred cultural sites. The U.S. military contributes heavily to environmental crises in Hawai’i, being responsible for example for the Red Hill water contamination crisis.

The effects of the colonization of Hawai’i are still felt today because the U.S. government still considers Hawai’i to be their playground for tourism, army and the mass distribution of pineapple.

Native Hawaiians face higher rates of poverty compared to whites — 15.4% versus 9.6%. Cost of living has soared in Hawai’i with the introduction of a tourism industry (owned by white businessmen); 40% of Indigenous Hawaiian households are cost-burdened by rent prices, meaning they spend more than a third of their income on rent. Indigenous Hawaiians form only 10% of the population of Hawai’i, yet make up 51% of the homeless population. 50% of Native Hawaiians live outside of Hawai’i. The tourism industry pays pittance wages with most of the profits going to the white owners.

More than a quarter of missing girls in Hawai’i are Indigenous, and the average profile of a missing person is a 15-year-old Indigenous girl. Hawai’i is the state with the eighth-highest rate of missing persons in the United States, and 84% of Indigenous women experience violence in their lifetime. In Operation Keiki Shield, 38% of those arrested for soliciting sex from a 13-year-old online were active-duty U.S. Military personnel. 

The tourism industry in Hawai’i has put over 60% of plants and animal species in the ‘endangered’ status, largely due to deforestation to build resorts that make a parody of traditional Hawaiian culture. 44.7% of water on the Big Island (the island of Hawai’i) is consumed by hotels and resorts.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military causes crisis after crisis, and never cleans up after. They pollute potable water through mismanagement. Over several months in 2021, fuel tanks failed one by one at U.S. navy bases at Red Hill (Oahu island) and released tens of thousands gallons of fuel into the island’s drinkable water supply. The U.S. military controls 30% of the land on this island and used it — and the sacred cultural site at Kaho’olawe — as a bombing range for decades. The issue was compounded by the fact that the leaks happened over several months, raising the question as to why the fuel tanks were not inspected and fixed after the first leak. Petroleum contaminated the public water supply for 1 million residents, and the U.S. Navy both refused to help fix the problem and did not notify the authorities when the leaks happened — the problem was reported far too late, when local residents noticed the leak in their tap water. Instead, the Navy ‘promised’ to close the facility by 2027. Today in January 2025, 4,000 gallons of fuel and 28,000 gallons of sludge still remain in the pipes and tanks. In the first weeks after the leak, colonial authorities in Hawai’i even said that the water was safe to drink, leading to the poisoning of thousands.

Pearl Harbor, which we mentioned at the beginning of this piece, was known as Wai Momi (Pearl Waters) by the Hawaiians, and got its name from the pearl oyster diving trade that took place there. The pristine and shallow waters were perfectly suited for that activity, as well as fishing to feed the population — and they did so faithfully for over 600 years. 27 fishponds lined the shores of the Pearl Waters. In 1887, after the Bayonet Constitution, the U.S. gained exclusive rights to the lagoon as a coaling and repair station and from there built their naval base. Today, the water at Pearl Waters is polluted with arsenic, lead and mercury.

In the mid-20th century, the U.S. military detonated nuclear weapons as part of tests in the Pacific, not far from Hawai’i. At the Pacific Proving Grounds — Johnston Atoll, Bikini Atoll, and Enewetak Atolls — nuclear bombs were detonated. As part of Operation Fishbowl, a nuclear test was conducted in high-altitude, which caused an artificial aurora visible from Hawai’i and an electromagnetic pulse that damaged electrical infrastructure on the island chain. Over 100 nuclear detonations were made in the Pacific between 1946 and 1962, and the fallout caused — and is still causing — cancers in Hawai’i and other Pacific Islander populations. Residents of Bikini Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands chain, still cannot grow food locally.

In 2023, deadly wildfires burned on the island of Maui, becoming one of the deadliest natural disasters in Hawai’i’s history. The fires were caused by sparks from broken power lines that ignited dry vegetation. 102 people were killed by the fires, making it the deadliest U.S. wildfire in history. As of 2025, only three homes have been rebuilt, out of 2,200 structures destroyed. Landlords immediately sensed a good business opportunity, and rent rose by 44% on the island, further displacing Indigenous Hawaiians from their ancestral home. The only help from the federal government was a FEMA loan that will stop in 2028.

In terms of land ownership, some 200,000 acres have been set aside by the Department of Hawaiian Homelands to be distributed to Indigenous Hawaiians, but long waitlists persist. The U.S. Federal government, in comparison, owns 531,000 acres which are used for military bases and national parks. National Parks in the U.S. (under Roosevelt), as in “Israel”, were mainly established to drive Indigenous tribes away from their homelands — Yellowstone Park, for example, is located on the ancestral homeland to the Shoshone, Bannock, Blackfeet, Crow, and Nez Perce.

Mark Zuckerberg has also been acquiring land on Kauai since 2014. He now holds over 1,400 acres including beachfront and agricultural properties. In 2016, he initiated lawsuits to force owners of kuleana (small parcels with ancestral rights enclosed in ‘his’ property) to sell their property, dragging them in expensive lawsuits that the families could not finance. He is not the only one: other U.S. tech figures such as Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO) own mansion compounds of their own in Hawai’i. Larry Ellison, the Oracle co-founder, owns 98% of Lanai island, one of Hawai’i’s eight islands. Meanwhile, Indigenous Hawaiians pay $3,000 per month in rent for an average of $18 per hour, which is twice as low as the occupation state’s average wage of $32 per hour.

Again, all of this is technically illegal, not only under U.S. law, but also under international law. The U.S. is illegally occupying Hawai’i, an occupation made possible only by their military might and the putting down of independence movements. In effect, the Kingdom of Hawai’i is under occupation and U.N. Occupation law applies to it — similarly as it does to Palestine. More and more organizations are recognizing this occupation status, including U.N. bodies, the International Association of Democratic Lawyers and the National Lawyers Guild. Under Occupation Law, the occupied population has the right to resist occupation, including by force.

Indigenous Hawaiian groups have been very clear about the effects tourism has on their homeland, and have thus requested that tourists refrain from visiting Hawai’i — not just U.S. tourists, but all tourists. I can only echo their voice and make you reconsider visiting Hawai’i as long as it remains a U.S. colony. 

Like many other countries and territories, Hawai’i is not spared by the effects of ongoing colonization; and all of this is still happening in the 21st century. The only just solution for Hawai’i is the complete expulsion of the U.S. army, the recognition of a sovereign Hawaiian state and nation by the U.S. government, and the relinquishing of its status as a U.S. state or dependency of any kind.

Donald Trump is promising deportation on a mass scale not seen since the Eisenhower administration. Right on cue, liberals have opened their tired old playbook and started to bleat on about “the xenophobia of Trump,” failing to understand that the current hostility being shown to undocumented immigrants is neither unique to this president nor to this particular time in U.S. history. The ruling class provoking animosity toward a group defined as “other” dates back even further than the founding of the republic itself, and serves a vital purpose in maintaining unity among the oppressor classes. 

The Settler and the Indigenous

Since the arrival of the first Europeans to what is now the United States, settler colonists have used any and every excuse to expand their territory and to pillage and plunder, either by direct military conquest, lying, cheating, or a terrible combination of all three. In search of land and riches, colonists invaded the North American continent and found seemingly endless land that, if put to European methods of cultivation, could yield enormous profits. The settlers expanded out from original landing sites like a virus, squatting on “claims” (sometimes) made in the name of the king and paying no heed to those who lived there. The violent pushback visited upon the settlers by Indigenous groups was given by the settlers as justificatory evidence not only for increased settler war against native populations (and subsequent settler expansion), but for the categorization of the native by settlers as a racially subaltern group. A Declaration of the state of the Colonie and Affaires in Virginia categorizes Indigenous people of the region as “beasts,” “treacherous,” and, crucially, “wicked Infidels,” among other epithets. Englishmen of the Virginia Company saw the Indigenous as people in need of a Protestant salvation, people who lacked the moral character necessary to obtain the individual prosperity so coveted by the settler, and thus in need of “civilizing” — which in practice meant subservience and a tranquil acceptance of expulsion and extermination. The never-ending thirst for land led to even more ousting of the Indigenous — the “other” — clearing the way for more expansion, exploitation and murder by the settlers.

Bacon’s Rebellion is an early example of European unity against the Indigenous “threat” — a threat wholly instigated by settlers appropriating Indigenous territory. Nathaniel Bacon — a white landowner — instigated the rebellion as a response to his exclusion from the inner circle of the Virginia plantocracy. He leaned on both the settlers’ desire to expand their holdings and their fear of the Indigenous people fighting against the occupation of their land to whip the disenfranchised among them into a frenzy. The rebel mob was a multiracial coalition, and Bacon promised instant freedom to any enslaved or indentured laborer that joined his cause. While Bacon and his ragtag regiments managed to take Jamestown and burn it to the ground, the arrival of 1,000 English soldiers under the command of Herbert Jeffreys pushed the rebels to a hasty acquiescence. In an attempt to smooth things over, Jeffreys pardoned the insurrectionists and agreed to a treaty with the local Indigenous peoples. 

But the plantocracy was not so quick to forget their close call with revolution. Watching enslaved Black laborers march side-by-side with poor whites shook the planters to their very core, and as a result Virginia society underwent a significant restructuring. In 1705 the Virginia government passed an act reinstating the headright system first enacted in the Great Charter. Each free white settler was now guaranteed 50 acres of land to be exploited for their own use, and as the planter class refused to subdivide their own enormous holdings, the land was thus expropriated from Indigenous people. Tribes were relocated again and again to make room for the crushing hordes of white hopefuls desperate to get their grubby hands in the tobacco business. The burgeoning mob of settlers slashed, burned, scarred and destroyed land that for millennia had been carefully managed to provide everything necessary for survival and happiness. Blind greed for hogsheads full of stinking green narcotic profit pushed the Indigenous farther and farther away from the places they had called home as far back as they could remember, as the land itself was bent to suit the will of colonial capitalism.  

The Settler and the Enslaved

To kidnap someone — to take them to a ship in chains, manacle them naked below decks for almost the entirety of a three-month voyage and, upon arrival to port, to sell them at auction to the highest bidder — requires a most severe differentiation between oneself and those forced into enslavement. To purchase said human beings at auction — to transport them to one’s home or place of work, incorporate them into a building crew, set them to toil as a domestic servant or install them in any other position as may exist in the settler’s business concerns, and work them until they die — likewise requires an extraordinary rationalization. Thus Africans, captured, sold and sent — many to remote concentration camps isolated from most of society — and given a life sentence of work without having committed a crime, had to be considered not only as property, as cargo, as a price, as a means to wealth, but to be somehow deserving of said treatment. 

But the settlers’ collective Christian conscience  —  so worked upon by Calvin, Locke, and eventually by the brothers Wesley — pricked them yet, and the consequences of their sins could not help but be made clear to them. The Stono Revolt, the Maroon Wars in Jamaica, the panics in New York City in the 1740’s all fired a (well-founded) fear both in slave-owning and non-slave-owning settler whites of a mass slave revolt. Dread hung in the air of every colonial port, town and plantation, and while settlers were able to make the connection (obvious as it was) between slave revolts and the whippings, rapes, and genocide that scarred the life and conditions of enslaved Africans in the British Atlantic colonies, others were unwilling or unable to do so. Just as settlers blamed the consequences of their violent expansion into native territory on the Indigenous themselves, so also they put the consequences brought about by their countless abuses, their innumerable crimes against both their fellow man and the God they claimed to follow, upon the Africans themselves.

The wages of their sins having been made manifest, the Christian slaveholders launched a desperate attempt to postpone their payment. The settlers convinced themselves that the victims of their violent enterprise were in fact the instigators of their own misfortune, thus blaming the enslaved for the deeds of the enslavers. In the settler’s mind, the African was born to follow orders from the white man, and failure to do so constituted a break with the natural order, characterized as “insolence” from an “inferior” race. So slave codes were tightened, punishments became more severe, and even free Africans fell under suspicion from terrified settlers. As the crackdowns continued, so too did slave revolts, which augmented panic among whites to a hysterical pitch. The latter reached a crescendo in 1775 with Lord Dunmore’s famous proclamation that all slaves in the colony of Virginia that aided the Crown during the colonial rebellion would be liberated. The settlers howled, wailed, and eventually won their war with the help of France and Spain. But the colonists — now “free men,” citizens of a country of their own making, did not see fit to resolve the issue that provoked so much fear throughout the former colonies. 

The vaunted founding fathers wrote screeds about freedom and man’s right to seek his own happiness, but when it came to the men and women they enslaved, the great men dithered, hemmed and hawed, and excreted the most pitiful, paltry excuses imaginable. They stammered about inconceivably abstract futures, far, far removed from their own time, when the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery would be banned or would have disappeared of its own right. Jefferson and Madison and all the rest of the hypocritical lot spoke of liberty while raping and whipping the enslaved on their own plantations; they pontificated on supposedly universal human rights but couldn’t see their way to sacrificing even a fraction of their own material comfort that others might have the “freedom” about which they blathered on so incessantly. So Stono gave way to Gabriel’s Rebellion, and Nat Turner’s Revolt, and eventually a bloody civil war, all while settlers still considered the enslaved Africans “insolent” and lazy. In the settlers’ minds the Africans still embodied all the faults and vices of the settlers themselves. 

The Settler and the Undocumented Immigrant

The turn of the 20th century marked the so-called “closing” of the frontier, as settlers proclaimed a supposed “end” to the centuries-long extermination campaign visited upon the Indigenous peoples. As the domestic frontier closed, the international frontier opened, and U.S. soldiers were shipped to foreign lands, to oppress and exploit, to force other peoples, societies, and economies to bend the knee to the interests of U.S. capital. Sons of white Southern sharecroppers mingled with the sons of white Northern shopkeepers, and they were led by officers hailing from families of industrial capitalists, factory supervisors, and monied planter families. American troops, united in their racial identity, plundered the vaults of Port-au-Prince, toppled the government in Santo Domingo, and partook in atrocities that were hauntingly familiar to those their forebears committed upon enslaved Africans and the Indigenous. Massacres, wanton executions, violations and an extravagance of bloodshed followed in the wake of the U.S. military wherever it went. Wholesale looting ensured that factories back home, kept churning by a never-ending flow of cheap immigrant labor from Asia and Europe, never ran out of raw material. International plunder ensured astronomically high profit rates for an all-American oligarchic capitalist class. 

This brutal, rabid expansion continued throughout the 20th century, picking up steam in the 1950s with the advent of the Cold War. A restructured world in the process of jettisoning the old boots-on-the-ground European colonialist template provided a wealth of new opportunities for the capitalist kingpin country. Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Angola, Burkina Faso, Yemen, Indonesia, and both sides of the Korean peninsula are only some of the most notable manifestations of the United States’ unquenchable thirst for accumulation.

But reckless growth across the globe has come with a price. The constant upheaval and instability that follows in the wake of imperial capitalist expansion has resulted in a tsunami of people shut out of any hope of achieving prosperity in their home countries by whatever flavor of capitalist brutality is local to them. The tentacles of American hegemony are long and deeply rooted, so migrants have flooded northward — a frenzy of dreamers hungering for the life that was plundered from them to feed the American labor aristocracy and their oligarchic overlords. At first, the lords of American capital were all too willing to manipulate the new immigrants to their own advantage — using the immigrants’ unstable legal situation to drive salaries to pitiable lows. However, a justification was required to explain the blatantly unfair treatment received by the undocumented worker. Thus, in the same way that enslaved Africans were said to have deserved their subservience to the ruling slaveholding class, as Indigenous peoples were said to have deserved their genocide and expulsion at the hands of the ravaging settlers, the ruling class and its flunkeys assert that the immigrant that finds work due to settler unwillingness is in fact stealing jobs, that asylum seekers fleeing political instability in their home countries are in fact the cause of said instability, that those who have seen their homelands corrupted and defiled, those who have seen their hopes, dreams, loves and lives ground into the mud by the jackboot of capitalism are in fact the true corruptors and defilers of the pure American settler state. In short, the immigrant is abused and exploited simply because, to their abusers and exploiters, they are inherently inferior, and thus deserve inferior wages. When the immigrants have fulfilled their duty to the capitalist overlords, they can then be discarded, as the whole world can see now.  

However, it is here that a break with the past becomes evident. The tactic used by the ruling class when faced with a crisis of their own making — blame the oppressed for the faults of capital — has always been accompanied by a tangible benefit for a certain subset of the petit- bourgeois population (usually an exclusively white coalition). Designated members of this “in-group” could then be counted on as loyal foot soldiers in the expansion of oppression. The settler invasion of Indigenous land was not only fought to bestow more land upon the plantocracy; lower-class white settlers were also able to stake their “claim” to the newly-emptied lands, thus ensuring lebensraum for the planters themselves. African slavery resulted in a phasing-out of white indentured servitude and a host of economic and social benefits opening up to members of a newly-named “white” class. U.S. economic and hegemonic expansion has likewise resulted in a glut of well-paying job opportunities for the American settler petit bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy both at home and throughout the world. 

However, this most recent push to deport immigrants is missing any sort of increase in the economic position of the settler labor aristocracy or petit-bourgeoisie. While chauvinist social consciences will be eased, the capitalist or small business owner who formerly employed undocumented workers will find themselves with the same amount of work to be done, but a much smaller (and less-pliable) workforce. The reserve army of labor will shrink substantially. Another point: the current increase in profits for capitalists is being driven in large part by a mass pirating of middle class wealth within the imperial core by capitalists. Prices are skyrocketing, salaries are not keeping pace with inflation, and the smooth promises of the big bourgeoisie are evaporating like morning dew on a hot day. Even the exalted “American Dream” no longer fulfills its propagandic function, but has been reduced to a talking point for those who use it as a yardstick by which to compare all supposed economic, social, and moral failings of American settler society. In the face of capital’s imperative to grow at all costs, the strategy to manage, package, and sell that growth to the lower imperial social classes has fallen apart. 

The deportations are a feeble attempt by the settler bourgeoisie to bargain with the lower settler classes, to postpone the day of reckoning for the consequences of capital’s rapacious thirst for blood and land, its insatiable need to squeeze human beings like rags and wring out every drop of work and wealth. Eventually the bill comes due, and the more intelligent members of the capitalist class understand this. They hope to buy a little more time to increase military strength, in the hope that brute force can replace mass subornation of the white settler class as the primary impulsor for order. Heaping blame for current social ills upon undocumented immigrants and deporting them in a twisted attempt to sell the idea that the sins of capitalism are being deported along with the migrants might buy U.S. capital hegemony a little more time, but the days of glory for the majority of white American settlers are long gone, the last great capitalist plundering is on, and rifles and tanks are coming to replace the hideous amalgamation of sin-eater ritual and race-class bribery fundamental to the American settler project.

Colonialism, Settler Colonialism, and National Liberation

Colonialism in the modern era first developed in the latter years of the 15th century, but reached maturity in the late 19th and early 20th century with the comprehensive colonization of the African continent. In their infancy, colonialism and capitalism developed hand-in-hand, with the resources and profits extracted from the colonization of the Americas and the Atlantic Slave Trade spurring rapid growth in the European economies. In turn, products manufactured in the European metropoles were utilized to further develop the grip of the European economy over the world at large. In essence, capitalism was born with the profits of colonial extraction, and the insatiable capitalist mode of production drove the expansion of the colonialist system.

In its “traditional” form, the colonial economy is primarily an extractive economy, maintained through economic, political, and military domination. The colonial power takes raw materials and other resources from the colonized territory to be shipped back to the “home” country to fuel their burgeoning economies. During the dawn of the era of imperialism (from the 1880s onwards), colonial holdings also served as a sink for the exportation of capital from the European countries, financing international corporations in their advancement of the extraction of resources from the colonial territories. For “traditional” colonialism, the Indigenous population constitutes the labor force for the international corporations. The rapid development of the urban centers in the colonial territories drove the “proletarianization” of the colonized workforce; that is, driving populations from the countryside to the urban centers to engage in the newly imposed capitalist-colonialist economy. The Indigenous people themselves in this context serve as a resource; labor to be exploited for profit, most acute under the slave system in which colonized peoples were literally exchanged as commodities themselves.

Settler colonialism is a distinct form of colonialism. Whereas in the “traditional” colonial economy, extraction of resources is the primary focus of the occupying power and indigenous labor utilized in that extraction is a central component, settler colonialism is concerned with complete control and assimilation of the land as the foundation of a new settler nation. Under settler colonialism, the Indigenous populations are eradicated, in whole or in part, by a series of deliberate policies enacted by the settlers to drive them off the land and claim it for themselves.

In its initial stages, the development of settler colonies on the American continents was driven by rivalries between the last remnants of the European monarchies, which involved religious and military expansionism. The so-called “New World” presented a crisis for the European kingdoms, essentially constituting a new battleground for existing tensions on the continent. At the time, the nascent capitalist system in the form of mercantilism was subordinate to the interests of the monarchs, driven by the need to expand control in the religious sphere, through which the kings justified their “divine right to rule”, and the need to grow the coffers through which they funded their respective armies. An as yet “undiscovered” continent made up of billions of acres of “unclaimed” land presented both an opportunity and a threat to the kingdoms. They could not afford to be left behind while their rivals expanded their power overseas.

What resulted was a mad dash for the direct control of the land, leading to a period of primitive accumulation which increased the wealth and power of the European kingdoms, but also increased the wealth and power of the nascent bourgeoisie which would go on to supplant them in the following centuries. Some of the European powers attempted to engage in “traditional” colonization schemes, but the most successful and the earliest — that of Spain — was settler colonial from its inception and would provide the model for England.

The problem for the Europeans was that this land was not “unclaimed” as they pretended, but was inhabited by millions of Indigenous people organized in thousands of complex societies across both continents. Instead of halting the ambitions of the European economies, a solution was developed, and the Europeans, especially the English, having honed their skills at warfare through centuries of struggle both inside and outside the continent, utilized those skills towards the complete supplanting of the indigenous populations for their own.

Today, the first phase of the settler colonial project in North America is complete. What once was a land of dizzying cultural wealth and complex civilization has been completely supplanted by the US settler colonial empire and its Canadian counterpart. The millions of Indigenous people that once inhabited the continent have been subjected to outright slaughter, ethnic cleansing, and otherwise removed from the land to be corralled into reservations, making way for the fascist global hegemon to thrive. 

Some believe that because the “settlement” of the U.S. is complete, the colonial relation in the country has ceased. On the contrary, through the reservation system and the indigenous reserve labor force kept in perpetual poverty, through the continued subjugation of the Black interior semi-colony by the survival of slavery in the prison industrial complex and the continued denial of land rights in the Black Belt, and through the exploitation of immigrant labor largely consisting of indigenous South and Central Americans, the colonial relation is thriving. This relation is most clear through the antagonization of these colonized populations by the armed wing of the state — the DHS, the BIA, and the federal, state, and municipal police — which takes up its legacy as an occupying colonial military.

The imperial outpost of “israel” is the most readily apparent example of settler colonialism due to the intensity, and thus visibility, of the conflict. Through widespread media coverage of the issue, this genocidal relation is undeniable. Despite billions of dollars being funneled every year into maybe the most advanced propaganda campaign the world has ever seen, the age of social media has allowed the Palestinians to demonstrate their plight for all to see.

The colonization of Palestine is well-documented by scholars and by the zionists themselves. Following the British acquisition of Mandatory Palestine from the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of World War I, the “holy land” provided a golden opportunity for the zionist conference in Britain to begin their colonial project. Between 1917 and 1948, zionists began in earnest to claim land in Palestine through both purchase and conquest. This process culminated in the infamous Nakba of 1948, in which zionist paramilitaries excised large swaths of the land through genocidal slaughter and ethnic cleansing, killing thousands and driving many hundreds of thousands more from their homes. What resulted was almost 80% of the land of Palestine falling under control of the zionists, driving the displaced Palestinians into refugee centers that became the Gaza Strip and the West Bank territories, an act that was legitimized by the international community’s recognition of the “State of israel”.

Zionist ideology closely resembles the religious settler ideology of Manifest Destiny that drove the lion’s share of the colonization of what would become the western United States. Believing the land to be promised to them by God, settlers push the boundaries of the existing colonial borders, encroaching into land that is still controlled by the indigenous inhabitants, often in violation of the various treaties and agreements previously negotiated between the colonialists and the colonized. When the colonized naturally resist this unlawful expansion, the military forces of the colonial entity intervene on the basis that the settlers constitute civilians and they must be defended from the “violent, uncivilized natives”. Thus, the colonial borders expand and the indigenous are further removed from the land. This practice is utilized to this day in the zionist settlements in the West Bank.

We should not be surprised at the similarity; we should not be surprised that the zionists appear to be brothers in arms to the U.S. ruling class. After all, the same economic exploitation of Indigenous people is the basis for both.

So what is the resolution to the colonial contradiction? Despite settler colonialism constituting a distinct form of colonialism, the solution remains the same: national liberation. The anatomy of the colonial system consists of the economic, social, and political domination of the colonized by the colonizers. To abolish this relation, the political, economic, and social spheres must be taken hold of by the subject nation. In a “traditional” colony, this is easy to envision due to the fact that the majority of the population is Indigenous. The anti-colonial liberation movement in this context must seize control of the state from the colonizers and the bought-off compradors, nationalize the colonial enterprises, and begin the process of developing national self-determination. In the settler colonial context, control of the land is the axis upon which the Indigenous peoples are oppressed and self-determination takes the form of the reclamation of the land from the settlers.

South Africa is a particularly interesting case study on this point. Prior to the takeover of the South African apartheid government by the ANC in the 1990s, South Africa could similarly be described as a settler colonial project. After the apartheid system was overthrown and Mandela elected in 1994 as the first president of the country, a process of land reform was undertaken, but was not taken to completion as it had been in Algeria in the 1960s and in Zimbabwe and other territories that made up the former Rhodesian state in the 1980s. As a result, racial disparity and racial tensions continue to wreak havoc on the South African social and political sphere, with white settlers still owning a disproportionate amount of land relative to their population, leaving millions of indigenous South Africans in poverty. What this tells us is that the land and who controls it is the most important aspect of the settler colonial context.

CPUSA Convention Controversy

This past weekend, June 7–9, the Communist Party of America (CPUSA) held its 2024 national convention in Chicago. Two particularly important results of this conference made a significant stir among communist circles on social media regarding the Party’s position on settler colonialism.

As part of the party’s membership in the International Meeting of Communist Workers’ Parties (IMCWP), the CPUSA invited delegates from several other participant parties to speak at the convention. Included in this group was the Communist Party of Israel (CPI), whose speech, delivered by israeli Knesset Member, Ofer Kassif, was streamed on YouTube and subsequently posted by the Party’s official account on Twitter. In this speech, Kassif began by “providing context” to the situation in the zionist entity, in which he vocally condemned the Palestinian Resistance for its acts on October 7, repeating the rigorously debunked lie that thousands of Israeli citizens were massacred by the Palestinians. Later in his speech, he rightly describes the treatment of Palestinians in Gaza as a genocide, but ultimately delivers a message that is indistinguishable from the messaging of, say, US Senator Bernie Sanders. In essence, it espouses a political position which can be described as “labor zionism”; the genocide of Palestinians is to be condemned but so are those struggling against it. It is bad to kill Palestinians, but those who are waging a national liberation struggle to overthrow the settler colonial relation are terrorists. Essentially, their position is that the state of “israel” has a right to exist and that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine between 1917 and 1948 is legitimate, but with a left-wing facade. The position of the CPI is further revealed in an article posted on their website in November of 2023, calling for an investigation of war crimes against the Palestinians for sexual crimes committed on October 7, which has since been thoroughly debunked as a conspiracy, a lie spread by the IOF to justify the genocide in Gaza.

The Twitter post of Kassif’s speech received vitriolic backlash from people criticizing the party for inviting the CPI to speak at the convention, especially during the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Many CPUSA members took to social media in an effort to do damage control, justifying the invitation of the party with such excuses as CPI being a “fraternal party of the IMCWP”, as if that isn’t an indictment of the IMCWP in its own right!

During the CPUSA’s discussion of the resolutions being adopted at the convention, the question of settler colonialism in the United States was presented. Following this discussion, a CPUSA delegate who was present at the convention tweeted “After an investigation the Communist Party USA has rejected settler colonialism as the primary contradiction in the United States”. Again, backlash from communist circles on social media was responded to by hand-waving and justification by party members, calling any who criticized this decision “ultras” and “wreckers.”

The formulation of this CPUSA resolution is malformed and belies the lack of understanding on the part of the CPUSA delegates and those who rejected it. It is clear that the resolution was raised as a sop, and always designed to be defeated. There is no primary contradiction; this is a mish-mash of Marxist terms. There is, of course, in any situation, a principal contradiction, but this is a question of strategy. The principal contradiction conditions the other, secondary, contradictions, which cannot be resolved without first addressing it.

Party members on Twitter immediately began denying the need for any national liberation struggle in the US. It is clear that, where CPUSA once suffered from extreme white (imperialist) chauvinism, that chauvinism is alive and well.

Social Class and Class Struggle

Defenders of the party’s resolution on Twitter made a point of railing against Anything But Class (ABC) Marxists. While ABC as an ideological trend does constitute a liberal distortion of Marxism, the Nothing But Class (NBC) position lacks any basis in reality. Proponents of NBC argue that all oppression and oppressive institutions arise from capitalism, and thus through waging class struggle, all oppressive contradictions will be resolved. What this deviation ignores is the reality of social classes, and the particularity of the nature of class in the colonial context.

The Wretched of the Earth, written by Martiniquais revolutionary Frantz Fanon, who developed his analysis from his participation in the national liberation struggle against the French settler colonial project in Algeria, argues that in the colonial context a person’s race in part dictates a person’s class. An analysis of the colonial relation reveals this fact to be true. In colonial Africa, all of the enterprises were owned by Europeans, whereas all of the industrial and agricultural workers were African. They were workers and not owners because they were members of an oppressed nation; because of their indigeneity. As a result, class was stratified along national lines, meaning that a national liberation struggle also constitutes a class struggle.

“Identity politics” is a contentious topic among Marxists, with many taking the view that the concept of identity is a liberal distortion that only serves to obfuscate the class struggle. What this leaves out is a robust understanding of what exactly goes into determining someone’s social class. In our white-supremacist cis-hetero-patriarchal settler colony, a person’s identity plays a part in determining a person’s class. If you are a trans person, a Black person, a gay person, or any intersection of the various avenues of oppression, odds are that you are not a member of the bourgeois class. As a result, gender relations, race relations, disability relations; these things all constitute social relations with an objectively identifiable economic base. They are class relations and thus are essential to address when engaging in class struggle.

These are fundamentally not questions of identity. Identity is a social question; the relations that produce these social identities are economic questions.

In the US settler colonial system, Black and Indigenous people are corralled into reservations and ghettos, flushed into the prison system to work as money-printing slaves, and are oppressed along national lines. As a result, a national liberation struggle must be waged as PART of the class struggle. National liberation IS class struggle, and must be taken up and supported by Communists.

When CPUSA and its membership reject an in-depth analysis and discussion of settler colonialism, reject the principles of national liberation, and embrace only a simplified analysis of class, they are, in effect, abandoning the class struggle. 

Do not mistake their behavior. The CPUSA has abandoned the class struggle. At best, they represent a dam holding back a reservoir of committed Communists, straining to fight in the class war. At worst, they represent an active barrier to the advancement of the very movement they claim to lead, and thus serve as an objective pillar of U.S. capitalist-imperialism.

A source within the party shared a section of one of the resolutions to be adopted at the convention with regards to the national sovereignty for Indigenous peoples of the Americas which read:

Therefore be it resolved that the CPUSA fully supports the struggles of the Native American people for full social, economic, and political equality and national sovereignty over Native lands. We demand expansion of federal and state funds and services for all the reservations. We oppose schemes to nullify tribal treaty rights.

While paying lip service to national sovereignty for indigenous nations, this resolution reveals deep issues within the party’s understanding of settler colonialism. In their message of support for the struggles of the Indigenous people of the Americas, CPUSA takes care to specify that this only extends to the borders of so-called “Native land”, a distinction that legitimizes the settler control of land not specified as “Native”. The resolution also calls for the expansion of federal and state funds with regards to the existing reservation system. Instead of calling to abolish this violent colonial institution, the CPUSA takes the position that the system should be expanded! Funneling funds into the existing genocidal reservation system can do nothing but strengthen it in its purpose: exercising control over the indigenous populations held captive inside of them. Additionally, this resolution calls for the upholding of existing treaties between indigenous nations and the US government, with no mention at all as to the nature of those treaties as documents forged through coercion that legitimize the settler control over already-stolen Native lands.

This position is indistinguishable from the “labor zionist” position of the Communist Party of “Israel,” which pays lip service to the plight of the Indigenous Palestinians while at the same time upholding the existing colonial borders taken through wholesale slaughter and ethnic cleansing in 1948 and today. By refusing to acknowledge the nature through which this land was claimed and the illegitimacy of the settler control over it, the CPI and its brethren in the CPUSA effectively condone the genocidal actions taken by the settler system.

Settler colonialism and national liberation are not buzzwords. They are not empty platitudes to be tossed out and then ignored, nor are they secondary issues to be subordinated to an ill-defined “class struggle”. They are class struggle, and any party which seeks to overthrow the settler colonial relation must engage with this from the outset. Settler colonialism is a material relation concerned with control of the land. A communist party in a settler-colony must contend with the question of the land and who controls it. They must take the stance that the reclamation of the land through a national liberation struggle is the issue at hand. Otherwise, they are giving in to settler chauvinism as willful idiots of empire.

What is to be Done?

A problem of this magnitude requires extensive education of general party membership, but the capacity to carry out that education would require a party leadership which has this understanding and is capable of imparting it to others. Many members of the CPUSA, especially the younger ones, have a better understanding of these issues than the old party bureaucrats, but the undemocratic nature of the party —  through measures such as the slate system — prevents that leadership from being replaced. Instead, membership at large is forced to table any attempts at eliciting structural change until the party convention, which is only held every four years, and even then resolutions are laundered through the National Committee before being put to a vote.

With the CPUSA’s rejection of settler colonialism as the principal contradiction, they willingly reveal the settler chauvinism that is eating away at the party’s structure, nullifies its revolutionary capability, and condemns it to serve the forces of reaction. 

We have no Communist party in the United States. Once we accept this, we can then begin the process of building one. National liberation and gender liberation are essential aspects of the class struggle, and we must begin to organize a resolute political structure that understands this fact. In order to engage in class struggle, in order to destroy all existing oppressive relations, we must come together to build a political formation capable of taking on this challenge and building a better world for all people.

If you read the newest article by CPUSA officer C.J. Atkins (managing editor of the party organ People’s World, and Executive Director of the pro-Canadian government NGO, ProudPolitics), How does the Communist Party elect its leadership, it’s clear that they still aren’t ready to admit new voices. We will address the hypocrisy that is the CPUSA constitution and the anti-democratic structure it enshrines to protect its opportunistic and careerist leadership below, but first we must deal with something that is purposefully hidden from new recruits in the CPUSA: the party’s own history.

For this reason, we urge the widest possible circulation of this pamphlet among the new recruits of the CPUSA, so they can make their choices clearly, and have their voices heard despite the pressure from the “national” organization. Only through real struggle — not the tame, leashed thing present at CPUSA conventions of the past century — can the party be vigorously purged of its opportunists and careerists and fit to participate in the revolutionary milieu of North American Communism.

A History of Opportunism

It’s not easy to learn the history of the CPUSA; comprehensive studies haven’t been compiled, and the publicly available information online is all tinged with bias one way or the other. Fatally for the CPUSA, the party’s own accounts of its history that are publicly available (for instance, Five misconceptions about the CP’s stance on Black liberation, written by a CPUSA employee who is paid through one of its shell corporations) are outright lies. We know this because other party members and even earlier party historians disagree. The Five misconceptions can be easily debunked by looking at the party records!

We can divide the history of the CPUSA into several major periods based on the predominant forces at work. The party’s roots can be traced back to the Pre-Party Period (roughly 1876-1919). The founding of the party (1919-1923) was followed almost immediately by fierce factional fighting between different types of political opportunists. We can call this entire period the Lovestone War (1919-1928). The party’s Third Period (1928-1935) coincides with the so-called Third Period of the Comintern. These three periods can collectively be termed the “early party” in which the membership was grappling with imperialist opportunism. The Early Party was followed by the disastrous Browder Period (1935-1958), during which open class-collaborationism ruled the day. The intervening Hall Period (1958-2000) was followed by the most recent period of open liquidation (2000-2019) and the Sims/Cambron Co-Chair Period (2019-present).

The Early Party

The party was initially created out of several social democratic organizations that had long subordinated internationalist concerns to mere economism — the narrow concerns of direct economic gains. A coalition of “leftists” brought together non-reformist elements of the Socialist Party of America. This group was known as the Left Wing Section, a formal faction within the party. This faction was not only praised by Lenin, but was even used by the Communist International (Comintern) to help form the Communist Party of the USA. So much for the ban on factions!

The early party was actually unable to cohere; immediately following the election of the Left Wing Section to most of the executive positions in the SPA in 1919, the moderates in the SPA expelled them. The non-English speaking “language sections” of the SPA broke off and founded the Communist Party of America. The SPA called an emergency convention in August of 1919 and the remaining left delegates formed the Communist Labor Party. These were both ordered by the Comintern to join into the single Communist Party of the United States of America and the CPUSA as we know it was born.

But it was not born without strife. The following ten years would be typified by a power struggle between two cliques represented more or less by two forces of opportunism within the party: the Ruthenberg-led former CPA and the Lovestonites. There’s a reason you’ve never heard of Lovestone: he was responsible for the thesis of “American exceptionalism.” This is the line that the CPUSA, openly or not, still materially follows. They can’t afford to educate you about Lovestone because you might see through their program.

His clique put forth the so-called analysis that capitalism was stronger in the U.S. than anywhere else on earth or in history, and that it could not be overcome by revolutionary might until it began to decay. He presented this thesis to the Comintern and helped lead the early CPUSA toward a position of capitulationism. He proposed that the party should just attempt to “hang on” until the revolution was possible, retrenching and defending itself from the capitalists but taking no moves to advance toward overthrowing the capitalist class. This basic thesis has informed top leadership in the CPUSA since.

The Comintern blasted Lovestone, as did Comrade Stalin himself. They ordered the CPUSA to cease factional fighting between Ruthenberg and Lovestone and chastised Lovestone as being a defeatist. This was not the end of Lovestone. By the 1960s, Lovestone would be an active CIA contact inside the AFL-CIO, funneling money from the counter-revolutionary forces of the Central Intelligence Agency into the labor movement.

At the same time, the African Blood Brotherhood was being integrated into the CPUSA and revolutionary action was proceeding in Alabama and the Black Belt. Harry Haywood is the most famous of the revolutionary theorists to come out of the U.S. during this period, and for good reason. Haywood was a proponent and defender of the Black Belt Thesis, the analysis that the Black population of the U.S. Empire was a nation-in-chains in the South, and this serves as a nexus of oppression everywhere until land reform is undertaken. He was a staunch opponent of revisionism and opportunism in the upper ranks of the CPUSA.

Those who opposed Haywood and the Comintern’s position on the Black nation classified racial prejudice as a “moral concern” that needed no special attention. Haywood, the Comintern, and many Black comrades in the U.S. defined Black liberation with regard to specific economic structures. The struggle within the CPUSA against Black liberation came to a head not during the early party period, but in the 1940s, under the villain Earl Browder, as the party tacked toward peaceful coexistence with the U.S. capitalist class, and then finally during the liquidationist period at the end of the 1950s as the party was permanently conquered by petit-bourgeois interests.

Earl Browder: Arch Class-Collaborationist

The never-unified CPUSA’s internal struggles continued to grow more dangerous throughout the middle and late 1930s. It had not been on any firm class footing, despite its membership achieving certain powerful successes in the U.S. class struggle. Earl Browder was appointed by the Comintern to suppress this factionalism and was selected to serve as the party’s head alongside William Z. Foster, the CPUSA’s candidate for president who ran on a Black Belt liberation ticket. Foster suffered from health problems, and Browder took command of the party apparatus.

In the early 1930s, the CPUSA considered president Roosevelt to be a fascist, and opposed joint work with the Democrats. Browder took the lead in convincing the Comintern that a new detente with capitalists in the U.S. was not only possible, but necessary to fight European fascism. He was the champion of the “People’s Front” — a corruption of Georgi Dimitrov’s United Front strategy — and by 1936, Communists were in key positions of the Roosevelt administration. Foster, now sidelined, fought against Browder’s collaborationism with Roosevelt, but Browder controlled the key party positions.

This is how the embarrassment of “Communism is 20th Century Americanism” came to pass. “Patriotic” Communism, as seen today, is a revival of Browder’s efforts at class-collaboration.

It doesn’t stop there.

Browder produced a piece of “theory” known as Teheran, Our Path in War and Peace which was published in 1944. Among other garbage, including a contention that imperialist exploitation of the world by the U.S. was weakening, Browder wrote that “There can be no effective national unity in America… that does not include big capitalists.”

“The Communists,” he wrote, “foresee that the practical political aims they hold will for a long time be in agreement on all essential points with the aims of a much larger body of non-Communists, and that therefore our political actions will be merged in such larger movements. The existence of a separate political party of Communists, therefore, no longer serves a practical purpose but can be, on the contrary, an obstacle to the larger unity.”

The party encouraged no-strike pledges during the war, ostensibly to protect Soviet Communism, but in actuality destroying the revolution at the time when the organization of the working class in the U.S. Empire was at its height, and a time when U.S. imperialism was weakened by fighting foreign enemies.

In 1944, Browder dissolved the party.

This move was nearly successful; throughout 1943 and ‘44, he suppressed all dissent to the buildup of the plan to dissolve the CPUSA as being in violation of party discipline. This toxic and ludicrous understanding of democratic centralism, preclusion of all dissent, persists within the CPUSA and many other “sister” parties to this day. It was only through the intervention of the French C.P. and the circulation of newspapers and letters from France blasting Browder and demanding his removal that the party was reconstituted in 1945.

Although the party was actually dissolved and Browder managed to issue party-wide orders to that effect, it was shortly thereafter put back together under the leadership of William Foster.

It was during this time of Browder’s leadership that the attacks on Haywood and the Black members of the party holding to the line of national self-determination grew stronger and stronger. Browder fought to suppress national self-determination as antagonistic to the new vision of the world he predicted in which the U.S. capitalist class would eventually peacefully hand over power to the working class.

The Traitor’s Convention: 1957

In response to FBI investigations and the prosecution of eleven highly-placed members of the CPUSA, the party took the position that it was not advocating for the overthrow of the capitalist state — a crime under bourgeois law — but for Browder’s “peaceful transition.” The eleven defendants were found guilty and each sentenced to five years in prison. This led to the prosecution of some 100 more party members throughout the early 1950s.

The party, having been led down the rabbit-hole of opportunism by Browder, who took advantage of the already-existing petit-bourgeois tendency for collaboration and conciliation with Roosevelt and the so-called “progressive” capitalists, was caught unprepared for this onslaught.

Khrushchev’s “secret speech” also rocked the party. John Gates, editor of the Daily Worker, called for dissolving the CP as a Marxist-Leninist vanguard party and became the center for a new liquidationist faction, intent on removing the revolutionary content of Marxism and making it palatable to the progressive capitalists. Liquidationists sprang out of the CPUSA woodwork. They demanded a “re-examination” of Marxism-Leninism and condemned the theory of the bourgeois state as an instrument of class rule.

The most fateful convention of the CPUSA, that of 1957, was fast approaching. A draft resolution was circulated in September of 1956 to be debated at the convention. The draft argued for what Haywood recorded as a “peaceful, parliamentary, constitutional transition to socialism.” It would be

…the development of an anti-monopoly coalition through “labor and popular” forces gaining “decisive influence in key Democratic Party state organizations and even liberal Republican movements.” Thus would develop the “American Road to Socialism.” The Communist Party would remain on the sidelines to “support and endorse” such progressive campaigns. On the Afro-American question, the right of self-determination was completely omitted and the Party urged wholehearted acceptance of the NAACP slogan of “Free by ‘63.” Working class leadership and proletarian revolution were entirely excluded from this document. The National Board voted in favor of the resolution, Foster and Davis voting a qualified “yes.”

Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik

Left opposition to this turn grew throughout the end of 1956 and the beginning of 1957. However, they were lacking central guidance; the left opposition was excluded from the National Board. They had no regular access to any of the party machinery to air their views, and leadership deliberately suppressed Marxist-Leninist education to maintain the status quo. All dissent was systematically suppressed, and inner-party democracy was quashed.

Three factions of rightists came to the Sixteenth Convention on February 9, 1957. The Gates faction was openly anti-Soviet and supported the liquidation of the party in its entirety. The center-right  faction was led by Eugene Dennis and called for the ideological liquidation of the party’s vanguard position. The left-center was represented by Foster, and were staunchly opposed to any further leftward movement — embracing open calls for revolution, for instance, in the face of FBI repression.

The Sixteenth Convention, in an attempt to quell the disunity that had plagued the party from the beginning, moved to suppress the split. The three right trends, which had captured the National Board, called for a “unity of all trends” during the convention. The left opposition attacked this false unity, and upset many of the “unity slates” — you see the beginning of the hideous slate system here — that were planned to oust left candidates.

As part of this “unity of all trends,” the three right cliques forced through the passage of the treacherous September Resolution, which spelled the death knell of the party as any kind of revolutionary force. Immediately following the convention, the three “unified” trends began to harass the left opposition within the party, driving membership out through bureaucratic gamesmanship. When Haywood attempted to challenge the slogan calling for the party to follow the petit-bourgeois lead of the NAACP, he was attacked by the leadership. The question of self-determination for the Black Belt and the oppressed Black nation was abandoned. The CPUSA had openly determined to follow the petit-bourgeois-dominated NAACP and the petit-bourgeois/bourgeois alliance that formed the central core of the Democratic Party of the 1930s-60s.

The Party Leaves the Struggle — So the Struggle Leaves the Party

The content of the CPUSA program has been, since the Sixteenth Congress, roughly the same for the last 70 years. In some periods it is more openly liquidationist (as we will see below, with the coming of Sam Webb), and in some less (as this current period), but the actual on-the-ground effect of every party program since 1957 has been, on one end of the spectrum, to tail the petit-bourgeois “progressives” or, on the other, to call for the complete abolishment of the party.

The Black Power movement and the New Communist Movement began in the mid-60s  as the CPUSA failed in its historical role to lead the working classes. In 1966, the Black Panther Party was formed. Organizations like the essentially anarchist Students for a New Democratic Society and its militant offshoot, the Weather Underground, sprang up. These were organic expressions of working class militant socialism that arose independently because the main outlet for the working class had been stopped up by the revisionist, opportunist, and government-infiltrated CPUSA. Two FBI operations, SOLO and TOPLEV, garnered many CPUSA informants; as early as 1948, the CIA had identified a goal to implement agents at the top levels of the CPUSA, and unredacted reports from the FBI as late as 1984 indicate a large number of government spies within the CPUSA ranks. Operation CHAOS, a CIA domestic spying program begun by Lyndon Johnson in 1967, undoubtedly planted even more spies within the CPUSA ranks.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the struggle thus, having been driven out of the party by its accommodation of U.S. capitalism, manifested in other organizations. Projects were undertaken to re-found the CPUSA or to purge it of its opportunistic elements. None of these produced lasting results. Because the CPUSA had consumed the oxygen for working class organizing on an all-Empire level, because it stood back and did nothing while the Black Power movement was slaughtered in the streets by police both in uniform and in suits, there was no way to challenge it, and all meaningful revolutionary activity drained away. By the late 1980s, party membership had dwindled from a once-proud 300,000 to 25,000.

The Ghost of Sam Webb

The next stage in the CPUSA’s development was the appearance of the treacherous Sam Webb in 2000. Webb became chairman, and kept the party on the same tack as its 1980-incarnation: playing a supporting role to the Democratic Party against the “ultra-right” threat of the GOP.

Webb repeated the Sixteenth Congress throughout his entire tenure. He directly contradicted the tasks set out by the socialists of the 20th century and embraced Bernsteinian revisionism as the order of the day. “While political supremacy of the working class and its allies is imperative, once acquired its task isn’t to smash the state into so many pieces, but rather to transform the class content of state structures,” he wrote in 2009. “[C]ommunists of our generation,” he sang, in the siren song we have seen above, designed to convince the petit-bourgeois, vacillating elements, “would do well to follow the example of our Depression-era comrades.”

He denounced Marxism-Leninism itself, calling it “rigid and formulaic” and said it was time to move “beyond Communist Parties.” At the 2014 convention, the party narrowly avoided removing Marxism-Leninism itself from the constitution and party documents.

Webb was ousted at this convention by John Bachtell — current editor-in-chief of the party organ, People’s World. Bachtell, who worked for the Obama campaigns, had worked extensively as chair on the so-called inside/outside project coordinating “Communists” within the Democratic Party. He was slightly to the left of Webb in that he didn’t call for open liquidation of the CPUSA as an organizational structure, but did hew, in his time as chair, to a tailist strategy to “defeat Trumpism” (as he put it). Class consciousness had begun to rise with the threat of the far-right fascist advancement of the Tea Party and then-metastasizing MAGA elements in the GOP. Webb, who advocated dissolving the party just as Browder had done, had to go. The party couldn’t countenance open liquidation — perhaps because it once again began to serve its purpose as a magnet for young Communists who don’t know any better. This allows the party to draw in potential revolutionaries and neutralize them by subjecting them to Byzantine, opaque, and undemocratic party structures. The rules require them not to get too feisty, and soon they find themselves forced to keep their revolutionary activity at a very low grade. At every opportunity, that energy is redirected into campaigning for the political class of the Democratic Party — to campaigning for our enemy. Sam Webb had to be sacrificed to save Webbism. Growing class consciousness threatened to push the working class into a revolutionary position. John Bachtell helped to negate it. The party had been winnowed down to some 2,500 members in the wake of Webb’s disastrous time as chair. After Webb was ousted, it grew again to roughly 5,000.

In 2019, Bachtell lost the chairship to long-time CPUSA members and Webbites Rossana Cambron and Joe Sims. This followed the even higher pitch of class consciousness during the Trump years; membership in the CPUSA appears to be as high as 8,000 people. The co-chairs immediately began to call for more revolutionary organizing to channel the surge of class consciousness — while maintaining the exact same 1957 line in action.

CPUSA’s Democracy — but For Which Class?

There exists at the top of the CPUSA a group of well-paid labor bureaucrats that make their living off of corporations owned by party members. Party properties and organs — in fact, all CPUSA assets — are owned by shell corporations like the International Publishing Corporation and Long View Publishing. This includes a network of charities and other corporations that pay out salaries, such as Military Voices Speak Out (the charity headed by Arturo Cambron, Rossana’s husband and a District Organizer for the party in California). Individuals are vetted to serve in these positions, then moved up through the CPUSA and the “mass” organizations that are controlled by high-ranking CPUSA members (like Long View, etc.)

To understand how this leadership retains control of the money and resources of the party as a whole, we can step through the sly doublespeak of C.J. Atkins’ article about elections within the CPUSA.

To begin with, Atkins starts with a canard. “In the Communist Party,” he cautions, “our unity and our collectivity are our most powerful weapons. Our democratic process is all about finding ways to include the voices, thoughts, and experiences of everyone in the party as we decide our policies — and doing so in a fashion that is collective, which safeguards our unity.” This sounds like a touching bit of organizational dogma, but what does Atkins mean when he says this? He admits right away that elections “might even strike [new members] as downright undemocratic when they first see it, totally top-down.”

What is he talking about? The slate system and the National Committee.

Let’s forget that the U.S. Empire isn’t a “nation” but rather a prisonhouse of nations. Set that to one side. What is the National Committee? It is the executive body of the CPUSA, and makes all decisions on all levels. It is the final arbiter of all disputes, and the body to which one would appeal if you disagree with another body. The National Committee is the Politburo and the Executive Committee and the Supreme Soviet rolled into one.

So how are members of this ultra-powerful party-brain elected? Once every four years (or longer, if the National Committee decides to postpone) a convention is held. Once the convention date is set, the existing National Committee creates a subcommittee called the Committee on Leadership. This subcommittee develops what Atkins calls “proposals” for who should staff the National Board and the National Committee, and who should serve as officers of the various subcommittees. How does it do this? Through no formal process. It “casts a broad net across the entire country.” How democratic! Can you submit your name for consideration? Not formally.

“Consultation is the name of the game,” Atkins says. “It’s all about ensuring that the leadership of our party is equipped with the diversity and experience that’s needed.” Ah, but the Committee on Leadership is also “tasked with guaranteeing the party’s continuity, and that means getting the right mix of seasoned party veterans and newly-emerging or young comrades who are growing into leaders.”

Break that down.

The leadership of the party, who have the absolute authority to expel or dismiss members, to select officers, to pick who get the lucrative sinecures of appointment to the party corporations and the payroll of party charities, breaks off a piece of itself (we don’t know, from Atkins’ article, how big the Committee on Leadership is — it might be composed of all the same members as the National Committee) to pick a few people “growing into leaders” (based on the criteria that they share the same political outlook as the current leadership) and “seasoned veterans” (by which they mean, charitably, the same small pool of people on rotation, or uncharitably, just themselves).

Is the floor open for nominations at the convention? Sure, but the vote is presented as a slate. Members are not allowed to campaign — Atkins presents campaigning as some filthy bourgeois tactic, rather than the knowing coalition of groups sharing struggles — so any attempt to campaign prior to the convention is just labeled factionalism and the campaigners are expelled.

But the process doesn’t end there. The National Committee then appoints a Presiding Committee — a credentialing committee and executive committee for the conference. The Presiding Committee makes final rulings on procedural questions, and then presents the slate of candidates selected by the Leadership Committee to the convention. No one that is not approved by the Presiding Committee can appear on the slate. Voting is not yes or no. It is not up or down. Voting proceeds by “choosing a minimum percentage of names from the final list of nominees” — the slate.

Truly, we can take Atkins’ words about process at their face value: the National Committee elects itself.

Debate about political lines and issues is prohibited until the convention begins. Such debate is (wrongfully) called a breach of democratic centralism in the long four-year plus stretches between conventions. Don’t like a party policy? Don’t like a party line? Even bringing up that fact inside a party meeting is grounds for discipline. How can you determine if you agree with people on the slate? How can you tell what you think about any individual candidate? You are left to the whims of the Leadership Committee and the Presiding Committee, both of which are wholly creatures of the National Committee.

Whom does this “democracy” serve?

It serves the clique of interested functionaries who live off of the wages of the rank-and-file party members. It serves John Bachtell, who is paid by Long View and International Publishers. Every few months, the party brass sends out a party-wide warning that People’s World needs more, more, more donations, or else they won’t meet their goal! What is their goal?

Subsidizing the very opportunist serpents that are paralyzing the party with coil after coil and loop after loop of bald-faced lies.

Proletarian Democracy Requires Struggle

It is not possible to achieve a meaningful contribution to the revolution without struggle. Bitter struggle! That means the combat of opposed viewpoints, the dialectic of conflict. Why is the CPUSA averse to conflict? Because its leadership cannot afford to be on the losing end. All struggle must be controlled and subsumed, lest the party be re-captured by the revolutionary element and its resources directed to the destruction of the capitalist state and the very lifestyles of the petit-bourgeois functionaries that now command it.

Do not let them defang the struggle.

Confront the beast in its lair.

Ever onwards, toward revolution!

History and Background
Blood libel is an antisemitic canard that accuses Jewish people of ritual murder and blood sacrifice, specifically that we kill Christians to use their blood for various rituals. Many of the historic accusations of blood libel suggest that Jews use the blood of Christians to bake Passover matzah. Primarily, though, the accusations of blood libel sprang up when a Christian child (often a young boy) went missing or was killed in a town. The local Jewish community would be blamed, often by the actual perpetrators (if a crime had taken place at all), and Jews would be brutally tortured until a confession was given. Sometimes, the specifics of these accusations tied into deicide, another antisemitic trope blaming all Jews throughout all of time for the crucifixion of Jesus. Jews are frequently used as scapegoats for countless disasters throughout history, and the death of young children is no exception.

Though the first documented occurrence of blood libel dates back to 40 BCE, the examples we usually see originate from Europe in the Middle Ages, where it was an incredibly dangerous time and place to be Jewish. Blood libel was used alongside various other antisemitic canards to justify the mass-murder and expulsion of Jewish people, especially from Central and Western Europe, like modern-day England, France, and Germany (who is always at the scene of the crime).

In 1144, Jews in Norwich, England were accused of blood libel after a young boy named William was found to have been stabbed to death on Good Friday. A monk named Thomas of Monmouth wrote The Life and Miracles of St. William of Norwich about the murder of the boy and the alleged miracles occurring near his burial site. It’s his fabrication that solidified the rumors of blood libel stirring in Norwich. William was treated as a Christian martyr (someone killed for being Christian/professing love for Jesus) and even canonized as a saint. A cult began to form around him not long after that.

After several more instances of blood libel popped up in England in the following decades, the pogroms started. Jewish communities across the country were raided and their people massacred. A few decades after the death of Hugh of Lincoln, another young boy who was killed in 1255, England expelled its entire Jewish population in 1290 and they were not allowed to return until 1657, four hundred years later.

Another notable case of blood libel – perhaps the most famous – occurred after the death of a two-year-old boy in modern-day Italy, Simon of Trent. Simon was killed in 1475 and like a majority of other children used in blood libel accusations, was venerated as a saint. His cult spread throughout Europe and to this day, I’ve still seen him referenced by antisemitic Christians.

Blood libels have persisted throughout time since then, including being published in Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer. Though their more modern iterations haven’t really resulted in the mass-murder or expulsion of Jews, like all antisemitic tropes, they’re still extremely dangerous and we absolutely should take great lengths to avoid them.

Modern Applications
Now with the background on blood libel accusations of the past, we can see what they look like today. The most common example I can think of is the adrenochrome conspiracy theory, a popular one amongst the QAnon crowd. The adrenochrome conspiracy posits that “Hollywood elites” participate in child-trafficking rings to harvest their blood for adrenochrome, which would allegedly make them immortal somehow. Of course, the usage of “elites” makes it easier for the promoters of these antisemitic conspiracy theories to deny that they’re talking about Jews, but dogwhistles are very common with contemporary antisemitism (which we’ll discuss more in depth another time).

The trope has also “accidentally” been regurgitated by modern media plenty of times. I think this may sometimes be unintended, because of how antisemitic tropes have worked their way into acceptable public consciousness, but it’s still negligence on the part of the creators. A good example would be Inside Job on Netflix (see this article about why). Or perhaps Roald Dahl’s The Witches (but this one’s not really hard to put together considering Dahl was a raging antisemite). Disney’s Tangled suffers enormously from the Jewish-coding of Mother Gothel, in appearance and behavior and using her blonde-haired, stolen child’s powers to keep herself young. 

It can also sometimes be applied to vampire media in particular, and it’s definitely not uncommon for there to be a connection between vampire imagery and antisemitism, but that’s something I’ll cover another time. 

What Blood Libel is Not
Blood libel absolutely is a trope that still exists today in the media we consume, but that doesn’t mean the label of “blood libel” can be ascribed to something that doesn’t fit in with the libel itself. Today, Israel has leveled the accusation of blood libel against South Africa for describing the attacks on Gaza as “genocide” as South Africa attempts to hold Israel accountable at the International Court of Justice. The same accusations are regularly directed towards anyone else being vocally pro-Palestine.

Accusing supporters of Palestine of blood libel for pointing out that Israel is committing genocide is a blatant attempt to take legitimacy away from these statements. None of these discussions bring up ritual murder or consumption of blood, which are very key parts of categorizing a claim as blood libel. Zionists also pretend any “blood libel accusation” against Israel is the same as one being made against Jews in general; it’s not. Israel is a militaristic, apartheid state that commits atrocities in the name of the Jewish people, but it is not “us”.

Most importantly, the genocide of Palestinians is actually happening. There is an overwhelming amount of photo and video evidence documenting the atrocities being committed against Palestinians, along with testimonies from the people involved, including admissions from the perpetrators themselves.

Another consequence of unjustly accusing people of antisemitism is that antisemitism is taken less seriously, or legitimate accusations of antisemitism are met with denial or indifference. I would argue that this is intentional, because Israel relies heavily on the lack of safety of Jews in diaspora to legitimize itself.

By combatting antisemitism in all its forms worldwide, we make sure that Israel can no longer claim to be the only safe place in the world for us. We will thrive where we are, and education about antisemitism is imperative to that goal.

Sources
Passover and Blood Libels | My Jewish Learning
The Adrenochrome Conspiracy Theory—Pushed By ‘Sound Of Freedom’ Star—Explained (forbes.com)
Does Netflix’s ‘Inside Job’ encourage antisemitic conspiracy theorists? – The Forward
Israel-Hamas war: List of key events, day 85 | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera

Republished from the author’s blog, Doikayt Delivered.

The 18th Brumaire of Louis-Napoléon

Our story begins with the fall of the July Monarchy, itself the result of a brief explosion of street fighting in the early 19th century which rid France of the last restored Bourbon king, Charles X. King Louis-Phillipe d’Orléans took the place of Charles and instituted a vaguely liberal constitutional monarchy.

In February of 1848 — the year that saw Europe explode in upheaval against the so-called Metternich system, with revolutions breaking out in Italy, Vienna, Budapest, and Berlin — the people of Paris demanded Louis-Phillipe liberalize his government. When he failed to meet their demands, revolution swept the streets of the city. The radical socialists of Paris and the bourgeois liberals joined together to erect barricades in the heart of the city. Louis-Phillipe, unwilling to give the order for the army to fire upon the people of France and fearing the republican revolution would send him to the same fate as his father and uncle — regicide — fled first Paris and then France. The bourgeois ministers who reaped the rewards of this revolution would have no such compunction about ordering the army to turn their guns on their former allies, the radical socialists. The July Monarchy came crashing down.

The 1840s were also the years of the great potato blight that swept through Europe. Financial turmoil and an enormous market crash played a decisive role in spurring the 1848 revolutions and, in France, left millions starving and without work.

The bourgeois liberals at once moved to cut out the radical socialists and utopians from the new government. They founded what the French call the Second Republic (following the First Republic, that of the Revolutionary Government in 1792). Although the bourgeois government that took over from Louis-Phillipe promised to enact the “right to work” laws sought by the socialists, instead, they purposefully constructed mismanaged National Workshops in Paris to provide make-work for those thrown into unemployment by the blight, the financial crash, and the tumult of the February Revolution.

When the bourgeois republic of 1848 closed the National Workshops, as poorly managed as they were, the workers in Paris exploded in outrage. Thousands had come from the surrounding countryside to seek work, and now they were told they had scant days to clear out of the city. On 23 June 1848, the city rose. Barricades were built across the heart of Paris and the armed citizenry demanded the establishment not only of a democratic republic, but a social republic: one that solved the crisis of poverty and property. The Second Republic responded by calling out the National Guard, that body of petit-bourgeois shop owners formed into a 40,000-man-strong Parisian militia. Under General Cavaignac, the National Guard crushed the revolt of the June Days, shuttered the workshops, and deported nearly 4,000 insurgents to newly conquered French Algeria.

Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew to the former emperor of France and self-styled Prince, was permitted by the Second Republic to return to his native soil and to run in the parliamentary elections of 1848. In September of that year, he won a seat in the new National Assembly. Catholics and peasants, who missed life under the Empire which had at least seen to their needs, overwhelmingly supported Prince Louis-Napoléon; he was seated in the Assembly to cries of “Vive Napoléon!” and, more troublingly, “Vive l’Empereur!”

In December of 1848, Louis-Napoléon won the newly-created presidency in a landslide 74% vote in the first French election with universal male suffrage. The memory of the glories won by the emperor Napoléon had not faded. The France of the restored and then the July Monarchy was a beaten France, hemmed all around by former enemies that still cowered at the thought of the revolutionary wars that Paris and her armies had brought (along with fire, requisition, and the sword) to all of Europe for a generation. Embittered former soldiers of the emperor and those who longed for the days when tribute flowed into France — instead of out of it — swept the victorious miniature second Napoloéon to power. This movement was backed not only by the old officer corps and the class of career military men created by Napoléon I, but also by the big bourgeoisie, the mighty capitalists of France.

In December of 1851, facing the end of his term limits and unable to convince the Party of Order and the French Parliament to lift them, Louis-Napoléon followed his more famous predecessor. He staged a coup.

A fanatically loyal army was all he needed. On the morning of 2 December, Louis-Napoléon deployed troops all over Paris. His opponents were arrested. On the walls of the city were plastered flyers proclaiming the Six Decrees:

In the name of the French People.

The PRESIDENT of the Republic

DECREES:

The national assembly is dissolved.

Universal suffrage is re-established.

The French people are convened in their committees.

A state of siege is declared.

The council of state is dissolved.

The ministry of the interior is charged with the execution of the present decrees.

On January 14, 1852, the Prince-President declared himself Emperor. The Second Republic was abolished and the Second Empire begun. From 1852 until 1870, the social revolution, which had broken out in 1848 and been suppressed by petit-bourgeois republicans who had, in turn, been crushed by bourgeois monarchists, was crushed under the weight of the Second Empire. Napoléon III went so far as to restructure the face of Paris. Under his direction, the Baron Haussmann tore down entire districts, plowed broad avenues through the old warren of streets, and made certain no one could barricade the center of Paris — just as they had during the fall of the July Monarchy or the June Days, again.

The Franco-Prussian War

In 1870, Germany was being unified by iron and blood under the ungentle guidance of the arch-conservative Prussian minister, Otto von Bismarck. Von Bismarck had, in his own way, helped to shackle the social revolution in Prussia by granting constitutional reforms to disarm Prussian political radicals, just as Louis-Napoléon had argued for universal suffrage merely so he could have himself voted emperor.

When Leopold of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a prince of Prussia, seemed poised to take the throne of Spain, France took action to prevent an encirclement on both borders. Although the prince’s candidacy was withdrawn, Otto von Bismarck published a doctored telegram, called the Ems Dispatch, that appeared to show a diplomatic slight between the King of Prussia and a French ambassador. Napoléon III declared war. Many in his court approved, as did the big landowners and bourgeoisie in France, hoping to restore the French Empire to its former glory. Military advisors and Napoléon III  himself believed that the southern German states would ally against Prussia to help serve as a check on their aggressive northern neighbor.

The French army left Paris on July 28, 1870, driving for the German city of Metz. Far from joining the French, the southern German states revealed secret treaties of aid to Prussia, freeing up the entire Prussian army, renowned for its bloodthirstiness and precision, to concentrate against France. After a brief campaign, Napoléon III, surrounded at the small French border-town of Sedan, surrendered to the Prussian army on  September 1, 1870.

Prussia did not accept the surrender as the end of the war. It was Bismarck’s plan to reduce France as a European power; to do so, they would accept only an unconditional surrender. At home, the Second Empire was overthrown when news reached Paris. A group of moderate Republicans, Jules Favre, Léon Gambetta, and General Louis-Jules Trochu, led a coup against Napoléon’s remaining ministries and declared themselves to constitute the Government of National Defense.

The Socialists of Paris

Commune member and National Guard general Antoine Brunel said that the revolution that began on March 18, 1871 was “provoked by patriotic sentiment,” and he was right. For Benoît Malon, member of the Commune and the International Workingman’s Association, the Commune was essentially a socialist undertaking, and he too was right. Gaston Da Costa, a follower of the great revolutionary conspirator Louis-Auguste Blanqui and deputy procurator of the Commune, saw the Commune as a continuation of the Jacobin tradition of the first great French Revolution, and he too was right. The journalist and poet Maxime Vermersch saw in the flames set by the dying Commune a foretaste of the purifying revolution that was still to come, and he also was right. Massenet de Marancour, leader of a National Guard battalion and participant in the Commune’s battles, saw the entire event as the working class falling into a trap set by the bourgeoisie so the latter could have done with any threat to their rule, and he was right as well.

Communards, The story of the Paris Commune of 1871, As told by those who fought for it, Mitchell Abidor Ed., Marxists Internet Archive (2010)

At the time of Napoléon III’s defeat, Paris had many currents of radicalism and socialism within her walls. At the extreme right were the bourgeois republicans who wanted to see the end of the Empire but who demanded protection for private property, safety from the “mob,” and suppression of everyone to their left.

The socialists, of every stripe, advocated for what had come to be known as the “social revolution.” Everywhere in Europe, the questions of the future had been divided, cut in two. There was the “political question” — republic or monarchy — but there was also the “social question” — property or equality. Since the eruption of the French Revolution in 1789, every power in Europe had colluded to prevent the working people from answering the social question. Republicans, monarchists, parliamentarians; all were horrified by the specter then haunting Europe, the specter of Gracchus Babeuf and the sans-culottes of Paris, the specter of Communism.

Pierre Joseph Proudhon, although dead by 1865, lived and worked in Paris and left his legacy there. There were many Proudhonists among the Commune. There were also Jacobins and Babeufists, the heirs of Robespierre and Gracchus Babeuf, two towering figures of the French Revolution. Also among these socialists were the followers of Louis Auguste Blanqui. Although Marx called them “pure revolutionists,” for they followed Blanqui’s theories of the conspiratorial overthrow of the capitalist state, most had no social or economic solutions which would follow such an overthrow. Ideologically, most of the socialists within the Commune were unformed — they had no distinct comprehension of how they were to set about achieving socialism — what economic measures they should take. Their ultimate creation, the Commune, serves as the Marxist model for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The two strongest streams of  socialism, then, were the anarchism of Proudhon (which had been criticized thoroughly by Marx) and the vulgar putschism of the Blanquists. Yet, many of the members of the Commune’s governing bodies were also members of the International Workingmen’s Association — the party to which Marx and Engels belonged, and that would be involved in the Haymarket Massacre in 1886.

The average Communard was the average Parisian: young, between twenty-one and forty years of age. They included artisans and craftsmen. They were skilled and semi-skilled workers. Shoemakers, printers, small-scale artisans, construction workers, day laborers, domestic servants, shopkeepers, clerks, and men in the so-called liberal professions. The women of the Commune came from the world of women’s work, the textile and clothing trades, and prostitutes.

Of the 733 people participating in political clubs, 115 were women (15 percent), and 198 held a position within the Commune (27 percent). These were socialists without a precise program, or rather with many programs that had yet to be tested. Adolphe Thiers’ armies would start the fires used to test them; the Commune would finish them.

The Government of National Defense

On the morning of September 4,  1870, all of Paris poured into the Palais Bourbon. Debate was raging within. Jules Favre had proclaimed the end of the empire, and Adolphe Thiers, the most perfect servant of the murderous capitalists, called for the nomination of a provisional government of national defense. The crowd and the partisans, which included both the bourgeois republicans and some radical elements, moved to the Hôtel de Ville. There, they found a gathering of the most prominent socialists and quarante-huitards (Forty-Eighters), veterans of the failed 1848 revolution.

The Prussians wanted not only the official surrender of a government they could trust, but also the transfer of now-occupied Alsace-Lorraine. Louis-Napoléon was sent packing to Great Britain. The partisan Government of National Defense sued for “peace with honor,” but refused to accept a loss of territory. The Prussian army advanced into France and, unopposed, marched all the way to Paris.

This new government was aggressively conservative. They made it clear that they were committed to “God, Family, and Property.” Paris took on a festive air, all its residents confident they would be able to resist the Prussians, just as their ancestors had resisted the Austrians during the first Revolution of 1789. At the same time, the wealthiest residents of Paris fled the city. 

The socialists mobilized at the same time. The Arrondissements, the districts of the city of Paris, each created a local “vigilance committee,” composed of coalitions of radicals, which set out to organize the defense of the city. On 15 September, the committees published a red poster demanding elections for the municipal government. They formed a single Central Committee of the Twenty Arrondissements and signed the red poster. They demanded popular control over defense, the food supply, housing, and the universal armament of the Parisians. The word “Commune” was heard on the streets, referring back to the old Insurrectionary Commune of the Revolution. The Prussian armies surrounded Paris and took its forts, even as the Government of National Defense and France’s wealthy capitalists took flight. 

The first siege of Paris began on 19 September. The Prussian army ringed the city around, occupied its outlying forts, and encamped in the palace at Versailles. The Parisians treated it lightly until they heard, at the end of October, that the last hope of relief was gone: the French army under siege at Metz inexplicably surrendered to the Prussians. On October 31, this boiled into rage against the Government of National Defense. Angry workers attacked the Hôtel de Ville and, led by Blanquists, stormed it. Militants announced a new government but, once the crowd dispersed, the Government of National Defense swept in and arrested most of the leading socialist partisans.

By December, people were “talking only of what they eat, when they can eat, and what there is to eat…. Hunger begins and famine is on the horizon,” according to the journal of Edmond de Goncourt. Signs were hung advertising “canine and feline butchers.” Calls for the Commune grew louder, and twice more, the Vigilance Committees put up red flyers announcing that the hour had come for Paris to govern herself.

During the siege, the Vigilance Committees did what there was to be done to help distribute the little resources they had. The Government of National Defense suspended rent payments and debt repayments. The National Guard swelled to 400,000 strong and its petit-bourgeois, shopkeeper character was completely overwhelmed by radicals, socialists, and workers who joined either for ideological reasons or because the Guard continued to pay a stipend, even while the city was starving.

On January 28, 1871, the Government of National Defense agreed to the first preliminary armistice with the Prussians, ending the siege of Paris and permitting food to re-enter the capital. Two days later, the government signed the surrender at the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles. France would have to pay an enormous war indemnity and cede the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine to the Prussians. The government scheduled new elections almost immediately, despite the outcry that this would favor monarchists and conservatives. True to the fear, the monarchists dominated the National Assembly, which removed to Bordeaux rather than its ancient seat of Paris. Adolphe Thiers, an avowed restorationist, was elected head of the executive authority of the republic. Thiers and the other reactionary capitalists had been long suspected during the war of favoring a slow strategy of attrition so the Prussians would bleed out the radicals in Paris. Many had heard the wealthy muttering “Better Bismarck than Blanqui.”

Although the armistice had disarmed the remnants of the French armies, the National Guard were permitted to keep their weapons and, above all, their cannons. Some of the guard units had paid for those guns themselves. Thiers and the new government were wary of the National Guard, and feared that they would side with the radicals — which they would, because they had been thoroughly infiltrated.

On March 7, the National Assembly ended the moratorium on debts and rent, declaring repayment due immediately on penalty of eviction from rented rooms. They also ended the daily stipend of 1.50 francs for national guardsmen, leaving tens of thousands of families without enough money to buy food or fuel. Adolphe Thiers and the National Assembly moved the seat of government from Paris to Versailles and issued their orders from the safety of the old royal palace.

On March 17, Thiers decided to be done with his enemies in Paris, the militant socialists and republicans. On 18 March, the Versailles government sent army troops to take the cannons from the National Guard of Paris. The guns had been moved to Montmartre and Belleville, where they could command a range of fire over the city. He said, “Businessmen were going around constantly repeating that the financial operations would never be started until all those wretches were finished off and their cannons taken away. An end had to be put to all this, and then one could get back to business.”

At Montmartre, the 171 cannons were ranked up into two rows on the heights and also on a plateau further down. At 4:30 a.m., March 18, troops began to enter Montmartre. A column of 4,000 men under the command of General Bernard de Susbielle began marching to place Pigalle at the foot of the great hill. As women in these neighborhoods woke to buy bread first thing in the morning, they found themselves facing the French army.

The residents of Montmartre mounted the steeples of their churches and sounded the tocsin bells, which had been the call of the insurrectionary Commune going back to the first Revolution of 1789. The National Guard answered. The civil war had begun.

The Civil War in France

Although the troops from Versailles had arrived to secure the cannon in Montmartre, they had failed to bring horses with them, and so the guns remained immobile. When horses finally came, they started to limber the cannon and move them down from the hilltop. But the women who had been out that morning had wakened their families, and Louise Michel, the so-called “Red Virgin,” the fighter for socialism, had donned her National Guard uniform and run out to assist. The crowd threw bottles and rocks at the regular soldiers. One observer saw “women and children swarming up the hillside in a compact mass; the artillerymen tried in vain to fight their way through the crowd, but the waves of people engulfed everything, surging over the cannon-mounts, over the ammunition wagons, under the wheels, under the horses’ feet, paralyzing the advance of the riders who spurred on their mounts in vain. The horses reared and lunged forward, their sudden movement clearing the crowd, but the space was filled at once by a backwash created by the surging multitude.” A national guardsman shouted, “Cut the traces!” Men and women drew their knives and cut the harnesses that tied the cannon to the horses. To cries of encouragement, the artillerymen left the guns and joined the crowd in eating meat, rolls, and wine. On the other side of the hill, troops refused to fire on a national guard platoon. The national guard began building a barricade. The troops withdrew. 

On Montmartre itself, General Lecomte stepped forward to get the guns moving again. He ordered his men to fire into the crowds. They did not move. He ordered again, and still the men did not fire. He ordered a third time. A woman shouted back, “Will you fire on us? On your brothers? On our husbands?  On our children?” Lecomte threatened to shoot any man who refused to fire and asked if his men “were going to surrender to that scum?” Louise Michel later wrote that a noncommissioned officer left ranks, “placed himself before his company and yelled, louder than Lecomte, ‘Turn up your rifle butts!’ The soldiers obeyed… [T]he Revolution was made.”

All of the columns were engaged in similar scenes, though the troops on rue Lepic had been beaten off by gunfire. National guardsmen took Lecomte and a few other officers prisoner.

Mayor Clemenceau, a petit-bourgeois politician and mayor of the 18th Arrondissement, which contained Montmartre, went down to broker the general’s release. At the same time, national guardsmen arrived with another prisoner: General Clément Thomas, the butcher of ‘48, who had slaughtered so many working people during the June Days. The crowd pulled Thomas and Lecomte into a garden and shot them both.

Adolphe Thiers ordered the troops out of the city to regroup at Versailles and ordered the evacuation from the forts of Mont-Valérien, Issy, Vanves, and Montrouge. He quickly realized that abandoning Mont-Valérien was a mistake, and his troops beat off a halfhearted assault by the National Guard to retake it.

The communist Rigault took command of the police. He ordered the release of political prisoners. The Blanquists demanded the National Guard follow Thiers’ retreating army to Versailles and destroy the Versailles government, but the Central Committee of the National Guard (which had been reorganized along democratic lines) demurred. The Jacobins and members of the International agreed; they would try to resolve the crisis by peace.

On 19 March, Émile Duval warned the Central Committee that conservative elements in the wealthy First and Second Arrondissements were on the move. They had summoned their conservative, bourgeois National Guard units to Versailles. Members of the committee protested that they did not have the popular mandate to defend Paris and refused to take authority over the revolution. They only went so far as to order detachments of guardsmen to key points in the city such as the Bank of Paris and the Tuileries. The committee then determined to hold elections.

They sent out a list of demands to the National Assembly in Versailles insisting that Paris be granted the right to elect its own mayors, that the prefecture of police be abolished, that the regular army be kept outside of Paris, that the National Guard be allowed to elect its officers, that the moratorium on rents be resumed, and that the National Assembly proclaim the republic. They declared that since 18 March, Paris “has no other government than that of the people and this is the best one. Paris is free. Centralized authority no longer exists.” But the mayors of the arrondissements refused to meet with the central committee, as did the deputies of Paris in the National Assembly.

The conservative and monarchist National Assembly met in a secret session on 22 March. They determined that no concessions would be made. “The criminals who now dominate Paris have attacked Paris: now they attack society itself.” Thiers explained that they should give the Commune time to establish itself while they built up an army so they could make the bloody execution of the Commune’s members appear legitimate. Thiers relished the thought of civil war. It was understood by Thiers and others in the Assembly that this was a class war.

On March 23, the Paris branch of the International proclaimed, “The independence of the Commune will mean a freely discussed contract which will put an end to class conflict and bring about social equality.” The supporters of the Commune were now being called Communards, and the specter of Communism clearly animated the Versailles government, which was terrified that the Commune would redivide property. Protestant minister Élie Reclus said, “Lazare, always starving, is no longer content with the crumbs that fall from the table of the rich, and now he has dared ask for his part of the feast.”

The city held municipal elections on 26 March to elect a central council of the Commune. Most of the delegates were Jacobins, Blanquists, and members of the International — the wealthiest residents had already fled the city.

The Commune needed money. It needed to pay the national guardsmen their 1.50 francs a day and to pay its municipal employees their workman’s wage. Arguments broke out in the provisional authority over where the money was to be gotten. Some demanded the remaining gold reserves left during the siege be taken from the Bank of France. However, the delegate for finance, François Jourde, instead arranged a loan of 700,000 francs and credit for 16 million francs more — nothing compared to the 258-million-franc credit received by Versailles.

The Commune Council met 57 times during the life of the Commune. It established executive commissions, each run by a delegate. These commissions convened twice daily at the Hôtel de Ville, but the meetings ran long, were increasingly contentious, and wasted much time discussing issues of no importance. Some members were swept away in the ceremony of their new authority. Most of the servants of the Commune had no experience in government.

On 10 May, the newly constituted German Empire and Thiers’ treasonous Versailles government signed the Treaty of Frankfurt, formalizing the capitulation of France. Immediately, Bismarck released captured French soldiers to Versailles, swelling the size of the counterrevolutionary army.

The forces of the Commune were led by their delegate for war, Gustave Cluseret, a Paris-born graduate of the elite military school of St. Cyr. He had been wounded in Algeria in the colonial venture of the very last Bourbon king and had fought as a commander of the Guarde Mobile to put down the June Days in 1848. He had gone to the United States to fight for the Union Army in the American Civil War and become an American citizen. He returned to France in 1867 committed firmly to social revolution and was jailed in 1868 for writing revolutionary articles.

He believed that if he could hold off Thiers and his minions, the Commune would be able to reach a negotiated settlement with Versailles. But the National Guard resisted Cluseret’s attempts to make it into a regular army. The democratic councils within the Guard sent out their own commands and ignored Cluseret.

The first fighting began on March 30, 1871, two days after the Commune was officially proclaimed. A patrol of the Versailles army came upon a Communard perimeter post. The troops hesitated to fire. General Gaston Gallifet ordered the artillery to fire and threatened them with a pistol. He then charged forward and took prisoners as the Communards fled. This was the first time the army had obeyed orders to attack their fellow Parisians and Frenchmen. It would not be the last.

On April 2, a skirmish broke out at Courbevoie. A military surgeon general called Pasquier approached the Communard lines to negotiate, but his uniform resembled that of a gendarme colonel. The Communards shot him, and a firefight saw the Communards beaten. Thirty or so Communards were taken prisoner, but General Vinoy ordered that all soldiers, men from the Guarde Mobile, and sailors who were taken prisoner were to be shot. There would be no quarter and no prisoners. Any citizens of Paris taken under arms would be summarily executed as traitors.

In response to the losses at Courbevoie and the massacre of the Communards there, the Commune assembled some 20,000 men and, in the early morning of 3 April, they marched out of Paris towards Versailles. The cannons of the national government began to shell them immediately from Mont-Valérien. The columns straggled. They failed to coordinate. Some of the National Guard seemed to be barely paying attention as the troops from Versailles closed on their positions.

In fact, many of the guardsmen assumed that the line troops would not fire on them and would turn their rifles around, butt up, like they had done on Montmartre. They did not. Two Communard generals, Émile Duval and Gustave Flourens, important and energetic men within the Commune, were taken captive. Flourens was hacked to death on the banks of the Seine by a gendarme. Duval and his chief of staff were shot.

This disorganization and hesitance would typify every military action taken by the Commune. By the time it was determined to act, it was already too late.

The Red Flag

The Commune banned the death penalty, though Thiers had no such scruples. On April 7 at the place Voltaire, below the prison of La Roquette, the national guardsmen burned a symbolic guillotine.

On April 16 the Commune ordered a survey of abandoned workshops. They expropriated these and turned them into workers’ cooperatives. A cooperative iron foundry was started in Grenelle employing 250 workers and producing shells for the city’s defense. Night baking was abolished on 20 April. Maximum salaries for municipal employees were set at 6,000 francs a year. Employers were barred from assessing fines from workers’ wages. Labor exchanges were established.

“The social revolution will not be operative until women are equal to men. Until then, you have only the appearance of revolution,” proclaimed Citoyenne Destrée. Louise Michel said, “[A woman] bends under mortification; in her home her burdens crush her. Man wants to keep her that way, to be sure that she will never encroach upon his function or his titles. Gentlemen, we do not want either your functions or your titles.” Proletarian women were (and are) doubly exploited — by gendered labor and by their employers. Bosses are the “social wound that must be taken care of.” 

Élisabeth Dmitrieff, née Elisavieta Koucheleva, was actually dispatched to the Commune by Marx himself to act as an observer there. She became intimately involved in calling for the creation of workshops for unemployed women, for equal salaries for male and female workers, and for a reduction in overall work hours within the Commune. She founded the Union des Femmes alongside four other women and took a position as its general secretary.

The Commune held up a revolutionary morality — a high standard of honesty and accountability. The Commune rejected high salaries for officials. Public servants in appearance and rhetoric were to be public servants in fact. Marx covered the public aspects of the Commune and its political organization in detail.

The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at any time. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class…. The police, which until then had been the instrument of the Government, was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune. So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be done at workmen’s wages. The privileges and the representation allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the high dignitaries themselves…. Having once got rid of the standing army and the police, the instruments of physical force of the old government, the Commune proceeded at once to break the instrument of spiritual suppression, the power of the priests…. The judicial functionaries lost that sham independence… they were thenceforward to be elective, responsible, and revocable.

Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, pp. 217-21 (1973)

To illuminate what this meant, Lenin compared the governance of the Commune to the modern parliamentary “democracies.” The bankrupt nature of “representative” government in, for instance, the U.S. Empire is made clear by the comparison to the truly representative government of the Commune.

The way out of parliamentarism is not, of course, the abolition of representative institutions and the elective principle, but the conversion of the representative institutions from talking shops into “working” bodies…. [T]his is a blow straight from the shoulder at the present-day parliamentarian country, from America to Switzerland, from France to Britain, Norway and so forth — in these countries the real business of “state” is performed behind the scenes and is carried on by the departments, chancelleries, and General Staffs. Parliament is given up to talk for the special purpose of fooling the “common people.”

V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution (1918)

Counterrevolution: The Bloody Week

On April 2, the second siege of Paris began; Versaille ordered the armies of counterrevolution to begin shelling Paris. By 21 May, Versailles had indiscriminately killed hundreds and possibly thousands of Parisians and destroyed hundreds of buildings in the western and central districts. The British resident John Leighton said that Versailles was “not content with” battering forts and ramparts killing Communard soldiers but also targeted “women and children, ordinary passers-by [including] unfortunates who were necessarily obliged to venture into the neighbouring streets, for the purpose of buying bread.” U.S. diplomat Wickham Hoffman agreed: “It must always be a mystery why the French bombarded so persistently the quarter of the Arch de Triomphe — the West End of Paris — the quarter where nine out of ten of the inhabitants were known friends of the Government.”

This was worse by far than the Prussian siege. Versailles bombed medical facilities. Thiers proclaimed defense of property while the cannons of Versailles obliterated rows of houses on the Champs-Élysées.

The Commune tried to achieve a negotiated settlement with Versailles, but every attempt was rebuffed. Even as late as 21 April, the Freemasons in the city sent a delegation, but Thiers sent them away with the dismissive (and telling) remark that “A few buildings will be damaged, a few people killed, but the law will prevail.”

On April 28, with the Versailles cannon pounding the city continuously and threatening to reduce its fortifications, the Commune floated a plan for a five-member Committee of Public Safety. On May 1, the Commune approved the creation of the committee by a vote of 34-28. The Committee was a self-conscious echo of the 1793 Committee of Public Safety. It immediately called up General Gustave Cluseret, and, blaming him for transforming the National Guard into an effective army, he was accused of treason and incarcerated in the Conciergerie.

One by one, the forts of Paris fell to the army of Versailles. The National Guard showed up in fewer and fewer numbers to their musters. On May 9, only 7,000 guardsmen arrived to a call that was meant to call up 12,000. On May 12, Jenny Marx, who was in Paris, told her father that the Paris Commune would be destroyed. “We are on the verge of a second June massacre.”

Spies and counterrevolutionaries in the employ of Thiers brought him information about the state of affairs in the city. He spoke menacingly of his obligation to order “dreadful measures” to destroy the Communards. He bribed guardsmen away and operated a secretive military organization within the walls.

On May 15, the leaders of the Commune saw that the end was coming. They knew they could not defend the city. Instead, the Commune determined to deny the old order of the city, to destroy the symbols of despotism and class-rule throughout the city. They fired Adolphe Thiers’ house first. They destroyed the Vendôme Column, the symbol of Napoléon’s empire, on May 16. 

On May 21, a counterrevolutionary in the city realized the Point-du-Jour was undefended and Porte Saint-Cloud was unmanned. He waved a white flag from the ramparts and Thiers’ killers entered the city. Within the hour, line troops under General Félix Douay had entered the capital. Porte Saint-Cloud and Porte d’Auteuil fell without resistance. The defenders began to build their last barricades within the city, each National Guard unit taking responsibility for its own defense and refusing to follow central orders.

Versailles moved slowly, executing everyone under arms they found. They swept the streets for traps, mines, and ambuscades. They poured fire into any house they believed held Communards. Fifty thousand line troops were soon in Paris and, within seventeen hours, 130,000 of Versailles soldiers, along with heavy artillery, had entered the city. They moved easily along the great boulevards. No Communard cannons concentrated on them — they were too uncoordinated. In twenty-four hours, Versailles had taken one-third of Paris from the Commune. Everyone they captured, they gunned down.

A woman ran into a building carrying a red flag. She was found in her attic with crates of weapons. The troops of Versailles hauled her down the stairs, but shot her before they reached the bottom.

The barricades were not enough. That Monday, on the rue Montmartre, a retreating Communard soldier screamed in tears, “Betrayed! Betrayed! They came in where we did not expect them!” At the place d’Italie, national guardsmen secretly tossed away their rifles, muttering, “It is the end!”

Vainly, at this late hour, the Commune proclaimed the levée en masse, the universal armament of the inhabitants of Paris. The American, W. Pembroke Fetridge, watched about thirty women demand a mitrailleuse machine gun to protect their barricade defending the Place du Palais-Royal. “They all wore a band of crepe round the left arm; each one had lost a husband, a lover, a son, or a brother whom she had sworn to avenge. Horses being at this time scarce in the service of the Commune, they harnessed themselves and dragged [the mitrailleuse] off, fastening their skirts round their waists lest they should prove an impediment to their march. Others followed, bearing the caissons filled with munitions. The last carried the flag.”

On Tuesday, the Commune issued an order stating, “Blow up or set fire to the houses which may interfere with your system of defense. The barricades should not be liable to attack from the houses.” The Commune ordered the burning of any house from which Versailles fired shots.

The Palace of the Conseil d’État was burned to deny it to the enemy. The Committee of Public Safety ordered the destruction of the Palais-Royal. The Ministry of Finance was torched. The Naval Ministry went up; the Hôtel de Ville was ordered destroyed. The Commune had become the scene of intense despair. Better to burn down the city than to give it to the enemy. Louise Michel warned, “Paris will be ours or cease to exist.” On Tuesday, May 22, the Communard general Jean Bergeret ordered the Tuileries Palace to be consigned to the fire. Two days later, a Montmartre woman asked what was burning; the Communard replied, “It’s nothing at all,” only the Palais-Royal and the Tuileries, “because we do not want a king any more.”

Communards were executed regardless of their resistance now. On the rue Saint-Honoré, line troops found thirty national guardsmen in a printing shop with no weapons. They took them to the rue Saint-Florentin and shot them in the enormous ditch in front of the remains of the barricade. Nearby, on the rue Royal, troops found six men and a young woman hiding in barrels. They were thrown in a ditch and killed. When line troops reached the place, Vendôme, Versailles shot thirty Communards.

At the Church of the Madeleine, Versailles used a mitrailleuse to execute 300 Communards. On May 23, an officer ordered a soldier who refused to shoot women and children shot. Not far away from there, troops killed a man who had done nothing, then shot his wife and child when they hugged him too long and then shot a passing doctor who tried to help the child.

By Friday, the line soldiers were lying to national guards on the barricades, telling them to come down and all would be well. They were taken aside and shot. Victims were taken to basements or attics to be executed. Police detachments hunted for suspected Communards. On Saturday evening, the Versailles troops blew up the gates at Père Lachaise and stormed in. Hundreds of Communards fell in the rows in hand-to-hand bayonet combat amid the tombs. Hundreds of guardsmen were lined up in rows along a wall and machine-gunned. Clemenceau would later recall that the machine guns were firing for thirty minutes without pause. On Sunday, groups of 150, 200, and even 300 were brought continuously to the cemetery where they were machine-gunned by the troops of Adolphe Thiers.

Pierre Vésinier, a journalist and member of the Commune, wrote that thousands of bodies “strewed the avenues and tombs. Many were murdered in the graves where they had sought shelter, and dyed the coffins with their blood…. [T]errible fusillades, frightful platoon fires, intermingled with the crackling noise of mitrailleuses, plainly told of the wholesale massacre…. Property, religion, and society were once more saved.”

Sunday, May 28, 1871, marked the end of the Commune. Executions continued until the end of July.

Lessons from the Paris Commune

“Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?”

(emphasis added.) Friedrich Engels, On Authority (1874)

“[T]wo mistakes destroyed the fruits of the splendid victory. The proletariat stopped half-way: instead of setting about “expropriating the expropriators,” it allowed itself to be led astray by dreams of establishing a higher justice in the country united by a common national task; such institutions as the banks, for example, were not taken over, and Proudhonist theories about a “just exchange,” etc., still prevailed among the socialists. The second mistake was excessive magnanimity on the part of the proletariat: instead of destroying its enemies it sought to exert moral influence on them; it underestimated the significance of direct military operations in civil war, and instead of launching a resolute offensive against Versailles that would have crowned its victory in Paris, it tarried and gave the Versailles government time to gather the dark forces and prepare for the blood-soaked week of May.

But despite all its mistakes the Commune was a superb example of the great proletarian movement of the nineteenth century…. The Commune taught the European proletariat to pose concretely the tasks of the socialist revolution.

The lesson learnt by the proletariat will not be forgotten.”

V.I. Lenin, Lessons of the Commune (1908)

The Commune has taught us the form and has played a historical role as the forerunner to the new society yet to come. It has taught us, too, that we cannot be lax in the prosecution of the social revolution. We cannot forget what our enemies will do to us if they should get the chance. Behind every smiling politician lurks the face of Adolphe Thiers, and behind every executive order is the Party of Order, waiting to strangle the revolution in its infancy.

Men and women died to teach us these lessons; they have died so that the revolution, the same revolution, their revolution and ours, may live.

The place was Chicago, the year 1886, and the ground fertile with revolution. With the Union’s victory in the U.S. Civil War — and the triumph of waged over enslaved labor, of capitalist industrial over slavery-based production — the development of capitalism in the U.S. Empire, long impeded by the backwardness of the Southern plantation economy, at last accelerated toward maturity. The country’s industrial output exploded, and its industrial proletarian workforce, swelled by Black freed persons and waves of migration and settlement from Europe, Asia, and Latin America, dramatically expanded. As U.S. capitalism matured, so did the proletariat mature as a class.

Chicago was then the central hub of the country’s transcontinental railway network. It connected the old U.S. colonial metropoles of the northeast Atlantic coast — New York, Boston, etc. — to the developing settler colonies along the Pacific.

The city had also earned a reputation as America’s larder, thanks to its massive slaughtering yards and meat industry. The Union Stock Yard & Transit Co. was founded by a number of railway firms in 1865. By the 1880s, the Union Yard spread over 375 acres and housed 75,000 hogs, 21,000 cattle, and 22,000 sheep at any given time. Each year, the Yards slaughtered somewhere on the order of 2 million animals. The horrible noise and the even worse stench were internationally infamous. This abattoir of animal (and, through overwork, exhaustion, and accident, human) flesh was famously cataloged by the socialist journalist and author Upton Sinclair in his 1906 novel The Jungle. By the end of the 1860s, the huge meatpacking firms in Chicago had perfected an ice-cooled refrigerator car, designed to transport meat by railway across the country without ruining it.

As the railyards and the stockyards consolidated, Chicago’s burgeoning industrialists were stricken with an unquenchable thirst for cheap labor. In 1880, the U.S. population was 50 million. Between 1880 and 1920, over 20 million Southern, Eastern, and Central European migrants entered the U.S., with smaller numbers arriving from Mexico, China and other east Asian countries, and the Ottoman Empire. In the 1870s alone, 60,000 Europeans flooded into Chicago, reaching a total of 204,859 by 1880. At that point, they were 56% of the workforce. By far, the largest number, 163,482 workers, came from the German Empire. The overwhelming majority of these immigrants lacked any property aside from their personal effects, and came to the U.S. as laborers. In the 1880’s, 40.5% of all residents in Cook County were migrants, and the majority were either first- or second-generation citizens. Well supplied by waves of poor freed persons and migrants, propertyless and desperate for work, and ripe for conversion into an industrial army of proletarians, the capitalists drank, and drank deep.

During the 1880–90 decade, Chicago doubled in size. Large factory complexes cleared land near the stockyards. The coal operators had established their own “company towns” or “planned communities.” Advertised as philanthropic ventures, a sort of “caring capitalism” in which the workers would be well-looked after by their bosses, these were instead planned towns centered on a company-owned mines, to which workers were lured, debt-trapped by a combination of low wages and artificially high costs of living, and effectively imprisoned in an endless cycle of indentured servitude. The Pullman Company, which owned the captive town of Pullman (just outside of Chicago, the rail hub of the Empire) to house the workers who made the Pullman railway cars, would, less than a decade later, cut the low wages of its workers to near-starvation levels. This triggered the infamous Pullman Rail Strike, during which striking workers brought the U.S. Empire’s railways to a halt from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Coal Wars were on the horizon.

Socialists and the Working-Class Movement

We find ourselves at the end of the “long 19th Century,” nine years after the revolutionary upsurge and Great Rail Strike that led to the formation and brutal repression of the proletarian St. Louis Commune. The Long Depression of 1873–1896 was in full swing. The period began with the “Panic of 1873,” which saw the collapse and ruin of one of the U.S. Empire’s largest banks, Jay Cooke and Co., a giant that had financed the Union during the Civil War and the Northern Pacific Railway thereafter, and the shut-down of the New York Stock Exchange for ten days. In the midst of the depression, socialist and anarchist labor agitators had found wide, sympathetic audiences among the increasingly impoverished, still-young U.S. proletariat, and labor mobilization across the country had reached a fever-pitch. Hymns for the martyrs of the defeated Paris and St. Louis Communes, the thousands of socialist workers mass-murdered by reactionary forces, were sung by demonstrators throughout the country. The clarions of socialism and political liberty had issued their call, and the people — the working-poor and oppressed — were answering in the millions.

This labor agitation came, however, with a patina of white-settler chauvinism. For instance, the 1877 “Great Uprising” in San Francisco, led by the Workingmen’s Party of the United States, which nearly overturned the government in that city, was at the same time virulently Sinophobic — violently hostile to recent Chinese migrants. The young, immature socialist movement in the U.S. would eventually fail to overcome the racist tendencies that predominated within it, and would collapse under the weight of its own internal contradictions. The St. Louis Commune itself had collapsed largely because the white socialists actively chose racist discrimination against their Black fellow workers over solidarity and a fighting alliance against the capitalists.

The Militants of Chicago

Socialist and anarchist veterans of the Great Railway Strike of 1877 and the St. Louis Commune moved to Chicago and, along with the existing socialists of the city, opened the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, a German-language radical newspaper. Albert Parsons, Lucy Parsons’ husband, founded The Alarm in Chicago at around the same time. The Knights of Labor, a non-socialist and fundamentally capitalist-reactionary organization, began agitating in the city in the 1880s as well. Chicago was the industrial heart of the U.S. state, and socialists of all stripes were seeded among its workers and rising from their ranks.

A battle raged inside the U.S. socialist movement, and raged with particular intensity in Chicago, over whether or not the proletariat should organize itself into militias, over whether or not it should be armed. They had all watched in 1871 as the Paris Commune was destroyed. Albert Parsons threatened that “if people try to break up our meetings… they will meet foes worthy of their steel.”

One of those militants was August Vincent Theodore Spies. August left his home of Landeck, Germany in 1872. By the time he landed in New York he was well-read in German history — particularly what he saw as the social heroes of the Protestant Reformation, like Thomas Muntzer. Like many other German immigrants, Spies gravitated toward the capital of Teutonic life in the U.S.: Chicago. He settled in the North Side and began work as an upholsterer. By the end of 1875, when the city’s small band of predominantly German socialists began organizing massive parades demanding bread and work, August had been introduced to the writings of Karl Marx.

He watched as the city’s businessmen formed a militia to defend their stores from the socialist marchers of ‘75. By 1877, the year of the Great Rail Strike, Spies was an avowed Marxist. He met Albert Parsons and the two worked together as union organizers and socialist agitators. When the Rail Strike broke out, it spread to Chicago. On July 25, 1877, strikers gathered to hold meetings; they were attacked by patrolmen. That night, a Burlington switchman was shot dead by the police for the crime of being a striking worker. On July 26, the following day, blue-coated police shot into a crowd of protestors at the viaduct where Halstead Street crossed 16th Street.

The police marched up Halsted Street to the Vorwärts Turner Hall at 12th Street. Inside, the members of a cabinetmaker’s association were discussing the eight-hour-day question with their employers in German. Officers burst through the doors, clambered into the meeting hall, and clubbed cabinetmakers without mercy. Charles Tessman, a twenty-eight-year-old union cabinetmaker, was shot through the brain. Outside, a Chicago police sergeant fired his pistol at bystanders while his men beat cabinetmakers fleeing the hall in terror.

Having witnessed the “Battle of the Viaduct,” many German workers joined the Lehr und Wehr Verein (“Education and Defense Society”), an armed organization of workingmen dedicated to community defense. August Spies was among them. From then on, he adhered absolutely to Marx’s dictum that the proletariat must at all times be prepared for armed conflict with the enemy state and its apparatus of oppression.

In 1881, the Supreme Court of Illinois upheld a state law banning the Lehr und Wehr Verein and all other proletarian militias. Parsons and Spies watched as the businessmen’s First Regiment continued to arm itself in public and conduct drills, but the workers’ self-defense groups were banned. The Bill of Rights, Parsons argued, did not protect the socialist; it protected only their sworn enemies. (It is this case, by the by, Presser v. Illinois, in which Herman Presser was fined $10 for belonging to the Lehr und Wehr Verein, which formed the legal basis for all U.S. gun control until it was finally overruled in 2010. A century later, during the 1960’s and 70’s, the Illinois court’s ruling would serve as the legal grounds for the State of California, headed by then-Governor Ronald Reagan, to disarm another Communist organization: the Black Panther Party.)

The militants within the Socialist Labor Party took control of the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, a German-language socialist newspaper with a wide circulation among the organized workers, and hired August Spies as its editor. The militants held a conference in Chicago in 1881 and, tired of tepid trade-unionist reformism and its transitory, merely “paper”  victories, staged a split within the SLP. The splitting faction called their new organization the Revolutionary Socialist Labor Party. Its founding principles urged the formation of communistic trade unions that would forsake the ballot and take up arms. It proclaimed it would lead “armed organizations of workingmen who stand ready with the gun to resist encroachment upon their rights.”

Fight for the Eight-Hour Day

In 1886, most U.S. laborers worked 60–70 hours per week. Ten hours a day was the industry standard — and the capitalists wouldn’t accept a minute less from their workers. Indeed, some firms forced their workers to maintain the grueling pace of 12- or 14-hour days for six days a week. The rallying cry of the U.S. socialist movement was the reduction of the working day to 8 hours, the working week to 40 hours, but with the same, 10-hour pay. The Eight Hour League had begun the long and bloody campaign to realize this demand in the 1860s, but had failed to secure real reforms. Although the State of Illinois passed an eight-hour law under pressure from organized labor and socialist organizations in 1866, which went into effect on May 1, 1867, the employers categorically refused to honor it, and the State refused to enforce it. The capitalists claimed this infringed on their “freedom of contract,” and demanded the right to “freely contract” for longer hours. Through this “freedom of contract” “loophole,” the capitalist courts saw to it that the law was reduced to a mere cipher. No firm would hire those who refused the longer hours, and the workers were forced to accept employment on the capitalists’ terms. The reforms therefore represented only a paper victory for organized labor, and an inconvenience for the capitalists that was overcome with the stroke of a pen.

Chicago, the heart of the labor movement at that time, erupted into spontaneous marches and protests. The capitalists deployed the police to club them into submission. The eight-hour movement was devastated.

In October of 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions, led by Marxists and other revolutionary socialists, set May 1, 1886, as the day by which the eight-hour work day would become the standard — whether the bosses agreed or not. This time, things would be done correctly; the victory would come not from a capitalist-owned state government, but from the organized workers themselves. All across the U.S., marches would be coordinated; there would be no spontaneous protests exposed to the batons of the urban cohorts of the capitalist police and National Guard. The U.S. labor unions began to prepare. The Arbeiter-Zeitung demanded the eight-hour day. “Eight hours work, eight hours rest, eight hours for what we will,” was the call.

Strike!

On Saturday, May 1, 1886, nearly half a million workers across the U.S. went on strike. They called it “Emancipation Day.” In Chicago herself, it was estimated that 40,000 workers left their workplaces to march, and twice as many people took to the streets to join them. The city was quiescent. Her vast skyline of smokestacks was nearly still. Factory power plants were silent, the coal slumbering peacefully in its stalls or barrels. Steamships rode at anchor, unable to take on supplies.

The workers were on strike — and not only in Chicago. All over the country, workers marched in solidarity. In New York City, they were on strike. In Detroit and in Milwaukee, they were on strike. The machines stopped whirring. The looms waited. In factories and plants all over the republic, the productive forces of Capital were frozen. The spindles and lathes, scythes and scissors, hammers and presses, that day-in and day-out had produced a continuous rattle, and continuous clink of coin for their capitalist owners, and a continuous exhaustion for their worker-operators, were now gathering dust where they stood. They were wasting away, and so was the potential for profits they contained, useless without the workers to set them into motion. If you listened closely, you could just about hear the soft sizzle of money burning.

But not at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Plant in Chicago. The Reaper Works was not idle. Its 360 foot, four-story brick face was alive with motion. The nine-room woodworking department was filled with sound. The nine-thousand square-foot blacksmith shop thundered with the labor of hammers. The foundries and the engine house: thumping away at their tasks.

Cyrus McCormick, Jr., president of the McCormick Harvester Company, was not about to be cheated out of his day’s profit by any socialist balderdash. No, he would keep his factory open while all the rest were luxuriating in the cool May air. And how? Cyrus McCormick had hired scabs. This came as no surprise, since McCormick had hired Pinkerton agency mercenaries in 1885 to beat trade unionists demonstrating in Chicago’s downtown streets.

In fact, at the Reaper Works there was a labor dispute still bubbling over from earlier in the year. After locking out striking molders, plant managers had sought replacements all over the midwest and issued revolvers to 82 loyal employees. They built kitchens to serve the 400 Chicago police sent to protect strikebreakers. Cyrus McCormick was ready on May 1, because he had been fighting this battle since April. As the rest of Chicago held its breath, the armed battalions at the McCormick Harvester Company simply went about another day, prepared to see the crowds gathered by the Arbeiter-Zeitung and the discharged unionized workforce howling on the street just outside the compound.

Nevertheless, fully half of McCormick’s scabs defected to the strike, leaving their posts in the works. The strike at McCormick, begun as an isolated dispute over pay, ran right up into the general strike of Emancipation Day. As the whole city, the whole country, joined the strike, even the McCormick strikebreakers left their posts. Management, now desperate, promised an eight-hour day to the strikebreakers if they returned. They made no concessions to the locked-out strikers.

By Monday, May 3, many of Chicago’s employers, reeling from a few days’ lost profits, started to cave. The breweries agreed to employ only union members, limit Sunday work to three hours, and set five break periods each day. The pork and beef packers agreed to the demand to cut the working-day from ten to eight hours, but with the same day’s pay. 

In the morning, August Spies rushed to his printing office to put together a special strike edition of the Arbeiter-Zeitung. He rushed all over the city to speak to strikers. In the early afternoon, a Czech-migrant lumber leader asked him to come down to the Southwest Side to give a speech, and the obliging Spies rushed there, too. When he got there, the crowd was large but uninterested. Just behind him and down the street stood “Fort McCormick,” the heavily armored and fortified Reaper Works. He was not there to rally the workers at McCormick’s. While he was still speaking, the bells at the works clanged, signaling the end of the strikebreakers’ workday. The McCormick strikers in the crowd wheeled away and surged toward the factory gates. Gunfire cracked and boomed from the heavily defended plant: the police had opened fire on the strikers. 200 armed officers boiled out of the Reaper Works, clubbing strikers with truncheons and shooting them at point blank range with pistols.

Spies escaped and sprinted back to the newspaper offices, where he grabbed handfuls of agitational leaflets before sprinting back into the fray. 

REVENGE! Workingmen, to Arms!!! Your masters sent out their bloodhounds — the police — they killed six of your brothers at McCormick’s this afternoon…. You have for years endured the most abject humiliations; you have endured the pangs of hunger and want; you have worked yourself to death; your children you have sacrificed to the factory lords…. [the master sends] his bloodhounds out to shoot and kill you! … If you are men, if you are the sons of grand sires who have shed their blood to free you, then you will rise in your might, Hercules, and destroy the hideous monster that seeks to destroy you. To arms, we call you. To arms!

Meetings of union workers and socialists were held that night to decide a response. Rather than gather the next day on Market Street, in their usual meeting place (because, as one socialist argued, this would serve as a “mouse trap” if the police attacked), the socialists decided to gather in a larger space — Haymarket Square.

4 May: Haymarket

On May 4, the strikes redoubled. Acts of rebellion erupted across Chicago. A dozen laundry girls employed at the Clifton House Hotel informed their foreman that they’d be running things. When he refused, they quit on the spot. Young women left clothing shops for the eight hour strike; at one shop, strikers removed the belt from an engine, rendering it useless. Ships were prevented from offloading at the queues by lumber shovers who refused to work unless they got their ten-hours’ pay for eight hours of work.

In the Pullman company town, union workers elected a committee to present their demands to Mr. Pullman himself. The delegation was made up of cabinetmakers, tinners, finishers, carpenters, wood turners, car builders, wheelwrights, upholsterers, and common laborers. Pullman, of course, refused to receive the delegation. In response, at 7 p.m. that day, the strike committee met with all 3,000 Pullman employees in the company baseball park, and they voted to strike.

Employers across the city demanded their still-legal shopowners’ militias be deployed against the workers. At noon on the 4th, Colonel E. B. Knox, commander of the First Infantry, was warned of 6,000 strikers in the lumber district. Knox called up the National Guard and armed them. The mob never arrived — the scare was a capitalist fabrication.

The Arbeiter-Zeitung compositor, Adolph Fischer, added the words “Working men, arm yourselves and appear in full force,” to a leaflet calling for the Haymarket meeting, even though the socialist planning committee had not suggested that workers bring guns to the rally at Haymarket. Spies demanded Fischer redraft the leaflet for fear that the words would provoke a police attack.

The rally began in the dark. The street stank of manure and rotting vegetables. A single gaslight on a lamppost guttered over the Haymarket. August Spies began the meeting saying it should be peaceable. For twenty years, he declared, workingmen had asked in vain for two hours less work each day; they’d trusted the “democratic” process, only to be betrayed by legislator “representatives” and treated with contempt by their employers. “I see Mr. Parsons is here,” he said, as Albert made his way through the crowd. “He is a much abler speaker in your tongue than I am, therefore I will conclude by introducing him.” Parsons climbed up on the wagons near Crane’s Alley and looked out on a street that was packed with 3,000 workers.

Parsons reminded the listeners of 1877 and the words of the railroad baron Tom Scott, who said of the striking trainmen in that year: “Give them a rifle diet and see how they like that bread.” He condemned the police for the outrage at the McCormick plant.

After Parsons, Samuel Fielden addressed the crowd. He warned of danger everywhere. He brought his speech to a fiery close, invoking the workers martyred in McCormick’s massacre the day before. “Keep your eye on the law,” he cried. “Throttle it. Kill it. Stop it. Do everything you can to wound it — to impede its progress.”

A storm was blowing up. Albert Parsons suggested adjourning. Fielden said this wasn’t necessary because he was about to conclude. Parsons left anyway, and so did some in the crowd. Even Fischer departed. By 10:20 p.m. only about 500 people remained at the Haymarket. Fielden finished his speech: “The Socialists are not going to declare war; but I tell you, war has been declared upon us; and I ask you to get hold of anything that will help you resist the onslaught of the enemy.”

Murmurs rippled through the gathered workers. Through the gaslight, it was clear that there was a column of blue tunics and brass buttons making its way across the entire width of Desplaines Street toward the Haymarket. George Brown, a Yorkshire-born shoemaker, said that he saw “a great company of police with their revolvers drawn, rushing into the crowd which parted to make way for them.” The police had decided to strike.

Their captain, William Ward, stopped his men. He shouted up to Fielden, “I command you in the name of the people of the State of Illinois to immediately and peaceably disperse.”

From Fielden: “But we are peaceable.” Then, after silence, “All right, we will go.” He started to climb down from the wagon.

There was hissing in the air. A Union navy veteran recognized the thing now passing overhead. He shouted, “Look out. Boys, for God’s sake, there is a shell!” A few men looked up. An orange flash ignited overhead, and the device detonated in the street.

The police reacted, without a second thought, by unloading a hailstorm of bullets. Although officers would later testify that the crowd had thrown the bomb and opened fire on the police, Captain Ward thought the bomb came from behind police lines. Two businessmen who later testified in the criminal trials likewise swore that no one in the crowd fired.

“Goaded by madness,” the Chicago Tribune wrote, “the police were in the condition of mind that permitted no resistance, and in a measure they were as dangerous as any mob of Communists, for they were blinded by passion and unable to distinguish between peaceful citizen and Nihilist assassin.” According to witnesses, patrolmen “emptied their revolvers, mainly into each other.”

The numbers of workers and of socialist and anarchist leaders killed went uncounted. The capitalist papers didn’t care. We know that the deployed police  killed seven of their fellow officers by friendly fire. We can only guess at what these rabid dogs of the capitalists inflicted on the demonstrating workers and their socialist leaders.

The state reacted to the Haymarket massacre, committed by their own shock troops — with at least seven, according to police reports, and probably far more, workingmen slain by police bullets — by arresting the editorial staff of the Arbeiter-Zeitung and several associated socialists and anarchists. Chicago city officials were determined from the outset to hang them; they had only to convince a stacked jury. The city coroner’s inquest listed the causes of death of the officers as bomb shrapnel “aided, abetted, and encouraged” by Spies, Parsons, and Fielden. For days, detectives flushed anarchists and Marxists from cellars, conveniently “discovering” caches of weapons and dynamite as they went.

Eight men — socialist and anarchist leaders — stood accused. The trial, Illinois v. Spies et al., started on June 21, 1886, and went on until August 11. The judge was openly hostile to the defendants. No union members or anyone with socialist sympathies was permitted to be seated on the jury. The jury returned eight guilty verdicts. The judge sentenced all but one man to be hanged.

Fielden received a governor’s commutation to a life sentence. One man blew his own face off with a blasting cap in his cell, lingering on for six hours in brutal agony, rather than face the shame of a public hanging. On November 11, 1887, four defendants — Engel, Fischer, Parsons, and Spies — were taken to the gallows. They sang the Marseillaise — a French Republican hymn. As he stood with the noose around his neck, Spies shouted, “The time will come when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today.”

May Day: The International Remembrance

Solidarity with the Haymarket Massacre martyrs poured into Chicago from around the globe. In 1890, the Marxist Second International decreed May 1 “International Workers Day” in honor of the Haymarket martyrs. The 1904 sixth conference of the Second International asked all Social-Democratic parties and all labor unions in all countries to agitate for the eight-hour day on May 1. Today, International Workers Day is celebrated in some form in almost every country on earth.

Since it was established, May Day demonstrations have played a pivotal role in revolutionary history.

Bloody May 1929 marked the high point of Communist labor agitation against the corrupt bourgeois Weimar German republic. The German Communist Party, at the height of its popularity numbering over 350,000 members and millions of supporters, marched in defiance of the Social-Democratic Party government on May 1 in 1929 — and, as at Haymarket nearly fifty years before, the government unleashed its shock-troop police, and ordered them to open fire on unarmed marchers. The reformist, capitalist-captured Social-Democratic Party’s repeated betrayals of the workers caused its base of support to shrink and the socialist movement to become disorganized. The Nazi Party would soon use this instability to its own advantage. After the Nazis swept the German elections in 1933, the Social-Democrats capitulated and accepted fascist rule, leaving the Communists the country’s lone anti-fascist party.

For the international socialist movement, May Day has been a holiday held sacred since that fateful night in 1886. Recognized by all socialist states, it has been the subject of a thousand paeans and celebrations. In the Soviet Union, May Day was a celebration of the triumphs and accomplishments of workers the world over, but particularly those working toward socialist construction.

Our monopoly-capitalist rulers in the U.S. Empire and their loyal servant politicians in its appurtenant state machinery, of course, have done their best to suppress public celebrations and public awareness of the history of May Day in this country. In the U.S. Empire, labor is “celebrated” in September, not in May — an international idiosyncracy meant to keep us from getting any funny ideas about belonging to a global working-class movement! Officials in this country discourage marches, and there are no laws giving laborers the day off, either on May Day or on the U.S.-specific Labor Day in September. Why would there be? Our rulers won’t abide May Day celebrations taking off in the same country where the tradition first took hold; their aim is, and always has been, to force us back to work, from the first May Day until this one.

But the workers of the world know that May 1 is the day of labor’s emancipation. As our movement for Communism within and against the U.S. Constitutional Empire recovers from its nadir, we must all remember the socialist martyrs lost on May 1, 1886. More importantly, we must look ahead. We know, along with all the conscious workers of the world, that the victories of Capital are fleeting, while ours is the grand historical march of emancipation, the inevitable tide of total social revolution. That is what we celebrate. The sacrifices made by the brave socialist martyrs of the past, their deaths at the hands of our oppressors, are the links in the great revolutionary chain, by which we wend our way to the ultimate victory.

Housing prices are skyrocketing, forcing impoverished people to move further out to the city’s edges and into a food-desert apartheid created by disappearing grocery stores and rising food prices. These struggles are exacerbated by deteriorating public transportation as a result of divestment and  increased policing, resulting in fewer social services and increased police terrorism. This is a horrific, but all-too-common, example of U.S. capital’s  assault on the working classes, which continues to intensify as another periodic crisis in capitalism looms. 

White people are indeed suffering the consequences of a settler-colonial empire in decline — an empire their colonizing ancestors built, and an empire they carried forward with a regime of racial apartheid — but these hardships are much more severe for working-class Black and Indigenous communities across Oregon. The same is true of other racially marginalized and nationally oppressed peoples across the state. Capitalism in the Pacific Northwest is grounded in settler colonialism, chattel slavery, and racist and xenophobic immigration and property ownership laws. Oregon became Oregon through the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous and Black people, mob and legislative violence against Asian immigrants, and the state-sanctioned support of white settlement, wealth, health, and property at the expense of all others. Oregon is a white supremacist state. Progressive? Hardly! Today’s problems have been centuries in the making. Consistent racist and patriarchal policy throughout the entire U.S. Empire’s history has brought us to this moment.

From 1804 until 1806, the U.S. Army Corps of Discovery carried out a military operation to chart the geography and learn how to economically exploit the land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. This would become known, and is today taught to schoolchildren as, the “Lewis and Clark Expedition.” While an express goal of the operation was to study the terrain and wildlife, Lewis and Clarks’ notes also conflated the many Indigenous peoples with the flora and fauna. This practice went on to influence the historical work on the frontier until about the 1980s. Left out of the fictionalized, classroom retelling of the expedition are the indispensable contributions of Sacagawea, an enslaved 14-year-old Agaidika girl and child-bride of a French-Canadian fur trapper, and York, an enslaved 34-year old African man, whose request for his freedom was denied upon the expedition’s return. The violent coercion of Black and Indigenous labor quite literally paved the way for the settlement of Oregon. Once the operation had concluded, the U.S. military sent soldiers to establish forts along their expanding empire’s so-called frontier, with the express purpose of defending the encroaching white settlers and permitting them to conduct terror-raids and attacks of extermination against the Indigenous populations of the territory. These settlers were guided by Protestant ideas of private property, enclosure, and “rights of conquest,” as well as the wink-and-nod lie that the land was “uninhabited.” Fort by fort, settlement by settlement, the U.S. moved further West until its Destiny was made Manifest.

Just before the American Civil War, the provisional government of the Oregon Territory passed a law banning slavery. Far from a triumph of abolitionist progressivism, the same law required all Black persons to leave Oregon Territory at once. The white legislature then passed another law — one that forbidding free Black persons from entering the territory. The punishment for the violation of any of these new laws was public flogging, repeated every six months until the offending Black person left the territory — not dissimilar from the punishments enslaved would experience. 

The white property owners in Oregon passed these laws not only because the Territory could not be admitted to the Union as a slave state, but also because they needed to exclude Black people from the workforce, in order to prevent them from owning private property. Black private ownership of the land would undermine the white-supremacist order, predicated on the theft of Indigenous land and its repurposing into a “reward” for white settlers. Any white male could receive 650 acres of land upon arrival, plus an additional 650 if married, encouraging as many as 400,000 white settlers to flock to Oregon during the mid-19th Century. The ultimate goal of this policy was to relieve the economic (class) tensions on the East coast. To reduce the conflict between white workers in the East and their industrialist bosses, the government engaged in systematic dispossession of land in the West through broken treaties and military occupation of the “frontier.”

Oregon’s white supremacist policies of exclusion also applied to Indigenous people in the state. In 1919, an Indigenous Tillamook woman, Ophelia Paquet, wished to claim the property of her recently deceased white husband of 30 years, Fred Paquet. The Tillamook county court recognized her as his widow and appointed her as the administer of the estate. “Two days later, though, Fred’s brother John [Paquet] came forward to contest Ophelia for control over the property.” The legal battle took place over the next two years and was eventually seen in the Oregon Supreme Court. Despite John’s horrible reputation (described by a county Judge as “a man of immoral habits… incompetent to transact ordinary business affairs and generally untrustworthy”) his status as a white man under the Oregon miscegenation laws was enough to ensure that he won his case against Ophelia. Not only were her people dispossessed of their ancestral lands by the state, but Ophelia, as an individual, was excluded from legally reclaiming even a small parcel of that land under the new private property regime. 

These horrific events are merely local instances of the systemic dispossession of oppressed nationalities, primarily Black people, across the U.S. Empire. Property relations have always been racialized in this country.

One of the many Supreme Court cases that helped codify the boundaries of racialization in the U.S. Empire comes from Oregon. In 1923, an Armenian immigrant, Tatos Cartozian, gained citizenship; this was challenged by the state in 1924. Cartozian argued that he was a white man and was, by law, guaranteed a pathway to citizenship and the right to continue his business as a rug dealer. In the resulting 1925 Supreme Court case, United States v. Cartozian, the Court ruled that Armenians were white and not Asian based on the provided “scientific” evidence. Race is not a biological fact, but rather a social construct and a legal category. The boundaries of whiteness can be restricted and expanded to suit the needs of the ruling classes.

Oregon eventually “allowed” Black settlement at the beginning of the twentieth century. Black persons were relegated to the Albina neighborhood in North Portland through a myriad of interwoven systems of discrimination carried out by the state and private institutions, but most notably through a process called redlining — a process in which banks refuse to give mortgages to Black people or extract unusually severe terms from them with subprime loans. During World War II, Portland’s Black population grew significantly, from roughly 1,800 to about 15,000 in five years. Three major shipyards were established in the Pacific Northwest, two in Portland, Oregon and one in Vancouver, Washington. These shipyards employed about 97,000 workers in total at their peak, and the prewar population of 340,000 was simply insufficient to meet the amount of ships commissioned by the U.S. Maritime Commission. Only fulfilling 27% of the commissioned vessels by the end of the war, it was clear that white male labor alone couldn’t maximize the market potential that was begging for ships. Thus, Oregon’s white capitalist class opened the doors to more workers and the general entry of women into the industrial workforce. To house the massive influx of people, Portland established a new, racially integrated city called Vanport to serve as temporary housing. The city was built in a dried lakebed between Portland and Vancouver and surrounded by locks to keep the water from the Columbia River out. Intended only to serve for the duration of the war, the buildings lacked foundations. In 1948 the locks gave way. Vanport was flooded, and the racially integrated, effectively autonomous, growing city was razed and swept away by the Columbia River. Portland refused to rebuild Vanport or compensate residents for the loss of property. The Black residents who could not find housing in Albina were then forced out of the area — through redlining. 

During the Second World War, Oregon and Southwest Washington also dispossessed 3,676 Japanese of their property via Executive Order 9066, issued by Franklin Roosevelt. The state imprisoned the Japanese at the Pacific International Livestock Exposition Center, known today as the Portland Expo Center. Upon their release, most families found that their homes, businesses, and personal belongings had been auctioned off by landlords or the state and were now occupied by white families. In commemoration, “Portland artist Valerie Otani created Voices of Remembrance (in the form of [traditional Japanese torii gates] most commonly found at the entrance of a sacred space)” at the Expo Center MAX Station. Each gate is adorned with hanging metal luggage tags to represent the individuals who were interned there. There is no sign or indication of what the art installation represents to passersby.

Throughout the twentieth century, Portland continued to wage economic warfare on the remaining Black population in the Albina neighborhood through various “urban renewal” programs. Programs like the 1961 Albina Neighborhood Improvement Project were established by city officials and were then awarded to private construction firms. From 1956 to the 70s, the city ripped through the neighborhood, splitting up the community with various construction projects and highways—specifically Interstate 5 and Highway 99 (ironically, OR-99 was named Martin Luther King Boulevard). Most notoriously, the Legacy Emanuel Medical Center expansion plan, which covered 76 acres of land,  dispossessed 300 Black families of their homes and businesses. The area was razed, but the hospital expansion was never actually built. Today, a fenced-off empty lot is all that remains. 

City officials had proposed the project at the height of the Black Panther Party’s Portland chapter. The Panthers had built interracial solidarity between the Black community concentrated in Albina and other poor communities, including white workers, in Portland. The City effectively ended the Black Panther Party’s solidarity work through aggressive dispersal of the Black community, robbing the Panthers of a place to organize. Today, minor and insignificant-looking signs dot the sidewalk of Albina’s North Williams Avenue — a pitiful attempt to tell the story of the historic neighborhood. 

Since the 1980s, conditions for Black people in Portland have not improved. Under the so-called Urban Renewal projects, Black residents were either forced out of their homes or continued to live in the increasingly disjointed neighborhood. Redlining has further prevented Black people from creating new communities outside Albina. Banks and policy-makers have worked hand-in-hand to prevent the reappearance of significant Black communities. Systemic disinvestment in Albina gave rise to further problems, ultimately resulting in more families abandoning their homes. Across the United States, the 1990s abounded with gentrification projects, and Portland was no exception. This project continues today with the unrelenting construction of expensive apartment buildings, expensive restaurants, and boutique shops in historically poor and majority-Black neighborhoods. 

Free and fair trade are nothing but capitalist fairy tales, meant to justify the obscene wealth of the rulers and the obscene poverty and deprivation of the masses. When the underlying logic of an economic system is to generate endless profits and amass unlimited wealth, why would the powerful allow “fair” competition? The capitalists and other property-owning classes mitigate competition through exclusion; they nurture and manufacture racism, misogyny, and other prejudices to suit their own ends. Whiteness is an elastic identity that can include or exclude groups of people depending on the needs of a given moment in time. Blackness, however, is a highly policed identity, allowing whiteness its elasticity through exclusion. Non-white nationalities, so long as they are not Black (or in the case of the U.S., Indigenous), may be incorporated into whiteness (i.e., Jews, Irish, Italians, light-skinned Latinés and Asians, etc.). The “right” to the various spoils of exploited labor is mainly bestowed upon those considered white, while privileges and benefits are granted to assimilated non-whites (re: Armenians). At the same time, the U.S. Empire frequently intervenes to thwart the “anomaly” of capital accumulation by Black and Indigenous people — those who cannot be subsumed by whiteness and the colonial project. The history of Portland provides a stark local portrait — unfortunately, only one among many across colonized North America — of how vile, cruel, and relentless the capitalist U.S. Empire is in its construction of race.

“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.”

Memphis is a city built on slavery. Black African slaves picked the cotton that was shipped up to the city wharfs. Black slaves worked the docks loading the cotton onto the steamboats. From its founding in 1819 until abolition, the buying and selling of slaves was one of the most lucrative businesses in Memphis. Nathan Bedford Forrest, city alderman, owned a slaving firm that charged between $800 and $1,000 for each individual person sold as chattel. In a good year, Forrest and his partner Byrd Hill sold more than 1,000 slaves, with a net profit of somewhere in the realm of $10,000-$30,000 1850 dollars — the equivalent buying power of $370,000-$1.1m in 2023 dollars.

The city fathers were uneasy — by 1860, there were 16,953 slaves within Shelby County and only 22,000 free whites. The danger to the white slave masters was obvious. None of the slavers nor the enslaved were likely to forget the fate (or the lesson) of Haiti; the enslaved looked to their Haitian brothers for inspiration, while the slavers looked on in horror. A law of 1848 created the office of city marshal. On March 27, 1850, a bill was passed by the government of Memphis that required 

State laws against slaves, free blacks, and mulattoes to be enforced by city marshal. 

Slaves not allowed to be entertained or permitted to visit or remain on Sabbath in the house of any free person of color. 

Large collection of slaves banned, except for public worship conducted in an orderly manner under superintendence of a white person. 

Unlawful for slaves to remain in corporate limits of city after sun set or any part of the Sabbath, except by permission of owner specifying limit of time.

This was the foundation of the Memphis police department. In 1852, a resolution was passed to furnish the “Day and Night police” with badges and uniforms. By 1857, the city marshal, the same one who was to enforce the anti-slave laws, was made chief of police and, on February 20, 1860, the marshal title was changed to just that: Chief of Police.

Slaves were property, Black men and women who were held and sold as any other piece of property was. The Memphis police force was founded, like every police department in the entire United States, to protect property. In Memphis, it served a double purpose: protecting the investments of property owners, and protecting property owners (slavers) from the rightful vengeance of their own property, the slaves. The legal end of human beings as property didn’t simply extinguish the legacy of slavery. Although the end of the Civil War saw a formal end to the enslavement of Black individuals, new property relations were quickly erected by the white-supremacist ruling classes. In the South, these were created by the Dixiecrats to protect their huge plantations and their monopoly on politics. In the North, these new property relations were primarily the work of industrialists keen to win over the allegiance of a mostly imported, white, European work force, often with the active collaboration of those workers themselves.

Mid 19th-century Memphis was home to a large number of poor Irish laborers, mostly confined to slums and excluded from city politics. City police records often described them as “Irishman; no account” and “low Irishman,” hounding them and dogging their tracks. However, by the late 1850s, Irish settlers coming into the country from New York and other East Coast ports established a foothold in the Memphis business community. In 1861 Ireland-born John Park, who had married a young Bourbon-Dixie widow and was a successful real estate speculator, was elected mayor. Irish settlers soon dominated the city government and were determined to stay in power no matter the cost. After the close of the Civil War, as thousands of Black refugees and soldiers from the embattled regions of the former secessionist states poured into Memphis, the Irish community of the city, conscious of its shaky hold on power when compared with the old Bourbon Dixiecrats, essentially went to war with the new Black community. Irish laborers tried to prevent Black workers from entering the skilled trades. By early 1866, the city was a powder keg.

In January of that year, Mayor Park and Shelby County sheriff T.M. Winters asked Major General George Stoneman to remove his federal troops from the city streets and turn them back over to the Memphis police. In late April, the army discharged the last of its Black  troops at nearby Fort Pickering. They came into South Memphis waiting for their pay vouchers. On May Day a crowd of one hundred or so former soldiers congregated on South Street where they celebrated and discharged their weapons in the air. In the middle of the May celebration, a white wagon driver turning onto South Street crashed into a Black wagon driver; the two men started arguing. The soldiers rushed to the Black driver’s defense, and the Irish police to the white driver’s. Gunfire was exchanged, and soon there was a full-on street battle between former federal soldiers from the Black Union regiments and the Memphis police. Local whites stiffened the police line, joining them with their own weapons as irregulars.

It was only when Maj. Gen. Stoneman’s federal soldiers arrived to separate the sides in the late afternoon that the fighting stopped. With peace more or less restored, two Black soldiers arrested, and the rest still waiting for their pay, the fall of night saw white Memphians swarm into South Memphis and slaughter every Black person they saw. A reporter from the New York Times wrote:

Large numbers of armed citizens repaired to the scene of the fight and commenced firing upon every negro who made himself visible. One negro upon South Street, a quiet, inoffensive laborer, was shot down almost in front of his own cabin, and after life was extinct, his body was fired into, cut and beat in a most horrible manner.

The Memphis police joined the white mob. For two days, white Memphis burned and massacred the Black community in South Memphis. Forty-six Black people had been killed. Two whites had died. Ninety-one Black homes, twelve Black schools, and four Black churches had been burned.

The Police as White Guard

Tyre Nichols was murdered by the Memphis police. The ruling class has been doing its best to try to confine the public dialogue to the five officers their lackeys have indicted. It shouldn’t escape us that these instant suspensions and indictments fell on five Black policemen. But they, the capitalists and their mouthpieces, desperately want (need) you to believe that the capitalist police are a good institution, a necessary institution. A permanent institution. The only way for them to do this is to perform the same sleight-of-hand game they always do. You remember the phrases: “a bad apple,” rogue cops, even whole rogue departments. 

But the young U.S. settler-republic didn’t build police departments. In the English colonies and the early republic, police simply did not exist. By the 1830s and ‘40s, every urban center in the new settler-republic faced crises in public order spurred on by the development of industrial capitalism. All of a sudden, between the 1840s and ‘80s, every major U.S. city built up a large police force. Why? Sam Mitrani answers this question precisely and elegantly in The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894: “The most basic answer is that the leading businessmen who dominated both urban economies and their politics pushed city governments to build powerful armed institutions that could defend their property and their interests from the new threats that accompanied the development of a wage labor economy.”

The police are the frontline, the shock troops, of the capitalist class. The Dixiecrat planters are gone; formal chattel slavery has been abolished. Legal enslavement is now permitted only through the criminal “justice” system and the state’s prisons, where prisoners, disproportionately Black, toil to produce commodities for private corporations. But though the legal framework of slavery is gone, the property relations of race remain, transformed and reconfigured, but no less poisonous. 

Although only 13% of the U.S. population is Black, 38% of all inmates in prison or jail are. Black citizens are disenfranchised by felony convictions at a rate of 5.3 times that of the white population. In the largest 50 metropolitan areas of the country, mortgage denial rates for Black applicants is twice that of the overall population. Black homeownership is lower across the board than white homeownership. Between 1910 and 1997, Black farmland has decreased (gone into foreclosure, been purchased away, etc.) by 90%. Black wage-earners earn 30% less than white wage-earners on average, and Black households have one-eighth the wealth of white households.

These facts of racial inequality are rooted in the property relations of white supremacy. Black-owned property can be seized by the state, by the banks, and by white capitalists and landlords by a variety of legal means much easier than white-owned property can. Who enforces this regime of property rights and relations? Why, the U.S. garrison-police. The hyper-exploited regions of the U.S., those places where Black and Indigenous peoples have been forced by white supremacist zoning, lending, and other laws, are treated as internal frontiers. In the Black Belt and the urban centers, the police don’t serve the local community; they are a foreign garrison, preventing rebellion. Today, nearly 25% of all police officers in the U.S. first serve in the military. The U.S. police force, no matter the state, no matter the municipality, no matter the national composition, is an occupying army. Killer cops aren’t the exception and they aren’t “the bad apple that spoils the bunch.” They are the intended outcome of the policy that unleashes stormtroopers in blue on the streets of every poor and majority-Black neighborhood in every city across the U.S. Empire. The capitalist relies on the law officer and their truncheon just as much as they rely on strikebreaker and the Pinkerton, the warden and the prison walls, and just as much as they rely on their lackeys in the Congress to pass their laws.

These killer cops are the front line of the struggle between capital and labor in the United States. The horrific murder of Tyre Nichols is not an aberration, but a byproduct of a system working as intended. Every day, Black people are tortured, terrorized, and slain by the U.S. police. While the police kill white persons too, they target Black, Indigenous, and Latinx persons at a disproportionately high rate; they swarm majority-minority neighborhoods, always on the lookout for racially oppressed people to brutalize. This is by design. Those groups form the internal colonies or semi-colonies of the U.S. and those nations oppressed by the white settler majority — and it is not stretching the meaning to call it what it is, the U.S. Empire. 

Tyre Nichols now joins the other names of the slain, including Elton Hayes, murdered in much the same fashion by the very same Memphis police, 52 years ago in 1971. But the legacy of murder and terror stretches back to the middle of the 19th century, and it will end only when property relations themselves are reformed. No reform to a capitalist police department can prevent it from being monstrous.

Great Britain drafted colonized subjects into the colonial police. It was the Indian gurkha armies that conquered the princedoms of the subcontinent. The Portuguese and Dutch merchant houses in Indonesia, Singapore, and Ceylon elevated local merchants to be their agents, their compradors. The same is true of the oppressed who reach a side-deal with the system that oppresses them here in the U.S. Empire. The Black policeman is a colonial turncoat. The Black Democrat mayors of cities like Chicago, Atlanta, and Minneapolis never even try to stand in the way of police militarization and expansion.

James Baldwin warned:

We used to say, “If you just must call a policeman”—for we hardly ever did—”for God’s sake, try to make sure it’s a white one.” A Black policeman could completely demolish you. He knew far more about you than a white policeman could and you were without defenses before this Black brother in uniform whose entire reason for breathing seemed to be his hope to offer proof that, though he was Black, he was not Black like you.