On Friday, ICE made widespread raids across Los Angeles, arresting 44 people with the express purpose of deporting them without offering even the fig leaf of liberal “due process.” By Saturday afternoon, the people of Paramount had had enough. When rumors started circulating that ICE was planning a raid on a local Home Depot, the people of Paramount gathered in force to protect their community.

The revolt began at the Home Depot at 6400 Alondra Boulevard — and was provoked by the police forces themselves. Federal agents threw flash-bangs at peaceful demonstrators to try to scare them off and complete their quota of kidnappings. The demonstrators fought back. Over the course of the day, righteous anger escalated to throwing rocks and bricks, burning cars, and establishing vehicle barricades to stop ICE deportation buses.

As has become typical, the consciousness of the masses is racing ahead of any pretension of an organized revolutionary movement. Our “Marxists” are too busy calling their senators and organizing police-approved parades to get involved, except perhaps to raise their hands in surrender and loudly proclaim a policy of treasonous social peace.

But the “Marxists” who are afraid of the spontaneous wrath of the people are exposing themselves more and more to be nothing more than toothless opportunists of the old regime. Let them show their true colors! The flags they fly look red at first glance, but look at them closely — you’ll see they’re the white flags of surrender; the white flags of reaction.

This spontaneous wrath must be organized, or it will dissolve into disillusionment and defeatism! We cannot let it.

Real revolutionists must not only embrace the spontaneous rage of the people, but give it aid and support. Marxists in the affected areas must form combat brigades at once. They must be strategic, arm themselves, and openly march with the people. “But we’ll be destroyed!” Maybe, and maybe not… but if we don’t stand up, then we deserve to be destroyed. The revolutionary who hides from the people, who insists on remaining underground at all costs, or worse, aboveground but only as spokesmen for cowardly social peace, is nothing more than an enemy partisan.

If your organization forbids you from forming combat units, leave it.

We must build combat brigades! A combat brigade is a Marxist organization, composed of militant cadre, organized along military lines for the purpose of providing support and projecting power on the ground. A combat brigade is not the same as community self-defense. Community self-defense is the construction of mass organizations, with trained Marxist membership, sometimes under the direction of Marxist organizations, that mobilizes the activated masses and forms a central spine for them to act.

Quickly, now, study Mao’s On Guerilla Warfare, the Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla, and the U.S. marines doctrine manual Warfighting.

Popular consciousness admits the need for violent confrontation and struggle against the state. The escalation and ultimate military defeat of the student movement, the breaking of the 2020 June Insurrections, the actions of Aaron Bushnell, the Universal Healthcare executioner, and Elias Rodriguez have prepared whole strata of the masses to act. No less, the obscene public show of the Trump immigration police are galvanizing popular resolve.

If you are a Marxist in an insurrectionary region, form your brigade. Be prepared for community defense. Establish emergency phone trees. Hold mass meetings. Assure the community that you will respond. Distribute flyers and pamphlets.

Contact the All-Empire Worker’s League if you want to help coordinate actions. Contact USU Press for propaganda resources. Join us.

The time has come to fight.

When “Israelis” left Europe to settle Palestine in 1948, they brought European plants with them to remind them of “home” — the home they said did not accept them. Introducing non-native plant species was also a means to drive Palestinians out of their own homeland and towns and deny them access to water and land.

One tree the settlers favored was the eucalyptus tree, known in “Israel” as the “Jewish Tree” (despite being native to Australia) as it was so instrumental to the colonization of Palestine.

But first, what is settler-colonialism? Colonialism is the forceful arrival of settlers into a land that is already occupied to enable exploitation benefiting these settlers’ state back home. The settler part, however, presupposes that a native population, which becomes Indigenous when it exists in relation to settlers, is being displaced permanently so that settlers can occupy their homeland for themselves. Settler-colonialism creates new countries where none existed, and usually ends up carving out a state of their own instead of staying beholden to the state that sent them in the colonies — an example being pre-independence British Colonies and post-independence United States of America.

The importation of these foreign plant species into Palestine firstly played a part in concealing the Nakba. After 1948, zionist organizations planted more than 250 million trees in Palestine, most of which were invasive pines and eucalyptus. These trees were planted around the ruins of Palestinian villages that were ethnically cleansed and emptied during the Nakba. Under the guise of “turning the desert green”, land around ancestral Palestinian communities was seeded with these foreign plant species and then expropriated to be turned into a ‘natural reserve’ that is neither natural nor a reserve of anything. Legally, it means the land cannot be built on. It cannot be excavated. The Nakba is concealed.

When objections are raised about this practice, settlers —  who think of everything in terms of their potential for exploitation — is “well, at least we’re doing something with the land!” but Palestinians were doing something with the land too. Just because the settlers didn’t understand this relationship doesn’t mean that the land was not being used in some way.

It’s difficult in the West to understand ties to the land. We are removed from the processes of production, and see commodities only as the object in front of us on the grocery store shelf. We don’t see the labor that went into bringing us vegetables on a stall or candy in the aisles. Someone has to till the land, someone has to plant the seeds, someone has to water the sprouts, and someone has to harvest, package, and drive the grown crops to the store so we can eat them.

Thus, we think of land in the abstract. We think that the shelves will always bear food, because from our perspective it just appears there, conjured out of thin air. But for most of human history (and for a vast portion of the world still today) this has not been the case. It was instantly clear to any farmer of the past, including in Europe, that land had to be taken care of lest it stopped providing for good.

Before the Nakba, Palestinians distributed land communally under the Masha’a system. Plots were distributed among families for a certain period, and land outside villages was held in common for grazing and collecting firewood.

Many ways in which Palestinians made use of the desert and marshes and why they chose to leave them as they did may have very well been lost in the Nakba. Most of the information about the Masha’a practice in Western studies comes from British sources and is thus seen through their worldview. After which, the absence of evidence about how people used to survive on their native land is used by the settler to justify more of their destructive practices.

A system that works for its population cannot be said to be a failed system. That settlers “made the desert green” is a childish myth for a childish people who mythologize their history where none has been. Throughout history, Palestine had long been a provider of commodities around the Mediterranean. Even today, the only use “Israelis” have for the Naqab desert is to abandon asylum seekers there to die. No settler wants to live in the desert — they prefer the lush, neatly-colonized landscapes west of the Jordan, or the seaside accommodations that Gaza keeps away from them. What one finds in the Naqab today are 36 unrecognized Palestinian villages that do not appear on any map (including Google Maps), and several kibbutz suspiciously close to the border with Jordan; this makes sense within “Israeli” settler-colonial policy, as the kibbutz were established to serve as the first line of human shields against incursions (and that is indeed the purpose they served on October 7, 2023).

The introduction of destructive species in Palestine has disrupted local ecosystems and the availability of water. Eucalyptus trees drink up as much water as is made available to them, which can be used to justify not providing water to Palestinian communities – and eventually forces Palestinians to abandon their homes. Eucalyptus trees have also been the cause of many wildfires in Palestine — the oil in the bark is highly flammable and makes the trees explode under heat, spreading the fire. Wildfires in Palestine are now more common than they used to be, and this can be directly attributed to the presence of foreign plants that have been imported to Palestine.

Since 1967, settlers in Palestine have uprooted over 800,000 olive trees — trees which are suited to the local climate and provide food and livelihood to millions of Palestinians. Settlers are not interested in cultivating olives for themselves; they prefer to destroy these generational trees and import olive oil from Turkey or Spain; Because of this, the “Israeli” settler state has become the 35th largest importer of olive oil in the world. The settler state turns itself into a caricature because no concessions can be given — not one step back can be made.

The ramifications of this form of colonialism are plenty. Under humanitarian concerns, the settler reinforces their power and ensures the native population will never be a problem for them. They kill the Indigenous; they force them into reservations; they sever their ties to the land that feeds us all, and then wonder why climate catastrophes happen. And when these catastrophes happen, the settler retort is to say “well, there’s just nothing we could have done to prevent this!” To say otherwise would mean recognizing that the land is occupied and that people did know what to do for hundreds of years, but they were uprooted and severed from the land — only then will the settler know peace, however briefly. To recognize and integrate Indigenous practices would mean to recognize their claim to ownership of the land – at least partly – and this is antithetical to the survival of any settler state.

Despite being removed from its process of production, land is land: it feeds us. We extract its resources for our devices. This is true whether one is Palestinian, European, American, or anyone else.

In 1626, when Puritans arrived in what is now Salem, located off the Bay of Massachusetts, they came across empty buildings and, thinking they were abandoned, appropriated them. By winter, when the Naumkeag band of the Massachusett came back to their winter fishing grounds for the season, they found white people occupying their homes, redecorating them to suit their European tastes. Instead of driving them out, the Naumkeag welcomed these newcomers as people needing help in a new land they did not know. They taught the English how to cultivate the land, how to plant in the hills productively, and how to survive there.

In Salem the settlers drained swamps and built upon them houses and industry, despite the fact that the Naumkeag had been living perfectly well with these swamps next to their fishing grounds for thousands of years. They understood the importance of these biomes because they had lived with them for millennia. In Salem too the rocky hills in Salem were also a problem to the settlers — just another obstacle to be flattened, destroyed and paved over.

When Europeans came to Turtle Island, they thought they were seeing wilderness; huge forests and marshes greeted them. But what they were actually seeing were carefully-tended autonomous systems that served as breadbaskets for the Indigenous population. Controlled burns were used seasonally to renew the soil, promote the growth of fire-adapted plants and prevent wild forest fires. Over generations, these burns could be massive and span over hundreds of miles — but they were not random. They were the result of careful planning over decades.

As fires destroy entire towns in California right now, we may want to remember that Native American burns across Arizona and New Mexico showed that it is possible to break the typical climate-fire pattern across large areas. This pattern consists of a few years of rainfall promoting plant growth followed by a year of drought that starts wildfires. It becomes even more mind-boggling to witness these fires and wonder how much must have gone wrong that things have come to this when Indigenous people would be able to enact these practices today in California, but are kept away from doing so at the administrative level.

Native tribes actively managed and enriched forests by introducing beneficial species and useful plants for human life that could thrive in a given system. Plants were sustainably harvested and encouraged to become resilient by sometimes purposely — but always strategically — disturbing the ecosystem.

This was not wilderness and neither was it unique to the Americas. This was not undeveloped land. It looked undeveloped to the European eye because they did not see cobble roads or brick houses, but it sustained life for millions of people for millennia. The European considered the Natives’ tie to the land magical, as if they had some secret sixth sense and knew just where to find berries and game, because they could not see the approach taken to building a multi-generational system with reason and labor.

Dams along the Klamath river were removed just three months ago to restore salmon populations, and now enlightened descendants of Europeans are blaming the Indigenous populations that led this initiative for dispersing water that could have been used against the fires. But salmon indirectly help forests become resilient against wildfires, and this is what the settler mind refuses to see.

The Naumkeag band used the Salem grounds as their seasonal fishing spot. How did all the fish happen to congregate there specifically?

And European settlers could have enjoyed this way of life too — the Naumkeag and many other tribes did not pick up weapons against them, even as the settlers killed them off with diseases they brought over from Europe, but instead welcomed them into their homes and communities, teaching them what they knew of the land. Instead, settlers chose to create reservations outside of the nations’ ancestral homelands through 535 treaties that the U. S. government broke with the Indigenous at every turn.

In California, forest fires are a natural risk. The climate is naturally prone to wildfires, and certainly climate change is worsening the situation. But the European response to these constant risks is always to consume more. Build more dams to dump more water on more fires. Then build more walls to retain more water when the dams flood. Build more dykes to help the walls we built…

Indigenous practices are not magical or mystical. They are the result of understanding the local conditions (something we all do as humans) through practice over millennia. What seems more magical is expecting that we would be able to transpose foreign practices to entirely different conditions with no friction.

I can tell you one thing: if the land in California had been under Native stewardship, the fires would not be destroying thousands of acres, countless homes, and causing the suffering we are all witnessing at this moment.

It wasn’t. Warren’s politics were class peace and reform. He treated Communists as class agitators, but he also ruled consistently to “soften” the excesses of capital.

The Warren court went on to decide some of the most important cases in modern Statesian jurisprudence. Brown v. Board of Education, ending legal segregation, Loving v. Virginia, outlawing antimiscegenation laws, Griswold v. Connecticut, establishing the right to birth control, and four major criminal cases that established the rights we think of as fundamental to the criminal process: Gideon v. Wainwright, the right to a court-appointed attorney, Brady v. Maryland, the right to be given exculpatory evidence held by the state, Wong Sun v. United States, granting the right to suppress evidence that was obtained by the police illegally, and Miranda v. Arizona, the right to be informed of your rights when you’re arrested, the famous Miranda warning.

Among these progressive expansions of individual rights was Robinson v. California, the case that the current Supreme Court has just limited to its facts and robbed of any precedent-establishing power. What did the Warren court hold in Robinson? That it was cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the 8th amendment of the federal constitution to criminalize a “status” over which a person has no control. In that case, the court struck down a California law making it a crime to be addicted to drugs. The fascist court of John G. Roberts, Jr., has just held, in the newly issued City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, that the Robinson ruling doesn’t apply to the homeless. This is just the latest in the Roberts court’s piecemeal march against established Warren precedents, and represents nothing less than the sharp contraction of the U.S. empire.

Warren and the Apogee of Empire

By 1953, the war had been over for eight years. Europe lay devastated. In 1948, Truman enacted the Marshall Plan, pumping U.S. capital into areas Washington’s elite thought might be vulnerable to Communism. It was a kind of economic GLADIO, a stay-behind program (and if you don’t recognize GLADIO, that’s worth reading up on). The world war hadn’t ended before the Cold War began, and the U.S., its domestic production untouched by the conflict, stepped out of Great Britain’s shadow to claim hegemony over the West and proclaim itself the sword and shield of the Euro-American capitalist class.

Eisenhower was the first truly post-war president to preside over this new American empire. In a sense Warren and his court, which lasted until 1969, was an extension of the ruling class politics of the age. What was this policy? The expansion of New Deal-type programs — which Warren had attacked before taking the bench — and the creation of a new Pax Americana. Under Eisenhower, post-war imperial wealth flowed from all corners of the globe and it was used to establish social security, the interstate highway system, and NASA. Instead of the growth of social democracy and the welfare state, as seen in Europe, class struggle was suppressed in the U.S. through the expansion of public infrastructure and the goodwill (read: self-preservation) of the capitalist class, which gave out robust pensions, employer-provided health insurance, etc. These benefits fell primarily to the “white” workers, which by now included formerly “non-white” ethnicities from Europe such as the Irish and Italians. The class struggle was thus forced underground during this period, and it manifested explosively in the struggles for national liberation that shook the country from the mid-50s until the end of the 1970s.

We needn’t prove Warren’s personal motivations as Chief Justice to make our case. In fact, from all outside appearances, he genuinely believed in the principles he espoused through his decisions. But such is the case with many bourgeois politicians. They earnestly believe their class ideology. The fact that it serves a class purpose operates on a level below their conscious understanding. It is typical for members of the ruling class to be thoroughly seduced by the self-justifications and illusions that make up their class morality.

Above all, it is this legacy of bourgeois morality that the ultra-fascist majority on the Roberts court have set as their target. As arch-reactionaries, they are working to roll back the clock and restore the early 20th century pre-Warren legal landscape. They are ushering in an era of naked class domination, stripped of the comfortable fat provided by the loot of empire.

Grants Pass is a Return of Labor Discipline

To understand Grants Pass we have to look at the direct precedent that the Roberts court has overturned. The case in question is Martin v. Boise, a 2019 decision concerning unhoused people that was issued by the Ninth Circuit federal Court of Appeals. The Ninth Circuit covers the geographical area of Washington state, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, California, and Arizona. According to the 2022 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report released by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, 40% of the country’s entire unhoused population lives within the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction. As the fascist justice Gorsuch, author of the majority opinion in Grants Pass, noted, “homelessness in this country has reached its highest levels since the government began reporting data on the subject.”

The Martin ruling made it unconstitutional (within the Ninth Circuit) for a state to enforce criminal penalties on public camping if the city in question lacked sufficient shelter beds to house its unhoused population. The legal rationale is dull, but in essence the court held that it was a violation of the 8th amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment to jail houseless people simply because they had nowhere to stay, especially if the city lacked sufficient public relief. The Martin decision was predicated on the Warren court’s Robinson ruling, where the court held it to be a violation of the 8th amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment clause to criminalize addiction.

City of Grants Pass arises from a Martin injunction brought by Gloria Johnson and John Logan, who challenged the city’s public-camping laws. They brought a suit as a federal class action, representing “all involuntarily homeless people living in Grants Pass.” A panel of the Ninth Circuit found that Johnson and Logan faced a credible threat of punitive action from Grants Pass and that all unsheltered people in the city were “involuntarily homeless” because the city’s unhoused population exceeds available shelter beds. The city, desperate to retain its punishment power and other tools of state repression, sought a rehearing en banc by the entire court; it was denied. 

Grants Pass filed a petition to the Supreme Court for certiorari (certification that the issue be heard by the Supreme Court of the United States). The cities of Albuquerque, Anchorage, Chico, Chino, Colorado Springs, Fillmore, Garden Grove, Glendora, Henderson, Honolulu, Huntington Beach, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Murrieta, Newport Beach, Roseville, Saint Paul, San Clemente, San Diego, San Francisco, San Juan Capistrano, Seattle, Spokane, Tacoma, and Westminster, the National League of Cities (representing over 19,000 other American cities and towns), the League of California Cities (representing California’s 477 cities), the League of Oregon Cities (representing Oregon’s 241 cities), the Association of Idaho Cities (representing Idaho’s 199 cities), the League of Arizona Cities and Towns (representing all 91 municipalities in Arizona), the North Dakota League of Cities (representing 355 cities), the Counties of Honolulu, San Bernardino, San Francisco, and Orange, the National Association of Counties (representing all 3,069 counties of the U.S. empire), the California State Association of Counties, the Special Districts Association of Oregon, the Washington State Association of Municipal Attorneys, the International Municipal Lawyers Association, the District Attorneys of Sacramento and San Diego Counties, the California State Sheriffs’ Association, the California Police Chiefs Association, the Washington State Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs, California Governor Gavin Newsom, San Francisco Mayor London Breed, and 20 other states (Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, and West Virginia) all joined the city to support the petition for certiorari.

All the lackeys of law and order, all the petty bourgeois strivers and graspers, all the pigs and their captains, all the fascist forces of the Western United States, put their names on the petition and many of these wrote briefs in support of Grants Pass, begging for Martin to be overturned. The Roberts court was only too happy to oblige.

The Unhoused: Proletarians and the Reserve Army of Labor

The unhoused generally fall into one of two categories when it comes to class. Either they are themselves working class proletarians, who work by wage labor, or they are sub-proletarians, thrown out of the labor force entirely and denied any means of support. These are people who would otherwise live by wage labor, who have no substantial property or investment in the machinery, land, or other tools by which society produces the commodities that are its lifeblood. Many unhoused people were sheltered proletarians or even petit-bourgeoisie only a short time before they became unhoused. With the dismantling of the feeble safety nets erected during the imperial apogee by the “liberal” crowd of Clintonites in the 90s, it has become easier than ever to fall out of the sheltered working classes and enter the ranks of the sub-proletariat, the great unhoused.

The unhoused already suffer a number of critical disabilities inflicted on them by “civil society” before we reach the question of criminalization. Lacking a permanent address and in many times deprived of a stable telephone number, the unhoused are generally prevented from voting by registration requirements. This means the lofty list of cities, towns, counties, etc., that filed to support the City of Grants Pass in its bid to criminalize homelessness were elected without input from the very population they want to police. This is what we mean by class domination. (In the case of the rest of the working proletariat, this relationship is slightly more disguised; because we can technically cast a ballot, and we are often duped into thinking the ballot matters.)

Marx calls those who are kept out of work the relative surplus population (meaning, those people who are, relative to the active work available, kept as extra or surplus without employment) or the industrial reserve army. By limiting the number of jobs available and ensuring that every proletarian and sub-proletarian who isn’t working lives in squalor and near-death, the capitalist class “forms a disposal industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost…. [I]t creates, for the changing needs of the self-expansion of capital, a mass of human material always ready for exploitation.” Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 25, Section 3. At the same time, this industrial reserve army creates a source of extra labor with which to break strikes and serves as a club to discipline the labor force. 

Imagine, for instance, that you work in a McDonalds or an Amazon warehouse. The conditions are atrocious in this particular location. Wages are being docked or withheld illegally, people are being disciplined for nothing, and you aren’t being allowed to take your breaks. You decide to unionize to force the owners to the table; after all, if everyone threatens to walk off the job, they’ll have to make concessions. If you’re in a city where there is a very large unemployed or under-employed population, the owners might simply say “Fine,” discharge you and all your fellow would-be unionizers, and hire replacements from that unemployed labor force — that industrial reserve army.

This helps keep down wages even before we begin to account for the widespread U.S. practice of utilizing basically free prison labor. Criminalization gives capitalists the chance to make use of that free labor because the habitually unhoused will be arrested again and again, and eventually be given sentences of imprisonment that turn them into a state workforce. This is state-labor-for-hire without compensation, all perfectly legal under the 13th amendment to the constitution, which outlaws slavery except as punishment for a crime. After all, about one-third of all California’s firefighters are judicial slaves.

The effect of this ruling on wages and benefits occurs purely by operation of the underlying political economy that will result. It doesn’t require an active conspiracy on the part of the court, the cities, the sheriffs and police, or anyone in the entire chain of command that will ultimately enforce the punitive bans that wind up criminalizing homelessness. Even if, at each step in this process, the agent of the state is merely expressing an honestly-held dislike of “public vagrancy” (and the Gorsuch opinion is brimming with classist descriptions of public defecation and children wading through used needles), it will have the same ultimate effect. More enforceable criminal penalties means more prisoners; it means more court fees; it means, therefore, in states where inmates are forced into slavery, a larger free laboring population. This means the cost of labor will fall relative to its value as more laborers enter the market. Businesses will have the choice between hiring free workers, who might be disobedient, agitate for a rise in wages, etc., or paying the state money to make use of a captive work force. The market price of labor will therefore fall. This, while we are experiencing the sharpest rise in cost of living since the inflation crises at the close of the 1970s, ensures that more workers will be made unhoused as their wages fall, and a downward pressure will continue to be exerted on wages.

The more precarious a workforce is, the more subject to random arrest and search or other punitive measures, the less likely it is to seek redress through unionization and organization. That lesson was demonstrated by the poultry industry when they simply had their unionizing workers deported en masse.

Marching Counter Clockwise

This decision is part of the court’s broad assault on the Warren-based state, the administrative state (that is, the delegation of rulemaking authority from Congress to the administrative agencies), and, critically, the legal regime of unionization. The ultra-fascist justices have rejected a century of precedent and appear intent on ushering in an era of labor-discipline that resembles the U.S. of 1900, before the labor struggles that established the legal right to unionization and prior to the creation of the National Labor Relations Board. The Grants Pass decision fits neatly into this plan to march backwards, into a pre millenarian century.

The door now stands open for the re-establishment of the debtor’s prison in name as well as form. Although the judicial system has long practiced a kind of debt imprisonment in actuality, in form the debtor’s prison is often seen as a quaint Victorian curiosity. There is much less need for covert imprisonment-for-debt now that the highest court in the country has ruled that it is permissible to make homelessness illegal. Yes, certainly, there is an act that these laws proscribe (sleeping in public), but the act is inextricably tied to the status that Gorsuch claims they aren’t criminalizing. The Supreme Court has legalized the debtor’s prison, has given its blessing to the mass incarceration of the unhoused, and has created the conditions for a massive reactionary backlash.

We can see it in the language the majority uses, through Gorsuch. He disdainfully complains that a Chico, California homeless shelter wasn’t sufficient under Martin, even though it “included protective fencing, large water totes, handwashing stations, portable toilets and a large canopy for shade…. Why? Because, in that court’s view, appropriate shelter requires indoor, not outdoor spaces.” Gorsuch has described a concentration camp for the unhoused and mocked a court for holding it insufficient.

This is the future imagined by the Roberts court. Of course Gorsuch defends the concentration camp. When the Supreme Court issues a decision, it isn’t merely making a legal ruling, it is communicating with the parties and potential future parties. The parties to this case weren’t merely the City of Grants Pass, Gloria Johnson, and John Logan, but also every one of the thousands of cities and counties, sheriff’s associations, police groups, district attorneys, state’s attorneys, and other agents of the bourgeois state apparatus. The lurid language that Gorsuch uses is a signal. Justices choose their words carefully. We must be prepared. The state is. They are preparing labor camps for the houseless, “shelters” with protective fencing and a canopy for shade. Taken in the light of the other rulings the Supreme Court recently decided, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, which we discussed when the year began, the intention of the court is clear. They aim to strip administrative agencies of their power, destroy the NLRB, and subject working people throughout the country to a regime of labor discipline by police control.

On Monday, May 14, 2023, San Francisco district attorney Brooke Jenkins, who has a history of dropping charges against police, announced that she was declining to prosecute the Walgreens rent-a-cop Michael Anthony for the April 27 murder of Banko Brown. The security video has been made widely available on social media, and one thing is clear: this was an execution. Anthony lunged at Banko, then let him go; when Banko turned to leave, Anthony shot him. The rent-a-cop would later say that Banko was threatening to stab him, but, of course, there was no knife, and we have only his self-interested word for that.

The DA’s report alleges that Banko had “collect[ed] items” and then “move[d] to exit the store without having paid for any items.” From the brief clip that has been circulating on social media, it’s clear that when Banko tried to leave the Walgreens, he was confronted by mall cop Michael Anthony. Although Anthony wept when he was told he’d killed Banko, he later said what he meant: “I did what I had to do.” He told the police “I feel like I wasn’t, you know, wrong.”

Michael Earl-Wayne Anthony is employed by private security corporation Kingdom Group Protective Services. His title is “robbery suppression officer.” Walgreens has a contract with Kingdom whereby the pharmacy employs these “robbery suppression officers.” Kingdom requires them to buy and maintain their own firearms. Although almost all loss prevention staff are instructed not to get into physical altercations with people they suspect are shoplifting this is purely out of the corporate interest to avoid lawsuits — because Kingdom is a private contracting group and Walgreens is unlikely to be held responsible for their “hands-on policy.” Armed and unaccountable, rent-a-cops like Michael Anthony are the front line of defense… for what?

For corporate property.

Let us be even more precise: this front line of defense is maintained not by watching, recording, reporting, but by unleashing these rabid mercenary dogs to go on the offensive, to proactively murder people they suspect of shoplifting.

We have no evidence, other than the word of the top cop, DA Brooke Jenkins (and the killer Anthony himself), that Banko was trying to steal anything. Legally, thefts of the kind that Anthony claims was occurring are low-level misdemeanors. Under California law, petty theft is the theft of anything under $950. The maximum penalty for this kind of petty theft is a six month prison term. Loss prevention officers and mall cop types love to physically block, tackle, or grab people who are committing what would otherwise be a petty theft or a minor larceny. The reason for this is simple: robbery, that is theft from a person or using force, is a felony. In California the difference between walking out of Walgreens with under $950 worth of merchandise and of tugging a plastic bag containing $1 in snacks away from a “robbery suppression officer” is the difference of a jail sentence of six months, and one of nine years.

But here’s the thing: even under the law of capitalism, what Anthony did was murder.

We know that property owners will kill to make sure their ownership isn’t contested, and that’s not just in the claim-jumper frontier murders of bygone ages. Every winter, unhoused people are swept out of abandoned buildings to freeze to death on the street so the owners of those buildings can maintain their title. White homeowners in particular have established a recent trend of murdering strangers for driving up their driveways, knocking on their doors, etc. Property is sacrosanct, and Americans have been primed to defend theirs with violence.

Still, it is a long established practice that loss prevention is not supposed to be involved in the actual physical apprehension of people they think are taking property. Of the $48.9 billion in shrinkage reported in 2016, for example, less than 1 percent of that was accounted for by “external theft.” Loss Prevention Media, an online trade magazine, said this, in 2018: “[T]his is a staggering statistic. Even when a substantial margin of error is factored in, this data does not support the philosophy of any loss prevention program that spends the bulk of their time and capital investing in the apprehension of shoplifters.” The California State Senate passed Bill 553 this summer, which bans retail staff from physically stopping suspected thieves.

Under U.S. law, using deadly force against someone to stop them from stealing is murder. It’s not manslaughter, it’s not justified homicide. It’s murder.

So why isn’t Anthony being charged with murder?

Despite the fact that the laws, as they are on the books, forbid the execution of suspected thieves — despite the fact that the only justifiable homicides are those in which the imminent use of deadly force is reasonably feared by the person who did the killing — despite the fact that using escalating force is not justifiable (if you make a fist I can’t shoot you in self defense) — despite all of this, suspected thieves or people who are later said to be suspected thieves almost never receive the protection of the law. The law was written by capitalists and their petty-bourgeois lawyer cronies. When they want to change it, when they need it to do something other than what it says it must do, they can.

There’s this thing, you see, called prosecutorial discretion. That means prosecutors get to choose which cases to bring and which cases to drop. There’s no way to hold them accountable for this.

That’s why Brooke Jenkins, San Francisco DA, moved to dismiss the murder case against Officer Kenneth Cha for the brutal slaying of unarmed Sean Moore as soon as she took office. That’s why she won’t prosecute Anthony. What did she say when she made this choice? “The people of San Francisco elected me to restore accountability and enhance public safety… As prosecutors, we have a sacred duty to try cases in good faith, to not abuse our power and ensure that the cases we bring forward are fair in order to maintain trust in the criminal justice system.”

What Jenkins meant was that she was going to quash investigations into the police. In her twisted parlance, “accountability” meant the end of accountability. She essentially accused her predecessor, not the police of being “unaccountable” for trying to prosecute them. Not even the most straight-forward language is safe around the lackeys of capitalists — they will piss on your head and tell you it’s raining.

Samuel Sinyangwe, an anti-police violence activist, said that “murder is now fully decriminalized for police in the city of San Francisco.”

Just like the murder of Banko, the murder of Sean Moore was captured on video. In Sean’s 2017 case, there was no crime whatsoever. He was at home, on his front steps, unarmed. A noise complaint had been made and Kenneth Cha had been dispatched to investigate. Moore was having a mental health crisis when the police arrived and, from the safety of his home, he told them to leave. They forced him outside, pepper sprayed him, and beat him with a baton. In his thrashing, he punched an officer and kicked Cha.

Cha shot him. Those wounds killed him in prison.

Jenkins presides over a city with one of the worst records in California for disparate use of force on Black people, who are 6.5 times more likely to be killed than white people by San Francisco officers. This, despite the fact that there are 10 times as many white people in San Francisco as Black people.

Jenkins, who has helped the police and the monied interests of the Golden City to contort the law in new and obscene shapes to help justify their violence, is an enemy of the people she claims to serve.

Two particularly powerful forces are shaping the landscape of the negotiations: streaming technology and artificial intelligence (AI). In recent years, streaming services have grown to dominate the entertainment industry, and the new model for intellectual property monetization no longer conforms to the terms of the writer’s contracts. The WGA says that the changing landscape has effectively transformed the industry into a gig economy, leaving its members to fend for themselves between contracts.

After weeks of negotiations, the AMPTP ultimately refused to budge, causing the writers’ contracts to expire and leaving them with no choice but to go on strike. Recently, the writers have been joined on strike by the Screen Actors Guild (SAG), motivated both by solidarity and by similar grievances with the studios. 

The Cutting Edge in Strikebreaking: Artificial Scabs

Just as a torturer must skillfully select the right implement to extract a confession from his victim, so too do the Hollywood producers have at their disposal brutal strikebreaking tools — the classic, of course, being the infamous “scab.” Sure enough, the AMPTP has already attempted to replace the striking workers with scabs. Alongside this tool, the producers are employing a fundamental tactic of siege warfare: cut off the enemy’s supply lines, and slowly but surely starve them out. Because the bosses can withhold the workers’ means of subsistence, that is, in the form of wages, and because they have a greater horde of wealth, the producers are betting that they can outlast the workers. One anonymous producer infamously stated as much with unusual honesty: “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.” In a now-deleted instagram reel, actor Ron Perlman said that he knows which “motherfucker” (sic.) producer said this, “and where he fucking lives,” suggestively adding, “There’s a lot of ways to lose your house. You wish that on people? You wish that families starve while you’re making $27 million a year for creating nothing? Be careful motherfucker. Be really careful.”

Mr. Perlman is right to call out the producers for living in extravagant luxury while the workers who actually create the value, who pay for the producers’ lifestyles, struggle to keep a roof over their head and food on their table. Perhaps most insidiously, these ungrateful parasites are attempting to entirely replace these very same workers, not just with scabs, but with machines. One need not cross the picket line to get a fill of their dystopian cyberpunk fantasies: artificial intelligence is already here! Only, the kind of “intelligence” in demand by the market is a very limited and mundane sort of intelligence: intelligent scabbing.

The final counter offers turned down by WGA and SAG included two critical “compromises.” In the first case, AMPTP maintained the right to replace writers with AI text generation. If you doubt the efficacy of existing AI technology, its capacity to replace writers, and whether this is an idle bluff by the studios, then I encourage you to re-read the first two paragraphs of this article, which have been co-authored by Chat GPT.

The studios also insist that they have the right to digitally scan background actors; the actors would be paid for a single day of labor, and the studio would walk away with full ownership of that actor’s likeness, to use as they please, forever, without even a single cent of compensation. This grotesque move has spurred the SAG to join their fellow workers in the WGA in protest.

Perhaps the AMPTP is bluffing. We can surmise that their plot to replace writers and background actors with AI was an empty threat, never intended to leave the negotiating table. Of course the studios knew this would be unreasonable and offensive to the workers before they proposed it — but that’s exactly the point! In both cases, the studios are challenging the power of labor by threatening to automate and thereby replace it with an unlimited supply of robotic “scabs.” They’re saying: “if you don’t step back in line, we will eliminate you, and you will starve.” The entertainment industry bosses have clearly signaled their unwillingness to negotiate in good faith. They’re confident that, one way or another, they will win — the workers be damned.

Indeed, it’s as the old saying goes: not all that glitters is gold. Nowhere is this truer than the entertainment business. As the bourgeois propagandists in the capitalist news media rally behind the corrupt studio executives and attempt to sow division between the workers, it is paramount that we not get beguiled or misled. Unconditional solidarity to the writers and actors in their fight against the producers is the only policy for the class-conscious proletariat. All power to the workers! Down with the producers and the executives! Down with the bosses! Down with all the parasites who feast upon labor!

But workers have been dying — this is no secret. We “essential workers,” the workers without-whom-which there is no production, there is no profit, and there is no society, could not do our work by crystal ball. We had to go to the workplaces, teeming with danger, and watch as our colleagues, our customers, and our companions were cut down by COVID. The danger, the death, faced by workers, has made us that much more precious, that much more valuable. We’ve all seen the unstable rollercoaster of the U.S. stock markets — with their investments at such enormous risk (Who will buy the products being produced when everyone is dying? Who can afford to leave their houses and spend money on entertainment?), the capitalists are weaker now than they have been at any time in the past century. The mere whiff of work-stoppage can drive a rout on the market and force Senators and Congresspeople into emergency session to protect their money and the money of the ruling class.

So labor is at a crossroads. Workers have a more advantageous position in this country today than we’ve had since we were fighting the Coal Wars or throughout the strikes and Unemployment Councils of the early 1930s. Over a third of the work stoppages in 2022 were in the hospital subsector. Hit hard by COVID and without relief, this included Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in L.A. and the 15,000 nurses of Twin Cities Hospital Group in Minnesota. A quarter of the strikes occurred in public education; 1,000 teachers at Brookline Public Schools in Boston and 4,500 teachers and professionals in Columbus City Schools in Ohio, and the 48,000 workers at the University of California. But labor laws don’t protect all striking workers equally, and those they do protect are only protected from some things, at some times.

Earlier this year, the Writers Guild of America (WGA), which represents all film, television, radio, and online media writers, entered into negotiations with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) — which is, in essence, a “producers union,” a collective bargaining association that represents 350 U.S. film and T.V. companies in bargaining with the WGA, the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), the Directors Guild of America, and the American Federation of Musicians. These negotiations led up to the expiration of the WGA’s Minimum Basic Agreement on May 1, 2023.

The WGA had several basic propositions on the table: an agreement that “artificial intelligence” tools like ChatGPT would never be used to produce entire screenplays or replacing writing work, minimum staffing requirements to ensure that writers are granted healthcare benefits, and, perhaps most importantly, an agreement that writers should be paid when their work is streamed online.

At 12:01 a.m. PDT on May 2, 2023, the WGA went on strike, taking the work of more than 11,000 writers with them.

On June 30, 2023, the agreement between SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP expires. In advance of that date, the actor’s guild has voted, by an overwhelming 98% to 2%, to authorize a strike.

Writer Bill Lawrence, showrunner of the Apple+ show Shrinking, claims that “this will become a business that you can only do if your parents are well-off enough to help pay your rent and support you while you get to a point that you can support yourself.” That is increasingly already the case. Jonah J. Lalas, a WGA-employed lawyer and former SIEU organizer, wrote that “If the studios win, only the rich, white, and the privileged will be able to tell [] stories [on television].”

But this is already by and large how the industry operates. “Anyone who knows with confidence they can eat and sleep for years to come without having to generate income to cover it has a lot more freedom (time and energy) to write and learn and network,” commented an anonymous Redditor in 2021. The Bureau of Labor Statistics confirms that a “college degree in English, communications, or journalism is generally required for a salaried position as a writer.” The average earnings of a WGA writer each year was $260,000 in 2021. The guild minimum was $6,967 per week in 2019-20, or $83,609 each year. For someone from a poor or working class family to become a WGA writer is not the usual course of business, and those who do are compensated at a rate far above the median wage of workers in the U.S., which is a mere $56,420. 

Although the writers have very legitimate points of contention around their labor expectations and the increasing unreliability of their employment, and have every right to bargain for better conditions, every worker should have the right to bargain as well. But the relative ease of the WGA strike so far is not the norm. In addition to their relatively high incomes, the writers face less repressive force preventing them from organizing.

Writers are allowed to strike. Healthcare workers are sometimes allowed to strike. Dock workers are allowed to strike. We should, of course, stand with striking workers in whatever productive fields they occupy; only those whose work materially furthers the oppression of our siblings across the globe — the Raytheon missile artisans, CIA intelligence goons, rabid-dog police agencies, and so forth — deserve our scorn. Everyone else deserves our solidarity.

Yet, not every industry is treated the same. Writers deserve and expect our solidarity when they strike. They must also give their solidarity to us when we fight for the improvement of our working conditions. They must stand up and say no, they must use their cultural cache and power, their economic power, everything they have at their command, and decry the treatment of their sibling-laborers. Who is not permitted to strike?

Firstly, those workers who haven’t unionized can’t avail themselves of the right to strike. Although U.S. law “recognizes” a right to strike even in un-unionized workplaces, there is almost no way to enforce that right. If an un-unionized workforce attempts to strike, those workers will find, the following morning, that they have all been fired and replaced. Any attempt to form a picket line will be physically dispersed by the police. Of all the workers in the U.S. Empire, only 10.1% are unionized. That means 90% of workers cannot strike. To prevent its workforce from becoming unionized and being able to effectively make use of the “right” to strike, corporations will do just about anything, including bribing government officials (for instance, Amazon bribed the town of Bessemer to place a post office box in front of the warehouse so unionizing workers would have to file their union cards in full sight of the bosses), harassing employees and union organizers, filing fake lawsuits, denying healthcare benefits, and firing people for no reason to deprive them of access to the job site.

Of those unions, there are several sectors who are not permitted, by law, to strike. Public sector (employed by the federal government) workers are not permitted to strike. Importantly, as was forcibly demonstrated earlier this year, rail workers can be prevented from striking by use of the 1926 Railway Labor Act. Air traffic controllers are not permitted to strike — when they did, in 1981, President Reagan fired all 11,000 striking workers. Looking at the data, we can identify two general rules of thumb about who is not allowed to strike.

1. Workplaces which are “fundamental” to the economy generally have strict rules about when, how, and if they are allowed to strike. One of the federal government’s primary tasks (one of the primary tasks of any bourgeois capitalist state) is to ensure the economy continues to function; that profit continually flows to the capitalists. After all, it is for their benefit that the government exists in the first place; they choose all the candidates for office, pay for the campaigns of and then elect all the politicians, and themselves generally either serve in government or have direct contact with those who do. That means any worker whose job is too important, for whom a strike would be “too powerful” — that is, threaten the very fabric of capitalist society, threaten to establish a more equal society — are prohibited from striking.
2. Workplaces with historically high class-consciousness, high awareness of the power of withholding labor, have also been legislated out of the right to strike. The railway workers fall into both of these categories; not only are the transport networks of the railroads vital to the functioning of the economy, railway workers have known this since at least 1871, and successive railway strikes threatened to overthrow the entire U.S. government and capitalist system repeatedly at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.

The reason that the WGA writers are not subject to much of this same opposition is that they occupy a privileged place in the U.S. productive system. They are the heart of cultural production and reproduction. They help determine what blares from every theater and television screen in the country. Mass media has been, since the foundation of the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the modern CIA, a tool of the ruling class in the U.S. Empire. Psychological warfare was developed in its modern form by the OSS; pirate radio became Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia — anti-Soviet and anti-Chinese propaganda stations. The OSS continued after the war, deploying its psychological operations both at home and abroad, reincarnated as the various intelligence agencies of the empire. Today, intelligence, primarily in the form of the Department of Defense and CIA, maintains observers and “advisors” that interpenetrate the mediasphere and help shape what we see, hear, and read.

We live in the shadow of Hearst and the newspaper trusts, of the domineering “Studio System” that controlled the production of films for so long — and still does control it, though the old monopolistic system has relaxed its grip, it is only to permit a sort of neo-monopoly to take its place, in which studios exercise just as much influence, but through back-door channels, shell corporations, and the cautious funding of “indie” film. There is a reason that writers in the WGA make much more than the average worker in the U.S. Empire, and it’s not because they’re doing that much more work, or that writing requires that much more training — although, we must recognize that writing is a trade skill that needs honing, like any other. Although the WGA writers themselves are not wholly responsible for the complex web of capital-driven propaganda, their position in such a crucial sector nevertheless affords them relative privilege and protection from repression. 

There are many groups of workers in the U.S. who have been given more than their siblings, who are exploited less; that doesn’t make them our enemies, but it does mean that they must open their eyes to this bribery. When they fight for their advancement, they must not forget that they advance or retreat farther and faster only when they have their sibling workers at their side. The strength of the WGA is illusory — although it has garnered concessions, it will be subject to the next wave of repressive anti-union legislation that is sure to follow in the wake of COVID. Without a firm footing among the rest of the working classes, the WGA workers will be swept away by that reactionary tide, and find themselves alone in a sea of enemies, or be winnowed down to the handful of privileged ultra-wealthy guild masters who agree to work with the imperial ideologists. We must, must advance together. This is the ethos that capitalist production teaches every worker; it is this very socialization of labor by which Capital digs its own grave. My well-being is dependent on yours; yours on mine; and both of ours on taking back from the owners, the investors, the capitalists, what they stole.

Here, in the U.S., we have a venomous tradition of “I’ll look out for me; I’ve got mine.” This has infected union organizing, and cabined off unions from one another, broken solidarity, and as a result wrecked any chance the unions have of fighting the real enemy — the capitalists — on their home turf. This has not happened accidentally; the capitalists have always been trying to break up worker solidarity, to cabin us off into separate “sectors,” to play one union off another, or to break unions altogether.

We cannot allow that to happen. The organization of a union, even the victory of the union to secure better conditions for its membership, is the beginning, not the end. The union is a workshop, or better yet a training ground, where the working class can prepare for conflict against its enemy: the exploiters.

Should we support the WGA strike? Unequivocally! But the WGA cannot stop at residuals. It must continue to push, and only through its membership can it do that. We workers have had enough of the slothful, reformist union leadership — we are tired of the comfortable political agents of the unions. It is the hour for war-chariots, not clown cars; we must carry fire and brimstone at the head of our movement, at the head of our class. Most of all, we must be immune to bribes and blandishments, must turn up our noses at “above average” salaries. We are not to be bought off with the paltry spoils of the capitalist-imperialists or their political lackeys. Yes, you can strike! Make your strike count — strike true.

The supposed “outstanding warrant” on Xodiak was apparently filed two months earlier, in the wake of community defense for a drag storytime event at West Hollywood library, which had been targeted by fascists. During that action, Jairo the Hitlerite, a notorious fascist propagandist in Los Angeles County, showed up to film and antagonize the crowd. While attempting to disrupt the library event, he had his ass kicked by anonymous “black bloc” crews standing in the entrance to the library. The pigs stood nearby, no doubt fearful of starting a riot, as Jairo called for their help. As he turned tail and left, he continued to vlog from the very cellphone he would later claim was stolen by Xodiak. And while Xodiak was indeed present at the action, leading the crowd in chants and cheers, Lavender Press journalists who were on scene have confirmed that Xodiak never once laid a finger on Jairo, let alone stole any property. Yet the police report posted after Xodiak’s arrest accuse them of exactly that:

After Xodiak was arrested, they were placed in jail at the West Hollywood Sheriff’s Station with a ludicrously trumped up bail of $100,000. Speaking incredible volumes about the love and solidarity shared by the LGBT community, the necessary 10% of that sum — $10,000 — was quickly raised to have Xodiak released. Yet, immediately after submitting the bail funds, the Sheriffs moved Xodiak to a different detention center and added a second charge, which as of writing this article has not been publicly specified. Clearly the pigs must share Jairo’s disdain for Xodiak, who has tirelessly advocated for police abolition and for cops to stay away from Pride; clearly the pigs are doing everything in their power to prevent Xodiak from being released, despite having committed no crime! As Jordan later identified in his Twitter thread detailing the arrests, Xodiak is a political prisoner — that is to say, guilty of no crime other than challenging ruling class hegemony.

West Hollywood mayor Sepi Shyne, a bourgeois identity-opportunist who is quick to fall back on her lesbian identity when criticized, has stated that this incident is “deeply disconcerting,” but nevertheless maintained that “these arrests … conform to policies and protocol.” She further promised “conversation” and “dialog,” which might have held some weight if this were the first incident where she’s been called upon to actually represent the interests of her supposed queer peers and to reduce, defund, and dismantle the police. Earlier this year, another trans activist living in West Hollywood, Annie Jump, was brutalized by LASD in her own apartment while defending her Fourth Amendment rights. Annie confronted Mayor Shyne in a variety of forms and repeatedly received idle talk about reform. Despite promising to help, Mayor Shyne has repeatedly supported and defended the institution of the police, offering only symbolic gestures, such as declaring West Hollywood a “sanctuary city for transgender people.” Of course, it’s difficult to feel safe in this “sanctuary” when the police who, ostensibly, are supposed to protect us, are part and parcel to the campaign of fascist violence against us.

In the age of “rainbow-capitalism,” where corporations routinely tout “queer-friendly” marketing, where the Pride movement has been overtaken by shady nonprofits and corporate sponsored Pride marches, where politicians make feeble denunciations of chauvinism and flaccid appeals to “equality,” it has been easy for many of us to forget our historical roots. After all, even the most liberal and “queer accommodating” curricula don’t really do justice to the movement for queer liberation, preferring to push our radical history under the rug. But Stonewall (1969, NYC) was a riot against the police who raided a gay bar and brutalized its patrons!

But Compton’s Cafeteria (1966, SF) was a riot against the police who tried to arrest transsexuals for loitering (despite paying for coffee)!

But Black Cat Tavern (1967, Silverlake) was a riot (well, civil protest) against police brutality following a raid by LAPD’s vice squad — undercover police with quotas of homosexuals to catch!

But Cooper’s Donuts (1959, LA) was yet another riot against police brutality!

What the history of our movement shows is that, far from being simply about peace and love, the Pride movement is about the fight against oppression and state violence. We would do well to remember that as the pigs today not only continue to brutalize us, but routinely defend the very fascists who call for our eradication. While our attention is focused on the troubling rise of this “grass-roots” fascism, liberal politicians and propagandists continue their efforts to beguile us, to deceive us into neglecting the institutional fascism that’s been around us all this time, to continue accepting the lie that the fascist cops will protect us from these other fascists. In truth, fighting fascism won’t be accomplished at the ballot box, by voting for liberal oligarchs who continue funneling money into the police, prisons, and military. Fighting fascism means getting involved and organized, it means building a militant mass movement of the people!

Release Xodiak! Release Abby! Release all political prisoners!

Update: June 7, 2023 at 2:00 p.m.

While Xodiak’s arraignment was originally scheduled for the morning of Tuesday, June 6, 2023, their court appointment was repeatedly pushed back throughout the day, and then canceled altogether. After a campaign of public scrutiny, a judge ordered Xodiak’s release. Yet the police have so far refused to comply.

Update: July 7, 2023 at 7:00 p.m.

As of 6:00 p.m. (Pacific Daylight Time), police have complied with the court’s order to release Xodiak.

“This is going to continue to happen. Trans people are going to be targeted. The sheriffs won’t be held accountable… Because our legislators don’t care about us.”

— Annie Jump Vicente, reflecting on her arrest a week prior.

On December 7th, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department arrested Annie Jump, a West Hollywood resident and police abolitionist, who was returning home to her apartment with her groceries. The sheriffs had apparently arrived to investigate a completely separate domestic violence call, which had turned out to be a false report. As Annie explained to us, there actually had been ongoing domestic violence in the building, but the survivor had left earlier that morning; hence, without a genuine exigent circumstance, the sheriffs required either a warrant or an invitation to enter the building. On her way into the apartment, Annie thus refused entry to the sheriffs, who subsequently grabbed and handcuffed her, slammed her head into the nearby wall, and detained her.

As Annie had to keep reminding the sheriffs, she is a trans woman, and yet the sheriffs persistently misgendered her before, during, and after the arrest. They also claimed that she was impeding their investigation, though they had no right to enter the building. Part of this encounter was caught on film by Annie’s roommate.

A later video was also published online, at which point 10 sheriffs had arrived and Annie was being held face down outside of a police vehicle. After Annie berated the sheriffs for doing nothing to stop domestic violence and for continuing to misgender her, she can be seen being carried off into the nearby vehicle.

At no point did the police read her Miranda rights, at no point did they tell her that she’s under arrest or being detained, and at no point did they command her to stop resisting. Annie’s injuries were not adequately treated, and since we last spoke to her, she said she’s had a persistent headache ever since. She maintains that the way she was mishandled and abused by the sheriffs was not only a violation of her rights, but was also motivated by transmisogyny — and she further speculates that the sheriff’s hostilities towards her may have been retribution for her political activism, in which she has repeatedly demanded the city council to defund the sheriff’s department.

As it stands, anyone would be well within reason to distrust LASD and to treat them as a potential danger. It’s been long known that violent deputy gangs operate from within LASD — in fact, the city’s civilian oversight commission recently acknowledged this formally, though they wouldn’t even entertain the idea of firing the deputy gang members. Gang members or not, the police and deputies are well known for their violence and discrimination. On another occasion, Annie’s leasing agent had threatened to kick her out of the apartment because she’s transgender; Annie had attempted to report this incident as a hate crime, but the sheriffs refused to take a statement. In fact, this isn’t even the first time the sheriffs have investigated domestic violence in the building. According to Annie, the sheriffs had been to the apartment on seven other occasions responding to a domestic violence call, and each time they did nothing about it — again, not even taking a statement. If sheriffs are well known for their violence and scarcely known for helping, could anyone honestly blame Annie for not permitting the sheriffs entrance to the apartment? We hold that they could not!

We interviewed Annie a week after her arrest, and she was able to tell us more about the circumstances leading up to and events following her arrest.

Members of the Lavender Guard will be meeting Annie along with the WeHo Social Justice Coalition to demand the new city council members to fire the deputies who arrested Annie and adopt a progressive agenda. For those local to LA county, you can help support the struggle by joining us at the city council meeting (625 San Vicente blvd, West Hollywood) on December 19th at 6pm and stand in solidarity with Annie Jump. If you’re feeling confident, please give a public comment demanding the deputies involved be fired and the Council adopt The People’s Agenda.