Before the citation was written, the woman being harassed by a pawn of the state made it clear she was losing amniotic fluid, a sure sign that labor had begun, and a sure sign that she had to immediately go to the hospital. The uniformed pig was not interested in the fact that her husband had left to call an ambulance, and began attempting to detain her. In body-cam footage released later, Caleb Stewart is shown safe in his patrol car discrediting her story, stating that he “wasn’t seeing what she was saying.” Our “safety” is guaranteed by having such qualified airheads respond to any and all emergencies.

The situation outlined here is not unique, and it will happen again. In fact, the new genocidaires in charge have guaranteed that not only will human rights violations like this continue, but will surely increase as any semblance of an existing “welfare state” in Washington is dismantled and sold off to the highest bidders. As people are left in the dust by an already brutal system becoming even more so, more and more expecting mothers are being pushed to the street.

The horror here not only lies in the blatant disregard of human life for the sake of property, as evidenced here by this little boy in blue protecting a sidewalk from a woman having a medical emergency, but in the fact that women are being forced to live on the street while navigating a situation that is extraordinarily difficult to deal with even for those with the needed resources.  Countless studies have shown that birth, always dangerous and always painful, is an even more harrowing experience for homeless people.

The Republicans’ “pro-life” commitments do not apply to the expecting mother, and cease applying to the child as soon as it is born. No help will be given to the mother or child, assuming either survive the ordeal, and any health conditions brought on by the circumstances of houselessness will go untreated until it’s too late, driving up the cost of living as ICU visits are notoriously prohibitively expensive in the so-called “United States.”

Let’s be clear here, this did not happen out of nowhere, this was not an aberration, this wasn’t even a partisan issue. This was a crystal clear example of class warfare. This is the front line of the battle the capitalists wage against us every day, with those deemed not productive enough facing the most open forms of violence. As the Communist Manifesto so bluntly stated over a century ago: 

“The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.”

This veil, torn away, has become a mask the capitalists can don and dispose of as necessary. To ensure an intrusive and dangerous condition such as pregnancy is suffered through, the capitalists clutch offended at the pearls of morality. However, should a newborn’s single bloody toe risk staining the capitalist’s true divine entity, property, the hammer of the state will smash you to bits.

The timing and location reveal another layer of evil to the crime. Cornelius was sleeping across the street from Ebenezer Baptist Church, the same place where Martin Luther King Jr. was once co-pastor with his father. This church hosts a highly attended memorial service every MLK day, along with other events covering several blocks around MLK’s childhood home. With the federal holiday just four days away, city officials called for the area to be purged of the visibly poor in preparation for the events. They desired to display a pristine picture of urban life in the Capitalist metropolis — removed of its racialized homelessness, as if Martin Luther King Jr.’s neighborhood were an exhibit at Disneyland. In a city where New Afrikans are 47% of the total residents, 86% of the homeless are Black. This racial disparity among the homeless is even more telling on the All-Empire level (13% versus. 36.6%). “Gentrification,” deployed as a mode of ethnic cleansing; a modern buzzword for the mass displacement grinding in the background of each and every victory of the white worker. 

Cornelius Taylor spent his last day on this Earth in a plastic tent on Old Wheat St in the King Historic District of Atlanta, just two blocks down from MLK’s childhood home. City workers arrived on January 16 in a frontloader with a metal bucket attachment, accompanied by Atlanta police officers. Neither worker nor pig bothered to check the tents; this was out of sheer laziness, yes, but also the active, ingrained dehumanization of people who cannot afford an apartment. We know what happened next because of the medical examiner’s report, which attributes Mr. Taylor’s cause of death to “blunt force trauma to the pelvis and abdomen.” The bastards ran him over with the state machine, essentially crushing his body in two. The tent, pavement, and other debris were soaked in Cornelius’ blood. 

And the pigs who stood guard as Mr. Taylor was crushed? They have already tried to cover up their active role by submitting an incident report that implied Mr. Taylor died of a drug overdose, rather than the tons of force that had spilled the blood from his body. 

The report of lies describes another homeless man waving the officer down to point them to what had just happened. The cop pulls Mr. Taylor’s paralyzed body out of the collapsed tent, but didn’t notice (read: chose not to report) the unconscionable injuries to his abdomen and torso, nor the pools of blood seen by all the other witnesses. All they included in the report was a “nose bleed” and “foam emitting” from Mr. Taylor’s mouth; that an “overdose” was suspected. Let us now dispel any possible lingering notions of good-faith in this report. It is a blatant lie; meant to muddy the waters, create doubt of the obvious, and most of all, shift blame away from the pig and onto the victim. Police think they can literally sweep Cornelius Taylor under the rug if they just assassinate his character as a “drug addict,” another maligned group that the pigs see as undeserving of shelter or life. In what can only be understood as an admission of guilt, police continue to delay release of the body cam footage in the “ongoing investigation.” This is nothing new. Body cams which support a pig’s claim get released immediately; those which contradict their lies are held in purgatory to quell the public’s outrage. 

A service was held on February 3 for Mr. Taylor at Ebenezer Baptist Church, the same church where honorary services were held for Martin Luther King Jr. the week before. After the service, family members and activists led a silent march to city hall. They are demanding an end to encampment sweeps… 

But a demand like this will do nothing to alleviate the daily state-enforced torture of the homeless. Just hours after the funeral, the Atlanta city council voted to change the methods used to carry out homeless displacements. They voted to stop using heavy equipment in their raids, as well as to bring back another useless “task force” on homelessness. It is now up to the mayor to ratify or veto the changes. No, begging the state for change will not stop the displacements, even if they are carried out with a shinier boot. It is a mistake to make preemptive concessions to the killers, it is a mistake to limit this movement by demanding mercy from the oppressor and their infantry of goons. Like bartering a sale in a market, the seller shouldn’t start from a price that’s lower than what they want. 

Others in the city already understand this, if we are to believe anonymous sources who claim to have returned to the scene of the crime in the early morning of January 30. According to these sources, the frontloader was incinerated; a spontaneous outcry of people who want to start from the opposite of concessions. 

The demand to stop encampment sweeps is a far cry from the vision of Martin Luther King Jr; a man who was assassinated for his efforts to upend the deep antagonists of capital and its tentacles of destruction squeezing the life out of Black and other oppressed communities. The night before his assassination, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech titled I’ve Been to the Mountaintop to New Afrikan sanitation workers on strike in Memphis, Tennessee. These workers were striking for better working conditions after a malfunctioning truck crushed two fellow workers to death, like Cornelius Taylor. King told them, “We’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point in Memphis.” 

But tragedy did follow. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered the very next day; 60 years later, their monopoly on violence causes the same “tragic accidents” which impoverish, brutalize, and crush New Afrikans beneath the state. 

Martin Luther King Jr’s name was slandered by the state his entire career before modern attempts have tried to rob his legacy of all its anti-capitalist beliefs. They strangled George Floyd under a pig’s knee and blamed his death on an overdose. They mutilated Cornelius Taylor in a violent attack against the Black and homeless, before pushing that same tired lie. There is no reforming a system that operates on New Afrikan death. We will live and die in these conditions, or we will live and die winning our shared liberation.

Cornelius Taylor. Say his name!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We must break that pattern and prove them wrong. 

Here is the ideological degradation of the yankee political movement. Here is our diagnosis. It has been desolated. It has been converted into a lackey of an imperialist colonialist government. It cannot even accept what is happening to itself.

We are now in the “post-politics” era of bourgeois propaganda. Now our politics is relegated to this ridiculous demand of democracy. If there are many genocides, a cop city for each municipal government in fascist amerikkka, another operation wetback, continued rabid islamophobia, continued rabid anti-immigrant and anti-refugee terror, continued genocide in Sudan, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Congo, continued constant executions of Black people which go to the protest of only a small awake portion of the masses of the yankee empire,  continued terroristic bombing of Syria, continued terroristic yankee occupation of Somalia — all this is fine. It is very well. We must protect our democracy. Our democracy first.

Khaliifah Williams has been martyred.

Who wants to study politics, wants to work on politics, wants to practice politics? We cannot just sit and click a vote button or sign a letter and receive our portion of imperial privileges stolen from a poor country whose genocide we only protest tomorrow.

To Cesaire, colonialism is thingification — the bringing down of a person into dehumanized subhuman status. Now, we see furthermore the thingification of revolutionary consciousness. The social being of this nightmarish empire, of this settler project, has been split into dehumanized parts that are easily manipulable — the social consciousness hereof is bourgeois-ified to the extent that it is so degraded, so pacified, so depoliticized that it can now be, with a few words, with a few slogans, manipulated into turning off consciousness altogether, and into reaction.

The social consciousness derived from the majority’s social position in settler society has by default inclined them into such slavishness, into such political apathy, inaction, that they accept whatever the bourgeois fascist government says, and whatever its political parties and spiritual instruments of oppression say, by underwhelmingly deceptive slogans. That economic position — one that, not unlike the israelis, siphons material benefits from settler-colonial occupation and looting of the Global South — pollutes the worldview of those inside the U.S.-Canadian empire, hoping to ensnare us in a belief that the imperialist vampire is our friend. There is not even a need for a programme anymore in the yankee empire, only repetitions of: Democracy! Protect your rights! Lesser of two evils! Vote against Trump! It is just these simple, blank slogans – and by invoking them you have all of the workers paid off by the spoils of empire behind you, all of the social democrats and “vanguard communists” behind you, and it is now scandalous for anyone outside of this crowd to point this indisputably weak and illogical capitulation out to the world.

Khaliifah Williams has been martyred.

Regarding the Black nation, this special colonial question, everyone who is still somehow awake still charges genocide. The chauvinists by contrast have disputed this, and demand only a paper “unity” between the white laborer and the Black laborer that completely ignores the super exploitation of the latter for the sake of the former.

Regarding immigrant people, so often fleeing the devastation of U.S. foreign policy, we charge genocide. The government is continuing its policies of concentration camps and systematic destruction of immigrant languages, culture, communities. Deportation is an instrument of the most chauvinistic and fascistic oppression. The chauvinists meantime are demanding merely a paper “immigrant non-immigrant unity.”

 To “protect democracy” means to close the border in the collective yankee mind. Chauvinism assuredly has always been embedded in the minds of the imperial “left,” as they are and always have been settlers here — and now it is flaring still more. Fascism was already here; the fascist positions before now were superficially rejected, now the fascist positions are widely, universally accepted, and our rotten, all pervasive chauvinism today is only deniable because, by its very omnipresence, it is now unquestionable. Deportation is rising; we vote for a cop. People die; we vote for the killers.

Unity only for unity’s sake: unity around “democracy” that does not exist.

 They speak of “democracy.” I speak of over a hundred thousand dead in Gaza, of wholesale slaughter of peoples, of Black peoples who are still being genocided, who are still suffering in the prison colonies, who are still being enslaved in the prison colonies. I am speaking of many genocides and immigrant people fleeing countries “our own” government has overthrown who are now being oppressed and deported again by this same government of ours. 

I am speaking of the fact that in the epoch of imperialism and colonialism, the national and colonial questions are embedded with all other problems. They speak of the need to “protect democracy.” I speak of the need to destroy a “democracy” which is itself the agent of colonialist and imperialist terrorism and wholesale slaughter of nationalities.
We need to destroy the “democracy” of Death Rows lined up state to state with Black people who are shipped to the objection of absolutely zero tangible social-political force to the legalized gallows. We need to destroy the “democracy” that smothers Syria, Iran, Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon. We need to destroy the “democracy” that for more than 200 years has relegated Black people to  second-class citizenship. This “democracy” is rotten and parasitic. It demands we focus all our political energies on it until it consumes our capacity for political life. They are in anguish for this “democracy” of theirs. Insofar as it is a democracy of ongoing Nakba, of lynchings, of mass oppression of Black and Indigenous people, of occupations and coups, we aim to destroy it.

This demand for “democracy” is chauvinism. It is a demand for the improvement of a settler order that is committing many genocides, that is itself genocide against Turtle Island, and nothing more. This is the belly of the beast but it is not being accepted as such.

 As long as chauvinism continues to control our movement for the abolishing of present-day society, it is no such thing, and we have no urgency — we are not meeting the maturing crisis, and we are instead fleeing from it. We say we want to work “for democracy in November” because we want to regress into “business as usual” and accept the epoch of many genocides as normal. We have forsaken our Marxism and our anti-zionism for colonialist, ruling-class endorsed privileges. We are giving up on the oppressed for ourselves to be “ascended” still closer to being a bourgeoisie.

Without a single doubt there is a election coming upon the horizon which shall be the genocide ticket, in which the two parties of the bourgeoisie will indulge in theatrics and meaningless trifles, but fundamentally be enthusiastically propagandising and materially supporting the multiple genocides they are carrying out. Joe Biden, the so-called “most progressive” president of the empire is apathetic about the horrors he is supporting and we are left to debate “social gains” outside of a genocide we may or may not get as a result of this election cycle.
 He is actively, consistently supporting the genocidal entities which depend on his government. He is actively, consistently ignoring the demands of every oppressed movement. Joe Biden and his Democratic Party are in no way progressive – they’re the most progressively apologetic for reaction. 

But there are no social gains independent of genocides, in the era of many genocides. The epoch of imperialism is the epoch of decaying, moribund capitalism – it is absolutely a fetter upon continued social development. It is abating any forces of progress. It is a hindrance – not a tool with which to reach a preferred end. There can only be progression with its destruction. And when imperialism reaches rabid stages of genocides, multiple genocides, it is calling for its own gravedigger. 

Khaliifah Williams has been martyred.

The material force of oppression in bourgeois society is also its spiritual force of oppression. In the epoch of many genocides it has never been a greater spiritual force of oppression than now.

The colonialist bourgeoisie has successfully reduced politics down to papers and ballots. Chauvinism is abundant and the many genocides are now to the chauvinists less important than their little medal of democracy. Politics in the empire is materially for genocide insofar as it is rhetorically for democracy.

We need a truly internationalist proletarian party. It is time to consolidate communist organizations of the oppressed, of the lumpenproletariat, of the super exploited and colonized masses, of Indigenous people — which will be the first really communist party, which will first and foremost, and primarily and always (until the epoch is truly over, until we have smashed it with our hands), struggle against the many genocides, always in relation to the genocides. 



This is for all land back. This is for the death of the zionist entity. This is for freeing the Land and New Afrika. This is for Hawaiian independence and all the rest of the colonies of the yankee empire. This is for the end of the yankee empire and for Palestine to be free from the river to the sea. This is for a globalized intifada. This is for Nasrallah, Khaliifah Williams, Ismail Haniyeh,  and all of our martyrs.
All of this constitutes what is actually important, what is practically the most important. This title does not allot itself to the “democracy” of hypocrisy.

And all politics which does not see this, which does not accept this, which does not struggle around all of this all of the time, is a politics which is as good as dead, just as “democracy” in the yankee empire is as good as dead. There is no room for saying otherwise. There must be the reconsolidation of the movement along the lines of the most awakened and oppressed peoples imprisoned herein because in them lies our only hope. 
The movement must learn to disrupt business as usual, to disrupt settler, imperialist, chauvinist politics as usual, to disrupt “democracy” as usual. In this fascist empire we have to knock down bourgeois democracy, not protect it. Every protection of it is 100 more state executions, 100 more million dollars to the zionist entity, 100 more immigrant families deported. There are no more excuses for passivity. 

We must stop wasting time and start committing to gaining in this task now. We must make daily gains in this task starting now. And if we do not do this, we are going for barbarism.

We are on the path to barbarism now.
 We have a duty to get off this path.



We cannot waste any more time.

Khaliifah Williams has been martyred.

There will be more.

We cannot let there be more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Khaliifah, At Last…Another’s heartbeat

On the evening of Monday, July 15, 2024, the Austin, Texas chapter of the Communist Party USA was liquidated by members of the Texas district committee. The district claims this vote was unanimous, but the representative from Austin was not made aware that this meeting was taking place, nor was she allowed to defend her club or participate in the vote.

The accusations made towards Austin comrades are factionalism and refusal to follow the Party line on four issues:

• Two delegates leaving during the “Israeli” speech at the National Convention in June 2024
• Not being fully on board voting for Biden/Dems – aka Resolution 5
• In house open discussion of the petition and reasons for its creation (we urged comrades not to sign it)
• Accused of “Black Nationalism” and following the Black Panther Party playbook with our mutual aid work

Let us address these accusations individually.

Yes, two of us left during the “Israeli” speech at the convention. Is quietly walking outside against the rules? No grand walkout nor vocal statement was made. We simply disagreed with what the man was saying, and thought that inviting him to speak after the Palestinian speaker canceled was bad optics. We stand by this belief. When should comrades dissent if not at the National Convention? Rather than having a comradely discussion on this issue, one of the Party co-chairs chose to make passive aggressive statements in her closing speech, “when you walk out on an Israeli comrade, you’re walking out on the working class.”

We disagree with the validity of her statement.

Free Palestine.

Yes, we dissented on Resolution 5, as did half of the delegates present at the convention. Again, when should comrades dissent if not at the National Convention? The Party claims that this “vote against MAGA” resolution is not a “vote for Biden” demand, although several Party members quite literally stated a need to support Biden and the Democratic Party during the shortened convention discussion.

On the last day of the convention, a white Party elder from Connecticut gave a speech calling all dissenters on Resolution 5 “racist” and “chauvinist” for refusing to support a genocidal, bourgeois administration with the statement, “Black and brown comrades fought and died for the right to vote, and you don’t want to?”

It should go without saying, but Joe Biden has a long history of racism against Black Americans. He is, right now, actively contributing to the genocide of the Palestinian people. Several Black and brown comrades spoke against Resolution 5, and a white woman accusing them of racism is disgusting and unacceptable.

Many of us were sent “A Comradely Petition” the week after the CPUSA National Convention. This petition was a demand to reopen discussion around Resolution 5 before the National Committee was slated to vote on it. The Austin delegation was in agreement that the petition was silly, and not the correct path forward, but that it was important to understand why it was created. Many rank and file comrades feel that they are not represented by the National Committee. The fact that the discussion around this contentious resolution was cut short added to those feelings.

All of the Austin delegates advocated against local comrades signing the petition. We did, however, give space for discussion at our local meeting. As many comrades were talking about leaving and searching for a new organization, we also gave space for this discussion. The discussion was very respectful and productive. Some comrades shared that they were ready to leave. Most stated that they preferred to stay and struggle under the Party banner.

A rat within our organization, who was not present at the National Convention nor at the local meeting, leaked internal documents to members of the Texas district committee. They used these documents without context to frame our discussions as “factionalism.”

Comrades, if you are suspicious of someone within your organization, trust that feeling.

The most bothersome reason for liquidation is this accusation of “Black Nationalism” levied because we read from members of the Black Panther Party, and participate in mutual aid work.

First, one major problem within the local chapter is that we currently have no Black members. Austin, Texas is the only growing major city in the US with a shrinking Black population. This is mostly due to rapid gentrification thanks to the ongoing tech sector boom and rising cost of living. Historically Black neighborhoods are being demolished for “modern” developments which have caused property taxes to rise rapidly and out of control. Austin is becoming unaffordable for much of the working class, but our Black and immigrant neighbors are the most affected by the rising cost of living.

Second, we see no issue with the concept of Black Nationalism as described by Malcom X and the Black Panther Party. While this is not something we, as a majority white chapter, are openly advocating for, why does CPUSA see Black Nationalism as a threat to their working class movement? It is up to those of us who do not live the Black experience to educate ourselves as much as possible on how to support our Black neighbors, their needs, and understand their experiences. Black Nationalism is simply self determination.

Third, mutual aid is the most important work we do in our community. Period. We were told that organizing with the lumpen proletariat is against the CPUSA Party Program. During our many reads of the Program, we have yet to come across such a passage. One major flaw in the Party is the lack of education around mutual aid and community defense programs, and some of us have brought this up on appropriate occasions. We do also participate in the local electoral struggle, as commanded by the Party.

Mutual aid is important for many reasons. The most obvious is that we are literally helping vulnerable people. Why would a communist not want to help those in need? It is also a way to meet and work with other individuals and organizations doing similar work in our neighborhoods. This is how we build alliances. It is also how we build community trust. “Communism” can be a scary word in the USA, and when people meet us out in the streets helping each other, we begin to build trust.

So this is what happened to the Austin, Texas chapter of the Communist Party USA. We no longer exist. Comrades were given the option to reapply to the Party and begin to rebuild from scratch. Everything we built over the last three years is gone. Most of us, including local leadership, are moving on. We have already begun to rebrand as a mutual aid organization, and have set up a meeting in a few weeks. We will be okay, and the work will continue.

Stay vigilant, comrades. Take care of each other. Support your community. We are all we have.

Last year, the Supreme Court of the United States decided Counterman v. Colorado, 600 U.S. (2023), which held that negligence could never be the standard for First Amendment cases. Essentially, SCOTUS said that, in order to hold someone accountable for their speech, malicious intent must be proved. Under Anglo-American law, there is a differentiation between general intent (intent to do an action) and specific intent (intent to bring about a result). Under the standard decided in Counterman, speech-related acts must have the specific intent of bringing about the complained-of result.

What does that mean in the case of DeRay Mckesson? If the fascist Court of Appeals of the Fifth Circuit had followed this decision, it would have meant that Mckesson could not be found liable to Officer Braindamage unless the officer could prove that Mckesson had organized the protest specifically with the intent of hurting him, or had otherwise directly urged the protestor who threw the concrete to do so. In fact, the District Court did hold that, and dismissed the suit, but Officer Shatterface appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which issued a ruinous decision. The Fifth Circuit covers the states of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, and in their 2022 decision they held that protest organizers owe a duty not to “negligently cause a third party to commit a crime that is a foreseeable consequence of negligence.” This means, as far as federal law is concerned in those three states, protest organizers are civilly liable for any damage caused by a protest.

Furthermore, it is possible that this will establish the basis for criminal liability. It is an echo of the RICO prosecutions in Georgia. It is not impossible that prosecutors’ offices throughout the South now possess the weapons to indict and charge any participant in a protest as part of a domestic terror plot.

This Monday, the nine robed fascists on the SCOTUS declined to review Mckesson’s case, denying certiorari, and permitting this Fifth Circuit decision to stand. The entire swathe of the U.S. South, the stronghold of the most powerful elements of right-fascistic reaction, will now treat all of its citizens the way it has long treated its Black and Indigenous citizens. The age of the settler-compromise is coming to an end, and the age of open warfare between the proletarian class and the state has returned.

Solidarity to all in the fortresses of fascism — we urge all aid in this hour of war to be sent to them. We will defy the tools of the enemy state, spit in the face of its bourgeois masters, and the masses will have no choice but look into the eye of their propertied enemy, and decide: Whose side are you on?

Beyond approving the funding, the vote actually doubled the public cost of the project due to a little reported unlimited leaseback agreement with the Atlanta Police Foundation. The city is leasing the 85-acre plot of the Weelaunee Forest to the APF for about $10 a year, and councilors voted to lease it back for access to the training facility for $1.2 million per year for the next 30 years (about $36 million total). This flies in the face of the nearly two year Stop Cop City movement; it also ignores  the many commentators who pleaded with the councilors to redirect this funding toward Atlanta’s marginalized populations, the major housing problem, and to help the 20% of the city’s children and 14% of adults who face daily hunger.

In the city council’s previous election, there was a major turnover, largely due to the rejection of harmful policing policies after the murder of George Floyd and Atlanta resident Rayshard Brooks, bringing in seven new officials. The new city council was touted to be younger and more “ideologically progressive” than previous iterations. But the vote tally in favor of doubling funding for Cop City was 11-4, with eight of the eleven being Democrats. Once again, the fascist ideology of capitalism has held firm thanks to its stabilizing left wing, the Democratic Party. In a struggle with the far right for dominance in government, they have eagerly served the interests of the ruling class, despite their hollow words.

One of these new councilors, Byron Amos, has been fueled by developers and airport concessionaires throughout his political career. Another younger member, Matt Westmoreland, who has served since 2018, used his post as the Chairperson of the Community Development/Human Services Committee to cut time for public comment in half. He has also come under scrutiny for violations of the Open Meetings Act, which requires details of all votes to be recorded. In one meeting, Westmoreland appears to have falsified the votes of his colleagues in order to discuss legislation in a private, executive session. In a video, nobody, not even Westmoreland himself, was recorded voting on the motion before it was approved.

The true purpose of these offices — to serve the interests of the ruling class — is illustrated by Councilor Westmoreland’s former Chief of Staff, Wayne Martin, who came under investigation for conflicts of interest in 2019. The staffer became an employee of Comcast a few months after leaving his government post, which is a clear violation of Georgia law. According to the ethics complaint which triggered the investigation, his employment was a reward for helping the company secure another seven year franchise agreement with the city. While working for Comcast, Martin twice addressed the council, and personally lobbied them during the debate about the Comcast Franchise Agreement. He used his relationships and knowledge about the council process to secure the contract with a unanimous vote. Although Martin was careless enough to get caught, his is not the only example of the city government’s service to capital.

The City Council has awarded many lucrative contracts to corporations in the name of improving public safety with little evidence to prove that these new investments actually deter or prevent crime. One of these initiatives, One Atlanta – Light Up the Night, expands the city’s network of streetlights in areas with higher crime rates and traffic accidents. Georgia Power has installed 10,000 new LED street lights with multi-node capabilities, meaning that many of these lights are equipped or can be equipped with two cameras, microphones, A.I. filtering technology, and 5G capabilities. The partnership combines technology from GE, Genetec, AT&T, and CivicSmart that allows for detection of illegal parking, surveillance of the street and sidewalks, and uses ShotSpotter, which is an audio detection technology that alerts police to loud sounds that may be gunshots, and has a track record of being used to violently target Black and Latino communities.  In Chicago, it was a ShotSpotter alert that deployed police to Little Village, a majority Latino neighborhood, who then chased down and murdered 13-year old Adam Toledo. There, researchers at Northwestern University MacArthur Justice Center found that at least 90% of ShotSpotter alerts yield no evidence of an actual gunshot, meaning that system produces dangerous, racist over-policing.

Georgia Power has also gotten a contract with the city through APF’s Operation Shield, selling them surveillance and license plate reading technology. Operation Shield has made Atlanta the most surveilled city in the U.S. Empire. The license plate reading tech is made by FlockSafety, whose products are now being used across the empire after being tested in Atlanta. Georgia Power and Flock Safety are both donors to the APF.

Corporations not only get contracts through the APF, but this foundation, like all other police foundations, are a means for private direction and guidance of municipal police forces. The police are molded to more effectively serve powerful interests. The over-policing of the U.S. Empire’s nationally oppressed communities, like Atlanta’s historically Black neighborhoods, goes hand in hand with their accelerating gentrification. This results in increased police murders and terror, which has led to many uprisings across the empire this past decade. The state is building Cop City in response to these uprisings; it was first proposed in 2017 and approved shortly after the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. In this training ground for domestic occupation, as Kwame Olufemi of Community Movement Builders in Atlanta puts it:

They [will be] practicing how to make sure poor and working class people stay in line. So when the police kill us in the streets again, like they did to Rayshard Brooks in 2020, they can control our protests and community response to how they continually murder our people.

The council’s vote comes not out of dismissal of the empire-wide movement against racist police terror, but because of it. Fear is growing in the hearts of the capitalists, as can be seen with the staggering $28.1 million in revenue the APF had in 2021, triple the amount from the year before. This is higher than the New York City Police Foundation, and with a population 6% of its size. As cities across the empire double down on escalating police violence, a pattern seems to emerge: an endless barrage of police terrorism and murders that will inevitably result in more uprisings. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy that increases the already egregious funding and militarization of the police, and siphons more public funds to megacorporations.

Bail funds for left-wing protestors, marchers, and direct action networks played an important role in the 2020 June uprisings and have continued to be important for protest rights throughout the empire. In fact, bail funds have served as a historical link between the progressive-liberal forces in the U.S. Empire and the radical on-the-ground forces in both the Civil Rights and labor movements going back to 1920. The first bail funds were set up by the ACLU to release those arrested for sedition during the First Red Scare. The bail fund draws liberal progressives into the fight and provides a channel for resources to reach the frontlines of the struggle.

Marlon Scott Kautz, Savannah D. Patterson, and Adele MacLean were arrested by the state of Georgia and charged with money laundering and charity fraud. MacLean, Kautz, and Patterson are respectively the CEO, CFO, and secretary of the Network for Strong Communities, the corporation that runs the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, spurred on by Gov. Kemp and his network of sycophants, has already arrested over 40 people on charges of “domestic terrorism” for their efforts to put a halt to the construction of the Cop City terror-complex in Atlanta.

This is a watershed moment. These tactics harken back to those used by the FBI in the 1960s and 70s, when the young Black Communist movement was at its strength. The warrant by which these three activists were arrested sets forth the absolute depravity of the charges:

Transfer and misappropriation of funds collected through a State of Georgia registered 501c(3) Network for Strong Communities (NFSC) to the private bank accounts of NFSC officers. Additionally, Patterson was reimbursed via her personal Paypal account… from Network for Strong Communities for 26 payments beginning April 28, 2021, through March 27, 2023 totaling $6657.59. These payments were for various expenses such as gasoline, forest clean-up, totes, covid rapid tests, media, yard signs and other miscellaneous expenses.

It is clear from the flimsy allegations that no law was broken. Rather, legitimate solidarity expenses have been taken to, themselves, be criminal. There are two possible purposes for the leveling of these ludicrous charges. The first is a typical and time-tested tactic of counterinsurgency; that is, knowing the charges won’t stand up in court, they may have been brought merely to disrupt the bail network and help push the construction of Cop City further along while minimizing resistance. The second, however, is to float this case as a test, a bellwether. If the charges stick and the state can get convictions (whether after trial or on a plea bargain), it sets a dangerous precedent — not a legally binding precedent, but it will set the expectation of prosecutors and judges in Georgia that these kinds of spurious and facially vapid “crimes” can be successfully prosecuted. Once that has been established, the state can issue waves of warrants, each of which stands some reasonable chance at seeing some kind of conviction. This is the criminalization of political dissent. Any liberal who thinks it will be used solely on “extreme” antifascists is sorely deluded.

This is the plan of a large clique, the ruling clique, within the Republican party. But we cannot afford to lose sight of the fact that the execution of this plan requires the complicity of identifiable individuals that work on the ground. The “cogs” in the machine are not “just doing their jobs” any more than the agents of Hitler were merely following orders. This is no defense. The warrant, for instance, was signed by Judge Shondeana C. Morris, a former state attorney. There is no probable cause stated in this warrant. The statute cited by the affiant (§ 7-1-915 of the Georgia Code) does not even set forth the elements of the crime of money laundering — it’s the penalties section. Everyone involved in the prosecution of these three organizers is either an ideological fascist or materially serves as the tool of ideological fascism.

This clique of extreme-right Republican fascists — the “MAGA” Republicans —  now dominates politics on the all-Empire level. They have been establishing strongholds of domination throughout the country, from which they have launched repeated attacks on the fascists farther to their left — other Republicans and Democrats. These tools and tricks that the Republican MAGA crowd are perfecting now in places like Georgia and Florida will soon be turned on their political rivals in the ruling class. We Communists are merely their whetstone.