However, white supremacists face an immediate contradiction due to the essential role of undocumented labor in the U.S. Some capitalists have already begun to beg the president to scale down the raids, complaining that ICE is taking all their best workers and hurting their profit margins. Every fascist accusation against the Global South is an admission², whether directed at Black people in South Afrika for “white genocide” or undocumented people in the imperial core for bringing violence to a society that seeks to exploit and assault them. 

30 years after apartheid, the 7% minority of white settlers continue to occupy 72% of South Afrika’s farmland. Legalistic mechanisms for land reforms have failed to address the problem; only 9% of the land has been returned to the Black people it was stolen from. Before it can return land, the government needs to provide compensation to the white settler. In other words, the law requires the government to pay thieves to return stolen land. Black South Afrikans can’t get their land back because doing so would bankrupt the country. The result? In 2025, South Afrika has the highest wealth inequality of any country in the world. The average Black household owns 5% of the wealth of the average white household. These statistics alone explain why South Afrikan white lobbying groups — who project false claims of supposed “racial persecution” throughout the world  — have spoken out against relocation to the U.S. Relocating white settlers would only hamper domestic settler efforts towards retaking full political power and overturning the basic legal rights won by the Black majority in 1994. One white pensioner spelled the situation out clearly: “If you haven’t got any problems here, why would you want to go?” 

Trump’s relocation of white settlers appears to be part of a larger U.S. attack on South Afrika’s government. In 2024, President Cyril Ramaphosa enacted the “Land Expropriation Act” —  essentially an eminent domain law which allows the government to repurpose private land for the public benefit. According to the law, land can only be expropriated without compensation in limited scenarios, like when property is unused or abandoned. To this day, no land has been seized in South Africa without compensation. This is the law that Trump claims will cause “white genocide” in South Afrika. The U.S. had already cut off nearly all foreign aid to South Afrika back in February, throwing the country’s healthcare system into a new crisis overnight. 

Although Trump and his imperialist collaborators understand the reformist nature of South Afrika’s government, the country is still centered in the U.S.’ crosshairs because of its rejection of outright western colonial rule. South Afrika has been represented by the ANC (African National Congress) — the party of Nelson Mandela — since the end of apartheid. In all likelihood, the U.S. wants to remove the ANC from power and replace it with one of the more imperialist-friendly parties representing white interests. In its 30 years of rule, the ANC has built strong economic relationships with enemies of the U.S. such as China, Russia, and Iran. The South Afrikan lawsuit against so-called “israel” in the International Court of Justice — supposedly the highest court in the world — continues to isolate the zionist entity, which has lost sympathy even in the West. If the U.S. were to succeed in its regime change effort, they would replace the ANC with a party such as the Democratic Alliance. With its bedrock of white support, this party would be quick to submit to the U.S. by signing extortionist trade deals and dismissing the I.C.J. lawsuit. For Trump, the chance to bully an oppressed country like South Afrika while pandering to the white base at home was too convenient to pass up. 

From within the U.S., we can see how the relocation fiasco is in perfect alignment with the current fascist playbook. The illusions of a multi-racial participatory society in a racist settler colony are dissipating in the face of an explicit preference for white immigration, especially those who show loyalty to the imperial project. I.C.E. agents and deputized local police are snatching undocumented people from their homes and workplaces. The most immediate hurdle to the new terror project lies in the capitalist class itself, who keenly appreciate the essential role of undocumented immigrants in the Amerikan economy. Capitalists in both meatpacking and agriculture economic sectors pleaded directly to Trump that the ICE raids are having a bad effect on business. By working the hardest jobs for the least pay, undocumented workers ensure that Amerikans have access to cheap produce while guaranteeing a steady profit for the capitalist. The class collaboration between these capitalists and Amerikans at large is essential to the arrangement. Without undocumented labor, the already small profit margins in agriculture and meatpacking would vanish, which would then trigger skyrocketing food costs. The takeaway from this is that there was already ample reason to be in the streets before the ICE raids began. Instead of waving the Amerikan flag like the recently-arrived South Afrikan settlers, protesters should agitate based on the general conditions of racial hierarchies in labor. Violent ICE raids will of course continue, although the business enterprises of certain capitalists will now be spared by the Trump regime. The federal and municipal pigs will continue to arrest grandparents, parents, and children. 

While fascists balance the contradictions between their rhetoric and reality, they still agitate their base by attacking a sovereign nation with racist dog whistles. On June 2, 9 more settlers from South Afrika arrived in the U.S, and more will be on the way unless South Afrika bows under the pressure. We must never forget that Land Back is as desperately needed here on Turtle Island as it is in South Afrika. Amerikan fascists feign horror at Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of land repossession. Imagine their response to a real campaign for Land Back on what they consider to be their home territory. 

Spend these summer months engaged in social investigation or engaged in study. USU and the All-Empire Workers’ League are here to join you in struggle with materials and assistance as we work on tangible projects in the real world. Whatever you do, don’t let the summer pass you by as white supremacists continue their push to convert the mass fascist state into its final, deadly form. 

1.  The term “global flea market” is borrowed from George Jackson’s Blood in my Eye (page 118)  ︎
2. For further discussion of colonial psychology, see Chapter 2: The Historical Background in Robert Biel’s Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement, with special attention paid to page 32 (local page source) ︎

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.