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.

“They say: ‘How strange! But never mind – it’s Nazism, it will pass!’ And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.”

There is a war going on within the two great bourgeois factions. Over the last 30 years, since the destruction of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the Democrats and Republicans — the left and right wing of a single fascist ideology — have fought ever more acrimoniously over control over the United States Empire. This struggle has occasionally, and now with greater frequency, exploded into outright intraclass violence. Take Trump’s January 6 putsch, for instance, which was not merely a weak last grasp at retaining the presidency, but an early experiment in political maneuver by way of fascist militia terror.

Their relative unity has been shattered with the lack of a clear enemy and the collapse of the U.S. Empire’s foreign prestige. Both camps claim the war between them is something that should concern all of us, the working people of the Empire, rather than merely being a disagreement between the ruling cliques of a rotting state. On the left are the Democrats, the stabilizers, who are attempting to halt the rot that infects the empire and cling to the relatively stable fascism of the past — the Clintonite “Third Way.” On the right are the Republicans, the expansionists, who want to expand the U.S. state’s fascism. This is a disagreement of tactics and strategy, not a disagreement over principle. The Democrats feebly insist their struggle against the MAGA Republicans is a fight for democracy, while the Republicans claim that it is a fight for “Christian civilization,” tradition, morality.

Both Democrats and Republicans are the handmaidens of empire. Between these two camps of vultures, we, the working people, are liable to be torn limb from limb or crushed like a kernel of grain betwixt the grinding stones. It is imperative that we dispel the lies, myths, and half-truths told by both sides in this war. In the final calculation, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have the interests of the working people in mind. To them, we are hapless pawns to be cynically maneuvered upon a chessboard to see who will control the mechanisms of empire and which confederacy of bourgeois vampires will drink our blood and the blood of the world. 

Factions have grown up inside each great bourgeois camp. By far and away the largest power bloc within the Democratic Party are the Third Way “centrists” and their far-right allies, the “Blue Dogs.” The leading politicians of the party — Biden, Harris, Klobuchar, Pelosi — are all members of this broad coalition of the center-right and right. There is a small, left-leaning wing of the Democratic Party that is properly called the “progressive” wing, which includes members like Fetterman, Warren, and Ocasio-Cortez. While the centrist bloc occasionally trots out the language of social justice like a broken-down horse on its tired way to the glue factory, the progressives dress in slogans of socialism and social democracy — meanwhile voting rank and file with their conservative masters in the center.

For the Republicans, this dynamic is reversed. Their center is weak and has been consistently routed by their far-right elements since the presidency of the center-right Republican par excellence, Bloody Bush II. In recent years, this center has been reduced to a simple “anti-Trumpist” position which has suffered significant marginalization by the party’s continuous march to the far right — Romney, Liz Cheney, Kasich, and their ilk have been sidelined. The dominant factions within the party are the Christian theocrats, headed by Pence and their close allies, the so-called Trumpists like Boebert, Greene, and Gaetz. Where the Democrats are dragged toward the center-right by the gravity of their membership, the Republicans have been falling further and further into the abyss of the far-right, and more extreme fascism has been developing within the Republican cocoon.

The Inter-Bourgeois War

This battle was a long time coming. In any bourgeois republic, where money is the basis of power and where power is used to procure more money, the buying and selling of state power is a kind of property of its own. Senators put in their time on important subcommittees, then go into private business with the very firms that lobbied them. Their time in office is nothing more than an audition for their eventual career in the private sector, and they treat every legislative session as an interview with their prospective bosses. When those businesses need a favor, these same politicians come out of “retirement” to return to “public life” — a life of graft, debauchery, and greed. The elected representatives of the people of the United States live in mansions that would be envied by the mightiest princes of the old world; not from the proceeds of their humble and devoted service to the people, but from their service to capital itself!

Control over government offices have long constituted political spoils in this country, the reward doled out among partisan hacks for their devotion to the party machine. We all know the story. Set it in the 1890s, the 1910s, the 1920s, it comes as no surprise. Why should we be shocked to know that it happens today, exactly as it happened then? Perhaps the politicians have grown a little cannier, learned to hide their theft a little better — but not much. Instead of exchanging money in bags, now there are promises of future employment in lucrative oil company office towers.

While the Republicans and Democrats have slugged it out in public going back to the beginning of the last century, their policies have rarely diverged in significant detail. From time to time a gap has opened between them — Northern Democrats grudgingly supporting the Civil Rights movement, for instance, and driving Southern Democrats into the arms of the Republicans — but only because they were afraid of a riotous second March on Washington and how the movement might affect their voter turnout. Martin Luther King Jr. knew well that Lyndon Johnson was his enemy, a virulent racist. The truth of the matter is that, behind closed doors, the parties have long recognized each other as friends.

What are the real and meaningful differences between the Republicans and the Democrats when it comes to policy? What are the historical differences, and the differences today? Do the Democrats and Republicans differ on militarizing NATO? Will either surrender the U.S. nuclear arsenal, that tool of world destruction? Did either vote against the invasions of Yugoslavia, Iraq, Afghanistan, the greater part of Africa? Will either call off the NATO-Russian war in Ukraine? Will either peacefully end the Cold War with China? In the wake of the 2008 crash, which party opposed bailing out the “too big to fail” banking monopolies?

The Democrats, of course, spin their public relations story that they stand up for labor, for the oppressed. But look back at the history: when did they do this? Only when they were forced to. What happened when the rail unions threatened to strike in late 2022? Which president, remind us, was enshrined in the White House as the most progressive and pro-labor candidate since Roosevelt? That’s right, President Biden, the corpse propped up by the Democrats during the last election. This very same “pro-labor” president sided with the rail bosses and crushed the strike. With just a brief look beneath the peeling blue paint, we see the Democrats’ actions are not those of a party meant to oppose right wing attacks on workers. In fact, the parties have historically been not in opposition, but in alignment.

In 1991, after nearly a century of choking trade sanctions, starvation, brinksmanship, infiltration, war, and near-war, the USSR was finally destroyed by the United States Empire and its flock of depraved NATO allies. The feast that followed, that wild frenzy of capital investment, theft, and outright brutality, slaked the lust of western Capital for a time. From the former Soviet territory they carved great hunks of flesh. These were the days of the prospering empire, its last glory days, the vaunted “end of history.” One third of the earth, which had been taken away from the capitalists, which had been beyond the reach of exploitation of the West, was suddenly and awfully exposed once more. The Democrats were dressed in their finest Republican suits — the Clintonite Third Way — and across the aisle they joined hands to rule the world. What need had United States Empire of diplomats in the 1990s? After all, it had a ready supply of cruise missiles.

That has been changing. The extreme wing of the Republican party, the class-conscious wing of Capital, the wing that has provided the studious adepts and acolytes of the intelligence services and assassination bureaus, has slowly but steadily gained control of the ship. For this far-right coterie it isn’t enough to sit atop the mountain of bones that forms the foundation of the bloodiest empire in history. They demand the U.S. Empire let more blood, steep itself in more crimes, sink down ever deeper into the mire. These are the men who pushed for the Bay of Pigs invasion, who carried out Project MK-ULTRA; these are the men, and women too, who forged ties with the vilest religious zealots, who speak in awe-struck tones of the days of the rule of the white man, as though such days have ever truly passed.

Then came the lean times. After every capitalist success, there is the inevitable capitalist collapse. The burst of the dot com bubble was a hiccup, but the 2008 crisis was a sledgehammer. It struck at the foundation of all this new-found wealth and glory, and the party was, abruptly, over. No more Democratic warhawks gleefully joining with the death merchants of the Republican right to dismember oil-rich states; no, the hour of the wolf was at hand, and the rangy beast came prowling for its meat.

The first sign of this coming battle was the formation of the ultra-right Tea Party in 2009. The inevitable crash produced Occupy Wall Street, but it also produced its opposite. Unlike Occupy, which held neither capital nor the power to disrupt it, and was neutralized by the state’s counterinsurgency tactics, the Tea Party has never really gone away. No, it has gained ground, grown strong, and in 2016 it took control of the entire country with President Trump acting as the embodiment of the whole incoherent movement.

We have thus seen the bourgeois consensus fracture in two. On the left hand sit the conciliators and on the right the maximalists. The Democrats want only to hang on, to hold the Empire in their bony grip for a few decades more, to bring about the “end of history” in which Capital only climbs. The right-Republicans, however, are no longer content with just hanging on. They correctly estimate that a capitalism that fails to constantly expand its blood-drenched reach is doomed to be relegated to the dustbin of history. Unlike the Democrats and the moderate Republicans, this clique is driving the country further and further toward crisis fascism. At this moment, they are engaged in a political war. They are pushing to conquer state power entirely, on the grounds that their extreme crisis-fascism is more fit to govern the dying Empire than the left class-collaborationism of the Democrats.

Here we stand, as both enemy parties try to convince the working people that the long and hungry snouts we see are merely the cute muzzles of friendly sheep. The Democrats promise the rising tide that lifts all ships (but somehow always seems to leave behind the working classes) and the Republicans promise a return to bloody conquest and white anglo-saxon “glory,” but the tacticians of these great parties consider their enemies to be not the working classes they exploit, but rather each other. We working people are mere dupes in their game — draftees in their war.

Fortresses of Fascism

A terrorist dictatorship is not built all at once, does not spring fully-formed from the brow of Steve Bannon. Open (rather than the old covert, class-) dictatorship comes in fits and starts. It is constructed piecemeal. The U.S. Empire is a federated state; the right-Republicans have used this to their advantage. Although they had conquered and maintained a tenuous grip on federal electoral power for four years, they were unable to convince the majority of the ruling class that they were good for the job. Still, they dug their trenches and worked on their fortifications. They captured the Supreme Court for the rest of our lifetimes. Appointments were made to the executive agencies and the judiciary that would send their effects cascading down to us forty years hence — but still, in 2020, they lost at the federal level.

The same cannot be said of all the individual states that comprise this federated, constitutional empire. The right wing of the GOP, its dominant wing, has been building up fortresses in the south and west of the empire. Florida, Georgia, and Washington state have all become bastions of reaction. We are watching as advanced elements of the fascist counter-insurgency experiment with methods of control. The recent surge of anti-LGBT and forced-birth anti-abortion legislation represents only the outriggers of the movement.

In North Carolina, abortion after 12 weeks has been banned. In Kansas, a law requiring bothrooms, locker rooms, prisons, domestic violence shelters, and rape crisis centers recognize “distinctions between the sexes” based on “reproductive anatomy at birth” passed at the end of April. And the fascist stronghold is not only in the “deep” South; anti-LGBT and anti-women bills describe a north-south belt across the center of the country from North Dakota and Minnesota down through Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma, with another bastion in Texas. That’s only looking at the violently bigoted bills now making their way through state governments. The fact is that, using a strategy laid out by the group REDMAP, an initiative funded by the GOP in 2010, aggressive state redistricting has led to powerful enclaves of anti-democratic forces throughout the southern, central, and western U.S. Empire. Critics have noted that this string of fortress-legislatures has established the ground for a kind of permanent minoritarian rule.

Georgia’s Cop City is a prime example of this fortress fascism that now threatens to swallow the U.S. Empire whole. This megaplex in the heart of Georgia, funded by JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, WH Capital (which owns the Waffle House), Axon Enterprises (which manufactures body cameras and Tasers), the Cathy Family (who own Chik-fil-A), Delta Air, UPS, Home Depot, Inspire Brands (which owns Arby’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, Jimmy John’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Baskin Robbins), and other large, all-empire corporations, is designed to provide the U.S. Empire with the latest in counter-insurgency training and technology.

[T]he real piece de resistance is the simulation city… [the] “Mock Village.” This is a four-block square containing a convenience store, a hotel, a nightclub, houses, residential apartment buildings (low and high-rise), and a warehouse. This is the plan for training a domestic occupation force. In the early 2010s, U.S. army intelligence built fake “Middle Eastern” villages to train its imperialist occupation forces…. “In the emerging world of 21st century conflict, the battlefield is no longer the countryside but the city…. stores, a gas station, school, soccer field, church, mosque tunnels, subway platform…. The subway trains look exactly like that of the DC Metro’s, down to the logo.”

Each of these stronghold states is advancing and testing fascism in its own way, according to its own, localized plans. The most aggressive campaigns are being tested in Florida under the DeSantis regime and in Georgia under Kemp. Readers will recall the December, 2020, deployment of a SWAT team to raid and arrest a data scientist in Florida who was tracking the COVID-19 pandemic against DeSantis’ wishes. The latest attempt to establish a permanent terror-dictatorship in Georgia this past week made use of similar tactics. As Georgia marches toward the creation of Cop City — and make no mistake, the completion of the Cop City project will mark a sea-change in the entire empire, a new phase of domestic police terror — the state government has escalated its attacks from direct murder of the protestors like Tortuguita, who was shot 57 times in a police execution to the arrest and detention of bail fund activists.

Georgia’s Bureau of Investigation is also pursuing tactics similar to those used in the 1960s and 1970s against Black and Indigenous Communists. On Wednesday, May 31, police in Atlanta arrested three organizers — Marlon Scott Kautz, Savannah D. Patterson, and Adele MacLean — and charged them 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 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.

The plan of a large clique, the ruling clique, within the Republican party, is to establish these fascist strongholds throughout the country and use them to launch an all-out assault. 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.

The Ghost of Fascism Yet to Come

From these strong points, the right-fascists intend to launch renewed attacks on their left-fascist bourgeois rivals. Part of their strategy, and a not insignificant part, requires the Republican fascists to proclaim an ever-escalating war against a shadow enemy: Communism, radicalism, and anarchism. The fact of the matter is that there are no organized Communist or anarchist forces capable of standing up to the state; we pose, at this juncture, no real threat. The right-fascists are not afraid of a resurgent Communist or anarchist movement, although they may be on their guard against the kind of spontaneous class- and national-liberation violence that spurred the 2020 June uprisings. No, for the right-fascists, Communism and anarchism are merely a stalking horse. By pressing against targets that many center- and even some left-liberals will agree are valid and dangerous — the Communist, the anarchist — the far-right can tighten its grip in the fortress-states it has captured. By the time the left wing of the bourgeois camp wakes up to the danger, it will already be too late for them.

The parasite, for-profit, bail bond industry, one of the most nakedly exploitative forms taken by capital, now struggles with the forces of the people in the state of Connecticut. This is the latest development in an 80-year-long war between the people and the capitalist state that began in the 1960s with the first wave of bail reform.

The Connecticut Supreme Court released a decision last week, State of Connecticut v. Qinxuan Pan (SC 210039), granting all prisoners in Connecticut held on bond the right to seek a full evidentiary hearing at some point after their arraignment where they are permitted to present evidence regarding their lack of ability to afford their bail bonds. The courts are now required to consider that evidence and give a fully-articulated ruling as to whether and why the bonds will be reduced or will remain as set. This represents a new front in the war against the evil practice of cash-and-surety bail, which has been flaring up and dying down in Connecticut over the past decade.

A Background on Bail

As far back as the Anglo-Saxon law codes, arrestees were “set free as soon as some sureties undertook or became bound for his appearance in court.” Bail was further legislated by the 1275 Statute of Westminster, which established three governing criteria to bail: 1) the nature of the offense (some offenses were not bailable), 2) the probability of conviction, and 3) the criminal history (“ill fame”) of the accused.

The English colonies that would become the United States tended to grant the right of bail — that is, the temporary payment of some amount of money to the court to guarantee the appearance of the accused — almost sacrosanct dimensions. The 1641 Body of Liberties of the Massachusetts Bay Colony granted the right to bail for all non-capital (that is, punishable by death) cases. In Connecticut, there is an absolute right to a “reasonable” bond (that is, amount required for bail) in almost all cases.

Bourgeois legal scholars are often content to trace this history, then sit back and wipe their hands, happy that they’ve discovered some ancient authority for the present day. What they rarely do is undertake the question of what this custom or law looked like in practice in, for instance, Anglo-Saxon England and compare it to what the custom or law looks like in the U.S. Empire today. It is easy, and perhaps natural, to assume that the concept of bail simply continued from its original date to the present, altered here and there as required, but essentially propelled forward by the inertia of its own history.

That’s an ahistorical understanding of the law. It ignores the context of how the law functions, it ignores the real and practical effects of the law, and it instead merely interprets the written word as it is written down without an examination of actual practice. We Marxists can and must do better than these bourgeois legal historians!

Bail in Anglo-Saxon (and later, Norman) England served one purpose; bail in the modern U.S. Empire serves another. There are a whole host of ancillary questions not answered by this gloss: what kinds of bail were and are required? Who would post them? What was society like, and how did the judges determine amounts? Who were the judges? What classes of people were bailable?

The bail of Anglo-Norman England identified by the legal historians is, in effect, something completely different and distinct from the practice now current in the U.S. Empire. Bail in the medieval past was a matter of elite connections; medieval society was riven with conflicts between families and their larger units, clans. Bail was, in essence, the pledge of a family or network of social peers that you were as good as your word. Under the Anglo-Norman system, the amount required for bail was the same as the amount at stake in the case; every crime was conceived of as a private wrong of one against another, and every type of crime could be translated into a monetary amount. Bail, in this instance, wasn’t merely the pledge of the accused, but the pledge of the entire kin-group of the accused.

But what is bail today?

Firstly, no longer are bonds posted or sureties pledged by communities or kin-groups. No, instead there is a whole industry that has transformed the freedom of the accused into a kind of commodity. A bail bond has become nothing more than a personal mortgage, a lien against the freedom of some individual defendant’s life.

Bail bonds are underwritten by international insurance agencies; Tokio Marine America, Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited, R&Q Accredited Surety, Endeavour, Bankers Financial Corporation, Allegheny Casualty, Financial Casualty & Surety, Lexington International, and the American Surety Company are the largest insurance companies which may be backing nearly a billion dollars in bail bonds each. Regulations don’t require these companies to disclose their underwriting of bail bonds, but it’s likely that between them they account for more than half of the $14 billion bail bond industry. These international finance giants prey on the poorest parts of the working classes, and disproportionately on  Black, Chicanx, Latinx, and Indigenous persons.

Bail bonds are extraordinarily high; they aren’t set at amounts that any reasonable person could afford to post for even a short period, let alone lose. Bail in Connecticut is routinely set at $10,000 and higher. Yes, a federal law makes all bail set at $20,000 or lower postable with 10% of the amount put up in cash, but paying $1,000-$2,000 to make sure you or a loved one stays out of jail is not within the reach of most working class families.

If the amount of bond is over $20,000, the law prevents private individuals from posting it. They literally could not, even if they had the money. The bond must be what’s called a “surety bond,” something postable only by a specially licensed “professional” who pays the state a kind of rent in the form of a licensing fee — in other words, a bail bondsman. This bail-for-hire scheme turns the old English system entirely on its head. Rather than a social pledge to attend trial, bail becomes a sort of judicial tax. Bonds are now set in courts in most states across the U.S. Empire; these bonds by and large require the accused to hire a bail bondsman or else suffer the debilitating effects of incarceration while their cases remain pending. Criminal cases can take years to resolve, and even longer if the accused is actually proveably innocent, because wait times for trials have shot up during the COVID pandemic.

But these bondsmen, these mercenary pocketbooks, aren’t the only people making money off of this system. No, as we mentioned above, international insurance underwriters reap enormous rewards. When a bondsman is hired to post a bond, that bondsman charges the accused whatever rate the bondsman thinks he can get. In return, the bondsman puts up a surety with the court. So, for instance, if the bond is set at $100,000 and the accused has a low or moderate-paying job, the bondsman may ask for $15,000. The accused agrees to a payment plan for this money, usually asking for help from family and friends. The accused will never get this money back. The bondsman then places $100,000 in surety with the court. When the case ends, the bondsman gets his money back.

The only time the bondsman would lose his money is if the bond is “called” (that is, the defendant fails to appear) and the bondsman doesn’t bring the defendant into court later. The bondsman is empowered to run out and use physical force and almost any type of restraint to bring the bail-skipping defendant in. When he does, he recoups his entire posted amount. The defendant will never see the money they paid again.

This is the system that international financiers can’t wait to get their hands in: a system which, due to many factors including disparate policing and disparate bond decisions by judges, impacts Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Chicanx persons far more than white persons, and the poor far more than any other group overall. Cash bail transforms the court system into a debt trap designed to keep the poor and persons of oppressed nations in bondage.

As an aside, the jury system itself can be seen as following a similar development. Early juries were specifically made up of one’s fellow community members — people who actually knew information about the cases because they lived and worked alongside those who were being brought to trial. They have become, under the bourgeois state, a method of white-washing the capitalist’s twisted “justice” by passing it off as the acts of “the people;” jury trials today stand as the most horrific perversion of justice, where they cloak the naked domination of the capitalists, and tell the masses that they are, in a sense, oppressing themselves.

The Struggle Against Cash Bail

The rapacious greed of the for-profit bail industry doesn’t harm only the poorest segments of the working classes; predatory bondsmen are dangerous to the petit-bourgeoisie and, occasionally, to elements within the bourgeoisie itself. For decades, progressives and true radicals have been united in waging a war against the oppressive use of cash bail. The first wave of bail reform emerged in the 1960s and was largely driven by Communists. The second wave of bail reform emerged in the 1980s and was driven by reactionaries who wanted to jail “dangerous” persons indefinitely and without bail. The arguments to return to a for-profit bail system came from the same place in both instances: the U.S. Empire’s for-profit bail industry itself.

New York State began the opening front for the third round of bail reform that is now mounting. Local activists, prison abolitionists, the ACLU, etc. rallied together to pass a new piece of legislation in New York which divides all cases into one of two categories: so serious as to require bail, and not so serious as to require bail. As a result, hundreds of people who would otherwise have been held on cash bonds have been released.

This struggle is on the frontlines of the movement. Over the past century and a half, the capitalists have perfected their machine of oppression. During the latter half of the 20th century the capitalist state has colonized the country with labor camps, ensnared every city and suburb in a net of police officers, has enlisted an army of spies and saboteurs, and has armed all of its agents with implicit death warrants. This enormous expansion of the state, this consumption of almost every regular function of the capitalist government, has had one overriding source above all other sources: the threat of national self-determination, of the revolution and class consciousness of the nationally oppressed. The fight against this enormous, titanic, all-encompassing system of incarceration, at any level, is the fight against the capitalist state itself.

This fight is as acute in Connecticut as anywhere in the U.S. Empire. Although a mere 14% of the state’s population is Black, Black persons account for 41% of the state’s inmates. Bail reform is a front in the overall war against the carceral state and those who profit from it. By reducing the obscene profits of the bail system, the capitalists themselves are weakened and the nationally oppressed communities gain breathing space to organize against their enemies.

Victory – Of a Sort

Political victories are won by the mobilized and militant working classes, this much is true. Nevertheless, the ruling of the Supreme Court of Connecticut in State v. Pan is a judicial decision, not a political one. Though it is not an out-and-out victory, it represents a partial retreat of the capitalists from their long-held position defending the obscenity that is the system of cash bail. A rising tide of awareness produced real, radical victories in the neighboring states of New Jersey and New York; that tide can be harnessed by the organizers and activists of Connecticut to do battle against the bail system.

Although State v. Pan grants criminal defendants some recourse to fight back against the unfair bail system, like most judge-motivated reforms it is more appearance than substance. It purports to give a meaningful way to challenge unreasonable bonds set by the arraignment courts, but in actuality the hearing Pan grants will mostly result in the same outcomes as the present bail hearings: the judge will deny the modification of bail, regardless of the evidence the defendant manages to put on. Now, the judge will have to be more explicit about why they are not changing the bond amount, but that is a cosmetic change at best.

Lawyers, even more than members of other petit-bourgeois professions, tend to be mired in idealism. “These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves,” as Engels would say. Pan has only just gone into effect, but there should be no doubt that, in a year’s time, we will not see substantially more people released on lower bonds as a result.

Is there a chance that a new hearing under Pan will result in a bond being lowered? Yes, of course. Is a significant change in incarceration rates going to occur? No, most likely not. This individualist, idealist thinking is part of the smoke-and-mirrors show practiced by the bourgeoisie to convince the working classes that proceedings are fair and aren’t tilted against them. The Pan hearing amounts to little more than the show put on by the snake oil salesman before he fleeces his audience. 

What the Pan decision does not say is that if a defendant can’t afford to post the bond the court sets, then the bond is per-se unreasonable. This is the first step to real bail reform in Connecticut. A $5,000 bond is nothing to a Groton defense contractor accused of drunk driving and assault with a motor vehicle, but to an unhoused person in New Haven a $5,000 bond may as well be set at $5 million. There has long been a movement among the socially conscious lawyers of Connecticut to have the courts recognize that, in order to be “reasonable,” bond amounts must be actually postable by the actual defendant.

What we can take from the Pan decision is that the growing wave of class consciousness is impossible to ignore even from the heights of the Supreme Court of Connecticut. This a kind of victory, but the victory we should see is that the justices of the Connecticut Supreme Court believe it’s become necessary to disguise the operations of predatory capital. That means they know the working classes are becoming more powerful, more united, and more militant. That is exactly why they are making these concessions.

As the murderous results of the Biden regime’s COVID handling become clearer, as Connecticut landlords once again begin to ramp up evictions in the face of the failing resolve of Governor Lamont’s administration to protect the poorest segments of the population, more and more class warfare will break out into the open. The Supreme Court of Connecticut recognizes this; State v. Pan is a tacit acknowledgement that the capitalist state must retreat from its maximalist position and adopt a defensive posture. They are preparing their defenses, hoping the tidal wave of class consciousness will break.

We will all work diligently to ensure that these last-ditch sea walls are overwhelmed.