“The struggle… is in essence a struggle for political domination… The primary issue is control over people… our adversaries have generally employed armed force… primarily as a political abrasive intended to cow the population into submission, collapse all political structures… and erode the appetite for struggle… but the ultimate measure of success or failure will not be relative casualties… but — instead — whose political writ runs… over the population of South Vietnam.”

In July of 1967, the CIA began what it would later call the Phoenix Program. A 2005 U.S. Army proposal paper drafted by Lieutenant Colonel Ken Tovo said Phoenix “directed the participation of key representatives from civil government, police, security services, and military organizations” in Việt Nam with the explicit purpose of destroying support for the Communists in the South. In 1971, after rumors exploded into the public consciousness, the U.S. Congress held a series of hearings on Phoenix where it was described as a “murder program.” In 2015, CIA analyst Samuel Adams described Phoenix as a combined assassination and torture program. The Phoenix Program was shut down on paper in December of 1972, but in reality, as our own Lt. Colonel Tovo noted in his very forthcoming paper, the program continued under CIA direction until the “fall of Saigon” in 1975.

Douglas Valentine, an independent journalist, has spent the last forty years warning the American public about the Phoenix Program and how it has been operationalized within U.S. borders. Today, we are going to talk about what the Phoenix Program still means for the broad group of Communists and anti-imperialist/anti-capitalist activists working to topple the U.S. foreign policy regime of terror, death, and profit. In reality, the Phoenix Program never went away: it was merely transplanted, first to Chile, then to El Salvador, Iraq, Afghanistan, and folded into the “Global War on Terror.” Now it is mushrooming up again as the Department of Homeland Security, militarized police, targeted murder of Black Lives Matter activists, and the not one but many Cop Cities springing up all over the United States.

Before we begin, it is important that we extend our thanks to Twitter user @sxlongshadow for his continued commitment to exposing the Phoenix Program’s involvement in modern domestic affairs and the CIA’s meddling in all aspects of U.S. policy. This article will not be able to replace the primary research conducted by people like Douglas Valentine, but it will lay out the basic operational outline of how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) follows the Phoenix outline and, we hope, provide cautionary information for those who are on the front lines of the struggle today.

Part One: What is the CIA?

To understand the methodology and function of the modern incarnation of Operation Phoenix, we have to understand the formation of the CIA and the national security state.  When we say that fascism is already here, it is the creation of the national security state and the inauguration of a century of surveillance and murder primarily directed against the nationally oppressed and left groups — Communists, Black liberation fighters, and anyone else designated by the decision-makers of white “square” America as outside the social fold. In Marxist terms, the class-conscious advanced workers in all spheres, the nationally oppressed members of internal colonies like the Indigenous peoples and Puerto Rico, and the nationally oppressed members of the internal semi-colonies like the Black Belt, were all targeted as non-people, individuals outside the protection of the legal arrangements of the liberal U.S. state.

The 19th and early 20th century U.S. state was anemic when compared with the vast machinery we now associate with Washington. There were few federal agencies and departments: the State, War, and Treasury Departments (1789), Department of the Interior (1849), of Agriculture (1862), Justice (1870), Commerce (1903), and Labor (1913) were the entire executive apparatus. In 1901, President William McKinley was shot to death by Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exhibition. This set off an imagined scare of anarchists and revolution, which was used by Attorney General Charles Bonaparte (yes, of those Bonapartes), to justify the creation of the Bureau of Investigation in 1908. More state machinery was needed to “enforce” Prohibition, which led to the creation of new jobs and departments. By the end of the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt, pursuing his “program of preparation for fascism and war” (according to the CPUSA before its revisionist turn), created an American version of the German Reich’s controlled labor union, the Deutsche Arbeitsfront, by shepherding into existence the Works Progress Administration and the National Labor Relations Board. For those thinking this is a stretch, we refer you to the comments of President Biden this past week that the unions in the U.S. represent a “domestic NATO.”

World War II marks the major transition into a qualitatively different kind of state. In 1942, by Roosevelt’s executive order, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was created to serve as the intelligence agency of the U.S. during the war. One of the key tasks given to the OSS as the war progressed was to ensure the defeat of Communism in Eastern Europe and Asia. To achieve this, the OSS partnered with the Kuomintang in China, and became involved in protecting the drug-running operations that financed the Kuomintang warlord Chiang Kai Shek. To Washington and the bourgeois businesses of the U.S., the OSS was a way to strike against rivals for imperial power — Germany and Japan — as well as to prepare the ground against the Soviet Union for whatever would come after the war.

In 1947 Harry Truman, who was a pure class puppet of the high bourgeoisie and was a compromise vice president to replace the left-leaning Henry Wallace in case Roosevelt should die, signed the National Security Act, creating the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This new agency was formed out of members of the armed forces intelligence services as well as the OSS, and was immediately directed to continue the former activities of the OSS in combating Communism. The National Security Act forbade the CIA from taking action within the U.S. The newly created agency almost immediately violated its authorizing act and began the process of fighting Communism everywhere: at home and abroad. Among its most well-known domestic spying operations were CHAOS, which served as a counterpoint to the FBI COINTELPRO during the 1960s and 1970s, and the infamous MKULTRA, which began in ignominy as a series of mind-control experiments on U.S. citizens and ended with CIA agents filming U.S. politicians having sex with trafficked minors.

“The national security state emerges from war, from fear of revolution and change, from the economic instability of capitalism, and from nuclear weapons and military technology. It has been the actualizing mechanism of ruling elites to implement their imperial schemes and misplaced ideals,” wrote Marcus Raskin, co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies in 1976. At home, the national security state gave the office of the president nearly untrammeled power, placing him at the helm of the various national security gangs: the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, etc. It was Truman himself, in Executive Order 9835, who instituted loyalty oaths for government officials. By 1949, dissenting voices — Communists, socialists, progressives — were being driven out of the unions, which became the vehicle for capitalist control of the labor movement.

Let us consider the words of D. Guerin in his 1939 book, Fascism and Big Business:

[a]n important fact [in the case of Mussolini’s Italy] is that the fascist squadron had at their disposal… not only the subsidies of their financial backers but the material and moral support of the repressive forces of the state: police, carabinieri, and army. The police recruited for the squadrons, urging outlaws to enroll in them and promising them all sorts of benefits and immunity. The police loaned their cars to squadron members and rejected applications for arms permits by workers and peasants while extending the permits granted to fascists. The guardians of “law and order” had their orders to remain idle when the fascists attacked the “reds” and to intervene only if the latter resisted. Often the police collaborated with the fascists in preparing attacks on labor organizations.

The line between criminal gang and police is crossed without compunction in the national security state. Compare this to Noam Chomsky’s introduction to COINTELPRO: The FBI’s Secret War on Political Freedom:

One FBI provocateur resigned when he was asked to arrange the bombing of a bridge in such a way that the person who placed the booby-trapped bomb would be killed. This was in Seattle where it was revealed that FBI infiltrators had been engaged in a campaign of arson, terrorism, and bombing of university and civil buildings, and where the FBI arranged a robbery, entrapping a young Black man who was paid $75 for the job and killed in a police ambush.

The CIA was once part of this network of national security gangs, but now stands above it as the premier agency of the national security state. They achieved this position through their control of criminal networks in Eastern Europe and Asia. This led them to infiltrate and essentially take over the Drug Enforcement Agency in order to protect their sources in drug running operations across the world. At the same time, they pioneered the Phoenix Program, which has become the counterinsurgency technique par excellence.

The CIA’s initial role, the destabilization of Communist governments, was undermined by their victory over the Soviet Union in 1991. In order to continue driving its militarism and the national security obsession, the U.S. needed a new enemy, and it turned out that the CIA had already financed them to be an enemy of the Soviets: political Islam. It’s here that we catch up with the 2005 proposal paper by Lieutenant Colonel Tovo and his desire to bring the Phoenix Program in its entirety to the “War on Terror.”

The contradiction for a secret police agency like the CIA is simple. The acts which the CIA targets are essentially non-criminal. Yes, it is against the law to commit treason or to teach of the necessity for the overthrow of the U.S. But there are ten thousand other acts that lead up to this treason that the CIA wants to stop. Subversion, progressivism, unrest, dissent. These are the hidden, non-criminal activities the CIA targets. These acts are usually carried out between willing participants. Talking about revolution isn’t something you do with every person you meet on the street. In order, therefore, to draw out their targets, the CIA needs to manufacture crimes by enticing potential Communists into criminal conspiracies with CIA plants.

To review: on the eve of George W. Bush’s War on Terror, the CIA was one of several terror gangs of secret police operating on U.S. soil. It pioneered a unique cocktail of drug running and hunter-killer squads abroad and domestic spying at home. It was poised at the tip of the U.S. foreign policy spear, to enter into a target country and subvert its government, undermine its authority, assassinate its leadership, and so on. It had already done so in Chile, in Nicaragua, etc. One of the CIA’s previous benefactors, political Islam, came into conflict with the U.S. empire at around the same time. The CIA recommended that they themselves be put in charge of all counterinsurgency operations, and for the U.S. to adopt the same plan the agency had deployed in Việt Nam. Lt. Col. Tovo’s proposal in 2005 is part of that scheme; the paper embodies that recommendation.

The CIA encouraged the federal government to create a Project Phoenix for the U.S. homeland. It engineered the creation of the Department of Homeland Security.

Part Two: What Is Phoenix?

Philip Agee and the other former spies that ran the magazine CounterSpy between 1973 and 1984 called the Phoenix Program “the most indiscriminate and massive programme of political murder since the Nazi death camps of World War 2.” In 1963, the CIA began operation Chiêu Hôi, “open arms,” which sought to subvert National Liberation Front (a.k.a. Viet Cong) members to defect through amnesty and resettlement. When this failed to produce results, the CIA reoriented and began to train, direct, and equip what were called Counter-Terror Teams (CTTs), later given the rebranded name of Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs). This was the beginning of Operation Phoenix.

Phoenix had the following attributes:

1. Action at a distance;
2. Data-driven;
3. Civilian targets;
4. Recruitment of motivated anti-Communists;
5. Combined arms of counterinsurgency;
6. Torture;
7. Recruit, defect, capture, kill;

Action at a distance. Phoenix operated through “local” agencies to increase deniability. CIA advisors sat with Vietnamese National Police and gave them instructions about what they wanted not by doing it themselves, but primarily instructing their GVN subordinates. They created their own branch of the National Police to act on their behalf. If agents instructed information to be extracted by means of breaking ribs, withholding medicine, or attaching electrodes to a detainee, if they ordered their hunter-killer teams to kidnap or execute someone, they could tell Congress that the CIA never actually did anything illegal. A child’s distinction of morality, but such are the men (and now, women) that make up the premier intelligence agency of the U.S. empire.

Data driven. It began with a general census taken through the GVN to help identify the names of the secret Communist Party cell leaders in each village, as well as identifying their family members for later extortion, kidnap, and torture.

Civilian targets. The CIA developed its program not to demoralize the army, the National Liberation Front, but to kidnap, subvert, or kill the civilian members of the Communist Party that ran the administrative roles within Communist organizations. The CIA pursues what Douglas Valentine calls a “political order of battle” as opposed to the armed forces’ military order of battle.

Motivated anti-Communists. The CTTs or PRUs recruited the most highly motivated anti-Communsits and paramilitary forces available; this included deserters, desperados, and criminals facing lengthy prison terms or execution; even American soldiers who were otherwise going to be disciplined would volunteer for the CIA’s special operations roles.

Combined arms of counterinsurgency. The crown jewel of Phoenix from the CIA’s point of view was the Province Interrogation Center, or PIC. PICs were combined-arms centers that coordinated strategic civilian, police, and military intelligence in one place. The PICs were built all over the country, in each province, and that is where the Special Police interrogated “suspects.” Results of these interrogations, usually the identities of civilian Communists, were shared with a CIA paramilitary officer in the province, and the paramilitary officer could then dispatch a CTT to kidnap or kill the target.

Torture. There was widespread use of torture. As Douglas Valentine recounted in the words of a Phoenix officer, torture that was conducted out of sight of the CIA but with their instructions included “rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes or hard objects, and rape followed by murder, the ‘Bell Telephone Hour’ rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body; waterboarding; “the airplane,” in which a prisoner’s arms were tied behind the back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling suspending the prisoner in mid-air while he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; and the use of police dogs to maul prisoners.

Recruit, defect, capture, kill. Phoenix established a hierarchy of outcomes. The creator of Phoenix, Nelson Brickham in 1967 explained it: “My motto was to recruit them; if you can’t recruit them, defect them (that’s Chieu Hoi); if you can’t defect them, capture them; if you can’t capture them, kill them.” The COINTELPRO and CHAOS programs were designed to sow distrust among Communist and left organizations by planting false evidence of federal agents in their midst; their crowning achievements were the actual subversion of Communists. The same with the Phoenix program. 

Operation Phoenix went so far as to dress the Special Operations Division police in the clothes and gear of National Liberation units and have them commit atrocious crimes against the people to spread fear of the Communists among the rural population. Subversion can come from the inside, or the outside. These seven elements made up the basis of the Phoenix Program and still serve today as the underlying logic of the Department of Homeland Security.

The War on Terror and the drive for homeland security are merely two sides of the coin of class warfare. The effects of imperialist policies have long been known to us. In 1950, Aimé Césaire, the Martinican poet, wrote “colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken in him buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism…. no one colonizes innocently, [] no one colonizes with impunity either; [] a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization — and therefore force — is already a sick civilization.”

Veterans of the U.S. armed forces make up 20% of police officers. These men and women are sent overseas to engage in targeted murder and terror in Phoenix-like operations in Afghanistan or Iraq, to operate little Phoenix Programs across the world, and then brought back to work in the domestic police force. They are desensitized to killing, torture, and corruption because those tools are taught to them as the legitimate methods of control of foreign territories. They train in Abu Ghraibs abroad only to come home and build little Abu Ghraibs in the U.S. Officers who served in the military are more likely to have fired their weapons while doing police work (32% vs. 26%). The use of SWAT teams and military tactics has ballooned. 

The Chicago Police Department operated a secret black site where suspects were held without booking, shackled, and beaten. Beginning in 2005, the Maryland State Police began keeping a list of death penalty opponents and anti-war protestors as part of their effort to track terror. After Hurricane Katrina, the private security firm Blackwater patrolled the city of New Orleans and operated under DHS authority. Starting with the Reagan-era War on Drugs, police began to receive surplus military equipment from the Pentagon. After 9/11, DHS created anti-terror grants to provide new military equipment — armored trucks, ballistics gear, armored personnel carriers — to police departments. As Valentine says, “[F]our months after 9/11, D[irector of Central Intelligence] George Tenet personally arranged with New York City’s Muslim-hating Mayor Michael Bloomberg to slip senior CIA officer David Cohen inside the NYPD as its deputy commissioner for intelligence.”

The Homeland Security Act of November 25, 2002, created the same centralized structure out of the domestic U.S. law enforcement agencies, including local police departments, as the Phoenix Program did in Việt Nam. This is point 5 of the Phoenix Program as described above. DHS established “fusion centers,” which they call “focal points in states and major urban areas for the receipt, analysis, gathering, and sharing of threat-related information between State, Local, Tribal and Territorial, federal and private sector partners.” DHS says the role of these fusion centers is to receive classified information from federal partners, analyze and assess the implication of those reports, gather information to feed back to federal partners, and then disseminate the threats assessed with local law enforcement.

That is point number 1 of the Phoenix Program: act through local agencies. There is at least one fusion center in every state, which permits the CIA to coordinate its so-called counterterrorism efforts through local law enforcement. As of 2018, there are 79 operating fusion centers. These are no different from the Province Interrogation Centers: coordinating hubs between the federal security gangs and local police and paramilitary operations.

It was recently confirmed by the Intercept that the FBI paid a felon to infiltrate Denver’s 2020 racial justice protests. He spent his time trying to convince George Floyd protestors to pick up a rifle so the right-wing paramilitary agents could shoot back. Even though the protestors were too smart to be fooled by this agent provocateur, that didn’t stop the media from creating the circumstances for Kyle Rittenhouse to murder Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber. He was recently set free by a Kenosha jury. So much for law and order!

At the top of DHS is the executive management team. Below them are the deputy undersecretary for intelligence and analysis, who manages the Office of Intelligence and Analysis, containing about 1,000 analysts, many from the contributing agencies. There is also an Office of Operations Coordination and Planning, which oversees the DHS National Operations Center (NOC). The NOC acts as a central clearing-house for the fusion centers. DHS employs over 250,000 people. It communicates with tens of thousands of private Terrorism Liaison Officers, or privately-paid secret police. TLOs monitored Occupy and BLM from inside the protests and encampments.

Citing Valentine again, “[a]t the strategic political level it consists of bankers and corporate lobbyists paying elected officials to create tax loopholes for the rich, blanket domestic surveillance that compels working people to live in terror of being fired if they make suspicious utterances, and corrupt officials rewarding their arms industry contributors by laundering taxpayer dollars into the war machine.”

Non-governmental agencies (NGOs) play a huge role in this machine by trammeling revolutionary energy and redirecting it. Grants are doled out by CIA cut-outs and in response, groups report their entire membership and submit expenditure reports directly to Washington.

Part Three: Why Don’t We Recognize the Enemy?

We are trained not to understand the class forces at play in society. There are several tactics used by the law enforcement gangs to shape public perception through the media we consume. For federal agencies, the most prominent is the scheme of “it happened long ago,” a kind of limited hangout. For police and the military, there is what we’ve come to call copaganda. A generation or two ago, these would have all been overshadowed by the sentimentalist portrayal of all these agencies as uncomplicated heroes, but the modern period is one of increasing cynicism as the machinery of capital becomes more and more exposed.

“It happened long ago,” is a rhetorical trick that the CIA and FBI use to downplay their history of misdeeds. They allow certain records of very bad behavior from 30+ years ago to become public, owning up to the things their agencies did in the past. COINTELPRO, CHAOS, MKULTRA, Phoenix? Yes, these agencies did those things. But they happened long ago. We’re a new agency now. Meanwhile, they continue to pursue the exact same strategies that they honed in the 1960s and 1970s.

Copaganda is a topic too broad to cover here, and there are numerous other good sources on it as a media tactic. The news media doesn’t cover the most egregious and flagrant abuses of federal law enforcement agencies because the reporters would lose their access to exclusive stories and contacts within those very same federal gangs. The letter agencies carefully control what information is published.

Together, these strategies feed what CIA agent Cord Meyer dubbed the “compatible left,” liberals and pseudo-intellectuals who claim to challenge power but in fact are easily duped by its narratives and influenced by the ruling class and its nodes of control. Compatible leftists will regurgitate pre-cooked CIA talking points about how everything happened a long time ago, or worse, will actively engage in disinformation, claiming there was never any proof for Iran-Contra or the flooding of Black communities with drugs by the intelligence agencies. During the Trump years, the compatible left was responsible for the Mueller Report amplification, and now works tirelessly to exonerate Biden and Washington from the provable charge of having engaged in genocide in Palestine.

Conclusion

We must hold ourselves apart from NGOs, which are tools of governmental control. We must make a firm break with the compatible left, and reject all attempts to escalate to “direct action” that we do not have a firm strategic plan for. Above all, when analyzing the behavior of police and local authorities, we must never forget that behind every tin badge in the U.S. empire there stands the full might of the letter agencies, coiled and ready to strike.

It is necessary for us to maintain independence of action from the compatible left and to strictly delineate our organizations to be independent of all NGOs and government grants. We cannot take money from the enemy state, for every grant comes with intelligence agents of one stripe or another quick behind it. The maintenance of strict organizational control over our local groups (and, eventually, our all-empire party) is necessary to prevent the kind of backbiting that was fostered by the letter agencies in the last century.

The effect that the federal law enforcement gangs hope to achieve is one of terror and paralysis. We cannot afford to become terrorized or paralyzed. It is not the death of one, or even one hundred, that destroys the movement, but the fear that ripples through it thereafter. For the same reason, we must engineer the production of new Communists as the first and most critical task of any organization we build.

Further, we must insist not only on organizational integrity but on political development as a necessary component of organizing. We cannot fall prey to the trend of hyper-security that plagued the New Communist Movement of the 1970s and 1980s and still haunts us today. This is an outcome actively desired by the CIA and the other federal law enforcement gangs because it cuts Communists off from the wellspring of the movement: the people. We must study the techniques used to build both above- and under-ground movements in China during the struggle against the Kuomintang and the Japanese; we must insist on politically developing our membership; we must above all be principled and reproduce principled members.

As Fred Hampton said — you can jail a revolutionary, but you can’t jail the revolution. You can murder a freedom fighter, but you can’t murder liberation. While we cannot underestimate the U.S. Empire’s capacity for violence against us, we must also remember that, by the very nature of this program, the anti-imperialists who came before us have already proven victory is possible. The Communists have beaten the Phoenix Program before, because it undermines the support of the capitalist invaders. We will beat the Phoenix Program again, in the same way.

The indictment runs to 109 pages and alleges a secret conspiracy born on the date of George Floyd’s murder. Georgia’s Republican Attorney General and sweaty thumb Chris Carr (pictured left) is framing this openly as a crusade against “anarchist, anti-police, and anti-business extremist[s]”. In typical bourgeois fashion, he equates property damage with violence against living human beings.

If you come to our state and shoot a police officer, throw Molotov cocktails at law enforcement, set fire to police vehicles, damage construction equipment, vandalize private homes and businesses, and terrorize their occupants, you will be held accountable,

he complained. Of course, not one police officer has been killed defending the multi-million dollar stormtrooper training ground. Yet the Atlanta police murdered a Stop Cop City activist — Tortuguita, Manuel Esteban Paez Terán — by shooting them 57 times while their hands were raised. Despite calls for investigation by an Atlanta city councilwoman and the community, Chris Carr and the Georgia Department of Justice have declined to prosecute or even investigate this murder. Nor have the traditional channels for community protest been of any avail.

The city council ignored days of protests and the clear will of the people of Atlanta when they voted to fund Cop City on June 6 of this year. 116,000 signatures graced the desks of the legislators in the form of a ballot referendum to stop the construction; they refused to certify it. 17 hours of public comment bombarded the council on the day of their vote. They pointedly ignored it.

The curtain is finally being lowered on the state’s pretense of impartiality. It doesn’t mediate class conflicts — the state is, itself, the most powerful weapon in the corner of the wealthy capitalists. It’s in the deep fascist strongholds of Georgia and the South, where the neoliberal project was long ago rejected for a return to the naked rule of the bullet and the baton, that the most depraved exhibition of power is now being displayed. It won’t remain in the South — it will crawl across the U.S. Empire, county by county and city by city, one by one letting the local pigs off their leashes, turning them free on the people, calling us out as enemies by name. If the police succeed in building Cop City in Atlanta, it won’t be long until similar facilities are built across the United States.

The facts are simple: the hateful politicians and the enormous corporations that pay for their campaigns will never bend to public pressure in Atlanta. Worse, as one of the bastions of fascist reaction in the South, the state apparatus of Georgia has made it clear that the police will treat anyone with a dissenting voice as though they personally opened fire on a cop. Property damage, raising money, and even something as innocuous as posting ACAB on social media — these are all one and the same crime to the Atlanta police and Attorney General Chris Carr, and they all carry the death penalty. 

There can be no more half-measures. The state of Georgia isn’t fooling around, and there’s no one overseeing them who will step in and put a stop to these abuses.

Any fight in Atlanta must now be a fight to win.

Defend the Atlanta Forest is a loose circle that is organizing the fight against Cop City. They need fighters to join them, but they need more than this: they need organization. They need plans. The state has shown that there is no line they won’t cross, no escalation too gruesome to undertake in the pursuit of their interests. Activists must now treat the state of Georgia as a hostile belligerent; Cop City is not a political statement or even a promise of future repression, but a war zone. Their actions must be coordinated, organized, and focused.

This isn’t a game; this is the first live-fire front a war a long time coming.

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.

Almost nowhere in the United States is the class struggle sharper, or more one-sided, than in Atlanta, Georgia. And almost nowhere can the dynamics of race in that class struggle be more clearly seen. This has been true for years. In 2018, the Guardian devoted a week of coverage to the city, laying out in great detail a situation which was, even then, remarkably bad. The passage of five years, with the pandemic and the political unrest those years brought, have only made things worse.

Atlanta’s population in 2019 was 51% Black. By the following year, that number had fallen to 47%.  This was the first time in its modern history the city did not have a Black majority. In January of 2019, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the city was $1,868. By January of 2023, that had gone up to $2,212. The national average rent over the same period increased from $1,465 in 2019 to $1,900 in early 2023, placing Atlanta well ahead of the national curve for the period. These numbers clearly show a city that is rapidly becoming both whiter and more expensive.

This process is known as gentrification, of course, and it has arguably been the primary contradiction faced by the U.S. working class over the last several decades. In Atlanta, several factors have come together to create a situation that surpasses the scale and scope of the problem elsewhere. The most obvious of these, as a driver of the increasing whiteness and costliness of the city, has been the relocation of much of the U.S. film and television industry to Atlanta. Hollywood has come to town, and both the city and the state have rolled out a red carpet worthy of the gaudiest, most decadent film premier.

In the period 2019-2020, Georgia was home to an estimated total of 641 film and television productions, which brought over $5 billion into the state.  The vast majority of these productions were and are based in Atlanta. And what led them all here was simple: money. Georgia, from 2008 onward, has offered the industry heavy incentives in the form of tax rebates and other enticements. And the local government has allowed the influx of film industry people to essentially colonize the city. No effort has been made to protect longtime residents from the economic impact of a tidal wave of rich Californians and New Yorkers crashing into the place. Quite the opposite, in fact. The city has declared class war on its poorest people and their neighborhoods. And the army that fights that war is the Atlanta Police Department.

An excellent case in point comes from a neighborhood known as the Old Fourth Ward, which sits east of downtown. This was Dr. King’s neighborhood, and he and his wife are buried there. It is also rapidly being transformed into precisely the kind of petty bourgeois Potemkin village that has sprung up all over the city, to house and amuse the white gentry. Gated communities of condos or townhouses that come with game rooms and gyms, dog parks and pools, surrounded by upscale restaurants and shops to soak up the residents’ spending money. Many of these also feature a “market,” essentially a high-end mall food court minus the mall, of which there are many throughout the city. The one in the Old Fourth Ward is called the Krog Street Market. To go there on a weekend evening is to stumble into a stereotypical yuppie’s wildest dreams. Throngs of white people peppered with a few darker faces, all of them frolicking in their artificial paradise, dropping fistfuls of cash. What one does not see is any poor people, and very few Black people, who are not at work. This is one of Atlanta’s most historic working class Black neighborhoods.

The question is how the Old Fourth Ward got this way. We are fortunate to have a firsthand account from a former Atlanta police officer who, disgusted by what he was ordered to do and why, not only quit over it but went to the media. This was Tom Gissler, which may not be his real name. According to Gissler, in 2020, after three years on the force, he was given very specific instructions by his superiors: target the people living in an Old Fourth Ward complex called Bedford Pines Apartments, which is privately owned public housing. Gissler’s orders were explicit: get the people living there on anything you can, parking violations, old warrants, petty drug charges, whatever. Let nothing slide. According to Gissler these orders were unusual:

It made me very curious. So on my own time…I drove over there and…was like: “Hey, this is what I’m being asked to do. Why do you think that is? What’s going on?”

A homeowner in the area was very frank with me. He said the guys who own Bedford Pines got their tax bill last year, and their taxes were assessed based on all the gentrification that’s happening in the area. And so they wanted to move everybody out of these apartments and knock ’em down and rebuild these nice expensive apartments and the government said no. And so then they said, “Well, that’s ok, we’ll just increase the rent.” They tried to increase the rent and the Section 8 guys came back out and said, “No, you can’t do that either.”

The only way you can evict or do anything like that is if the person who [lives in] the apartment is convicted of a felony. So the Bedford Pines guys just went to the police department and said: “We want you to police in here, and we’re going to give you a section of Bedford Pines to actually have office space. And I want you to lock up as many people as possible so we can make these apartments vacant and we can knock ’em down.”

I go to my supervisors: Is this what the case is? And they looked at me like, what are you, stupid? Of course, why else would we be doing this?

The pattern of aggressive policing to drive out working class Black residents that Gissler witnessed in the Old Fourth Ward has been carried out in neighborhoods around the city. Summerhill, Peoplestown, Pittsburgh, the Bluff; the list is long and growing. Once the original residents are mostly gone, the city and their preferred developers move in and buy up whole blocks. These are then leased out to white hipster capitalists, who renovate the buildings and open their foodie restaurants, their breweries and cafés, their boutiques and yoga studios. Fast forward two years and the high-end yuppies start to move in. They displace the hipsters, and the whole grim circus rolls on to the next neighborhood. And if, somewhere along the way local residents become frustrated enough to protest or otherwise object, the police come back, make more arrests and bust whatever heads catch their eye. Many of the city’s numerous gang prosecutions are rooted in this process.

This has gone on in Atlanta for years, at least as far back as the preparations for the 1996 Olympics. It might appear, from the outside, to be strange. Atlanta is a Black-controlled city, after all. The offices of mayor, police chief and city council have been mostly occupied by Black people since the 1970s. The city has long been held up as the most successful, practical, capitalist answer to the demands of ’60s radicals for Black power. And yet the policies that slowly eroded that Black majority have been relentlessly pursued. One might be tempted to conclude, on this basis, that the primary contradiction in Atlanta is class rather than race. As we shall see later on, this is not really the case, though class does play such an outsized role in the political economy of race in the city that the two are difficult to separate.

The best guides through this terrain are E. Franklin Frazier’s 1955 book The Black Bourgeoisie, Charles Hamilton and Kwame Ture’s 1967 work Black Power, and the work of the late Glen Ford on the concept of the “Black misleadership class.” The short version is that the Black political leadership in Atlanta employs a rhetoric crafted to appeal to their working class constituents, while their policies advance other interests. Viewed through this lens, the situation becomes more clear.

Things in Atlanta would likely have continued this way until the remaking of the city was complete, if not for 2020. That year, the covid pandemic collided with outrage at the police murder of George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and many others. There was a serious uprising in Atlanta. It was in the aftermath of that uprising that a proposal was put forward which had, as its stated goal and purpose, rewarding the police after a long hot summer. The centerpiece of that proposal was a massive, new, state-of-the-art police training facility.

This announcement was years in the making. Research on “what a training center would look like and what it would cost” began as early as 2015. By January 2021, after months of reactionary media coverage about crime waves and low police morale, conditions were ripe. The mayor at that time, Keisha Lance Bottoms, rolled out “One Atlanta: One APD,” a multi-pronged plan to “bolster police presence, training, and morale.” The plan called for the expansion of the city’s already vast surveillance network, the targeting of “nuisance properties” such as bars and nightclubs with increased force, and the forming of partnerships with the FBI and local sheriffs to “put more officers on the street.” 

Lance Bottoms’ plan further promised to “explore a public safety training academy that expands recruitment classes and ensures that police officers and firefighters have high-quality facilities and training.” On April 1, 2021 plans for the training academy were finally revealed. The $90 million project, to be constructed on a parcel of forested land in neighboring Dekalb County, was to include housing for police academy trainees, many shooting ranges, an explosives testing and training site, and large a mock city for urban warfare and counterinsurgency training. It was this last feature that led opponents of the project to give it the name which stuck: Cop City.

Opportunism from the White “Left”

Right Opportunism 

The proposal to construct Cop City was met with harsh criticism and resistance from around Atlanta. An eclectic coalition of neighborhood associations, police/prison abolition groups, environmentalists, liberals, democratic-socialists, and anarchists began to come together. Soon they had a slogan: Stop Cop City.

Activists focused their efforts on mobilizing community pressure on the City Council to vote the proposal down. They canvassed neighborhoods, circulated petitions, held rallies, marches, and town hall meetings. As opposition to the plan grew, the city made a few calculated concessions. The 150-acre project was scaled back to 85 acres, and provisions were added to plant 100 hardwoods for every tree removed during construction. Meanwhile, the official city council vote on the project was twice delayed by allegations that the “listening sessions” being held to gather community feedback were a sham. Eventually, the Council set up a phone line that people could call to make a short recording of whatever they had to say. This resulted in 17 hours worth of audio, about 70% of which was firmly against the project. Nevertheless, on the evening of September 8, 2021, the City Council voted to greenlight Cop City by a margin of 10-4, swatting away four months of mobilization like a gnat.

This was of course predictable, and indeed it was predicted. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America’s local Steering Committee, told a reporter at an August protest outside City Hall, that DSA thought the measure would pass. “We just believe that Councilwoman Shephard isn’t actually listening to her own constituents, and she is doing what she wants to do to support the Atlanta Police Foundation’s funders.” For some organizers, the obstinance of local officials was more than just likely, it was necessary. A former member of a local organization called Defund Atlanta Police Department, Refund Communities (DARC), Jesse Pratt López, stated in a recent interview that the defeat came as no surprise. It was, in fact, the very reaction the coalition had built their strategy around. According to Pratt López, the goal was to radicalize the masses by leading them through a futile civic exercise, thereby catalyzing a more militant movement against the project. Following the vote, however, rather than picking up steam the first iteration of the movement to Stop Cop City began to fissure.

Within days of the city council vote, DARC itself would dissolve. Its last act was the publication of an open letter, endorsed by a majority of active members, explaining the reasons for this dissolution. The letter describes a pattern of chauvinism and anti-Blackness in a movement riddled with internal contradictions. It begins: “In early September, our abolitionist group…informally dissolved after multiple white and non-Black organizers in DARC and Atlanta DSA completely eroded the trust and confidence of Black comrades in DARC. These same organizers harmed DARC’s relationship with other coalition groups that collaborated on the #StopCopCity campaign.” The letter goes on to allege that DSA’s leadership used the movement and the moment to advance their own goals: “While the campaign began as a horizontal movement-building project, it became clear that Atlanta DSA sought oversight and control (financially and structurally).” The DSA, according to DARC, saw the campaign against Cop City primarily as a way to recruit people into their own formation, and attempted to take over the coalition’s messaging and strategy. A text message from a member of the local DSA Steering Committee, sent the week of the council vote and published with the open letter, reveals them advising others to use this period of “peak attention” to “try to absorb as many people into DSA as possible, win or lose.”  

DARC’s letter helps explain the tactic of lobbying the City Council to vote the project down while knowing damn well they would not. The notion that working class Atlantans, people who live their entire lives in the trenches of the city’s class war, require a civics lesson to be radicalized is self-evidently chauvinistic. Such a plan coming from a broad, predominantly Black, coalition of locals makes no sense; but coming from a clique of mostly white, petty bourgeois electoralists, it does. DSA appears to have been more interested in growing their organization than winning a fight they always expected to lose. In pursuit of that goal, it strong-armed its way to the front of a movement of working class Black people, maligning and alienating fellow organizers as it went.

It is no surprise to see DSA, in this particular case and as a broader organization, move this way. It is an instrument, not of the working class, but rather of, by, and for petty bourgeois opportunists. Born out of the work of Michael Harrington, himself a petty bourgeois opportunist, amid the pervasive anticommunism of the Cold War, the DSA was formed in the early 1980s by a merger of two smaller social-democrat formations. Then as now, DSA’s entire reason for existence is to be a place for liberals who want to go further than the Democratic Party, but not “too far,” i.e.: not toward outright, mature communism. Its theoretical framework is derived largely from the work of Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky, two bourgeois collaborators who were soundly refuted by Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg over a century ago.

Even the group’s name gives this away, speaking as it does, as Kautsky did, of “democracy” without going the necessary further step to ask: democracy for which class? The group has never, at any point, revealed an accurate understanding that everything in class society has a definite class character, and that which is not explicitly proletarian is bourgeois, because it derives from the culture and ideology of the bourgeoisie. As such, the DSA’s attempt to collage together a form of socialism that the bourgeois state will tolerate is doomed from the start, because this can only be accomplished by leaving the essence of Marxism, its scientific revolutionary character, behind. The end result can only be a reformist, radical liberalism at best, though more frequently such formations function, objectively, as agents of the bourgeoisie. The only real question being whether they are themselves aware of this or not.

Opportunism of this type arises in tandem with imperialism, as a fraction of imperialist superprofits are tossed to a section of the working class like so many crumbs. It emerged in the context of the First World War, which the opportunists supported in collaboration with their national bourgeois, in defiance of a revolutionary understanding of that war as an essentially imperialist project. In the heat of this controversy, Lenin defined opportunism simply as “an alliance between sections of the workers and the bourgeoisie, directed against the mass of the proletariat.” DSA’s actions in Atlanta clearly demonstrate the accuracy of this definition. They attempted nothing but the advance of their own short-term interests over those of the majority Black proletariat of Atlanta. And they accomplished nothing but furthering the bourgeoisie’s goal of building Cop City, in that they seriously damaged the working class resistance to the project in the city.

Left Opportunism 

It is within this context of a working class movement undermined by opportunism that anarchists entered the scene in a significant way. Early in 2022, a nebulous group of individuals calling themselves “forest defenders” moved into the South River Forest, site of the proposed facility. They began setting up camps and erecting “tree-sits.” Their intention was to physically occupy the forest, thereby preventing work on Cop City from beginning. It is unclear how the decision to pursue this particular tactic, which has been employed many times with very little success, was made. In many reports, the forest defenders describe themselves as a “decentralized, autonomous movement [where] nobody is in charge, and nobody is responsible for anybody else’s actions,” so it’s unlikely we will ever get an answer to that question.  

The camp was in a state of perpetual flux, with people constantly coming and going, but reports indicate that somewhere between 40-100 activists were ensconced in the trees throughout 2022. They practiced yoga, planted gardens, held religious ceremonies, and of course engaged in minor vandalism of construction equipment. Their strategy was to make themselves “an immovable obstacle to any construction” while allies outside of the forest went to court and pressured construction companies in an effort to end the project before it began. And when, as they sometimes did, work crews tried to start clearing the forest despite all this, those in the camp “put their bodies on the line, climbing into trees to prevent them from being felled.”

The risks involved with such tactics hardly need to be explained. The police were called in very quickly and there were frequent altercations, which became increasingly violent as the year went on. During a May confrontation, police claimed a forest defender threw a Molotov cocktail at an officer. In a December raid on the encampment, police used tear gas, pepper balls and rubber bullets on activists in the trees. Yet for all of this, the approach to operational security in the camp was incoherent at best. When speaking to the media, as they often did, forest defenders concealed their identities, distorted their voices and used aliases like Twig and Rutabaga. This gives the impression that, on some level, they understood how vulnerable they were. But rather than regimenting security given the clear threat of police violence, they left fundamental things such as scouting and keeping watch to be taken up by anyone on a spontaneous, voluntary basis, for reasons which were purely ideological.

Arguably more important security concerns, such as the fact that police would surely attempt to infiltrate the camp, do not appear to have been considered at all. On their numerous social media accounts and websites, forest defenders repeatedly sent out open calls to the public: all were welcome, no questions asked. A June 2, 2022 communique posted to the website Scenes from the Atlanta Forest reads:

We are welcoming ALL the tactics. Kate Bush flash mob when kkkops arrive? Fuck yeah. Frontline Action to stop machines of destruction? Fuck yeah. Please just get your sweet fucking feral ass down here.

Your house sitting gig & coffee shop job can wait– come occupy the forest, & if you got privilege, use it to throw down, as trees, community members & non-human animals are better than a clear cut lot with a militarized police training center.

The stakes are high & the forest is calling!

Come for the blackberries & community, & stay for the chaos!

Setting aside the condescension toward workers who, with bills and babies, must have jobs that absolutely cannot and will not wait, there are serious problems here. The “act first, ask questions later” ideology permeates the forest defenders’ entire internet footprint. One of their Instagram pages features a buffet of organizing tactics: phone zaps, rallies, marches, mutual aid, and teach-ins. These are peppered with more urgent calls to direct action. One such post, from January 25, 2022, reads in bold red and black font: “We need folks on the ground to stop bulldozing happening by the ponds by the Old Atlanta Prison Farm. Most of the entrances have cops. Risk of police encounter is medium-high, be smart. Be alert.” Another post, from May 4, 2022 reads “Police are entering the Weelaunee Forest in large numbers to remove forest defenders. Please come help now!”

One needn’t be a seasoned organizer to understand how reckless this is. To put out a mass call to action, on the internet, insisting that anyone who reads it charge immediately into the woods, flinging their bodies in front of a brigade of heavily armed cops and bulldozers is astonishing. The best it can do is halt construction at that particular moment, a victory so temporary as to be essentially Pyrrhic. At worst, it leaves everyone who turns up totally vulnerable to police violence, with no means of self defense and without the requisite knowledge of the terrain to even flee. It boggles the mind that activists, so diligent in concealing their identities from the readers of Rolling Stone or Vice, could have such a cavalier attitude about the various dangers posed by police. Eventually, this would have literally fatal consequences.

On the morning of Wednesday, January 18, 2023, gunfire rang out in the forest. Police encircled the camp and ambushed, opening fire on Manuel Terán, known in the camp as Tortuguita a.k.a. Tort. They were shot at least 13 times, killing them as they emerged from a tent. A sheriff’s deputy was shot as well, and while police claim that Terán shot first, everyone on the scene except the cops have disputed this from the start. For weeks, police denied that there was any body camera footage from the incident; but such cameras were clearly visible on APD officers in news reports and the recordings were eventually released. They reveal a cluster of suppressed, high caliber military weapons opening up almost in unison, with no preceding, small caliber fire such as might have come from the legal, registered pistol which Terán owned. Later in the video an APD officer is seen asking someone off-camera, “You fucked up your own officer?” and receiving a grunted, affirmative reply.

What happened that day is as clear as it will likely ever be, though important questions remain. Did the police know beforehand that Terán had a gun and target them on that basis? If so, how did the cops come by that information? How were police able to encircle the camp that morning without being detected? Why were there no lookouts when everyone knew this was coming eventually and even one minute’s warning would likely have kept everyone in the camp alive? Because the only real feature of the “autonomous, nonhierarchical” form of mobilization that prevailed in the forest is that “no one is in charge and no one is responsible for anyone else,” there is no one to even ask such questions, leaving only silence regarding the entirely needless death of a brave, committed person.

Rather than pausing to reevaluate their strategy after this catastrophic turn of events, anarchists immediately resorted to reckless mobilization once again. The Saturday after Terán’s murder, a vigil in their honor was used as cover for a small-scale riot. A police car was burned, a Wells Fargo vandalized, and 6 more protestors were arrested. #AvengeTort became a trending topic on social media and across the country there were other random acts, ranging from graffiti to attacking office buildings with “stench agents.” What the people involved clearly fail to understand is that mobilization alone, no matter how immediately satisfying to the emotions, will never be enough to halt Cop City or anything else. As Kwame Ture was constantly at pains to point out, mobilization is easy because people instinctively respond to injustice, but “if we’re not careful, we allow mobilization to become an event. The struggle is never an event, it’s a process: a continual, eternal process.” Mobilizations that aren’t tied to a disciplined, organized, working-class base will always fall apart once the heat of feeling fades.

Liberal reformists, petty bourgeois opportunists and custeristic anarchists have spent two years at the center of this struggle. For all of their efforts, they have not made any measurable progress at all, having failed at every turn to convert mobilization into organization. In fact, many of their tactics have proven downright alienating to Atlanta’s working class. This is certainly true of all the tilting at City Council windmills. And it is equally true of the forest camp, where one local resident noticed that “those treehouses are nicer than my fucking apartment.” The erstwhile movement against Cop City seems to be about everything except winning, and therefore it is losing. One activist is dead. Eighteen are facing Domestic Terrorism charges that carry thirty-five year sentences. At time of writing, construction crews are clearing the forest while heavily armed police stand guard at every entrance. And the best the project’s opponents can come up with is a plan to re-occupy the forest the first week of March, to which end they have called, once again, for anyone and everyone to come to Atlanta and go camping with them.

These events are as troubling as they are familiar. Recent history is littered with the wreckage of such mobilizations. From Occupy Wall Street to Standing Rock to Black Lives Matter, all were undone by their insistence on mobilization at the expense of disciplined, militant organization. And for all this, still such methods are widely praised and held up as the future of leftwing politics, which is flatly absurd. The reality is that a truly horizontal organization does not and cannot exist. Friedrich Engels explored this in his 1872 essay, On Authority, concluding that, under bourgeois rule, it is impossible to create an organization in which one’s will is never subordinated to another’s. Even in the most utopian, anti-authoritarian formations, someone’s ideas end up prevailing. And when the idea that prevails is nothing but a refusal to have coherent ideas, it virtually always ends in defeat, with people dead or in prison.

The Atlanta Police Foundation and Ignored Answers 

The movement against Cop City, such as it is, has focused its outrage on various actors at various times. The mayor, the city council, the police, the contractors, and the corporations who have provided funding for the project have all been targeted for everything from protest to graffiti to sabotage. Often overlooked entirely, and rarely correctly analyzed, has been the private, 501(c)3 nonprofit called the Atlanta Police Foundation.

This is a serious error, because the APF is in fact the primary force behind Cop City. It was their idea, they brought it to the mayor, they pushed it through the city council, they have controlled the conversation around the issue, they control the land in question, they are slated to provide the overwhelming majority of the funding for the project and they will apparently operate it if it is eventually built. The question, then, becomes who and what is the APF? Answering that question is of paramount importance, because it reveals not only the interests that want Cop City built, but also maps the real terrain of power in the city of Atlanta.

In seeking an answer to this question, what we do not find is as eloquent as what we do. The APF, as a 501(c)3 organization, is required to file fairly transparent tax documents which subsequently become publicly available. But such records are only available up to and including fiscal 2020, the year before the activity around Cop City begins. So few details pertaining to the project are on the formal record. There are receipts for some of the money, though the source is APF itself and the information must, therefore, be viewed somewhat skeptically. This is relevant, because the records for 2020 show $24.1 million in assets against $16.7 million in liabilities, leaving a balance around $8 million. This is well short of the $60 million the APF has committed to the project. None of the tax records currently available, which go back to the organization’s founding in 2003, show them having anything close to a spare $60 million dollars lying around. So it is clear that a massive amount of money was raised very quickly for the Cop City project.

The information APF has chosen to make available, in a “campaign update” from the third quarter of 2022, lists 24 large donors. Nine of these are foundations, including the project’s two largest single donors. The Woodruff Foundation, endowed from the estate of an early president of Coca-Cola, has contributed $13 million. The James M. Cox Foundation, endowed by the owner of Atlanta’s only major newspaper, gave $10 million. Also on the list are the companies that control gas and electric service in Georgia, two large railroad companies, and then a laundry list of large corporations based or doing substantial business in Atlanta and Georgia more broadly.

For some reason, efforts to problematize the project’s funding have ignored the foundations almost entirely. Some attempts have been made to pressure one or another corporation into withdrawing their support, though at this point only Coca-Cola has been responsive to this pressure. And even then, the victory consisted only in extracting a promise that they would provide no further funding, rather than somehow clawing their prior $1 million “donation” back. Every other corporation involved has simply ignored the pressure.

But the corporations as such are beside the point. They are not the major donors to Cop City. And they are not people, despite the legal sophistry that classifies them as such in the U.S. They are not subject to shame or embarrassment. The investors to whom they ultimately answer might be, at least in theory, but probably not. The corporations and the foundations, along with all the other donors, are advancing the self-identified interests of human beings. If they judge that one way to do that is to give millions of tax-deductible dollars to the APF, then they will. The only language they understand is money, so arguably only a strategy that would escalate the cost of their involvement beyond what they were prepared to spend would have a chance of success. And it seems no such strategy was ever even considered.

The fact of the matter is that money to fund Cop City is simply not a problem the APF has. If one corporation were to drop out, as Coca-Cola appears to have done, it changes nothing. If they all pull out, the APF already has their money, and could simply switch to soliciting money from more foundations and private individuals. More to the point is who the APF is and what it does with the money that comes in. And here the available tax documents are actually useful.

First, the who. APF’s fiscal 2020 documents list some 50 members of the board of directors, 41 of whom hold the mere title of “director.” The other 9 are the foundation’s officers at the time, and even a brief glance at them is very revealing. The president and CEO is one W. David Wilkinson, who has served in that post through the administrations of three successive Atlanta mayors. Wilkinson’s prior work experience consists primarily of 22 years in the U.S. Secret Service. Marshall B. Freeman, the APF’s chief operating officer, is ex-APD, where he was the deputy chief administrative officer. The chief financial officer in 2020 was one Courtney Collins, who came to the APF from the local nonprofit sector, specializing in homelessness, toward which the city is infamously brutal. She has since left the APF, and gone on to work for something called the Atlanta Building Wealth Initiative, which is exactly what it sounds like. APF chairman Robin Loudermilk is a member of one of the oldest, wealthiest families in the entire South, and has a background in high octane real estate speculation. Vice chairman John F. O’neill was formally president of “US Multifamily Capital Markets” at Cushman & Wakefield, a Chicago-based commercial real estate firm with over $9 billion dollars in annual revenue. Calvin Darden, also a vice chairman, was an executive at UPS, and was heavily involved in the building of the city’s yuppie hiking park known as the Beltline. Treasurer Tye Darden has been general counsel for both Georgia-Pacific Railroad and Koch Industries. And finally, secretary Bob Peterson also has a background as a commercial real estate executive. Of these nine officers at the APF, only two are Black.

As for the what, the tax records don’t cover the Cop City project, but the APF’s other programs are nightmarish enough. Taken together, these activities are clearly seen as intended to bring about a kind of new golden age for U.S. police on behalf of those the police serve and protect. For the rest of us, the future the APF is working to bring about can only be described as a chilling, dystopian police state.

Perhaps the most obviously problematic program is what the APF calls OPERATION SHIELD. This is a surveillance network. It consists, not only of the 11,000 cameras that APF has provided to the city, but of virtually every other public and private camera in the entire city. Closed circuit security cameras, Amazon’s Ring cameras, traffic enforcement cameras and others are all linked into a single network that the APD can monitor in real time from their APF-provided Video Integration Center. As an adjunct to SHIELD, the APF has built what they call ComNet, a communications hub linking the APD to private security outfits. These networks are available to any group that cares to pay the subscription fee for access. This means communications between APD and any manner of private security, from the unarmed watchmen of a company like Securitas to the more overtly militarized personnel of a mercenary firm like Blackwater, are perfectly seamless because they are all on the same network.

More subtly troubling is an initiative called SECURE NEIGHBORHOODS. Under this umbrella, the APF purchases real estate in neighborhoods targeted for gentrification. They then bring in contractors to build new housing or renovate existing structures on those lots, and these homes are then sold to APD officers at sub-market prices. The end result, obviously, is that various working class neighborhoods come under full-time surveillance and threat of police intervention, courtesy of their new neighbors. This program has also provided discounted housing for APD recruits at a development called Unity Place, which has room for up to 30 such recruits at a time.

Another, more overtly carceral APF initiative is something they call the Atlanta Repeat Offender Commission. According to the APF’s tax records, in 2014 “the AROC was given authority” to track and issue reports on repeat offenders who, if their cases originated in different jurisdictions, might have received something less than the harshest legal punishment.

And finally we come to the Atlanta Crime Research Center, which APF describes as its “research and analysis arm.” Launched in 2019, the ACRC’s first task was a study of APF’s own Repeat Offender program, which included compiling reports on local judges’ sentencing patterns, no doubt intended to help pressure or remove those who decline to throw the entire book at every such defendant. The language in the tax documents is intentionally vague, stating that the ACRC “is managed by APF but works in concert with local universities and law enforcement partners to develop and analyze content” and conduct various “short- and long-range studies” with the goal of reducing “crime.” It seems reasonable to assume that this entity will be and is being used to identify law enforcement targets, probably using the pseudo-science known as “predictive policing.”

While this is not quite a complete list of the APF’s programs and activities, it is sufficient to outline the nature of the organization’s efforts. These, clearly, are all about expanding the power of the police. The Cop City project is about consolidating that expanded power, giving the police a physical, military-style base from which to operate while moving towards more sophisticated techniques of crowd control and counterinsurgency. Furthermore, it is quite clear that there is very little chance of effective political oversight being exercised by the city government. The city council has fallen over itself in its zeal for the project. And two mayors have now been caught in the project’s undertow. One has seen her political ambition go up in flames, in part, because of the controversy around Cop City, and the other has compromised himself so publicly that it is highly unlikely that he will even seek, let alone win, re-election.

In point of fact, one has to question who actually runs the city of Atlanta, where the real power resides. Mayors come and go and are tossed aside once they can no longer advance the APF’s agenda. City Council members, too. All of these elected officials, most of them Black, put in office by the city’s still large population of mostly Black Democratic Party voters, have a clear record of laboring, not on behalf of their constituents, but rather on behalf of the APF. And as we have seen, the APF’s officers and funding come from a sewer of private and corporate interests that all emerge from a single source: the bourgeoisie.

The Atlanta Police Foundation, then, is best understood not as a slush fund or a shady organization behind the scenes, but rather as a de facto shadow government that actually runs the city on behalf of a mostly white bourgeoisie. And it follows that the local political and civic leadership is not a Black bourgeoisie at all, but a petty bourgeois faction at best, a gang of compradors at worst, always at the service of those with real power. This understanding clarifies the situation around Cop City substantially, and such clarity is something that the movement to stop the facility’s construction has far too often lacked. But not always.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy in this whole sordid tale is that, while mostly white “leftists” of whatever persuasion were offering no analysis of the problem, inventing strategies based on that missing analysis and deriving faulty tactics from that bad strategy, there was an organization in the city that not only could have but was doing all of this better: Community Movement Builders, one of the best grassroots organizations in the city.

CMB is based in a neighborhood known as Pittsburgh, where the APF is currently building three homes under the auspices of its “Secure Neighborhoods” program. The group is loosely modeled on the Black Panther Party’s community outreach programs. They teach adult literacy and political education classes, organize community gardens, host lectures on various topics and otherwise defend the community’s interests. As the struggle against Cop City has progressed, CMB’s involvement has increasingly become showing up to do media damage control for the latest mess their white “comrades” have made. They have done an admirable job of this, somehow managing to not directly criticize their “allies” in public. This says a lot, both about their organizational discipline and the quality of the help they’ve had in the fight.

CMB’s most public face is a movement lawyer and organizer named Kamau Franklin, who has lately been interviewed by a wide variety of liberal/progressive outlets like Democracy Now. He is also a key member of a grassroots platform called Black Power Media, frequently appearing on their morning news program, The Remix Morning Show. Featuring a group of contributors such as Jacqueline Luqman, Dr. Jared Ball, Kalonji Chonga, and Kim Brown, with music by The Ear Doctor, The Remix airs four days a week. It, and Black Power Media more broadly, are the best on-the-ground source for news about Cop City and the class war in Atlanta in general.

Much of this essay has its ultimate roots in regularly watching Black Power Media over the last year and a half. Had any of the variously problematic caucasians discussed above done the same, things might have gone differently. Almost every day since the Cop City project was first announced, someone on BPM has been talking sense about it. This analysis can have no better conclusion than simply quoting them and their analysis of the situation and what must happen from here if the fight against Cop City, or any similar struggle, is to have any chance of success.

Kamau Franklin, speaking to Robert Scheer:

It’s extremely important that people realize that these police foundations are taking off across the country, they’re not accountable to public officials because they are private nonprofits… [Cop City] is basically their facility that they’re renting from the city of Atlanta for $10 a year…for the next 20 or 30 years. So this is completely not going to be scrutinized by the public or answerable through CC hearings. They will train as they see fit, as an agency set up to promote policing…I’m not sure who elected or decided that the APF should play a prominent role in “crime fighting” and or “training” of the police. They’re not elected to do so.

Jacqueline Luqman, Remix Morning Show, the day after the murder in the forest:

I want people to understand that the right wing, the system, the corporatists, the capitalists in this country, they are very patient. They play the long game and they recognize the difference between mobilization and organization. They understood, I think, that the uprisings in 2020 was great mobilization, it was a wonderful, global mobilization. But most of those people did not connect to actual radical anticapitalist, anti-imperialist, socialist organizations to organize for actually changing this system. And they knew that a lot of people, yeah people were responding to the horrible thing, the public lynching of George Floyd, and they were angry in the moment, but most of those people did not want to commit to actually changing their own world view. Most of those people, like I said, great mobilization, but a lot of those people thought well we’re going to change…the police without addressing the need to change this whole system. And that is, I think, the very foundational difference…between mobilization and organization. What should have happened, during that uprising, is that radical organizations should have seen a crazy influx of people saying OK I get it, this capitalist system is the problem, or help me understand how this is a bigger problem than just the police, it’s about an entire system, teach me, let me learn all these things. But can we be real? People in this country don’t want to, largely, change a system that has benefitted them, most of them materially, if they’re not working class and poor, really. And working class and poor people are kept so tired and worn out just trying to survive that the idea of organizing and committing yourself to this other thing is overwhelming for a lot of people. So the system was like: We’ll wait. And we’ll give this nice, a lot of white folks, a little taste of what we’ve been giving the Negroes and the Indigenous for all this time and then they’ll go home. The politicians will make some promises. And then they will think they have done something, when in fact the system just kind of hibernated for a little while during those uprisings, to a certain degree, and they waited til those well-meaning, mostly white folks went back to their regular lives where they don’t have to deal with this every day. Where they’re not interested in overturning capitalism. Where they see no problem with U.S. imperialism and they don’t want to know the connections between domestic racist police terrorism and U.S. militarism abroad, particularly focused and targeted at Africans and the global south. I really want people to understand how absolutely critical and important it is to be in organizations. This is not like a part time gig. It’s really not. Because 24/7 365 days a year our enemy is organizing. They are.

Ajamu Baraka, of Black Alliance for Peace, on the Remix Morning Show: 

This fantasy that Europeans think that they’re gonna be the leaders of some kind of process, of some kind of radical, revolutionary process in the U.S., is absurd. And basically, if it ain’t us leading this thing, it ain’t going nowhere…The white left has got to understand: you aren’t going to be at the center of this. Not anymore.

Author’s note: In the time between the writing and publication of this piece, Stop Cop City activists revealed plans for a music festival in the South River Forest, which is still under construction and heavy police surveillance. Additionally, activists on social media are promoting a public calendar for a “week of action” to stop Cop City that anyone can access and edit. Meanwhile, the Black Power Media youtube page was temporarily suspended this week after reactionary elements of the white left brigaded and harassed one of the contributors quoted above, Jacqueline Luqman, following her criticism of an anti-war rally organized by members of a far-right Libertarian Party caucus.