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

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

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

Warren and the Apogee of Empire

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

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

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

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

Grants Pass is a Return of Labor Discipline

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

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

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

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

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

The Unhoused: Proletarians and the Reserve Army of Labor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marching Counter Clockwise

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

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

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

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

The college students of Connecticut participated wholeheartedly in April’s student intifada, despite the police violence and state repression brought to bear against them. No fewer than 46 Yale and 26 UConn students are now facing criminal charges in Connecticut state courts as a result of their organizing. Prosecutors, who have wide latitude to pursue, change, or drop charges, have been clear that they have no intention of backing off.

This is a clear signal that the business interests of Connecticut want the matter concluded. They don’t want any further outbreaks of student unrest. State Prosecutors are letting the movement know that, in Connecticut, the buck stops in the courthouse. The message is that, although this first spin through court won’t hurt too much (defendants are mostly being offered a court program called Accelerated Rehabilitation, or A.R., which will result in the charges being dismissed as long as they don’t pick up any more in the next year or two), they’ll be watching for “repeat offenders.” Today, A.R.. Tomorrow, a conviction.

This is how movements are broken. The state learned this lesson in the 1960s and 70s. Repeated arrests exert a pressure that is hard to resist. They bring charges and push them, so they can eventually burn radicals out of the movement. They want college students to think twice about protesting. Sure, one arrest doesn’t seem like much… but the second arrest will violate that A.R., and now you’re looking at a conviction. The third time will be probation, or worse. This is the state playbook. They’ll turn around and give a sad-faced press conference: “These darn kids. They just aren’t getting it. We have no choice but to take a hard stance.” And then all of Fourth Reich middle America will eat it up, and cheer the prison buses as they cart kids off to jail.

We can help delay the strategy of our clever little clave of Connecticut Goebbels’ by putting pressure on them, and forcing them to reconsider whether or not they really want to pursue charges against the college students arrested for protesting genocide.

How do we do that? Well, at the end of the day, a prosecutor is just a pig in a suit, and like the pigs, prosecutors only understand force. So the time has come for us to use it, to force them to drop the charges. We need to exert the pressure of public opinion. Signing petitions is a good start, but it doesn’t stop there. The next stage of organizing and escalation must be directed against the courts where these charges are being pursued.

Here are some petitions and campaigns to get you started.

Now go out and organize.

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

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

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

For corporate property.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why isn’t Anthony being charged with murder?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cha shot him. Those wounds killed him in prison.

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

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

The battle over gerrymandering has been fought since the introduction of the current political machine by antebellum Democrats in the early mid-19th century. In fact, the term comes from 1812 and the redrawing of Massachusetts electoral districts by Governor Elbridge Gerry, when he redrew a district in Boston to look like a salamander on a survey map. The practice is designed to combine various districts so that the voting population of the enemy — the party not currently in power, whichever that may be — is concentrated in the fewest number of districts or broken up so that they are counteracted by larger numbers of the party doing the drawing. Gerrymandering is nearly as old as elections in the U.S. and almost coeval with the founding of the U.S. settler-republic itself.

It has always caused righteous and justified outrage among the people who are actually doing the voting. By its very nature, Gerrymandering is anti-democratic. In electoral regions where the ruling party has a safe majority of the votes, there’s no reason to Gerrymander. It’s only where the ruling party is slipping from power or foresees a loss in voters that it goes to the district maps and tries to draw the borders in its own favor.

In 2019, the Supreme Court of the United States, stacked with right-fascist jurists, ruled that partisan gerrymandering, even when “excessive,” was “nonjusticiable” and involved “political questions.” This was the case of Rucho v. Common Cause, 139 S. Ct. 2484, 2491, 2507 (2019). In the everyday language of human beings, this tortured legal-speak means that, should a political party redistrict your entire state to make sure it, and it alone, can win elections in the future, the courts have no power to aid you. “Nonjusticiable” means there is nothing the court can do; a “political question” is one that the courts have decided must be fixed by elected representatives. Never mind that the gerrymandering itself makes it impossible to elect representatives who would undo the partisan redistricting.

Under a little-used and even less-granted rule of procedure, the legislature of North Carolina asked their state supreme court permission to re-argue a case that had been decided once already last year, when the judges of that court had held a Democratic majority. That case, Harper v. Hall, 380 N.C. 317, 390 (2022), had determined that the North Carolina constitution prohibited partisan gerrymandering.

On 28 April, 2023, the Supreme Court of North Carolina, newly-packed with pro-gerrymandering right-fascist Republicans, overruled Harper v. Hall. The new Harper v. Hall ruling explicitly mirrors the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Rucho v. Common Cause — that is, since the redistricting has already been done, there’s no way to fix it. The question is, in the twisted language of the law, “nonjusticiable.” In other words, to those who have lost the ability to have their voices heard in even the meager and anemic elections we’ve become accustomed to in this dying bourgeois republic, the answer is: “Too bad!”

Gerrymandering: the Legal Landscape

The most prominent gerrymandering cases were, of course, all within the territory of New Africa — that band of fertile soil in the U.S. South where the biggest and most prosperous slave plantations were founded, which imported the most Black African slaves, and which are, consequently, today the regions where most Black people in the U.S. Empire live. The practice of redistricting to disenfranchise Black voters came under federal scrutiny in the 1960s and was explicitly outlawed by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Under the liberal order, any victory secured by the oppressed, by the laboring masses, is subject to reversal. Liberalism, and in particular the brand of left-liberalism popular among the functionaries of the Democratic Party, functions on the level of form rather than content. To the left-liberal, there is no higher principle than applying, however unequally, the same form to many situations and arguing, from the fact that the form remains unchanged, that this, in some abstract and metaphysical sense, represents equality. 

It was only a matter of time before this liberal mania of honoring procedure and process over results caused an utterly ludicrous shift in the very meaning of the law. Although the fight against gerrymandering had taken on an explicitly anti-racist cast, it would, in 1993, be used to deprive a Black population of its political power.

Shaw v. Reno, 509 U.S. 630, was a 1993 U.S. Supreme Court case that came up out of North Carolina. In the 1990 census, North Carolina qualified for a new electoral district. This district was drawn by the North Carolina state legislature in a “snake-like” manner to create what is called a “majority-minority” district; that is, the new electoral district was majority Black. North Carolina was under the rule of the Voting Rights Act, which meant any redistricting had to be approved by the federal government, which would approve or deny the redistricting based on a test as to whether the new districts jeopardized minority presentation. The Justice Department accepted this new district.

Ruth O. Shaw and a group of other white residents sued the U.S. Attorney General and various state officials over the plan. The Supreme Court, then under the conservative right-fascist leadership of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, ruled that the electoral district, because it separated out Black voters, was an effort to segregate races and was therefore a violation of the white resident’s constitutional right to equal protection under the law. You’re reading that right: the redistricting was held to be unconstitutional because it violated the white resident’s rights by attempting to ensure that Black voters were heard in North Carolina, a state with a historical record of suppressing the Black vote.

Now that the reactionary elements had realized they could use the anti-gerrymandering rules to their benefit, a drive kicked off to make gerrymandering illegal on its face and reverse the gains made by the Black voters of the South throughout the 1960s and 1970s. This legal push has resulted in the modern division of gerrymandering into two categories: the legal, and the illegal.

Racial gerrymandering is still per-se illegal. But, thanks to a string of U.S. Supreme Court decisions culminating in Rucho v. Common Cause, politically partisan gerrymandering is not. That is, it is illegal to design an electoral district such that Black voters are concentrated and can form a majority, but it is not illegal to design an electoral district such that Republican voters can form a majority.

Under the hood of the bourgeois democracy under which we live, district-drawing is one of the mechanisms used by both parties to try to gain an advantage in the federal government. Both Democrats and Republicans aggressively redistrict to shore up seats where they’re weak. Unlike the Democrats, however, the Republicans have been pursuing a united strategy for redistricting since 2010. REDMAP (the Redistricting Majority Project) was founded in that year and the Republican party has poured some $30 million dollars into this project. Over the past 23 years, REDMAP has used computerized mapping software to help redraw hundreds of districts in each round of redistricting. By 2012, the Republican party had already received an enormous benefit in the U.S. House of Representatives. Today, many states that were formerly controlled by Democrats are now bastions of Republican power thanks to this, and other efforts to control which votes are counted and which are neutralized.

Voting in the Bourgeois Republic

Once every few years, the workers in the United States Empire have been accustomed to being given the opportunity to engage in a piece of political theater: voting which wing of the great vulture will be in charge of our oppression. State ideologists, textbook authors, and talking heads on television cloak the bourgeois republic in the dizzy and eager language of democracy. We, the working people, know better. This is shown in every election in our lifetime. Voter turnout in the presidential elections, for instance, has hovered between 50 and 65% throughout the entire 20th and 21st century. Why don’t people vote? Because they know, both from history and experience, that their votes don’t matter.

Why don’t the votes of the working people matter? There are numerous ways and means used by the ruling class to denude, sift through, sort, and screen the votes of the working people. To address them all would be an involved exercise, but some of the ways the power of the democratic vote is reduced and winnowed away include: first-past-the-post elections, election days coinciding with work time, polling stations that are inaccessible, the electoral college, huge costs of running a campaign for office, and the worst and most potent tool of the ruling class of all: backroom dealing. We all know that the way politics works in this country is that moneyed interests talk directly with politicians outside of the view of the public. Even supposedly “progressive” politicians take pride in their ability to manipulate the system of deals, bargains, and secret handshakes that pervades the halls of power. The fact of the matter is, all the decisions made by our politicians are made in private. We are never in the room. The money is.

But because the power of the vote is often useless or meaningless, that doesn’t mean it’s always meaningless. There have been times when the vote has mattered. There have been times when the vote has shown an expression of collective rage, even of class power! Those times are few and far between.

More importantly, though, the franchise, the right to vote, has expanded significantly since the settler-republic was first founded. Initially, only propertied white men of English heritage could vote in most states (and, consequently, in federal affairs). As this changed, the power of the vote was reduced, to prevent what the liberal hysterics refer to as “mob rule” or the “rule of the many.” (Why are they so afraid of the rule of many? Because they are the few!) In liberal democracy, enfranchisement is not political power in its own right, but rather an indication of which segments of the population the ruling class deems important enough to placate. 

So why should we be up in arms about voting rights, which we have just agreed don’t mean much, being taken away? Here’s why: Those rights have been secured through bloodshed. They are the concession, wrung through the centuries of hard class struggle, that we have forced from the ruling classes. It’s not so much the fact that we begrudge the blood-suckers and parasites in our government or the bloated hypocrites that own the companies and thus the country the right to participate in their dog-and-pony show. But winning the vote was a step toward winning the political battle. Losing the vote — watching them strip it away from us with gerrymandering and other tricks — that demonstrates not only the disdain in which they hold the working people and the nationally oppressed, the disgust they have for you and I, but it is the worrying and dangerous call of the rise of open violence and reactionary attack.

What should stir our blood is not that our voices carried weight with the ruling class, but that we are now being told not to talk at all. The fact that they feel no need to operate under even the scant theater of pluralism and popular will should concern everyone.

The Sharpening of Partisanship 

Since the 2016 elections, following on the heels of Republican victories in redistricting in the early 2010s, partisanship has sharpened on the right side of the aisle. The GOP has been tilting steadily rightwards into more and more brutal forms of right-fascism since 2001, and in 2016 the far-right fascist element within the party won control, not only of the party, but of the entire country.

We are now in an era where the entire U.S. government at all levels stands divided between the left-fascists, who merely want to see a stabilization in the current capitalist world-order, and the right-fascists, who call for increased exploitation, white class collaboration, and much more vigorous suppression of the growing Communist movement within the empire.

The Supreme Court of North Carolina lost two of its Democratic Justices last year, and these were replaced by Republican Justices. This is what enabled the clever maneuvering by the North Carolina legislature to get the case in which gerrymandering had been rendered illegal under North Carolina law heard for a second time before a new, sympathetic — we might even call them co-conspiratorial — court.

This battle between the left-fascists and the right-fascists is playing out not only in the political arena, where it traditionally has been fought, but also in the country’s courts. Long having pursued a project of planting arch-conservative lawyers into positions of high authority in both state and federal courts, the GOP is now poised, pushed by its dominant far-right wing, to deliver body blow after body blow to their political opponents. The reversal of Harper v. Hall is one such stroke; and because the Democrats had relied upon the oppressed Black masses to support their capitalist program, it is also a blow against the already-shaky structure of the bourgeois “democracy” enjoyed under the empire.

Harper v. Hall

The Democrats, and by extension (though of course, not by design) the people of North Carolina, won Harper v. Hall in 2022. This was a case brought in 2021 by the North Carolina League of Conservation Voters and individual voters joining together to file suit against the president of the North Carolina senate, the speaker of the North Carolina house, and the chairs of the redistricting committees, challenging the constitutionality of the redistricting maps that were drawn. The maps, of course, only got that far because the U.S. Supreme Court had repealed key sections of the Voting Rights Act, mentioned above.

On 20 January, 2023, the legislature of North Carolina filed a motion for rehearing before the new, right-fascist Supreme Court of North Carolina. The court gave no real reason for its decision to rehear the case (“a recently issued opinion appropriately is reheard if the petitioner makes a satisfactory showing that this opinion may be erroneous” was all the logic it provided). It needed none! The GOP-controlled court reheard the case because they wanted to reverse it. On 28 April 2023, they did exactly that.

In its new decision, the Supreme Court of North Carolina sneers, “such claims ask courts to apportion political power as a matter of fairness…. Individuals have no constitutional right as members of the public to a government audience for their policy views.” Harper at *48 citing Minn. state Bd. for Cmty. Colls v. Knight, 465 U.S. 271, 286 (1984). (emphasis added.)

The left-fascists still cling to a form of bourgeois democracy, but increasingly the right-fascists have determined that even the shreds of participation in government that have been won over the past century and a half are too dangerous to the ruling class. This is a naked, undisguised attack on democratic participation in government. We should read the decision of the Supreme Court of North Carolina in the same terms that they state it: 

As long as you get to cast a vote, the fact that it is purely symbolic doesn’t matter.