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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Khaliifah, At Last…Another’s heartbeat

On May 15 a pig army ran rampant at California’s U.C. Irvine. Despite the fact that the semester will end next month (U.C. Irvine’s spring quarter concludes on Friday, June 14), the protest was going strong. Other encampments have been broken up by sustained pig violence and state repression; a few were betrayed by their own unelected leadership, such as the camp at Brown, and dispersed after accepting false deals and empty promises from their administrators. Not U.C. Irvine.

$32 billion USD of the U.C. Irvine endowment is invested in zionist-allied or zionist-operated companies. This money supports the continued existence of the zionist state. On April 29 of this year, U.C. Irvine students established a divestment encampment and demanded that the school divest these zionist assets and cease to profit from the apartheid regime. The encampment expanded to occupy a lecture hall on campus and maintained its radical demands. Its leadership did not waver.

This is, perhaps, why the University unleashed no less than 10 pig agencies on the students there. An army of some 200 pigs assembled outside the encampment in full riot gear, carrying drawn nightsticks, and prepared to dismantle the camp and its barricades. These colonial cops marched in jackbooted columns that are all-too-familiar to anyone who watched the pigs attack an Austin, Texas encampment earlier this month or saw the marching SS troopers break up the UCLA encampment. Just like their siblings in blue all over the occupied United States empire, the California pigs were frothing for violence. They clubbed, beat, and batoned their way through the barricades, arresting at least 40 of the student-activists. The standoff began at around 2:30 pm; by 5:30, the camp was cleared and the pigs’ dirty business was done.

The pattern has been set. NYPD’s storming of Hind’s Hall and CUNY is now the order of the day. Every outpost of the student movement should prepare for violent suppression, no matter what the current mood of the authorities may appear to be. UC Irvine justified this explosive response by pointing to the students’ occupation of the Physical Sciences Lecture Hall. Make no mistake! Whether students occupy a building or a quad, the fear has entered the hearts of the administration and the political caste that the student movement will join together with the radical elements of the labor movement.

Had there been radical locals from the community labor unions, radical clergy, petit-bourgeois professionals who support the movement for Palestine, in sufficient force, the pig army would have hesitated before they stormed the barricades and swept the U.C. Irvine students into jail. The masses have the capacity to resist the police, indefinitely if need be; but only when they are united, organized and prepared.

We once again urge the student movement to organize democratically elected councils and to join up with radical labor. Again, we urge the students to study how to retreat if they cannot hold their ground; again, we urge the student-radicals to spend the summer sharpening their knives and preparing for August.

The fight goes on!

At 1:53 PM on the 27th, two NYPD officers responded to a mental distress call made by Win Rozario himself. Soon after police arrived, Rozario felt threatened and grabbed a pair of kitchen scissors. Officers responded by shooting the teenager with tasers. According to the police narrative, Rozario’s mother then knocked the taser’s prong from her son while trying to hold him still. The officers drew their guns and, while his terrified mother and brother screamed and begged them not to fire, shot Rozario to death. Police maintain that this extreme escalation was necessary, that wielding scissors against armed and body armored officers is reasonable grounds for the summary execution of a teenager. They maintain that they feared for their lives, even after deploying their tasers.

The body camera footage reveals this to be a hollow lie.  It shows what is now a sickeningly familiar scene — that police entered Rozario’s home and immediately escalated the situation to lethal violence. Rozario had called for help during a time of intense mental distress. The responders were armed thugs who only spoke to shout orders and only raised their hands to pull triggers. This didn’t happen due to a lack of officer training on mental health calls or by some mistake. The police were adhering to their prime directive, and carrying out their true social role: violent suppression of the colonized, and execution of those capitalism deems “mentally unfit” for production. 

The purpose of a system is made clear by what it does. What police do reveals what police exist to do. There’s no mistaking it: U.S. police exist to brutalize the colonized, the poor, the mentally or socially “abnormal,” placed behind bars or within padded rooms, to keep them too battered and traumatized to resist the function of capitalism. 

This is the reason the President of Columbia University unleashed this same department on her students. The same occupying force for which Biden recently reaffirmed his plans to raise the national funding by 37 billion dollars and increase the ranks by 100,000. He calls it “My Safer America Plan.” Here, we must congratulate the President on his honesty. It certainly will be safer for him and every member of his class, the settler-colonial capitalists. Because in order for them to sit so high, it must be on a mountain of beaten and incarcerated students and marginalized people, with swift execution awaiting all who show even the slightest resistance.