The United States of America isn’t a nation-state. It never has been; it never can be.

This may be provocative to some, but there is no denying it once the actual structure of the state is understood. This isn’t a historical point of curiosity, but the bedrock on which the United States has been built and continues to stand to this day.

If the United States isn’t a nation-state, then what is it?

Above all, the United States is a settler-colonial state, and it has remained a settler-colonial state for well over three hundred years, going back to when the territories that would go on to form its constituent parts were ruled by the British crown from across the ocean. European settlers of different nationalities crossed the Atlantic, leaving behind increasingly precarious class positions, to seize Indigenous land for themself by force. For this purpose, the Indigenous peoples were murdered, expelled, and forced into unequal treaties that weren’t worth the paper they were written on, until gradually the settler colony turned into an independent, continent-spanning empire that reigned supreme from coast to coast.

In the meantime, the settlement of the so-called ‘New World’ combined with the globalization of trade brought a new horror with it: the transatlantic slave trade, resulting in the abduction, purchase and enslavement of millions upon millions of Africans to provide forced labor on the other side of the world. In the prosperous lands of the so-called American South, ripe for exploitation after the native populations had been expelled or exterminated by the settlers, slavery created the foundation for the quasi-aristocratic planter class. This relation would form the backbone of the southern plantation economy, so vital for primitive accumulation, which paved the way toward fully developed capitalism in North America, by appropriating the labor of the enslaved African masses.

All of this finds its expression through the central ideology of this American settler empire, creating justification for the crimes and consolation through the crimes’ artificially constructed necessity in one: White supremacy.

So far, this should be a relatively agreeable understanding of American history, even if expressed in sharper terms than one would find in the average acknowledgement of historic (always historic, never current) brutality. All but the most reactionary Americans generally conclude that slavery and the genocide of the indigenous peoples aren’t something that should be celebrated long after the fact, and even they will usually admit that racism ‘played a role’ in it. The issue is that the hegemonic narrative starts to become confused and downright bizarre at the latest when assessing everything following the post civil war reconstruction period—a period that is criminally misunderstood by many, which contributes to the confusion—and is given over to historical narratives that are pure expressions of liberal ideology, which insists that equality in the United States is aspirational, and slowly (but surely!) ‘history’ is moving in that direction. Its proponents, often across party lines since internalized white supremacy is genuinely bipartisan, might ask:

Did we not abolish slavery?

(Ignoring the astounding continuity between the modern American prison system and the legal reconstruction of slavery after the Civil War.)

Did we not give the Indigenous peoples rights to their land?

(Ignoring the forced assimilation once the process of extermination was concluded, and the continued existence of the reservation system on tiny fractions of their land.)

Did we not give civil rights to everyone?

(Ignoring the complete banality of formal rights in the absence of equality in all political, economic, and cultural spaces.)

Are we not a nation of immigrants? Are we not all human? Are we not all Americans?

This ‘we’—the worst kind of we, the chauvinist’s national we—is imaginary in all capitalist states, but it is especially empty in the context of the US empire. There is no American national identity with any content beyond propagandized adherence to the symbolism, slogans and personality cults of the settler state, mixed with what is essentially commodity fetishism. The exception is the one identity that outright fascists try to revitalize out in the open, and liberals try to obscure with an incoherent ideology of moral progress: Whiteness—an ever-expanding and yet brutally limited category built around the exclusion of the actual nations within the empire’s borders.

Some of these nations carry names and are recognized by the US as a token gesture, and even that much was often bitterly fought for: Sioux, Cherokee, Shawnee, Navajo, and a hundred more Indigenous nations split into disparate tribal reservations by the process of genocide, displacement and subjugation.

Just as the settler state fragmented Indigenous nations, it forged new oppressed nations through slavery and annexation. Enslaved Africans, ripped from their home continent, transported across the ocean, and over generations deprived of much of their cultural heritage and even their language, formed a distinct national identity through the shared experience of enslavement, liberation and struggle against white supremacy. Similarly, although in less acute circumstances, the people subjugated by the conquest of the western territories once held by the Mexican state were subsumed into the empire, but not into whiteness, and without that, never raised to the status of settlers. When we speak of nations, we mean communities forged by shared history, territory, and struggle—not mere cultural identity. The Black nation in America, for example, like the Indigenous nations in their modern form, was created through violent subjugation and resistance against it. All of this, from the first settlements to the modern condition, exemplified by the underserved reservation and the ‘inner-city’ ghetto, only leaves one conclusion:

The United States isn’t a nation-state. It is a prison—a “prison of nations.”

And it isn’t the first of its kind.

When the Bolsheviks prepared for revolution against the semi-feudal Tsarist state—the original “prison of nations,” as Lenin referred to it—the task of national liberation was often at the forefront, and often controversial; from the question of how to deal with bourgeois nationalism to autonomy for the colonized tribal nations of Siberia. The experiences of the early Soviet Union show that dismantling empire requires combating national chauvinism with proletarian internationalism, which necessarily includes the right to national self-determination.

Consequently, the nations chained by the empire must be liberated from it—this goes for the less than United States now, as it did for the decrepit Tsarist Autocracy a hundred years ago. Let’s take a closer look at the similarities and differences, and what concrete lessons there are to learn for today’s liberation struggle.

The National Question — From Empire to Union State

Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality.

This, in three words, can be understood as the official ideology of the Tsarist state in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and was in many ways its answer to surging bourgeois national movements all over Europe, including within the borders of the empire. We will focus on the “Nationality,” which would be better described as national supremacy and primacy of the “Great Russians”— we simply call them Russians today, and the name already contains a hint of their supposed role in the eyes of Tsarism, as a guiding nationality for the “lesser” peoples.

Lenin describes the use of this supremacist ideology, as it was expressed by the proto-fascist Black Hundreds movement and endorsed by the Tsar:

The conditions of life of this vast population [the oppressed nationalities] are even harsher than those of the Russians. The policy of oppressing nationalities is one of dividing nations. At the same time it is a policy of systematic corruption of the people’s minds. The Black Hundreds’ plans are designed to foment antagonism among the different nations, to poison the minds of the ignorant and downtrodden masses […] This dirty and despicable work is undertaken, not only by the scum of the Black Hundreds, but also by reactionary professors, scholars, journalists and members of the Duma. Millions and thousands of millions of rubles are spent on poisoning the minds of the people. — Lenin, National Equality, 1914

So, how are these conditions resolved, and how do they relate to socialist revolution? The most obvious answer, the “common sense” of today’s liberals, as it was of liberals of the last century, is the establishment of legal equality. This was obvious to everyone except the most reactionary chauvinists. Even the 1906 constitution gave token concessions to the national minorities, and finally, the February Revolution of 1917 abolished the remnants of official national discrimination, especially severe against the Muslim and Jewish minorities of the empire. The success of the Bolsheviks was not needed for this hollow “equality under the law,” instead, they went far beyond. While Kerensky’s government of national defense quickly became a government of national oppression, attempting to keep the prison of nations intact by all means—a cause soon taken up by the White Army, much to their detriment—the Bolsheviks, and Lenin in particular often against fierce opposition, insisted on the uncompromising right to national self-determination and secession by oppressed nations. This position was kept up during the entirety of the civil war—the only debatable exception is the Red Army’s seizure of Baku to secure an oil supply for the nascent proletarian revolution, and even there, a government of Azerbaijani communists took the lead.

For the Bolsheviks, the national right to self-determination was the basis of proletarian internationalism:

In this situation, the proletariat of Russia is faced with a twofold or, rather, a two-sided task: to combat nationalism of every kind, above all, Great-Russian nationalism; to recognize, not only fully equal rights for all nations in general, but also equality of rights as regards polity, i.e., the right of nations to self-determination, to secession […] Complete equality of rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determination; the unity of the workers of all nations—such is the national programme that Marxism, the experience of the whole world, and the experience of Russia, teach the workers. — Lenin, The Right of Nations to Self-Determination, 1914

It is no coincidence that Lenin would later stress the negative influences of Great-Russian chauvinism on the early Soviet Union, and, with that, the centrality of combating it. It is no coincidence either, but rather a direct expression of this policy, that the Union Treaty of 1922, which formally established the Soviet Union, enshrined the right to secession for the constituent socialist republics, that the Soviet Union returned land seized from China and Mongolia by the Tsarist autocracy once the revolution took root there, and that where policies of russification or national suppression were implemented the offending members were expelled from the party without hesitation. This program was applied to all colonized nations, from autonomy for the tribal peoples of Siberia to demanding equal rights for those colonized by the imperialist states across the oceans.

The so-called American left should be ashamed that a party leading a revolutionary conflict in one of the most underdeveloped regions of Europe was miles ahead of them when it came to the question of national self-determination over a hundred years ago. In fact, they often reproduce the exact chauvinism so sharply attacked by Lenin.

Of course, not all of this survived into the era of consolidation under Stalin’s leadership, but that is a discussion for another time—the general principle and its importance should be clear:

The October Revolution did not lead to the foundation of a ‘Great Russian Soviet Republic’, and neither can an American revolution lead to the foundation of an ‘National American Soviet Republic’. The right to national self-determination and secession must be upheld under all circumstances. In fact, these rights become only clearer in the American case, because of the class structure inherent to the settler state. Let’s talk about that in more detail.

Facing the Settler — Finding an ‘American’ Proletariat

The argument that is about to follow is the exact type of argument people in the West who imagine themself as prospective revolutionaries don’t like to hear. That makes the argument all the more important, considering most prospective Western revolutionaries never engage in revolution. I’ll try to be gentle.

Unlike in Tsarist Russia, where the ‘Great Russian’ proletariat became one of the chief revolutionary forces for the reasons discussed in the last section, the vast majority of American settlers, even those among them who are supposedly proletarian, have always been complicit in the reproduction of empire. To be clear: This isn’t a moral judgement on individuals, but rather an attempt to approach the objective class relations within the boundaries of the US state, and understand where revolutionary potential can be found and under what circumstances. Without that, making revolution is an impossibility.

To explain the particular class position of American settlers, we should talk about J. Sakai’s often maligned but rarely seriously interrogated polemic ‘Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat’. He didn’t try to be gentle. His fundamental position is that the vast majority of white workers in the US have always constituted a privileged labor aristocracy, ultimately in alliance with the bourgeoisie when it comes to the subjugation of colonized nations. They are settlers, which, in turn, reflects on the self-conception of the American left if they falsely identify them as the primary revolutionary class.

Sakai states this position on the history and present of the American state and with that the American left, explicitly:

The imperialists even concede that their standard ‘U.S. history’ is a white history, and is supposedly incomplete unless the long-suppressed Third-World histories are added to it. Why? The key to the puzzle is that Theirstory (imperialist Euro-Amerikan mis-history) is not incomplete; it isn’t true at all. Theirstory also includes the standard class analysis of Amerika that is put forward into our hands by the Euro-Amerikan Left. Theirstory keeps saying, over and over: ‘You folks, just think about your own history; don’t bother analyzing white society, just accept what we tell you about it.’ — J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

What are we—those of us not interested in reproducing national chauvinism with our analysis of class relations in the US—to make of this? Well, for now, let’s take Sakai’s arguments seriously.

One of the most destructive tendencies of the American socialist movement has been to view the struggle of the oppressed nations against the empire as ‘merely’ an incidental part of the larger struggle against capitalism. This tendency will acknowledge that white supremacy is a central issue, that indigenous self-determination is vital, that reparations for slavery may be necessary, and so forth, while ultimately seeing all of it as an afterthought compared to the ‘real’ fight for socialism. These ‘lesser’ issues are relegated to the eventual destruction of the white supremacist bourgeois state, which will presumably unfold in the revolutionary process that is, for the foreseeable future, exclusively unfolding in their heads.

On what terms is this real struggle supposed to take place, then? The Bolsheviks understood the necessity of a combined struggle on all fronts, so what do these ‘Euro-Amerikan’, self-declared revolutionaries have to offer? They would never say it out loud because that exposes the blatant white supremacist logic beneath, but ultimately they conceive the revolutionary process as one advanced by the white majority, which should ‘accommodate’ or ‘integrate’ non-white proletarians into the larger struggle. And just in case it needs to be said: No, claiming you ‘don’t see color’ like a caricature of the worst kind of liberal, doesn’t change the ideology of this surface-level integrationist tendency, and its complete inability to conceive of a general liberation struggle against the American bourgeois state by those who are actually subjugated by it.

In reality, and this is absolutely vital to understand, the revolutionary process is one and the same as the struggle for self-determination by the proletarian masses of the oppressed nations. They have never been truly integrated by the settler state, and face it as the most severely exploited people within the empire’s borders.

Ignoring this inevitably reproduces white supremacy, and ultimately is an expression of the settlers’ concrete class interest of maintaining their comparatively privileged position as part of the global imperialist hegemon’s labor aristocracy, petit bourgeois landowners, and at the very top, as the imperial bourgeoisie. This is rarely understood in those terms, but is crystal clear when viewed through the historical failures and capitulations of the American union movement and various communist organizations—as Sakai does—which were dominated by a settler majority.

At best—and it really isn’t good at all—it results in treating the conflicts of the oppressed nations, and with that, the vast majority of the most acutely exploited proletarians, as secondary, as it has been done over and over again by class-collaborationist unions in the United States. Instead, the goal is to win concessions from the spoils of empire.

Sakai makes special note of this in his characterization of early trade-unionism:

Underneath the surface appearance of militant popular reform, of workers taking on the wealthy, these movements were only attempts to more equally distribute the loot and privileges of Empire among its citizens. That’s why the oppressed colonial subjects of the Empire had no place in these movements. —J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat, 1983

At worst, we can see the results in parties like the CPUSA, which gradually turned itself into a sad, parasitic entity attached to the Democratic Party—and with that to the settler state—by abandoning even the semblance of revolutionary action. Why? Because once the Civil Rights Act established formal legal equality, they had exhausted their wedge issue, which initially led them ‘across racial lines’, and reverted to the lowest common denominator for all practically exhausted and theoretically confused communist parties: reformism thinly veiled by red flags. To this day, the CPUSA blatantly denies that anyone except the American bourgeoisie can be understood as settlers, while appropriating the language of national liberation—they, too, have made the ‘prison of nations’ comparison, abusing Lenin’s work only to retreat to the equivalent of a ‘Great Russian’ chauvinist’s position on the matter.

A crass difference can be seen between organizations taking on the role of de facto collaborators with the empire, and those that actually presented a threat to it by focusing on a proletarian liberation struggle, and connecting it to the larger fight against world imperialism. There is a reason why the Black Panther Party became the most advanced communist organization the US has ever seen before it was suppressed, why militants of the Black Liberation Army were killed and hunted down without mercy, why the Indigenous-led Red Power movement was torn apart with armed force and the violence of courts, and why even the generally more ‘moderate’ Land Back Movement and Chicano Movement are under continued surveillance and pressure by American state institutions. They present a real threat by uniting the proletarian masses of oppressed nations within the Empire’s borders in the struggle against the bars of their collective prison.

These movements prove liberation must begin where the empire’s violence is most acute, not where settlers feel most comfortable.

The Terms of the Struggle — Shattering the Prison

Ultimately, the American left has two choices: continue as the empire’s useful idiots, or finally recognize that liberation won’t come from the settlers, but from those they’ve imprisoned in the boundaries of their state. Of course, it is no coincidence that the largest sections of the so-called left have not recognized this, since it is in their class interest as labor aristocrats to close their eyes, and the others are pulled along by their sway in organizations. Class suicide—actively working against one’s own class interests, in more than words—is rarely an appealing notion, and neither is the prospect of a grueling revolutionary struggle that will, for some time at least, shatter the established value chains, reduce living standards and cause panic among those used to living off the superprofits extracted from the labor of the third world and the land of subjugated nations.

This can be no excuse. Facing reality is always preferable to idealist fantasies and lies, produced to enable a false radicalism that is ultimately destructive. Lenin was quite clear on that matter, and the role of such delusions in revolutionary situations:

After their first serious defeat, the overthrown exploiters—who had not expected their overthrow, never believed it possible, never conceded the thought of it—throw themselves with energy grown tenfold, with furious passion and hatred grown a hundredfold, into the battle for the recovery of the ‘paradise’ of which they were deprived […] In the train of the capitalist exploiters follow the wide sections of the petty bourgeoisie, with regard to whom decades of historical experience of all countries testify that they vacillate and hesitate, one day marching behind the proletariat and the next day taking fright at the difficulties of the revolution; that they become panic-stricken at the first defeat or semidefeat of the workers, grow nervous, run about aimlessly, snivel, and rush from one camp into the other. — Lenin, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, 1918

All of this does not mean there is no role for white Americans in this struggle—quite the opposite, in fact, because they have the veil of protection granted by white supremacy others are not afforded—but without understanding their own position, they are bound to reproduce completely dysfunctional and often outright reactionary tactics. And while whiteness is generalized, there are, of course, differences in the concrete class positions of white workers in the United States, ranging from fully integrated labor aristocrats in the empire’s metropoles to the historically superexploited workers of the Appalachians—the fact that this needs to be addressed is already a concession to white fragility, but I want to anticipate the inevitable outrage in the comments somehow.

At the same time, the objective existence of oppressed nations must be seen as an opportunity. The most elemental task of any revolutionary organization is to find a revolutionary class to make revolution with, not as an appendage, not as an imposition, but as one of them, leading the struggle in the clearest possible terms. This is the task of the vanguard party—not to ‘include’ or ‘consider’ the proletarian masses, but to take a leading position from within the proletarian masses.

Consequently, in the United States, the task of this revolutionary organization is not to convince oppressed nations or settlers that they must work together, on a vague and entirely ahistorical and anti-materialist basis akin to liberal denial of the most severe expressions of white supremacy, but rather that their collective liberation is one and the same task. This is what the most advanced socialist organizations like the Black Panther Party advocated for, despite distortions to the contrary that attempt to deny the colonial nature of the state:

The dissolution of the American settler empire, the destruction of the bourgeois state, the establishment of workers’ power, and the uncompromising right to self-determination, autonomy and secession for the nations imprisoned in the boundaries of the empire.

The terms of this struggle are clear—the prison of nations must be shattered.

By 1965, the old slave power had managed to beat back Reconstruction and establish itself as a constellation of terror-states in the U.S. South. While the capitalist ruling class in the North was content to hide or mystify the national oppression the U.S. system relied on, for the defeated Southern planter class and their petty-bourgeois hangers-on, this sublimation wasn’t enough. They were either ideologically incapable or materially incapable of joining the northern capitalists in adopting grand-sounding language about equality while maintaining the national oppression of New Afrikans and Indigenous Peoples; their deep-seated ideological commitments required them to constantly express their white supremacy in overt and terroristic ways. Sitting atop a semi-colony of brutally oppressed people, the ruling class in the U.S. South had, as the slaver Jefferson said, “the wolf by the ear.” In order to feel safe in that great prison, the Southern ruling class had to maintain absolute, fascistic, political supremacy over the Black population.

Indeed, the southern whites had been more or less permitted to do just that in the long period between the overthrow of radical Republican Reconstruction in 1877 (the period known to the Southern whites as “Redemption,” that is, redemption of the white supremacist power and the defeat of New Afrikan self-governance) and the alliance that emerged between Black World War II veterans returning to the South and the growing Black petty bourgeoisie. This period lasted from roughly 1877 until 1950.

In 1941, the racist policies of the FDR administration were challenged by A. Philip Randolph and his Black March on Washington; in 1954, the Supreme Court ended the legal basis for segregation in public schools when it decided Brown v. Board. Northern capitalists were insistent on bringing the southern slaveocracy into the modern day, not for moral reasons, but for economic ones. In 1957, the federal government passed the Civil Rights Act, the first signed into law since 1875. These decrees from on high were motivated by the need to free up labor in the Black Belt from the regressive agrarian prisons that the colonial relations still kept them in; but none of these decrees changed the balance of power in the South. Black New Afrikans in the semi-colonial states were held in a vice of property and labor theft, rape, arson, lynchings, and undisguised murder. In the U.S. South, the state ruled by terror. Despite the promise of the amended U.S. constitution, Black people who registered to vote took their lives in their hands.

At the end of the 1950s, the militant streams of Black resistance gained more and more currency and began to unite. These were often spearheaded by Black veterans or radical Black students, many of whom were explicitly Communists — Marxist-Leninists or otherwise. This period saw the rise of Malcolm X, the Black Panther Party, and of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The passage of the Voting Rights Act was the result of a tightening labor market in the U.S. at the same time that militancy was increasing and the consciousness was widening for the support of a Black national movement.¹ Economic pressure joined with the Black drive for liberation. There was a real fear in the halls of power that the U.S. state could face a Black domestic insurrection and an increasing desire to see the fragments of the Southern planter class and their dependents defeated entirely, to consummate the triumph of free labor, as opposed to low-productivity sharecropping and semi-slave labor that still reigned in the South. Even the former planters themselves had begun to realize that they couldn’t continue to manage their sections of the country by relying purely on terror. They realized they needed to find a way to accommodate the form and appearance of equality while maintaining the white supremacist content of the slaveocracy.²

The VRA established a relation between the planters and the federal government that was similar to that of Reconstruction. Its general provisions under section 2 of the law prohibit state and local governments from enacting any law or rule that denies or abridges the right of any citizen to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language group. Other general provisions outlaw literacy tests and poll taxes. The special provisions granted the federal U.S. Attorney General and the District Court for DC power over Southern elections, redistricting plans, and so forth, that essentially put the Southern states into a kind of federal receivership for the purposes of voting.

The War on the Voting Rights Act

Although the VRA was a necessary concession to save the capitalist state by creating a veneer of participatory democracy in the US South, it wasn’t fully implemented all at once. This gave the ruling class time to find ways to empty the vote of its power. There remained, however, a significant faction within the broader US capitalist class itself for whom the VRA remained ideologically intolerable. Existence of international pressure from the Soviet Union and the national liberation and Pan-African movements forced the US to maintain this veneer. With the fall of the USSR and the declining world-position of the US ruling class, this clique of ideologically devoted racists has gained more and more adherents from their bourgeois colleagues. 

The Federalist Society is one of the bastions of the movement to reverse the changes in the US legal landscape and return to the early 20th century when capital openly ruled the courts.³ In 2013, the US Supreme Court, that bastion of ruling-class power,⁴ nullified the powerful special provisions of the VRA in Shelby Counter v. Holder. In the 2021 decision Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, the Supreme Court weakened the general provisions of section 2 of the VRA. Now, the court is poised to rule on the constitutionality of section 2 as a whole. The legal war waged by the growing right-fascist bloc for half a century is nearing its conclusion. We must ask: does it matter if section 2 is struck down? If it does, why and how? Is there any way we can agitate around this issue? Does it mean we Marxists must join hands with Democrats and other fragments of the ruling class?

To briefly answer each in turn: firstly, yes; secondly, it is a sign of how advanced the imperialist decay is; thirdly, yes again; and, finally, absolutely not!

What Will Be the Outcome?

Despite the fact that the VRA in and of itself cannot guarantee anything, and despite the fact that its passage was an accommodation that was fashioned as part of an overall effort to pacify Black militancy and disarm the Black national revolutionary consciousness of the 1950s and 60s, it is actually of great importance to us whether or not the fascist court strikes it down. Oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais have already signaled that the court does intend to roll back this final element of the VRA. This is part and parcel of the right-fascist drive to restore capitalists to open and undisguised power in all aspects of political and legal life. It dovetails with the same right-fascist attack on the administrative state presently being carried out under the guise of the shutdown, a political “conflict” in which the left-fascist Democrats are playing the role of useful idiot.⁵ Given the disposition of political forces and the economic situation (increasing inflation and unemployment) it is likely that the VRA’s section 2 will be struck down.

The fate of the VRA is a bellwether for the degree of decay of the old US imperialist system that prevailed from 1991 until today as well as the balance of power between the left- (Democratic/Progressive) and right- (GOP and MAGA) fascist cliques within the ruling class. If the VRA is struck down, Democratic Party operatives will ceaselessly and breathlessly fund raise and proclaim their old doctrines about emergency organization in the face of “Trumpist” fascism and the need to permit people from both sides of the color line to participate in and enjoy the capitalist system. In private, of course, they will signal more cynically that it’s just good strategy to give the nationally oppressed the illusion of democracy. After all, they will say to their donors in closed-door dinners, it’s not as if the masses of Black people — or for that matter, any working-class voters — actually have any way to influence the important policies of the US state.

If the VRA is struck down, it signals the right-fascists are extremely advanced on their path toward carrying out the genocide of the nationally oppressed that they have been preparing for Black and Indigenous people in the US.⁶ Striking down the VRA would remove entire layers and battlefields of intra-bourgeois political struggle — layers that are “wasteful” in the eyes of the ruling class, just like the “waste” of the administrative state that they are dismantling — but would also strip away the illusion that the US state can be altered by the oppressed voting in any meaningful way.

What Is Our Task?

If the VRA is defeated, the Democrats will attempt to lead the movement that organically emerges in reaction. Many will rightly be afraid of what the loss of the final provisions of the VRA mean for the nationally oppressed and other groups openly targeted by the right-fascist government. We cannot allow this to happen. Democrats will naturally frame the question as one of government participation. They will start new voter registration drives, demand mobilization to defeat the right-fascists at the ballot box, and exercise a full-court press for the election of Democrats to the Congress and in local government.

We must instead first agitate against the new terror-government directly, then propagandize to expand the consciousness of the masses to connect the striking down of the VRA with the entire rotten system. It will be clear to many that there are no self-correcting measures available. With the open and legal disenfranchisement of Black voters in the South and other right-fascist strongholds, the layer of mystification that promised government responsiveness to the people will be gone.

Now is the time to prepare for the VRA to be removed. Now is the time to lay plans. If it is not, and the right-fascists instead uphold the remaining section to buy more time before carrying out a direct assault on the ballot box, then our preparations won’t have been in vain; we can still carry out agitation and propaganda on the basis that the VRA could have been struck down, and likely will be struck down in the near future. We must broaden the call to include other landmark rulings and laws that were offered during the heyday of empire — Griswold v. Connecticut, Lawrence v. Texas, Loving v. Virginia, Brown v. Board, and Obergefell v. Hodges — and warn that they too stand to be struck down by the right-fascists.

The moment is ours; the Democrats must not be allowed to stand at its head.

Footnotes

1. The tightening labor market put the pressure on to mobilize and “free” tied up labor; business interests wanted to draw from the pool of sharecroppers in the Black Belt.
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2. “By the 1950s the language of white supremacy was gradually softening in some quarters, becoming less shrill in an attempt to gain respectability for racism. Phrases like ‘states’ rights’ and concepts such as the need to protect ‘constitutional liberties’ from communist subversion and federal intervention were becoming stand-ins for raw racial rhetoric.” Cobb, Charles E. Jr. This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible. Duke University Press, 2015.
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3. See The Society Behind the Supreme Court’s Fascist Blitzkrieg in the Clarion.
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4. See Capital’s Supreme Defender in the Clarion.
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5. See This Land Ain’t Your Land: The US Government Shutdown in the Clarion.
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6. See DC Occupation: Coming to Your City Next in the Clarion.
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However, white supremacists face an immediate contradiction due to the essential role of undocumented labor in the U.S. Some capitalists have already begun to beg the president to scale down the raids, complaining that ICE is taking all their best workers and hurting their profit margins. Every fascist accusation against the Global South is an admission², whether directed at Black people in South Afrika for “white genocide” or undocumented people in the imperial core for bringing violence to a society that seeks to exploit and assault them. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many are describing these acts as a “protest” of the horrific conditions at Virginia’s Red Onion State Prison. That is a mistake. It was a protest when Demetrius Wallace, Kevin “Rashid” Johnson, and 12 other imprisoned people organized a food strike that lasted nearly two weeks for Wallace and 71 days for Rashid. In retaliation, the prison punished Wallace by revoking his right to see friends and had guards threaten, stalk, and harass said friends. Wallace himself was already suffering additional punishment for attempting to use the “proper” channels to defend himself — for daring to bring a lawsuit against guards who had ruthlessly beaten, sprayed, and stomped on him while he was restrained. 

Such are the conditions at the Red Onion prison. Suffering intolerable abuse, beaten away from legal means, and exiled for peaceful protest, men are now setting themselves on fire. These are no longer acts of protest, or even individual defiance. These are calculated acts of desperation. Conditions in the prison are so bad its victims would rather self-immolate and roll the dice that they could be transferred elsewhere than continue their horrific routine. And what happens to those men that are transferred? They are sent right back. Wallace, the self-immolater of late summer, said that when he returned to Red Onion after two weeks in a hospital, his harassment continued, he was thrown in solitary, and his email and phone privileges were still revoked — an ongoing retaliation for his earlier lawsuit. These are just the men we know of. Wallace says five others were at the hospital with him in Richmond, Virginia, where he was being treated for his burns. If this is just the overlap of when he arrived, it’s safe to assume there are many more cases we aren’t allowed to know about. 

There is a widespread myth, one even those sympathetic to the legacy of the Black Panther Party (BPP) fall prey to: that somehow life in prisons has gotten better since the mass struggles to end racial apartheid in the United States. The myth that things have improved for imprisoned people within the vast penal colonies of the United States, in spite of everything we know about the continued abuses of the police state on our streets and in our homes, that their ruthless behavior will have gotten even an iota better behind closed doors and with complete impunity. 

Rashid Johnson describes an atmosphere of extreme paranoia and oppression, where every day prison guards try to pressure and barter Johnson’s fellow abductees into assassinating him. We might as well be describing the 1960’s conditions of the BPP theorist George Jackson, who wrote of having to constantly be prepared to divert a stabbing and wrestle his way out of assassination. Conditions at Red Onion, and, let’s face it, supermax prisons in general, mirror what Huey Newton described with his greatly radicalizing exposure to the U.S. prison colony — lying in a tiny cell with a hole in the middle, slowly filled with his own excrement. Dogs, classically used by fascist police during the Civil Rights era to assault and intimidate protestors, are used in Red Onion. Rashid Johnson describes systematic use of attack dogs to terrorize and brutalize prison populations. 

The imagery of the brutality of the war on U.S. apartheid is alive still, cordoned off behind cement and barbed wire, beyond photography and video. It would be wrong to say, “all that is old is new again,” since for the oppressed and imprisoned, such horrors never ceased. Everyday, hundreds of atrocities that might have sparked the fires of another George Floyd uprising occur, beyond where we can see or hear them, and are then denied by fascists like the head of Virginia’s Department of Corrections, who say that those lighting themselves aflame are ‘manipulative’ and ‘misbehaving’. Here stands naked the depravity of colonial capitalism. To accurately assess the current reality of our so-called republic, we need only turn toward the prisons, and not flinch at what we see, hear, or smell. First you see smoke, then fire. Hundreds of thousands of people are choking on the smoke. 

Since its conception in the first English colonies, the U.S. colonialist project has been a genocidal assault on the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Through the combined force of arms, biological agents, ecological devastation, starvation, kidnapping Indigenous children, and land theft — all propped up by the ideological force of a colonialist legal system — United States has stolen 99% of the land historically held by the Indigenous nations. Land is the basis of all economic organization as the most essential and basic building block of production; it is, as Marx said, “the universal subject of human labor,” and the original source of all wealth. By stealing land,the U.S. Empire has liquidated the economic basis of pre-colonial Indigenous ways of life and forms of social organization. The treaty territories were reduced to little more than government grants, administered  under the thumb of the Bureau for Indian Affairs. Existing property relations were forcibly dissolved, and replaced with a system of private property and enclosure, transplanted from England; conquered peoples were removed from their lands and forcibly converted into classes of smallholders, while the ruling families of a few “civilized tribes” joined the ranks of the slaveholding planters in the U.S. South. “Adoption” — the kidnapping of Indigenous children by white settlers, against the wishes of the child’s parents, community, and nation — has proved an effective weapon in genocides around the world, and has long been a staple of the U.S. colonialist regime. The U.S. Empire has never lost its originally genocidal character, and the legal theft of Indigenous children by settlers carried on until 1978, when Indigenous nations gained legal protections against kidnapping with the passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA).

The Act, as the Supreme Court recognizes, “aims to keep Indian children connected to Indian families.” Under the ICWA, an “Indian child” is a child who is a “member of an Indian tribe” or who is “eligible for membership in an Indian tribe and is the biological child of a member of an Indian tribe.” If this child lives on a reservation, the ICWA grants the tribal courts exclusive jurisdiction over custody proceedings. If a state court adjudicates custody, the ICWA controls and overrides local state law. The parent or custodian and the tribe have the right to intervene in any custody proceedings, to request extra time to prepare for those proceedings, to examine all reports and documents, and for court-appointed counsel.

The ICWA gives the tribe the right “to intervene at any point” and to challenge the state court’s decree. The ICWA also codifies custody placement preferences for Indigenous children: “(1) a member of the child’s extended family; (2) other members of the Indian child’s tribe; or (3) other Indian families.” State courts are required to follow these preferences. 

The case of Haaland v. Brackeen began when three white families, joined and sponsored by the fascist-captured State of Texas, challenged the ICWA, alleging that it infringes on their constitutional rights. Their grounds were as follows: First, that Congress never had the authority to pass the ICWA in the first place, rendering the law invalid. Second, that the ICWA violates anti-commandeering principles in the Tenth Amendment (essentially, that the law transforms state governments into servants of the Congress, conscripting those governments to spend their own money to enforce federal decrees). Third, that a provision in the Act allowing individual tribes to alter how it applies to them violates the non-delegation doctrine, the legal rule that Congress cannot pass off its law-making power to other groups, agencies, or organizations. Most importantly, fourth, that the ICWA uses “racial classifications that unlawfully hinder non-Indian families from fostering or adopting Indian children.” The plaintiffs unashamedly argued that the Indian Child Welfare Act is racist, because it protects Indigenous children from white kidnappers.

The challenge is the court case Haaland v. Brackeen. Deb Haaland, Secretary of the Interior, brought the appeal to the Supreme Court after the 10th Circuit decided in favor of Chad Brackeen and the other parties who seek to steal Indigenous children from their communities and nations. The 10th Circuit court held that the ICWA violated the Equal Protection clause — that, in essence, white would-be kidnappers had suffered racial discrimination.

On June 15, 2023, the Supreme Court upheld the ICWA by a vote of 7-2. Chief justice Alito and justice Thomas, infamous for standing out as extreme-right fascists even among a far-right Supreme Court, stacked with recent Trump appointees, are the two dissenters. Although the majority upheld the ICWA, they did so on the narrowest possible grounds while laying out the legal justification for the law to be challenged in the future. They clearly and unequivocally restate the principle, often expounded by the U.S. imperial government, that Indian sovereignty has ended.

How does the court justify the ICWA? The far-right justice Barrett, a Trump appointee, wrote the majority’s decision. She states that “Congress’ power in this field is muscular, superseding both tribal and state authority,” and that “[V]irtually all authority over Indian commerce and Indian tribes lies with the Federal Government.” Then, when discussing the treaty clause of the U.S. constitution, she off-handedly remarks that “[u]ntil the late 19th century, relations between the Federal Government and the Indian tribes were governed largely by treaties.” Now, however, she argues that Congress can legislate Indian affairs based on what she euphemistically calls its “trust relationship” with the Indigenous nations — the paternalistic, white saviorist, nonsensical position that, by subjugating this continent’s Indigenous people through centuries of brutality that have scarcely been paralleled in history, the “Federal Government has charged itself with moral obligations of the highest responsibility and trust toward Indian tribes.”

Barrett thus handily does away with the major arguments of Brackeen and his fellow litigants, but only with a sweeping restatement of Congressional authority. Yes, says Barret, Congress does have this power, because Congress possesses plenary and ultimate authority to govern Indian affairs. The civil rights of Indigenous families, children, communities, and nations are “safe” from encroachment by the states and by white private citizens — but only because the Indigenous nations are under the watchful eye of their shepherd, the U.S. Federal Government. In the instance of the ICWA, Congress was kind and benevolent; should Congress determine it wishes to be less generous — that it wishes, for example, to extinguish all remaining reservations and duties to the Indian nations — it could just as easily do that.

Most importantly, the seven justices held that the Supreme Court actually can’t decide on the Equal Protection claim brought by Brackeen. This is the bomb buried in Haaland. The left-fascist Democrats and their allies long ago established that the equal protection clause of the U.S. constitution applies to the oppressors as well as to the oppressed, in essence, enshrining the idea of “reverse racism,” or “misandry.” Any government agency that “discriminates” against white men can be found in violation of the equal protection clause. Smirking lawyers remind us that the constitution protects us all equally, not all equitably. The equal protection issue raised (but not reached) in Haaland is the claim that the ICWA disfavors white parents. This issue wasn’t decided because the case was procedurally improper for deciding it. The court could have run roughshod over the posture, but it would have been too bold a move, too openly flaunted the political nature of the court, which of course postures itself as “above” politics while engaging in fundamentally nothing else.

In an obscure bit of lawcraft, Barrett states, “Article III requires the plaintiff to show that she has suffered an injury in fact that is ‘fairly traceable to the defendant’s allegedly unlawful conduct and likely to be redressed by the requested relief.’ Neither the individual petitioners nor Texas can pass this test.” The Court declined to make a ruling simply because Brackeen and his fellow petitioners brought their case in the wrong court — a legal technicality. Barrett doesn’t reach the question of whether they were right at all. Why? Because the Supreme Court cannot order the state courts and agencies, which were not brought as parties to the suit, to do anything about the enforcement of the ICWA. In a footnote, Barret archly remarks that “[o]f course, the individual petitioners can challenge ICWA’s constitutionality in state court.” She is signaling that the state courts of Texas can and should bounce this issue back up to the Supreme Court for a proper adjudication — this time, in Brackeen’s favor.

Nor can we afford to lose sight of the fact that the liberal justices didn’t write any of their own concurrences to articulate alternate grounds for the decision. Although they compose an absolute minority of the court, concurrences nevertheless allow judges who sit on the weaker side of the court to stake out positions they can defend, both to the other justices who might be persuaded to adopt their arguments, and, perhaps more importantly, to the public (especially in this instance when the court’s legitimacy has been repeatedly brought into question by the highly public war between the two wings of the ruling class). But the liberals on the court — Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson — didn’t write anything. They joined in the decision written by Barrett, endorsing the majority’s view that the Indian nations are the child-like wards of the Federal Government and that, should the U.S. Congress so decide, treaty rights and tribal sovereignty can be dissolved at any time.

Surprisingly, the far-right reactionary justice Gorsuch wrote a concurring opinion, in which he details the historical injustices dealt by the U.S. Empire to the Indigenous nations of North America. He writes, “[I]n those early decades, [the 1850s–1860s] schooling [to assimilate Indigenous children] was generally not compulsory” but that “[t]he federal government had darker designs.”

By the late 1870s, its goals turned toward destroying tribal identity and assimilating Indians into broader society. Achieving these goals, officials reasoned, required the “complete isolation of the Indian child from his savage antecedents.” And because “the warm reciprocal affection existing between parents and children” was “among the strongest characteristics of the Indian nature,” officials set out to eliminate it by dissolving Indian families. …

Certain States saw in this shift an opportunity. They could “save… money” by “promoting the adoption of Indian children by private families.”

This restarted a now-familiar nightmare for Indian families. The same assimilationist rhetoric previously invoked by the federal government persisted…. “If you want to solve the Indian problem, you can do it in one generation,” one official put it.

Despite this acknowledgement, Gorsuch, too, argues that the federal government has ended its treaty-making period with the Indian nations. However, in contrast to Barrett, he puts it this way:  the sovereignty of the Indian nations “creates a hydraulic relationship between federal and tribal authority. The more the former expands, the more the latter shrinks” but “the only restriction on the power of the Tribes in respect to their internal affairs arises when their actions conflict with the Constitution or the laws of the United States.” Sotomayor and Jackson joined in this portion of Gorsuch’s concurrence, creating a three-justice minority who still nominally recognize tribal sovereignty — at least, for now. None of the justices, however, would bat an eye should Congress unilaterally abolish this legal fiction.

This is in sharp contrast to the majority and to both the dissent written by Thomas and that by chief justice Alito. Thomas’ dissent is filled with vile, white supremacist logic, laying bare the actual underpinnings of the legal regime: “For today’s purposes, I will assume that some tribes still enjoy the same sort of pre-existing sovereignty and autonomy as tribes at the Founding,” he muses, indicating of course that no contemporary Indigenous nation has retained real sovereignty, that all are under the federal government’s thumb, and that “tribal sovereignty” is a legal fiction. More than that, Thomas argues the familiar refrain of the genocidaire that the genocide is already mostly complete; that the remaining Indigenous tribes are merely “remnants of tribes that [have] been absorbed” by the individual states and assimilated into the colonizing population; that there are no “real Indians” left to defend their rights and sovereignty and to fight for their liberation. Thomas ends his dissent with a damning statement, one that outlines the limits of the Haaland decision: “[T]he majority holds only that Texas has failed to demonstrate that ICWA is unconstitutional.” In other words, what remains of tribal sovereignty in the U.S. Empire is still in the fascist Supreme Court’s crosshairs — and everyone knows it.

It is the extremely brief concurrence of the reactionary Kavanaugh that encapsulates the fundamentals of the majority’s decision, displaying, as Thomas does, the danger and the purpose: “I write separately to emphasize that the Court today does not address or decide the equal protection issue.” They are begging for a chance to hear the case again, but properly plead, and properly situated. The fascists intend to strike down what remains of the sovereignty of the Indian nations — the right-wing fascists openly, and the left-wing fascists by quiet assent. The fascists want every opportunity to bring to completion the anti-Indigenous decisions issued by their less brazenly reactionary predecessors, before the Supreme Court’s recent extreme-right capture during the Trump presidency.

It is, perhaps, in recognition that the great masses of the U.S. working class no longer sees the Supreme Court as some defender of the downtrodden, that there is now, in the political and public discourse, a powerful undercurrent that correctly identifies the court as an illegitimate, anti-democratic institution that serves to protect the ruling class. The court expresses capitalist class-power, nothing more. For true, people’s democracy to rule, the reactionary power of the court must be destroyed. For the colonially oppressed peoples to achieve liberation, on the basis of real sovereignty, the Supreme Court, and the whole existing U.S. Constitutional order, must be abolished.

Federal prosecutors allege that Lammond aided Tarrio and his associates during the Capitol Hill putsch of January 6, 2021.

On that day, an armed mob of MAGA fascists, numbering 2,000 and primarily led by Tarrio’s contingent of 200 Proud Boys members, marched on the U.S. Capitol Building as part of a half-hearted putsch. Their ostensible intent was to reinstall Donald Trump, who lost the 2020 presidential election by a considerable margin, as President of the United States; in fact, this was an experiment in fascist mobilization — a training or staging exercise, test-run, or proof of concept, if you will. Trump had spent the weeks following election day in November 2020 mobilizing his most militant supporters with false claims of a “stolen” election. (The majority-Democrat House of Representatives would later impeach Trump for a second time in retaliation.) The rioters actually breached the Capitol’s inner chambers and drove elected officials and staffers into hiding. Still, the attackers failed to capitalize on their victory — apparently owing, in part, to legitimate surprise that they were so rapidly successful.

One rioter was shot and killed during the assault. In the months that followed, four police officers committed suicide. Many cops were distraught at the “family” infighting: They had been forced to confront their mostly white, mostly middle-class fascist paramilitary brethren with a modicum of the repressive violence they normally reserve for terrorizing Black and other colonized people and the desperately poor. 

Since January 6, 2021, more than 1,000 individuals have faced criminal charges, including “sedition,” relating to their participation in the putsch.

Federal prosecutors unsealed the charges against Lammond on Friday, May 19. They allege that Lammond aided Tarrio and his associates during the Capitol Hill putsch, specifically by supplying Tarrio with classified information via text messages. If convicted, Lammond, a “veteran” officer with over 20 years on the force, and a “decorated” “intelligence expert” (who was evidently not intelligent enough to avoid incriminating himself), faces a maximum of 30 years in prison.

One might ask, why would a “decorated” police officer such as Lt. Shane Lammond aid a terrorist like Enrique Tarrio? As a police officer, wasn’t it his duty to prevent terrorism and to catch terrorists?

Actually, the police exist for one reason, and one reason only: To maintain the existing social order by means of violent repression.

What is the existing order in the U.S.?

The United States of America was founded as — and remains, to this day, regardless of how our rulers brand it — a settler-colonial empire. This country was built upon the enslavement of millions of Black Africans and upon genocidal campaigns of land-conquest against this continent’s Indigenous peoples. Dispossession of the colonized remains the economic foundation of the U.S. Empire. In order to keep the oppressed peoples from rising up and overthrowing the colonialist order, the U.S. Empire must arm itself with a powerful repressive force — in fact, the most powerful military and police forces in world history. It is impossible to understand the ubiquity of police terror and brutality against Black and other colonized peoples today if one fails to recognize that the U.S. Empire’s police forces have their origins in settler militias, organized and armed by colonial governors, planters, and land-greedy settlers in order to massacre and drive out Indigenous communities, recapture escaped slaves, and terrorize ethnic and religious minorities.

The U.S. Empire is also ruled by a dictatorship of the capitalists. Originally, when the settler colonies that would later form the U.S. declared independence from Britain, they were ruled by three powerful classes: the big merchants, who owned massive fleets, and whose profits largely derived from the trans-Atlantic slave trade; the bankers, who financed the former; and the slaveholding planters, who grew rich by exploiting the enslaved labor of Black Africans upon their massive plantation estates. Capitalism, in its modern, industrial mode, developed in this country during the 19th Century, first in the “free” North; gradually, as the “frontier” West was colonized, it was transformed into a site of open battle between the capitalist and slave-plantation systems, which led directly to the U.S. Civil War; after the Union’s victory over the slaveholder-dictatorship Confederacy and the legal abolition of slavery, capitalism also began to develop in the South. The big merchants, bankers, and planters converted themselves into industrialists — the “barons” and “captains” of American steel, coal, rail, manufacturing, agriculture, and other industries — and financiers. As capitalism developed, so did monopolies, and the new monopolists retooled the country’s existing state machinery, including its police forces, to serve their new dictatorship.

Those police were reorganized and given an additional purpose: to act as the guardians of capitalist private property in the U.S. Empire’s developing industrial cities, and to crush any and all organized proletarian resistance, even as labor agitation and open revolt raged throughout the 19th century. But as the economic structure of the U.S. Empire changed, its colonial substructure remained intact, and the institution of U.S. policing never forgot or forsook its colonialist origins in slave-catching, plantation enforcement, “frontier” massacres, and white terror.

In sum, it is no accident that police in the U.S. Empire have deep links with civilian-fascist paramilitaries. This is not an unintended “flaw” in the way this country’s police forces are organized; it is a consciously reproduced “feature” of any colonialist police force. Police function, by design, as the crucible of U.S. fascism. As the saying goes, “Cops and Klan go hand-in-hand.”

But if that’s the case, if civilian-fascist paramilitaries like the Proud Boys ultimately serve to uphold the U.S. Empire’s settler-colonial, white supremacist, capitalist order, then why has the Federal Government cracked down in recent years on the fascists involved in the January 6, 2021 putsch?

The war of “lawfare” raging in this country’s courts represents a factional struggle within the U.S. Empire’s ruling class of monopoly capitalists.

One of these factions is represented mainly by the “moderate” mainstream wing of the Democratic Party, currently headed by President Joe Biden, as well as by the vanishingly small and inconsequential “moderate” wing of the Republican Party. This faction’s main goal is stability: It wants to stabilize the U.S. Empire’s fascist regime at its present level of ascendency and brutality, because it believes (rightly so) that any expansion of fascism may provoke civil unrest. This faction remembers the Summer 2020 Rebellion that shook the country after the police murder of George Floyd, and it desperately wants to stave off any further mass uprisings for as long as it can. We refer to this faction as the left-wing of U.S. fascism.

The other faction is represented mainly by the recently ascendant extreme-right wing of the Republican Party, which has coalesced since 2016, and especially since 2020, around its political figurehead, Donald Trump. This faction’s main goal is expansion: It wants to expand the U.S. Empire’s fascist regime at all costs. It wishes to stave off the march of history, of progress, by intensifying the U.S. regime’s state terror and brutality against the poor and colonized masses, against women and LGBT people, and against other oppressed sections of the population. It stands for the openly terroristic dictatorship of the most depraved elements of the monopoly-capitalists, their allies among the predominantly white middle classes, and their lackeys in the military, police, and other institutions of the fascist state’s bureaucracy. We refer to this faction as the right-wing of U.S. fascism.

In the 2020 general elections, the Democrats won a majority in both houses of Congress and the presidency. The left-wing of U.S. fascism temporarily won power back from the right-wing. Since then, in order to consolidate their gains and carry out their program of fascist stabilization, the Democrats directed the Department of Justice and other arms of the Federal Government to carry out a minor campaign of repression against the most militant forces of the opposing right-wing faction. That campaign has even reached Trump himself; the former President is currently on trial for election-related criminal charges.

Such factional struggles are hardly out of the ordinary in a fascist regime. Take, for instance, the rise of the Nazis in Germany.

During the Weimar Republic era, a paramilitary force known as the Freikorps was instrumental in the rise of fascism. The Freikorps took in military rejects and veterans, indoctrinated them into fascism, and remilitarized them as shock-troop terrorists to be employed by the German state. When the proletariat of Germany, fatigued by the brutality of the First World War, but still highly organized and class-conscious, rose up in 1918–1919, the capitalist dictatorship employed the Freikorps to crush the revolution and assassinate its Communist leaders. The Freikorps retained their significance into the early 1930’s, and would be integrated in large part into the Nazi Party’s Sturmabteilung and Schutzstaffel paramilitaries. But in 1934, a factional struggle broke out within the Nazi Party, culminating in the Night of the Long Knives incident, in which Hitler’s faction carried out targeted assassinations of prominent Nazi Party leaders and jailed others, including some Freikorps members, in order to consolidate the Hitlerite faction’s control over the Nazi regime. Hitler would go on to denounce the Freikorps as “degenerates,” reversing his earlier endorsement.

Fascism in the U.S. Empire has not yet expanded to the stage of absolute despotism and omnipresent terror reached in Germany in 1934. But fascism in this country is expanding, and the struggles between its factions are intensifying.

The Trumpite Republicans are amassing their forces, both political, in the Federal and state governments, and paramilitary, in the streets. The Proud Boys, the Three Percenters, and the whole variety of civilian-fascist paramilitaries that have coalesced and grown in recent years, especially under the MAGA banner, are of the same type as the Freikorps in proto-fascist Germany, and they will be made to serve the same ends by our American Hitlerites. In cities across the U.S. Empire, these rabid dogs, these cops in plain clothes, are assembling to terrorize oppressed communities: They stand across from LGBT bars and nightclubs holding rifles. They stand across from Movement for Black Lives marches, alongside their blue-uniformed brethren. They stand across from reproductive healthcare clinics, threatening the patients who seek abortions and other health services and the doctors who provide them. They are ready at a moment’s notice to open fire, to commit lynchings and massacres, to enact the chaotic-yet-organized terror that only a civilian-fascist paramilitary can — no questions asked. And when the time comes, when fascism is absolutely ascendent in the U.S. Empire, those civilian-fascist terrorists who prove useful will be absorbed into the American Schutzstaffel; the remainder will be discarded.

The “moderate” Democrats, the “moderate” left-wing of U.S. fascism, are carrying out the present lawfare campaign against Trump and his most militant supporters not because they care about “safeguarding our democracy,” as they claim, but because they are desperately clinging to what remains of their power. Faced with the ascendancy of a new variety of U.S. fascism, the Democrats have been compelled to use the repressive force of courts and police — even against other police. But this cannot last forever; the weight of this regime’s internal contradictions will inevitably bring it to the point of collapse. As fascism continues to expand across the U.S. Empire, the question is therefore not whether the Democrats will fold, but when.

And as for the oppressed masses? We are poor and exhausted by the everyday facts of our lives; we are horrifically outgunned by the enemy state. Our only weapon is organization, and organization on an independent basis. Let the capitalist parties vie for hegemony in this country’s halls of power. Our task is to organize, educate, and arm ourselves, our loved ones, our neighbors, and our communities — to build power where we stand. Only by building popular power among the oppressed masses will we find the power to defeat and eliminate the fascist cancer, once and for all.

The police arrested Anthony Lester later that night on probable cause, but released him after a 24-hour holding period, without charges. For four tense days, Ralph’s family, and the Black community in Kansas City, grieved and demanded justice, while Lester sat at home, free of charges. Obeying police instruction, local news agencies protected the perpetrator by refusing to speak or print his name. Nevertheless, local community members gathered in protest outside Lester’s house on 115th Terrace over the next few days, persistently demanding he be brought to justice for his attempted murder of an unarmed Black child. The police, the state prosecutor, and the Missouri courts did not want to prosecute him.

Anyone can see that this was an attempted murder. The Missouri statute for second degree murder, 565.021, is simple. It requires only that the perpetrator knowingly caused the death of another person or, with the purpose of causing serious physical injury, caused the death of another. There is no reasonable debate to be had. No one shoots a child in the head without intending at the very least to cause serious injury. Lester, in no uncertain terms, shot to kill, and Ralph almost died.

Missouri, like many states in the U.S. Empire, also has a so-called “attempt” statute (562.012). To be found guilty of an attempted crime, the law of Missouri requires only that the perpetrator have taken  a “substantial step” toward carrying it out. Failing to successfully carry out the crime in question is not a defense. Being physically unable to carry it out is not even a defense.  In other words, Ralph’s survival makes Lester no less guilty of attempted murder in the second degree. Moreover, the penalty for a criminal attempt in Missouri is the same as the penalty for the completed crime — in this instance, ten to thirty years imprisonment.

Now, most people believe that the police are obligated to enforce the law and “protect and serve” people. That’s why they exist, after all, right? What would be the point of the police if they only “protected and served” when they felt like it? 

Good question! In fact, police explicitly aren’t obligated to enforce the law or protect people from danger — not even life-threatening danger. In a 5–4 decision in 1989, DeShaney v. Winnebago County Dept. of Social Services, the Supreme Court of the United States warned that citizens have “no affirmative right to governmental aid, even where such aid may be necessary to secure life, liberty, or property interests.” The Court ruled in that case that the county’s department of social services had no duty to protect a young boy from being beaten until he suffered brain damage, despite the fact that his mother repeatedly begged them to intervene. This doctrine, now well-established in U.S. law,  also applies to police departments. For example, in the 2005 case Castle Rock v. Gonzalez,  SCOTUS ruled 7–2 that police have no affirmative duty to protect people — even when doing so will prevent murder. In that case, a woman, Mrs. Gonzalez, called the police because her husband abducted her children, and she feared for their safety. In fact, she had an active protective order in place preventing him from coming to her house or seeing the children. The police chose to wait and see what happened. Mr. Gonzalez murdered all three of their children and then committed “suicide by cop.”

Every day, thousands of people across the U.S. Empire are arrested on “probable cause.” Only a modicum of evidence is required to make a “probable cause” arrest: If a single person says out loud that they saw a crime being committed, that is sufficient for police to arrest a suspect. Probable cause is so broad as to be essentially a free pass to police to arrest almost anyone at any time, for any (or virtually no) reason. Prosecution of any crime requires merely probable cause to proceed. This may be confused with another standard of proof, “beyond a reasonable doubt,” which is the standard for conviction in a criminal trial. To bring charges, all prosecutors need is a a few threads of evidence: hearsay, or a person claiming to have witnessed, for example, the suspect giving money to a friend on the street, or pocketing an item, or running down a street, or otherwise “acting suspicious,” is sufficient “probable cause” to support an arrest and continue prosecution for an illicit drug sale. “Probable cause,” those thin threads, prevents defendants from getting cases dismissed — cases upon which any reasonable person would say the state has no grounds to proceed. As a result, hundreds of people lose their jobs, their homes, and their families or are incarcerated each month — on these scant probable cause.

Every day, lawyers challenge probable cause on cases far less evident than this one, and judges in every court in the country frown and reply, “It’s only probable cause, counsel,” before overruling the defense. Yet in the case of Andrew Lester, who was witnessed and admitted to shooting Ralph Yarl, point-blank, in the head,  the police decided, and attempted to convince an enraged public, that there isn’t enough evidence to arrest this would-be child killer. The emperor is not only naked and exposed; he has been skinned and hanged from the branches of a sycamore tree.

The Black community of Kansas City, and their allies, did not wait for the police to act. They demanded action. The masses, primarily the local Black working-class community, poured into the streets. They gathered in front of Lester’s house to demand justice. They gathered in front of the police station to expose the lie of “protect and serve.” Missouri has not forgotten any of her dead — not Michael Brown, not any of the Black lives cut short by white supremacy. The Movement for Black Lives has only sunk deeper and broader roots among the masses; its demands have become more organically and urgently adopted with each Black life cut short by the U.S. Empire’s regime of apartheid terror. The people protested for days, crying for action. Slogans that have become all-too-familiar in their demands for justice denied under the white supremacist empire were heard on the streets — “Black lives are under attack!”; “Standup, fight back!”

An organization calling itself The People’s Coalition led the protests, mobilized  marches, prepared slogans, and channeled the wrath of the people into an undeniable, if still localized, political force. The Yarl family’s lawyer, Ben Crump, pressed the attack, demanding the recalcitrant state immediately arrest Lester. It’s not only in Missouri that voices have been raised. No, across the entire empire, the people have lifted their voices in protest. Black outrage and working-class solidarity rose swiftly.

Two days ago, over one thousand students at Staley High School in Missouri walked out of class in an organized display of protest at the callousness of Kansas City officials. Ralph’s friends and classmates carried signs and banners, and condemned the failure of the city to prosecute Lester, then to release him on a low bond — $200,000 — when most attempted murderers look at bonds of $1 million or more.

This firestorm has even drawn, like a dying, confused moth to a mighty inferno, the undead imperial president Biden, a man of an age and complexion with the murderous Lester, to Kansas City. There he and his second-in-command Kamala Harris took the opportunity to denounce, of all things, gun violence. Gun violence! Of course the white supremacist state has tried to tie the shooting of a young Black man by a white would-be killer, as pure an expression of direct national oppression, of murder motivated undeniably by racism, as a problem caused by the white supremacist’s tool! God forbid the oppressed take up the same tool, and wield it against their oppressor! No, it wasn’t the gun that gave rise to lynch terror! It’s not the gun that causes Black children to fear the police from childhood — the same rabid dogs-in-blue who will routinely pummel, tase, and strangle Black people to death without once drawing a gun! It wasn’t gun violence the people of Kansas City gathered to combat: it was the white supremacist state — the state that refused to bring a racist child-killer to justice, until it was forced to.

But that state, that white supremacist state, is afraid! Its servants keenly remember the of the 2020 Summer Uprisings, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and fear the specter of another rebellion. They know that the next wave could begin anywhere, and they are desperate to prevent it. The prosecuting attorney and his compatriots in the Kansas City police have finally made the decision to hold Lester “accountable,” and city officials have finally acknowledged that the crime had a “racial component.” But they will just as soon provide for Lester’s acquittal, if they believe the public is no longer watching. It’s not the crime that concerns them — it’s the threat of another uprising.

The people have everything within their power. When they are united and prepared, nothing can stand against them, not even the white supremacist state of the most powerful empire in human history. We have seen it reel; we have seen it falter. Now, the pressure must be kept up, not only to prevent Lester from entering a favorable plea deal or the state prosecutor from purposefully bungling a trial, but also to remind our oppressors of the cost of injustice — and only the people can do that.

They call it “the Foundation.” It is the evil heart of a reactionary network that stretches across the U.S. Empire. Its home is in Atlanta, Georgia. 

The city of Atlanta has been called a “Black mecca.” It’s the country’s 4th-largest Black-majority city and a center of Black wealth, political and social power, education, and culture. It has been called “the capital of the New South” and the “capital city of Black America.” It has one of the highest LGBT populations per capita, behind only San Francisco and Seattle; it’s the second-fastest growing city in the U.S. Empire. The wealth and size of the Black propertied classes of the city — its petit-bourgeoisie, bourgeoisie, landlord, and political classes — are exceeded only by New York City and Washington, D.C. Yet, between 2000 and 2020, the city has seen wave after wave of white gentrifiers pour into the city. According to analysis performed by RentCafé, the average rent in Atlanta increased 65% between 2010 and 2020, from $895 to $1,474 per month. Median home prices in and around the city have increased by 98%, from $126,830 to $251,135 in that same period.

At the same time, Atlanta has seen the creation of the Foundation. But what is this mysterious reactionary Foundation? What do these demographic changes have to do with it? In order to answer that question, we have to examine it closely. More properly the “Atlanta Police Foundation,” the APF is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit, incorporated in 2003. On June 12, 2020, Atlanta police murdered Rayshard Brooks for sleeping in his car at a Wendy’s drive through. On June 17, 2020, the Atlanta Police Department went on strike to protest the charges that were filed against the officers that performed the murder. On June 18, 2020 the Atlanta Police Foundation paid out each Atlanta police officer a special $500 bonus. The municipal government of Atlanta relies on the Foundation and its increasing ratchet of police militarization. It needs the Foundation to control the people.

But it’s not just Atlanta. The Foundation is far from the only police foundation in the U.S. Empire, and the money trail leading to the Atlanta Police Department doesn’t start with the Foundation itself. No, the money comes from a long list of corporations and firms. The APF, for instance, receives funding from JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, WH Capital (the Waffle House), Axon Enterprises (the company that manufactures police body cameras and Tasers), the Cathy Family (who own Chik-fil-A and lobby against reproductive and LGBT rights), Delta Air, UPS, Home Depot, Inspire Brands (which owns Arby’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, Jimmy John’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, and Baskin Robbins), and other businesses. Foundations across the U.S. Empire have their own lists of capitalist backers, and the lists tend to overlap from one local department to the next.

Why do capitalists fund police foundations and police unions? As an investment. The police are the main domestic arm of the state’s repressive forces, whereas the military is the international arm, and the state that governs the U.S. Empire is a dictatorship of the capitalists and the other propertied classes. Ultimately, the American police serve the class of monopoly capitalists, represented by the big corporations. These corporations rely on the police to enact daily repressive violence and terror  against the vast majority of the population of the U.S. Empire: the colonized and working masses. These “unruly” masses must be continuously brutalized, beaten down, and reminded of who this country — this empire — really belongs to: the capitalists. Every time a politician runs on a platform of defunding, demilitarizing, or funding alternatives to the police, the local police foundation snaps into action and, through these foundations, the business community funnels money and  pledges more support and equipment to fund the murderous police.

The first of these organizations, these police foundations, was the New York City Police Foundation, which dates back to the 1971 police strike and city bankruptcy crisis. The foundation was created by the “Association for a Better New York,” a voluntary business association which was funded by real estate developers and local business owners. The logic is the same in Atlanta as it was in 1970s New York City: private business derives a particular benefit from the police. This is self-evident, if we really stop to think. Private businesses are property-hoarders, and the only way to protect this unjust distribution of property is with armed battalions to repel the needy by force. Here in the U.S. Empire, police have two basic jobs: the defense of corporate private property and the suppression of national self-determination in the Empire’s internal colonies. Atlanta, of course, the “capital of the New South” stands at the heart of the Black Belt, a crescent-shaped region of the U.S. South where the wealthiest slave plantations were located and where the majority of Black persons in the U.S. Empire today still live. Police foundations are the very incarnation of neoliberalism. Where the police cannot be privatized directly, private corporations can still fund and influence them, direct and guide them, and they can be run as companies, making money from the taxes of the masses by selling their “expertise” to municipalities. Today, the NYC Police Foundation gives millions of dollars in private donations to the NYPD each year which are not disclosed.

In 2019, the NYC foundation made $11,885,187 USD. The APF made $10,848,654 USD. The St. Louis foundation made $10,378,796 USD. On and on it goes. Of all the police foundations, the APF is one of the largest and most well-funded. These foundations are an engine of white terror — they are the direct expression of capitalist control over the oppressed nations within the U.S. Empire. They are factories that produce brutality and fear, the very machinery of the state outsourced, by 1970s neoliberal policy, to private corporations. Despite their tax-exempt status, these “foundations” still turn a profit and pay their executives and employees incredible salaries to teach the police how to better beat down the poor. Some employees of the APF, for instance, make nearly half a million dollars every year.Now, as the demographics of Atlanta change and the capitalist rulers of the region are united in a concerted effort to push out Black families, the APF wants to build the mother of all training centers: a 381 acre, $90+ million USD facility complete with fake streets to patrol. This is Cop City, in the words of Kwame Olufemi of the Community Movement Builders, a

war base where police will learn military-like maneuvers to kill Black people and control our bodies and movements. The facility includes shooting ranges, plans for bomb testing and will practice tear gas deployment. They are practicing how to make sure poor and working class people stay in line. So when the police kill us in the streets again, like they did to Rayshard Brooks in 2020, they can control our protests and community response to how they continue to murder our people.

They make their money by the suppression of Black, Indigenous, Puerto Rican, and Chicanx liberty, and by hawking their ludicrous wares to city governments. Cop City promises to be their crowning achievement.

The New White Guard

Like all police departments, the Atlanta Police Department (APD) has an evil history. In 2006, APD officers killed 92-year-old Kathryn Johnson while trying to serve a no-knock warrant. Three officers entered her home, cutting off the bars on the door and breaking the door itself down. Although the officers claim that Kathryn fired at them, evidence suggests she may have fired a single shot over the heads of the officers. They fired 39 shots and hit her with five or six. They then planted marijuana in her house to cover themselves, but it was later discovered that not only had they lied about this, but that they had entirely fabricated the reports they submitted to a judge to get the no-knock warrant: they made up a story about buying cocaine at Kathryn’s house.

On September 10, 2009, APD raided the Atlanta Eagle, a gay bar, brutalized its employees and patrons, and arrested eight of the bar’s employees. Seven of the eight had their charges dropped or were found not guilty at trial. The eighth failed to appear to court and was arrested by bench warrant. Those arrested — and there were 62 patrons in addition to the employees — were subject not only to beatings, but also to vicious anti-gay slurs. In 2011, sixteen of the police officers involved in the raid were fired for lying, fabricating evidence, and later destroying evidence that was pertinent to lawsuits against the city.

The city of Atlanta pays the APF for access to their Security Communication Network that, like something from a sci-fi dystopia, they call ComNet. This network is a radio link between private security firms (which have to pay to subscribe), the city’s 9-1-1 service, police dispatches, and the APD. 

In the late 2010s, the APF launched “Operation Shield.” This ominously named plan saw the installation, by the conclusion of 2017, of 3,000 surveillance cameras throughout the city. As part of the plan of Operation Shield, the APF also launched software that allows some 7,000 cameras owned by individuals and businesses to connect to the Shield network and integrate the ComNet system. Yes, private homes can link their Amazon Ring cameras into the Shield network — but that should come as no surprise, considering Amazon itself is one of the institutional investors in the APF. In total, then, this Operation Shield has transformed Atlanta into the most heavily surveilled city in the U.S. Empire, and most likely the world. The “public-private” snitch network not only ensures that businesses can call on APD jackboots whenever they need to, identify anyone in the city at a moment’s notice using their cameras, or summon both rent-a-cops and Atlanta’s own White Guard to their premises; it also transforms every home that signs up into a little Hitler-Jugend, ready to turn over friends, neighbors, and community members to the police for interrogation, prosecution, and incarceration.

The main product of the APD is White Terror. In revolutionary terms, white is the color of reaction and reactionaries. It was the color of the Bourbon kings in France and was taken up by monarchists across Europe. In the U.S. Empire, white is the color of the reactionary movement by a kind of metaphorical coincidence: here, the White Terror doesn’t represent the terror of monarchs and their nobility revenging themselves on the working people. We’ve never had formal nobility. Here, the White Terror is the terror of the settler-garrisons, the constant fear the ruling classes want to exert on the oppressed nations that they might be surveilled, arrested, questioned, jailed, or murdered at any moment. The police are the agents of the White Terror. It is what they’re paid to make, more so even than the arrests and “crime-stopping” power of prosecution, they exist to terrify and subdue. They are an alien, occupying army, encamped in the heart of every community.

The Atlanta Police Department is forced to spend roughly $950,000 a year on average to settle lawsuits brought by the communities in which it operates. Between 2018 and 2020, APD shot 14 people to death, all Black. This is White Terror. The old forms of punishment — public flogging and even execution, bodies hanging on gibbets or from the city walls — have given way to new ones. Rather than watch the punishment be inscribed on the bodies of others, we are forced to internalize the potential, to grow up under terror. No more does the ruling class ask us to go out and watch an outlaw or a rebel be hanged. Now, we are reminded that every house has a camera. The force of the regime has moved from the public square to lodge firmly in our hearts and minds. Institutionalized post-traumatic stress disorder is the tactic of the day.

If the police department of Atlanta serves as the White Guard of the New South, the APF is its captain and leader. New “policing initiatives” come from the APF. The city has tasked the APF with developing its plans for the police department — which now includes expanding the police force by at least 750 people, increasing their presence everywhere in the city, increasing arrests, and increasing convictions. The APF is the institutional memory of the Atlanta police; even when circumstances change, police chiefs retire or are fired, scandal rocks individual politicians, the APF sits behind everything, guiding the city to spend more money on the militarized police, granting payouts to killer cops, and buying police departments military-grade equipment. In this way, the big businesses can funnel money into state repression while presenting superficially clean hands. There are no direct links between Amazon and the Atlanta Police Department. No one can say with legal certainty that Amazon put Operation Shield into place, or that Amazon is putting advanced “crowd control” machinery, guns, drones, bombs, or armored cars into the hands of police. Moral certainty is another question. Amazon has done, is doing, and continues to do these things. So do all those businesses funding the police foundations. This is the fascist integration of the profit motive directly with the state’s apparatus of repression.

In September of 2021, the Atlanta City Council voted to bulldoze 85 acres of woods in the South River Forest and commission the construction of the $90 million USD training camp that’s now known as “Cop City.” Just east of the land that’s been designated for the killer cops, the city gave permission to another developer to destroy a further 40 acres of forest to build a soundstage for Atlanta’s growing film industry. The two projects are linked by the bonds of gentrification and capital: as Atlanta’s white petit-bourgeoisie and haute bourgeoisie grows, it needs more and more protection from the impoverished working people who actually make the commodities it consumes and consume the commodities it makes.

In 2017, the same year the APF created the Shield network, it announced a plan to build a megachurch of white violence. In the words of the APF, the harmless-sounding Atlanta Public Safety Training Center will “improve morale, retention, recruitment and training for APD…, facilitate collaboration and joint training between Atlanta’s police… and their local, state, and federal partner agencies.” Of course, they harp about “community engagement,” and mention over and over again that Cop City will also train firefighters. In an official document, the Foundation said “APD and AFR training facilities have been starved for resources for 30-plus years,” which is a patent lie. The most telling admission, however, was that Cop City “was never envisioned as a money-making venture.” The Foundation is doing this purely out of the kindness of their hearts! Oh, and also because the corporations that fund it want more effective police to combat the working classes. What exactly is in this proposed 85-acre monument to police overreach and violence? It will have a shooting range, of course, to train the police in the use of their sidearms, which they use to shoot young Black men, often in the back. The shooting range will also presumably train the APD in more advanced crime-stopping techniques, such as precision riflery. There’s a leadership center, where the police can give lectures like those described in the Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop — that is, lectures “taught by old cops, run like a paramilitary bootcamp, strong emphasis on protecting yourself more than anyone else.” These confessions are worth quoting at length:

The majority of my time in the academy was spent doing aggressive physical training and watching video after video after video of police officers being murdered on duty.

…[N]early everyone coming into law enforcement is bombarded with dash cam footage of police officers being ambushed and killed. Over and over and over. Colorless VHS morality plays, cops screaming for help over their radios, their bodies going limp as a pair of tail lights speed away into a grainy black horizon. In my case, with commentary from an old racist cop who used to brag about assaulting Black Panthers.

….Once police training has — through repetition, indoctrination, and violent spectacle — promised officers that everyone in the world is out to kill them, the next lesson is that your partners are the only people protecting you.

….One of the most important thought leaders in law enforcement is Col. Dave Grossman, a “killologist” who wrote an essay called “Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs.” Cops are the sheepdogs, bad guys are the wolves, and citizens are the sheep (!). Col. Grossman makes sure to mention that to a stupid sheep, sheepdogs look more like wolves than sheep, and that’s why they dislike you.

….Every single second of my training, I was told that criminals were not a legitimate part of their community, that they were individual bad actors, and that their bad actions were the result of their inherent criminality. ….To us, anyone committing a crime deserved anything that happened to them because they broke the “social contract.”

Above and beyond these, the real piece de resistance is the simulation city the Foundation calls its “Mock Village.” This is a four-block square containing a convenience store, a hotel, a nightclub, houses, residential apartment buildings (low and high-rise), and a warehouse. This is the plan for training a domestic occupation force. In the early 2010s, U.S. army intelligence built fake “Middle Eastern” villages to train its imperialist occupation forces. One of those training facilities also cost $90 million USD (in 2014 dollars). The words of the imperialists’ Asymmetric Warfare Group in 2014 are prophetic here: “In the emerging world of 21st century conflict, the battlefield is no longer the countryside but the city…. In full, the urban complex of the AWTC [Asymmetric Warfare Training Center] include [sic] stores, a gas station, school, soccer field, church, mosque tunnels, subway platform and a bridge…. The subway trains look exactly like that of the DC Metro’s, down to the logo.”

It’s clear that the Foundation planned Cop City with the June Uprisings of 2020 in mind. Although they first pitched their cathedral of violence in 2017, the design for Cop City wasn’t presented before the city until 2021. It is, in essence, a real life Call of Duty: a training simulator designed to look like the U.S. Empire’s newest war — the war at home, against its own working class.

The Direct Opposition: Six Activists Charged with Domestic Terror

Standing opposite the new campus of state terror are a mixed group of environmentalists, anarchists, and scientific socialists of all tendencies that go by the collective name Defend the Atlanta Forest (DAF). While the driving impetus appears to have been primarily environmental, the movement has become multivalent and much focus has been given to the construction of the new state terror complex as an evil in itself, above and beyond the clearing of forestland. They have established an encampment, Vengeance Village, in the forestland which is supplied by a network of supporters throughout the country. They host teach-ins and community events during the day and at night they have cultural performances that feature bands and local DJs.

The real work of the DAF, however, is violent confrontation with the developers and the state. Direct action — destroying excavators, chaining activists to trees, building barricades and armored treehouses — has been the word of the day. Most recently, five of the Forest Defenders were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism: Francis Carroll of Maine (22 years old), Nicholas Olson of Nebraska (25 years old), Serena Hertel of California (25 years old), Leonardo Voiselle of Macon (20 years old), Arieon Robinson of Wisconsin (22 years old), and Ariel Ebaugh of Stockbridge (22 years old) have been called the Atlanta Six by activist media and their unjust imprisonment may lead to becoming the all-empire faces of the movement. Their arrests appear to stem from bombarding police cars with rocks as the Atlanta cops and Georgia Bureau of Investigation (cops in fancier clothes) attempted to clear out Forest Defenders and the later discovery of prepared “incendiary devices” (read: gas bombs).

Under Georgia’s state law, anyone convicted of domestic terrorism is subject to 5-15 years in prison, no portion of which may be suspended, stayed, probated, deferred, or withheld. That makes the 5 year number a mandatory minimum jail term. It’s unlikely that the state will really proceed on these charges; it would do more harm than good to Cop City and its image among the community. One of the ways the state breaks up movements like this, however, is to threaten extreme legal response over a long period without actually needing to use it. That way, momentum is sapped, important members of the movement are taken out of the fight, and by the time the legal battle has concluded with a plea on a lesser charge or even outright dismissal or acquittal, the actual battle over the territory (in this case, the Atlanta forestlands) has been lost. The fight needs resources to carry on; the DAF is confronting the enemy state directly, head-on, and only with the support of an all-empire movement can it hope to overpower the State of Georgia, the City of Atlanta, and the titanic corporations behind the Foundation. The DAF solicits funds directly through the Forest Justice Defense Fund. More broadly, social justice and social revolutionary movements in Atlanta rely upon the legal assistance of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund. If you cannot join the fight, consider making donations to stiffen the resistance to the Foundation and its citadel of White Terror — because if it isn’t stopped, it will become the center of a whole new network of police training and brutality throughout the U.S. Empire.