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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Opportunism from the White “Left”

Right Opportunism 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Left Opportunism 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The stakes are high & the forest is calling!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Atlanta Police Foundation and Ignored Answers 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kamau Franklin, speaking to Robert Scheer:

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

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

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

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

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

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

At this year’s State of the Union, Joe Biden had a narrative to sell the people of the U.S. Empire: According to Biden’s story, when he entered office, the economy was reeling, but now, under his tenure as President, the economy is on the mend, with millions of new jobs “created” in the last two years, and unemployment at historic lows — nevermind the ongoing housing and cost-of-living crisis, the continual depression of wages, a crisis of overproduction and waste, and an impending financial crash. According to Biden, the COVID-19 pandemic is over; in Biden’s story, COVID-19 isn’t still killing thousands of people every week, while the Biden regime stands by, condemning those thousands to death. According to Biden, “our democracy remains unbowed and unbroken” two years after Trump’s attempted coup d’état of January 6th, 2021 — nevermind that basic human, civil, and democratic rights for women, LGBT people, and Black people are under assault in courts and legislatures and police departments at every level of government across the U.S. Empire. According to Biden, his administration has “defended a stronger and safer Europe” by funneling billions of dollars in arms to Ukraine’s fascist Zelenskyy regime, to fuel the ongoing proxy-war between NATO and the Russian Federation.

As we will see, Biden’s narrative is a simple one: consolidation. Although the regime toyed with, for example, undermining the right-fascist capture of the Supreme Court by adding new, left-leaning justices through a planned expansion of the court by adding new, left-leaning justices, that plan was never really on the table. Biden allowed it to be leaked to the press, publicly announced he was considering it, and even went so far as to appoint a commission to study the subject. Instead, we have a morass of half-measures designed to stabilize the dangerously out-of-kilter economy and social environment into a new equilibrium, one that is substantially rightward of where it stood in January of 2016. That is the actual function and outcome of the Democratic strategy of “compromise.” Above all, this State of the Union Address is an effort to rally the fractious and divided masters of the country, to get them all on the same page, to restore the shaken stability of capitalist class-rule in the face of increased labor agitation and rising consciousness of governmental misdeeds.

And who does Biden look forward to compromising with? His State of the Union begins with an effusive congratulations to GOP Senator Kevin McCarthy. McCarthy was one of the most vocal defenders of the now-disgraced Trump regime. He voted to strip $500 million from abortion funding. He voted against the house resolution to condemn racism against Asians because he believed the COVID-19 virus was created by or in China. He was part of the planned legislative assault on LGBT people and supported the so-called Defense of Marriage Act to deny legal recognition to same-sex couples — indeed, went so far as to join in a legal brief to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of that heinous act. 

As Biden said: Congratulations, Mr. McCarthy! 

Already, media conglomerate Comcast, through one of its many media arms, MSNBC, has already begun casting the State of the Union as a triumph, and Biden’s recognition of shared class interest with his Republican siblings as “savvy” and “quick-witted.” Thus, should the GOP-fraction come to an agreement with the Democrat-fraction, Biden’s regime will be able to say that they engineered this unity. Should they fight, the words of unity will be cast either as sarcastic and biting or as a heartfelt plea that was snubbed by childish Republicans. Fundamentally, this introduction was an effort at bridge-building, at reminding the GOP (or at least its center and left wing) that the real interests of the ruling class are shared interests.

The new House Minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, delivered high praise by Biden during the speech is, of course, a member of the Clintonite New Democrat Coalition — a caucus within the Democratic Party that brought Bill Clinton to power in the 1990s and saw the wholesale dismantling of economic regulation in the private sector, the passage of anti-Black “anti-crime” bills during the Clinton period, of which Biden was himself a prominent partisan crusader in the Senate — and that collectively joined the GOP as a Democratic voting block just last week to pass the atrocious, a-historical, reactionary  resolution “Denouncing the horrors of socialism.”

The typical response from the professional mainstream media pundits and “analysts,” who turn public dissection of ruling-class discourse into a hobby and a sport, to this kind of in-club back-slapping and glad-handing is that  “compromise” is necessary for advancing any agenda in  the U.S. political arena. This obsession of the Democratic Party with unity between the center-left and the center-right serves as a convenient shield for ruling-class ambitions. This broader attitude is merely the wide application of that principle: the unity of the interest of the ruling class. Compromise is based on shared goals. It cannot be achieved by enemies unless they share interests; the interests shared by Biden and the Republicans (up to, but not including, the most extreme-right, which we will address further on) are the basic interests of the ruling class. All Republicans and Democrats share these interests in common, and Biden will carefully and specifically spell out those things they share throughout the course of this speech. This is ruling class language at its finest, even though Biden has barely said anything yet.

Throughout his entire speech, Biden referred to Americans as a nationality, as a “nation.” This is common in U.S. discourse, but why does that matter — in other words, why point that out? In actuality, the U.S. isn’t a single nation, nor is there any “American people.” The U.S. is a settler-colonial empire, a grand prison-house of nations, a vast expanse of stolen land, in which many Indigenous nations are subjugated, oppressed, and hyper-exploited, either as colonies or semi-colonies. 

This idea of the “melting pot” became a shibboleth after the First World War to encourage the complete assimilation of most European and some Asian immigrants (although not, at that time, the former slaves of New Africa, or this continent’s Indigenous peoples, or newer Black and brown migrants from Africa, the Caribbean, and elsewhere, or various “undesirables”) into the white Anglo-American “nation”. This “American” white nationalism was supported by no less prolific a fascist as Henry Ford, who founded the English School in 1914 for just this purpose — that is, to transform his immigrant workers into “true Americans.” Ford’s graduation ceremony saw his workers step off a symbolic immigrant ship, pass through a melting pot, discarding their “ethnic” clothing — the last vestiges of the lands, cultures, and languages they left behind, and end their “transformation” dressed in identical suits, waving American flags.

But why this lie? Why is this American melting pot imagery deployed here by Biden? Because the Democratic strategy relies on class-collaboration not only between the white working class, the white petit-bourgeoisie, and the ruling capitalists, but also between the nationally oppressed peoples. How often have we heard that, for instance, Black voters overwhelmingly vote Democrat? Here, in a few swift and well-calculated words, Black Americans — New Africans — are stripped of their nation and join the hundreds of Indigenous peoples, the subject and exploited Puerto Ricans, the captured Chicanx, and the many many refugees fleeing U.S. imperialist violence who were drawn to the stability at the eye of the world-wide storm of U.S. murder; and all of these groups are erased to become simply “Americans.”

The lie of a unified America stands in direct contrast to reality, to the actual, economic truth in the U.S. The different nations imprisoned within the U.S. Empire are subject to intense economic exploitation by the Anglo-American capitalists. Black property is stolen every day, Black lives destroyed for the benefit of white financiers, and the same goes for Latine and Indigenous lives and property. Pretending everyone living within the borders of the empire is part of the same nation is only one of many ways of saying that everyone living here is equal before the law — the biggest lie of all.

Much of Biden’s speech was occupied with hammering on the apparent achievements of his administration in triumphing over COVID, restoring the economy, etc. But COVID is not over, despite the pronouncements of regime propagandists and Biden himself. Even the opponents of the Biden administration pretend the disease has been “defeated” or was never that big of a problem to begin with. Nothing could be further from the truth. Thousands die each week from complications related to the pandemic. Many thousands more are permanently damaged or disabled by the disease. The virus continues to mutate and change so rapidly that the new variants are no longer named, merely given identifying combinations of letters and numbers. Because the capitalist state refuses to take the necessary measures to put an end to the pandemic, it not only continues on, but threatens to break out anew in ever-more deadly and virulent forms.

The capitalist economy is on anything but firm footing. It hasn’t recovered from COVID; in fact, it’s been demonstrably rotten since the 2008 financial crisis. Economists (who are themselves presently all combinations of capitalist propagandist and diviner in some degree or another) grew used to the prevailing post-2008 conditions of the financial markets, in particular a persistent near-0% federal funds rate. From 2008 to 2020, the federal funds rate was kept below 2.5% to make credit easy to come by, and to stimulate investment in risky business prospects. Prior to that 2008 crisis, the federal funds rate floated between 2% and 6% at any given time.

The COVID crisis, which necessitated the shutdown of most elements of the cycle of production to be even partially contained, has exposed the rot at the core of the U.S. financial markets. Only through massive quantitative easing (the buyback of government bonds using freely-extended credit from the Federal Reserve to pump new money, in the form of credit, into the bank and investment spheres), the removal of the overnight bank funding rate, the lifting of the bank reserve requirement (meaning they do not have to keep sufficient cash on hand to cover any given withdrawal), and the termination of most financial regulations kept the U.S. market afloat during the all-too-brief shutdown. The result is that, of all circulating U.S. currency today, 2/3rds of it was created within the last 2 years.

This massive increase to the money supply has gone entirely to the super-wealthy and their investment agencies like Blackrock. The result has been an inflationary spiral. More currency in circulation without a rise in the number of commodities also circulating means prices must go up.

We’ve seen efforts to contain this financial disaster in the sudden and precipitous raising of the federal funds rate by the Federal Reserve. This rate shows no sign of slowing down, and has been raised at every subsequent Federal Reserve meeting for the past year. The current rate is 4.5%, the highest it’s been since October 31, 2007.

The historical unity of the ruling class is realized in the state. Biden then moves on to celebrate shared victories achieved by a combination of Democrats and Republicans. So what issues are the Biden regime proud of “coming together” on? The first is the safety of Europe, or in other words, the nearly-decade long assault on the freedom and security of the Ukrainian and Russian people. Never to look a gift horse in the mouth, the Biden regime and its predecessors not only managed to install a Banderite-fascist government in Kiev, it has also attacked its own allies in Germany and France, forcing their peoples into ruinous de-industrialization by switching from Russian oil to good old U.S. liquified petroleum gas.

The other things of which he claimed to be proud are the Electoral Count Reform Act, the Respect for Marriage Act, and the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act.

The Electoral Count Reform Act is an update of an 1887 law that adds safeguards against elector fraud during the presidential election; it does nothing to address the growing threat of right-fascist capture of the executive office. It merely clarifies obscure procedural details and ensures the vice president has no say in the outcome of a presidential election. Having been secure in their power for over 200 years, the U.S. politician is a great believer in procedure. Procedural niceties make the politician comfortable, assure them that all is well, even when their settler-empire is collapsing around their ears. Never mind, no, never mind that the Electoral College itself is the embodiment of the white supremacist demands of slavers, and today embodies bourgeois class-supremacy. Never mind that! We only need to fix down the right procedure for making it fair.

The cowardly vacillation in the face of the impending court-driven crisis that threatens the marriages and the legal marriageability of millions of gay and lesbian couples as well as so-called inter-racial couples by the Democrats and Biden himself was resolved with the totally unsatisfactory Respect for Marriage Act. Rather than enshrining the legal right for all sexuality and nationally oppressed couples to marry in every state in the United States, the act merely ensures that if and when the Supreme Court overturns its landmark Obergefell case — which the court has signaled is only a matter of time — the majority of states that do not recognize gay and lesbian marriages will be required to recognize any that are contracted in states that do. 

The Violence Against Women Act, despite its progressive wording (although its name is curiously lacking any words indicating that it’s meant to stop violence) is actually a vehicle through which the Congress grants $225 million to police and courts to more stringently enforce existing laws. It should not be forgotten that the single demographic most likely to engage in domestic violence are the very police officers the act gives extra funding. The latest renewal of the act extends its “protections” into Indigenous communities that, under Biden’s watch, have had their sovereignty in law enforcement stripped from them by the right-fascist Supreme Court.

Above all, Biden sounded that old fascist drumbeat, the reveille of white-supremacist America. The threat of the “good jobs” going abroad to Asia leaving, as Biden and his fascist coreligionists frame it, a denuded and feeble economy of service jobs. But if there are two words that have always gone together in fascist jargon, they are nation and race. Biden does not here say the word race, but it can be read into the American nation; what is the American nation, in the eyes of the president of the United States? Not the men and women disproportionately jailed by the police, but the white businessmen and defense contractors, snug in their walled compounds of suburbia.

The “problem” with production in the U.S. Empire isn’t that the manufacturing jobs have moved abroad. The loss of intermediate manufacturing (that is, transforming raw materials not into finished products but into the commodities that themselves will be used to create the finished products) isn’t a flaw in the imperialist system. It is the outcome of a century of the profit motive grinding against the power of organized labor in the imperialist West.

No imperialist politician can afford to explain this connection, because it would immediately give the lie to all of their social safety net talk. We should be explicit! Intermediate and even some finished manufacturing jobs have moved overseas because the wages required to hire laborers in the U.S. are too high to maintain the rate of profit the capitalist owners have come to expect — to demand. In exchange for cheap commodities manufactured abroad, there has been a kind of unwritten agreement between the business leaders and white labor. You get cheap phones, cars, refrigerators, electricity, and the cushiest high-end technical jobs are reserved for you here in the U.S. Empire. In exchange, the capitalists get to reap the benefits of labor arbitrage between the low cost of labor in the imperialized periphery (one of the reasons the U.S. keeps bombing these countries is to keep the cost of living, and therefore wages, low).

All throughout the 1990s, the Democrats official position was that this process was actually good. They used coded terms like “technological jobs” and “technological advantage” and told the entire U.S. population that all we had to do was “learn to code” and the United States Empire would reign over the global economy as a country of managers, technicians, and bureaucrats. It’s only now that the network of exploitation underlying the imperialist lifestyle is showing its cracks, only now that the truth is indisputable, only now that we are remembering that even in a country of managers, technicians, and bureaucrats with all of its basic industry exported to the poorest sectors of the world, that there will still have to be a construction industry, a transport industry, a personal service industry, that the Democrats have desperately begun trying to recapture the loyalty of manufacturing workers.

This is what the Democrat pundits mean when they say that Biden is the most labor-friendly president since FDR: when bourgeois politicians say “labor friendly,” they don’t mean that they will vindicate labor agitation in the face of the owning class, they mean that they will help “stimulate” the economy such that more people will be hired. Biden hits this theme over and over again, and in reality it’s no different from the GOP rhetoric about “job creators.”

Biden made a laughable claim that inflation was “coming down.” Inflation, in fact, is not “coming down.” The Consumer Price Index, that is the price of a basket of common consumer items used to estimate overall inflation, has been climbing steadily since the economy reopened after the all-too-brief COVID shutdown in 2020. Perhaps what Biden’s speechwriters meant, in typical political-speak (read: lies) was that the speed of inflation was slowing. A car traveling at 100 miles-per-hour that gains 20 miles-per-hour in the first minute (to reach a speed of 120 mph), 10 miles-per-hour in the second minute (to reach a speed of 130 mph), and 5 miles-per-hour in the third minute (you guessed it, 135 mph) isn’t slowing down. It’s a fatal accident waiting to happen.

The administration is sensitive to the economic crisis that is building within both the financial markets and the consumer markets. That’s why Biden went on to tout his regime’s plan to strengthen the domestic technology economy with ludicrous statements about microchip and semiconductor manufacturing (although you wouldn’t be able to tell, listening to Professor Biden, that there was a difference between a microchip — an integrated circuit composed of semiconductors linked together — and a semiconductor — a material that has specific electrical properties and which makes up the components of a microchip).

Despite lying about the pace of inflation, the president then had to specifically identify the manufacturing crisis that’s leading to the inflation in the price of all commodities that make use of microchips. In the Western imperialist centers, and particularly in the U.S. Empire where excess is a way of life, everything contains microchips, because almost every commodity has a computer installed in it.

But Biden’s speechwriters were once again thinking of more than just the average worker when they wrote this passage. It’s also a message to Biden’s fellow Democratic warmongers and Western-based microchip manufacturers that the slowly boiling trade war with the People’s Republic of China is heating up. We can never let this happen again, Biden said — meaning, the rise in prices that resulted from trade sanctions against the People’s Republic microchip sector. For Biden, microchip manufacturing can be used to sound like he’s restoring the old Democratic contract with labor while also signaling his intent to pursue economic independence from the People’s Republic; together with  his other policies it’s clear why: the Democrats foresee increased economic warfare against China and the non-aligned bloc it represents.

Nevermind that semiconductor manufacturing threatens to collapse an already overburdened water supply system in the U.S. Nevermind that part of the rise in prices of semiconductors is directly attributable to the ill-planned visits of U.S. lawmakers to the island of Taiwan in violation of U.S. treaty obligations with the People’s Republic and subsequent sanctions from the People’s Republic in retaliation prohibiting the manufacturers on Taiwan from importing the all-important quartz sand necessary for their production.

And what role have Biden and the Democratic Party played in combating environmental degradation? More oil and gas drilling approvals than under Trump. Going ahead with the ConocoPhillips plan to drill in Alaska. In fact, far from “tackling the climate crisis,” the Inflation Reduction Act requires the federal government to lease 60 million acres of federal land for fossil fuel extraction every year, which will continue to expand the disastrous emission of greenhouse gasses. And, most horrifically and most recently, the Biden government has caused the worst-ever ecological crisis in United States history.

In the Biden government’s efforts to, one supposes, retain the image of most labor-friendly president since FDR, Biden himself crushed a rail strike last year. Many of the demands of the near-striking rail workers went directly to the safety of the country’s many trains: longer hours, no leave time, no sick time, fewer workers, and fewer safety precautions have resulted in the terrifying derailment of a train carrying vinyl chloride. As a result, Ohio is now filled with toxic phosgene gas and other fumes, the groundwater has been poisoned, and a noxious pillar of black smoke is now rising from the ruined train.

Part of the plan of stabilization and consolidation is the punishment of the most flagrant exploiters, those who are the most exposed in the eyes of the public for gouging the working masses. This was Biden’s next talking point. But, this selective punishment is not out of goodwill or empathetic concern for working people. It is a feature of any system of exploitation that, when its excesses become too egregious, fall too much outside of the accepted norms, that where even other exploiters take notice and wrinkle their noses, the system itself as the representative of the corporate, collective power of the ruling classes takes action to curb them. Too naked a pattern of exploitation, too obvious and flagrant a system of abuse, and it threatens to expose the injustices that are the basis upon which society is founded. That’s what Biden is expressing here, although he’s claiming that “capitalism without competition is not capitalism” as his cover.

In fact, the steady suppression of competition is one of the key features of capitalism. This process is called concentration of production and capital. It is the tendency of competition to drive smaller capitalists out of business, to have their factories, shopfronts, and what-not bought up by the bigger capitalists. As technological breakthroughs in more and more efficient machines mean that any new capitalists have to put up more and more starting capital, small capitalists are barred from competing because they simply can’t scrape together enough money to buy the latest lathe or die-stamping tool.

Competition produces concentration, and in this way, destroys the conditions of competition themselves. Biden is talking like a capitalist of the 19th century — or, perhaps even more accurately, like a fascist of the early 20th century. Let’s look at another speech: “We no longer have the struggle for life, free competition, the selection of the fittest. We note the first symptoms of fatigue and deviation in the capitalistic world. The era of cartels, syndicates, combines, and trusts now begins….The end of free competition…. The very law of supply and demand is no longer a dogma, for cartels and trusts make it possible to influence both supply and demand.” That eerily similar sentiment comes not from our friend Mr. Biden, but from his early 20th-century counterpart, Mr. Mussolini.

There was another topic that he could not avoid: the increase of violence on the part of the U.S. capitalist police state. In one breath during his speech, Biden pretended to care about the rampant abuse and murder of his capitalist police, and then applauded more stringent laws that will enable the police to abuse and murder untold thousands. Gun control is the dialectical compliment of the settler police force, but a Democrat like Biden cannot or will not draw the connection.

In fact, in 1994 then-senator Biden worked with some of the most vile open segregationists remaining in the United States government to pass legislation eerily similar to the 1960s gun control legislation of California, passed to prevent Black Panthers from arming their cop-watch patrols. In fact, what Biden said then, in 1994, wasn’t that he was trying to find common-sense gun control. What he said was “Every major crime bill since 1976 that’s come out of this Congress, every minor crime bill, has had the name of the Democratic senator from the State of Delaware: Joe Biden.” That same year he compared himself to Richard Nixon. “Every time Richard Nixon, when he was running in 1972, would say, ‘Law and order,’ the Democratic match or response was, ‘Law and order with justice’ — whatever that meant. And I would say, ‘Lock the S.O.B.s up.’”

Lock the S.O.B.s up. That’s the true face of U.S. gun control policy, and the true face of Joseph Robinette Biden.

He also launched a plan to engage in a crusade against fentanyl. This isn’t even simple consolidation of the right-ward shift of the country, it is an intensification of the white terror. Biden’s fentanyl crusade is creating the very problem it pretends to be combatting. It’s well known that once the ban on the sale of alcohol was a fait accomplis in the early 20th century that many politicians in the U.S. prepared to reap the rewards by establishing what were in essence large criminal production networks. It will come as no surprise in 50 years when it is revealed that the politicians by and large responsible for the War on Drugs are shown to have been among its primary beneficiaries.

If you weren’t yet totally exhausted by Biden’s fascistic talking points, he followed this up with plans for closing the borders to “unwanted migration” from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, New border plans? What do they include? Biden himself tells us: more money for the fascist border patrols. These border police even went so far as to brutalize immigrants ahead of Biden’s own visit to El Paso, Texas, in order to make the president look better when he arrived. What words did the president and top Democrat just recently use toward those at the border? That’s right, “Do not show up here.”

What about the rest of this criminally negligent speech? The lies contained within it have mostly been addressed by points above, and are so self-evidently false that they require no reproduction by us to demonstrate it. More hot air about fentanyl and the drug war, false promises about curing cancer, and bloviating about the “peaceful” role of NATO in provoking the Russian-Ukraine war, followed by the same “we’re all in this together” pablum peddled by the addle-pated Biden at every campaign rally he’s ever been to, and interspersed throughout every speech he’s ever given.

The most important thing to listen to is the flag-waving surrounding what he cast as the defeat of the January 6th Movement — the petit-bourgeois putsch attempt that stormed the capitol building in Washington, D.C., and could have installed a second Trump administration if its organizers had any idea how successful it was going to be. Biden’s disdain for the putschists is a signal to the remainder of the GOP, and it tells us everything about what he plans to do domestically. His administration’s plan is a clumsy attempt to split the far-right fascists from the right fascists in the GOP and transform the center (straddling both sides of the aisle) into a bloc capable of resisting the right and the moderate left. In other words, Biden is attempting to shore up the crumbling status quo position at the center of government.

In foreign policy, the entire State of the Union is a declaration of war: war on the Russian Federation, which he intends to escalate (and indeed, in the week since giving the speech has already begun escalating) and war, eventually on the People’s Republic of China, which he signaled over and over again with his talk of the United States Empire standing on its own two feet and relying on no one.

So, we have our outline for the final period of the Biden presidency: war, on every front; with enemies foreign and domestic, and between the ruling class and the working classes but with a concomitant peace: peace between the fractious and rebellious groups within the bourgeois ruling class, so they can present a united front. Well, let him draw his sword. We are forging ours.

The residents of East Palestine, Ohio, and of communities all along the Ohio River basin, for hundreds of miles around, are the latest victims in the war between the working classes and the bosses — in this case, mostly big financier companies like Vanguard Group, Blackrock, and JPMorgan Chase. Although the people and ecosystems of Ohio were exposed to these toxins by the careless greed of Norfolk Southern, this disaster doesn’t have just one father. No, to get to this place, Norfolk Southern has lobbied and bribed its pet politicians, has spent $450,000 on Democratic politicians in just 2022 alone, and spends every year over $1.5 million in lobbying to the Congress. This disaster has been years in the making. Under the administration of President Obama, proposed safety regulations for cars like those being transported by the Norfolk Southern death train were scuttled by Norfolk Southern dollars. Although a train leaking vinyl chloride had derailed in New Jersey in 2012, Obama’s administration took the rail company bribe and let the deadly transport continue.

Under the Trump administration, the rail companies went farther — they pushed the government to withdraw regulations requiring better braking systems on all cars carrying hazardous waste.

The final blow came this last fall and winter when President Biden and the capitalist-controlled Congress helped the rail giants crush a railway worker’s strike. One of the chief demands of that strike was an increase in staffing on the sometimes miles-long cargo trains that the rail companies send cross-country with dangerously slow braking systems (developed in the late 1800s), without proper hazardous waste warnings, and now with chronically and criminally over-tired workers.

They asked for fourteen sick days. They did not receive fourteen sick days. They did not receive twelve sick days. They did not receive ten sick days. They did not even receive the seven sick days that Democrats hastily tacked on to the contract at the last minute. They did not receive five sick days. They did not receive one sick day. The rail workers have received exactly what they started with: no paid sick leave.

This united, capitalist front of Republican and Democratic politicians is directly responsible for the tragedy in East Palestine. President Biden, President Trump, President Obama, and all the cronies and lackeys in Washington are as responsible for the derailment as if they had dropped a phosgene gas bomb directly on the town of East Palestine.

At 8:54 p.m. on 3 February, along main track 1 in East Palestine, Norfolk Southern’s general merchandise freight 32N derailed, jumping 38 cars from the track and causing a fire. The train was hauling 20 hazardous material cars and 11 of those cars derailed. Train 32N was 150 cars long. “The longer the train, the heavier the train, the more wear and tear it puts on the actual rail itself, as well as the equipment,” said Jared Cassity, legislative director for the country’s largest rail union, SMART-Transportation Division. “We’re seeing more wear and tear. We’re seeing more unintended train separations, which is where the train breaks apart.”

How many rail workers do the monopolies put on trains that are 150 cars long? Two. Plus one trainee. For transportation magnates, fewer employees means more profits. Not only that, 32N broke down at least once before derailing in East Palestine according to Norfolk Southern employees. It could happen again. It will happen again.

The National Transportation Safety Board promises a full report in a few weeks, but for now all we know is that the government claimed the fire threatened the pressurized vinyl chloride cars. When subject to fire, a pressurized vinyl chloride car is dangerous to a range of at least a half mile, according to the National Library of Medicine, and the only way to put the fire out is to flood the entire area and cool the containers.

Sittig’s Handbook of Toxic and Hazardous Chemical Carcinogens contains this ominous warning: “The only respirators recommended for firefighting are self-contained breathing apparatuses that have full face-pieces and are operated in a pressure-demand or other positive-pressure mode.”

Since the derailment, thousands of local animals have died, poisoned by the release of the hazardous chemicals. In the few days after 3 February alone, before the controlled release began, 3,500 dead fish were found in local waterways. It is almost certain at this point that, despite government protests to the contrary, the Ohio River has been contaminated.

Andrea Belden was staying with her boyfriend and their two cats at his grandparents’ East Palestine house when the train jumped the tracks. Although they fled immediately when the evacuations were announced, her 2-year old cat Leo fell ill. Leo, who had been given a clean bill of health two weeks prior at his vet appointment, was sent to the emergency vet and Andrea was told that “his heart was enlarged, he had fluid around his heart and in his lungs, [and] his blood pressure was severely low.” The vet told her it was heart disease triggered by vinyl chloride poisoning. When she wrote to Norfolk Southern asking for help to pay the $11,000 and mounting veterinarian bills, she was told that she should file a damaged property claim and might get recompense in weeks or months. She couldn’t afford to continue his treatment. Leo died.

All residents of East Palestine within a 1-mile radius of the crash were evacuated on February 6, the day Mike DeWine and Pennsylvania’s Governor Shapiro (a Republican and a Democrat, respectively) decided they were going to vent the vinyl chloride cars. Those who refused to depart were arrested by the East Palestine sheriff’s department and taken out of the zone of death. Despite the danger, Governor DeWine and all state and federal officials involved in the crash gave the all-clear signal for the residents to return home a mere two days later, on 8 February.

In the meantime, the all-empire news has been obsessed with something of little or no moment: Chinese-made weather balloons. The media has been plastered with the announcement of a Chinese balloon shot down over the Atlantic, near South Carolina. The People’s Republic informed U.S. officials that it was an off-course civilian balloon, but the Department of Defense has spent the last two weeks blanketing the news media with stories about a worldwide Chinese spy balloon network. Coverage has been focused almost entirely on the “spy balloon” story which, even if it were true, would be a matter of no moment for most of the residents of the U.S. Empire — unlike the poison-cloud released from the Norfolk Southern train in Ohio.

Only in the past few days has the Norfolk Southern death train been publicized to any degree. On February 8, a reporter was arrested at a press conference given by the Ohio governor and charged with criminal trespass; this is the degree to which the U.S. government wants the people of this empire to see the criminal contempt with which the capitalists treat the working classes. It took until February 15 for the state of Ohio to drop the charges against the arrested reporter, even though he was clearly arrested at a press conference merely for doing his job.

Given the disregard with which the organs of the U.S. state, even those that are supposedly “non-political,” like the Center for Disease Control, have treated the COVID crisis, and given the response of the government to legitimate inquiries about the dangers of the spill, it’s not surprising that the residents of East Palestine are asking questions. At a town hall conference on the 15th, many complained that they still felt sick. The Environmental Protection Agency, although certifying that everything is supposedly safe, has warned that residents shouldn’t vacuum for too long (for fear of disturbing particles and throwing them into the air where they’ll be inhaled) and that they should disinfect and clean surfaces continuously. When the residents at the February 15 town hall asked where the representatives of Norfolk Southern were, they were told that none had chosen to attend because they didn’t feel safe.

In the coming days, Norfolk Southern will try to defend itself. Some of what you’ll hear is even true — train derailments do occur at a fairly regular rate in the U.S. (about 1,000 every year), but disasters of this magnitude are rare. The rail monopolies have completely reorganized their operations to cut out the costs of workers since the start of the COVID pandemic. Precision Scheduling Railroading, the cousin of “just in time” inventory management, was developed by the railroad owners to reduce the number of workers per train — at great savings to the monopolists and at great costs to the people living in the U.S. Empire. Trains are now 30% longer, some miles from the engine to the last car. During COVID, the rail industry has fired 30% of its workforce. Conductors and other workers are required to walk miles from car to car, to work on skeleton crews, and to be responsible for increasingly long trains. Those workers are badly paid, given no time off, and are forced to work while sick if they want to keep their jobs.

This is class warfare. Railway workers, traditionally the most well-organized labor sector in the U.S. Empire, have always stood at the forefront of the working class battle for control over production. Who are the most impacted by lax safety standards, out-of-date brakes, and skeleton crews? Railway workers. Who are most impacted by train derailments? Railway workers, followed closely, in the cases of chemical leaks like this one, by the working class people who live near the rail lines themselves. At every step of the way, railway workers warned of something like this and did whatever they could to combat it — to no avail, as the federal government did its job and sided again and again with the railroad monopolies.

The fight against workers for control over profits, for control over industry regulation, for control over their very lives, is intensifying. It’s no wonder that the monopolists are striking some of their hardest blows at the rail industry, which has stood ahead of most other U.S. production in terms of organized labor. Rail workers are class-conscious. They know it takes a walkout of just a few people to paralyze the entire rail system across the whole country. The rail monopolies are only the forefront of the capitalist response to organization among the working classes. As a comparison, for forcing workers to work in unsafe conditions and causing a chemical explosion, the People’s Republic of China sentenced the owner of a chemical firm in Tianjin to a suspended death sentence. Here in the U.S., executives are almost never held accountable. The fact of the matter is, the rail workers don’t need Norfolk Southern. They don’t need the investors that own the monopolies. They don’t need the capitalist “managers.” In fact, management from the capitalists — really, interference from the investors — merely degrades their ability to work, their ability to keep the people of the U.S. safe as they transport the dangerous chemicals required for the many industrial processes across the country. Without the investors, the monopolists, the industrial capitalists, production would be smoother, faster, cleaner, more democratic, and safer.

It is worthwhile to look at the liberal political and media response to this murder, which has emphasized shock and horror, and has called for massive but non-confrontational “protest” assemblies. These commentators are not looking to create the conditions for lasting or fundamental change, and their calls do not signify a shift towards anti-racism in our government. The goal of these propagandists, from government officials to media talking-heads, is to assuage mass outrage in the wake of yet another act of police terror; their goal is to render “protest” harmless. With this behavior, these ideological institutions are also carrying out their function; in this case protecting their more repressive brethren.

Claude Levi-Strauss, a founder of structural anthropology, once observed: “To say that society functions is a truism; but to say that everything, in a society, functions is absurd.” The society we are looking at, the U.S., is capitalist: It is directed entirely by a dictatorship of the bourgeois class. This function is maintained and reproduced by the capitalist state, through many specific apparatuses. These can be ideological institutions, concerned with reproducing the various social relations that form capitalist society: those concerned with legislature and legality; with education, training, and certification; with reproduction of workers and family; with creation, distribution and censorship of media; with disability, eugenics, and the management of the surplus worker army; and many more. Or they can be repressive arms like the police, prisons, border security, or others which act directly to suppress any struggle against the ruling capitalist class, and carry out direct population management.  It is obvious to most how the police fight against the interests and cause of workers, of Black people, of Indigenous people, of women, of LGBTQ people. What is perhaps less obvious is how this repression is supported at the ideological level. 

The primary approach of liberal media to repression by police and other state arms is simply silence. Most abuse, by police or otherwise, is routine, and where possible bourgeois propagandists simply do not highlight it. When this approach fails and the crimes of the state’s repressive arms threaten to break through this wall of silence, the ruling class throws the gears in reverse. The portrayal then is as an event of shocking dysfunction that all Americans must unite in outrage over, about which there must be tragic soul searching. This accomplishes several goals: it obscures the systematic nature of the repression from being focussed on, it pushes an imagined “national unity” (disregarding the fact that there is no “American nation”) in front of a real class dictatorship, and it promotes individual moral reflection over collective direct resolution. President Biden’s statement on the murder of Tyre Nichols is a very recent, very clear example of the government’s role in ideological production — that is, in the crafting and control of the socially-accepted narrative surrounding these events. Biden described the murder as an exceptional tragedy and situates it within an abstract “pain” and “trauma” experienced by Black people in the U.S., rather than a concrete system of racial repression. Biden’s most definite, actionable declaration is to “join Mr. Nichols’ family in calling for peaceful protest.”

Suppose we take Biden’s framing for granted, and believe that the murder of Tyre Nichols was an isolated, exceptionally tragic event, a moment of terrible dysfunction in an otherwise “functional” police system, and suppose we take for granted Biden’s appeal for “peaceful protest” in reaction to this momentary tragedy. The resulting picture is incoherent. How can the chief executive of the state call for peaceful protest against the action of that same state? How would any protest compel him to act, that the weight of tragedy didn’t already? If, however, we view this statement as one part of capitalist society (the office of the President of the U.S.) functioning to maintain another part (Black oppression, expropriation, and murder), then things are totally clear. The work of the statement is to push for the exceptionalization of this routine anti-Black violence, to create assemblies for “protest” that instead merely mark the event and then dissolve again. What is the capitalist state advocating? Nothing more than protests that act as a pressure valve! In other words, Biden says, “Burn off some anger, release some steam, but don’t let it threaten anything important — like our property.”

This analysis is nothing new. The British-Indian Marxist-Leninist and Communist Party leader Rajani Palme Dutt wrote similarly in 1923 about the error of highlighting individual atrocities and so casting into shadow the routine basis of imperial violence:

The practice of peaceful liberal protest in the U.S., as encouraged and specifically called upon by all levels of state propaganda, is just such a sentimental tradition. Many of those who participate oppose the cult of empire, and in doing so are sometimes described or self-identified as anti-imperialist. But they remain short of positive action, and frequently fail to even understand the material basis of imperialism beyond its cult. Indeed much of this liberal ‘anti-imperialism’ is committed to a social-democratic welfare state funded by taxation of capital, and so ultimately endorse exploitation by the empire they claim to oppose.

We must always ask, however, what is the solution that you propose? We will quickly see the bankruptcy of the liberal ideology: the solution is not a solution at all, but rather a massive grieving session. There is no solvable problem, they are telling us; the crimes of policing are elevated from the realm of politics, to the realm of tragedy. At best, we may expect some token gestures — perhaps adding some extra funding for police sensitivity training — or some other non-correction.

Our discussion above is not intended to condone anyone sitting idly by in the aftermath of police abuses, or other acts of repressive state terror. Instead, we emphasize that as we stand up and speak out, it must be to communicate the routine nature of state violence, and its constitutive importance in maintaining capitalist society. Our protests must coincide with and emanate from the project of building organizations of working class power, and specifically of Black Power. With this in mind, the message of any mass assembly is simple: To the oppressed masses, protest must communicate the rooted presence, revolutionary consciousness, fighting discipline, and unwavering solidarity of our organizations; to our enemies in the capitalist state, protest must communicate the heightened organization and rising power of the people, and the continual threat of popular rebellion against our oppressors. A peaceful assembly, called for and dismissed by the President himself, is quite the opposite: it is a demonstration of powerlessness and mass disorganization. In the words of Trotsky, such assemblies make up “a safety valve for mass dissatisfaction, a condition of the stability of the social structure”. If a riot is the language of the unheard, as the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, then we must not let it be silenced and rendered nonthreatening by our rulers’ appeals to officially condoned sentiments of “peaceful protest.”

It is the duty of every worker — and especially those claiming class-consciousness — to not only join in the marches and protests, but to propose real and concrete solutions to the system-wide oppressions, even short of a total revolution in social relations. Black people are being murdered every day. It is not enough for us to simply point to the existence of the problem (one here hidden by consciously framing it as a “tragedy” rather than what it is — merely the every-day workings of the white supremacist state machine). It is not enough to say that the fault lies on the heads of the ruling class, that they are all collectively and individually culpable, that the state machine in the form of the police itself is to blame. We must present actual steps to resolve this century-long crisis of white terror and murder of the Black population.

The organic consciousness of the Black laboring masses have already rushed out ahead of many organizations of the working class; community control of policing (the establishment of local oversight boards with the power to cut funding or redirect it, to hold police accountable, and so on) lags behind the people. The slogan has already appeared: Abolition! Abolition of the capitalist police! Our place is standing with Black workers against the murderers in blue; our chief task is to concretize the drive for abolition into organized forms of working class power, and not allow it to be diverted into a narrative of futile grief and abstract tragedy.

We leave the reader with a passage from the Black revolutionary, Marxist theoretician, political prisoner, and martyr George Jackson’s Blood in my Eye to consider.

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

Memphis is a city built on slavery. Black African slaves picked the cotton that was shipped up to the city wharfs. Black slaves worked the docks loading the cotton onto the steamboats. From its founding in 1819 until abolition, the buying and selling of slaves was one of the most lucrative businesses in Memphis. Nathan Bedford Forrest, city alderman, owned a slaving firm that charged between $800 and $1,000 for each individual person sold as chattel. In a good year, Forrest and his partner Byrd Hill sold more than 1,000 slaves, with a net profit of somewhere in the realm of $10,000-$30,000 1850 dollars — the equivalent buying power of $370,000-$1.1m in 2023 dollars.

The city fathers were uneasy — by 1860, there were 16,953 slaves within Shelby County and only 22,000 free whites. The danger to the white slave masters was obvious. None of the slavers nor the enslaved were likely to forget the fate (or the lesson) of Haiti; the enslaved looked to their Haitian brothers for inspiration, while the slavers looked on in horror. A law of 1848 created the office of city marshal. On March 27, 1850, a bill was passed by the government of Memphis that required 

State laws against slaves, free blacks, and mulattoes to be enforced by city marshal. 

Slaves not allowed to be entertained or permitted to visit or remain on Sabbath in the house of any free person of color. 

Large collection of slaves banned, except for public worship conducted in an orderly manner under superintendence of a white person. 

Unlawful for slaves to remain in corporate limits of city after sun set or any part of the Sabbath, except by permission of owner specifying limit of time.

This was the foundation of the Memphis police department. In 1852, a resolution was passed to furnish the “Day and Night police” with badges and uniforms. By 1857, the city marshal, the same one who was to enforce the anti-slave laws, was made chief of police and, on February 20, 1860, the marshal title was changed to just that: Chief of Police.

Slaves were property, Black men and women who were held and sold as any other piece of property was. The Memphis police force was founded, like every police department in the entire United States, to protect property. In Memphis, it served a double purpose: protecting the investments of property owners, and protecting property owners (slavers) from the rightful vengeance of their own property, the slaves. The legal end of human beings as property didn’t simply extinguish the legacy of slavery. Although the end of the Civil War saw a formal end to the enslavement of Black individuals, new property relations were quickly erected by the white-supremacist ruling classes. In the South, these were created by the Dixiecrats to protect their huge plantations and their monopoly on politics. In the North, these new property relations were primarily the work of industrialists keen to win over the allegiance of a mostly imported, white, European work force, often with the active collaboration of those workers themselves.

Mid 19th-century Memphis was home to a large number of poor Irish laborers, mostly confined to slums and excluded from city politics. City police records often described them as “Irishman; no account” and “low Irishman,” hounding them and dogging their tracks. However, by the late 1850s, Irish settlers coming into the country from New York and other East Coast ports established a foothold in the Memphis business community. In 1861 Ireland-born John Park, who had married a young Bourbon-Dixie widow and was a successful real estate speculator, was elected mayor. Irish settlers soon dominated the city government and were determined to stay in power no matter the cost. After the close of the Civil War, as thousands of Black refugees and soldiers from the embattled regions of the former secessionist states poured into Memphis, the Irish community of the city, conscious of its shaky hold on power when compared with the old Bourbon Dixiecrats, essentially went to war with the new Black community. Irish laborers tried to prevent Black workers from entering the skilled trades. By early 1866, the city was a powder keg.

In January of that year, Mayor Park and Shelby County sheriff T.M. Winters asked Major General George Stoneman to remove his federal troops from the city streets and turn them back over to the Memphis police. In late April, the army discharged the last of its Black  troops at nearby Fort Pickering. They came into South Memphis waiting for their pay vouchers. On May Day a crowd of one hundred or so former soldiers congregated on South Street where they celebrated and discharged their weapons in the air. In the middle of the May celebration, a white wagon driver turning onto South Street crashed into a Black wagon driver; the two men started arguing. The soldiers rushed to the Black driver’s defense, and the Irish police to the white driver’s. Gunfire was exchanged, and soon there was a full-on street battle between former federal soldiers from the Black Union regiments and the Memphis police. Local whites stiffened the police line, joining them with their own weapons as irregulars.

It was only when Maj. Gen. Stoneman’s federal soldiers arrived to separate the sides in the late afternoon that the fighting stopped. With peace more or less restored, two Black soldiers arrested, and the rest still waiting for their pay, the fall of night saw white Memphians swarm into South Memphis and slaughter every Black person they saw. A reporter from the New York Times wrote:

Large numbers of armed citizens repaired to the scene of the fight and commenced firing upon every negro who made himself visible. One negro upon South Street, a quiet, inoffensive laborer, was shot down almost in front of his own cabin, and after life was extinct, his body was fired into, cut and beat in a most horrible manner.

The Memphis police joined the white mob. For two days, white Memphis burned and massacred the Black community in South Memphis. Forty-six Black people had been killed. Two whites had died. Ninety-one Black homes, twelve Black schools, and four Black churches had been burned.

The Police as White Guard

Tyre Nichols was murdered by the Memphis police. The ruling class has been doing its best to try to confine the public dialogue to the five officers their lackeys have indicted. It shouldn’t escape us that these instant suspensions and indictments fell on five Black policemen. But they, the capitalists and their mouthpieces, desperately want (need) you to believe that the capitalist police are a good institution, a necessary institution. A permanent institution. The only way for them to do this is to perform the same sleight-of-hand game they always do. You remember the phrases: “a bad apple,” rogue cops, even whole rogue departments. 

But the young U.S. settler-republic didn’t build police departments. In the English colonies and the early republic, police simply did not exist. By the 1830s and ‘40s, every urban center in the new settler-republic faced crises in public order spurred on by the development of industrial capitalism. All of a sudden, between the 1840s and ‘80s, every major U.S. city built up a large police force. Why? Sam Mitrani answers this question precisely and elegantly in The Rise of the Chicago Police Department: Class and Conflict, 1850-1894: “The most basic answer is that the leading businessmen who dominated both urban economies and their politics pushed city governments to build powerful armed institutions that could defend their property and their interests from the new threats that accompanied the development of a wage labor economy.”

The police are the frontline, the shock troops, of the capitalist class. The Dixiecrat planters are gone; formal chattel slavery has been abolished. Legal enslavement is now permitted only through the criminal “justice” system and the state’s prisons, where prisoners, disproportionately Black, toil to produce commodities for private corporations. But though the legal framework of slavery is gone, the property relations of race remain, transformed and reconfigured, but no less poisonous. 

Although only 13% of the U.S. population is Black, 38% of all inmates in prison or jail are. Black citizens are disenfranchised by felony convictions at a rate of 5.3 times that of the white population. In the largest 50 metropolitan areas of the country, mortgage denial rates for Black applicants is twice that of the overall population. Black homeownership is lower across the board than white homeownership. Between 1910 and 1997, Black farmland has decreased (gone into foreclosure, been purchased away, etc.) by 90%. Black wage-earners earn 30% less than white wage-earners on average, and Black households have one-eighth the wealth of white households.

These facts of racial inequality are rooted in the property relations of white supremacy. Black-owned property can be seized by the state, by the banks, and by white capitalists and landlords by a variety of legal means much easier than white-owned property can. Who enforces this regime of property rights and relations? Why, the U.S. garrison-police. The hyper-exploited regions of the U.S., those places where Black and Indigenous peoples have been forced by white supremacist zoning, lending, and other laws, are treated as internal frontiers. In the Black Belt and the urban centers, the police don’t serve the local community; they are a foreign garrison, preventing rebellion. Today, nearly 25% of all police officers in the U.S. first serve in the military. The U.S. police force, no matter the state, no matter the municipality, no matter the national composition, is an occupying army. Killer cops aren’t the exception and they aren’t “the bad apple that spoils the bunch.” They are the intended outcome of the policy that unleashes stormtroopers in blue on the streets of every poor and majority-Black neighborhood in every city across the U.S. Empire. The capitalist relies on the law officer and their truncheon just as much as they rely on strikebreaker and the Pinkerton, the warden and the prison walls, and just as much as they rely on their lackeys in the Congress to pass their laws.

These killer cops are the front line of the struggle between capital and labor in the United States. The horrific murder of Tyre Nichols is not an aberration, but a byproduct of a system working as intended. Every day, Black people are tortured, terrorized, and slain by the U.S. police. While the police kill white persons too, they target Black, Indigenous, and Latinx persons at a disproportionately high rate; they swarm majority-minority neighborhoods, always on the lookout for racially oppressed people to brutalize. This is by design. Those groups form the internal colonies or semi-colonies of the U.S. and those nations oppressed by the white settler majority — and it is not stretching the meaning to call it what it is, the U.S. Empire. 

Tyre Nichols now joins the other names of the slain, including Elton Hayes, murdered in much the same fashion by the very same Memphis police, 52 years ago in 1971. But the legacy of murder and terror stretches back to the middle of the 19th century, and it will end only when property relations themselves are reformed. No reform to a capitalist police department can prevent it from being monstrous.

Great Britain drafted colonized subjects into the colonial police. It was the Indian gurkha armies that conquered the princedoms of the subcontinent. The Portuguese and Dutch merchant houses in Indonesia, Singapore, and Ceylon elevated local merchants to be their agents, their compradors. The same is true of the oppressed who reach a side-deal with the system that oppresses them here in the U.S. Empire. The Black policeman is a colonial turncoat. The Black Democrat mayors of cities like Chicago, Atlanta, and Minneapolis never even try to stand in the way of police militarization and expansion.

James Baldwin warned:

We used to say, “If you just must call a policeman”—for we hardly ever did—”for God’s sake, try to make sure it’s a white one.” A Black policeman could completely demolish you. He knew far more about you than a white policeman could and you were without defenses before this Black brother in uniform whose entire reason for breathing seemed to be his hope to offer proof that, though he was Black, he was not Black like you.

In the year since Trump’s failed January 6th putsch, amid the ongoing COVID-19 plague, to which the U.S. Empire alone has lost more than a million people (and counting), and against the backdrop of an accelerating cost-of-living and housing crisis, the enemy state has just managed to restabilize — but only just. The Democratic Party, with its tenuous partial-majority in Congress, under the faltering leadership of the Biden administration, is doing everything in its power to hold on to this modicum of stability. Meanwhile, this “stabilizing” Democrat left-wing of American fascism contends with the rising extreme-right Trumpite faction of the Republicans. This “destabilizing” Republican faction is locked in a struggle for hegemony over the federal and state governments, and aims for the final conversion of the blood-drenched U.S. Empire into an arch-fascist settler reich.

It has been some two-and-a-half years since the murder of George Floyd, and his long shadow still looms, grim and unforgiving, from one coast to the other of this genocidal settler-colonial empire. Court proceedings are ongoing for three of Floyd’s murderers. The square where Floyd was murdered, renamed George Perry Floyd Jr. Square in his honor, is still occupied by local activists, whose demands for justice have still not been met by the local Minneapolis government.

It has been some two-and-a-half years since police departments across the U.S. Empire, those barracks of the shock-troops of white supremacist state terror, were set ablaze by millions of the oppressed masses, rioting in righteous fury, in what the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called “the language of the unheard.” In that time, the rate of murders-by-cop has only risen; indeed, 2022 was the deadliest year on record.

Now, in the aftermath of yet another brutal and gruesome murder-by-police, our fascist rulers are terrified that the oppressed masses will again rise up, and again threaten to burn down every last rotten institution of their white supremacist terror regime.

Now the enemy state is wavering.

Only two words are on the minds of the U.S. Empire’s capitalist despots, and “justice” isn’t one of them. “Damage control” — this is the order of the day; this is the sole focus and the sole crying demand of our monopolist tyrants.

And so, before the oppressed masses, on mainstream TV news, on Twitter, on podiums facing an aggrieved public, they trot out their loyal, stabilizing, left-wing-of-fascism politicians — from the local police chief to the President of the United States — with simple but absolutely vital marching orders:

Keep that righteous fury contained.

Keep the uprisings at bay.

Keep intact the unjust peace.

So enters Cerelyn J. Davis, the police chief of Memphis, Tennessee, whose rabid-dog officers mercilessly beat Tyre Nichols, unarmed and pleading for his life, into a coma during a routine traffic stop. In an exclusive interview with CNN the night before the body-cam footage of the murder was released, Chief Davis somberly warned, “You’re going to see acts that defy humanity. You’re going to see a disregard for life, duty of care, … and a level of physical interaction that is above what is required in law enforcement.” The police chief declares herself “outraged,” stating that the violence against Nichols “was incomprehensible.”

The police chief further acknowledged that the “extraordinary measures” taken against the killer cops — namely, that all five were quickly fired and charged with second-degree murder — “speaks to the fact that, over the last several years, we have all talked about police legitimacy and police reform. And I think it’s really important that in instances like this … when a person’s constitutional rights [and] their civil rights have been violated, that we act swiftly.” In other words, Chief Davis is admitting, although indirectly, with weasel-words, that the “extraordinary measures” taken against these killer cops are a preventative measure — that the goal is to “get ahead” of the inevitable public outrage, and to quell potential uprisings before they begin.

When we say that our rulers are trembling with fear of another Summer 2020, another wave of uprisings, this is what we mean. When in recent memory, or, indeed, in the U.S. Empire’s whole bloody history, has a killer cop been fired and arrested even before the news gets out, and even before the public demands it — let alone five killer cops, let alone on charges of second-degree murder, let alone in such a carefully coordinated and carefully televised manner?

Now the enemy state is wavering.

Steve Mulroy, the district attorney of Shelby County, openly and explicitly admits that containment was the local government’s goal. In an interview with CBS, when asked “what led you to the charges, and why you all [i.e., local government officials] feel the need to prepare the public the way you’re preparing them to see this video” Mulroy replied, 

In any case like this, where you have an officer involved fatality, there’s going to be a certain amount of public agitation. [Note the district attorney’s turn of phrase! Even when charging the killer cops with murder, Mulroy cannot bring himself to call the “officer involved fatality” what it really was — a cold-blooded, ruthless murder.] But when people actually see with their own eyes the kinds of things that occurred in this incident, there’s an even greater potential for a very serious public reaction. And I think that’s why it was important for the charges to be announced prior to the release of the video, and for expectations to be set, and for people in the community with credibility to call for calm… If people feel the need to protest, we’re confident that protests will be peaceful.

The two sides of this last sentence, its cravenness — if people feel the need to protest? — and its calculating, abject honesty — we’re confident that protests will be peaceful — together encapsulate the enemy state’s self-contradictory maneuvering. On the one hand, our rulers are attempting to whitewash the social character of the Tyre Nichols murder, namely the fact that it was an act of state terror against the oppressed Black people within the U.S. Empire; and by this method, the puppet politicians of the monopolist tyrants are attempting not only to “get out ahead” of and quell potential uprisings, but to call into question, in the public’s mind, the very act of protesting state terror. On the other hand, the agents of the enemy state, the politicians, officials, and spokespersons, are openly admitting their fear of the oppressed masses, of our rage, of our capacity to burn this wretched, fascist empire to the ground — a fear well-deserved, and a capacity realized only in half-measure during the Summer 2020 Uprisings.

The ruling capitalist class and its representatives in government will never abolish the police, for the police stand dutifully between the expanse of private property of the capitalists — their incredible hordes of wealth — and the overwhelming majority of the U.S. Empire’s population, the mass of the working classes, the poor and dispossessed, the colonized and the nationally oppressed. The ruling class cannot afford to put an end to police terror. Thus, instead, the enemy state must desperately seek out new stratagems, new maneuvers and ploys by which they might deceive, distract, and assuage the righteous fury of the oppressed masses.

Now the enemy state is wavering.

Chief Davis also claimed in her interview, “I don’t think I’ve witnessed anything of that nature in my entire career. Really.”

But the police chief is, in fact, lying. In truth, the officers who ambushed and murdered Tyre Nichols were members of a police unit called the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace in Our Neighborhoods, or SCORPION — a unit established by Chief Davis; the blue-uniformed murderers were trained in “violent crime reduction” — SCORPION’s stated purpose, code for the violent, terroristic suppression of poor and oppressed communities — under Chief Davis’ tenure. In only the past two months, during December 2022 and January 2023, under Chief Davis’ command, Memphis police have murdered four people, the latest of whom is Tyre Nichols.

Amber Sherman, local Black Lives Matter organizer, described the murder of Tyre Nichols as “extremely disgusting, but also not a surprise, considering the way police here treat people in Memphis.” In an interview with Democracy Now!, Sherman said,

We’re extremely overpoliced. Every experience that my friends have had, and of folks that I know, has been violent. [The police] immediately approach situations with violence. They don’t give us the respect that they want us to give them. It’s always, “You’re a criminal!” and “How can we put you down?” or “How can we put you in your place?”

When asked whether the violence Tyre Nichols suffered at the hands of police was “consistent” with the community’s experience of interactions with the Memphis police, Sherman replied,

Yes. This experience, among Black people, isn’t abnormal. It’s literally just been caught on camera. We have experienced this same kind of violence over and over and over again in our communities. And their cute little statements [i.e., those of the police chief and other local government officials] don’t mean anything to me, because the SCORPION movement still exists… Honestly, [Chief Davis] can keep the cute statements; it does nothing for us.

According to Sherman, the goal of the Memphis PD’s SCORPION program “was [to] flood ‘high crime areas’ with officers. And that’s supposed to deter the crime. But that definitely isn’t what’s happening… They’re scaring citizens; they’re assaulting people, and they’re murdering them.”

Meanwhile, the Democrat mayor of Memphis, Jim Strickland, says in a regular “weekly update” that “no one, including law enforcement, is above the law. I assure you we will do everything we can to keep this type of heinous act from happening again.” To this end, the mayor states that “We are initiating an outside, independent review of the training, policies, and operations of our specialized units. Since this event happened, the SCORPION Unit has been and remains inactive.”

Local community members active in the Movement for Black Lives have rejected the empty promises, two-faced expressions of “outrage” and “condolences,” and crocodile tears of the chief of police and the mayor, and have condemned both, along with the whole rotten “local officialdom” of Memphis, for their political cowardice and their dutiful role in upholding white supremacy.

At first glance, one might be fooled into believing that Mayor Strickland is taking action, just as an elected official should. In fact, however, the mayor fails to mention that this is far from the first time he has received complaints about the Memphis PD in general and the SCORPION program in particular. Memphis activists have confronted Mayor Strickland about the SCORPION Unit’s rampant abuse and called for its disbandment, among broader calls to defund and scale back the department. But only now has the unit been deactivated — only after the unit’s officers have been caught in the act of one of multiple “heinous” murders, and only as mass rage builds in Memphis and across the country. Mayor Strickland could have prevented Tyre Nichols’ murder, and could have prevented all the murders-by-police that preceded Nichols’ murder — but only now does the mayor proclaim that “no one, including law enforcement, is above the law.”

Disbanding the SCORPION Unit is nothing more than a desperate “public relations” stunt — yet another tactic aimed at mitigating protest activities.

Now the enemy state is wavering.

Leading maneuver of containment, this discordant symphony of canned outrage and condolences from the representatives of the left-wing of American fascism, is our decrepit President Joe Biden. His statement, published yesterday, just after the release of the video of the Tyre Nichols’ murder, is instructive.

In the first paragraph, Biden refers to the murder as a “beating that resulted in Tyre Nichols’ death” — the president, just like the Shelby County district attorney, cannot depart from the police-union “public relations” style guidelines for referring to murders-by-cop as “officer involved incidents” that “result in deaths.”

In the second paragraph, the president says his “heart goes out” to the family and “all Americans” grieving for Nichols. He then says, “The footage that was released this evening will leave people justifiably outraged” — but, wait! — “Those who seek justice should not to [sic.!] resort to violence or destruction. Violence is never acceptable; it is illegal and destructive.”

How sympathetic! “Our” president takes care to warn us that, aggrieved as Black people and other oppressed people in this country may be, fighting back against our oppressors is not the answer; it’s “illegal and destructive.” Yes, riots and uprisings are destructive — that’s the point. The alternative is passively awaiting our benevolent rulers to hand down kind words, alms, and stepwise reprieves from the daily terror we suffer.

Or, as Biden puts it, toward the end of his statement, “Real and lasting change will only come if we take action to prevent tragedies like this from ever happening again.” But again, only if said action remains nonthreatening, timid, servile, contained.

What “real and lasting change” does Biden have in mind? An executive order and a failed police reform bill, the so-called George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which would have done less than nothing to scale back the presence of police in and the terror they inflict against oppressed communities.

The president’s words are not only empty, but shamelessly deceptive. In the president’s so-called Safer America Plan, announced in July 2022, the Biden administration’s “fiscal year 2023 budget requests a fully paid-for new investment of approximately $35 billion to support law enforcement and crime prevention — in addition to the President’s $2 billion discretionary request for these same programs.” Biden has a decades-long track record, first as a senator, and now as president, of supporting police militarization and police terror, of promoting racist policies, including Jim Crow laws, and of dutifully working to maintain the centuries-old regime of white supremacist state terror upon which the U.S. Empire was built and expanded. Despite his relatively new, “progressive” veneer, Biden remains the same militarist and the same white supremacist he always was — and requests nearly $40 billion in yearly police militarization funding to prove it.

At every level, from the federal to local governments, the enemy state takes the same approach to police terror and the waves of mass uprising that inevitably spring up against it: Police militarization and police terror continue, unabated and without reprieve, public outcry and mass discontent notwithstanding. But from time to time, mass discontent boils over into mass rage, and mass rage fuels the mobilization of mass uprisings — yes, sporadic, disorganized, and without a clear political direction, but nevertheless powerful enough to shake the very foundations of the U.S. Empire.

Now the enemy state is wavering.

Only in the coming days will we learn whether this wavering has spared our rulers a refrain of the Summer 2020 rebellion — whether it has spared the white-terror institutions of their fascist empire the righteous, self-emancipating flames of the people. In the meantime, our proclamation can only be:

Down with the enemy state!

Death to the fascist U.S. Empire!

All support and all glory to the Black liberation struggle!

If you live in the U.S., chances are you’ve noticed something strange in the grocery store recently: the price of eggs has skyrocketed. The simple explanation you will likely hear from any news source is that this is a direct result of an egg shortage, brought on by an outbreak of avian flu. That is an oversimplification, and one that ignores the rampant profiteering going on across all sectors: although egg production has declined about 5% year-over-year, egg prices have more than doubled.

Although price increases are far outpacing supply chain issues, the outbreak has still been a precipitating factor. What will seldom get mentioned in mainstream coverage is the reason this avian flu outbreak has been so devastating. Far from a simple case of a few chickens getting sick enough to die, the main problem has been that farms have had to slaughter their entire stock of chickens whenever cases are found, to prevent it from spreading. This precaution has been deemed necessary as a direct result of the conditions on these farms. Laying hens are packed in as tightly as they can for the sake of efficiency, meaning one infected chicken is almost certainly going to spread the disease to every other individual. Not only is this grotesque mistreatment of animals a moral outrage, it is also an example of the short-sightedness of the capitalist mode of production. The current egg shortage is only the latest strain brought on by the profit motive of the capitalists.

Until the mid-20th century, almost every banana sold on the market was of a variety called Gros Michel. It was delicious, easy to ship, and therefore the most profitable banana for plantation owners to grow. Market pressures forced individual capitalists to grow a monoculture of Gros Michel bananas; anything else — being less profitable — would mean ceding market share to more market savvy competitors. Then, in the 1950s, a fungus called Fusarium ran rampant through the plantations, destroying every Gros Michel plant in quick succession. They had no immunity to the disease, and the cultivar was quickly driven to near-extinction. Rather than learning their lesson, the capitalists began switching over to the Fusarium-resistant Cavendish variety, which has now replaced Gros Michel as the one and only profitable banana. A new strain of the fungus now threatens the Cavendish monoculture, meaning we may soon see a global shortage of bananas yet again.

Palm oil has recently been taken up as a toothless liberal “ethical consumption” cause, due to the ecological devastation wrought by the palm oil industry. Vast tracts of biodiverse rainforest are routinely razed to make room for the very profitable business of growing palm plantations for the sake of extracting oil from the trees. As is commonly pointed out, this habitat destruction has driven the charismatic orangutan of Indonesia and Malaysia into critical levels of endangerment, but its environmental impact goes far beyond one gentle ape species. Rainforests act as incredibly resilient carbon sinks, with many interwoven ecological threads and self-reinforcing cycles — all of which get bulldozed in an instant in the name of the most expedient source of profit in capitalist agriculture: cash-crop monocultures. The liberal solution is of course not to forcibly remove the capitalists from power and prevent them from ever having the means and the motive to destroy the environment; liberal governments usually won’t even consider restricting capitalist production or penalizing capitalist firms for ecological harms.Instead, liberal governments entreat the consumer to consciously avoid consuming products containing palm oil. The problem with consumer-based approaches to environmentalism, however, is that there is no individual solution to a social problem. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and attempting to consume “conscientiously,” while noble, has the effect of removing a drop from the ocean of suffering caused by the capitalists’ insatiable pursuit of profit.

This problem goes far beyond eggs, bananas, and oil. Every aspect of the economy is governed by the profit motive, which demands efficiency over resilience. Each dollar spent on redundancy, safety, and minimizing environmental impact is a dollar given up to competitors. An egg company which wants to avoid avian flu outbreaks would need to invest much more into facilities that do not force chickens into hazardous conditions, putting them at a massive market disadvantage compared to their amoral competitors. The economic advantage yielded by mass-scale cost-cutting is so great that even regulation is no match: capitalists simply make a cost-benefit calculation. If the savings are greater than the potential of receiving a fine, they will opt to risk it. If the fine would be too burdensome, they instead invest their excess profits into political lobbying activities, and pay off politicians to roll back regulations altogether.

The entire modern economy is now run around the just-in-time philosophy, where shipments are perfectly calibrated to arrive at exactly the moment where the previous shipment has been depleted. This is an excellent profit-maximizing solution in the short-term, but any perturbation to the delivery schedule for any reason leaves businesses, workers, and consumers in dire straits. And there is no way for the capitalist system to move away from this “innovation,” as long as it still offers a competitive edge for its proponents. Capitalists are locked into their pursuit of the local optimum, trapped in a vicious cycle of overproduction by the very production-maximizing mechanisms they devised to beat their competitors.

Capitalism is inherently governed by profit maximization, driven by market competition. In a process similar to evolution by natural selection, market selection drives capitalist enterprises to evolve into their most immediately-profitable forms — but not necessarily the most optimal overall. Both in terms of long-term profitability and in terms of the broader social and ecological context, Capital has no interest in sustainability. It simply can’t afford to. At every possible opportunity, a capitalist must seek out the local maximum of profitability, even if that leads them on a path toward eventual ruin, because if they don’t, someone else will. If there is more profit to be made by increasing the exploitation of workers, a capitalist will do so, even knowing that might lead to workers rebelling in the future. If those workers later attempt to unionize, Capital will absorb the cost of attempting to break up the union through outside firms, scabs, or private security. At every turn, the most profitable action is taken, leaving a trail of inefficiency, social rot, and ecological ruin in its wake.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the mounting climate catastrophe, wrought by the carbon fuel upon which our energy system relies. Departure from cheap, plentiful, easily-transported energy sources like fossil fuels is simply impossible under the capitalist regime. Decades of feeble attempts at regulation — carbon taxes, subsidies for solar and wind technology, cleanliness standards, and so forth — have only managed to alter the calculations made in the minds of profit-optimizers. Governments in capital-dominated societies are only able to meddle in the market to the extent Capital allows, which is why no capitalist government has ever been able to reign in carbon emissions, just-in-time delivery, factory farming, or other social ills to any measurable degree.

The plight of the egg gives us a glimpse into the absurdity of the capitalist system. The drive for profit blinds the capitalist and binds them to a system of accelerating self-destruction — and their myopia will drag all life on Earth down with them.

The LAPD murdered Keenan Anderson on 3 January 2023, over a week ago. Keenan is the third person to be executed by the LAPD in January of this year — meaning the third in as many days. Horrifically, his case isn’t exceptional. He’s one of hundreds slaughtered every year by white terror. Last year, in 2022, police across the U.S. Empire killed at least 1,176 people — nearly 100 a month. This is two years after the June Uprisings rocked the white supremacist establishment in the wake of the extrajudicial murder of George Floyd and the subsequent calls to defund or abolish police across the U.S. With 2023 not even a month old, we’ve seen intensified white violence, as we warned last year: rising class consciousness has triggered a brutal wave of white reaction. The U.S. settler-empire makes use of white supremacists in and out of uniform: police terror is joined by paramilitary fascist organizations that are their brothers-in-arms.

Keenan Anderson was 31 years old when the LAPD tased him to death. He was a beloved 10th grade schoolteacher at Digital Pioneers Academy, a Washington D.C. charter school. He leaves a 6-year-old son and a grieving family. His cousin, Patrisse Cullors, is one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, and she now faces what many Black organizers must face in this country: the murder of one of their own family members by the enemy state’s police force. Did the LAPD know who he was when they tased him over and over? We don’t yet know. Whether this was a revenge killing carried out by U.S. domestic stormtroopers or yet another unmotivated execution designed to keep the population compliant, the fact is that LAPD sent 50,000 volts at 3.6 milli-amps of current pouring through Keenan Anderson’s body. They electrocuted his heart.

He Needed Help

Although we don’t know much — the police have, so far, only released highly edited versions of their body camera footage, purposefully cutting critical minutes of their execution — we know that Keenan Anderson was involved in a traffic accident and that he flagged down the police to help him. He was distressed, confused, and in all likelihood concussed.

Officers restrained him, chased him down, and then, after they already had him under their control, grabbed and pinned him to the ground. The body camera footage clearly shows Keenan becoming more and more frightened and desperate. He cried out: “They’re trying to George Floyd me!” He was handcuffed and bound, shot with a Taser over and over for at least 35 seconds. Like so many others, he was executed in public by the police.

The LAPD has since released a police-conducted toxicology test, claiming Keenan’s blood showed positive for cocaine and marijuana. As any trauma specialist can tell you, concussions and brain injury from a car accident can result in delirium, hallucinations, delusions, and other perceptual disturbances. People suffering from concussions can appear drunk, become amnesiac, and forgetful. But the LAPD didn’t give Keenan medical attention. They gave him a lethal administration of force: they crushed him to the concrete and unloaded at least two Taser shots at him.

A Taser gun (manufactured by the same corporation that makes the body cameras worn by many police departments and one of the companies that funds the Atlanta Police Foundation, Axon) normally releases its charge in five-second bursts unless the officer keeps their finger on the trigger, like they did with Keenan. He didn’t suffer for a mere five seconds; the Taser was deployed seven times longer than the “safe” five-second cycle. Many studies and most regulations warn to “avoid prolonged or continuous exposure(s) to the TASER device electrical discharge…. Severe exhaustion and/or over-exertion from physical struggle, drug intoxication, use of restraint devices, etc., may result in a serious injury or death.” Is this the same department that gave a glowing interview to CNN one year ago and said they would only deploy a Taser “with somebody who is violent, that’s posing an immediate threat to maybe ourselves or another citizen”? Is this the same department who’s Captain said the community wanted police “to de-escalate. We’re only going to use that Taser when a suspect’s actions are violent”? Surely the LAPD doesn’t expect us to believe that Keenan Anderson posed an immediate threat, that he was “violent.” He was Tasered after running, crying, and sitting on the ground. He was electrocuted while he was physically restrained. Even the beasts with badges in the LAPD don’t claim he was threatening anyone or that he tried to attack them. They killed Keenan Anderson because they could, because they know they’ll get away with it, and because it’s their job to keep the working people of the U.S. Empire — particularly the Black, Chicanx, Peurto Rican, Indigenous, and other oppressed peoples — quiet, cowed, and afraid.

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.