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.  

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.

“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.

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.

“This is going to continue to happen. Trans people are going to be targeted. The sheriffs won’t be held accountable… Because our legislators don’t care about us.”

— Annie Jump Vicente, reflecting on her arrest a week prior.

On December 7th, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department arrested Annie Jump, a West Hollywood resident and police abolitionist, who was returning home to her apartment with her groceries. The sheriffs had apparently arrived to investigate a completely separate domestic violence call, which had turned out to be a false report. As Annie explained to us, there actually had been ongoing domestic violence in the building, but the survivor had left earlier that morning; hence, without a genuine exigent circumstance, the sheriffs required either a warrant or an invitation to enter the building. On her way into the apartment, Annie thus refused entry to the sheriffs, who subsequently grabbed and handcuffed her, slammed her head into the nearby wall, and detained her.

As Annie had to keep reminding the sheriffs, she is a trans woman, and yet the sheriffs persistently misgendered her before, during, and after the arrest. They also claimed that she was impeding their investigation, though they had no right to enter the building. Part of this encounter was caught on film by Annie’s roommate.

A later video was also published online, at which point 10 sheriffs had arrived and Annie was being held face down outside of a police vehicle. After Annie berated the sheriffs for doing nothing to stop domestic violence and for continuing to misgender her, she can be seen being carried off into the nearby vehicle.

At no point did the police read her Miranda rights, at no point did they tell her that she’s under arrest or being detained, and at no point did they command her to stop resisting. Annie’s injuries were not adequately treated, and since we last spoke to her, she said she’s had a persistent headache ever since. She maintains that the way she was mishandled and abused by the sheriffs was not only a violation of her rights, but was also motivated by transmisogyny — and she further speculates that the sheriff’s hostilities towards her may have been retribution for her political activism, in which she has repeatedly demanded the city council to defund the sheriff’s department.

As it stands, anyone would be well within reason to distrust LASD and to treat them as a potential danger. It’s been long known that violent deputy gangs operate from within LASD — in fact, the city’s civilian oversight commission recently acknowledged this formally, though they wouldn’t even entertain the idea of firing the deputy gang members. Gang members or not, the police and deputies are well known for their violence and discrimination. On another occasion, Annie’s leasing agent had threatened to kick her out of the apartment because she’s transgender; Annie had attempted to report this incident as a hate crime, but the sheriffs refused to take a statement. In fact, this isn’t even the first time the sheriffs have investigated domestic violence in the building. According to Annie, the sheriffs had been to the apartment on seven other occasions responding to a domestic violence call, and each time they did nothing about it — again, not even taking a statement. If sheriffs are well known for their violence and scarcely known for helping, could anyone honestly blame Annie for not permitting the sheriffs entrance to the apartment? We hold that they could not!

We interviewed Annie a week after her arrest, and she was able to tell us more about the circumstances leading up to and events following her arrest.

Members of the Lavender Guard will be meeting Annie along with the WeHo Social Justice Coalition to demand the new city council members to fire the deputies who arrested Annie and adopt a progressive agenda. For those local to LA county, you can help support the struggle by joining us at the city council meeting (625 San Vicente blvd, West Hollywood) on December 19th at 6pm and stand in solidarity with Annie Jump. If you’re feeling confident, please give a public comment demanding the deputies involved be fired and the Council adopt The People’s Agenda. 

Clearly, in order to abolish classes completely, it is not enough to overthrow the exploiters, the landowners and capitalists, not enough to abolish their rights of ownership; it is necessary also to abolish all private ownership of the means of production, it is necessary to abolish the distinction between town and country, as well as the distinction between manual workers and brain workers.

On Thursday, December 8, around 1,100 New York Times reporters, editors, salespersons, IT specialists, concierges and security personnel, and other union workers represented by the Times Guild, a member of the News Guid of New York City, initiated a 24-hour strike, beginning at midnight.

The mass action was initiated after the Times Guild workers warned, last Friday, December 2, that they would launch a strike on Thursday if a “fair deal” was not reached with their employer, the New York Times Company, by Wednesday, December 7. In return, on Wednesday, the company’s representatives snubbed the workers by walking out of ongoing negotiations after 12 hours at the table, and with more than 5 hours left until the Guild’s deadline.

As if to mock the workers, the company’s spokesperson claimed that the strike was unnecessary, and chastised the Guild for taking “extreme action.”

The warning and subsequent strike followed nearly two years of stalling by the New York Times Company, which has refused to negotiate in good faith with its workers toward a new, “fair” contract.

The Times Guild’s demands are wide-ranging and fairly ambitious, but also, at the same time, perfectly reasonable.

In addition to general salary raises, the workers are demanding equal pay for equal work for women and people of color, who are paid, on average, significantly less than white men. Among other “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” demands, the Guild specifically wants more women of color to be elevated to leadership roles within the company’s newsroom, in order to address the company’s lack of diversity.

The workers are also demanding a more robust and comprehensive health-care plan. In particular, the workers want coverage for mental health, fertility, and family planning services. On this point, the Guild has included a demand of “equitable treatment for temporary and casual workers employed by the company on a regular basis.”

So far, the company has agreed only to a few of these demands, and even then, only to partially fulfilling them. This is despite the fact that the company’s profits have grown considerably in the last few years. The New York Times Company’s projected adjusted operating profit for 2022 is estimated at over $320,000,000.

On Thursday, hundreds of workers picketed outside the New York Times office near Times Square. The Times Guild workers were joined by comrades from other newspaper guilds, who commuted from as far away as Pittsburgh. Workers delivered speeches and chanted slogans like “We make the paper, we make the profit!” and “Hey Gray Lady, time to pay me!” 

The Times Guild strike is the latest in a recent series of organized labor actions in the news media industry.

Across the labor movement, a mood of solidarity has prevailed. However, some socialists and progressive activists have balked at supporting the Times Guild workers.

Some socialists have objected on the grounds that New York Times employees are already paid far more than the average proletarian worker. Some have gone so far as to say that the strike is reactionary, that it is against the interests of the proletariat as a whole, because it expresses the demands of a privileged upper stratum.

According to Business Insider, base salaries at the New York Times range from $53,392 to $306,000 per year. A recent article on the strike in a local New York paper, The City, stated that some employees “earn as little as $52,000 a year.” By contrast, in 2021, the U.S. median wage was $37,586 per year, according to the Social Security Administration; meanwhile, a full-time worker earning the federal minimum wage of just $7.25 per hour would earn about $15,000 per year. Clearly, even the lowest-paid employees of the New York Times Company are among the best-paid waged workers in the U.S., which, in turn, is one of the world’s wealthiest countries per capita — New York City’s astronomical cost of living notwithstanding.

The Times Guild is fighting for a $65,000 per year salary floor, as well as an immediate 10% pay raise for all employees.

We certainly shouldn’t deny that real disparities exist within the proletariat, both within this country and globally, that privileged upper strata of the working classes do, indeed, exist, and that often, throughout the labor struggle’s history, these upper-strata workers have failed to stand in solidarity with the working-poor.

But for all this, we cannot turn away from the Times Guild’s strike.

Yes, these upper-strata workers enjoy privileges closed to the proletariat writ large, and yes, these privileges engender vacillation among the wealthy and comfortable workers, but every injustice against these privileged workers, every slight from their bosses — the capitalists and their lackey corporate managers — forces them into antagonisms with capital, and draws them closer to the proletariat, to our great common struggle for economic dignity, for social justice, for political power.

Should we isolate the relatively privileged workers? Should we count them among our class foes? Should we reflexively turn them away, back into the arms of their capitalist bosses? Of course not! To do so would serve only to grow the army of capital.

This is not to say that we must beg the high-earning, relatively comfortable, exceptionally privileged workers for solidarity. On the contrary! When the relatively privileged workers strike, we must call them to strike with us, the underprivileged mass of workers. We must awaken them to the plight of the proletariat, and demand that they stand in solidarity with the rest of the working classes. The privileged upper-strata workers must be made to realize — and, as capitalism continues to decay, will be forced to realize — that proletarian solidarity is their only salvation. It is the relatively privileged workers who must actively choose to forsake their status, who must stand in solidarity with us.

Another common objection has been voiced by anti-war activists: The New York Times is one of the premier mouthpieces of American imperialism. The Times has again and again repeated casus belli lies straight from the U.S. government, including the infamous “weapons of mass destruction” lie that the George W. Bush administration used as its pretext for the Iraq War. The Times has run hundreds of pro-war opinion columns, calling for unilateral military action against America’s “enemy” states. Some anti-war activists refuse to support a strike launched by the employees of such a company.

The vast majority of Times writers are tasked with pumping out mundane articles on mundane news items. The newspaper’s political bent, its bloodthirsty support for Yankee imperialism, is the prerogative of its owners and large shareholders, its upper management, and its editorial board — not of the company’s workers.

Still, there can be no doubt that the New York Times employee, whatever their role, stands in the conveyor-belt system of Yankee-imperialist propaganda. 

But if this were enough to rinse out solidarity with workers, there would not be a single industry within the U.S. Empire that “deserved” our solidarity. There is no “ethical work” under capitalism; every job, however “mundane” or “noble,” however quiet or celebrated, is a link in the chain of world imperialism. Doctors and nurses, however many lives they save, carry on their work so that private hospitals can profit from human suffering — the Hippocratic Oath notwithstanding. Public school teachers raise the next generation of docile workers, while private school teachers raise the next generation of arrogant rulers. Novelists, musicians, and other artists, even those who “speak truth to power,” participate in a market furnished and controlled by the ruling capitalist class.

The determining factor is not whether a worker stands within the world-imperialist system; we all stand within it. Every agent of the imperialist war machine — every cop, every imperialist troop, every prison guard, every “tough-on-crime” judge and prosecutor, every designer and manufacturer of munitions that kill our siblings in the imperialized periphery, every worker directly employed by the manufacturing arm of the war-machine, and, of course, every politician within the U.S. two-party duopoly — is, in no uncertain terms, our enemy. But we, the workers, who are forced, by the necessity of earning a wage, into the cogs of capitalist production, who are exploited and oppressed by the capitalists and their agents, have the power to abolish this machine — if only we can unite and struggle as a class.

The New York Times workers, the relatively privileged “professionals,” must realize that the sole condition of the success of their struggle, of the fulfillment of their just demands, is their class solidarity with the proletariat. We implore the Times Guild workers to continue their struggle, to demand $60K salaries, full benefits, and more — but not only for themselves! These demands must be extended to all workers, to the whole proletariat — and not only to the imperial proletariat of the U.S. Empire, but to all oppressed workers of the world.

That is why we extend solidarity to the striking New York Times workers: The workers, united, can never be defeated! The workers, united, will bring down and liberate ourselves from the system of mass violence and exploitation that oppresses us all.

EDITORS NOTE: This statement was released by the New School Students Occupation on 12/8/22 and is reproduced here exactly as it was released, with their permission.

In light of recent attacks by the New School administration on all school employees including faculty and students, as well as the blatant refusal to meet ACT-UAW 7902’s demands or even negotiate in good faith, the students have decided it is the time to escalate direct action. The University Center will be occupied until the administration resumes pay, full healthcare protection, and retirement benefits to all striking employees and a fair contract is reached with part-time faculty.

New York, NY: ACT-UAW 7902, composed of Part-Time Faculty at the New School, has been on strike for 23 days—this makes the strike the longest strike of adjunct faculty in the nation’s history. Part-time faculty are fighting for a fair contract that truly compensates them for their labor, their care, and their commitment to their students—which the New School administration has refused to offer. Not only has the administration prolonged this strike, showing a complete disregard for its students, staff, and faculty it claims to care for, it offered nothing of substance.

They have retaliated violently. As of yesterday, ALL striking workers at the New School have their wages withheld, no access to healthcare benefits, as well as no added funds to their retirement plans. This decision risks the lives of our faculty—many of whom are caretakers, primary insurance holders, some even pregnant or have upcoming surgeries—and this is all happening while New York City experiences a Covid-19 surge with over 40k cases as of the last two weeks. Students who work at The New School have also been notified that if they don’t cross the picket line they will be without pay as well. This applies to Federal Work Study employees—a disgusting move by the administration upon students who qualify based on financial need for the FWS grant.

The administration has also attacked Full-Time faculty who are in solidarity with PTF, notifying them that they must sign “work certification” forms that they will hold class, and if they do not or are found to have not fulfilled what they sign on the form—they risk termination. At all points, the administration of the New School is trying to break the solidarity that ALL faculty and students have fostered—but we will not let them.

This abuse of power by the administration is exemplary of a long history of the New School betraying its founding mission, radical history, and declared values. We no longer recognize the administration as representative of The New School.

The violent, manipulative, and cruel attacks from the administration upon every part of the New School community have left us with no choice but to escalate student action—We are now occupying the University Center.

We will peacefully occupy the building day and night until the administration resumes pay, full healthcare protection, and retirement benefits to all school employees and until the university reaches a fair contract with part-time faculty. We do not take occupation lightly, this is a necessary response to the administration’s violent escalations.

We students will stand in solidarity with faculty who we love and trust, and demand that they are treated and paid not only a living wage and benefits—but that they are respected. The administration would like to believe they can divide us, that we will allow them to exploit our faculty and our friends, but if anything this strike has shown us and the struggle for fair working conditions around the world, the UCs, in HarperCollins, in UCU in UK, that ‘Solidarity is Forever.’ These Administrators have nothing on us and cannot be allowed to continue operating as such. We will win.

The parasite, for-profit, bail bond industry, one of the most nakedly exploitative forms taken by capital, now struggles with the forces of the people in the state of Connecticut. This is the latest development in an 80-year-long war between the people and the capitalist state that began in the 1960s with the first wave of bail reform.

The Connecticut Supreme Court released a decision last week, State of Connecticut v. Qinxuan Pan (SC 210039), granting all prisoners in Connecticut held on bond the right to seek a full evidentiary hearing at some point after their arraignment where they are permitted to present evidence regarding their lack of ability to afford their bail bonds. The courts are now required to consider that evidence and give a fully-articulated ruling as to whether and why the bonds will be reduced or will remain as set. This represents a new front in the war against the evil practice of cash-and-surety bail, which has been flaring up and dying down in Connecticut over the past decade.

A Background on Bail

As far back as the Anglo-Saxon law codes, arrestees were “set free as soon as some sureties undertook or became bound for his appearance in court.” Bail was further legislated by the 1275 Statute of Westminster, which established three governing criteria to bail: 1) the nature of the offense (some offenses were not bailable), 2) the probability of conviction, and 3) the criminal history (“ill fame”) of the accused.

The English colonies that would become the United States tended to grant the right of bail — that is, the temporary payment of some amount of money to the court to guarantee the appearance of the accused — almost sacrosanct dimensions. The 1641 Body of Liberties of the Massachusetts Bay Colony granted the right to bail for all non-capital (that is, punishable by death) cases. In Connecticut, there is an absolute right to a “reasonable” bond (that is, amount required for bail) in almost all cases.

Bourgeois legal scholars are often content to trace this history, then sit back and wipe their hands, happy that they’ve discovered some ancient authority for the present day. What they rarely do is undertake the question of what this custom or law looked like in practice in, for instance, Anglo-Saxon England and compare it to what the custom or law looks like in the U.S. Empire today. It is easy, and perhaps natural, to assume that the concept of bail simply continued from its original date to the present, altered here and there as required, but essentially propelled forward by the inertia of its own history.

That’s an ahistorical understanding of the law. It ignores the context of how the law functions, it ignores the real and practical effects of the law, and it instead merely interprets the written word as it is written down without an examination of actual practice. We Marxists can and must do better than these bourgeois legal historians!

Bail in Anglo-Saxon (and later, Norman) England served one purpose; bail in the modern U.S. Empire serves another. There are a whole host of ancillary questions not answered by this gloss: what kinds of bail were and are required? Who would post them? What was society like, and how did the judges determine amounts? Who were the judges? What classes of people were bailable?

The bail of Anglo-Norman England identified by the legal historians is, in effect, something completely different and distinct from the practice now current in the U.S. Empire. Bail in the medieval past was a matter of elite connections; medieval society was riven with conflicts between families and their larger units, clans. Bail was, in essence, the pledge of a family or network of social peers that you were as good as your word. Under the Anglo-Norman system, the amount required for bail was the same as the amount at stake in the case; every crime was conceived of as a private wrong of one against another, and every type of crime could be translated into a monetary amount. Bail, in this instance, wasn’t merely the pledge of the accused, but the pledge of the entire kin-group of the accused.

But what is bail today?

Firstly, no longer are bonds posted or sureties pledged by communities or kin-groups. No, instead there is a whole industry that has transformed the freedom of the accused into a kind of commodity. A bail bond has become nothing more than a personal mortgage, a lien against the freedom of some individual defendant’s life.

Bail bonds are underwritten by international insurance agencies; Tokio Marine America, Fairfax Financial Holdings Limited, R&Q Accredited Surety, Endeavour, Bankers Financial Corporation, Allegheny Casualty, Financial Casualty & Surety, Lexington International, and the American Surety Company are the largest insurance companies which may be backing nearly a billion dollars in bail bonds each. Regulations don’t require these companies to disclose their underwriting of bail bonds, but it’s likely that between them they account for more than half of the $14 billion bail bond industry. These international finance giants prey on the poorest parts of the working classes, and disproportionately on  Black, Chicanx, Latinx, and Indigenous persons.

Bail bonds are extraordinarily high; they aren’t set at amounts that any reasonable person could afford to post for even a short period, let alone lose. Bail in Connecticut is routinely set at $10,000 and higher. Yes, a federal law makes all bail set at $20,000 or lower postable with 10% of the amount put up in cash, but paying $1,000-$2,000 to make sure you or a loved one stays out of jail is not within the reach of most working class families.

If the amount of bond is over $20,000, the law prevents private individuals from posting it. They literally could not, even if they had the money. The bond must be what’s called a “surety bond,” something postable only by a specially licensed “professional” who pays the state a kind of rent in the form of a licensing fee — in other words, a bail bondsman. This bail-for-hire scheme turns the old English system entirely on its head. Rather than a social pledge to attend trial, bail becomes a sort of judicial tax. Bonds are now set in courts in most states across the U.S. Empire; these bonds by and large require the accused to hire a bail bondsman or else suffer the debilitating effects of incarceration while their cases remain pending. Criminal cases can take years to resolve, and even longer if the accused is actually proveably innocent, because wait times for trials have shot up during the COVID pandemic.

But these bondsmen, these mercenary pocketbooks, aren’t the only people making money off of this system. No, as we mentioned above, international insurance underwriters reap enormous rewards. When a bondsman is hired to post a bond, that bondsman charges the accused whatever rate the bondsman thinks he can get. In return, the bondsman puts up a surety with the court. So, for instance, if the bond is set at $100,000 and the accused has a low or moderate-paying job, the bondsman may ask for $15,000. The accused agrees to a payment plan for this money, usually asking for help from family and friends. The accused will never get this money back. The bondsman then places $100,000 in surety with the court. When the case ends, the bondsman gets his money back.

The only time the bondsman would lose his money is if the bond is “called” (that is, the defendant fails to appear) and the bondsman doesn’t bring the defendant into court later. The bondsman is empowered to run out and use physical force and almost any type of restraint to bring the bail-skipping defendant in. When he does, he recoups his entire posted amount. The defendant will never see the money they paid again.

This is the system that international financiers can’t wait to get their hands in: a system which, due to many factors including disparate policing and disparate bond decisions by judges, impacts Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Chicanx persons far more than white persons, and the poor far more than any other group overall. Cash bail transforms the court system into a debt trap designed to keep the poor and persons of oppressed nations in bondage.

As an aside, the jury system itself can be seen as following a similar development. Early juries were specifically made up of one’s fellow community members — people who actually knew information about the cases because they lived and worked alongside those who were being brought to trial. They have become, under the bourgeois state, a method of white-washing the capitalist’s twisted “justice” by passing it off as the acts of “the people;” jury trials today stand as the most horrific perversion of justice, where they cloak the naked domination of the capitalists, and tell the masses that they are, in a sense, oppressing themselves.

The Struggle Against Cash Bail

The rapacious greed of the for-profit bail industry doesn’t harm only the poorest segments of the working classes; predatory bondsmen are dangerous to the petit-bourgeoisie and, occasionally, to elements within the bourgeoisie itself. For decades, progressives and true radicals have been united in waging a war against the oppressive use of cash bail. The first wave of bail reform emerged in the 1960s and was largely driven by Communists. The second wave of bail reform emerged in the 1980s and was driven by reactionaries who wanted to jail “dangerous” persons indefinitely and without bail. The arguments to return to a for-profit bail system came from the same place in both instances: the U.S. Empire’s for-profit bail industry itself.

New York State began the opening front for the third round of bail reform that is now mounting. Local activists, prison abolitionists, the ACLU, etc. rallied together to pass a new piece of legislation in New York which divides all cases into one of two categories: so serious as to require bail, and not so serious as to require bail. As a result, hundreds of people who would otherwise have been held on cash bonds have been released.

This struggle is on the frontlines of the movement. Over the past century and a half, the capitalists have perfected their machine of oppression. During the latter half of the 20th century the capitalist state has colonized the country with labor camps, ensnared every city and suburb in a net of police officers, has enlisted an army of spies and saboteurs, and has armed all of its agents with implicit death warrants. This enormous expansion of the state, this consumption of almost every regular function of the capitalist government, has had one overriding source above all other sources: the threat of national self-determination, of the revolution and class consciousness of the nationally oppressed. The fight against this enormous, titanic, all-encompassing system of incarceration, at any level, is the fight against the capitalist state itself.

This fight is as acute in Connecticut as anywhere in the U.S. Empire. Although a mere 14% of the state’s population is Black, Black persons account for 41% of the state’s inmates. Bail reform is a front in the overall war against the carceral state and those who profit from it. By reducing the obscene profits of the bail system, the capitalists themselves are weakened and the nationally oppressed communities gain breathing space to organize against their enemies.

Victory – Of a Sort

Political victories are won by the mobilized and militant working classes, this much is true. Nevertheless, the ruling of the Supreme Court of Connecticut in State v. Pan is a judicial decision, not a political one. Though it is not an out-and-out victory, it represents a partial retreat of the capitalists from their long-held position defending the obscenity that is the system of cash bail. A rising tide of awareness produced real, radical victories in the neighboring states of New Jersey and New York; that tide can be harnessed by the organizers and activists of Connecticut to do battle against the bail system.

Although State v. Pan grants criminal defendants some recourse to fight back against the unfair bail system, like most judge-motivated reforms it is more appearance than substance. It purports to give a meaningful way to challenge unreasonable bonds set by the arraignment courts, but in actuality the hearing Pan grants will mostly result in the same outcomes as the present bail hearings: the judge will deny the modification of bail, regardless of the evidence the defendant manages to put on. Now, the judge will have to be more explicit about why they are not changing the bond amount, but that is a cosmetic change at best.

Lawyers, even more than members of other petit-bourgeois professions, tend to be mired in idealism. “These gentlemen think that when they have changed the names of things they have changed the things themselves,” as Engels would say. Pan has only just gone into effect, but there should be no doubt that, in a year’s time, we will not see substantially more people released on lower bonds as a result.

Is there a chance that a new hearing under Pan will result in a bond being lowered? Yes, of course. Is a significant change in incarceration rates going to occur? No, most likely not. This individualist, idealist thinking is part of the smoke-and-mirrors show practiced by the bourgeoisie to convince the working classes that proceedings are fair and aren’t tilted against them. The Pan hearing amounts to little more than the show put on by the snake oil salesman before he fleeces his audience. 

What the Pan decision does not say is that if a defendant can’t afford to post the bond the court sets, then the bond is per-se unreasonable. This is the first step to real bail reform in Connecticut. A $5,000 bond is nothing to a Groton defense contractor accused of drunk driving and assault with a motor vehicle, but to an unhoused person in New Haven a $5,000 bond may as well be set at $5 million. There has long been a movement among the socially conscious lawyers of Connecticut to have the courts recognize that, in order to be “reasonable,” bond amounts must be actually postable by the actual defendant.

What we can take from the Pan decision is that the growing wave of class consciousness is impossible to ignore even from the heights of the Supreme Court of Connecticut. This a kind of victory, but the victory we should see is that the justices of the Connecticut Supreme Court believe it’s become necessary to disguise the operations of predatory capital. That means they know the working classes are becoming more powerful, more united, and more militant. That is exactly why they are making these concessions.

As the murderous results of the Biden regime’s COVID handling become clearer, as Connecticut landlords once again begin to ramp up evictions in the face of the failing resolve of Governor Lamont’s administration to protect the poorest segments of the population, more and more class warfare will break out into the open. The Supreme Court of Connecticut recognizes this; State v. Pan is a tacit acknowledgement that the capitalist state must retreat from its maximalist position and adopt a defensive posture. They are preparing their defenses, hoping the tidal wave of class consciousness will break.

We will all work diligently to ensure that these last-ditch sea walls are overwhelmed.

Near midnight on Saturday, November 19, the LGBT community of Colorado Springs, CO was shaken by yet another anti-LGBT mass shooting in the U.S. Empire. The site of the shooting was Club Q, a popular nightclub and a cultural fixture and “award-winning” venue, that served as a “safe place” for the Colorado Springs LGBT community. One survivor described Club Q as “a place we love, a place of peace, a place to be ourselves.” The perpetrator, armed with an AR-15 or similar rifle and a handgun, and wearing body armor, according to a Colorado Springs PD official, opened fire, killing at least five people and injuring at least 25; as of this moment, two of the hospitalized victims reportedly remain in critical condition.

The identities of the victims have been made available to the public: Daniel Aston (he/him), 28, a transgender man who worked as a bartender at Club Q, and that night was performing at the club; Derrick Rump (he/him), a bartender at Club Q; Kelley Loving (she/her), 40, a transgender woman who was visiting Colorado Springs and was at Club Q as a patron; Raymond Green Vance (he/him), 22, a patron visiting Club Q with his girlfriend, who identified as a pro-LGBT ally; and Ashley Paugh (she/her), 35, a patron.

Critically, the shooting took place during a drag show; it was also the night before the international Transgender Day of Rememberance (TDOR), a commemoration started in 1999 and observed annually on November 20 to memorialize all transgender people who’ve been lost to murder. So far in 2022, the murders of more than 30 transgender people have been reported — but the real figures are much higher.

Club Q had publicly advertised plans to host an “all ages drag brunch” on the morning of Sunday, November 20, to celebrate Transgender Day of Rememberance.

In recent months, fascists across the U.S. Empire have focused particularly on attacking drag shows. For instance, this summer, similarly themed family-friendly drag brunches were targeted by Christian-fascist organizations in Dallas and Houston, Texas. The fascists accused the LGBT community of attempting to “indoctrinate” children. Such organized anti-LGBT actions have been promoted by fascists in the media, and their demands have received political support from some extreme-right elected officials, such as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who has threatened to have parents who take their children to LGBT-friendly venues charged with child abuse. Meanwhile, in recent years, across the country, Republican-controlled state governments are instituting laws to criminalize the parents of transgender children, as well as pro-trans doctors and other medical professionals, by legally redefining gender-affirming healthcare as child abuse; other laws compel public schools to misgender and otherwise discriminate against transgender children. This is despite the fact that gender-affirming healthcare is safe, improves quality of life, and significantly reduces the risk of suicide in a section of the population that is particularly vulnerable. The Democrats, meanwhile, have stood idly by — as is their role in the duopoly of American fascism.

Fascists across the U.S. Empire have become increasingly emboldened to commit anti-LGBT hate crimes, especially against transgender and gender-variant people. Mass shootings and other acts of targeted anti-LGBT violence are becoming the norm, rather than the exception.

Despite this, in a truly shameful fashion, the Colorado Springs PD and the FBI have conspicuously declined to characterize the mass shooting as a hate crime; the chief of police stated to reporters that the terrorist’s motive has yet to be determined. When asked whether the terrorist attack would be investigated as a hate crime, the local district attorney said, “this will be investigated and is being investigated in that lens,” but that specific charges had not yet been determined, and whether to charge the suspect with a hate crime was still under consideration. Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers has acknowledged that the mass shooting “has all the appearances of a hate crime,” but then cautioned that the suspect’s motive was still under investigation. Other Democratic politicians, including President Biden, have characterized the mass shooting as an attack on the LGBT community.

Evidently, the terrorist, now identified as Anderson Lee Aldrich, 22, was arrested in June 2021, after threatening to harm his mother, who called the police. Aldrich had threatened to make a homemade bomb, and planned to procure a stockpile of weapons. Aldrich at first barricaded himself inside his house, but police negotiators eventually managed to convince him to surrender himself, at which point he was apprehended. He was charged with multiple felonies, including kidnapping.

A friend of the terrorist’s mother said in an interview, “Why is he not in jail, after that happening? After that initial day, police never reached out… [F]or him to be out there, and [to] have access to weapons after that incident, I don’t understand it.”

The Gazette, a Colorado newspaper, reported that the charges against Aldrich were ultimately dropped, and his case sealed; the reason has not been revealed. Interestingly, however, according to Heavy, Aldrich is the grandson of a Colorado state assemblyman, Randy Voepel, an extreme-right Republican who supported Trump’s January 6, 2021 coup attempt, in which hundreds of MAGA fascists stormed the U.S. Capitol. It is possible that Aldrich was freed after leveraging this political connection.

It is unsurprising that the terrorist has such a history, and it is just as unsurprising that he was ultimately set free, and allowed to continue plotting violence. This is not the first time that a fascist domestic terrorist has been known to police before committing a mass shooting; it is not the first time that police have been warned in advance, and failed to act.

If the enemy state truly wanted to stop these mass shootings, then this fascist terrorist, like so many before him, would have been apprehended by “red flag” laws. It’s no coincidence that so many mass shooters have had violent histories — in particular, histories of threatening women and LGBT people — and criminal records. Granted the most generous interpretation of the facts, we may condemn the enemy state incompetent, that is, incapable of preventing fascist violence and protecting oppressed communities. The truth, however, is that the enemy state is not incompetent, but actively malicious.

At a fundamental level, the U.S. Empire’s criminal justice system, from the police to the courts to the prisons, is not designed to prevent violence against the oppressed and marginalized masses, against women and LGBT people, against the poor — against anyone, except for the most privileged sections of the ruling classes. The U.S. criminal justice system is fundamentally designed for one, and only one, purpose: To protect the private property and the general class-interests of the ruling classes, first and foremost the monopoly-capitalists.

This mass shooting was no different. In the end, the police did not save the LGBT community gathered at Club Q — the community saved themselves.

According to reports based on statements from city officials, police, Club Q’s official social media, and survivor testimony, the shooting ended within minutes, when multiple Club Q patrons, including a transgender woman, tackled, disarmed, “beat up,” and subdued the terrorist, several minutes before police and emergency medical services arrived. While reports continue to emerge, and the facts continue to be gathered, a clear picture is developing. One survivor recounted at a vigil on Sunday that the bartender on shift at Club Q “jumped in front of the gunman,” sacrificing his life to protect the patrons. The bartender’s sacrifice allowed a patron to charge the shooter, “grab a handgun” from him, and hit him with it, knocking him down. According to the Club Q owners, who reviewed security camera footage, after the first patron subdued the shooter, a second patron then got on top of the shooter and helped the first patron hold him down, pinning him on the floor until police arrived. “He saved dozens and dozens of lives. Stopped the man cold,” said one of the owners, referring to one of the patrons. One of the persons killed in the terrorist attack, Raymond Green Vance, lost his life while assisting his girlfriend and another patron in finding a hiding place.

Club Q posted the following statement on its Facebook page:

Club Q is devastated by the senseless attack on our community. Our [prayers] and thoughts are with all the victims and their families and friends. We thank the quick reactions of heroic customers that subdued the gunman and ended this hate attack.

Colorado Springs Mayor John Suthers praised the actions of the patrons, stating that “their actions clearly saved lives.” The chief of police made a similar comment.

The brave individuals who acted to defend their fellow patrons were, without a doubt, true heroes. To put one’s own body in the way of an armed fascist, intent on carrying out mass murder, would rightly be considered heroic under any circumstances. But the bravery of those patrons was not merely an isolated instance of heroism — it was an act of solidarity with their LGBT community. It was an act of community self-defense, of community self-reliance. And it is this spirit of community solidarity and community self-reliance that every conscious LGBT person must strive to embody and work to cultivate in our communities.

As the fascist garrison encircles our communities, where can we turn?

Not to elected officials, not to the police, and not to the courts — that much is clear. The police don’t keep us safe; the police keep us repressed, keep us threatened, keep us marginalized. The police aid and abet the fascists who seek to murder us and the police protect the government officials who seek to drive us back underground. Our LGBT forebears couldn’t be fooled by police-sponsored pride parades and “diversity training” copaganda. Our forebears knew what most of us still know, and what the rest of us must relearn: that the police are our enemies. The police are the front-line repressive arm of the fascist enemy state, of our oppressors.

The Democrats, the “moderate wing” of U.S. fascism, are once more calling for “gun control” — for disarming the masses. President Biden, long a supporter of banning “assault rifles,” was quoted as saying, “When will we decide we’ve had enough? We must address the public health epidemic of gun violence in all of its forms.” Meanwhile, the “liberal” side of the capitalist media is already pushing for “gun control” in the wake of this tragedy.

For many in our traumatized community, this liberal “solution” will hold considerable pathos, especially given that “gun rights” is an agenda associated with the same right-wing of fascism that continually perpetrates vigilante and state violence against us. But the truth is that, throughout the history of the U.S. Empire, gun control has only ever been used to disarm the oppressed; it has never been used to disarm the oppressor. On the other hand, we do not endorse the common right-wing slogan, “Only a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun,” which, in truth, is a call for more civilian-fascist settler militiamen to be deputized against racially oppressed people. Our slogan is that only by arming and organizing the oppressed can we disarm and overthrow our oppressors, their standing armies, and their civilian-fascist auxiliaries.

This slogan was issued by Karl Marx over 170 years ago:

Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary.

No, LGBT communities cannot rely on help from the fascist enemy state.

LGBT communities, especially transgender people, must collectively defend ourselves. In no uncertain terms, this means that we must begin arming and organizing ourselves, and our communities, for self-defense, and in so doing build collective self-reliance.

We keep us safe — no one else will.

We know that this is a daunting task. For transgender militants and comrades who are unsure of where to begin, we encourage you to reach out to the Lavender Guard, a new revolutionary organization focused on community self-defense, community self-reliance, and mutual aid.