A little while ago, Red was given his final prognosis in the battle against cancer. He has only a few weeks left and is making his final preparations. We have to say goodbye to Red, but we aren’t saying goodbye to Red the soldier. We’re saying goodbye to Red, the gardener. We may miss his soldiering in the days to come, but it is his gardening that will have had the most profound effect on those around him and on the revolution that’s coming.

Around ten years ago Red and Lindsey, the Chairwoman of FTH, started up aid in their local community in Seattle. When COVID hit, they transitioned to a more intensive, full-throated community organizing project among the unhoused. For the first time in Seattle’s history, houseless encampments became permanent thanks to the suspension of sweeps and clearing laws. FTH and CRC are community survival programs with no precondition of adhering to Communist or even broadly leftist or progressive positions. Like all real red aid (as opposed to “red charity”), conversations about Communism and the road to revolution are never foisted upon attendees; their needs are met, by unabashed and unashamed Communists. And that’s the goal.

What is the difference between red charity, mutual aid, and red aid? Red charity is charity disguised as mass work — throwing food, clothes, whatever else at a problem without engaging with the masses or, alternately, demanding that those coming for help listen to a lecture about socialism. Mutual aid is the process of mutual — two way — exchange within a community to help meet survival needs. Exchanging labor on a collective farm, for example. But red aid is something altogether different: it is meeting the survival needs of the community while assisting in the self organizing of that same community. Giving the tools needed — mass meetings, procedures, and above all the answers to the burning questions that face the community that only Marxism can provide — while at the same time standing at the forefront of struggle.

This is what FTH and CRC provide, and what Lindsey and Red have worked to establish. As their work intensified, Red and Lindsey split up responsibilities between the “front of house,” that is, service and medicine handled by FTH, and “back of house,” that is, logistics, money, and protection, handled by CRC. Red has always worked to ensure that marginalized and oppressed individuals are placed into positions of power within both CRC and FTH — he trains, but does not command.

Red is a Taoist. As he put it, “it doesn’t make sense to expect a tree to be anything other than a tree.” For Red, it’s the revolutionaries who are the trees, the grasses, and the flowers. He cares for his cadre, learns what each member of his team is suited for, what kind of revolutionary work they naturally want to do (what kind of “tree” they are), and sets up networks of support to enable them to do that revolutionary work. He’s not a gardener of plants and flowerbeds, but a gardener of revolutionaries.

We will mourn the gardener but celebrate the garden. Over ten years, Red has helped to build a powerful engine of revolution. He has contributed to the safety and well-being of hundreds if not thousands of people served by FTH and CRC. Quietly, without drawing much attention to itself, a powerful seed of revolution is gathering strength in Seattle. That seed was watered by the Red Gardener. We may be losing Red, but his contribution to the revolution will live on — and when the revolution is victorious, those of us who knew Red will know that he forged the links in the chain of victory.

A comrade never fades away,

A comrade lives forever.

For though the body may decay,

The bond cannot be severed.

A comrade never fails to breathe;

Their voice is ours, unbroken.

Their struggle and their surety,

They live through words they’ve spoken.

A comrade’s earthly reach extends

Beyond their mortal tether.

A comrade never dies, my friends,

For struggle lasts forever.

Dremel, Requiem for Red

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

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

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

As Biden said: Congratulations, Mr. McCarthy! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now the enemy state is wavering.

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

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

Keep that righteous fury contained.

Keep the uprisings at bay.

Keep intact the unjust peace.

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

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

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

Now the enemy state is wavering.

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

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

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

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

Now the enemy state is wavering.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now the enemy state is wavering.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now the enemy state is wavering.

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

Down with the enemy state!

Death to the fascist U.S. Empire!

All support and all glory to the Black liberation struggle!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He Needed Help

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New White Guard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Direct Opposition: Six Activists Charged with Domestic Terror

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

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

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

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live — forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence — knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.

Friedrich Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England

Every year, around 1,330 people are killed by the purposeful neglect of the capitalist state in the richest and most powerful of the Western capitalist countries, where we are told resources are the most plentiful. These 1,330 people — some years more, some years less — are left to freeze to death. Over the 2022 holiday weekend in December, a killing winter storm swept across North America. The death toll currently stands at or above 60 individuals, more than half of them in upstate New York. Power across the worst-affected regions exacerbated the effects of the storm. At its height, the storm left 1.2 million homes and businesses without power. Two-thirds of the U.S. population were under winter warnings or advisories. Overnight temperatures were as low as 9 degrees below zero, and that’s before accounting for wind chill. As always, it is those with the fewest resources and least able to deal with a dire event like this that were most affected.

The U.S. imperialist news turned the storm into a spectacle of horror, but not once was a serious attempt made by the federal government to reduce the impact of the storm on the unhoused or those who could not afford their power bills. No, indeed, in places like Connecticut, electricity and heating prices are set to spike on 1 January. But we must not lie to ourselves: the deaths that came after this storm are no different than the deaths that follow every major weather event in the U.S. Empire. This isn’t an outlier; this is the status quo. It is accepted and expected that thousands of unhoused persons and lower-income members of the working class will die whenever a seasonal weather disturbance hits the country. Meanwhile, COVID is still killing hundreds and sometimes thousands of people every day, and the capitalist government has completely given up the pretense of trying to combat it.

Every last one of these deaths is directly attributable to the iron laws of capitalism: the private ownership and control of economic production and the exploitation of billions of workers by and for the profit of a small class of capitalists. The capitalist state takes great pains to preserve the private property and hoarded wealth of the opulent capitalists, while it lets those who have the least — the workers, the unemployed, the elderly and disabled poor, the unhoused — suffer and die with little more than a shrug and a few misery-porn stories in the capitalist media. When, for instance, the stock market begins to crash, like it did in 2020, or when the “too big to fail” capitalist institutions of the country crumble under their own weight, like they did in 2008, the state is always ready to lend a helping hand. Oh, I’m sorry, did your value-per-share drop? Here comes the state to make up the difference. Oh my, did your rampant speculation destroy your company and other big banks like it? Well, here is a prop and a taxpayer-funded loan to help keep it afloat. “Too big to fail” was the phrase they used, and too big to fail is what they mean: the wealthy are the state. For the capitalist, society exists only to service and protect those of means. There is a corollary to “too big to fail” — “too small to care.” The lives of the working people are meaningless to the capitalist state. Let ten, let one hundred, let two thousand die each day — of what concern is it to Washington or Wall Street?

But COVID and this latest winter storm are hardly the beginning or the end of the weather catastrophes that struck the beleaguered working class of the U.S. Empire this year. 83 tornadoes struck the U.S. South. Hurricane Ian blasted Florida and killed more than 125 people. Nearly 7.5 million acres burned in wildfires. The drought in the U.S. West continues unabated, even as new data centers and chip-building facilities that threaten to use the last remnants of the Colorado River reserves are being constructed or opened.

These are not isolated events. This is the result of a regime that thrives on, relies on, and profits from social murder. The capitalists that run the U.S. Empire don’t care what happens to the environment. The only thing they care about — the only thing they’re capable of caring about — is lining their own pockets. If that means the planet’s ecosphere dies, they’re willing to kill it. If it means thousands and hundreds of thousands of working class people die, they’re ready to commit social mass-murder. Oh, how they’ll cry for us on television, but don’t think for a moment that they aren’t laughing as soon as the cameras are off… and all the way to the bank.

Since the advent of capitalism itself, the ruling class have used natural disasters, cold, and hunger as weapons against the working people. Today, they want you to know that unless you take their minimum wage job, you will freeze to death in the snow — freeze to death in incredible storms created by their own greed. That is the legacy of the U.S. Empire and its capitalist masters: a world ruined by rapacious, never-ending greed, and lives thrown away into the frigid winter they themselves have brought.

On 21 December 2022 Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the comedian-president of Ukraine, was flown on a U.S. Air Force jet out of his war-devastated country to beg for alms from his American masters in front of the U.S. Congress. Zelenskyy is the representative of the fascist-infiltrated government in Kiev and serves at the pleasure of a loose coalition of Banderite leaders — men who profess loyalty to the vision of the ultranationalist, antisemite, and murderer Stepan Bandera who organized mass executions during World War II. Before his televised debut, Zelenskyy stopped over at the White House to receive assurances from the decaying Joe Biden that the Banderite government of Kiev would continue to receive U.S. support. The U.S. imperialists, through their gerontocrat mouthpiece Biden, announced that they would not abandon the U.S. commitment to Ukraine. Indeed, the mobile corpse at the head of the U.S. executive said that he had “never seen NATO or the EU more united about anything at all.”

With these promises in hand, Zelenskyy delivered his speech to the U.S. ruling  classes with a bald-faced recognition of the truth — ”Americans won this victory.” Despite the fact that Ukraine is even now being reduced to a smoldering ruin, despite the fact that millions and billions of dollars in war machinery and materiel is being destroyed, Zelenskyy began by recognizing the power of the U.S. propaganda machine. He praised that the “victory” Ukraine has already won is, in Zelenskyy’s own words, a “hearts and minds” victory, a triumph of propaganda and intelligence. He thanked, in essence, the most powerful media presence in the world. With the U.S. imperialist war-lobbying machine at his side, how can he lose? In fact, by June of 2022, Ukraine had already lost 50% of its military equipment. On June 13 one of Zelenskyy’s advisors, Mykhailo Podolyak, tweeted that Ukraine needed at least 1,000 howitzers, 300 Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (MLRS), 500 tanks, 2,000 armored vehicles, and 1,000 additional drones.

An estimate of Western-donated totals indicates somewhere around 200 howitzers, 51 MLRS, 250 tanks, and 700 armored vehicles have made it into Ukraine.
Zelenskyy went on to use the language of decolonization to describe Ukraine: Yet we have to do whatever it takes to ensure that countries of the Global South also gain such victory.” He hasn’t lost his gift for comedy! The “Global South” is dominated and colonized by the very U.S. Empire that Zelenskyy serves. The largest, most powerful empire in the world can’t “decolonize” anything!

This battle is not only for territory, for this or another part of Europe. The battle is not only for life, freedom and security of Ukrainians or any other nation which Russia attempts to conquer. This struggle will define in what world our children and grandchildren will live, and then their children and grandchildren.

Here, Zelenskyy appeared to be auditioning for yet another role — the battered president standing up against fascists, painting the Russian Federation with the same brush as Nazi Germany. This kind of rhetoric harkens to the world-shattering conflicts of World War I and II and, in good European style, Zelenskyy casts this war as one between democracy and destruction, between a free way of life and a dictatorship. But, like everything else in his presidency, for Zelenskyy this is nothing more than an act; this is no war between democracy and totalitarianism. Zelenskyy’s own government is shot through with fascists, and this big man of democracy role is merely a kind of sleight of hand. The real script is being written by the heirs of Stepan Bandera. Only a comedian could, with a straight face, defend the erection of statues to the antisemite and murderer of Poles Bandera, whose paramilitary Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists killed 35,000 Ukrainian Jews and between 50,000 and 100,000 Poles.  A fine deflection from his own Banderite government!

It’s of no small moment that Zelenskyy stood before the U.S. Congress to make this impassioned but bankrupt plea. It was the U.S. Empire and its machinations that put Ukraine on the frontlines. It is the insatiable drive of the U.S. imperialists for the natural resources of the Russian Federation, the pathological refusal of the U.S. ruling class to integrate Russia into the world-imperialist machine, and the bloody-minded desire of U.S. Cold Warriors who were sad to see the war end in their favor that put Ukraine on the path to war. For thirty years, the U.S. Empire has manipulated little Ukraine. The president of that embattled country must come to the U.S. and nowhere else to hold out his cap and beg for bullets, guns, bombs, even nuclear war. After all, Zelenskyy merely asked the U.S. to hold up the bargain its agents have been whispering in his ear since he took office. Make us like you, he says. Make us part of the imperialist West. And if his countrymen down to the last must die to fulfill the Banderite ambition? So what!

Zelenskyy went on to describe the Russian onslaught. “Every inch of that land is soaked in blood; roaring guns sound every hour. Trenches in the Donbass change hands several times a day in fierce combat, and even hand fighting.” But who, oh President Zelenskyy, invited that war? Who was it that loudly courted NATO, that loudly asked for the U.S. Empire to involve itself in the affairs of Ukraine? Whose government was it that waged a war of ethnic cleansing in the Donbass for the past three years? Oh, well, of course, Mr. Zelenskyy has nothing to say on those subjects.

But he admits that the Russian forces “have a significant advantage in artillery. They have an advantage in ammunition. They have much more missiles and planes than we have ever had.” The unspoken corollary: the U.S. must make up the deficit. You got us into this, Zelenskyy says without saying, now it’s up to you to get us out.

Of course, Zelenskyy couldn’t help but accuse the Russian Federation of what Ukraine itself has done. As early as February, Zelenskyy was releasing the prisoners in Ukraine to form penal battalions to fight the Russians. Yet, the comedian-president said to the Congress that “They [the Russians] sent convicts to the war.” And again, he cannot resist the comparison of Russian president Vladimr Putin to the Nazis: “[J]ust like the brave American soldiers which held their lines and fought back Hitler’s forces during the Christmas of 1944… [b]rave Ukrainian soldiers are doing the same to Putin’s forces this Christmas.”

But President Zelenskyy reminded Congress that the $68 billion USD sent by the Congress up to November 2022 is not enough money to win the war. “Financial assistance is also critically important.” The gross domestic product of Ukraine is only $200 billion USD; Zelenskyy warns that the entire output of the country is insufficient to win the war.

And what does winning look like, to this comedian president? “Ukraine has already offered proposals which I have just discussed with President Biden,” he said. Peace to President Zelenskyy looks like the Russian Federation voluntarily cutting the price of its gas and oil, guaranteeing food exports from Ukraine, releasing all of its prisoners, delivering over the sovereign regions of Donetsk and Luhansk back to Ukrainian war criminals and Banderite fascists, withdrawing all troops, submitting to an internal war crimes tribunal, and signing a peace treaty. Victory, in other words, is the complete capitulation of the Russian Federation and the return of the Banderite militias to the Donbass where they will continue to murder unopposed.

Zelenskyy, who once told a reporter that the fact that he was Jewish “barely makes 20 in [his] long list of faults,” under whose administration statues of the notorious antisemite and killer Stepan Bandera have multiplied, whose administration is staffed by open far-right fascists, demands that the U.S. help his government reconquer the Donbass so those same fascists can return to their ethnic cleansing. So much for the vaunted democracy and freedom! He then went on to say “We’ll celebrate Christmas. Celebrate Christmas even if there’s no electricity.” Throughout his speech he said the word Christmas no less than nine times.

At a time when the decrepit Biden White House has proved its value to the U.S. capitalist class by crushing the railroad workers movement, at a time when the consumer price index in the U.S. is soaring and inflation is spiraling out of control, at a time when student debt relief was dangled only to be canceled, at a time when the domestic population of the U.S. Empire desperately needs some kind of monetary relief, Biden and the other cronies of the big capitalists have chosen to spend over $60 billion in war machinery, ammunition, and supplies for the Ukrainian army rather than to give any relief to the U.S. working classes. Zelenskyy is their reasoning. The rugged face of the handsome actor-president serves as a stand-in for argumentation. It now merely needs to flash his photograph in the news or mention his name on the radio for standing ovations and tearful protestations of loyalty to Ukraine to spill from the lips of regular U.S. citizens (nearly always in the form of the fascist phrase Slava Ukraini).

This is a war against Russia; this is a war against the Empire’s European partners; but this is also a war against the working class. It is a war against the working class in Russia, which suffers. It is a war against the working class in Ukraine, which chafes under the fascist yoke. It is a war against the working class in the U.S. Empire, which must make sacrifices so the U.S. government can enact its capitalist masters’ bloody will in Eastern Europe and remake the map of the world.

We must not be duped by Washington or Kiev. When they send in the clowns, we must be prepared with the real facts that led to this conflict. When they cry crocodile tears about human rights abuses, we must remind them who created the abuses, who funded the murderous fascists that perpetuate them, who even now send money and materiel to them so they can continue their depravities. We are not fooled by the funny man from Ukraine.

Washington, we see your hand in the shadows.