As conditions for working and poor people have  stagnated and degraded throughout the territorial U.S. Empire, a rising tide of class consciousness has spread throughout the working classes. The long-delayed struggle to raise the federal minimum wage has polarized the divided strata of the working classes; the turn-coat labor aristocracy, those for whom the conditions are already “good enough,” have abandoned the common workers and allied themselves with the capitalist bosses in belittling the struggle for livable working-class incomes.  (“Why should you make $60k a year flipping burgers, when I do so and so?”). All over the country, the brutal conditions suffered by workers, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, have been exposed and brought to light: the momentous increase in Amazon’s infrastructure, the proliferation of snooping Ring-camera technology to monitor package deliveries, the mass social murder of workers by exposing them over and over to the COVID threat, and on and on. These legitimate grievances have fueled the resurgence of  a growing labor movement, and instilled in large sections of the U.S. proletariat a trade-union consciousness that spurs the organization of laborers into new union formations,  through which they can confront their bosses — and not only confront them, but confront them and win.

We’ve seen this trend in Amazon warehouses and Starbucks storefronts across the country. It should come as no surprise that the labor movement within the U.S. Empire, the political and economic center of world-imperialism, would first rise in the unorganized service industries that support the lifestyle of the labor aristocracy. For nearly one hundred years, the capitalist masters of the U.S. Empire have staved off revolution by doling out handfuls of scraps to the working classes. Fast coffee and speedy delivery of any commodity imaginable is the price the monopoly capitalists pay the suburban labor aristocrats and small-business owners haunting the colonial-estate suburbs of the imperialist metropole in exchange for their loyalty. The adherence of all those doctors, well paid tech workers, and small-business tyrants to the parties of the big capitalists has its costs.

This trend has entered Connecticut through Starbucks, calling Starbucks workers across the state to take action and get organized. Connecticut has long been a preserve of the ruling elite. New England boarding schools train the children of the ruling class. New England colleges like Yale prepare them for the management of the imperialist system. The state is the seat of the eastern seaboard’s defense contractors. The financial hub of New York is a mere two hours away and the protected, walled gardens of its monopolist elite can be found all along the southern Connecticut coast — comfortably far from the “danger” of the urbanized city where the finance market sits.

In Connecticut, the trade-union consciousness has surfaced most intensely through the union drive at two Starbucks stores — one in Corbin’s Corner, West Hartford, and the other in Vernon. These stores voted to unionize over the last six months and now stand as the  latest outposts of a campaign for Starbucks unionizations sweeping the country. While the Corbin’s Corner store has not yet seen aggressive intensifications of class conflict (to our knowledge), the Vernon store has been subject to the worst kinds of retaliation — unjust firings, refusal to bargain, and other anti-union tactics.

Generally, across all Starbucks stores in the U.S. Empire, the returning CEO Howard Schultz has waged what’s been called a “scorched earth” anti-union campaign. More than 325 unfair labor complaints have been filed against Starbucks since the first drive began. These complaints include one-on-one meetings between managers and workers to threaten them, captive-audience meetings with entire stores to give them anti-union rhetoric, and the roll-out of added benefits only in non-union stores. These are classic anti-union tactics that our forebears in the labor movement fought and bled to expose and defeat.

Here in Vernon, a local union leader was fired under the ginned-up pretense that a safe had been discovered unlocked during her shift. No money was stolen and no evidence presented that the union organizer in question was at fault, but she was summarily fired and given no opportunity to contest management’s decision. This kind of immediate firing using suspicious or outright fabricated reasons isn’t uncommon in non-union workplaces; managers, acting to protect the interests of the firm’s owners and shareholders, have near-dictatorial power over the workplace, and are encouraged by the capitalist bosses to fire “unruly” workers at will. In this case, the union organizer’s co-workers immediately suspected that she had been fired in retaliation for union organizing — which, even in the fascist U.S. Empire, is nominally illegal, if it can be proved — and have set up a Go-Fund-Me to help support her while her case is pending before the Connecticut National Labor Relations Board, the adjudicatory body that rules on labor practices on behalf of the capitalist dictatorship. (The semi-official representation of the Vernon Starbucks workers, Twitter account @VernonSBWU, did not respond to a request for comment.) Throughout the U.S. Empire, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz and his anti-union mercenaries have summarily and illegally fired over 100 local and regional union leaders in their effort to crush the unionization campaign.

At the Vernon store, management just recently refused to negotiate with the nascent union so long as they used a “hybrid meeting” model, meaning, so long as they insisted on the right of their members to attend the meetings with management using COVID-safe methods like Zoom, in addition to in-person meetings. This is a transparent effort to shut down negotiations between labor and management with red tape justifications, so that Starbucks can throw up its hands, while blaming the organized workers for their “unreasonable” ground rules.

The capitalist class is already scrambling to get ahead of this surge in trade-union activity and organization here in Connecticut. Amazon, which over the last two years has engaged in various union-suppression tactics to maintain “order” in their notoriously inhumane warehouses, is giving piecemeal raises to its Connecticut warehouse workers. These raises come just as, over the border in New York, the organizers driving the unionization effort  have fought tooth and nail to organize Amazon’s Staten Island warehouse. This is a desperate retrenchment by Amazon, a pathetic, last-ditch tactic to prevent the “contagion” of trade-union consciousness from reaching Connecticut. But miniscule, last-minute bribes will not placate an outraged employee body that has suffered, for years, some of the most depraved working conditions in the U.S. Empire.

Although the growth of unions and their increasing levels of militance signals the rising consciousness of the workers in these industries, it’s not, in itself, enough to bring about revolutionary change. It is a sign that we are increasingly prepared to become revolutionary, but not the way in which we will fight to win.

Why can’t the unions themselves lead us toward liberation? The fact of the matter is that most of these unions are “captured.” Their leadership serves as little more than puppets of the capitalists. These are the AFL-CIO unions, the AFSCME unions. Like the old revisionist parties of the Western capitalist world, the revolutionary potential of the unions was long ago surrendered to the business interests.

This does not mean we should oppose further unionization. Far from it! But we must be clear: the business unions are given to cowardly capitulation to management, to vile back-room deals with the ruling class, and to opportunist, labor-aristocratic, petit-bourgeois, now-progress, now-reactionary positions. That is, through local organization, the membership of the big unions can be radicalized and those local organizations can be developed into real workplace councils; unless and until it is these final steps are taken, to move from unionization to revolutionary organization, the unions, even those being organized under oppressive capitalist resistance, will remain little more than a foil to be manipulated by the capitalists, to be dangled in front of the workers as a promise of class collaboration.

Unionize! Fight for your unions. But don’t stop there. Push them forward to new heights; bring them deeper into the struggle, even when they don’t want to march forward. The unions are useful only insofar as they serve you to confront the enemy state, only so far as they serve you to stand up to the capitalist and the warmonger, the imperialist and the slick politicians in his pocket. Join your unions and force them to confront reaction — if you’re in a unionized workplace, go into the union and attend meetings. This is a place to advance the front, to win allies, and to do battle with the enemy.

What is a workplace council? It is the self-acting organization of the workers in a given workplace. It is like a union, and a union can easily form the shell of a workplace council. A workplace council is a deliberative body in which everyone who contributes labor to a workplace has a say, has a vote, on what goes on in that workplace; on who “manages” that workplace; ultimately, on whether that workplace continues politely working for capital’s starvation wage, or takes up arms against the rulers. Workplace councils represent workplace democracy in its most refined form. Unions are the crib, the training grounds, of workplace democracy, but it is the workplace council that represents its mature form, a form prepared to assert its demands, to heighten the struggle, and eventually to overthrow the system that made it necessary. Like a union, workplace councils can fight collectively for the rights of their workers. Unlike a union, they are not enslaved to the capitalist system, and are bound by no law. When the time comes, it will be the councils from which our power, the people’s power, springs.

We do not want class peace! We want victory in the class war!

As Marxists warned last year and the year before that, the crisis in the housing market, so long suppressed by the last-ditch stabilizing measures  of the U.S. government, has finally broken out into the open. The contradiction was unsustainable: the working classes have been deprived of their income by death, disease, and economic manipulation, and are now being forced to pay back rent that the government suspended — rent that they can’t afford. Now that this larcenous manipulation — the issuing of what are essentially interest-free loans to banks and investors, billed in the presses as “relief” — has increased the cost of staple goods and threatens hyper-inflation, the political lackeys of the U.S. real estate capitalists are preparing to give the economy a strong dose of “shock therapy.” The real costs of the so-called “relief” are becoming more and more apparent.

In Connecticut alone, hundreds of working class families have been thrown onto the streets. A smoldering fire of evictions threatens to explode into a full-blown conflagration of houselessness far beyond the capacity of the meager resources allotted by the capitalist state to combat it.

This particular housing crisis was created by the COVID pandemic and the bungled half-measures taken by the government in response. Even as investors line their pockets, the working people sink deeper into misery. This stop-and-start “protection” has merely given the illusion of safety while allowing the capitalists to plunder the public coffers and leave growing numbers unhoused, food-insecure, and unemployed.

“I haven’t seen this in my 20 years working in Connecticut,” said David Rich of the Housing Collective in Fairfield County. Housing advocates are calling it the “perfect storm” for the working classes. The state reports a shortfall of more than 85,000 units of rental housing. As of late August 2022, only about 2% of the state’s rental units were available, which gives Connecticut the lowest vacancy rate in the U.S. Empire.

“The people who are coming into the shelter now were housed and [lost housing] either through evictions or being priced out of their housing,” said Michele Conderino of the Open Doors Community.

ACT CT, a bourgeois NGO operating in Connecticut to “address the root causes of poverty, addiction, and health,” released a report on the state of houselessness in Connecticut from data gathered on Tuesday, January 25, 2022. They identified 2,930 people who were unhoused in Connecticut on that date. Last year the same report identified 2,594 houseless persons. The very first wave of the crisis has seen an increase in houselessness by 13%, which is a reversal of a decade of decreases.

And it’s not only that there is insufficient shelter for rent — the protections for tenants introduced at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic have since been lifted and evictions are now being processed at an increasing pace. Those protections were still in place in January of this year, when the study was conducted, but in March there was a 70% increase in eviction filings — from an average of 1,469 each March to 2,490 in March of this year. The effects of this dramatic increase have not yet been seen.

What’s more, landlords have taken this crisis as an opportunity to drive rents up. Average rents across Connecticut are up 12% over the last 18 months and are projected  to continue rising.

Inflation caused by the capitalist printing of “free money” to the banks throughout 2020, 2021, and early 2022 has pushed many working class families already on the brink of poverty over the edge. Compounded with the lifting of eviction protection and the predatory housing purchases by huge investment firms like BlackRock, Mandy Properties, and Farnam Realty, the capitalists appear to be conspiring to drive working class people out of their homes.

There’s no sign this crisis will let up any time soon. In fact, every law of capitalist development points firmly to its intensification as the investment markets suffer contractions and the U.S. Federal Reserve withdraws its offerings of what was essentially, until now, free credit to the banks and investors. All this adds up to a worsening crisis for working class families in Connecticut and across the U.S. Empire. 

Houses and apartments are “withdrawn” from the market for a “more profitable” resale or investment. There are 700,000 unoccupied units of housing in Connecticut. The owners of these properties refuse to rent them, for the selfish reason that they can make more money by waiting and using their real estate holding sas passive investments to sell as they “appreciate” in value than they can by renting them. In other words, under capitalism, housing is often more profitable when it isn’t actually used for housing. These landlords buy up all the property, wait for desperation and misery to increase, and then sell them at huge profits.

But why is all this happening? The greed of a few is the dispossession of many.

Let’s step back to the beginning of the COVID pandemic: To save the lives of millions, measures were implemented to keep many from going to work. Clumsy half-measures at alleviating pandemic-induced poverty were adopted by the government. But the government’s policies weren’t stringent enough to burn out the disease (unlike the zero-COVID plan in China) and weren’t liberal enough to keep the markets functioning.

While “essential” industries (from food processing to restaurants) were kept open and the workers there were subject to sickness and death, other workers, especially the labor aristocrats and petit-bourgeoisie, were protected under stay-at-home orders. COVID-19 was permitted to rage among the poorest strata of the laboring classes, resulting in government-sanctioned social mass murder.

But, for the capitalist economy to function, for money to circulate, for stocks to stay high, for banks to remain solvent, eventually even those labor aristocrats and petit-bourgeoisie had to go back to work. To support capital during the initial period, the Federal Reserve began issuing what were essentially interest-free loans to banks and investors. Then, under immense pressure from their capitalist masters, the government declared the pandemic was “over” and forced everyone back to work by removing all the protections it had extended: rent and eviction protection, mandatory or free COVID tests, free vaccinations and boosters, school closures, work closures.

The capitalists and their lackeys in government have the tools to alleviate the misery they’re creating. The unhoused merely have to seize this property or have it ordered available by the government; that this is unthinkable speaks to the power of the bourgeoisie to command not only the police force, but the very halls of government.

The pandemic has not ended. The capitalist government did not provide long-term solutions for anything. Neither the disease, which continues to ravage and kill, nor the economic problems, which were shifted from the ruling class onto the working classes, have been addressed. We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this.

The government has worked tirelessly to do what is best for the capitalists. When the capitalists were afraid they might be infected, a limited amount of protections were put in place. After they’d had enough time to develop suitable defenses, like monoclonal antibodies or increased security and temperature screening in their walled gardens, they told everyone “Hey! Get back to work! And by the way, you still owe me a year’s rent.”

This is a stark example of the contradictions at the heart of the capitalist system. The government, composed of the representatives not of the renters, but the landowning classes, can’t order the forgiveness of the overdue rents (doing so is actually constitutionally forbidden, because that would be considered a “taking”), nor can it afford to pay those overdue rents itself.

Where are public funds being spent? Not on the unhoused, those with marginal housing, or those working people being forced out of their longtime homes. Rather, the State of Connecticut just held a lavish state funeral for two Bristol police officers, costing tens of thousands of dollars, diverting millions in state resources, and drawing tens of thousands of fascist fellow-officers and fascist cop supporters from across the country. Indeed, every city in Connecticut is increasing funding for the police across the board.

Thousands of evictions are expected each month going forward. The dreaded “cliff” is still ahead of us: the sharp and sudden explosion of litigation and summary process that will drive thousands of working-poor people onto the streets across the U.S. Empire.

With this crisis now coming to a long-anticipated head, the subterranean contradictions of capitalism, its sometimes-hidden brutality, stands revealed and unveiled for all to see. In response, tenants unions are springing up across the state, but this will not alone stem the tide. Only a united coalition  of unhoused councils, unemployed committees, and housing justice activists, led by a strong Communist movement, can bring the capitalists to heel and force them to concede ground.

Jahziel’s probation was violated once on January 10 of 2020. He admitted his violation and was put back on probation. Sometimes, violators are re-sentenced, extending already onerous probations to last even longer as a punishment. It was violated again on May 10 of 2021; that violation has been pending since. This week, after eight years of suffering under court scrutiny, of the involvement of law officers in every aspect of his life, knowing that he was facing another four years in prison for the second violation of probation, he was shot to death in Hartford, Connecticut. 

The police claim Jahziel died when he and his brother tried to carjack someone in a parking lot. The driver was armed. He opened his door and shot Jahziel in the midsection, severing his spine. Jahziel’s case, that probation he was put on when he was fifteen, was still pending on the day he was slain. 

Prosecutors had already told Jahziel they wanted him to serve four years in prison for the violation, which would have made him 27 at the age of his release. In the state of Connecticut, a larceny in the third degree is an allegation that someone has stolen between $2,000 and $10,000, or a car of a value less than $10,000. The state tried to extract twelve years of Jahziel’s life over three somethings — the exact somethings are buried in Jahziel’s record — worth a total of $6,000 to $30,000 dollars. They only failed to get this from him because he was murdered over another piece of property — a car.

The capitalist state, over a property theft that occurred 8 years ago, wanted Jahziel locked up. Their intention was to put him in a prison for his probation violations. The state’s attorneys wanted to ensure that a young Black boy of 15 was kept under the thumb of the white-supremacist institutions of “law and order” — the court and its agencies — from the day of his arrest in 2014 until 2026. This is the value the capitalist state places on private property; this is what the ruling class is willing to do to protect it.

The Hartford police department has not charged the driver that killed Jahziel. In fact, they released a statement that they had no intention of arresting him, and this despite the fact that they themselves say he slew Jahziel, and despite the fact, too, that Jahziel’s brother may also die. The police rely on the “self-help” of the white population to help control the nationally oppressed masses. This is part and parcel of the legal regime that protects white property — and subjects Black property to legalized theft by the government, by the courts, and by banks. (The state still relies on the deputization of individuals to enforce its settler-colonial property relations.)

The court system of the capitalist countries serves to protect the interests of the propertied classes. Both civil and criminal courts are instruments of class control. The poor have little recourse to the court. Court procedures are arcane and hard to follow, and they aren’t free. Indeed, access to court costs far more money than most people can afford. This is no accident. Dating back to the foundation of the country, the landowners have always tried to exclude the landless, the wealthy have always tried to exclude the poor, the owners have always tried to exclude the owned. The court is merely another institution designed by the ruling class, for its own purposes.

The story of Jahziel Phillips is the story of millions of children of oppressed nationalities living in the United States Empire. “Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act.” So wrote George Jackson in 1971. “Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”

Jahziel is one of the children forced to live a butchered half-life at the mercy of U.S. capital and its machinery. Fascism is already here. It comes in the black robes of the judge and the smart suit of the prosecutor. It is adorned with the flashing lights of the squadcar, and you can hear it in the mantis-click of the handcuff ratchet. Every day, the nationally oppressed are dragged, screaming, into custody in the courtrooms of this country. Every day, U.S. capital advances its grim agenda through the bench. This inhuman and brutal system justifies itself to itself; many of the agents that carry it out have no wider conception of their role in this machine. Liberal-indidivudalism, the dominant philosophy of the bourgeois, capitalist class, is instilled in us from a young age. Judges and prosecutors, by and large, don’t see themselves as complicit in *anything.* They tell themselves that such-and-such is the law, and such-and-such is the person, and their narrow duty is to apply the law to the person in each individual case, without ever thinking about whether the law itself is just.

But the courts are not only an instrument of class-rule, they are also an instrument of white supremacy. U.S. capitalism cannot be disentangled from its white supremacist roots. It is, in essence, racial capitalism. It creates the races (in social relation and economic relation) through a process called racialization, and then enforces property rights along those racial lines. The court system, as all other arms of the U.S. state, works to reinforce the property divisions of race.

Misconceptions

The general public is largely ignorant of the legal system, is ignorant of what happens behind the closed doors of courthouses across the country. We are bombarded with television shows and books about the police and the courts, about the heroic battle of the police and the prosecutors against the morass of crime that plagues our upstanding citizens. Law & Order, for instance, is one of the longest running shows in U.S. television history. We are constantly encouraged to look to these authority figures as our protectors, as watching out for the rights of the “little guy.” In fact, we’re told the courts are the place to “vindicate our rights,” to make a stand, to fight for the truth. In reality, the courts are designed almost purely for the benefit of the landed and the wealthy.

On television and in movies, the real procedures of court are edited down and streamlined so we can have a compelling drama. Attorneys are always cutting and brilliant; they pull out arguments that win the day at the last minute. Trials are plentiful and exciting, with defendants either proving themselves innocent against incredible evidence marshaled by hard-working prosecutors, or with sleazy defense attorneys outmaneuvered by upright DA’s and evil men and women sent to jail. In reality, less than 1% of all cases go to trial. The vast majority of criminal cases resolve in a plea — whether the defendant is guilty or not.

In reality, the state has an overwhelming amount of power over the lowly defendant. Defendants are routinely incarcerated for years while awaiting trial. They are held in prisons across the country well before any legal authority says they’re guilty. The Prison Policy Initiative reports that 67% of people held in the city and county jails of the United States haven’t been convicted of anything. Fully 43% of that group is Black. In 1980, well before the “law and order” crackdown of the 1980s and 90s, the average pretrial detention period was 135 days. Now, with the COVID delays, many are held for years.

Defendants seeking trial will routinely wait upwards of a year or more to have their case called. In that time, they can be held (and thus lose their jobs, their housing, fail out of school, and so forth) or be at liberty – depending upon how much money they have, what kind of personal network of wealth they can draw on, and so forth. When someone is held in a prison for a year or two years, they will often be glad to plead guilty even to something they haven’t done, just so long as a guilty plea also results in their release.

It’s not only incarceration; like Jahziel, defendants can be placed on probation for decades, during which time, even doing things that would otherwise be legal can land them back in jail. Getting drunk, smoking marijuana, whatever conditions the probation officer (a kind of cop) decide to set can be added as conditions of probation. 

In civil cases, the plaintiffs are often up against insurmountable odds if they are facing anyone outside their class. Corporations maintain armies of lawyers that respond by burying the small resources of opposing counsel in paperwork. Even before cases get to court, corporations are known to send snow-drifts of spurious cease-and-desist notifications and other threatening legal mail to those who threaten their mercantile dominance, particularly if they know the threat is a lone person or small independent company that will not be able to raise the funds to fight the legal battle.

If the courts do not exist to vindicate our rights, to make sure we are not abused by the state, to protect the upright and punish the guilty, then what is their purpose? If our courts do not exist to protect children – children like Jahziel Phillips-Ray – from the mutilation of their psyches, their emotions, and their ego, such that they openly despair of any future, that they surrender themselves to death – then what purpose do they serve?

Disputes Between the Wealthy

The courts in the Anglo-American legal system were originally constituted to resolve disputes between people of the same class. We see this still in the guarantee of a “jury of your peers.” The original meaning of that phrase in English law was that the noble would be judged by the noble and the common by the common. The court is still structured this way today, although it’s no longer out in the open. The wealthy do battle with squadrons of high-paid lawyers, they post bail and remain out of prison, they take care of minor infractions without ever appearing in court. Working people, on the other hand, take days off work they can’t afford to wait in court, they are forced to defend themselves or hire lawyers they can’t pay for, and they are ground down by long continuances and delays in their cases.

Access to the courts is controlled by the guild of lawyers that calls itself “the Bar” in U.S. law. Those who seek to call upon the powers of the court system must know the secret language of the court; judges are instructed not to guide self-represented parties (on the reasonable-sounding basis that it wouldn’t be fair for a judge to give advice). Although U.S. law is “Anglo-American,” the language it uses isn’t English. The legalese spoken in court is a melange of special technical jargon with clearly-defined meanings (that lawyers spend years learning), old Norman French (different in meaning and spelling than, say, modern French), Latin, and bastardized Latin. The ability to read is no guarantor of the ability to understand a law or a court proceeding. Beyond the secret language, there is another special language of procedure and rules: what you do when, how you act in court, what motions can be filed when. You cannot act in a courtroom without knowing these secrets.

There are many reasons for this, first among them that the lawyers guild protects its own position. Should any lay person be able to walk into a court and understand the law, defend themselves, etc., there would be no need for the lawyers who charge exorbitant fees. The second reason is to restrict access to the court system to those who can afford to pay. There should be no doubt that the courts are an elite institution. Only lastly is the purpose of this specialized language to address complex and specialized issues that require technical terms to discuss — that is, only as an afterthought does the use of these technical terms embody an actual communication need.

What kinds of disputes are the courts of the United States Empire designed to settle? In order to get into court, a minimum amount of money has to be in dispute. In civil cases,  courts generally charge upwards of $200 to file a case; people have to take time out of their days to appear in court when they have cases scheduled. No attorney will take a case, even if they normally take their fee out of the portion of recovery (meaning: even if they get paid not by a client, but by the settlement or award after a lawsuit when they win) unless the amount they stand to make is at least $2,000. Since fees are capped at 1/3rd of awards, that means it’s hard to get a lawyer for disputes worth less than $6,000.

Civil court is most often used to settle money disputes between private citizens. The average cost of litigation per respondent (that’s one of those legalese words that means “person who is either plaintiff or defendant”) for U.S. corporations was $115 million in 2008. The group of people who can match that rate is vanishingly small. Corporations, of course, are legally recognized as “private individuals” these days thanks to the rulings of the Supreme Court over the last century.

The court exists to enforce class-rule. Capitalists and their corporations need a way to resolve their disputes short of open violence. If they were permitted to wage war on one another like medieval lords over perceived losses, the unity between them that allows them to suppress and govern the rest of us would fall apart. They have an interest, that means, in agreeing to abide by the rules of the court system, because they know they gain more from it than they lose. The biggest thing they gain is the perceived legitimacy of the U.S. imperialist state and the protection of that state (which is, of course, their creature) from the working masses.

Class Oppression and Private Property

The criminal courts are the primary method of enforcing the ownership of private property in the United States. By private property here, we don’t mean “things you own,” although those are protected by the court too, but rather productive property: tools, machinery, land, housing, etc. The capitalist state doesn’t distinguish between these and, say, the clothes on your back, except by the degree of crime. The more the property is worth, the more time of your life the state is empowered to seek in recompense.

First and foremost, the court is a site of transfer of money from the poor to the wealthy simply through its various fees for filing, fees for being found guilty, attorneys fees, and so on. The legislated fees — the ones you’re forced to pay to the court when you’re found guilty, when you file documents, etc. — are supposed to offset the state’s cost of running the court. In actuality, of course, because they aren’t set to a sliding income scale, the fees are meaningless to big capitalists and corporations, but can be annihilating to members of the working class. An NPR expose from 2014 demonstrated that cities like Ferguson, Missouri, collect millions in court fees from the poor. Who pays most of these fees? Working class proletarians and members of the middle and lower petit-bourgeoisie. Who do these fees benefit? Primarily government workers — labor aristocrats, middle- and upper- petit-bourgeois lawyers, bourgeois judges, cops.

By far the most common crimes being prosecuted by U.S. courts are “property” crimes. In 2020, the number of reported property crimes was 6.45 million according to the FBI. By the same lights, the FBI “violent crimes” statistics for 2019 show 1.2 million prosecutions. Despite the fact that property crimes account for nearly six times the prosecutions than so-called “violent crimes,” these numbers don’t show the full picture – because property crimes committed by the rich, like wage theft, securities fraud, and so forth, are not counted in those numbers. If the wealthy weren’t immune to certain prosecutions (they’re considered “civil” or “administrative” matters), the ratio would be even more heavily tilted in the favor of property.

Various forms of trespass and squatting aren’t considered “property” crimes, but are cut from the same cloth. These are the crimes levied against people making use of productive property (in this case, housing) that aren’t paying for the privilege. These are the crimes the unhoused are charged with so they can be thrown out of abandoned buildings and empty businesses to die on the streets in the winter. This type of social murder numbers, according to the National Health Care for the Homeless Council, somewhere between 17,000 and 40,000 every year. The courts must enforce these property laws. If they didn’t, the landlords who own the entire stock of the United States housing supply wouldn’t be able to charge rent. (Eviction, too, is another function of the courts.)

Poor neighborhoods are overpoliced. The imperial police arrest someone every three seconds, according to Vera News. Most arrests are made for nonserious, nonviolent charges. When the courts set bail, they consider how many arrests someone has had in the past. Just having contact with the police nearly guarantees, further, continued contact with the court system. Every brush with the criminal legal system, even incidental, exacts a heavy toll.

It’s easy to look at the mess and tangle of the U.S. court system and conclude that it’s simply broken. “Too much cludge, built up over the last two hundred years,” legal scholars sometimes argue. “It needs a good overhaul.” But these legal scholars, and they are almost invariably trained lawyers themselves, see a confusing nightmare that’s hard to navigate and find it incomprehensible. The problem is, they lack the point of view necessary to understand it. When you stop assuming that the court system should be designed for the efficient functioning of society and the just apportioning of blame, and instead view it as the product of inevitable pressures coming from the needs and desires of the ruling class, it no longer appears to be “broken.” In fact, all the pieces move into crystal clarity. The cases of extreme injustice that the news and even the left-liberal Democrats portray as extreme outliers become the point of the court system. We cannot explain these injustices as momentary lapses; no, they represent the purpose of the court system, and lay bare its entire mechanism of control.

To put it simply: the court system inhibits upward movement between classes, except for the handful of individuals who, whether by invitation or luck, manage to better their class position. Even so, in its day-to-day operation, the U.S. court system isn’t needed or noticed by the bourgeoisie for this purpose; its fiercest partisans are actually the petit-bourgeois property owners who feel the dual threat from above, as the big bourgeoisie push down on them, and from below, as they fight with their own workers over hours, just compensation, and every other workplace battle. It is small business owners and suburban labor aristocrats who show up to court and complain about vagrancy, about property crime, about theft from their bodegas and restaurants, and who generally push the state toward the most extreme positions.

It’s through the courts that unconstitutional vagrancy laws — like city ordinances barring panhandling, which is protected under the 1st Amendment to the U.S. constitution — are enforced to drive that deadly threat to business out of town. It’s by establishing monitoring systems in the form of probation or parole early and often that working class people can be forced to “contribute” to society. A frequent requirement of both probation and parole is that the probationer or parolee “maintain full-time employment.”

Instrument of National Oppression

Class oppression manifests along racialized lines in the United States Empire. This is more than a mere historical accident. The social category of race was created by Europeans during the colonization of North America and rose alongside the trans-Atlantic slave trade, while at the same time the old European practice of stealing from other faiths (Protestants of various denominations stealing from Catholics and each other, and vice-versa) began, as a result, to wane.

The groundwork for the national oppression suffered by the laboring Black toilers of the United States Empire was put in place in the 1700s when indentured servitude was being replaced by African slaves. Increases in the life-expectancy of workers in the American Colonies of England meant that slaves became more cost-effective; it was cheaper to buy someone outright and work them to death, because they were no longer expected to live a mere four to seven years (the time paid for under the old contracts of indenture).

The U.S. legal system was built on the economic bedrock of Black African chattel slavery. Through a combination of measures, including the explicit plans of the Federal Housing Administration (which purposefully refused to grant mortgages to houses in “mixed” neighborhoods after the Civil War), redlining, restrictive covenants on land (agreements that said no later property owner could sell their property to Black people, which ran with the land), and outright lynch-terror, even after the Civil War and the Great Migration, Black communities remained segregated. These communities were then subject to the same over policing noted above.

The class-oppression function of the courts is dependent on exploitation — the forced establishment of wage labor and continuous barriers to allowing wage workers to escape that labor. The national-oppression function of the courts operates differently: it allows direct expropriation from the nationally oppressed. What do we mean by this? It creates a fund of wealth (anything owned by Black, Chicanx, Latinx, and other non-white nationals) from which the ruling classes can seize money and property when they need it.

“Native dispossession occurs through the expropriation of land, while Black dispossession is characterized by enslavement and bodily dispossession,” writes Iyko Day. “[T]he racial content of Indigenous peoples is the mirror opposite of Blackness. From the beginning, an eliminatory project was drive to reduce Native populations through genocidal wars and later through statistical elimination through blood quantum and assimilationist policies. For slaves, and opposite logic of exclusion was driven to increase, not eliminate, the population of slaves.” Both of these projects required legal sanction and an administrative apparatus: the U.S. settler-republic’s courts. (Division of labor between “women” and “men” also falls in this category of expropriation, with the socio-medical category of womanhood reproduced through the unwaged theft of various types of labor, but that lies beyond the scope of this article and relies less and less on the power of the courts.)

Jackie Wang writes in her seminal Carceral Capitalism, “Black racialization, then, is the mark that renders subjects as suitable for — on the one hand — hyper-exploitation and expropriation, and, on the other hand, annihilation…. racial legacies that have marked Black residents as lootable are intimately tied to the police officers’ treatment of Black people as killable. The two logics reinforce and are bound up with one another.”

Even when Black and nationally oppressed communities don’t actually have anything for the police and courts to plunder through court fees, penalties, fines, and jail fees, the continued levying of these fees and the continued presence of the criminal legal system through its police and its judges means that these communities will sink into debt. Restitution paid over five years of probation, like the restitution Jahziel may have been ordered to pay for his supposed burglary, is a constant debt-pressure. This is, in essence, debt peonage: the continuous trickle of money from the Black and nationally oppressed to finance their own oppression.

A Harvard Law Review article, “Policing and Profits,” describes this process. Tom Barrett, a man from Augusta, Georgia, was arrested in 2012 for stealing a can of beer.

When Barrett appeared in court, he was offered the services of a court-appointed attorney for an $80 fee. Barrett refused to pay and pled [sic] “no contest” to a shoplifting charge. The court sentenced Barrett to a $200 fine plus a year of probation. Barrett’s probation terms required him to wear an alcohol-monitoring bracelet. Even though Barrett’s sentence did not require him to stop drinking alcohol (and the bracelet would thus detect all alcohol Barrett chose to drink with no consequences), he was ordered to either rent this bracelet or go to jail. The bracelet cost Barrett a $50 startup fee, a $39 monthly service fee, and a $12 daily usage fee. Though Barrett’s $200 fine went to the city, these other fees (totaling over $400 a month) all went to Sentinel Offender Services, a private company.

In the State of Connecticut, scores of private contractors make their money through the  Court Support Services Division (CSSD, the division of the judicial branch that monitors probationers) or the Department of Correction. The prisons contract a private phone service company, which exacts a toll on every phone call made in or out. Defendants found guilty of impaired driving are required to pay for, install, and maintain a subscription to an “ignition interlock device” — a tube you blow in to prove you aren’t drunk before your car will start — even if the conviction isn’t for drunk driving. That is, even if you’re  convicted of impaired driving because you accidentally took too many sleeping pills or because you were driving under the influence of heroin, you’ll still be paying a monthly fee to make sure your car has this interlock — or else you’ll go to jail.

The Social Murder of Jahziel Phillips

Jahziel had no future. From the age of 15 until the day he died, he was reduced to a subject of the state. He was monitored, watched, prodded, expropriated; he was told he had to work, be useful, contribute to society. He was told he had to make up for the harm he, a fifteen-year-old boy, had caused and made to plead guilty to a charge and a sentence that even many adult men wouldn’t have taken. He was transformed from a living, breathing child into a commodity bartered for and traded, and in that transformation his entire future was stolen from him.

We must be clear, and emphatic: whatever Jahziel was doing when he was killed — even if he was carjacking his killer — the pathless, destroyed future that drove him to this end is the fault of the U.S. settler-state. He was hounded every day of his life, his future was robbed from him. Is it any wonder he saw no hope in the days to come?

This is murder by any other name. Yes, the driver of the car Jahziel held up murdered him, but so too did the court system and the police. They killed him long before the day he was shot. They told him his life was forfeit to them, that he would never be in control of his own destiny. They told him that in addition to the eight years of probation he’d already served, he’d have to go into a prison and serve half a decade more. Every day, the courts of the U.S. settler-empire condemn the poor, the nationally oppressed, the proletarians, the Black, Chincanx, Latinx, and Indigenous to these stolen lives, these empty futures.

The fact is that capital, U.S. monopoly capital, requires the sacrifice of blood and lives so it can, itself, continue to live. Long ago, the founders of this settler-empire set out the rules by which those sacrifices would be chosen. Every few decades, the rules are slightly updated for the times, but they remain today, as they were in 1776, the rules of the counter-revolutionary enemy. Then they were the white, English, Protestant slave masters; today, whiteness need not encompass Englishness, nor Protestantism, but it is still the color of the ruling class and the ruling class makes use of the full panoply of its tools to enforce its rule.

Only with the full repudiation, the ultimate deconstruction, of the system at its very root can we save those who follow in Jahziel’s footsteps. And make no mistake: even now, there is a child who is being sent down the path of annihilation, of social murder, by the U.S. settler courts. We haven’t a moment to lose.