“When one individual inflicts injury upon another such that death results, we call that manslaughter. When society places hundreds in a position that they inevitably meet early & unnatural death … its deed is murder just as the individual.”

Friedrich Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England

We have been betrayed. For three years, we have been abandoned, misled, shepherded to our dooms. Millions have died. Hundreds of millions have been disabled. All the while, respectable faces with plastered-on grins breathlessly offer hopeful platitudes, assuring us we’ll all be ok. Just trust the system.

You could be forgiven for not realizing we’re still in the middle of a pandemic, considering the total absence of media coverage. If it was important, you’d surely be hearing about it, right? The last variant you heard about was likely omicron. The last you heard about vaccines was likely “we strongly encourage everyone to get boosted.” The last you heard about masks was that they work, but they’re not required. And why would you bother wearing masks anyway if, as the United States president himself proclaimed, “The pandemic is over”?

Here’s the truth: the pandemic is not over. It’s much worse than you have been led to believe. And unless you’ve spent the past several years reading scientific studies on the subject, it can be hard to convey just how wrong the public perception of COVID really is. Everything from how it’s spread, to how it’s prevented, to what it does once it’s in your body, is being tragically misunderstood.

None of this is an accident. It’s not your “fault” if you aren’t a virologist, immunologist, epidemiologist, or evolutionary biologist. It’s the job of experts and trusted voices to convey the truth and give you guidance. Not only have they failed at this, they have engaged in an active disinformation campaign dedicated to making the pandemic “disappear”. This has not been the result of a classic caricature of conspiracy — some tiny council of elites, gathered in the shadows to craft policy out of whole cloth. What we’re actually witnessing is the quiet collusion of class interest. This form of conspiracy is a feature of cultural hegemony, and it has aligned itself in direct opposition to public health and scientific reality. A “conspiracy” of this sort takes place in full view of the public. Every actor within it has openly telegraphed motivations that we are all taught to see as acceptable: keeping the current economic system intact at all costs.

From the moment humanity learned of the novel coronavirus, uncertainty swirled. SARS-CoV-2, named for its terrifying viral cousin, seemed to be even worse than SARS: more deadly, more transmissible, better at evading detection. A singular question arose in the minds of two very different classes of people: “How do we survive this?” For one of those classes, the question was literal: how do we avoid being killed by a disease that seems to be spreading and killing invisibly and indiscriminately? For the other class, the question being asked in boardrooms and capitols was really: “Could this dislodge our grip on power?”

For infectious disease experts, the emergence of an unknown human pathogen — quickly identified as a novel virus — necessitated a pretty clear course of action: contain it, characterize it, and share information as freely as possible. Days after the first cluster of cases were found in Wuhan, Chinese health authorities issued a warning to the WHO. The full genome of the virus that would come to be called SARS-CoV-2 was released to the world before it was even documented outside of China. Coronavirus labs around the world began mobilizing rapidly to study the virus, including creating synthetic versions to study in cultured mammalian cells to learn as much as possible about its life cycle and pathogenicity. 

Why did experts mobilize so quickly, even before human-to-human transmission was conclusively proven? The primary reason is the precautionary principle: when dealing with an unknown, if you don’t know conclusively that it isn’t dangerous, presume the worst case scenario and take the proper precautions. If that wasn’t enough of a reason, researchers figured out pretty quickly that this was a relative of SARS, which has caused enough mayhem on its own to warrant every measure possible to avoid a repeat tragedy. This principle was particularly upheld in China, which had borne the brunt of the SARS crisis, but true precaution never truly materialized in the capitalist world.

After a brief experiment in precautionary measures (stay-at-home orders, mask mandates, quarantine guidelines) many countries in the West quickly saw the writing on the wall — these precautions were not sufficient to stamp out the emerging pandemic. There were measures that could have stopped the virus in its tracks: contact tracing (testing every single person who was in the vicinity of a potential case), enforced quarantines combined with guaranteed paid time off for even the hint of exposure, mandating fitted respirators (and distributing multiple N95s to every resident). But these measures would have required central governments to nationalize key industries, companies to pay employees not to work, and individuals to get comfortable with some discomfort in the name of social welfare (although many already were). These measures would have been a tremendous imposition on the free market, and even then, there was no guarantee they would completely eradicate SARS-CoV-2.

Even half measures, like local mask mandates, were better than nothing, and they did keep many people safe in the beginning. But despite them being utterly insufficient in the face of the crisis we were thrust into, they were still too much for the capitalists to tolerate. They were “harming the economy” by impeding production and discouraging consumption. Tiny protests, led by business owners demanding an end to “restrictions,” garnered massive media attention. Less than 2 months after their implementation, stay-at-home orders were already on their way out, even as cases continued to rapidly climb. Injected into every news story about the pandemic was a consideration for the malaise of the capitalists, whose economic ruin would surely spell the end of our society. The drive to “end the pandemic” began almost as soon as the pandemic arrived in the U.S.

The Lies and the Truth

Near the beginning of the pandemic, you may have heard a common refrain from public health sources: if we address the situation properly, it’ll look like we overreacted. And yet, by the time community transmission started ramping up in the U.S. in March 2020, we had already failed to “overreact.” The consensus had already come in from the highest levels: at all costs, do NOT start a panic. World leaders at the time, including the U.S.’s Donald Trump, the U.K.’s Boris Johnson, Mexico’s Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, and Italy’s Giuseppe Conte, all spent the first few months of 2020 exhorting the public not to “give in to fear.” Following precipitous stock market crashes in February and March of 2020, every market analysis firm reported on the tremendous financial damage being done by “coronavirus concerns.” The overwhelming narrative in the early days was that fear of the virus would be worse than the disease it causes. This philosophy manifested in several ways, including outright lies that still haunt us to this day, driving misinformed “personal risk assessments” among the population, including:

• Masks don’t work.
• Masks do work, but cloth masks are fine.
• Stop the spread by washing hands, standing 6 feet apart, and sanitizing surfaces.
• COVID is not airborne
• COVID is airborne, but that’s not the main way it spreads.
• The only people harmed by COVID are old and immunocompromised people.
• Children don’t get COVID.
• Children can get COVID, but they can’t spread it.
• Reinfections are rare.
• Breakthrough infections after vaccination are rare.
• Reinfections and breakthrough infections happen, but they’re mild.
• Once enough people have been exposed, herd immunity will end the pandemic.
• Viruses naturally evolve to become less deadly.
• Once you recover from acute infection, you’re out of the woods.
• Long COVID is psychological, not physical.
• Long COVID is physical, but not a big concern.
• Heightened lethality of non-COVID diseases is due to “immunity debt.”

The list of officially-sanctioned lies could potentially go on for pages. The most critical feature of the misinformation is that it is always centered around that same core philosophy of minimization. That trend continued to evolve throughout the pandemic: whether it’s Anthony Fauci admitting that he discouraged masks because he didn’t want to trigger panic-buying, the CDC shifting its metrics from transmission levels to “community levels” in soothing pastel colors, school districts touting their supposed low transmission rates, or any of the other examples of public health malpractice, everything has been geared toward pushing people to underestimate danger rather than overestimate. This pattern has continued to this day, with officials attempting to head off panic in the face of the extremely infectious and immune-evasive XBB.1.5 variant (colloquially referred to as the “Kraken” variant).

Before going further, let’s clarify what that danger actually is. Because of how complex biological systems are, it is difficult to convey all the nuance of a viral pandemic without getting too technical. Nevertheless, we can make some pretty clear assertions, based on condensing hundreds of scientific studies into a few paragraphs. With that in mind, here’s everything you need to know about COVID-19 and the virus that causes it:

COVID is airborne. Airborne transmission is different from droplets, which are large particles containing the virus, expelled when you speak, cough, sneeze, etc. Droplets are heavy enough that they will eventually drop to the ground or nearby surfaces, meaning it’s relatively easy to contain: any physical barrier — like a cloth mask or plexiglass — will block these droplets before they can reach another person. “Social distancing” is a concept that applies to droplet transmission, under the presumption that the virus-containing droplets will fall to the ground before reaching someone 6 feet away. Sanitizing surfaces kills any viral droplets that have landed on them before someone can touch them and then touch their orifices.

However, COVID is not confined to droplets. We have known for years that it can spread through aerosol as papers published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Emerging Infectious Diseases, and Risk Analysis demonstrate going back to 2020. Aerosol is composed of much smaller particles that bounce around between air particles, and can stay suspended and infectious in the air. Picture someone smoking: the behavior of the smoke is much more akin to the behavior of viral aerosols. Can you still smell the smoke behind a plexiglass shield? How about if you’re six feet apart? In a crowded, enclosed space, how many people would breathe in the smoke of one smoker? Measures designed to protect against droplets aren’t exactly pointless against COVID, since it also spreads via droplets. But just because you’re not spewing COVID-laden spittle in someone’s face does not mean you’re keeping your germs to yourself.

You can get COVID over and over. The idea that you become immune to COVID after getting infected or vaccinated is based on the concept of immune memory. Every time a pathogen enters your body (either through infection or vaccination), your immune system mounts a defense to stop it: first a broad “kill anything that moves” phase we call innate immunity, then a phase of adaptive immunity, which is targeted to kill the specific thing that triggered the immune response. Pieces of the invader are used to create, recruit, and activate a variety of immune components — including antibodies, T cells, and B cells — that are trained to recognize that specific pathogen. Some cells of the immune system, called memory cells, are kept around from that second stage as a sort of permanent record. If the exact same pathogen shows up again, the immune system already knows what to look for. This is the key behind vaccination: expose your immune system to a harmless piece of the virus, and it’ll remember it when it encounters the real thing.

Except this isn’t even close to the whole story. For one thing, the snapshot stored in your immune memory is just a physical piece of the pathogen, and viruses evolve very quickly. As the virus changes, the real thing starts to resemble the record being kept by your immune system less and less, and it becomes easier and easier for new variants to evade adaptive immunity. The more people that get infected, the more times the virus randomly mutates — and the more likely it is that a particular combination of those mutations makes a virus that is unrecognizable to your immune system. For a while, the WHO used to categorize these mutants as “variants of concern,” giving them each a new name. When the virus mutated enough to evade the immunity to the wild-type virus, they named it alpha. The lineage that was able to evade alpha was called beta. Delta was particularly immune evasive and its mutations brought high levels of lethality. Omicron was so different from all existing strains that it was practically able to infect everyone, no matter when they got infected and/or vaccinated. And then… they stopped giving the variants names. “Omicron” is still used to describe every descendant of that original variant, despite the dozens of highly-infectious, highly dangerous variants circulating today, none of which look enough like omicron itself for your immune system to efficiently recognize them.

COVID screws with your immune system. Upon infection, SARS-CoV-2 immediately gets to work suppressing attempts to stop it. It hijacks your cells’ machinery to shut down production of crucial immune system alarms. This includes the component used to present pieces of the virus on the surface of the cell to tell the immune system “Hey! This cell is infected, and here’s the culprit!” This component is necessary for specific immune cells to identify the target and proceed with the adaptive immune response, leading to both delayed innate and adaptive immune response.

When immune cells arrive on the scene, the SARS-CoV-2 virus is able to infect them as well. Monocytes, which are involved in ushering in the adaptive immune response, get infected by SARS-CoV-2, and are reprogrammed to prevent them from presenting antigens and teaching the adaptive immune system what to look for. T cells rush to become cell killers, causing the signature massive tissue damage that can be fatal in severe cases. Every infection depletes your body’s reserve of naïve T cells — that pool of “blank” immune cells your body keeps on hand for later deployment and specialization — damaging your ability to mount an effective immune response to future infections — including other pathogens. This is why, no matter how many people get infected or vaccinated, we have not — and will not — reach “herd immunity.” Naïve T cells are also necessary for stopping the cell-killing activity of activated T cells, which is a factor in the severity of acute COVID. Worse still, the population is steadily becoming more vulnerable to infections of all types. We are in the middle of an alarming surge of diseases beyond just COVID: RSV, influenza, strep A, and many others are hospitalizing people in record numbers — opportunistic infections, handed the gift of a softened-up population of victims.

For a while, vaccines were highly effective against severe acute infections — not because they prevented infection or created lasting immunity, but because they prompted your body to create antibodies to the virus, which can persist in your blood for months. If you got infected while these antibodies were present, it helped your immune system compensate for the virus’s suppression of adaptive immunity. Your immune response was less likely to go haywire, cause massive tissue damage, and lead to severe clinical outcomes. However, by the time boosters became available, the vaccines were already obsolete: they were engineered to target the original version of the virus, which you were already unlikely to ever see again.

COVID evolves rapidly. An idea has been floating around for years that SARS-CoV-2 will naturally reach an “evolutionary ceiling,” where it can no longer adapt around our immune systems, and will become no more pathogenic than a cold. This is predicated on a misunderstanding of evolutionary and viral dynamics. The main factors guiding the evolution of the virus are: how well it can spread from person-to-person, how well it can infect cells, and how well it can evade the immune system. This latter factor is the most crucial since, as previously noted, the virus’s effect on the immune system is a significant driver of its danger. The idea of an evolutionary ceiling stems from the notion that, in order to adapt around our immune system, the virus needs to change, and those changes necessarily impact its other features — namely its ability to spread and infect. But this is not the case.

As the virus spreads, it racks up mutations. Every new host gives the virus trillions of opportunities to mutate before sending it on to the next victim. By the time SARS-CoV-2 first took over the world, it had already diverged so thoroughly into separate lineages, giving rise to variants like alpha, beta, delta, and omicron. The Omicron lineage eventually emerged with another profoundly unique and highly-infectious set of mutations, and followed the same pattern. In its wake, it left behind many more child lineages, each distinct enough from each other to create a “variant cloud.” For months, the various omicron sublineages have been unable to outcompete each other, because none has had a set of adaptations so exceptionally advantageous as to outstrip the spread of the others. However, as the mutations continue to accumulate across all lineages, it’s only a matter of time before a new mega-variant emerges. It will sweep across the population, again diverging as it goes, spawning new lineages of its own — and leaving millions dead and disabled in its wake.

COVID is persistent. We’ve known for years that other coronaviruses, like SARS, can persist in your body long after initial infection. This is likely a byproduct of their evolutionary history; they evolved to spread through bat populations and survive bats’ unique immune systems. Bats are very long-lived for their size, potentially living for decades, even with multiple different infections quietly simmering inside them. However, in humans, these viruses’ tactics for suppressing a well-regulated bat immune system present a form of overwhelming force, which wreaks havoc on our bodies.

After the chaotic and potentially-lethal initial stage of acute infection, the virus is able to settle in for the long haul — evidence has been found in the gut, in human waste, and among “cured” patients. This can happen whether the acute phase was disastrous and hospital-worthy, or quiet enough for you to experience no symptoms at all. By this point, the virus will have suppressed your body’s immune memory, infiltrated throughout various organ systems — including your cardiovascular, nervous, and renal systems — and begun pumping out a steady supply of new virus. Of course, this persistent infection causes damage to the various organs where the virus has made its home, especially since it can trigger further inflammation. Your immune system is constantly trying to smoke it out, damaging more organ tissue as it does so. Your risk of heart attacks, strokes, neurological symptoms, and death in general are much higher during this persistent phase — and it only gets worse with every reinfection. It still remains unclear how long this persistent phase can last — certainly as many months as have been studied so far.

Evidence has been mounting for years that COVID is actually a type of autoimmune disorder, with several components of your immune system turning against your own cells. Not only are pro-inflammatory molecules heightened in both the acute infection and in so-called long COVID, high levels of antibodies against normal cellular pieces have been found in over half of patients hospitalized with COVID. The implications of COVID triggering autoimmunity are broad and can get fairly technical, but needless to say, the population being infected over and over with such a debilitating virus is catastrophic.

The Motive

Why would governments, public health officials, news media, business leaders, and every other trusted voice tell us outright lies (such as “COVID is not airborne!”) and avoid highlighting crucial truths (such as COVID’s propensity to damage immune systems)? Why would such a simple thing as distributing and mandating the proper usage of high-quality respirators — a layup of public health policy — be portrayed as being so toxic that to suggest it would get you laughed out of the room? Why would institutions like the CDC casually mention the existence of long COVID with one breath, and with the next, pat themselves on the back for “diminished hospitalizations”? Why has the entirety of public health policy contracted down to “Get vaccinated and you’re free”?

Part of it is simple ignorance: in the beginning of the pandemic, there was a lot we didn’t know. There were clues, of course; hypotheses based on what we knew about other coronaviruses. We could have guessed at airborne transmission, immune suppression, viral persistence, and rapid evolution, but we didn’t know these things conclusively. We didn’t know the exact numbers for case fatality, transmission, long-term symptoms, etc. But we didn’t need to know. The precautionary principle could have guided us to keep up avoidance and containment practices until we knew exactly what we were dealing with. And yet, the clearer the picture has become, the more we have reduced those measures, instead of ramping them up. COVID is more dangerous than initially expected, and yet we have continued to make ourselves more vulnerable.

The cold truth of the matter is that the motive behind COVID minimization is greed and social control. The capitalist system depends on constant growth: constant production, constant consumption, constant expansion of profits. Even brief pauses — such as a month-long stay-at-home order — have disastrous effects on capital. Implementing the mass prevention strategies necessary to slow down transmission (daily rapid testing, contact tracing, guaranteed paid leave for exposed workers, high-quality respirators, etc.) is expensive, and eats into profits. An information campaign explaining why everyone needs to stay home, instead of contributing to “the economy,” eats into profits further. Winding down all non-essential business and keeping it shuttered until the true end of the pandemic would contract the economy down to only what is necessary for society to function. The opportunities for financial capital to invest in new, profitable enterprises would vanish faster than they reemerge.

For capitalism to function, it requires two things: a steady supply of workers producing value and an unending flow of consumption to realize that value as profit for the capitalist. The onset of a pandemic presented a challenge on both of those fronts. Workers getting sick en masse and being forced to stay home for a couple of weeks — or even dying or becoming disabled and exiting the workforce altogether — was only one potential headache for the capitalist class. Far worse was the prospect of workers staying home out of precaution, thereby grinding production to a halt. Consumers staying home and buying only the essentials would prevent the realization of profits across huge swathes of the economy, cutting off the flow of capital necessary to keep the whole system running.

The moment it became obvious to market analysts that COVID was more than just a local Chinese outbreak, it triggered utter panic in the financial sector. Fears about the slowdown of profits led to several mass stock sell-offs from investors, lowering stock value, triggering even more panic-selling, across multiple different days. This wasn’t just speculation: decreased demand for oil rapidly triggered a massive price war that caused prices to spiral for months until becoming negative, with the holders of oil futures paying to offload their contracts. Without ramping demand back up, production of this and other key commodities would be financially toxic.

Capitalism also relies on a reserve army of labor to keep labor costs artificially deflated. A contracted economy, in which any worker willing to work is a rare commodity, tips the balance of power in favor of workers. Workers could more easily bargain for higher wages and safer working conditions (including liberal COVID leave). Most worryingly of all, in the context of long-term precautionary measures, the population would get used to a dangerous notion — that we have value beyond our labor and our consumption. When faced with the prospect of death or disability, the contradictions become sharpened in our eyes. Hundreds of millions of workers would suddenly ask “Why am I risking my life for this?” The frustration at a choice between abject poverty and potentially contracting a debilitating condition would galvanize workers to stand up for our rights. Waves of labor mobilization, rent strikes, workplace lockouts, boycotts, and more would sweep the country — and the world. It would be the greatest challenge to the political power of the capitalist class in a century.

The Strategy

Actually solving the pandemic was never in the cards for the U.S. and the rest of the capitalist world. It would have necessitated deep international cooperation, massive investment in clean air infrastructure, a persistent information campaign (and censoring of hazardous misinformation), efforts to build public trust in government, guaranteed paid leave, nationalization of key industries, and more. Basically, it would involve massively undercutting the philosophy of free market capitalism.

Instead, the explicit goal of the ruling class has been to make the pandemic simply disappear from public perception. Any reminder of the existence of a highly-transmissible, highly-dangerous, mass-disabling disease could trigger panic, or worse: organized, militant labor action. Averting this crisis required a careful campaign of culture-crafting; the people themselves needed to become convinced that there was no reason to fight. Consent for protracted mass infection needed to be manufactured.

There are three main ways this hegemonic narrative around COVID has been propagated to the public: official rhetoric, public policy, and media framing. These three facets of idea propagation feed into each other, and all three are maneuvered in various ways by the interests of capital. The process by which a hegemonic narrative is crafted in the capitalist sphere is not quite as straightforward as one might expect. It’s not a simple matter of a state propaganda department deciding on a central doctrine, issuing scripts to paid actors, and imprisoning all who dissent. There is no party line for the capitalists, no single convocation of business elites, and relatively few shadowy backroom deals. Explicit planning meetings are held — independently — among the leadership of different ruling class parties and distinct business interests, and their similar class interests lead them to similar priorities. But the way narrative unity of this sort is achieved is not through an all-powerful conspiracy. Instead, the “decision” for how to frame events arises organically from the interplay of the many individual sectors that comprise the ruling class propaganda machine.

The tone struck by what we think of as official sources sets the stage for the broader social response. This rhetoric comes from a variety of places — heads of state, government agencies, individual experts, think tanks, and other entities imbued with a sense of authority. These are voices that we are socialized to pay attention to. When they speak, they easily garner media attention. A news outlet that ignores or disputes these sources loses access to them and invites flak, thereby harming their ability to sell more news. These voices are generally in the room when policies are crafted — or crafting the policies themselves. What “the experts” say matters, and the particular experts being promoted by governments and corporations have steadily coalesced around rhetoric that minimizes the public health threat of the virus.

Official rhetoric does not always come to total agreement on presentation. The two-party system in the U.S. is often characterized by competing “official” stances, even when both stances are de facto acceptable to the established capitalist order. Throughout 2020, many prominent figures, including Donald Trump, attempted to prematurely declare the end of the pandemic. The Great Barrington Declaration attempted to launder the notion that attempts to mitigate the pandemic were harmful, and that we should instead try to reach “herd immunity” by allowing the virus to run rampant through the population. This was a non-starter in terms of propaganda material, since we could all see the devastation in plain sight. However, this was still valuable to the ruling class, because it laid the groundwork for a potent narrative — that of the “level-headed pragmatists” guiding us through the pandemic. Against the backdrop of conspiracy theories, bunk cures, and political disengagement from the reality of the pandemic, there came a promise from the liberal wing of the ruling class: “Unlike our opponents, we actually care, and we will get you through this.” Despite the difference in tone, the trajectory of the policies themselves has largely been preserved across political lines.

Pandemic public policy has been both shaped by and indicative of the official rhetoric of whoever happens to be in charge. It has reflected the recommendations of experts — those experts which had been chosen by the ruling government. In places governed by more liberal tendencies, curfews and cloth mask mandates lasted longer, instilling an implicit message that, unlike those science-denying conservatives, the liberals were “following the science.” This meant that, when these half-measures were rescinded, it seemed obvious that now people could feel safe putting themselves at risk.

Every policy choice has acted to shape the public’s perception of the pandemic. Mandating that businesses put stickers on the floor to demarcate 6 feet of distance hammered home the false notion that being 6 feet apart from others protected you. Requirements that bars and restaurants be closed for indoor dining made people reckon with the fact that these necessarily-unmasked spaces were dangerous. Reversing that restriction while mask recommendations were still in effect created confusion and demonstrated that the recommendations were meaningless. School districts shuttering physical classrooms put every parent on high alert for their children’s safety, while so-called “hybrid learning” taught people that safety was a parent’s choice. As school districts moved away from virtual school altogether, the message became clear: there is no reason to worry about your children getting sick. Steadily, measures put into place to protect people from the virus have been reversed, until the current state of affairs, where every public health “policy” has become instead a recommendation — and those recommendations don’t even come close to establishing true safety.

Economic measures taken during the pandemic have worked in a similar way to public health policy. In the beginning, policies were put in place to help the people who would be economically impacted: paycheck protection programs, tax credits, expanded unemployment benefits, eviction moratoria, stimulus checks, and student debt deferral. This aid was granted to ensure that the economic situation for the working class never got so despondent that workers would have greater incentive to rebel through labor militancy, rent strikes, or even violent uprisings. As these measures dried up, they came with the accompanying message: “You’re on your own now.”

Throughout the pandemic, media attention has been focused on reproducing official rhetoric through op-eds and interviews. The experts promoted above all have always been selected based on their proximity to power, both in terms of their official appointment and their rhetorical line. As governments and agencies solidified their pandemic-minimization rhetoric and policies, individuals who championed that line became even more appealing. The lure of manufactured conflict allowed media companies to profit by highlighting astroturfed, unpopular movements protesting all forms of public health policy. Depending on their particular cultural bent, news corporations could position themselves either as “freedom-fighters,” standing up to the government tyranny of half-baked precautionary measures, or as “champions of reason,” pushing back against misinformation and science denial.

In all cases, the pivot in 2021 was palpable. Now that vaccines had arrived, there was a feasible narrative for transitioning away from “economically-disruptive restrictions.” As soon as you got vaccinated, you were free to get back to normal. “Fresh air smells sweeter without masks!” proclaimed the first lady, triumphantly. Summer of 2021 was full of freshly-inoculated people enjoying significant levels of antibody-based protection, and cases were at their lowest point. The media trumpeted this wonderful news at every opportunity, showcasing ecstatic public health officials, booming businesses, and throngs of maskless people, while ignoring the still-omnipresent circulation of background cases.

Prognosis

With every new major variant, cries of “No one could have seen this coming!” quickly give way to “At last, the pandemic is over.” The same refuted myths of herd immunity, hybrid immunity, and vaccinated immunity keep cropping up, only to be dashed to pieces by the next wave. In the latter half of 2022, we entered a phase of multiple overlapping variants — all deliberately still referred to by their parent, omicron, to avoid panic. The baseline of weekly infections and deaths have remained higher than at any other phase of the pandemic, save for spikes as a new dominant strain emerged. The expert, government, and media line has stagnated at a calibrated silence, interspersed with the occasional recommendation to get vaccinated. Fitted respirators are recommended (lumped in with less-effective cloth and surgical masks), but they are not mandated, and rarely even modeled. Schools are fully in-person, despite their established role as hotspots of community transmission. At every opportunity, governments, corporations, and community organizations congratulate themselves on making it through the pandemic.

This is not simple negligence on the part of those who govern and shape our society. It amounts to social murder: the establishment of policies that place large numbers of people on the path to an early and unnatural death. You have the right to health, and that right is being deliberately stripped away from you with a policy of mass infection. Just because the choice isn’t being made with the specific goal of eliminating us (such as in the case of genocide), doesn’t absolve the choice itself. And that choice is being continually reaffirmed every day. The calculation has been made with no special regard for human health; only the preservation of the social order. Too much death and disease could challenge the power of the ruling class; 15 million excess deaths is just the cost of doing business.

We are at a crossroads in this ongoing crisis. As we continue to pretend everything is normal, the virus continues to evolve. Multiple lineages are circulating, accumulating mutations that help them evade immunity and run roughshod over defenseless populations. The next uber-variant is likely already here: the XBB.1 lineage is as different from the original SARS-CoV-2 virus as that virus was from SARS, and has an even higher ability to infect cells. With every wave that washes over us, our organs and our immune systems become weaker. Life expectancy is declining at an alarming rate. We are an increasingly disabled population, with no community support — or even awareness. The longer we allow ourselves to be governed by a culture of individualism, capitalist greed, and ignorance, the sicker we will all become.

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.

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.