. We believe that through supporting and challenging one another while remaining accountable to a broader community, “men’s groups” can effectively and responsibly take action toward a world free of gender-based violence and oppression.

This is a call for submissions for a zine that hopes to compile a number of pieces containing the experiences and reflections of people who identify as having experienced male privilege and have worked to form or participated in “men’s groups.” The goal is to create something that can serve as a resource for people who may wish to form or are already members of men’s groups.

We are seeking short submissions that address one or more of the following:

– Why are men’s groups important? How has participation in a men’s group impacted you personally and/or how do you perceive the work that such groups do being important more generally?

– What are the goals of men’s groups? What can men’s groups achieve? What might be considered?

– What, in your experience, works and what doesn’t in starting or maintaining a men’s group? What recommendations would you make for people trying to start men’s groups?

– What resources would you recommend for people wishing to start or maintain a men’s group?

*** Although we believe that the work of challenging men to address patriarchy is the responsibility of those who experience male privilege, we are also seeking feedback, ideas and submissions from a wide spectrum of individual identities and experiences (including women, transpeople and queer people).

For questions, more information or submissions, please contact mensgroupzine at gmail dot com.  June 1 is the deadline for submissions!

Reportedly over 130 prisoners at Guantanamo Bay have entered the 100th day of the hunger strike protesting their INFINITE detention. The US Government has denied and underplayed the hunger strike which began on February 6th, 2013, after cells were stripped and Qu’rans were searched following a fight with the guards.

“The 166 prisoners have been there eleven and a half years and 90% of them haven’t been charged with a crime,” according to rt.com.  Approximately 86 prisoners have been cleared of any wrong doing and slated for release, but continue to held indefinitely without any pending charges because there is no politically viable agreement about where to or how to transport them out of Guantanamo.

Since Guantanamo has opened conditions have been in violation of the Third Geneva Convention and torture was admittedly practiced until 2006. There have been at least six suicides and over 41 attempts, although it is also possible that these deaths were a result of torture. Following the discovery of three bodies hanging, Saudi Arabia actually removed their detained citizens out of concern for their safety.

“Hunger strikers who have been force-fed describe it as the final humiliation. There are three stages to the pain, firstly there is the sensation of a tube being forced past their sinuses into their throat, which causes their eyes to water, then an intense burning and gagging sensation as it goes down the throat and finally when the tube enters the stomach there is a strong urge to vomit. When the tube has delivered the ‘food’, it triggers the most painful sensation of all: the return of hunger.”1

Currently three prisoners are in the hospital and 30 are currently being force fed with a feeding tubes, a violation of international law for political prisoners.

(1) http://rt.com/news/guantanamo-hunger-strike-100-336/

Looters of all races, own the streets, storefronts, and malls.  Blond kids loaded their Volkswagens with stereo gear … Filipinos in a banged up old clunker stocked up on baseball mitts and sneakers.  Hispanic mothers with children browsed the gaping chain drug marts and clothing stores.  A few Asians were spotted as well.  Where the looting at Watts had been desperate, angry, mean, the mood this time was closer to a maniac fiesta.(Newsweek, May 11, 1992)

Twenty years later, the death of Trayvon Martin has put the racism of American society back on public trial.  While characterized as a ‘race riot’ by the corporate media the Los Angeles Rebellion was the first challenge to Austerity and Capitalist Global Economic Restructuring.  The Prison Industrial Complex has brought slave labor back to America lowering the value of all labor in the country and contributing to the high rates of unemployment.  America imprisons more people than the rest of the world combined.  And of every 100,000 US residents of the same race and gender, 4,347 black males are incarcerated compared to only 678 white males.1  Martin Luther King’s warning that without economic justice, equal rights would have little meaning has come true.  The point is further evidenced in an article by Southern Studies Institute which states,

Since the Supreme Court reversed course in 1991 and authorized return to segregated neighborhood schools, there has been an increase in segregation every year, particularly for black and Latino students — 40% of Latinos and 39% of blacks now attend intensely segregated schools. The average black and Latino student is now in a school that has nearly 60% of students from families who are near or below the poverty line. …Residential segregation continues to play a large role and increasingly determines the racial composition in schools … The highest rates of total segregation actually come today in Northern cities like Chicago and Detroit, according to the report.2

During the Los Angeles Rebellion, where passions and forces were certainly standing up to and blasting away the “capitalist integument”, the limit remained the expropriation of property rather than expropriation of the expropriators – the abolition of the capitalists as a class.  This has been the stopping point of all revolutions and rebellions since Salvador Allende’s defeat by American funded counter-revolutionary forces.  Today, Occupy has raised the spectre of American Revolution once again, but whether it will directly confront Capitalism remains to be seen.

There should be no question that the LA Rebellion has been the most important event in recent US history.  Still in defending it against the attacks of liberals and conservatives, the “left” has neglected its own concrete task.  The rioters do not need left “radicals” to tell them they have the right to rebel!  The Question here is to project the rebellion as the abolition of the ruling class in a way that doesn’t merely legitimate rebellion, but meets the concrete needs that stand in the way of abolishing the ruling class and Capitalism.
State-Capitalism & “Austerity”

The LA Rebellion, the Chinese Student-Worker Uprisings in 1989, the Russian Miners strike, 3 and the East European revolts that toppled the USSR; Tahrir, Occupy, and the European revolts today; all issued out of the economic restructuring that we have been going through as far back as 1978.  Gorbechev called it Perestroika – literally meaning restructuring.  This plan was in retaliation to an economic crisis that was two-fold.

(1) “The spiraling arms race coupled with the military and political realities of the world and the persistent traditions of pre-nuclear political thinking,” impeded economic cooperation between nations.4  Military production and the costs of cold war politics had prevented Russia from receiving capital investments through government loans and grants that other nations, including the US, were taking advantage of.  This meant that the Russian rate of profit and economic development had fallen behind all industrialized nations.  Today we see the costs of war cutting into the US rate of profit and state of economic development.
(2) “Elements of what we call stagnation…began to appear…we first discovered a slowing economic growth.””…slack attitudes, the practice of covering up for one another and lax discipline.”5  From the Capitalist point of view: low productivity.  His solution to this crisis was three-fold.

(a)    “…a radical reorganization of centralized economic management is envisaged in the interests of enterprises.  We will free the central management of operational functions in the running of enterprises and this will enable it to concentrate on key processes determining the strategy of economic growth.”  Or the expansion and centralization of Capital, it’s concentration – nationally and globally– in fewer hands.
(b)    “So the initial task of restructuring…is to ‘wake up’ those people that have fallen asleep….To do something better, you must work an extra  bit harder…for me it is not just a slogan, but a habitual state of mind, a disposition.  Any job one takes on must be grasped and felt with one’s soul, mind, and heart….”6  More precisely put: Production speed-ups.
(c)    “In sum, the strategic concept for Soviet history should be a decisive commitment to transform the Soviet Union into a democracy and market economy; to rejoin the international community and be integrated into world society [Capital].”7
Surplus-value is defined as the quantity of value a worker produces beyond what they are paid for. For example, if you work 8 hours in a day, and it takes 2 hours to produce as much value as your wages for that day, for the remaining 6 hours you are producing surplus-values – these are unpaid labor hours. The surplus-value goes to the Capitalist which he counts as profit.  In the Soviet Union, the state was able to extract surplus-value from the peasants and the workers, first creating a special class of workers, then only redistributing wealth to the upper party members and the state. This is how all forms of state-capitalism operate, including in the US where we redistribute surplus-value in the form of taxes to the corporations and the 1%.

In Volume III of Capital, Karl Marx outlines how the Capitalist must extract more surplus-value, or unpaid labor, per unit of labor (defined as unit of Pay per unit of time). Thus, the Capitalist is forced to constantly trying to make less workers do more work, faster, for less pay. The larger capitalists or corporations will introduce new machinery, replacing workers. Those that remain are reduced more and more to mere appendages to those machines. This is why Marx called the production of each commodity a protracted class war and singled out the unemployed army created by this contradiction as the grave-diggers of capitalism.

The expansion of production produces capitals own problematic, which Marx outlines as the tendency of the rate-of-profit to fall. Since expansion allows for increased productive output from the same quantity of labor, there is less labor in each commodity, and thus less value. So, while the capitalist may make a greater overall profit because they are now producing 5 million rather than 50 commodities, the rate of profit (the profit per commodity) actually falls closer and closer to zero. This is the secret of “Austerity, or the redistribution of surplus-values from the workers in order to make up for instability and falls in the rate of profit.

Globalization is a move from State-Capitalism to World-Capitalism, the submission of the state economy to transnational Capitalism, the World Bank, and the 1%.  These three moves outline the economic structuring the world over:  national centralization and massive global expansion of the mean of production; speed-up of the rate of production, which also means unemployment as less workers are required to do more; and the internationalization of capital investments.  As trans-national capital runs out of markets to exploit, the rate of profit begins to fall, sending each nation to fight for its share of the pie.

It is the conflict between state-capital and world-capital which accounts for the rising manifestations of bourgeois-nationalist tendencies from fascism in Europe to anti-immigrant sentiments in the US or Al-Queda and Taliban in the Middle East.  Now we see the banks, state-capitalists, and transnational capitalists fighting for control of global economic planning. The move international capital paves the way to an organized, disciplined, international revolt of the working class.

Twenty years ago the Chinese, the Eastern Europeans, and the Black Masses in America rose up against this global restructuring.  The LA Rebellion began where the 60’s left off with the consciousness that racism can only be abolished by abolishing Capitalism.

Frantz Fanon: The Dialectics of Race, Class, and Revolution

It is a happy coincidence that this year, 2011, is also the 100th anniversary of the 1911 Revolution in China, which targeted both imperialism and indigenous despotism, while supporting democracy and women’s liberation.  More connected to the topic at hand is a third anniversary this year, the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the great Afro-Caribbean revolutionary and philosopher, Frantz Fanon, who, like Karl Marx, has a lot to say to us today about the dialectics of race and class.  Writing as a radical humanist steeped in the works of Hegel and Marx, Fanon sketched a theory of revolutionary violence as both necessary and liberatory when carried out by racially oppressed groups.  He did so on the basis of the experience of one of Africa’s most radical liberation struggles, the Algerian revolution.  In the 1960s in the U.S., this message of violent revolution sparked fear in some quarters, mainly conservative, and admiration in others, mainly radical, especially in Black communities.  In the spirit of those times, which were imbued with Mao Zedong’s concept of guerrilla warfare, Fanon’s message appealed to groups like the Black Panthers.

At the same time, this focus on Fanon’s theory of violence, which constituted only one chapter of his most important book, Wretched of the Earth, obscured the overall theme of dialectical humanism in Fanon’s work.  For in the magnificent conclusion to Wretched of the Earth, Fanon had called for mutual recognition and solidarity across national and racial lines, between oppressed nations and their former colonizers.  He did so in a wonderfully dialectical discussion, where he argued that the newly independent African peoples, long subjected to both economic and racial oppression, needed to develop further their self-consciousness, including pride in their cultures and histories (Fanon was always very critical, however, of patriarchal and other oppressive traditions), which had been so often demeaned by the colonizers.  While that appealed to Black nationalists of the time, Fanon argued further in his dialectical presentation that such self-consciousness and self-awareness did not mean looking inward or closing oneself off, either individually or as a people.  Instead, he concluded, consciousness of self, what Hegel would have called a particular or singular factor, was what under revolutionary conditions could move us from the particular to the universal of human brotherhood and sisterhood.

Here is how Fanon famously put it, in that beautiful dialectical language with which he concludes Wretched of the Earth:

The consciousness of self is not the closing of a door to communication. Philosophic thought teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee. National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension.

This may be hard to grasp, especially in today’s climate on the left – as in Hardt and Negri’s Empire, for example — where all forms of national consciousness tend to be rejected as reactionary.

Marx on Ireland: Class, Ethnicity, and National Liberation

But it is in keeping with Karl Marx’s own thinking about race, class, and nationalism.  Sometimes, as I have tried to show in Marx at the Margins, Marx saw the pathway to class consciousness and to proletarian revolution as not direct but indirect.  Take the British workers of the 1860s.  As Marx saw it, by the 1860s, they had become so imbued with condescension, actually racism, toward the Irish – both the Irish minority inside the British working class and the people of Ireland itself, then a British colony – that they too often identified with the British ruling classes. As Marx wrote in the “Confidential Communication” of the First International of January 1, 1870:

In all the big industrial centers in England, there is profound antagonism between the Irish proletarian and the English proletarian.  The common English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers wages and the standard of life.  He feels national and religious antipathies for him. He views him similarly to how the poor whites of the Southern states of North America viewed black slaves.  This antagonism among the proletarians of England is artificially nourished and kept up by the bourgeoisie.  It knows that this split is the true secret of the preservation of its power.

Note his comparison to race relations in the U.S.  Was such an impasse – whether in the U.S. or Britain — permanent, a “deep structure,” as some radical intellectuals like to say?

Not according to Marx.  Marx believed that an Irish revolution liberating that country from colonialism could break the impasse, not only freeing Ireland of British colonialism, but also opening up new possibilities inside Britain itself. Marx made these arguments in the face of strong opposition from the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who attacked the First International’s support work for Irish political prisoners as a diversion from the class struggle.  In a letter to Engels of Dec. 10, 1869, Marx suggested:

For a long time, I believed it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy. I always took this viewpoint in the New York Tribune.  Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite.  The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland.  The lever must be applied in Ireland.  This is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general. (MECW 43: 398)

This aspiration — for a linkage between anti-imperialist movements and the labor movements of the imperialist countries — was crucial during the twentieth century and remains important today.

France in the 1960s: From Support for National Liberation in the Colonies to Social Revolution at Home

An dramatic example of such a linkage is what happened in France in the 1950s and 1960s, after first the Vietnamese and then the Algerians wrested their independence from French colonialism.  Inside France, the Left had been defeated in the 1950s and had had to swallow the bitter pill of the authoritarian political system set up by Charles De Gaulle’s coup of 1958.  But by the 1960s, new networks inside France that supported the Algerian revolution, which were rooted in a new generation and youth and radical intellectuals like Jean-Paul Sartre, began to blossom.  (One example of this was Sartre’s preface to Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth.) They persisted, even in the face of assassination attempts (including one on Sartre), a type of violence the Algerian immigrant community inside France faced in an even starker fashion.  Once Algeria became independent in 1962, France seemed to return to conservative domination for a few years. But in fact, the new mentalities created by the Algerian revolution, as well as the networks of support that had been created for it in France, which helped form a Left considerably to the Left of the reformist and opportunist French Communist Party, played no small role in the explosion of 1968, the most serious revolutionary upsurge in a developed capitalist country since the early 20th century.

(Of course, an uncritical Third Worldism sometimes accompanied these developments; nor were the Algeria support networks the only revolutionary networks that had existed prior to 1968.  For here one should mention both Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Situationist International, but it should also be noted that if one were to collect the writings of either of these 2 groups on Algeria or the anti-colonial movements more generally, that would be a very short pamphlet indeed.  Somewhat similar libertarian Marxist currents in the U.S., like those around C.L.R. James or the Marxist-Humanists around Raya Dunayevskaya, the latter of which I have been involved in since the 1970s, did respond seriously to the anti-colonial and anti-racist movements, however.)

Marx on the American Civil War: Democratic Aspirations and Economic Reality

During the Civil War in the U.S., Marx penned some of his most significant writings on race and class.  Although these writings have received attention in the U.S. ever since W.E.B. Du Bois cited them in his Black Reconstruction in 1935, followed soon after by a translation of most of them in the volume Marx and Engels on the Civil War in the United States in 1937, unfortunately out of print today, they have received far less discussion than might have been expected.

Marx viewed the Civil War as a second American revolution, with a socioeconomic as well as a political dimension. He expressed these sentiments in the 1867 preface to Vol. I of Capital: “Just as the in the eighteenth century the American War of Independence sounded the tocsin for the European middle class, so in the nineteenth century the American Civil War did the same for the European working class” (Fowkes trans., p. 91). Of course, he saw the Civil War as a bourgeois democratic rather than a communist revolution, but he also believed that it could be the harbinger of that deeper communist revolution in Europe.  And as it happened, the Paris Commune, a radical communist revolution, did break out in Europe only a few years after the end of the Civil War.

Also, as Robin Blackburn notes in his recent book, An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (2011), in Marx’s view, “Defeating the slave power and freeing the slaves would not destroy capitalism, but it would create conditions far more favorable to organizing and elevating labor, whether white or black” (p. 13).  Thus, the war would create new possibilities for American labor, both Black and white.

Blackburn’s book has brought back into print a few of Marx’s Civil War writings as well.

The Civil War had important economic as well as political implications for Marx.  A Northern victory would, he noted repeatedly, shore up what was, with all of its limitations, one of the world’s few democratic republics.  It would do so not only by defeating the reactionary secessionists of the South, but also by abolishing slavery.  The latter measure would result in formal freedom for a substantial part of the U.S. population, making that democracy more of a reality. (And while the vote for women was also posed in the U.S. in the 1860s, sadly, as we know, that was delayed for 60 more years due to a split between proponents of Black male suffrage and feminists.)

We should not forget as well that in 1861, virtually all of Europe was ruled by monarchies or military regimes, and even those countries with strong parliaments, like Britain, had property requirements for voting that disenfranchised the working classes and even large portions of the middle classes.  The dominant classes of these societies tended to disparage the U.S. “experiment” with universal [white] male suffrage, sympathizing as well with the Confederacy.

The Civil War also had – Marx wrote — huge economic implications concerning land and property. Given the vast and growing size of the U.S. economy and of the proportion of it based upon slave labor, the emancipation of four million slaves without compensation to their “owners” would mean in economic terms the greatest expropriation of private property in history up to that time.

Another economic aspect concerned landed property in the South. Marx shared the hope of abolitionists and Radical Republicans—and of socialists more generally — that in the occupied South the postwar Reconstruction policies would go beyond the establishment of full political rights for the former slaves and toward a real agrarian revolution that would break up the old slave plantations and redistribute the land.  For example, in the 1867 preface to Capital, Marx alluded to the Radical Republican program of granting forty acres and a mule to the freed slaves.  He did so in a reference to Benjamin Wade, next in line to become President of the United State should the virulently racist and obstructionist Andrew Johnson, who succeeded Abraham Lincoln to the presidency in 1865 upon the latter’s assassination, have been successfully impeached by the Radical Republican majority in the Senate: “Mr. Wade, Vice-President of the United States, has declared in public meetings that, after the abolition of slavery, a radical transformation in the existing relations of capital and landed property is on the agenda” (Fowkes trans., p. 93).  This program was shelved the following year, after the Senate’s failure to impeach the reactionary Johnson.

Marx’s Critical Support of the North

Marx strongly supported the North, even at the beginning of the war when Lincoln still refused to place the abolition of slavery on the agenda.  Despite these deficiencies of the North, Marx noted again and again that the South was utterly reactionary, having put the “right” to own slaves as a founding principle of its Constitution. At the same time, Marx issued strong public criticisms of Lincoln.  In an August 30, 1862 article for Die Presse in Vienna, Marx attacked Lincoln’s refusal to endorse abolition as an aim of the war by quoting at length a speech by radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips.  In a widely reported speech in the summer of 1862, Phillips had castigated Lincoln as  “first-rate second rate man” who had failed to grasp that the U.S. would “never see peace… until slavery is destroyed.”

It should also be noted that when Marx’s First International was founded in 1864, this happened in large part on the basis of labor and socialist networks throughout Western Europe that had supported the North.  These networks mobilized people on behalf of the North during the crucial early years of the war when Britain and France seemed to threaten intervention on the side of the South.  In January 1865, after Lincoln had not only issued the Emancipation Proclamation, but begun to employ Black troops in the Union Army, the International sent a public Address to Lincoln drafted by Marx, congratulating him on his overwhelming victory in the 1864 election.  As Marx pointed out privately, this election victory, unlike the one in 1860, amounted to a ringing endorsement of the politics of emancipation.  The U.S. government actually established relations of a sort with the International, thus going directly to the working class over the heads of the British government, which remained antagonistic toward the North. Not only did U.S. Minister to Britain Charles Francis Adams agree to receive a 40-member delegation from the International to deliver the address.  In addition, after transmitting the Address to Lincoln, on the latter’s instructions Adams issued a remarkably warm public reply to the International on behalf of the U.S. government.  Adams’s official reply stated that “the United States… derive new encouragement to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies” (reprinted in Blackburn, An Unfinished Revolution, pp. 213-14).

The following year though, when Lincoln’s successor Johnson started to block citizenship rights for former slaves, the International issued another kind of statement about the legacies of slavery in the U.S.  The International’s very forceful Address to the American People of September 28, 1865 is a text that unfortunately has received very little attention.  It appealed over Johnson’s head to the U.S. public.  It included an all-too-accurate warning about racism and resistance down the road in the U.S.:

Permit us also to add a word of counsel for the future.  As injustice to a section of your people has produced such direful results, let that cease.  Let your citizens of to-day be declared free and equal, without reserve.  If you fail to give them citizens’ rights, while you demand citizens’ duties, there will yet remain a struggle for the future which may again stain your country with your people’s blood.  The eyes of Europe and the world are fixed upon your efforts at re-construction, and enemies are ever ready to sound the knell of the downfall of republican institutions when the slightest chance is given. We warn you then, as brothers in the common cause, to remove every shackle from freedom’s limb, and your victory will be complete.

Although Marx did not pen this Address, it is very doubtful that he would have disagreed with this statement of the International, in which his political influence was decisive.

Race, Class and the Civil War in Capital, Vol. I

The theme of race and class in relation to the specific situation facing labor in the U.S. emerged again and again in Marx’s Civil War writings.  This theme can also be found in a passage in Capital that has also been frequently overlooked:

In the United States of America, every independent workers’ movement was paralyzed as long as slavery disfigured a part of the republic.  Labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin. However, a new life immediately arose from the death of slavery.  The first fruit of the American Civil War was the eight hours agitation, which ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from New England to California, with the seven-league boots of a locomotive.  The General Congress of Labor held at Baltimore in August 1866 declared: “The first and great necessity of the present, to free the labor of this country from capitalistic slavery, is the passing of a law by which eight hours shall be the normal working day in all the states of the American Union. We are resolved to put forth all our strength until this glorious result is attained.” (1976: 414, emphasis added)

This passage was central to the chapter on the “Working Day,” where Marx more than anywhere else in Capital took up working class resistance.  The language above to the effect that “labor in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin” has rightfully drawn the most attention up to now.  Fewer have noted the language about combating “capitalistic slavery” in the statement Marx quotes from the first national U.S. labor congress, language that would become much rarer once the trade union movement became more established and bureaucratic.

In addition, as Raya Dunayevskaya has argued in a treatment of Marx’s Civil War writings that connects them to his overall critique of political economy, Marx added the chapter on the “Working Day” – and the language quoted above on race and class in the U.S. — in a rather late draft of Capital.  He did so, Dunayevskaya holds, under the impact of both the Civil War in the U.S. itself and the massive and principled support movement for the North that emerged on the part of British labor (the latter to be discussed below).  As Dunayevskaya wrote regarding the impact of the Civil War on the structure of Capital, Vol. I, Marx “as a theoretician” was “attuned to the new impulses from the workers,” as a result of which he created some new theoretical “categories” (p. 89).

Pre-Civil War Writings on Slavery and Capitalism

Marx had on occasion been discussing race, slavery, and capitalism since even before the Communist Manifesto.  In a December 28, 1846 letter to Pavel Annenkov, otherwise famous for its early exposition of his critique of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s version of socialism, Marx connects modern chattel slavery and capitalism:

Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc.  Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry.  It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry…. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance.

In another critique of Proudhon during this period, Marx attacked the common assumption of the day that Blacks were predestined for slavery.  And while he did not publish much on New World slavery until the period of the Civil War in the U.S., there are at least two indications of his intimate knowledge of and sympathy for the abolitionist cause.  One of these lay in the fact that during the 1850s, Marx was the chief European correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune, an abolitionist newspaper that he seems to have read most assiduously.

The second indication of his preoccupation slavery can be found in Marx’s private research notebooks, which have begun to be published only in recent decades, in the ongoing Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe or MEGA (Complete Writings).  Among the notebooks that have already been published in the MEGA are excerpts and summaries in a mixture of German and English of two books on slavery by the noted British abolitionist Thomas Buxton.  In August-September 1851, Marx read and annotated Buxton’s The African Slave Trade (1839) and The Remedy; Being a Sequel to the African Slave Trade (1840).  Marx gave great emphasis in his notes to Buxton’s conclusion that, despite Britain’s having abolished first the slave trade (1807) and then slavery itself (1833), the Atlantic slave trade had actually expanded.  Marx took up in great detail Buxton’s figures concerning the massive rate of death during the Middle Passage from Africa to the Americas, including passages like the following: “the mortality consequent on the cruelties of the system has increased in proportion to the increase of the traffic, which doubled in amount when compared to the period before 1790” (MEGA IV/9, p. 496).

This was because, as Marx’s notes from Buxton also suggest, once the British Navy was actively stopping slave ships, the trade went underground without actually diminishing in terms of the numbers of human beings that were being transported into slavery: “Hitherto we have effected no other change than a change in the flag under which the trade is carried on” (MEGA IV/9, p. 497). Moreover, the conditions on slave ships had, if possible, grown worse:

The slaves are now subjected to greater hardships in their being landed and concealed as smuggled goods than they were in former times, when a slave vessel entered the ports of Rio [de] Janeiro and Havana as a fair trader, and openly disposed of her cargo.  Twice as many human beings are now the victims of the slave trade as when [the abolitionists] Wilberforce and Clarkson entered upon their noble task; and each individual of this increased number, in addition to the horrors which were endured in former times, has to suffer from being cribbed up in a narrower space, and on board of a vessel, where accommodation is sacrificed to speed. (MEGA IV/9, p. 497)

Marx’s attention to detail here shows not only his moral outrage against slavery, but also his growing conviction that slavery was at the time a major feature of global capitalism.

In these notes, Marx also takes up Buxton’s discussion of the awful effects of the slave trade upon West African societies, where the trade dominated both the economy and the political order.  As petty African chiefs and kings told the European slavers: “We want three things, viz. powder, ball, and brandy; and we have three things to sell, viz. men, women and children” (MEGA IV/9, p. 499).  Marx seems to endorse Buxton’s view that only if Africa could be allowed to undergo a different type of economic development – taking advantage of its rich soil – could the deleterious effects of slavery inside West Africa begin to be overcome.

Race, Class, and Revolution in the U.S. South

A striking example of Marx’s discussion of race, class, and revolution inside the South is found in a letter to Engels that preceded the outbreak of the Civil War.  Writing on January 11, 1860, in the aftermath of the abolitionist John Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia a few weeks earlier, Marx intoned:

In my view, the most momentous thing happening in the world today is, on the one hand, the movement among the slaves in America, started by the death of Brown, and the movement among the slaves in Russia, on the other…. I have just seen in the Tribune that there was a new slave uprising in Missouri, naturally suppressed.  But the signal has now been given. (MECW 41, p. 4)

Brown’s expedition, which included other abolitionists, both Black and white, was an attempt to foment a slave uprising in the Harper’s Ferry area.

Marx wrote as well of the political and social consciousness of those whom he termed the “poor whites” of the South, noting that only 300,000 out of 5 million Southern whites actually owned slaves.  As the Southern states voted to secede in 1861, touching off the Civil War, he reported on how the votes at secession conventions showed that large numbers of the poor whites did not initially support secession.  In an October 25, 1861 article, “The North American Civil War,” Marx compared the poor whites of the South to the plebeians of ancient Rome, whose class antagonism toward the patrician aristocracy had been tempered by gains the plebeians received from Roman conquests.  Referring to the South’s drive for expansion into new territories where slave labor would predominate, as seen in the Mexican War of 1846, he argued that a similar process was unfolding in the U.S.:

The number of actual slaveholders in the South of the Union does not amount to more than three hundred thousand, a narrow oligarchy that is confronted with many millions of so-called poor whites, whose numbers have been constantly growing through concentration of landed property and whose condition is only to be compared with that of the Roman plebeians in the period of Rome’s extreme decline. Only by acquisition and the prospect of acquisition of new Territories, as well as by filibustering expeditions, is it possible to square the interests of these poor whites with those of the slaveholders, to give their restless thirst for action a harmless direction and to tame them with the prospect of one day becoming slaveholders themselves. (MECW 19: 40-41)

As August Nimtz writes in his Marx, Tocqueville, and Race in America (2003), “The forcible incorporation of Northern Mexico into the United States was clearly on Marx’s mind.  He sought to explain the material basis for what would later be called the false consciousness of poor antebellum Southern whites, thus offering insights into the establishment and maintenance of ideological hegemony” (2003: 94).  The need to create new slave states had driven the South to secede in 1861, Marx argued, because Lincoln’s opposition to the creation of new slave states, even though he had not yet advocated abolition of slavery in the present slave states, was a serious threat to the South’s future in the sense discussed above.

But Marx’s concern was not only the explanation of false consciousness.  He was also examining the possibility of a new form of revolutionary subjectivity that could emerge from the depths of the social system of the South, something that the dominant classes had worked relentlessly to prevent for hundreds of years: the potential for an alliance between poor whites and enslaved Blacks.  The war itself might overturn old social relations within the South, allowing such social contradictions to come to the surface.

Marx’s Arguments with Engels and Lassalle

As Marx saw it, the Civil War would open up revolutionary possibilities for the North as well.  As discussed above, he wrote in Capital of the birth of a national labor movement in the wake of the war.  In addition, as much as Lincoln tried to temporize around the issue of slavery, from the beginning of the war Marx wrote with supreme confidence that the logic of events would over time force the North to support not only the abolition of slavery, but also Black troops in its army, and full civil rights for the former slaves.  In this sense, the Northern cause was as a whole progressive and revolutionary from the beginning, at least implicitly.

Engels, for his part, was more sanguine about the North’s possibilities for victory, let alone the chances of its adopting any revolutionary policies.  Here, he seems to have shared, at least to some extent, the views of European socialists like Ferdinand Lassalle – a frequent butt of Marx’s withering critiques, which characterized Lassalle as a state socialist, or worse – to the effect that the North lacked both revolutionary radicalism and a real will to fight.  This meant that the South might well triumph in the war, due to the North’s indecision as contrasted with the South’s clear will to fight to defend its reactionary institution. In his arguments with Marx, Engels also pointed to the Southern officer corps’ greater military experience, given the fact that most of the U.S. national officer corps had defected to the South. This debate, which continued for several years in the correspondence between Marx and Engels, was to my knowledge the most explicit political difference to be found in their forty-year relationship.  It was during one of his arguments with Engels that Marx predicted, in a letter of August 7, 1862, that “the North will finally wage war seriously, adopt revolutionary methods” and that this would include the use of Black troops, which “would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves.”^[1]

Proletarian Internationalism: British Workers and the American Civil War

A large portion of Marx’s Civil War writings took up what he referred to in the Inaugural Address to the First International as the need for the working classes to “master for themselves the mysteries of international politics,” part of what later Marxists would call proletarian internationalism.  From the war’s inception, a British or French intervention on the side of the South was feared, something that would have gone a long way toward assuring a Southern victory.  As Marx and other socialists and trade unionists saw it, conservative forces, especially those based in the landowning aristocracy, were attempting to whip up popular sentiment against the North. These conservative voices noted that the North’s blockade of Southern ports, which prevented cotton exports, was causing huge economic hardship among the textile workers of Manchester and other industrial centers.

In “English Public Opinion,” a New York Tribune article of January 11, 1862, Marx described how the British and Irish working classes of were refusing to embrace the war cries of the British Establishment, even after the U.S. Navy had forcibly boarded a British ship, detaining two Confederate diplomats who had been on their way to London:

Even at Manchester, the temper of the working classes was so well understood that an insulated attempt at the convocation of a war meeting was almost as soon abandoned as thought of….  Wherever public meetings took place in England, Scotland, or Ireland, they protested against the rabid war-cries of the press, against the sinister designs of the Government, and declared for a pacific settlement of the pending question…. When a great portion of the British working classes directly and severely suffers under the consequences of the Southern blockade; when another part is indirectly smitten by the curtailment of the American commerce, owing, as they are told, to the selfish “protective policy” of the [U.S.] Republicans; …under such circumstances, simple justice requires to pay a tribute to the sound attitude of the British working classes, the more so when contrasted with the hypocritical, bullying, cowardly, and stupid conduct of the official and well-to-do John Bull.

Repeatedly, Marx published articles on large public meetings by British workers to support the Northern cause, even at the cost of loss of jobs at home in the short run.  This constituted one of the finest examples up to that time – and since — of proletarian internationalism.

As mentioned earlier, these meetings to support the North in the war were crucial in forming the networks out of which the First International emerged. Marx summed up this story succinctly in a letter of November 29, 1864 to Lion Philips.  He discussed how networks in the European labor movement that had supported the North – and later ones supporting the Polish insurrection of 1863 – had coalesced in the fall of 1864 to form the First International:

In September the Parisian workers sent a delegation to the London workers to demonstrate support for Poland.  On that occasion, an international Workers’ Committee was formed.  The matter is not without importance because… in London the same people are at the head who… by their monster meeting with [British Liberal leader John] Bright in St. James’s Hall, prevented war with the United States. (MECW 42: 47)

The meeting at St. James Hall, also the locale of the founding meeting of the First International, was where British workers and other supporters of the North had gathered to denounce yet another series of bellicose statements toward the U.S. government by the dominant classes.

Given this history, it was quite natural that, aside from the “Inaugural Address” drafted by Marx outlining its general principles, the newly formed First International’s first public statement was an open letter congratulating Lincoln on his re-election.  In that letter of January 1865, already discussed above in terms of the Lincoln administration’s response, the newly formed First International made explicit the internationalist principles that had motivated British workers to support the North in the face of economic hardship: “From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class…. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause” (MECW 20: 19-20). This refers both to the fact that the U.S. was the largest democratic republic at that time, and also to the large number of European immigrants, especially Germans, who took part in the war, sometimes in command positions.  The surprisingly warm response of the Lincoln administration, quoted earlier, generated for the International its first substantial publicity in the British press.

Civil War America was a society imbued with lots of revolutionary impulses.  Among other things, this sparked the growth of a large branch of the First International in the postwar U.S., among whose members were the radical abolitionist Wendell Phillips, the only abolitionist leader who made the transition from abolitionism to supporting labor in the Reconstruction era.  And as we know, reactionary forces, not only in the South, but also big capital in the North, worked together to limit the scope of Reconstruction, making sure, for example, that 40 acres and a mule was never achieved for the former slaves.  And by 1876, despite the hopes unleashed during the Reconstruction Era, now dashed, a new order of racial oppression, marked by forced segregation and violent repression, had come into place in the South.  And as we know, this system survived for nearly another century, until the 1960s.

I would like to end on a more general note, however, concerning Marx’s overall perspectives on race, ethnicity, and nationalism, and how they fit into his dialectical framework as a whole and his overall critique of capital, by quoting from the conclusion to my Marx at the Margins: “Marx developed a dialectical theory of social change that was neither unilinear nor exclusively class-based. Just as his theory of social development evolved in a more multilinear direction, so his theory of revolution began over time to concentrate increasingly on the intersectionality of class with ethnicity, race, and nationalism.  To be sure, Marx was not a philosopher of difference in the postmodernist sense, for the critique of a single overarching entity, capital, was at the center of his entire intellectual enterprise.  But centrality did not mean univocality or exclusivity.  Marx’s mature social theory revolved around a concept of totality that not only offered considerable scope for particularity and difference, but also on occasion made those particulars — race, ethnicity, or nationality — determinants for the totality” (p.  244).

******

This article is based on talks in September and October 2011 at Loyola University Chicago, the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library in Oakland, the Brecht Forum in New York, and the West Coast Marxist-Humanists in Los Angeles.

The US-Mexican border is arguably a low intensity war-zone. I don’t use the term lightly, nor for dramatic effect. In 2012, the Obama Administration deported over 400,000 undocumented people, setting a record high for the fourth consecutive year. There has also been 179 human remains found on the US-Mexican border in Arizona in the last year, this isn’t the full story though. Tucson hit the national news again last year when the Tucson Unified School District voted to ban Mexican American Studies and had the books removed while classes were in session. Then John Huppenthal, a state official involved in the ban is reported to be targeting the department of Mexican-American studies at the university and other college-level programs.

I believe these sorts of attacks on Mexican culture, in conjunction with xenophobic legislation such as SB 1070 has created the sort of environment where the April 8, 2012 shooting deaths of two Latino migrants in a wash that is part of the migrants’ trail near Eloy are a natural extension of government actions, especially since that occurred just after what had been reported to be the largest series of immigration raids ever.

While visiting Phoenix in October ’11, people were doing water drops in the area as people have been forced to start walking that far north from Mexico. 100 or so miles as the crow flies, but anyone who has spent some time in that desert can tell you, you’ll rarely walk very far in a straight line due to the rugged terrain. I think all this shows how stricter border enforcement hasn’t secured the border, but has forced people into extreme situations that have resulted in death, rape, and other horrific situations that could be avoided by changes in U$ immigration policies.

I’ve been able to volunteer for No More Deaths on the border near Arivaca a few separate times between March 2011-May 2012. I spent most of the time doing water and food drops along the migrants’ trail for people who are walking from Mexico into the Unites States. There is also a major need for people with medical expertise to be in the desert to treat people who are abandoned, lost or somehow else separated from the group they are walking with. There are also other solidarity campaigns that No More Deaths and other groups are involved in on both sides of the border such as the Tucson Freedom Summer and other struggles to bring back Mexican American Ethnic Studies, http://azethnicstudies.com. Please check http://www.nomoredeaths.org/ for more information on how to get involved.

Camp Ruby was my home when I was volunteering for No More Deaths doing desert relief. Ruby was a near by, abandoned mining town. Photo by Fionna

A Defeat For Mayor A C Wharton

The most significant outcome of Saturday’s demonstration was that at least 1,200 people (according to estimates by local mainstream news media), the majority of them Memphis residents, defied Memphis Mayor A C Wharton and came downtown in pouring rain to protest against the Klan. The fact that so many people came to the anti-Klan protest is very important when you consider the following:

For several days prior to the KKK rally, “Boss” Wharton, assisted by his cronies on the city council, in civil rights,religious, and white liberal groups, flooded the local media with the message that Memphis residents should “ignore” the Klan and stay away from downtown on March 30. Instead, the mayor and his sycophants urged people to come to an“alternative” event sponsored by the mayor, big business, and civil rights,religious groups and others, billed as the “Heart of Memphis.” This event featured an Easter egg hunt for children, free food, workshops and other activities. It was by no means a protest against the Klan but was billed as a“celebration” of the city’s cultural “diversity.” (Memphis is about 65 percent black. It is not a culturally diverse city!) The not-so-subtle message of the mayor’s propaganda campaign, which was promoted by the mainstream media, was that people who wanted to protest against the Klan were “troublemakers.”

The mayor got about 1,500 people at his event, according to local news media—only about 300 more people than attended the anti-Klan protest. Instead of ignoring the Klan, hundreds of people in Memphis ignored the mayor! This was a major defeat for Wharton.

Why Applying for a Permit Was Important

I want to clarify issues concerning the permit obtained on behalf of the Ida B. Wells Coalition Against Racism and Police Brutality for the Anti-Klan demonstration. The Memphis Black Autonomy Federation created the coalition with the initial purpose of organizing a multiracial counter-demonstration against the Klan. Since July, 2012,  MBAF has held three demonstrations and several other actions against police brutality in Memphis, where 14 people have died at the hands of the police since January, 2012. The majority of our protests were held in front of Memphis City Hall. One was held in front of the headquarters of the Memphis Police Department, and one was held in front of a police precinct office. All these protests were held at government offices, where citizens have First Amendment rights to protest.

When MBAF’s earlier protests were held, the city council was the primary authority for approving “parade” permits. However,two weeks before the Klan’s rally, the city council passed a new ordinance granting the police director virtually the sole authority to approve permits. MBAF believes that the new ordinance is unconstitutional. In order to have legal grounds to later challenge the ordinance in court, we filed for a permit. We also believed that since police director Tony Armstrong approved the white terrorist Klan’s request for a permit to spew its racist hatred, then the Ida B. Wells Coalition had a right for a permit to denounce the Klan’s bigotry.

Although not impossible, it much more difficult for a group like the coalition, which does not have non-profit status, to be granted a permit for a march and rally than it is for anon-profit group.

Power To The People, Inc., a 501 c(3)non-profit organization, with which my husband Lorenzo and I have worked for several years, applied for the permit on behalf of the Ida B. Wells Coalition.

The coalition had to apply three times before our permit was approved. Our initial request to the city permits office was for a First Amendment rally from noon to 2 p.m. on March 30 front of city hall, which is a couple of blocks from the Shelby County Courthouse, the site of the Klan’s rally, that was scheduled from 2 to 4 p.m. The head of the permits office told us that we had to first submit our application to the Downtown Memphis Commission. We were told that the commission manages themed-America Mall in front of city hall. We did not understand why such a group would have any authority over First Amendment protests.

The commission denied our request, claiming that a religious group was having a cultural program in front of city hall at the time we requested for our rally. We did not believe that any such program was going to be held, and that it was fabricated by city officials to prevent the coalition from having our protest. In our second request for a permit, we applied to have a rally in front of the courthouse. That request was also denied. We were told that anti-Klan groups would be restricted to the east side of the courthouse. So, we filed a third permit, which was granted on March 28,We also learned that day about the draconian security measures imposed by the police department, which included closing off several areas in the downtown area near the courthouse. One of those areas was the Mid-America Mall area in front of city hall—where we had been told there would be a cultural event at the time we had originally requested to use it. This was our proof that city officials lied to us when they said the area had previously been reserved.

MBAF believed that other groups would file permits for counter-demonstrations. However, this turned out not to be the case. Consequently, had the coalition not filed for a permit, no one would have been able to come, and there would have been no counter-protests. Tactically,we did the only thing that we could to protect our rights. We still need to sue the city  government to get rid of the unconstitutional regulations allowing the police department to control and approve political protests and arrest people on a summary basis for “illegal assembly.”

Why The Klan Protested

by Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin

The Klan is trying to re-establish its presence in Memphis. A couple of months ago, KKK fliers were circulated in east Memphis, where the largest concentration of white people live. The overwhelming majority of people in Memphis who have suffered economically during the last five years are black. However, Memphis does have a white poor and working population living on the east side of the city, some ex-factory workers and others who might be won over to the Klan, and who hate being reduced to poverty under a black president. These neighborhoods are well-to-do in comparison with mostly black areas that are basically ignored. However, these white middle-class neighborhoods are slipping into poverty, and the Klan says that black people,from Obama on down, are responsible for taking what the “white man is entitled to and giving it to them (blacks).”

The Klan has always had its way with the racist Confederacy preservation movement, founded by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. SOCV has been able to get every Memphis city administration since 1904 to finance and maintain the “white history parks”, while Dr. Martin Luther King JR. just got a street named for him by Memphis city government in 2011,some 44 years after the fact, and Ida B. Wells, 19th century Black journalist,feminist, anti-racist, anti-lynching advocate and co-founder of the NAACP has yet to have anything but a plaque in a muddy field in a economically depressed ghetto area.

The Klan feels that it is their right to have white supremacy and Confederate civil war symbols, as a matter of protecting white civil rights, and they are mobilizing in the white community with the idea of organizing an urban Klavern, a Klan chapter for a region. They have a unique opportunity because of so many years of collaboration between city officials and the Klan leaders. At first, this was to ensure tranquility from the racists who would not engage in violence against Blacks in the city, nor lead disruptive protests. All this was fine until 1998, when they protested Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday in January 1998. The resulting uproar even caused the SOCV to demand that they stop holding demonstrations in the city, just come to the parks for racist ceremonies,  and this was the case until the 2004 Centennial celebration took place and it leaked into the news media.

In early 2005, 750 Black activists led by brothers Walter and D’Army Bailey, along with national civil rights leader, Al Sharpton,  held a rally at the N. B. Forrest park downtown demanding that the Confederate parks be closed down, that Forrest’s remains be returned to either his family or a private cemetery, and that his likeness on a horse statute be put in mothballs or dismantled. Mayor Herenton refused to honor their demands, although he did move the statute out of the downtown area.

In 2013, the Klan split into various factions, and could only muster 63 Klan and Nazi members to come to Memphis. Although truthfully: they do have several thousand members nationwide, and are starting to grow again. We cannot depend on their weaknesses and mistakes to bail us out for the weakness of the anti-racist movement. We also must understand that it’s the state and its police forces, which are the greatest threat of fascism to our community. A Black city government mobilized over 600 cops, 4 armored personnel carriers, police in body armor, armed with sub-machine guns, and other deadly weapons, all armed to the teeth to protect the Klan against the people.

We must continue to fight against racism and police brutality, continue to build our movement, combat illegal counter-insurgency measures to stop us, and develop allies all over the country. We must have this movement active and fighting against police brutality, unemployment and poverty of (especially Black) workers and the poor,the of government revenues for the poor and workers, to stop the destruction of collective bargaining, and to stop racial profiling of Black and other peoples of color, in addition to combating the Klan. We must make the Ida B. Wells coalition into a national coalition, or at lest a regional coalition of Midwestern and southern activists, if we want to Change Memphis and the rest of this area.

If you or your group are interested in joining the coalition, please contact us in care of the Memphis Black Autonomy Federation, P.O. Box 16382, Memphis, TN 38186-0382, email organize,.the.hood@gmail.com.

Warning us not fall for attempts to pit black, white, and latino workers against each other, Pastor Craig Purchase proclaimed “We’re black, brown and white, and we’re all in this together, “ to a cheering crowd of over 300 residents gathered for a community meeting at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in Joliet, IL. Tom Garlitz, director of the Joliet Diocese’s Office for Human Dignity began the night, “The threat to human dignity we face this evening is the for-profit immigrant prison for Joliet.”

Residents and community leaders from Latino, African-American and white communities spoke out against a for-profit, immigrant detention center, by infamous Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), and called on residents to resist the building of this racist detention center. Bernie Kopera, leader against the plan in Crete, IL, spoke on their recent victory over CCA’s attempt to build the same prison in their town, saying it was important to start fighting early. “Political leaders (in Crete) had been negotiating with CCA for months, and we were lucky to find out about it,” he said.

Residents Gathered this Winter to Protest a Proposed For-Profit Immigrant Jail

Multi-billion-dollar Corrections Corporation of America has a track record of abuse and mistreatment, with 24 confirmed deaths of immigrant detainees while in CCA owned facilities and recently, two of CCA’s facilities made the list of the 10 worst immigrant prisons in the US. “This private, for-profit company has an awful history in terms of how they actually treat their inmates. Because they are for- profit, they cut costs where they can, which means they cut costs on health care for the detainees,” said Jesse Hoyt of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR).

 CCA also cuts costs when it comes to salaries and training provided for their employees.  Therefore the jobs promised to allow a CCA facility to move in are not the kind of employment that is beneficial to any community.  Over the last couple years there have been riots CCA prisons in Mississippi, Tennessee, Vermont, and Idaho where guards have been held hostage, assaulted and even killed.  Prisoners stated the riots were in response to the conditions they were being held in; so, the unjust conditions for the detainees translates to unsafe work environment for the employees of CCA who receive too little training and too little compensation.

Our shared vision for Scene Reports in the People Not Profit Editorial Collective is to provide the space for this sort of reporting for Infoshops, other radical spaces and projects such as Collective and/or Punk Houses. The fact that we can use the Internet to easily distribute the journal, and allow various Collectives and independent organizers to print an appropriate number of copies and save money on shipping and share the printing costs are just two of the reasons why we can have a similar project now that could go really well. I would like to use a similar format where cities take turns publishing issues to share about the trials and tribulations in the Anti-State of their local movements, without airing too much dirty laundry. Maybe we can have a list serve for that! I would also greatly appreciate input from people who were involved with (Dis) Connection.

Articles in the second issue such as “Against Half-Assed Race and Class Theory and Practice” by Ken Wong, “Gentrifuckation and White Frontier Collectives” and “On Boys In Collectives” were somewhat painful reminders about how many current Leftist activists in general, and participants in the Infoshop Movement in particular are pretty good at re-inventing faulty wheels. Bringing back these past discussions and insights is a large part of the point of that project. When asked to be on a panel about “Zines & Libraries” at Chicago ‘Zine Fest in 2010 when I was doing the research, I made a point in inviting Ken Wong and bringing the two copies of (Dis) Connection with me, and talking about how Wicker Park was still 70% Latin@ at the time the A-Zone was there according to the journal. I brought this up while talking about the current gentrification of Pilsen, for anyone there who still might not be taking it seriously. In the other issue of the journal I was able to check out, #3, Winter 95, one particular article stood out to me, “A-ZONE!? WHAT THE fuck?!?” The article is mostly an analysis of the discussion and its follow up, and a larger one was produced as a pamphlet, Existentialist Blues. I would Love to see a copy, and possibly include it as an appendix to a future edition of the project, or a new one.

In an era of so-called “social networking” websites, these journals were a real charge to get a hold of, and I’m sure I would have read them repeatedly if they were new, and that they would have spurred even more discussions than these old issues have recently. It was also fascinating to see Food Not Bombs in Chicago declared dead forever. There were three different neighborhood chapters going strong when I was reading the journal years later! The death of the Earth First! Movement was also pondered in this 1990s journal, showing how we can often despair when there still is hope. The networking that came formally out of the journal culminated in Active Resistance, a series of events that were held in Chicago in opposition to the Democratic National Convention that met there in 1996. We had an Active Resistance banner hanging on the wall in the main room of the Bucktown space, and the events were the stuff of local legend to me.

I had started the A-Zone Essay Project while volunteering for a space in El Barrio Pilsen, Chicago which had opened to the public as the Sowing Circle in the fall of 2008, and slowly changed to the Lichen Lending Library then La Biblioteca Popular del Barrio by the fall of 2009. I mentioned the A-Zone a great deal in meetings there, and was asked many questions which gave me the idea to put some of the history and lessons learned into print for people not involved with La Biblioteca, but other similar projects. As I’ve traveled the country since then, I’ve shared the ‘zine, The Autonomous Zone Infoshop: The A-Zone & a Decade of Anarchy in Chicago, which came out of the project, with volunteers, collective members and/or hangers-around at such projects as the Dry River Radical Resource Center, the Long Haul Infoshop, and the Taala Hooghan Infoshop. I’ve made a point of making the ‘zine available for free on zinelibrary.info where it can be read online easily or printed out.

Lately I’ve mostly been involved with the Taala Hooghan Infoshop in Flagstaff, Arizona, and the Collective is currently updating their 2010 DISORIENTATION GUIDE for students, which they’ve made available for free on their website, another great format which I first became familiar with while hanging around the Madison Infoshop in Wisconsin. There has been talk about making a state-wide Disorientation Guide for some time, and after I wrote the first draft of this article, there has been some talk here of making the it the first issue of this journal! If you are interested in supporting this project, I can be reached at scenereports at peoplenotprofit dot net.

Last  self published in ‘zine format as a pilot issue of the ‘zine and posted here for free in a readable format:  http://zinelibrary.info/new-connections-manifesto.  Max from People Not Profit was the only person to contact me after an earlier version was posted on POCO! and its social media spin offs. For the time being the project will probably be submerged into their Scene Reports.  The first submission we’ve gotten was from South Side Chicago ARA.  Though I’ve been mostly critical of Anti-Racist Action (ARA), I think this particular ARA group is a model, that if all ARA groups were more like, I would be down with their movement.  Please check it out here:

http://apoclove.wordpress.com/2012/12/29/south-side-ara-and-the-illinois-antifascist-scene-2009-present/

To grasp what happened at the March 30, 2013 Klan demonstration, you need to understand what led up to everything. The Klan said it came to Memphis to protest the renaming of the racist Memphis Confederate Parks system. Of course, all police preparations and media reporting claimed that the cops “had” to create a downtown police security zone of 10-12 square blocks to “keep the peace”, and not repeat the so-called anti-Klan “riot” of 1998, which was blamed on protesters then, but actually was a police riot as a result of an order by then-Mayor Willie Herenton to gas and beat protesters because they were approaching the Klan through breaks in the police line.

Memphis Police line up to protect the Klan from protesters.

So, using that mantra of “preventing a riot”, and also the media propaganda that this was a “new” Klan group (in response to critics who asked why the Klan was being allowed to protest at all) they put together a police army of 600 cops, 4 military armored cars with machine guns, a chain link fence to separate protesters from Klan, and confine the residents of Memphis behind a line of paramilitary riot police was used to “protect” the Klan from the people. Of course, the obvious reflection was that this even happened over 15 years ago and that the anti-Klan protest movement was “new” as well, did not penetrate the prevailing myth circulated by the cops and the lapdog media.

Our movement, the Memphis Black Autonomy Federation, had created a broad-based group called the Ida B. Wells Coalition Against Racism and Police Brutality to bring out Memphis residents, but also anti-fascist activists from throughout the Southern and Midwestern regions. We tried at first to have a meeting at city hall, but this was refused by a group of businessmen. Then the city permit office refused a permit for the same area as the Klan, which was at the courthouse itself,  just a few hours before. Then, the cops wanted to not allow any more than 100 people from the community come to the event, but we fought that, and they apparently allowed everyone to go in, including white supremacist supporters and anti-Klan activists. This latter decision was a recipe for disaster, we felt, and we did not initially feel that it would be safe to go inside. If someone got to fighting a Klan supporter, they could be shot and we all would have been in danger. We decided to press on anyway.

If we had not applied for the city parade permit, no one would have been allowed to protest at all, and we would not have even known of their security plans at all. Only because we kept prodding the city to back off on at least some of its security precautions, did they agree to allow the protest. They then issued the permit at the last minute, and the lapdog media dutifully reported it, including the city’s denial that it had ever denied our permits. This little media report would prove to be the undoing of the city’s plans for total denial of the event, and its plans of discouraging any protest through media saturation by the Mayor and government officials who time and again tried to frighten, scold, and intimidate people from coming down to an anti-Klan event. Just the fact that people knew that there was going to be a protest made them come down to the event, even if they were totally unfamiliar with our movement.

The day before the event we were concerned about being pushed into a “protest pit” as was done at many other events in other cities and was used to crush the anti-globalization movement, and because the original plan called for us all to be shoved into a small space on the side of the courthouse itself, we decided that it would be a threat to our security to go in that space, and we called for an activist General Assembly at a nearby park, which was outside the police protest zone, to discuss options. So about 150 of us met at Court Square park, and talked about going to the Forrest Park and attacking the statute itself, but then the cops came up and told us that we “had” to go to the “security zone, and we feigned going there, but in fact we had prepared a number of signs saying “Cops Stifle Free Speech!”, and about 150 of us marched down to police lines and protested the police state methods of controlling the protest.

The cops were perplexed, and a small number of them tried to chase us around or steer us into the barbed wire area, but we refused to go. It was a standoff, but they did not arrest anybody or beat us up. It was clear that they did not want to break their ranks to try to arrest all of us, so we took advantage of the moment and kept protesting. Then we moved towards the park, but there was a split between those who wanted to go inside the police lines, and those who did not. The group started splintering. After much soul searching, we decided we would go inside. So we headed for the entrance, and many followed us. The cops had everybody head through TSA style metal detectors, empty our pockets, and searched us. They seized all papers, pamphlets, protest signs, and denied you entry if you were wearing “radical” t-shirts of Che Guevara or Huey Newton, but also Jefferson Davis or N. B. Forrest attire. They seized our bullhorns, but returned one of them as we were entering the event.

When we got inside, everyone seemed subdued, and there was no chanting or screaming, everyone was just looking for signs of the Klan to show. The Klan was kept 2-3 football fields away from us, who were behind barbed wire. There was a long line of riot police inside arrayed as a gauntlet we had to pass, then there were police snipers on the roof, and a line of police standing across from us, about five deep and then others on horseback. They never moved for five hours, just stared ahead at us in military formation.

What made us feel good about going inside is that there was in fact a large number of people already inside waiting on us. They kept streaming in. These were not the usual white middle class activists or the old civil rights deadheads, these were working class Black people of every age. They were angry as hell because the Mayor had brought these “Ku Klux Kowards” to town, and had put us behind barbed wire and coddled the Klan. The Klan came on special city buses, only about 60 of them, which contained riot police and a special security wing of Memphis police and Shelby County Sheriffs.

The anti-Klan protesters were not intimidated by the cops or the Klan. When we began shouting “the cops and the Klan work hand-in-hand!”, everybody came to life and shouted it for hours. They then started talking to us about how they felt about a Black government and police chief working with the Ku Klux Klan. Most were clear that the Klan was in town to make the city government back off on its plan to rename the Confederate parks, which the Klan saw as just the first step of closing it down. I heard over and over a constant refrain that the politicians were treating the people like the criminal, instead of the Ku lux Klan, and that they were protecting the Klan’s First Amendment “rights”, while taking away those of Black community residents. They were seething with anger over it.

A month’s worth of propaganda in newspaper, television and radio by the Mayor, bootlicking political preachers, civil rights sellouts, corrupt businessmen and bankers did not work. This entire misdirection campaign, which cost several hundred thousand dollars, bombarded the community with a constant refrain all day long with one message: “don’t go down to the anti-Klan protest,  just ignore them and stay home”, simply did not work. The mayor even set up a diversionary event at the Memphis Fairgrounds that included watermelon and fried chicken, and it appears many went and ate his food, and then came to our event downtown. The Mayor did get 1,500 people at his event, but it was a defeat of his overall program. Before the day was over, there would be at least 1,200 people arriving in the space we were forced into, and truthfully it may have been more, that figure came from the capitalist media.

We defeated the purposes of the politicians, and the cops as well, to neutralize the anti-Klan event: the people were there and they were pissed. In fact, it all backfired! Now we know that Black people and white activists can work together in Memphis around anti-racist and anti-police brutality campaigns, (since 200 anti-racist whites also attended, the majority from our anti-Klan coalition, who also understood that the Klan is a threat to everybody). We know that, in particular, there are forces in the Memphis Black community that won’t not tricked, intimidated, or are willing to be driven off by the police or the fascist Klan either by threats of violence. This is important, that the people are not beaten down, they just need a movement that will stand up and give them a voice.

Beside demanding to know why the Klan was even allowed to organize in a majority Black city, and coddled in such a fashion by Black politicians and the police, the next thing they wanted to know is who is going to pay for all this police overtime, these high-tech weapons purchases, leasing of equipment, and other items, which amounts to over $1.5 million dollars minimum? Everyone I spoke to was pissed about that, and promised to address it with the city government. We therefore may have a mass protest at city council chambers or the Mayor’s office to demand an accounting, and that the Klan be charged for everything. We also are going to conduct a future campaign against the racist Confederate Park system, and the complete dismantling of the grave of Nathan Bedford Forrest and the removal of his statute into mothballs and his remains turned over to his family or placed in a private cemetery. Finally we demand that the Forrest park be named after Ida B. Wells, the first real civil rights leader in Memphis, a feminist, anti-racist, anti-lynching advocate, Black rights organizer who would go on to co-found the NAACP.

This event was a huge defeat for the Klan and city politicians. People stood 5-6 hours out in rainy weather just to protest the coming of the Klan. In the end, after the Klan left, cops had to threaten to arrest everybody before people would even leave. They never got to see or hear the Klan – they were kept too far away, and blocked by the police. I had stood  and marched so long around the police perimeter that my legs were literally cramped, and I could hardly walk. Yet, despite much confusion and many mistakes, I felt satisfied that we had successfully held the event and the people came, even with all the difficulties to do the protest, and despite all the media whiteout afterwards.

The lapdog media actually denied any such anti-Klan event took place, they just reported on the Klan and the cops’ 600-man army massed to keep the people under control. But we know that we were there, and we know what we saw and accomplished, and nothing will take that away. No lying state media, or army can stop an idea whose time has come. Death to the Klan!

If you or your group are interested in joining the coalition, please contact us in care of the Memphis Black Autonomy Federation, P.O. Box 16382, Memphis, TN 38186-0382, email organize.the.hood at gmail.com.