No one is free until we all are free [to paraphrase Fannie Lou Hamer], and that includes those who are employed, unemployed, those who are incarcerated or in gangs, or who are sex workers. What we are fighting for is a world where our full humanity is honored and protected and valued, and that includes all of who we are.
Aislinn Pulley
Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a radical intellectual and one of the most prominent advocates for prison abolition in the country. Her advocacy is anything but simple. To move toward the abolition of prisons (the inhumane practice of caging human beings), she argues, is to get involved with an intensive process of building: jobs, housing, new cultural practices, and new ways of thinking about work, rights, restorative justice, and community. Ruth Gilmore and her collaborator and partner, Craig Gilmore, point out that control of Black bodies, poor bodies, resistant bodies, and labor in general “first required extralegal violence, but later the legitimacy of the badge replaced the discredited Klan hood.”1 Here is what they have to say about the Black Lives Matter Movement/Movement for Black Lives (BLMM/M4BL): “Sparked by police murder in capitalism’s neoliberal turn, the post-Ferguson movement may therefore be understood as protests against profound austerity and the iron fist necessary to impose it. The movement’s central challenge is to prevent the work from facilitating another transition in regimes of policing and incarceration, displacement and disinvestment through formal but not transformative reforms.”2
Gilmore’s challenge to BLMM/M4BL is this: the movement must resist any push to narrow and constrain its goals or to decontextualize them from the larger political landscape of racial capitalism. Gilmore’s analysis also poses a challenge to the predominately white Left: Is the Left willing to repudiate the “class only” postracialism that some white and a few Black intellectuals have argued for? That line of thinking wrongly suggests that those organizing around the special oppression of women, LGBTQIA folks, Blacks, Latinx, and indigenous peoples have contributed to a fragmentation of the Left and divided the working class. The truth is that the Left and the working class were never monolithic or unified. Exploitation has always been experienced unevenly, to say the least. And racism, sexism, homophobia, and chauvinisms of various sorts have done more to divide and weaken the Left than those organizing to combat these injustices. Moreover, an intersectional analysis—a term that was coined by legal scholar and activist Kimberlé Crenshaw but has been advocated by Black feminists from Audre Lorde and Barbara Smith to the Combahee River Collective, bell hooks, Angela Davis, and others—sees the class struggle as intimately bound up with the struggle against all the other major forms of oppression. There is a symbiosis between US and European capitalism, empire, white supremacy, and hetero-patriarchy. This understanding is a basis for unity, not fragmentation. If only the various white-led Left and labor organizations could truly internalize these historical truths, the political possibilities would be enormous.
Gilmore also echoes the call by sociologist André Gorz for campaigns targeting “non-reformist reforms”—those demands that plant the seeds for systemic change and challenge the very logic of the profit system.3 This is what Gilmore and her abolitionist comrades are arguing for, and their ideas are gaining traction.
Framing the BLMM/M4BL campaigns in global and historical context is another critical ingredient for transformative change. Indicting the economic underpinnings of police control and violence is another. And forging a practice that not only includes but also centers the interests of the most oppressed and marginalized sectors of the Black community is also key. Finally, looking to a Black-led multiracial mass movement is inescapable, as Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor insists in her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Embracing a long-term vision, Taylor writes, “The challenge before us is to connect the current struggle to end police terror in our communities with an even larger movement to transform this country in such a way that the police are no longer needed to respond to the consequences of that inequality.”4
As I have argued in Dissent and elsewhere, BLMM/M4BL can be viewed as a Black-led class struggle—informed by, grounded in, and bolstered by Black feminist politics. This is evidenced by its links to the low-wage worker movement, through Alicia Garza’s leadership role in the National Domestic Workers Alliance, BYP100’s collaborative efforts with the Fight for 15 and its “Agenda to Build Black Futures” economic justice campaign, and Dream Defenders’ opposition to capitalism. Over and over, BLMM/M4BL leaders and organizers have insisted not only that racial justice must include economic justice and vice versa but that the two are intimately connected. Writing in Jacobin, Shawn Gude makes the point powerfully: “Baltimore, then, is like so many other cities with their own Freddie Grays: a place in which private capital has left enormous sections of the city to rot, where a chasm separates the life chances of black and white residents—and where cops brutally patrol a population deemed disposable.”5 Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, the African American father of four who was killed by police on Staten Island while trying to break up a fight but who was known to local cops for the minor “crime” of selling loosies (single unpackaged cigarettes), put it this way:
My son Eric died last year at the hands of the men who were supposed to protect him. At the time he was selling cigarettes to support his family. These two things are, of course, connected. They reflect the ongoing struggle the black community faces every day for racial and economic justice. They’re at the heart of the Black Lives Matter movement. Eric’s senseless death has forced our country to confront the toxic effects of police brutality. My hope is that together, we can also change the system that trapped him and so many black men and women across our city and nation in poverty, too.6
A core of BLMM/M4BL leaders have taken Gwen Carr’s words to heart, forging a praxis that centers class, gender, sexuality, and empire alongside race to reflect a truly intersectional analysis.
Why is this analysis important? It represents a set of politics and practices that hold up and enact the radical spirit of the 1977 Combahee River Collective statement. The Combahee collective was a Boston-based activist group of Black lesbian feminists, who were also unapologetically socialist. They wrote, “We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy. We are socialists because we believe that work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses. Material resources must be equally distributed among those who create these resources. We are not convinced, however, that a socialist revolution that is not also a feminist and anti-racist revolution will guarantee our liberation.”7 The group would come to included the late Black feminist icon Audre Lorde; New Jersey–based scholar-activist Cheryl Clarke; Demita Frazier; Kitchen Table Press publisher Barbara Smith and her sister, Beverly Smith; scholar-activist Margo Okazama Ray; and the current “first lady” of New York City, Chirlane McCray, who has traveled a long, interesting, and circuitous path since 1977.8 Over time, many Black radical thinkers like the Combahee founders have come to view that revolution as a process rather than an event.
Contrary to the shortsighted argument that groups like the Combahee River Collective and its offshoots are the epitome of “divisive identity politics,” Combahee River’s expansive and inclusive radical statement proves exactly the opposite. It begins by locating its authors in the hierarchy of the society and world we live in and grounds them in a set of lived experiences that create the basis for (but are not determinative of) their radical critique of the status quo—capitalism, empire, white supremacy, and hetero-patriarchy. The year 2017 marked the fortieth anniversary of the Combahee River Collective statement, and panels, conferences, articles, and strategy sessions have revisited the document, reclaimed it, and affirmed its continued relevance. The National Women’s Studies Association was proud to host its 2017 national conference in Baltimore, entitled “Combahee at 40: Feminist Scholars and Activists Engage the Movement for Black Lives,” which did just that.
Still, there remains work to be done—contradictions to sort out, debates to be had, stories to share, strategies to sharpen, and even some wounds to heal. Activists should not underestimate the profound seriousness of this work.
And so, what is needed? More organizations with “on-ramps” and portals of entry, so those who are now spectators can move toward action and find a way into the work. More national campaigns that bring activists from various sectors together with focused strategic purpose. We can think of the ongoing national coalition-building and united-front work as a wheel with spokes rather than a hierarchical, top-down pyramid. But the wheel has to have a hub and a center to connect the spokes (i.e., local and issue-specific struggles). And there needs to be more serious and rigorous political education, in terms of both history and theory.
To say this country is in a difficult political moment is an understatement, as neo-Nazis march across the South brandishing torches, as they did in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the summer of 2017. The reckless and racist policies of the Trump presidential administration have put many vulnerable populations in peril and on the defensive. The Department of Justice is moving away from even giving lip service to police reform or accountability, and is advancing policies to increase the number of prisons and extend the reach of surveillance and the punishment industry. Social programs, health care, and public services will be deeply impacted by the horrendous 2017 tax bill, which promises to be what economist Jeffrey Sachs has bluntly described as the biggest public “heist” ever—stealing resources from the poor to fatten the bank accounts of the wealthy.9 The third version of the so-called Muslim ban has gone into effect, making it difficult, and in some cases impossible, for those from predominantly Muslim countries to even visit the United States. The anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Trump administration threatens more deportations and harassment of undocumented residents. The threat of repression remains real as Trump praises and cavorts with dictators around the world, and maligns the media at home. The attack on net neutrality (through attempts to privatize and further commodify the Internet and social media) means organizers risk losing a powerful tool for organizing and communicating. And moves toward deregulation mean corporations can take calculated risks at public expense, with little recourse for citizens.
Still, I am reminded of a quote from philosopher Homi Bhabha, brought to my attention by my colleague Roderick Ferguson, that references a longer quote from Walter Benjamin: “the state of emergency is also always a state of emergence.”10 Already there has been an upsurge and intensification in organizing, coalition building, united-front formations, and serious strategizing in the Left, including the Black Left. Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, as lacking as it was on the issues of race and white supremacy, nevertheless widened the debate about the failings of capitalism and the possibility for alternatives. The growth of left-leaning groups like Democratic Socialists of America, Our Revolution, Indivisible, and the Working Families Party has the potential to pull US politics to the left, if and only if they take seriously the scourge of white supremacy and the generative and transformative power of the Black insurgent impulse. The Majority coalition, promising to “build an anti-racist Left for radical democracy,” and the newly formed LeftRoots, a people of color–led socialist organization heavily influenced by the lessons from the left movements in Latin America, are already organizing with that understanding in place. All of this is to ask the question—what comes next? We look to the new generation of organizers, dreamers, visionaries, and freedom fighters to forge out of this current state of emergency, this current bleak moment, a new path, for Black people, for all people, and for the planet.