“This kind of understanding—of the trauma that policing can inflict on Black and Brown communities, of the trauma that police officers experience doing their jobs—is crucial if we’re going to reduce violence committed by people on both sides of a badge.”
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Fewer than eight months out from Election Day, some Democrats are appearing to acknowledge that some of their biggest priorities are more likely to be accomplished by executive order than legislative action.
With only a tenuous majority in Congress, Democrats have been unable to pass many of President Joe Biden’s key agenda items on climate change, health care, childcare, and education. The Build Back Better Act is Build Back Deader than ever, and unlikely to be resuscitated. Democratic leadership in Congress seems to have adjusted to this reality and is now turning its attention to goals that can be accomplished on a bipartisan basis, such as beginning the process of reconciling the House and Senate versions of a bill that aims to increase competitiveness with China.
With the legislative channels increasingly closed to them, the Congressional Progressive Caucus is turning to President Joe Biden for succor. On Thursday, it released a slate of proposed executive actions for the president to issue, in order “to address some of the most pressing concerns of the American people, and unfinished business of the Biden agenda,” caucus chair Pramila Jayapal said in a statement. “This isn’t about abandoning the legislative path,” or so a fact sheet on the proposed actions produced by the caucus insists. Rather, it’s about accomplishing what can be done as quickly as possible, to fulfill the promises made by Democrats to the American people.
“I want to again be clear, we’re not giving in or giving up on legislating. That remains critical. It is our best chance to deliver enduring relief and to achieve goals that can only be accomplished through acts of Congress,” Jayapal said in a press call on Thursday, an assertion that might require a persuasion check had it occurred in a game of Dungeons & Dragons. “But this agenda that we’re releasing today is also about recognizing our chance to use all the tools in the toolbox that are available to us, and realizing the promise of democratic governance from every corner.”
Jayapal said that the proposed actions were intended to help working families, particularly as inflation reaches record highs. “That’s how we want to think about this, is, ‘Let’s deliver some relief quickly for people,’” Jayapal said. The comprehensive list of executive actions is a kind of Build Back Better Act in miniature; it would address many of the agenda items the dead-in-the-water legislation had aimed to tackle: climate change and health care costs, as well as progressive wish-list items such as immigration reform and canceling student loan debt. Jayapal said that there had been “a number of staff conversations” involving the White House and that members of the Progressive Caucus planned to have a conversation with Biden himself.
“The focus here was not necessarily to put out every fabulous idea that the progressive movement has but really to focus on things that we think are doable, and we feel pretty good about this list,” Jayapal said.
While executive actions may have the benefit of offering temporary relief, there are some serious drawbacks. The actions of one president can easily be undone by the next administration; think of President Donald Trump backing out of the Paris Climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal and rescinding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or Biden reversing Trump’s actions barring transgender individuals from joining the military and canceling the Keystone XL pipeline. If Democrats lose the White House in 2024, any actions Biden takes can easily be overturned.
A more immediate concern, however, is having actions tied up in the courts. As of early March, 40 multistate lawsuits had been filed against the Biden administration. The Supreme Court, with its conservative majority, has already demonstrated its willingness to rule against the administration. In August, the court blocked Biden’s order extending the federal eviction moratorium. In January, it struck down the administration’s rule requiring that large private companies impose vaccine or testing mandates.
In the unsigned decision blocking the eviction moratorium, the court pointed out that “Congress was on notice that a further extension would almost surely require new legislation, yet it failed to act in the several weeks leading up to the moratorium’s expiration.” Congress had failed to extend the moratorium before it was set to expire in late July, in large part because such legislation would have been unable to pass in the evenly divided Senate and even faced Democratic opposition in the House. “It is up to Congress, not the [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention], to decide whether the public interest merits further action here,” the decision read.
The eviction moratorium decision demonstrates in microcosm the dilemma that Biden would face if he approved some of these executive actions outlined by the Progressive Caucus. Congress is unable to pass certain legislation thanks to the narrow Democratic majority, so Biden takes what executive action he can. Federal courts, perhaps going up to the Supreme Court, find that Biden cannot take certain actions on his own and that some powers are reserved for Congress alone. But Congress is unable to pass that legislation thanks to the narrow Democratic majority. The cycle repeats.
The power of the executive is also being challenged in a lawsuit brought by Republican-led states and coal companies that could prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gas emissions and redefine how agencies can exercise their regulatory powers. The states and companies argue that Congress did not explicitly grant the EPA the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. (Interestingly, the case is not predicated on actions that the Biden administration has taken but on Obama and Trump rules that never actually took effect.)
But progressives argue that, despite the specter of these actions being overturned, either by a future president or a court decision, Biden should press forward with issuing these orders. “You can’t be too worried about what happens,” Representative Ilhan Omar told The New Republic. “I think there were a lot of promises made. The American people are looking to [Biden] to lead when Congress isn’t able to.”
Representative Mark Pocan, another member of the Progressive Caucus, acknowledged that executive actions may not be as permanent as passing a bill. “We’re just encouraging the president, since Republicans seem completely unwilling to work with us on almost anything, that the best thing we can do is have him move some of these ideas forward, and then hopefully after November when we have a Senate with a little more of a margin, we’ll be able to get some more done,” Pocan told The New Republic, bucking the conventional wisdom of the pundit class to assume that Democrats would hold control of the House and expand their majority in the Senate. He also scoffed at the idea that Biden should not take action if it may be challenged in the courts.
“So we’re going to say, ‘Don’t do anything’? I mean, clearly we want to move forward, we want to show people that we can work for them,” Pocan said. “These are just alternative paths, given how long now we’ve been waiting for Build Back Better.”
Representative Cori Bush, a member of the Progressive Caucus who slept on the steps of the Capitol for days in protest of the expiration of the eviction moratorium, an action that helped persuade Biden to extend it despite his warning that it would likely be struck down by the Supreme Court, argued in favor of taking action, and damn the potential torpedoing by the judicial branch.
“We do what we can to make sure that, if that does happen, we have the guardrails in place to make sure that we’re able to stand on solid ground. But I think we have to be able to move forward with some of these things,” Bush told The New Republic. “We keep saying, ‘Democrats deliver, Democrats deliver,’ but do the people believe that Democrats deliver? If they don’t feel like we’re delivering, then we have not done our work.”
“Do you
think Americans give a fuck about Ukraine?!”—Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaking to NPR broadcaster Mary Louise Kelly in January 2020
Whatever Americans were thinking two
years ago, when Pompeo gave his NPR interview, they now do give a fuck about
Ukraine—and therein lies a problem: For more than 25 years, the party of
Reagan has been transforming itself into the party of Putin, only to discover
that Vladimir Putin may not be a great role model after all. As a result, one
leading Republican after another has begun to perform Simone Biles–level
gymnastics in their bids to condemn their party’s most powerful patron.
Consider that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis
now calls Putin “an authoritarian gas station attendant with some legacy
nuclear weapons.” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called Putin “a ruthless thug who’s just invaded another sovereign
country and killed thousands of innocent people.” And on Twitter, Senator Lindsey
Graham openly called for Putin’s assassination. “The
only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out,” he tweeted.
“You would be doing your country—and the world—a great service.”
For more than 25 years, a large swath
of the GOP has enjoyed mutually rewarding relationships with Russian operatives.
But if you think this is hard-line Cold
War tough talk from the Reagan-era GOP of yore, think again. It’s not just Donald
Trump who’s in Vladimir Putin’s pocket. For more than 25 years, a large swath
of the GOP has enjoyed mutually rewarding relationships with Russian operatives
funding and working with K Street lobbyists, political consultants, super PACs, campaign fundraising operations, disinformation and propaganda campaigns,
social media operations, cyber-warfare efforts, money laundering schemes, think
tanks harboring Russian intelligence operatives, and much, much more.
Jonathan Winer, former deputy assistant
secretary of state for international law enforcement, has observed the relationship
for years. “If you go back
to the days of Jack Abramoff, when Americans started going to Moscow in the
’90s, and then to Paul Manafort in Ukraine, and so on, you start to see the
spine of a secret influence campaign between the Republicans and Russia that
has been built up over decades,” he said. “It goes right up to Tucker Carlson
rooting for Putin on Fox today. It has been built up over decades, and it is
not new, and it deeply infects the Republican Party. You have two forces with
deep political ties that are fighting American democracy in order to keep Putin
in power and install a Putin-like system in America. And to that end, they have
penetrated deep into our think tanks, our media, our journalism—everything.”
Take Ed Buckham, the recently appointed
chief of staff for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene. Today, Buckham handles a
congresswoman who proudly attends “white supremacist, antisemitic, pro-Putin” rallies, as Congresswoman Liz
Cheney characterized
them, and has become renowned for touting conspiracy theories about how the
California wildfires were started by Jewish space lasers. On Thursday, when the House of Representatives voted to suspend normal trade relations with Russia and Belarus, Greene, not surprisingly, was one of eight Republicans who voted against it.
Buckham’s ties to Russian interests date
back 25 years to 1997—before Putin came to power—when he served as an
aide to House Majority Whip Tom DeLay. This was the heyday of “Casino Jack”
Abramoff, the lobbyist-conman who took on pay-for-play clients ranging from the
Choctaw Indian tribe of Mississippi to the Kremlin with a panache made for
Hollywood. At the time, Buckham, in addition to his job with DeLay, oversaw a
lobbying outfit called the U.S. Family Network, which presented itself as a
public advocacy group but was really a vehicle funded largely by clients of Jack Abramoff.
In this case, the relevant clients
linked to Abramoff were executives from Naftasib, the Russian energy giant. If
DeLay’s lavish six-day excursion to Moscow in 1997 is any indication, the
Russians made cultivating DeLay a high priority and spared little expense, as the
junket involved golf, lavish dinners, and a meeting with Russian Prime Minister
Viktor Chernomyrdin. But the icing on
the cake was a $1 million contribution by the Russians to the U.S. Family
Network. According to The Washington Post,
Buckham told the former president of the U.S. Family Network that Russians made
the $1 million contribution specifically to influence DeLay’s vote on
legislation to finance a bailout of the collapsing Russian economy.
Ultimately, DeLay was forced out of
Congress, indicted, convicted, and sentenced to three years in prison for money
laundering and conspiracy charges relating to campaign financing. In 2013,
however, his conviction was overturned on appeal. Abramoff served 43 months in
jail for mail fraud, conspiracy to bribe public officials, and tax evasion. As
for Buckham, he is now back in the fray, a top aide to one of the most
controversial and extreme members of Congress. (Buckham did not respond to
multiple requests for an interview for this article.)
But Buckham’s and DeLay’s Russian
intrigues paled next to those of Paul Manafort, the Roy Cohn–trained fixer and
political consultant who represented the interests of corrupt despots the world
over—the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, Romania’s Nicolai
Ceausescu, Zaire’s Mobutu Sese Seko—and Vladimir Putin. Manafort’s ties with
Russia go back to 2004, when he began his journey into the shadowy world of
flight capital, offshore companies, and Russian intelligence. In all, over $75
million in Russian funds flowed through Manafort’s operations into his
offshore accounts. According to a Senate Intelligence Committee Report, Manafort appointed his constant
companion, a Russian intelligence officer named Konstantin Kilimnik, as head of
his Ukraine operations with full “power of attorney” to interact with pro-Putin
oligarchs who were funding Manafort.
Manafort set up sophisticated
disinformation campaigns, using phony think tanks and phony journalists to
write phony stories—all supporting Putin’s phony narratives.
He also set up sophisticated
disinformation campaigns, using phony think tanks and phony journalists to
write phony stories—all supporting Putin’s phony narratives. As Manafort’s
deputy, Rick Gates, once explained, “Paul has a whole separate shadow government structure.… In
every ministry, he has a guy.” And much of it was in service to Putin’s objective of taking over
Ukraine, not by military force as we are seeing today but from the inside, via
the pro-Putin Party of Regions, whose oligarchs paid Manafort, and its
candidate Viktor Yanukovych, an oligarch worth $12 billion.
Manafort launched Yanukovych into the
Ukrainian presidency in 2010. But by 2013 the pro-European facade he had
created for his candidate had been stripped away, revealing Yanukovych to be
merely another of Putin’s pawns. After the massive protests in Maidan Square in
2014, when nearly 100 activists were killed, Yanukovych was forced to leave the
presidency and flee to Moscow.
Text messages between Manafort’s two
daughters, Andrea and Jessica, suggest they felt their father was responsible for the deaths that took place at
Maidan. “Don’t fool yourself,” Andrea Manafort texted her sister. “That money
we have is blood money.”
So by the time Manafort became Donald Trump’s
campaign manager, the die had been cast. Deeply in debt to Putin’s oligarchs, he maintained, according to the report by the U.S. Senate Select Committee
on Intelligence in 2020 cited above, ongoing contacts with Kilimnik
that “represented a grave
counterintelligence threat” because his “presence on the Campaign and proximity
to Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert
influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump campaign.”
According to the Mueller Report, in
August 2016, Manafort met with Kilimnik at the Grand Havana Club in New York
and, according to an assessment by the Treasury Department, provided “Russian
Intelligence Services with sensitive information on polling and strategy,” presumably for use in influence
campaigns on behalf of Trump.
Of course, Manafort was not alone among
Republican lobbyists in carrying water for Putin. According to Open Secrets,
quite apart from Manafort, Russian interests have spent about $182 million on lobbying, influence operations, and propaganda in the
last six years.
As I reported in American Kompromat,
Jones Day, the fourth-largest law firm in the land, represented at least 10 major corporations and organizations close to Putin. These included: Oleg
Deripaska’s Basic Element; the Alfa Group and Access-Renova Group, which
jointly own billions in oil and gas assets; Alfa Bank, the largest private
commercial bank in Russia; Letterone, a $30 billion holding company for assets
in technology, oil, and gas; Rosneft, the
world’s largest listed oil company; the Sapir Organization, which helped fund
Bayrock’s Trump SoHo; and more.
Likewise, Kirkland and Ellis is the biggest
law firm in the world, with a star-studded cast of GOP power brokers in its
ranks—among them, former Attorney General William Barr; former solicitor general and GOP attack dog Kenneth Starr; Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh; Viet Dinh, chief legal and policy officer of Fox
Corporation, and as such the secret power behind Fox News; and former national security adviser John Bolton, to name but a few. Its most prized Russian
clients have included Alfa Bank, whose key figures, Mikhail Fridman and Petr
Aven, were entirely dependent on Putin for their wealth, and Oleg Deripaska’s
En+ Group, the largest producer of aluminum in the world outside of China.
Now that Putin has begun waging an
old-fashioned war with bombs, bullets, and boots on the ground, and is doing so
in an astonishingly brutal and clumsy fashion, it is tempting to forget that in
recent years, he has been far, far more successful with the kind of asymmetric
hybrid warfare we saw in the 2016 election. So as the horrifying carnage in
Ukraine flickers across our television screens, let’s not forget Russian trolls
activating strategic influence operations on multiple social media platforms,
the money laundering through real estate that enriched Donald Trump and his
associates, and the Russian conspiracy theories that just happen to be echoed by QAnon, former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, and the like.
Of course, now that there are far more
forceful sanctions in play and Russia has become a pariah state and Operation
Kleptocapture is underway, the once-close relationship between figures on the
American right and the Kremlin was bound to change. It wasn’t that long ago that Steven Brogan,
the powerful managing partner of Jones Day, could interact with partners Don
McGahn and Vladimir Lechtman, the head of Jones Day’s Russia practice, and in
doing so talk to one man who served as Donald Trump’s attorney and another who
was likely the single most trusted corporate counsel to Putin’s oligarchs.
Things can’t be quite that cozy these days.
“The
sanctions that have been put into place are intended to choke Putin’s entire
system of economic as well as military power. In the near term, there is
nothing but risk for those who engage with Russia, and intense pressure to
withdraw from Russian relationships,” says Jonathan Winer, who is credited with coming up with the Magnitsky Act, applying sanctions to Russian officials who were
responsible for the death of Sergei Magnitsky, the tax accountant for Hermitage
Capital Management who uncovered massive corruption by Russian officials and
was tortured to death. “The international law
firms and accounting firms operating in Russia are mostly shutting down for
now,” he added.
“Russian security state influence networks
are pervasive and persistent, and they are not going to suddenly disappear just
because Putin has now made himself the world’s most hated person.”
But that doesn’t mean it’s all over
between Russia and the GOP. When Lindsey Graham calls for the head of Vladimir
Putin, me thinks he doth protest too much. The relationship will continue. “Russia has been in the influence business a very long time,
and it’s a core part of its military doctrine, especially during what others
think of as peacetime,” says Winer. “Russian security state influence networks
are pervasive and persistent, and they are not going to suddenly disappear just
because Putin has now made himself the world’s most hated person. Instead, they
are likely to just go deeper underground.
“The oligarchs relied on twin pillars for support, both of
which are under attack right now,” Winer adds. “Putin was the wallet, and the
West provided entry into the global elite.”
As for the first pillar, the whole world can monitor Putin’s
fate day by day, hour by hour, as his army slowly slogs its way across Ukraine
getting shelled mercilessly in a showdown that had been billed as an easy win.
And as for the second, the consequences of truly harsh
sanctions, of Task Force KleptoCapture, and of other efforts will become
evident over time in terms of how much Putin’s oligarchs will be able to enjoy
the riches of the West. “That is the great question,” said Winer. “What is our
capacity to enforce money laundering? The EU finally made it illegal for
corporations to pay bribes. But how will they enforce it?”
And finally, there are other areas, such as cryptocurrency,
that are so new that one can’t make any predictions at all. “We know for
sure the Russians use crypto for influence operations working out of their St.
Petersburg troll farm,” Winer added. “But it is grossly unregulated.” What
happens with crypto may be the biggest question of all.
Foreign investors own the biggest slice of the U.S corporate bond market, followed by life insurance companies and mutual funds, according to a new CreditSights report.
Everyday, everywhere on Earth, some European is coming into spaces with African people (or Indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere) to express their perspective that nationalism is a primitive form of human consciousness. Even most of these people who claim to support national liberation for colonized people still see any semblance of national identity as reactionary and contrary to forward human progress. We have the European socialist left to primarily thank for this racism disguised as class analysis. How and why do we call nationalism racist? Mostly because the basis of this inept analysis is that the history of Europe . . .
The post African Nationalism is not European Nationalism. Stop Projecting. appeared first on Hood Communist.
Russia says it made coupon payments in dollars on a pair of sovereign bonds, news reports said, a move that would avert a potential default.
“The polling indicates that not only should candidates run on policies like the Green New Deal, but they should center them—especially if they want to engage young voters,” said the Sunrise Movement.
The Fed’s Lack of Transparency Is Harming the Dollar as the World’s Reserve Currency
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: March 17, 2022 ~ Yesterday, it was widely reported in the business press that Saudi Arabia is considering pricing its oil deals with China in China’s own currency, the Yuan, rather than in U.S. Dollars, which is the currency of choice for the bulk of the global oil trade. While it should be noted that this talk has been making headlines for the past four years without actually coming to fruition, the U.S. should stop taking the respected status of the Dollar for granted. Three of the key reasons that the U.S. Dollar has been able to maintain its status as the global reserve currency are the following: a stable government which is not subject to being toppled by coups; a large working population which allows federal tax payments to be automatically collected from paychecks in order to pay the nation’s debts on time; and, … Continue reading →
After remaining stubbornly dovish last year, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell on Wednesday has led the central bank squarely into the hawkish camp,
What Use Is An Empty Weapon?
An Amazon theorist once said that “women need a world view.” As I exit the dogmatic so-called “Maoist” movement in the United States and grapple with a clear eyed feeling of disillusionment, I’ve never been more convinced of the truth of those words. The last several years of my life have been spent, to one extent or another, in men’s communist organizing, culminating in my involvement in a small but well known amerikkkan Maoist party building project. In this movement I met some of the most militant women I’ve ever known, and I watched as, one by one, they were slowly ostracized from the organization and disappeared from my radar.
The problem I have consistently run into in this and other organizing projects is the immense pervasiveness of patriarchy. Somehow, contrary to every Maoist people’s army we were drawing inspiration from, we never developed a women’s department and never consciously developed women’s leadership and participation, the bare minimum required to be politically relevant. The question of women and other gender oppressed people’s leadership and involvement was brushed off in much the same way the question of colonized people’s leadership was (even by colonized cadre): politics, not identity, must be in command. To these paper Maoists (to borrow a phrase from Sakai), who was in charge didn’t really matter so long as they had the right politics. There is a wiff of legitimacy to this, but it is only a fraction of the picture, and ultimately this line has allowed men to creatively use proletarian feminist language to normalize their domination. I coined the now popular slogan “proletarian feminism is the weapon” during my time with this wannabe party and I would like to say once and for all that I consider the term, in amerikkka at least, completely co-opted by pigs and their apologists and politically worthless.
What those sycophants representing Marxism-Leninism-Maoism (which is definitely the highest stage of men’s revolutionary thought) in the first world fail to realize is that if they had their heads on straight politically, if politics was really in command, then they would have at least developed colonized, gender oppressed leadership in their organizations. Not as token leaders (as the dead-eyed men’s vanguard in Nepal did with Parvati) but as the systematized building of oppressed people’s power. Maoists in amerikkka can’t see this though, because at the end of the day, for all their proclaimed militancy, they’re working from an incorrect class map. There is an unstated assumption amongst Maoist men that classes are evenly divided by gender, but this is not only not true now but never has been. Butch Lee and Red Rover state in their groundbreaking work, Night Vision:
“Our primary question is, who is the modern proletariat and what role does it play as a class? The answer is simple: it is primarily women, children, and alien labor. Those who are colonized. The modern proletariat or industrial working class, which is both among the most oppressed and the most productive class that supports the structure of capitalist society by its labor, is not and has never been gender-neutral or nationally self-contained. No matter how indignantly some men may scream at these words, this is a matter of historical record, of fact.
In its infancy, the first English factory system of the 18th century was like a chain of prison workhouses, whose semi-slave laborers were primarily women and enslaved children. English men, no matter how poor, resisted giving up what independence they had to become ‘like women.’ A class attitude using gender, race, and nation in a way that the dominant values of the British ruling class encouraged. British historian Christopher Hill reminds his reader that being a factory worker was so disrespectable a position back then that it virtually placed her outside society, as an alien, a non-citizen (the word ‘worker’ today is supposed to make us think ‘him,’ the blue collar unionized man in heavy industry, so we misunderstand economics and class).”
Bringing this analysis up from 1993, Bromma says in a 2020 interview:
“But the really key underlying question I’m always trying to clarify is: on a global scale, what is the social base for socialist revolution today? I think that a transformed, modernized proletariat, centered around women, is beginning to take the stage as capitalism’s direct antagonist. This is partly a result of the destruction of traditional rural patriarchy by neoliberal capitalism. Large numbers of women are being pushed and busted out of private family life, and channeled by the tens of millions into very large scale, highly exploitative global industries, including globalized manufacturing, transnational service industries and factory farming. They are crossing borders, meeting lots of other proletarian women, becoming skilled with technology and participating in cosmopolitan world culture. I think we should orient our politics to this reality. Which requires decisively breaking with both worker elite mythology and male leftism.”
To the young men fashioning themselves as revolutionaries these words mean nothing, likely because Chairman Mao or Gonzalo didn’t say them. To them proletarian women and other gender oppressed people belong to their class, that is to say the men of their class (to paraphrase Monique Wittig), when in reality it’s entirely the opposite. The red boys’ club will happily quote their favorite patriarch on the need to unleash women’s fury for revolution (only to inevitably re-leash women again later on) but turn away from any analysis of how class is gendered on a global scale. Like parodies of actual revolutionaries they’ll robotically repeat that “women are not a class,” pointing to the class differences between the masses of settler women and the masses of the oppressed nations. We do not claim such a simplistic view, as any class analysis that puts settler women in with gender oppressed New Afrikans is miles off the mark. What we do claim is that, on a global scale, the proletariat has always been made up primarily of gender oppressed and nationally oppressed people. On top of this we see that gendered oppressions are racialized and vice versa, keeping colonized (primarily Black) men from achieving the status of “true men” and relegating colonized women (also primarily Black) to neither man nor woman in the eyes of the settler colony. As such gender oppressed people do not “belong” to the proletariat, but the proletariat belongs to gender oppressed people in a very literal sense, as they make up the vast majority of the proletariat and other oppressed classes. It is the relatively few proletarian men who will have to follow along, have to see their interests as inseparable from those of the gender oppressed proletariat, not the other way around. Maoist men ignore this, contenting themselves with building a strawman and tearing it down in one line so as to maintain settler and neocolonial domination of their patriarchal vanguard.
As an organization we accepted the settler-colonial contradiction as primary in amerikkka, putting us miles ahead of the most dogmatic US Maoists and miles behind anyone in revolutionary nationalist circles when J. Sakai’s Settlers was published in 1984. We failed to put any of the lessons from Settlers into practice and never even considered the theoretical line that Settlers inspired that has been further developed by authors like Butch Lee, Bromma, Sanyika Shakur, and numerous others. We did not consider the way that the settler-colonial contradiction is a gendered contradiction, and we frequently relegated patriarchy to the ignorable status of “secondary contradiction.” Aside from one collective in Portland who founded a short-lived revolutionary women’s group, there was no national effort to organize gender oppressed and colonized people at all. Instead, our Neocolonial Feminist leaders insisted that imperialism was in crisis, and tacitly claimed that a politics that acknowledged national and gendered contradictions but did not act against them could replace actually organizing the most oppressed in favor of organizing settler men.
Even when the organization did give mind to organizing women, the women to be organized were assumed to be white and cis, even when so many of us were trans women. No analysis of transmisogyny or misogynoir was synthesized or even worked on, despite many of our assertions that trans women were among the most oppressed within their specific nations and that New Afrikan trans women were the most oppressed of all. One man suggested that the org contain a “proletarian feminist” committee and a colonized committee that would then debate and compromise over issues. He was baffled that anyone would suggest that women and other gender oppressed people also have different national and class interests. To this comrade gendered oppression and national oppression were two distinct issues rather than inseparable aspects of one oppressive system. This was simply a more insidious way of looking to the settler nation for political answers, just without saying so. If this is the content of proletarian feminism in amerikkka (and it is) then I’m not surprised that so many of my sisters dropped out unceremoniously, I’m only embarassed it took me so long.
There Is No Gender Neutral Politics
Amongst revolutionary-minded men things like Marxism-Leninism-Maoism don’t represent any one gender. If a sister questions why a supposedly revolutionary movement is named after three men the wannabe patriarchs dressed as revolutionaries will dismiss her as a shallow identitarian (I once published a piece criticizing a misogynistic line in the Gonzaloite wing of amerikkkan Maoism and was lambasted as an “identitarian bitch” by the exact men I was criticizing, a badge I wear with pride). This question is important though and deserves actual attention. You’d be forgiven for thinking that, as communists, we would oppose great man worship and maintain a materialist analysis of individuals. Marx would certainly not be who he was without his wife, Jenny von Westphalen, who aside from discussing his work with him was also the one who pawned the family’s belongings between support checks from Engels. Neither would Lenin, nor the entire Soviet education system, be what they were without Nadezhda Krupskaya, frequently referred to simply as “Lenin’s widow.” Augusta La Torre, more commonly known as Comrade Norah and better known as Chairman Gonzalo’s first wife, is known for being the one who pushed Gonzalo out of the armchair and into the people’s war. She’s also credited with pushing for the involvement of women in the Peruvian revolution, and it was women guerrillas who took Sendero Luminoso nearly to the seat of power. But she hanged herself under mysterious circumstances in 1988, so she doesn’t get a thought named after her.
So why do the local Maoists insist on naming their thought after the Great Men in these historic movements? If we’re honest with ourselves, like really, brutally honest, we’ll find that it’s because these movements wound up serving neocolonial men as a gender-class. Alexandra Kollantai was one of the brightest and most clear-eyed Bolsheviks of her day, and she’s often acknowledged as such, but all her intellect and revolutionary experience was eventually brought to heel by Stalin’s patriarchal order and she was forced to give up her views on women’s liberation, going from anti-marriage revolutionary to repeating the misogynistic party line that proletarian women’s role was to support her proletarian husband (I can’t tell you how many misogynistic leaders have shut me down for noting that Stalin regularly preyed on women and girls many years his junior). Women’s advances in China were the first to be reversed by the counter-revolutionaries after 1976, but why were they so fragile to begin with? Because the Chinese revolution, like the Russian revolution before it and subsequent Marxist-Leninist (Men’s) revolutions, maintained a bourgeois feminist line of simple gender “equality” (despite denouncing all feminism as bourgeois, how’s that for irony). They didn’t pick up a true revolutionary feminist line that, as Butch Lee put it, demands the overthrow of capitalist property relations and its attendant sexist, racist, and colonialist oppressions. Communist men, mostly settlers and neocolonial tokens as they are, can’t get anywhere close to that line because to do so would mean abandoning their class power, committing class suicide as revs used to say.
The barbed, poisonous point in all this is that there is no gender-neutral politics. Just as politics serve specific nation-classes they also serve specific gendered classes. Marx, Lenin and Mao etc were all impressive thinkers to be sure, and there’s much we as revolutionary feminists can take from their work and experience, but we cannot ignore that their politics have, with two important exceptions in India and the Philippines, ended in shipwreck after shipwreck (the Indian and Filipino communists are more and more dominated by women and will have to contend with the history of betrayal of communist women by communist men). There’s no shame in this and the revs who fought and died in those revolutions weren’t wrong, as Butch Lee would say, but we would be wrong to try to follow their paths without avoiding the rocks where they met their end. As women we can’t afford to keep fighting and dying for men’s parties and revolutions and nations. We know how it ends: with women disarmed and crushed again under the boot heels of the men we fought and died to lift into power.
Anarchists too refuse to shirk their patriarchal origins in Bakunin and Proudhon. Let’s take an example from recent history. Anarchists were broadly involved in the 2020 uprising, and in majority white cities represented the most militant edge of the uprising (nationally the bleeding edge of the uprising was Black proletarian youth). That’s all well and good, but we’re interested in what happened after the uprising. Anarchists and other radicals were inundated with fresh blood, people who were radicalized by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor who were looking for something, anything they could do to help. The anarchists, the most visible revs around, as well as us Maoists so desperate for relevance, pushed them into so-called mutual aid work, and thus radical charity flourished.
Little attention was paid to the class background of the new recruits, even less was paid to their political development. Petty bourgeois settlers were tossed into collectives alongside lumpen/proletarians of the oppressed nations. No emphasis was placed on political education, no attention was paid to the positions of people of different genders and nations, no discussion of class suicide was had at all. On top of this, the anarcho collectives were frequently dominated by men, but the actual mutual aid workers who were doing the cooking and distribution were predominately women and other gender oppressed people. This too was ignored, prompting one such woman to tell a sister-comrade of mine that the collective they were cooking for was “proof that anarchy doesn’t work.” No influence was taken from important but defeated anarcha-feminist groups through history and nothing was learned. So on the Left women and other gender oppressed people really are rootless, to repurpose that old term that the Soviets used to mean “traitor” and “Jew.”
This is not as simple as picking up the empty weapon of lesbian separatism or second wave feminism. Though those movements began as movements for women’s liberation, they too turned into their opposite and served the interests of settler men (just as their heirs in amerikkka today, AF3IRM, have used the fight against the sex industry and the language of proletarian feminism to increase the Hawaiian police budget). Things were never as simple as “men bad women good,” and we can find women — settler women especially — crawling all over the amerikkkan genocide machine. This is why we distinguish between new classes of neocolonial men and queer men of the oppressed nations who do experience gendered oppression. The big thing we missed entirely in our little party building attempt is that settler-colonialism and patriarchy are not and have never been separate contradictions. The entire patriarchal gender system was imported with euro-settlers. Settler women, as such, are more like settler men than we are like New Afrikan or Indigenous women, women who have kept genocide at bay for generations. We’re nothing like those women, not right now anyway. Women’s liberation could have split settler women from settler men, could have transformed us through protracted armed struggle against our bourgeois nation, but instead our foremothers bought into the lie of their own innocence and demanded a seat at the table of genocide, becoming even more just-like-settler-men than we were before.
In this new period where revolutionary sentiment is sparking up all over again (led now by New Afrikan trans women) we must be wary of those who would have us repeat the mistakes women made 50 years ago. The answer isn’t in any of neocolonial men’s old decayed movements and organizations, however new they may seem. We settler women have to commit to the long and difficult process of building our own politics, a women-centered politics, that fractures the settler nation through armed struggle and a new revolutionary outlaw culture.
Gender Outlaws in the Wilderness
If settler women and gender outlaws were set loose of patriarchal and capitalist restrictions today we’d just rebuild them again. They’re all we know, all we’ve known since our independent peasant leaders were crushed during the centuries long euro witch hunt. No, we have to actively overthrow them through protracted, revolutionary armed struggle, our 40 years in the wilderness. In the old bible story when Moses and the Hebrews came to the promised land and found it full of giants, many of the former slaves panicked and wanted to return to Egypt, return to bondage. As such Moses proclaimed that they were not fit to enter the promised land and must spend 40 years in the wilderness becoming a new people. Same with us. If we don’t want to reproduce settler-colonial patriarchy then we have to break with settler men and build our own culture and political-military theory.
But what about taking leadership from colonized comrades, I hear some of my sister-comrades saying. I was in this boat as well until recently, it’s why I became a Maoist in the first place and it’s an understandable place to be, but as Tani and Sera say in False Nationalism, False Internationalism, we cannot hitch a ride on Black liberation. Referring to the Revolutionary Armed Task Force and the May 19th Communist Organization they specifically say:
“The grassroots of the New Afrikan Nation has never asked for and has never supported these alliances of New Afrikan men and settler women. No matter how well-intentioned, such distorted alliances have both sexist and neo-colonial aspects. The May 19th Communist Organization, which was primarily women, recreated the customary male-dominated movement only with New Afrikan Men instead of white men. There was a pattern of such alliances in the 1960s and 1970s, in many solidarity committees and anti-imperialist groups, as radical white women broke with white men but not with patriarchal ways of seeing the world.”
It’s not on the New Afrikan or Indigenous or any other nations to hold our hands through our revolutionary development, and revs of the oppressed nations have been telling us to organize our own people for decades. We must build our own political-military leadership and wage war against our own nation. We have a responsibility to ourselves and to everyone subjugated and genocided by our nation to leave the table and build our own women’s theory, women’s culture, and women’s army. We must build a revolutionary autonomous feminism, autonomous in the literal sense of autonomy from settler men and their politics, not in the 70s Autonomist sense, and we must do it without hesitation or fear of mistakes (mistakes are, after all, how we learn).
The old political modes are dead and it seems like everyone has moved on except us. Neocolonialism and modern revisionism have hollowed them out and left them by the side of the road. We can’t keep trying to pick them up and insist that this time we’ll use them correctly. The problem wasn’t that last generation’s revolutionary men did it wrong; the problem is that when crisis time came those theories could only serve new classes of men. Consider revolutionary Vietnam, that brave nation who defeated both French and amerikkkan imperialism by mobilizing the entire country, women and men, against them. What happened when the war ended though? Vietnamese women were told to return home, go back to their old lives where their revolutionary leaders said they belonged. This isn’t simply because those revolutionary men didn’t have the right politics, and gender outlaws cannot wait idly for men with the right politics to come along. Everyone from New Afrikan revolutionary nationalists and Black anarchists to gender oppressed Mayan revs in Chiapas to Dalit women in Chhattisgarh is adapting to the new neocolonial world (which has been “new” for over 35 years), it’s time for us to finally catch up.
We have to start by going to the lowest and deepest members of our diseased nation, to the ones with the least to lose by splitting away. This means lumpen/proletarian trans women and other transmisogyny affected people. The US is ramping up its attempts to systematically annihilate trans women, with Texas as a testing ground for this neocolonial genocide. We as settler trans women have a historic obligation to begin the process of breaking the settler nation apart. No more debating our status as oppressed women with those who want us dead, we need to find each other and begin building a new revolutionary outlaw culture, begin waging war on settler-colonial patriarchy and all its attendant evils. Our existence proves once and for all that gender isn’t about biology but about class, is class in drag as Night Vision says.
As trans women we know deep in our guts that settler-colonial patriarchy is poison to us. Many of us deny it, push the feeling down, worm our way into little niches in white world, but instinctively we know they’re coming for us eventually, we can see it in the dead eyes of our sellout sisters. Even still we’re caught up in it. Black genocide’s most pointed and obvious form is the near-constant murder of New Afrikan trans women. It’s so obvious that even settler news needs to report on it. We settler trans women get killed too, of course, but dialectically we are also responsible for the deaths of our New Afrikan sisters. Until we break from settler-colonial patriarchy that’s on us as much as it is the famous transmisogynist author or homophobe down the street. Our culture is built on it, is a form of genocide culture, and we badly need to detox.
There are landmines to avoid here. Historically in amerikkka white revs working on their own or in neocolonial formations have allowed their lines to degenerate into settler opportunism. In order to prevent this two things must be done. First we cannot claim that our specific fight is the universal fight for liberation. Rather we are one small but important aspect of the coming revolution. Second we must avoid the hoarding of resources beyond those necessary for our organizational reproduction. To do so would simply reproduce settler parasitism within the revolutionary movement. If the pinnacle of white third worldist praxis during the last revolutionary wave was the Danish Blekingegade Group, that group of communists who for years anonymously expropriated banks and armories and sent the money and weapons to third world revs (primarily the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine) then our praxis must necessarily contain a fourth worldist element (the fourth world referring to migrants and internal colonies in amerikkka). This is to say that the bulk of the resources we acquire in hypothetical future expropriations must be funneled to New Afrikan and Indigenous trans women and their revolutionary formations. In this way we connect two struggles while remaining autonomous and without recreating settler parasitism.
If it feels like I’m hammering the military point home especially hard it’s because I am. Frequently revolutionary women’s observations are used but our praxis and military theory is ignored. Whether it’s Monique Wittig, Butch Lee, Silvia Federici or Bo Brown, men will happily either ignore our contributions or try to jam them into their narrow patriarchal frameworks. Our material reality doesn’t conform to their old theories, and those theories certainly aren’t doing anything for us. It’s still taboo to talk about women’s war, but every woman followed home by a strange man or abusive ex, every trans child under investigation in Texas, every houseless sister hiding out in a shelter has keenly felt the need for a women’s army. Armies aren’t built by words alone, but the harder we hit this point the more seriously women looking for political answers will take it, and until we take it seriously we remain tools of settler amerikkka and its genocidal men.
“Socialism or barbarism” was an apt call in 1919, but we’ve been enduring barbarism for a generation now. Now the call must be autonomy or death, communism or extinction, and settler and neocolonial men can only give us the latter.
Towards 40 years in the wilderness.
-Val Travesti
Postscript
I began writing this before learning of Butch Lee’s passing near the end of 2021. What began as an attempt to write out my feelings of disillusionment with amerikkkan maoism now reads more like a eulogy for her via her work. Her influence is all over this piece, unhidden and completely obvious. I never got the opportunity to meet or correspond with Butch, but I hope my sister-comrades and I do her justice in our work and struggle going forward. Her preferred slogan, “which will you be, hammer or anvil” is still an important guidepost for aspiring Amazons and I’m certain that her work will continue to help light the way forward for us. Rest easy, Butch, thanks for everything.