Until the appearance of her new poem “Weather” on the first page of the June 15^th New York Times Book Review, Claudia Rankine had not been particularly prominent on the many reading lists about antiracism that surfaced in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Nonetheless, despite being published six years ago, Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric may be the book most representative of the current moment in terms of its possibilities and limitations. Indeed, Rankine’s insistence on the perduring nature of racial injury and her embrace of a politics that is at best what Cedric Johnson has called “a militant expression of racial liberalism” may qualify her as poet laureate of antiracism.2 National Book Award finalist, Citizen appeared in the year following the acquittal of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin, which was also the event that precipitated the founding of #BlackLivesMatter. Although the poem and the organization emerged independently of one another, BLM couldn’t have found a more apt literary avatar than Citizen had they contrived to design one on an app. A mélange of personal vignettes, reproductions of images and photographs, observations on Serena Williams’s career-long battle against racist officials and competitors in professional tennis, and most poignantly, tributes to black victims of police and vigilante violence, Citizen lends poetic form to the rhetorical politics of Black Lives Matter (and the allied #SayHerName campaign, which emerged after the death of Sandra Bland) in which intoning the names of an ever-growing list of the victims and of instances of violence produces an expression that seems at once intensely personal and immediately collective.

Central to Citizen’s genius is the way it harnesses the rhetorical power of iteration, particularly in the context of memorialization. In some ways, the poem brings to mind Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, whose glossy black walls cleanly etched with the names of the more than 58,000 Americans killed or missing in action from that war express Lin’s hope that “These names, seemingly infinite in number… [could] convey the sense of overwhelming numbers, while unifying these individuals as a whole.”3 Faced with memorializing a controversial war, Lin sought to make a work that could affect any viewer regardless of their opinion of the war. Although her design was initially met with significant objection from some veterans, it has largely succeeded in displacing the problem of the war’s meaning with individual feelings of personal connection to the dead—in Lin’s words, “creating a private conversation with each person, no matter how public each work is and no matter how many people are present.”4 But where Lin’s recitation of names intended to evacuate the political from the personal, Rankine’s poem operates through insisting on the identity of the two.

What is also crucial to the book’s use of iteration is its recognition of the way that the milieu of social media and 24-hour television—the world of tweeting/retweeting, posting/reposting, tagging, texting, and sharing—has become implicated in the aesthetics of memorialization, creating a sensation of living repeatedly through incidents, seemingly infinite in number, constituting a barrage that can leave one at once depleted and on the verge of striking out. Beginning with what its narrator assumes is a familiar sense of enervation, “When you are alone and too tired even to turn on any of your devices, you let yourself linger in a past stacked among your pillows,” the poem nonetheless finds itself drawn repeatedly, incessantly, to mediated—whether through television or radio—moments of outrage that carry the force of immediate affronts.5 Woven into these mediated encounters are relatively brief narrated moments of “everyday” racism—a comment from a colleague about affirmative action or a moment when the speaker’s first visit with her therapist provokes what is now described as a “Karen” incident, a histrionic reaction by a white woman to an unexpected or unwanted encounter with a black individual—that themselves have the quality of the kind of vignette made for retweeting, sharing, or reposting.

The success of, and possibly the ceiling for, this politics and aesthetics of iteration—the recitation of names and moments—can be gauged, as Cedric Johnson has noted, by the astonishing rapidity with which BlackLivesMatter has gone from being a provocation to a slogan embraced by different class layers, emanating as “facile expressions of unity in endless memes and viral videos of police-civilian line dances conceal substantive political differences among protestors and within broader U.S. publics.”6 And while any one of these instances of iteration might serve to exemplify this dynamic, perhaps the most emblematic occurred on June 2 when none other than U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, came perhaps as close as he ever has been to eloquence in addressing the murder of George Floyd on the Senate Floor. McConnell intoned:

This is an hour of great pain and unrest in our country. Americans from coast to coast have been grieved and horrified by the killings of African American citizens: Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia, Breonna Taylor in my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, and George Floyd in Minneapolis. In each disturbing situation, investigations and reviews are ongoing…We need the truth, and we need swift justice under law.

But here’s something that requires no investigation: In no world whatsoever should arresting a man for an alleged minor infraction involve a police officer putting his knee on the man’s neck for nine minutes while he cries out “I can’t breathe” and then goes silent. To me, to a great many of my fellow Kentuckians, and to millions of outraged Americans, these disturbing events do not look like isolated incidents. They look more like the latest chapter in our national struggle to make equal rights and equal justice under the law into facts of life for all Americans rather than contingencies that sometimes depend on the color of one’s skin. Obviously, this struggle remains incomplete. Our nation cannot deafen itself to the anger, the pain, or the frustration of black Americans. Our nation needs to hear this.7

McConnell, of course, went on to flash his credentials as a longtime supporter of Civil Rights, despite his recent role as the point of the spear for a rightwing assault on the U.S. federal courts and then to condemn the looting that occurred in some cities where protests were staged, calling upon state and local authorities,and ultimately the federal government, “to crack down on outside agitators and domestic terrorists,” making it apparent that he was equally, if not more, disturbed by the looting that ensued after the police murders than he was with the event that precipitated this recent crisis. But the fact that McConnell could run the BLM/Say Her Name playbook—calling the victims by their names, repeating Floyd’s desperate words before he lost consciousness, making apparent the role of racism in these deaths, insisting that these events were a part of long, unfinished story, and acknowledging the imperative of listening to the pain of black Americans—without first being blinded on the road to Damascus is an important part of this story.

The politics of BLM is a politics of expression, premised on a contention that the refusal to name the names of the victims and to say “Black Lives Matter,” is both symptomatic and causal. “Silence = Violence” (or as Rankine notes in “Weather,” “white silence equals violence”) is a common subtitle on the “Black Lives Matter” signs that now dot lawns and windows across the country. From this standpoint, the refusal to acknowledge the individuality of the victims of police violence and the failure to speak out betoken an indifference towards these killings that constitutes an act or posture of complicity.  And while every activist associated with this movement will insist that the words need to entail a commitment to act, the fact that McConnell and a host of major retailers (as I began writing this I received in my inbox an email from the CEO of a public relations consulting firm with the subject line, “One White Woman’s Lamentations,” the second paragraph of which consists solely of the sentence, “Black Lives Matter”) have said the words and committed to a variety of actions cannot, a priori, be dismissed as mere lip service. They are, in some fundamental way, unfolding the logic of BLM. Saying certain words and repeating phrases and slogans cannot be a matter of indifference.

In admonishing his audience to listen to the anger, pain, and frustration of black Americans, McConnell, whether wittingly or unwittingly, identified a distinctive feature of the politics and poetics of BLM, namely its hyperattention to bodily response—not merely the pain felt by George Floyd as Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck, but the pain felt by those who saw and continue to see the incident on one of their devices, and more specifically, the pain engendered by a felt, embodied knowledge that one’s ancestors and those perceived to be like oneself were either subjected to, or are statistically more likely to be subjected to, like treatment. This notion of historical and statistical embodiment is vividly displayed in Rankine’s Citizen, as the narrator recounts separate instances of watching Serena Williams at the U.S. Open, the 2004 semifinal against Jennifer Capriati, and the 2009 semifinal against Kim Clijsters. In the former, Williams was subjected to a series of bad calls by the chair umpire Mariana Alves so egregious that John McEnroe “‘was shocked that Serena was able to hold it together after losing the match’” (27). Serena did express her outrage after losing to Capriati, saying, as the poem recounts, “‘I’m very angry and bitter right now. I felt cheated. Shall I go on? I just feel robbed’” (27).

But the point of the first instance is that Serena does, “hold it together,” her relative poise leading the narrator to remark, “And though you felt outrage for Serena after that 2004 US Open, as the years go by, she seems to put Alves, and a lengthening list of other curious calls and oversights, against both her and her sister, behind her as they happen” (28). It takes the second match, the 2009 semifinal against Clijsters, when a rare foot fault is called against Williams, for Rankine to drive the key point home. This time, in reaction to the lineswoman’s call, which was at best overzealous and more likely wrong, Williams explodes, shouting at the lineswoman, “I swear to God I’m fucking going to take this fucking ball and shove it down your fucking throat, you hear that? I swear to God!” (29). For Citizen’s speaker, Williams’s outburst is almost cathartic. She remarks, “It is difficult not to applaud her for reacting immediately to being thrown against a sharp background. It is difficult not to applaud her for existing in the moment, for fighting crazily against the so-called wrongness of her body’s positioning at the service line” (29).

The poem doesn’t read the outburst simply as an instance of Serena being fed up with the unfair treatment she’s received over the years and finally deciding that enough is enough—a common human experience for which “the straw that broke the camel’s back” has become a stock phrase. Rather, Citizen seeks to make the point that Williams’s body itself has become the repository of not only the incidents that have happened to her, but the injustices visited upon black people for centuries. As the poem unfolds further, Williams’s body—and by extension all black bodies—become the bearer of experiences that set black people apart from their fellow citizens. The poem’s speaker asserts:

Yes, and the body has memory. The physical carriage hauls more than its weight. The body is the threshold across which each objectionable call passes into consciousness—all the unintimidated, unblinking and unflappable resilience does not erase the moments lived through, even as we are eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic, so ready to be inside, among, a part of the games. (28)

In any case, it is difficult not to think that if Serena lost context by abandoning all rules of civility, it could be because her body, trapped in a racial imaginary, trapped in disbelief—code for being black in America—is being governed not by the tennis match she is participating in but by a collapsed relationship that had promised to play by the rules. Perhaps this is how racism feels no matter the context—randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you, and to call this out by calling out “I swear to God!” is to be called insane, crass, crazy. Bad sportsmanship. (30)

To be black, according to the logic of the poem is to exist within a body “governed” by those “lived through” moments of capriciousness in which others’ perception of one’s body as black dissolves into one’s own experiencing of oneself as black. The lesson to be learned from Williams’s ordeal is that to “understand” what has happened to her “is to see Serena as hemmed in as any other black body thrown against our American background” (32).

Although the purported target of concern is the treatment of “any” black person and the fact that events like this happen all the time to people whose mistreatment never comes to our attention, the paradigmatic quality of Williams’s experience depends on the contrast between the outsized nature of her achievement and the contempt for her person conveyed by the slights against her. Arguably the best athlete in the world over the last decade, Williams’s treatment at the hands of these court officials demonstrates that “[n]either her father nor her mother nor her sister nor Jehovah her God nor NIKE camp could shield her ultimately from people who felt her black body didn’t belong on their court, in their world” (26). In order to make its point that it is the “black body” that matters, Citizen must highlight the dangers to and the indignities visited upon high-achieving black Americans. In an interview with Lauren Berlant in Bomb Rankine described her

conscious decision to inhabit my own subjectivity in this book in the sense that the middle-class life I live, with my highly educated, professional, and privileged friends, remains as the backdrop for whatever is being foregrounded. Everyone is having a good time together—doing what they do, buying what they can afford, going where they go—until they are not.8

In order to show that race—which is to say, the confrontation with blackness—and not something else prompts the interaction, the poem’s early scenes happen within the domain of the professional managerial class. The salience of the assault, whether psychic or physical, depends on a prior sense of wellbeing among those who are reasonably well off. Rankine also notes that this sense of wellbeing is illusory—the “eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic” outlook of highly successful black people who continue to play the game” (28). These assaults are not merely inconveniences but potentially life and death matters. The members of this class suffer from what has been called “John Henryism,” defined as a malady specific to those “people exposed to stresses stemming from racism. They achieve themselves to death trying to dodge the buildup of erasure” (11). The body, however, knows what the mind tries to hide from itself. As the narrator observes later, “You can’t put the past behind you. It’s buried in you; it’s turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you” (63).

So that while John McEnroe, as we have seen, feels outrage on Serena’s behalf and even expresses surprise at the restraint of her response during the Capriati semifinal, his feelings and those of the poem’s speaker are not the same because his body cannot remember—has not become the repository of—historical outrage. Indeed, the riots that follow the Rodney King verdict and the murder of Trayvon Martin lead the narrator to contemplate how “the years of passage, plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation, of poverty, inner cities, profiling, of one in three, two jobs, boy, hey boy, each a felony, accumulate into the hours inside our lives” (89). The effect of this accumulation leads the speaker to wonder ambiguously, “How difficult is it for one body to feel the injustice wheeled at another?” (116).

At least two beliefs that were once staples of racist thinking have now become rallying cries of antiracism. The first is that centuries of living under and through adverse conditions have set black people somatically and psychically apart from their fellow citizens. The second, to quote from Madison Grant’s racist 1916 The Passing of the Great Race is that “race lies to-day at the base of all the phenomena of modern society, just as it has done throughout the unrecorded eons of the past and the laws of nature operate with the same relentless and unchanging force in human affairs as in the phenomena of inanimate nature.”9 Frank Wilderson, the scholar most prominently affiliated with the idea of Afro-Pessimism asserts that this doctrine “is premised on an iconoclastic claim: that Blackness is coterminous with Slaveness.” He elaborates:

Blackness is social death, which is to say that there was never a prior meta-moment of plenitude, never a moment of equilibrium, never a moment of social life. Blackness, as a paradigmatic position (rather than as an ensemble of identities, cultural practices, or anthropological accoutrement), cannot be disimbricated from slavery. The narrative arc of the slave who is Black (unlike Orlando Patterson’s generic slave who may be of any race) is not an arc at all, but a flat line, what Hortense Spillers (2003) calls “historical stillness”: a flat line that “moves” from disequilibrium to a moment in the narrative of faux equilibrium, to disequilibrium restored and/or rearticulated. To put it differently, the violence which both elaborates and saturates Black “life” is totalizing, so much so as to make narrative inaccessible to Blacks.10

Combining the ideas of separateness and historical persistence, Wilderson and his epigones, some of whom don’t fully share in his pessimism, nonetheless insist that the first step in understanding social reality is to acknowledge the singularity of the condition of black Americans.

These scholars derive a variety of implications from this acknowledgement. Yet one stipulation holds constant across these formulations: Black people, regardless of their social positioning, face an existential threat not present for other people, and that all forms of social and economic organization—liberal or neoliberal capitalism, socialism, or Marxism–that do not stipulate this distinction will be insufficient to the task of bringing about justice for black people. By invoking “blackness” as a condition or a modifier, critics, commenters, activists, and scholars invest the people designated by the term with an existential radicality—they exist outside of, against, in excess of, fugitives from any norms that typically structure social and political life. More importantly, unlike the disparitarian discourses of liberal and neoliberal antiracism, which at least concern themselves with redressing those material inequalities produced by discrimination, the existential radicality of Afro-Pessimism actually turns out to be dismissive of the efficacy of ending any form of economic inequality. The prevailing conviction of Wilderson and company is that the commitment to antiblackness is fundamental and impervious to amelioration or erosion by conditions of material equality. Hence, as the key moments in Rankine’s poems reveal,  the incidents that matter most in their considerations are those that manifest intraclass difference between blacks and those of other races who hold the same jobs, earn roughly the same salaries, live in the same neighborhoods, and send their children to the same schools. To the extent that these individuals can feel that their victimization serves no purpose other than to express or enforce antiblackness they can present themselves as the paradigmatic figures of an abiding blackness. As a consequence even the most well-heeled black individual can, in an instant, be transformed into a voice of radical dissent. Bertolt Brecht once quipped, “The idea of race is a petty bourgeois’s way of trying to become an aristocrat. At a stroke he acquires a set of ancestors and has something to look back—and down—upon.” Brecht’s adage still holds, but for the current moment we might also add the following paraphrase: “The idea of Blackness is a petty bourgeois’s way of trying to become an activist. At a stroke they acquire a radical tradition and the posture of speaking truth to the very power they themselves exercise.”

Blackness, then, is a claim of exceptionalism masquerading as radicalism. This exceptionalism is derivative of a belief that the U.S. and the West, even without recourse to discredited theories of social Darwinism, have fully realized Madison Grant’s dream of making race the prime mover of history and social reality such that white supremacy has become the hooded ghost in every imaginable social machine. Ostensibly indicating a concern with those most victimized, those whose voices and needs have been ignored, “Blackness” substitutes claims of shared experience for structures and practices of democratic governance and accountability. Personal feelings confer authority on anyone who can attest to certain experiences to speak on behalf of a collectivity presumed to feel exactly the same way. And those who speak the loudest are those for whom commentary on matters of race is a part of their job description.

—Martin Luther King, Jr.

Demands to defund, dismantle, or even abolish police departments have leapt from the bullhorns of protesters, to the pages of the New York Times and even into the policy platforms of national Democratic Party figures. The demand, and the protest activity behind it, are informed by an assumption that the use of deadly force by the police is a fundamental and foundational part of policing. In this view, reforming the police is impossible. The only way to reduce the use of lethal force, argues Mariame Kaba, is to reduce policing itself: she advocates cutting the number of police officers in half nationwide.1

Much of the popular narrative also assumes that the primary cause of police violence is simple and readily apparent: racism. It is true that black Americans are far more likely to be shot and killed by the police than white Americans. And it is true that racial prejudice held by police officers plays a role. Yet to address the problem of police violence, we need to understand the scope, magnitude, and patterns of the problem. This requires a much wider lens than the focus on racism allows.

I fear many are getting the conversation around policing entirely wrong. And if mistaken analysis leads to bad policy, the results could be fatal. Starting with the proposition that that racism is intrinsic to policing, it may seem intuitive that reducing the footprint of the police would reduce the prevalence of police brutality – and especially the use of lethal force. Less cops, less cop violence. Yet a sober look at the evidence suggests otherwise. To get the politics of policing right we need to understand what drives the problem of police lethality in the first place.

The Police Kill the Poor

The racial disparities in police killings are almost always the first statistics marshalled in defense of calls to abolish, dismantle or defund the police. But the focus on racial disparities can confuse as much as it clarifies. Consider the oft quoted statistic that black Americans make up 24% of the victims of police killings despite only accounting for 13% of the population.2 Without context, this suggests that black Americans are indiscriminately murdered by the police, regardless of where they fall on the ladder of economic inequality or even where they live.

Jeff Bezos recently quipped: “I have a 20-year-old son, and I simply don’t worry that he might be choked to death while being detained one day. […] Black parents can’t say the same.” Are we to believe that the reason the Bezos children are not likely to be killed by the police is because they were born white, or might being the children of the world’s wealthiest man have something to do with it? Merck CEO Kenneth Frazier has declared that George Floyd “could have been me,” but do we really think that black multimillionaires are more likely to be murdered by the police than poor whites?3 In truth, this corporate brand of anti-racism—now present in the statements of major multinational companies, featured on the splash pages of all major streaming services, and prominent in most national papers—has sought to make invisible the most significant features of American society linked to police violence: inequality and austerity.

Though we don’t have comparable statistics at the individual level, there is much evidence to suggest a startling disparity in the pattern of police violence by class. According to one analysis, a person in the poorest quintile of census tracts is 3.5 times more likely to be killed by the police than a person in the wealthiest quintile. Of all the police killings in the United States about 60% take place in census tracts falling in the two quintiles with the highest levels of poverty – despite these tracts accounting for only 39% of the population. A full 35% of all police killings occurred in the census tract quintile with the highest concentration of poverty.4

And because this data is based on the place of killing, rather than the identity or residence of the victim, these numbers are very likely underselling the degree to which the poor suffer from police brutality. For instance, it is almost certainly true that many of the individuals killed by the police in relatively wealthy census tracts were themselves poor. Consider that in the real-world, patrolling relatively wealthy neighborhoods, like Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn, consists of haranguing any ‘trespassers’ from neighboring high-poverty areas like Red Hook.

The truth is police lethality is a problem almost exclusively experienced by the poor. And when we limit our analysis to this population alone we see that racial disparities in police killings are greatly diminished.5 In one study, Roland Fryer Jr. found that (despite robust evidence for racial discrimination, and startling disparities in the frequency and use of force) there was no statistically significant racial disparity in the use of lethal force.6 A 2019 study provided further confirmation, finding “no overall evidence of anti-Black or anti-Hispanic disparities in fatal shootings.” 7

Of course, a lack of racial disparities does not mean a lack of racism, it could be the case that the use of lethal force for one group is driven by prejudice, while for others it is driven by different factors. But then, the inverse is also true: the presence of a racial disparity does not mean that racism is the cause. In reality poverty is driving much more of the story than CEOs like Bezos and Frazier would like to admit. While it no longer surprises people to learn that black Americans are 24% of the total victims of police murder, it might surprise many that they also make up 23% of the total population living under the poverty line in this country. And while white Americans make up around 41% of the poor, they actually account for 46% of the victims of police killings. The takeaway here is that the racial breakdown of those killed by the police almost exactly matches the racial demography of the poor.

None of these facts excuse the problem of racism in American police departments. Yet racial prejudice cannot explain why white Americans are so much more likely to be killed by the police than Europeans of any race. Nor can racism effectively explain why police lethality is greatest in the states with the smallest black populations.8 Solving the problem of violent policing in America requires recognizing these complex dynamics and tailoring solutions that address the political and economic foundations which gave rise to it in the first place. Yet no such approach is apparent in the contemporary calls to abolish, dismantle, or defund the police. In fact, the evidence suggests that “defunding” police departments and cutting the number of officers is among the worst solutions, indeed it may even exacerbate brutality.

Budgetary Brutality

A comparison between Philadelphia and Phoenix might help illustrate the complexity of American police violence. The two cities are roughly the same size and capture roughly the same level of GDP, but this is where the similarities end. Philadelphia is about 44% black, whereas Phoenix is only 7% black. The City of Brotherly Love is among the poorest cities in the country, with nearly 26% of the population living in poverty; while Phoenix is also very poor, only 18% of its residents suffer under the crush of want. Notably, Philadelphia has about 42 police officers per 10,000 residents, compared to 17 per 10,000 in Phoenix.

Given the prevailing narratives, we should expect that Philly would be a hotbed of police lethality: after all, it’s a poor black city with lots of cops and an allegedly bloated police budget. But the truth is that in Phoenix, an average of 11.0 people are killed by police each year, while in Philadelphia that number is just 3.1. Phoenix, then, with less than half the number of police officers as Philadelphia, has 3.5 times the rate of police killings.9

Once you start to look, such apparently surprising results become visible all over the map. Montana is a very rural and overwhelmingly white state, with a relatively small police presence—just 17 police officers per 10,000 residents—but it is rife with police violence. Montanans are 1.4 times more likely to be killed by the police than Georgians, a state whose population is 30% black, and which employs 27 police officers per 10,000 residents.

Similarly, West Virginia, another lily-white state with relatively few police officers (just 14.9 per 10,000 residents), has a major problem with police killings. Its average rate is over 2.5 times as high as its more diverse and wealthier neighbor, Virginia, which employs 21.5 officers per 10,000 residents.10

These comparisons are not outliers: if we go down the list of cities and states that top the charts in police violence, we see a striking pattern: fewer officers often correlates with greater police lethality. If the examples here are any indication, cutting the number of police officers in half nationwide could result in a three-fold increase in police killings in some areas.

Police lethality also happens to be concentrated in states with lax gun laws; among populations with easy access to cheap weapons. Western and Mountain region states have nearly triple the rate of police murders compared to Northeastern states.11 It seems, then, that in areas with easy access to guns, high levels of poverty, and few police, the cops kill more people. This is no less true for mostly white cities like Colorado Springs or Spokane, than it is for majority-minority cities like Los Angeles or Stockton. Further, as police lethality in cities has decreased by an average rate of 5.32% per year over the past six years, just the opposite has happened in rural areas, which have witnessed an increase in incidences of police lethality by a nearly identical average rate of 5.14% per year.

Convincing causal explanations for the patterns and trends described here are available, but they require us to question the analysis and solutions offered by activists. Defunding police budgets, far from a solution, could in fact be one of the major causes of police violence. Cash-strapped departments seem to have both fewer officers overall and more incidences of the use of lethal force. This makes some sense. Firstly, the lack of cash in a given department is usually an expression of the level of poverty in the district they serve and, as we’ve seen, cops tend to shoot, choke, and kill poor people. But a more direct relationship is also evident: municipal austerity affects police behavior. Fewer cops means longer hours and shrinking budgets means lower pay. The result is overworked and underqualified officers.12

Returning to Phoenix, a 2015 study found that when officers were expected to work 13 hour and 20 minute shifts, as opposed to 10 hours, their work performance significantly declined.13 And a similar study in 2018 showed that police fatigue resulted in more citizen complaints about police behavior.14 Everyone acknowledges that medical professionals—nurses, surgeons, and EMT’s—are more likely to make life threatening mistakes when they are overworked, though no one would advocate cutting hospital budgets as a solution to fatigue.

A lack of funds also means lack of training and accountability. Consider the situation in Dolton, Illinois. This small Chicago suburb is home to a particularly violent police force. However, the trouble with reforming the department has been attributed to an inability to spend money on training and hiring qualified officers. Disgraced officers from larger urban districts often find their way to places like Dolton where their formal experience and their willingness to work for less make them attractive recruits. So, in the rare event that officers are disciplined for their behavior, violent cops tend to bounce around underfunded departments. In another Chicagoland example, Robbins, Illinois pays an all part-time force $10.50 an hour—similar wages were found in Ferguson, Missouri’s department in 2015.15 Low wages in policing are hardly a rare occurrence, across the country officers are expected to work for less and do more. It doesn’t take a social scientist to predict what might happen when you combine poverty wages with a job that requires you to carry a gun. In much of America we pay police officers McDonald’s wages to patrol Walmart’s workforce.

Austerity Allocations Aren’t Enough

All of this is to say that we cannot solve the problem of police violence by avoiding the problem of poverty. Yet this is exactly what the “defund” solution threatens to do. In a remarkable twist, liberal militants have embraced austerity as a solution for local government. Slashing police budgets has been so widely accepted on the Left that criticism of it—on welfarist grounds, policy implementation, or simple political commonsense—has been labeled reactionary or racist. The reality, as I have tried to show, is that if defunding the police were to result in fewer beat cops, more poverty wages for officers in already poor districts, less police training and effectively no change in the presence of guns or the rate of poverty, then the defunding “solution”—for all its radical rhetoric—would likely result in more, not fewer, incidences of police lethality. We cannot be afraid to say what is true: defunding the police is wrong because it will result in more people dying.

The response to this charge might be to claim that we could reallocate municipal funds to other social goods and offset the need for policing altogether. Yet slashing police budgets to zero would do almost nothing to stem the tide of municipal bankruptcies and solve the public funding crisis. That’s because, as Adaner Usmani and John Clegg have shown, it’s significantly cheaper to police the problems associated with joblessness and poverty than to solve them.16 Many activists point to what seem like high dollar amounts for police budgets as evidence that money could be better spread around. Instead of demanding that the federal government tax the wealthy and their corporations to fund public goods and eliminate joblessness, activists seem to believe that city governments have no choice but to rob Peter to pay Paul. Though if we took the $150 million Los Angeles recently cut from their police budget and redirected it to housing stipends for the entire poverty population, it would buy everyone no more than a couple weeks’ rent in LA’s cheapest neighborhoods.

Indeed, when looking at any major city budgets the big story is not eye-popping police spending but shockingly low investment across the board. Today, no city can afford to fund public provisions to adequately address the upstream causes of police violence. Therefore, no city can effectively use the public purse to reduce the demand for police in poor, violent neighborhoods. The reallocation argument fails on these terms. And without addressing poverty and unemployment, the human costs of removing the police would be staggering. When Baltimore reformed its department after the death of Freddie Gray, a move that involved removing dozens of officers from their beats and changing methods to avoid police contact with citizens, homicides increased in that city a full 63% in a single year. 93% of the murder victims were black.17

It is no wonder, then, that the demand to defund the police is deeply unpopular, no matter how it is phrased, among black and white voters alike. Truthfully, I can’t think of a better way to repel working people of any race (the very group that liberals and progressives have increasingly struggled to mobilize) than to accept that austerity is permanent and to insist that concerns about crime are inconsequential.

Bayard Rustin once warned about activists’ psychic inability to fend off leftwing slogans which result in rightwing policy. That difficulty persists today. Not only do calls to “defund” fail to address the problems of police violence, racism, public safety or poverty, they also risk missing the clear opportunity to unite a constituency around ending the complementary problems of police brutality, gun violence, municipal austerity, and economic inequality. Each of these problems are widely felt concerns among working people. And advocacy around popular solutions like massive increases in federal social spending on public goods to eliminate unemployment, raising the minimum wage to a living wage, and federal gun reform, would go a long way to reducing police violence.

Slashing budgets has never been a solution fit to rectify the failures of any institution of government. In fact, it’s the exact policy approach, which has failed to provide high-wages and a broad range of public goods from health care to education. And if miserable low-wages and the lack of any stable economic life are a major cause of our uniquely violent police force, then it is necessary to insist that the federal government be held responsible and reverse course. To return to Rustin, when he campaigned for the “Freedom Budget for All Americans”, he was roundly ignored by the youth-dominated activist Left and the new militancy around the rising Black Power movement. Rustin, in warning against the lure of a new ethnic politics, understood that “dignity and self-respect must spring from the economic and social position which you hold in the society and cannot be mythologically and viscerally created […] where the objective situation indeed makes dignity impossible.”

Similarly, black lives can only truly matter in this society when we provide adequate jobs, housing, education, health care and so on, to everyone. If we want to end police violence, we must seek to end the economic violence visited upon nearly all victims of police brutality long before anyone calls 911.

But where do these racial disparities actually take place?

Amidst this moment of reckoning the South, cast as the cradle of racism, seems to come in for special criticism. Antebellum Southern slave patrols are regularly name-checked as an origin of American policing. Confederate monuments are toppling, as they should. NASCAR banned the Confederate flag. A Nation writer decried “stupid” Southerners for flouting social distancing at a bacchanalian redneck vehicle jamboree on the beaches of Galveston, Texas. A Washington Post columnist asked rhetorically if Donald Trump wasn’t actually the last president of the Confederacy. And, let’s admit it, most of the country thinks of the South as profoundly backward.

Given this vibe one might be surprised by the actual regional demographics of police killings. What follows is a very preliminary, incomplete, back-of-the-napkin sketch of data on police killings. My main source on police killings is the Guardian’s Counted Project. Economic and demographic data come from the U.S. Census, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), and the Kaiser Family Foundation. I am rounding numbers with decimals up and down. For a discussion of the sources used see the first two footnotes.2

The South

Let’s start with Tennessee, the state that gave birth to the Ku Klux Klan. It seems reasonable to assume that the cops in Tennessee kill African Americans at a disproportionately high rate.

In 2016, police in Tennessee killed 25 people. Of these, nineteen, or 76 percent of the total, were white. Meanwhile, whites were 78 percent of the state’s total population. Tennessee police killed three black people, which was 12 percent of the total. However, African Americans were 17 percent of the state’s total population.

In other words, African Americans were, relative to their proportion of the state’s total population, actually 29 percent “underrepresented” in the stats on police killings. White people were 2 percent underrepresented in the police homicide stats.

Thus, Tennessee cops actually killed whites at a higher rate than they killed black people even as both whites and blacks were “underrepresented” in the police homicide stats. Latinos and Pacific Islanders each suffered one police homicide, and because they make up small percentages of the state’s population, were “overrepresented” in the police stats.

In Kentucky the cops killed 22 people. Of this total nineteen, or 86 percent, were white. The state’s population, as a whole, was 87 percent white. Two of the Kentuckians killed by cops that year were black, meaning they were 9 percent of the casualties. Meanwhile, African Americans were 8 percent of the state’s total population. One of the victims of Kentucky police homicide was Latino.

This means white people were slightly underrepresented among those killed by police while Latinos and African Americans were overrepresented relative to their proportion of the state’s population. But the black victims of police homicide in Kentucky were 12 percent overrepresented, not 100 percent overrepresented as they are in the national stats.

What about the Deep South where a greater percentage of the population is black? For example, take Mississippi—it doesn’t get any more “Deep South” than Mississippi.

In 2016, cops in Mississippi killed eleven people: six, or 55 percent, of these were white and five, or 45 percent, were black. The state’s population was 59 percent white and 37 percent black. This means Mississippi cops killed black people at a rate 49 percent higher than their prevalence in the state’s total population. Thus, we can say Mississippi displays a racist pattern as regards police killings. But it is only half as racist as the national numbers.

In Louisiana, cops also killed black people at disproportionately higher rates than they kill white people. African Americans were twelve of the 22 people killed by police. They were 32 percent of Louisiana’s population but were 54 percent of those killed by police in 2016. That ratio gets closer, but is not all the way, to the national aggregate numbers.

Florida is also closer to, but not at, the national average. In the Sunshine State African Americans were 16 percent of the population yet constituted 25 percent of those killed by cops in 2016. Cops in Florida thus killed African Americans at a rate that was 56 percent greater than the African-American percentage of the state population.

In Georgia cops killed thirty people in 2016. African Americans, being 17 of these victims but only 31 percent of the population, were 19 percent overrepresented. Latinos were 17 percent of police homicide victims but only 9 percent of the population and were thus almost 100 percent overrepresented. Whites on the other hand were 28 percent underrepresented in such stats, being only 43 percent of those killed by cops despite constituting 60 percent of the state population.

However, if we cross the Savannah River into South Carolina, the state that started the Civil War, the patterns change. In 2016 Palmetto State cops killed eighteen people. Of this total, four (or 22 percent) were African American even as they constituted 28 percent of the state population. This meant black people were 27 percent underrepresented in the police homicide stats. White victims of police homicide numbered fourteen (or 78 percent of the total) even as whites were only 67 percent of South Carolina’s population.

In other words, white South Carolinians were 16 percent overrepresented in the police homicide stats and they were significantly more likely to be killed by cops than were black South Carolinians.

I could go on with similarly weird and counterintuitive Southern examples but I will spare readers the jumble of numbers.

So then, where do cops kill black people most disproportionately?

Yankeedom 

One of the worst offenders as regards the disproportionate killing of black people—that is to say, the state with some of the most anti-black cops in the country—is liberal Massachusetts.

The Bay State—which during the Civil War produced the ultra-heroic, all-black 54th Regiment about which the fantastic film Glory was made—has police that kill black people at five times, or 500 percent the rate at which black people appear in the state’s total population. No wonder people joke about “up South in Boston.”

In 2016, police in Massachusetts killed fourteen people: five were white, five were black, and four were Latino.

White people are 79 percent of the population but only 35 percent of those killed by cops, and were thus 56 percent underrepresented in the police homicide stats.

Massachusetts police also kill Latinos at a very high rate. Latinos were 11 percent of the state population in 2016, but they were 28 percent of those killed by police. Thus, Massachusetts Latinos showed up in the police killing stats at a rate of 254 percent their proportion of the state’s total population, or 154 percent greater than the Latino share of the population.

The key number, however, is this: Only 7 percent of Massachusetts’s residents are black, yet they constituted 35 percent of people killed by cops. African Americans therefore appear in Massachusetts police homicide stats at five times the rate, or with 400 percent greater frequency, than do they appear in the state’s total population count. Now we are beginning to see where the national average comes from.

Illinois has a similar profile. In 2016 Illinois cops killed 29 people: nine of them (or 31 percent of the total) were white, while 61 percent of the state’s total population was white. Latinos were 27 percent of those killed by cops despite being only 17 percent of the state’s population.

Illinois cops also killed seventeen black people, (or 58 percent of the total) even as black people were only 14 percent of the state’s total population. In other words, during 2016 Illinois cops killed African Americans at a rate four times (or 314 percent greater than) the black percentage of the population.

Similarly, in Minnesota, cops kill black people at three times their prevalence in the state’s total population: 6 percent of the population versus 21 percent of those killed by cops. In New York police kill black people at three times their proportion of the population: they are only 16 percent of the population but constitute 48 percent of those killed by cops. In Michigan police kill African Americans at a rate about 2.5 times their share of the state population; they are 14 percent of the population but 37 percent of those killed by cops.

Moving west, the cops show anti-black racism in their patterns of killing but not to the level of what we see in the Northeast and Midwest. California fits the northern pattern. Cops killed black people at more than three times their share of the population. But Western police racism, expressed as lethal violence, falls most heavily on Latinos and Native Americans. Measured on a per capita basis no other racial or ethnic group comes near experiencing the appalling level of police violence meted out to Native Americans.

To be fair to the police of Greater Yankeedom, in general, they kill less often than do Southern or Western cops.

The Racialization of Poverty North and South

Why is Northern policing so disproportionately racist? In 1831 Tocqueville noted the peculiar vehemence of Yankee racism: “slavery recedes, but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary…. prejudice of the race appears to be stronger in the States which have abolished slavery, than in those where it still exists; and nowhere is it so intolerant as in those States where servitude has never been known.”3

This Northern prejudice often produced state constitutions that simultaneously outlawed slavery and prohibited African Americans settlement. Ohio, for example, outlawed slavery in its original 1802 constitution. But it also aggressively barred black immigration and enforced the ban with mob violence.

Northern tier states were also the first to pass eugenic forced-sterilization laws. By 1926 most Northern states had such laws but none of the Southern states did.

I suspect that modern patterns of “racialized” poverty, which is to say the racial demographics of poverty, does much to explain Northern police racism. Keep in mind, much of what police do is harass the visibly and “disorderly” poor. Disorderly frequently comes down to doing things in public that, if you had more money, you would do in private: drinking, smoking, buying and selling, yelling, arguing, disrobing, sitting down, and sleeping.4

The racism of Northern police also has something to do with the more “racialized” nature of poverty in the North as compared to the South. In the North, people of color tend to be heavily overrepresented in the ranks of the poor, whereas in the South there are higher rates of poverty and more of the white population is very poor. One crude way we see this is comparing the relative gap between white and black poverty rates in the North and South.

In the South the black poverty rate is typically about twice as high as the white poverty rate. But in most of the northern-tier states the black poverty rate is three times as high as the white poverty rate.5 This is not because black people are necessarily wealthier in the South, though the highest black poverty rates do cluster in the north, but rather because there are more poor white people in the South.6

The U.S. Census defines four major regions: Northeast, Midwest, South, and West. Of these, the South has the lowest median household income; it also has “the largest share of counties with high income inequality.” The South remains the region with the lowest median wages,7  has “maintained the highest rates of poverty over the past 40 years,” and has “the largest share of Americans living in poverty of all regions.” Food insecurity is highest in the South. It has the highest adult and infant mortality rates and the greatest prevalence of illnesses like cardiovascular disease, obesity, and HIV/AIDS. Southerners suffer higher occurrences of occupational fatalities, and the South has many of the highest rates of incarceration.8

The Political Economy of North and South

The South, from the settling of Jamestown onward, has always been home to a large population of poor whites. The South was intentionally designed to be a land of gentlemen and servants. This plan, if you will, shaped southern land distribution. Huge lots were given to rich men, while very little was made available to the common classes. The Yankee north, despite its many faults, pursued an intentionally more equal distribution of land. These divergent sectional settlement patterns had profound and long-term consequences for later economic development.

This sectional difference in land disposal patterns meant that the South never developed a large class of independent small farmers, whereas that class predominated in the North. As Charles Post has shown in his book The American Road to Capitalism, it was from this stratum of family farmers that American industrial capitalism emerged. During the nineteenth century, these small farmers, increasingly subject to market competition and price signals, began specializing and mechanizing. As subsistence production declined, production for sale increased. As it did, consumption increasingly depended on purchasing commodities with money in markets. Through it all the capitalist division of labor deepened, commodification and what Marx called “real subsumption” spread. With class struggle, in the form of growing unionization and then with the New Deal, the wealth produced by Northern industrialization, even as it made robber barons rich, also helped reenforce older Northern patterns of a more widespread, if modest, prosperity.

In the Slave South, several factors blunted this process. The extremely uneven land holding of the South limited the rise of a class of innovating, increasingly market-oriented small farmers. Uneven land distribution also translated into a lower population density and fewer cities, which meant smaller, less competitive markets. And as John Majewski explains in Modernizing a Slave Economy, weak and acidic soils, which are easily depleted by mono-cropping, encouraged the use of “shifting cultivation,” which in turn further reenforced the pattern of large land holdings, low population density, and class inequality.

Slavery also hindered economic development and industrialization because slaves were a fixed cost that had to be utilized even when not working on the cash crops. Because slaves could not be fired like free workers, slave owners needed to maximize their use of slave labor. This disincentivized and undermined the use of labor-saving equipment, resupply through markets, and the outsourcing of tasks to commercial specialists (like blacksmiths or carpenters). Put simply, instead of buying cheap, well produced bacon on emerging commercial markets supplied by small innovating farmers, slaveowners were incentivized to make their slaves raise hogs when they were not raising cotton. Thus even as slaves produced cash crops for export and plantations ran with capitalistic tools of efficiency, like modern account books, the fixed costs of slavery also encouraged nonmonetized production for use. This meant that in the South a smaller portion of production was governed by the law of value, and what Joseph Schumpeter called capitalism’s “gales of creative destruction.”

With large parts of the population (slaves) consuming little and producing much of what they consumed in a nonmonetized, production-for-use fashion, even small yeoman farmers who might have innovated and mechanized along capitalist lines, were for lack of markets effectively held back and stuck in a twilight economy that was capitalist but still heavily governed by the slow logic of production for use. Thus southern industrialization and capitalist “expanded reproduction” were thwarted.

In Slavery and Freedom, James Oakes summarized how slavery underdeveloped the South as follows: “Slavery hindered technological innovation even where its profitability depended on the latest techniques for processing and transportation. It slowed the growth of cities and industry, hampered the growth of a consumer market, reduced the flow of savings, and promoted soil exhaustion and demographic instability by dampening interest in long-term improvements on the land.”9

In the South the pattern of economic development was about cash-crop exports and later also resource extraction. This pattern of economic development reenforced the region’s tremendous class inequality. In the words of the Southern chronicler J.W. Cash, this made the South a society of “Big Men and Little Men, with strict reference to property, power, and the claim to gentility.”10

As a result of the South’s tremendous class inequality, the region’s demographics of poverty have long been less racially skewed than in the North.

In her fine book Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South, Keri Leigh Merritt shows that poor, landless whites constituted a full third (some have said one half) of the population of the U.S. South!11 To be clear these were not the hardscrabble small farmers. Rather these were a semi-itinerate, rural Lumpenproletariat, who owned no land and instead lived by occasional day labor, grazing hogs, gathering herbs, cutting wood for sale, stealing, poaching, making and selling liquor, fencing stolen goods, and prostitution. Prone to binge drinking, violence and cavorting with both free and enslaved African Americans (even as they were known for their loudly professed hostility to black people), these poor whites were by most accounts often genuinely dangerous. The planter class hated them. So too, it seems, did much of the smallholding yeomanry.

Prior to emancipation, slavery being the system that controlled most African Americans in the South, both extrajudicial mob violence and formal criminal justice were largely targeted at controlling this class of poor white Southerners.

Even today, in most Southern states the demographic distribution of poverty more closely tracks the overall demographic profile of the state than do poverty rates in the North.12 Of the states with the top ten highest white poverty rates all except for Idaho and New Mexico had been part of the Confederacy.

Making of the Yankee Ghetto

Concentrations of black poverty in the Northern states that once banned black settlement is the result of the racist articulation of deindustrialization and urban renewal. The Great Migration, that is the large-scale relocation of African Americans from the rural South to the urban Northeast, Midwest, and West, began with the industrial boom of World War I. Pulled north by the lure of jobs, higher wages, and greater freedom, the migrants were also pushed north by the hard times brought on by the increasing mechanization of Southern agriculture, and by the despotism of Jim Crow segregation and lynch-law terror. Roughly six million black people moved north before the migration subsided around 1970.

The greatest part of this wave happened from World War II until 1970. But African Americans arrived in the land of industrial democracy and upward mobility just as that political economy began a process of radical restructuring driven by automation and then industrial relocation. Almost as soon as African Americans established themselves in Northern industrial occupations and cities, deindustrialization and racist slum clearance began.

As Thomas Sugrue shows in The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, industrial employment in Motor City actually peaked in 1950, a full three decades before “deindustrialization” became a sociological watchword. As unionized industrial employment shrank, so too did the service sectors. According to Sugrue, black workers actually continued to move up the wage and skill ladder even as deindustrialization took hold. But this hardly made up for a shrinking regional economy and rising class inequality at a national scale.

Just as industrial employment was peaking, federally subsidized “slum clearance” and highway construction programs began reshaping Northern and Western cities. Coupled with suburbanization along racist lines, these developments increasingly forced black people into de facto segregated and underinvested communities. As businesses and middle-class whites left the urban core, municipal tax bases shrank, services and employment suffered, and concentrations of black poverty became defining features of the Northern-tier rustbelt.

The rustbelt geography became that of the doughnut city, with the African Americans’ deindustrialized core surrounded by autonomous, and for a long time de facto white, segregated suburbs.

The Modern Low-Wage South

Meanwhile, poverty in the U.S. South remained and remains widespread. This is revealed in the disproportionally high percentage of its population working for low wages. In 2016 the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the “states with the highest percentages of hourly paid workers earning at or below the federal minimum wage” were: Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and (one western outlier) Idaho.13

That year saw 2.2 million Americans working for wages at or below the federal minimum. Fully 49 percent of these workers worked in the South. These low-wage workers were predominately women. White women and people of color of all genders were (and still are) disproportionately represented in low-wage work. However, in absolute numbers, low-paid workers as a whole, were and are predominately white. The BLS reports that 74 percent of workers making wages “at or below the federal minimum” are white. (About 10 percent of that number are likely white Latinos but the BLS does not disaggregate in that fashion.) Thus white people work low-wage jobs in proportion to their share of the population. African Americans, at 18 percent of this workforce, are overrepresented. Latinos and Asians are each slightly underrepresented among low-wage workers. Thus for every African American working for the federal minimum wage or less there are four white workers in the same position, and, although the BLS does not offer numbers for race and region together, we can assume that most of both groups are in the South.14 In other words there are lots of poor white people in the South, and this probably helps explain why white people are killed at a higher rate in the south than in the north, and that, in turn, helps explain why black people so disproportionally show up in the northern police killing stats.

Conclusion

One clear takeaway from all these numbers is that Northern liberals—after all, they run most Northern city governments—should not feel too terribly smug when surveying the South, or applauding symbolic victories over racism, because very material forms of racism unfold up North on their watch and these are rooted not only in police prejudice but regional political economy and industrial policy. Transforming those “root causes” would be a massive though not impossible task. It would require challenging the prerogatives of capital; that is, confronting actual capitalists, i.e., campaign donors. That is a daunting prospect. And so, the liberal political class prefers progressive cultural change, renaming and redecorating, to the harder job of progressive economic change. Because, in the grand scheme of things, symbols are cheap.

If we think that these maladies are invariable and immutable expressions of an American system founded on settler colonialism and slavery, or if we believe on principle that coercion is bad and that the state has no “right” to coerce compliance with laws, then our course of action will be clear: we should steel ourselves with moral zeal and take up the cause to defund, dismantle, and abolish policing.18 But if we understand that these collective disorders represent a contingent fact of history—a modern shift of institutional logics that was gestated in the turmoil of the 1960s, born in the political retrenchment of the 1970s, and persists, albeit in increasingly attenuated modalities, today19—then we might begin the work of unpacking the bundle of associations, of bringing American law enforcement practices into alignment with constitutional protections, evolving international human rights norms, and rising standards of accountability.

The latter approach offers a richer and subtler view of history, to say nothing of having the advantage of being informed by a coherent comparative sociology. Policing, which exists in every modern society, can scarcely be traced to the slave patrols lore commonly circulated among abolitionists. Although it has plural (and often bloodstained) roots in the protection of private property, strikebreaking, sexual regulation, and the maintenance of race, ethnic, and class hierarchies, policing’s modern implantment in rationales of public safety represents a civilizational advance over private protection rackets and archaic forms of communal violence including lynch mobs, kinship-based self-defense, feuds, vendettas, and so on. It is part of an apparatus that inserts delays, rules, and deliberations in between accusation, apprehension, adjudication, and penalty. Its means of coercion are not intrinsically unjust or abusive. A socialist ought to be able to hold these opposed thoughts in his or her head at the same time.

Calls to defund, shrink, and ultimately abolish20 the police misdiagnose the problem with American policing and prescribe a course likely to make things worse, not better.

1. Compared with other countries, the US does not stand out as having a bloated police force. The US has 210 police officers per 100,000 people, about the same number as Sweden (203). It has significantly fewer police per 100,000 than the Netherlands (299), a country that is not usually associated with aggressive, violent policing. (See Tauheeda Yasin’s discussion in this symposium.) Germany (297), Scotland (322), France (326), Spain (361), and Italy (453) all have considerably denser concentrations of police, and the European average is 316 police officers per 100,000 people.21 No doubt each system has its own particular problems. (French police notoriously hassle North African youth, for example—although this does not sum up to the same general derangement of criminal justice; the country’s carceral system is no more than a feeble shadow of the US’s.22 ) But overall, the size of police forces is not readily correlated with abusive policing, excessive uses of force, human rights violations, high incarceration rates, or other features of a punitive state. (Inside the US, there seems to be an inverse correlation: smaller, poorly funded police departments commit more violence against citizens than larger, better funded ones; see Dustin Guastella’s piece in this symposium.) The pertinent questions are less about quantity than quality of policing.

2. Advocates for defunding the police propose to reroute the money to government programs, youth groups, NGOs, and assorted prevention efforts that might better serve communities and also might have the effect of reducing violence. But police budgets do not actually make up a large percentage of government spending. The Urban League estimates that police spending represents 4% of state and local direct general expenditures nationwide. Of course, cities do spend more than rural areas. In a survey of the country’s 150 largest cities, the New York Times found that the average share of general expenditures devoted to policing is 7.8%, with considerable variation among the outliers. In New York City, the police share comes to 6% of local spending. (Perhaps what is surprising here is how little the average number has increased from 6.6% in 1977, despite decades of bellicose “war on crime” political rhetoric.) Now some cities might indeed benefit from reordered priorities, investment in demonstration projects, housing supplements, enhanced poverty alleviation efforts, and so on. But in the aggregate, there is simply not enough money in police budgets to move the dial on social inequality. That would require new revenues—federal tax rates comparable to those of Northern European countries—and massive investments in health, education, and welfare.

3. The US is unique among affluent democracies in the number of civilians killed—mostly shot—by police. And the number of fatal shootings by police has remained stubbornly stable at around 1,000 per year since The Washington Post began tracking the numbers in 2015. These are shameful statistics. The problem is that demands to defund or scale back policing do not address the wider problem of lethal violence in America: The country has a persistently high violent crime rate and is uniquely awash with guns. The US homicide rate is two-and-a-half to ten times that of other developed democracies and of the 15,129 homicides recorded in 2017, 73% (10,982) were committed with a firearm. Of the 1,001 people shot dead by police in 2019, 93% (926) were said to have been armed with a weapon of some sort—60% (600) with a gun. It is hard to imagine eliminating police shootings, much less policing, in a heavily armed country so inured to violence. The two problems are interlinked. We need credible approaches that will reduce both violent crime and police violence.

4. Defunders and abolitionists say that reform hasn’t worked. They point to the cold-blooded murder of George Floyd and string of similar horrific events. Such images inflame the public, and rightly so, but police violence actually has declined significantly since the 1990s, dramatically since the 1970s. And police killings are down by almost a third in big cities since Michael Brown’s death in 2014, although they have risen in rural and suburban areas, offsetting urban declines. (Note that cops are typically better paid, better trained, and better supervised in big cities—and there are more of them.) Over the same period, the percentage of unarmed men shot and killed by police has declined from a little more than 9% of total fatal shootings to about 5%, perhaps reflecting new or clarified use-of-force protocols, especially in big cities. Meanwhile, authorities are becoming increasingly vigilant about curbing everyday human rights violations. “Stop-and-frisk,” once widely practiced, has been all but eliminated in New York City (and has been scaled back in other places as well). Collectively, these trends suggest that policing is quite reformable—and that we should intensify and quicken the pace of reforms.

Bernie Sanders’ recent refusal to embrace demands to defund and abolish policing (demands that tacitly accept the limits of austerity budgets) has drawn hoots and catcalls from the cancel culture activists of Twitterverse and Leftbook. Accustomed to circulating arcane terms amongst small groups of insiders, some have couched their counsel in inventive definitions of what the term “defund” might mean. Libertarians, at least, are honest about words and understand what they’re saying when they call for defunding: they want to privatize policing and put all security arrangements on the marketplace. Bernie’s position, by contrast, views security as a public good. This approach has the advantage of aligning with public opinion, which acknowledges racist enforcement, supports reform, and—across all race/ethnic groups—strongly opposes defunding. It also resonates with Colin Kaepernick’s point about underfunding and undertraining: “You can become a cop in six months and don’t have to have the same amount of training as a cosmetologist. That’s insane.” (By contrast, Northern European police typically receive 2 to 3 years of training, including extensive coursework in social sciences, human relations, and psychology—with emphasis on conflict resolution and crisis management.)

Embracing the urgent need for radical reform, Sanders also makes his commitment to a welfarist version of public security clear: “Do I think we should not have police departments in America? No, I don’t. There’s no city in the world that does not have police departments.” The democratic socialist elaborates: “I called for police departments that have well-educated, well-trained, well-paid professionals. And, too often around this country right now, you have police officers who take the job at very low payment, don’t have much education, don’t have much training—and I want to change that.” He continues, envisioning a much wider role for social services, as distinct from policing: “[M]any police departments and cops deal every day with issues of mental illness, deal with issues of addiction, and all kinds of issues which should be dealt with by mental health professionals or others, and not just by police officers.”

The call to defund or abolish the police is a gift to the right. We need instead a series of radical reforms along with enhanced training, closer supervision, and democratic accountability. We should be looking to models that work rather than engaging in fantasies about civil patrols and communal policing, which will ultimately mean an expansion of private guard labor and private policing, unaccountable to public oversight.

What the bill doesn’t address is the structural funding needed for these measures and more. A yearly $100 or even $250 million appropriation through a Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) is a wholly inadequate means of remedying training for the over 800,000 law enforcement officers, updating antiquated systems in order to provide more uniform reporting, or creating the Misconduct Registry, not to mention the other reforms. A JAG, while one of the leading sources for federal justice funding for state and local governments, is an impermanent grant that cannot address the need for a steady source of reliable funding for systemic change.

My research suggests that in response to the lack of a national funding strategy for public safety and policing, local and state governments use fines, fees, and surcharges to garner funds for their large budgets. In this process, many localities squeeze mostly poor folks for money. This reliance on the poor for law enforcement funding is a definite contributor to the dismal relations between some communities and law enforcement. Increased patrols, traffic stops, and searches aid a culture of mistrust and terror surrounding law enforcement interactions. 

Piling on fines and fees for things like parking tickets or expired registration, and charging for jail stays and probation fees, leads many poor people into cycles of debt to courts and law enforcement agencies. Entering into payment plans can lead to continuous forms of supervision, as people cycle through probation and incarceration.

For example, we already know that in the 2014 Department of Justice investigation into Ferguson, Missouri following the death of Michael Brown, frivolous traffic stops and quotas tied to promotions were part of the culture of policing in Ferguson, which had little to do with public safety and more to do with filling a budget gap. For years in nearby Pagedale, Missouri, residents were ticketed for too high grass, mismatched blinds, or BBQing on their front porches, putting mostly poor residents through trumped up ticketing and incarceration over unpaid fines. The Institute of Justice found in 2013 that the city’s municipal court, which met twice a month, “heard 5,781 cases, or an average of 241 cases per night.”  A successful lawsuit has curbed the practice, but public safety still makes up 75 percent of Pagedale’s over $2 million dollar budget with real estate taxes not even coming close to covering a quarter of the City’s budget. It is clear that in the absence of a federal mandate, many local governments with small budgets are weighed down by public safety expenditures and have been reluctant to institute increases in local taxes.

What I have found through my research is that at both local and state levels, fines/fees and surcharges have acted as a predatory tax system in the absence of real structural reforms for justice funding. Ohio and Florida are two states that have over 100 justice-related charges, and North Carolina is an example of a state that has had almost yearly rises in justice fees since 2003, with a seatbelt violation fee of $25 in the 1980s ballooning over 644 percent to around $180 with the addition of court fees. Accounting for inflation, this is still a 190 percent increase.

The movement to #defund police and redirect funds into education, youth, mental healthcare, and other social services has gained traction as we see local legislators begin to slash budgets across the country in New York, Oregon, and Minnesota, for example. However, #defund does not address the foundational problems of the model of public safety and law enforcement in the U.S., which can be traced not only to a racialized system and anti-blackness, but to a dearth in sustainable infrastructure around safety funding.

Using an amalgamation of federal and local grants and varying degrees of real estate and property taxation often falls short. For example, in South Carolina, 42 percent of the police training budget comes from traffic fines and fees and court filings, and with the covid-19 epidemic, that source of funding has been even lower with less drivers on the road. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously back in 2019 that states cannot impose “excessive” fines, fees, and forfeitures, but just what is “excessive” hasn’t been explicitly defined. 

Without a federal infrastructure for centralized and stable funding for law enforcement and courts in the U.S., problems will persist.

And yes, it is correct that law enforcement and the nation’s courts have been tasked with the impossible job of policing social problems. One of the most unfortunate cases I witnessed was in a New Orleans courthouse where a mother and daughter sat in maroon jumpsuits in Magistrate court inches away from each other after an argument; they had spent the night in jail, and the judge ordered them to “have no contact” with one another. Homelessness, domestic violence, and mental health issues are but a few of the communal issues that would be better suited for counseling and health advisors rather than criminalization.

Fortunately, there are models to learn from on law enforcement restructuring. Several countries throughout Europe, including Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Scotland have embarked on large scale system reform. There are many mistakes to learn from, but the Netherlands example is a particularly worthy case study.

The Netherlands model of decriminalization of certain minor infractions, nationalization of the police force to include centralized training, funding, and fine payments as well as providing strong national backing for public defenders has created a less antagonistic relationship between citizens and law enforcement; it has also led to the closing of several prisons. In addition, a diversification of responses to social problems along with increased use of technology, specifically in traffic situations, has led to less of a need for traffic stops.

While smaller than the U.S., the Netherlands has a slightly higher number of police officers per capita–295 per 100,000 versus the U.S., which has 238 per 100,000. It has some of the most punitive and highest fines in Europe (a Category 6 offense comes with a 890,000 Euro fine) and yet, it continues to close prisons with just 63 incarcerated people per 100,000 compared to the U.S. with 655 per 100,000. By decriminalizing infractions and settling them with fines or transactie (transactions), they have been able to lower police interactions and create a less volatile policing presence in Dutch cities.

For example, as the government explains: “Someone who travels by train without a ticket is fined € 90, someone found to be drunk and disorderly is fined € 90, and someone who urinates in public is fined € 140. These fines are dealt with administratively, which means that the courts are not involved.” 

In the U.S., depending on the city and location, these same behaviors could lead to arrest and incarceration, and a poor person who committed the infraction could face numerous days in jail if unable to afford money bail or if they happen to get caught on the wrong day of the week. The Dutch handle over 60 percent of infractions in a non-punitive way with either a fine or transaction, and up to 90 percent of all offenses could be handled this way. 

Payments are all processed at one centralized Bureau, the Central Fines Collection Agency or CJIB. Instead of imprisonment, those who cannot afford the payments can make arrangements.

A centralized system also allows for better training. Rather than a few weeks of learning, Dutch officers receive vocational, college, and university training at the Dutch Police Academy over several years, which includes specialized learning. The move to the national system was borne partly out of frustration with fragmentation and the delays in effectiveness, something the U.S. with over 18,000 law enforcement agencies is rife with.

Of course, the Dutch system is not without  problems and the national implementation process has not been entirely smooth as Terpstra and Fyfe discuss. And as the need for more officers has become apparent, a slick recruitment video narrated by a black policeman is indicative of an interest in a public perception of diversity. Studies demonstrate some negative attitudes towards police from immigrant communities exist, and in my own fieldwork, I did encounter mostly immigrants experiencing difficulties paying fines and fees; however, the Dutch police seem to have a less overtly negative perception from the public.

While the U.S. has been focused on micro-level reforms in individual officer conduct, the creation of a U.S. law enforcement initiative through a payroll tax would streamline funding. In the same way the Social Security Act and Medicare have brought effective systems for care and assistance, a nationalized service would allow for better police training and oversight. By decriminalizing minor infractions and offering alternatives to police interactions, including utilizing technology to overcome unnecessary, unsafe, and costly traffic stops, the U.S. could improve safety outcomes. Instead of a call to #defund law enforcement, let’s question where funding comes from in order to restructure it and create a better public safety infrastructure.

But it’s a mistake to believe that these things come from police unions, against the wishes of kinder-hearted mayors and governors, or that getting rid of police unions would eliminate a lot of the problems of police brutality. Police are banned from striking, so anything in their contracts is either negotiated with management or decided by a neutral arbitrator.  And while they have some political power, the money of the police union is not enough to elect someone to office, so they don’t control who the mayor or city council is. These things exist primarily because they’re rational for maintaining the social order of our economic system.

As others here have said, the primary function of the police is to protect property rather than people. More specifically, it is to contain and repress the anxiety and anger caused by economic desperation. It is also to clear out low-income areas for gentrification, and broadly to police the borders between higher-income and poor parts of town. As the economy gets more unequal and a growing proportion of people fall into increasingly desperate economic straits, more and/or more aggressive policing is needed to accomplish this goal. There are definitely things that bad police unions add to the equation that are terrible and should be undone. But it’s important to understand what is ultimately driving the hyper-policing we’re seeing.

Understanding this also means looking at police violence not as the result of individual or cultural racism that needs to be undone by education or deep introspection, but as a product of the economic order we’re living in. So, for instance, someone working in the real estate industry can either think “those cops are racist assholes, but I’m committed to anti-racist education” or can think “when I help ‘turn around’ ‘up-and-coming’ neighborhoods, my work is helping create the need for police violence.”

One way to think about the power of police unions is to imagine a counter-factual. Suppose, somehow, there was a very progressive police union in some big city, and in their contract negotiations they proposed that their work should be based on protecting people regardless of income, which would mean they would spend a lot of time making sure that housing projects and trailer parks are safe for the people who live there, and would pull a lot of resources out of downtown and rich neighborhoods. Does anyone believe that police unions have the power to force a contract like this, one that runs against the logic of economic power?

Beyond hypothetical counterfactuals, one can just look at the numbers. There are five states where it is illegal for police to engage in collective bargaining—Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. But these states are no better than anyplace else in terms of police repression, brutality and murders. In 2013-2019, police in Tennessee killed 4 people for every 100,000 in the general population, and 5.5 per every 100,000 among black people. By comparison, here are the rates for general population and black people in some states with pretty strong collective bargaining: NY 1.1/3.3; Michigan 1.7/4.2; Connecticut 1.4/2.7. In 2014-2018, Memphis saw a 500% increase in police killings, and Charlotte saw a 400% increase; by comparison, Columbus Ohio was 160%; and Annaheim, Denver, and Portland—all collective bargaining states—saw an increase of about 100%. So there is no correlation between the presence of police unions and the incidence of police brutality. Police brutality exists primarily because it is functional for the dominant economic and political class.

Finally, it’s important to note that, while I would be fine with the AFL-CIO kicking the police unions out, a lot of what’s being said on the left now echoes the lines from the right, such as this piece from the umbrella corporate lobby, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which quotes MLK, says government is the source of racism, points to charter schools as a positive example of combatting racism through privatization, and calls for reining in or abolishing police unions. Here the people who oppose minimum wage, sick leave, Medicaid expansion, public transportation, or the right to sue over race or sex discrimination on the job now appear as the champions of the victims of police brutality, in rallying everyone against police unions. Of course the fact that one’s beliefs may be echoed by those on the right for nefarious reasons doesn’t mean they’re wrong—but it’s a cautionary note to think about where we’re putting our political energy in addressing racist police violence.

Why would you take away someone’s ability to talk with their employer about how overtime is doled out because the Supreme Court has decided that a cop need only say they were scared to render themselves untouchable to an arbitrator in brutality cases?

Police get fired all the time, as anyone who follows arbitration reporter services knows. They just don’t get fired for brutality because it’s essentially unreviewable. No arbitrator is interested in upholding a termination knowing they are going to be overturned in court. It’s easier to fire a cop right now for tardiness than it is for beating unarmed black men but that has nothing to do with the contract. I also think it’s a mistake to engage this question as if it turns on what the definition is of the word “worker” and in turn to have that definition turn on someone’s role in the perpetuation of class relations.

It’s 100% true that cops in our society are on what I would say is the wrong side of basically everything politically. But that’s actually true of a lot of occupations. Coal miner’s living depends on extracting carbon from the earth that poisons the entire world, but disproportionately so members of their own class, to enrich a small number of ruthless plunderers. As Marx says in Wage Labor and Capital: “What is a Negro slave? A man of the black race….A Negro is a Negro. Only under certain conditions does he become a slave. A cotton-spinning machine is a machine for spinning cotton. Only under certain conditions does it become capital. Torn away from these conditions, it is as little capital as gold is itself money, or sugar is the price of sugar.” Police under capitalism are what they are not because police in general are this, but because capitalism is what it is.

If bargaining rights are to be treated as a privilege bestowed upon those deemed worthy of the title “worker” and that definition turns on your occupation’s contribution or injury to the rest of their class, police are certainly out. But then again, so are the legions of teachers who treat it as an obligation to pledge allegiance to the world’s foremost emblem of imperialism, as are the social studies teachers who get paid to whitewash the legacy of slavery, aggression, and oppression because their charge is to instill a toxic, nationalist chauvinism into every kid. So are the unionized public sector carpenters who board up the houses of other workers who are unable to make their tax payments.

Of course they have terrible politics and act like assholes. But if the extension of rights is conditioned on someone subscribing to similar politics to the person holding the keys, those are not rights at all. Those are privileges.

At the end of the day, capitalism has a whole hell of a lot of us doing work to perpetuate the current mode of production. It necessarily has to—physical coercion may be the most obvious manifestation of the perpetuation of capitalism and undermining of the interests of the working class but it’s not even the most important piece of the two apparatus that self-perpetuate the system. Capitalism enlists nearly every institution and countless occupations we have in its replication across generations. I feel like it is basic Marxism to understand and acknowledge that all of society reflects the dominant mode of production—good or bad. Capitalism is a system based on oppression, it depends on imperialism, and domination. Thus, even the most sacrosanct of our institutions bear the shameful mark of the economic base on which they exist. To quote Marx again, this time from Critique of Political Economy: “The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”

Cubans don’t hate their police because they exist within a different context and therefore don’t exist to oppress workers to defend capital. Acknowledging that means acknowledging that capitalism is the base of the issue, but I kind of thought we all already knew that?

I really think we can do better than these abstract conversations. Going back to the original point I made, all anyone has to do is actually read these contracts to see that there is something else at work. Did we learn nothing from the relentless onslaught against teachers unions that convinced a lot of fence-sitters to join forces with right wingers and misguided liberals to disembowel them because of a bogeyman that anyone could have dispelled the notion of if only they would read the damn contracts and do the research?

Adolph Reed, Jr.’s “How Racial Disparity Does Not Help Make Sense of Patterns of Police Violence,” should be read again and often during this moment of resurgent Black Lives Matter sentiment, precisely because he so clearly names the limitations of anti-racism as a way of thinking about the problems of carceral power, and cautions against any left-progressive politics that separates racism from historical processes and political economy. As Reed notes, “antiracism is not a different sort of egalitarian alternative to a class politics but is a class politics itself.” Furthermore, antiracist politics is essentially “the left wing of neoliberalism in that its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the distribution of goods and bads in the society, an ideal that naturalizes the outcomes of capitalist market forces so long as they are equitable along racial (and other identitarian) lines.” Of course, I can already hear some friends of mine, academic colleagues and activists alike, who will grumble and cry foul, quickly asserting the presence of this or that tendency that embodies the true radical spirit of Black Lives Matter. Others will likely point to the scale of recent protests as evidence of a new moment, a turning point that will yield massive substantive reforms. Like Occupy Wall Street protests before, however, Black Lives Matter is more of a sentiment than a fully formed political force. Let’s not forget that it was born as a hashtag, and while it has provided a powerful banner for longer-standing organizations and legislative campaigns working to reverse the social toll of carceral expansion, the liberal character of the hashtag should be more apparent now than ever.

We have all witnessed how readily different class layers have embraced the slogan over the last weeks. Some activists have seized upon the images of mass protests as evidence of a gathering political will, but the amorphous nature of Black Lives Matter, which Reed rightly compared to the Black Power slogan from decades earlier, and the facile expressions of unity in endless memes and viral videos of police-civilian line dances conceal substantive political differences among protestors and within broader U.S. publics. While a slim majority of Americans now believe police are more likely to use excessive force against blacks than other groups, millions more do not share the most militant calls to defund or dismantle police departments voiced by some activists.1 Most Americans are upset by police killings, but they also want more effective policing. Over the last five years, satisfaction with police has strengthened among all ethnic and racial groups, including African Americans (from 50% “at least somewhat satisfied” in 2015 to 72% now).

Black Lives Matter sentiment is essentially a militant expression of racial liberalism. Such expressions are not a threat but rather a bulwark to the neoliberal project that has obliterated the social wage, gutted public sector employment and worker pensions, undermined collective bargaining and union power, and rolled out an expansive carceral apparatus, all developments that have adversely affected black workers and communities. Sure, some activists are calling for defunding police departments and de-carceration, but as a popular slogan, Black Lives Matter is a cry for full recognition within the established terms of liberal democratic capitalism. And the ruling class agrees.

During the so-called Black Out Tuesday social media event, corporate giants like Walmart and Amazon widely condemned the killing of George Floyd and other policing excesses. Gestural anti-racism was already evident at Amazon, which flew the red, black and green black liberation flag over its Seattle headquarters this past February. The world’s wealthiest man, Jeff Bezos even took the time to respond personally to customer upset that Amazon expressed sympathy with the George Floyd protestors. “‘Black lives matter’ doesn’t mean other lives don’t matter,” the Amazon CEO wrote, “I have a 20-year-old son, and I simply don’t worry that he might be choked to death while being detained one day. It’s not something I worry about. Black parents can’t say the same.” Bezos also pledged $10 million in support of “social justice organizations,” i.e., the ACLU Foundation, the Brennan Center for Justice, the Equal Justice Initiative, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the NAACP, the National Bar Association, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, the National Urban League, the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, the United Negro College Fund, and Year Up. The leadership of Warner, Sony Music and Walmart each committed $100 million to similar organizations. The protests have provided a public relations windfall for Bezos and his ilk. Only weeks before George Floyd’s killing, Amazon, Instacart, GrubHub and other delivery-based firms, which became crucial for commodity circulation during the national shelter-in-place, faced mounting pressure from labor activists over their inadequate protections, low wages, lack of health benefits and other working conditions. Corporate anti-racism is the perfect egress from these labor conflicts. Black lives matter to the front office, as long as they don’t demand a living wage, personal protective equipment and quality health care.

Perhaps the most important point in Reed’s 2016 essay is his insistence that Black Lives Matter, and cognate notions like the New Jim Crow are empirically and analytically wrong and advance an equally wrong-headed set of solutions. He does not deny the fact of racial disparity in criminal justice but points us towards a deeper causation and the need for more fulsome political interventions. Racism alone cannot fully explain the expansive carceral power in our midst, which, as Reed notes, is “the product of an approach to policing that emerges from an imperative to contain and suppress the pockets of economically marginal and sub-employed working-class populations produced by revanchist capitalism.” Most Americans have now rejected the worst instances of police abuse, but not the institution of policing, nor the consumer society it services. As we should know too well by now, white guilt and black outrage have limited political currency, and neither has ever been a sustainable basis for building the kind of popular and legislative majorities needed to actually contest entrenched power in any meaningful way.

The wave of mass protests that George Floyd’s death provoked is not reducible to Black Lives Matter, but was also a consequence of the broader pandemic and real hardship of the shelter-in-place order, which was necessary for public health, but without adequate sustained federal relief, has produced mass layoffs, food pantries hard pressed to keep up with unprecedented need, and broad anxiety among many Americans about their bleak employment prospects in the near future. The looting that broke out in many cities the weekend after Floyd’s murder were not like the ghetto rebellions of the sixties, 1992 Los Angeles, or even Ferguson and Baltimore in recent years. The looters were multiracial, intergenerational and targeted downtowns and central shopping districts like Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, Manhattan’s Times Square and Chicago’s State Street and the Magnificent Mile. So far mainstream civil rights leaders, some Black Lives Matter activists, the corporate punditry and many Americans have frequently and loudly drawn a distinction between the righteousness of peaceful protestors and the “violence” and lawlessness of looters and rioters. That posture, like hyperbolic claims about the primacy of the color line, will continue to defer the kind of public goods that might actually help the most dispossessed of all races and ethnicities who are the most likely to be routinely surveilled, harassed, arrested, convicted, incarcerated and condemned as failures, the collateral damage of the American dream.

Some readers will know that I’ve contended that, despite its proponents’ assertions, antiracism is not a different sort of egalitarian alternative to a class politics but is a class politics itself: the politics of a strain of the professional-managerial class whose worldview and material interests are rooted within a political economy of race and ascriptive identity-group relations. Moreover, although it often comes with a garnish of disparaging but empty references to neoliberalism as a generic sign of bad things, antiracist politics is in fact the left wing of neoliberalism in that its sole metric of social justice is opposition to disparity in the distribution of goods and bads in the society, an ideal that naturalizes the outcomes of capitalist market forces so long as they are equitable along racial (and other identitarian) lines. As I and my colleague Walter Benn Michaels have insisted repeatedly over the last decade, the burden of that ideal of social justice is that the society would be fair if 1% of the population controlled 90% of the resources so long as the dominant 1% were 13% black, 17% Latino, 50% female, 4% or whatever LGBTQ, etc. That is the neoliberal gospel of economic justice, articulated more than a half-century ago by Chicago neoclassical economist Gary Becker, as nondiscriminatory markets that reward individual “human capital” without regard to race or other invidious distinctions.

We intend to make a longer and more elaborate statement of this argument and its implications, which antiracist ideologues have consistently either ignored or attempted to dismiss through mischaracterization of the argument or ad hominem attack.1 For now, however, I want simply to draw attention to how insistence on reducing discussion of killings of civilians by police to a matter of racism clouds understanding of and possibilities for effective response to the deep sources of the phenomenon.

Available data (see https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/?tid=a_inl) indicate, to the surprise of no one who isn’t in willful denial, that in this country black people make up a percentage of those killed by police that is nearly double their share of the general American population. Latinos are killed by police, apparently, at a rate roughly equivalent to their incidence in the general population. Whites are killed by police at a rate between just under three-fourths (through the first half of 2016) and just under four-fifths (2015) of their share of the general population. That picture is a bit ambiguous because seven percent of those killed in 2015 and fourteen percent of those killed through June of 2016 were classified racially as either other or unknown. Nevertheless, the evidence of gross racial disparity is clear: among victims of homicide by police blacks are represented at twice their rate of the population; whites are killed at somewhat less than theirs. This disparity is the founding rationale for the branding exercise2 called #Black Lives Matter and endless contentions that imminent danger of death at the hands of arbitrary white authority has been a fundamental, definitive condition of blacks’ status in the United States since slavery or, for those who, like the Nation’s Kai Wright, prefer their derivative patter laced with the seeming heft of obscure dates, since 1793. In Wright’s assessment “From passage of the 1793 Fugitive Slave Act forward, public-safety officers have been empowered to harass black bodies [sic] in the defense of private capital and the pursuit of public revenue.”3

This line of argument and complaint, as well as the demand for ritual declarations that “black lives matter,” rest on insistence that “racism”—structural, systemic, institutional, post-racial or however modified—must be understood as the cause and name of the injustice manifest in that disparity, which is thus by implication the singular or paramount injustice of the pattern of police killings.

But, when we step away from focus on racial disproportions, the glaring fact is that whites are roughly half or nearly half of all those killed annually by police. And the demand that we focus on the racial disparity is simultaneously a demand that we disattend from other possibly causal disparities. Zaid Jilani found, for example, that ninety-five percent of police killings occurred in neighborhoods with median family income of less than $100,00 and that the median family income in neighborhoods where police killed was $52,907.4 And, according to the Washington Post data, the states with the highest rates of police homicide per million of population are among the whitest in the country: New Mexico averages 6.71 police killings per million; Alaska 5.3 per million; South Dakota 4.69; Arizona and Wyoming 4.2, and Colorado 3.36. It could be possible that the high rates of police killings in those states are concentrated among their very small black populations—New Mexico 2.5%; Alaska 3.9%; South Dakota 1.9%; Arizona 4.6%, Wyoming 1.7%, and Colorado 4.5%. However, with the exception of Colorado—where blacks were 17% of the 29 people killed by police—that does not seem to be the case. Granted, in several of those states the total numbers of people killed by police were very small, in the low single digits. Still, no black people were among those killed by police in South Dakota, Wyoming, or Alaska. In New Mexico, there were no blacks among the 20 people killed by police in 2015, and in Arizona blacks made up just over 2% of the 42 victims of police killing.

What is clear in those states, however, is that the great disproportion of those killed by police have been Latinos, Native Americans, and poor whites. So someone should tell Kai Wright et al to find another iconic date to pontificate about; that 1793 yarn has nothing to do with anything except feeding the narrative of endless collective racial suffering and triumphalist individual overcoming—“resilience”—popular among the black professional-managerial strata and their white friends (or are they just allies?) these days. What the pattern in those states with high rates of police killings suggests is what might have been the focal point of critical discussion of police violence all along, that it is the product of an approach to policing that emerges from an imperative to contain and suppress the pockets of economically marginal and sub-employed working class populations produced by revanchist capitalism. There is no need here to go into the evolution of this dangerous regime of policing—from bogus “broken windows” and “zero tolerance” theories of the sort that academics always seem to have at the ready to rationalize intensified application of bourgeois class power, to anti-terrorism hysteria and finally assertion of a common sense understanding that any cop has unassailable authority to override constitutional protections and to turn an expired inspection sticker or a refusal to respond to an arbitrary order or warrantless search into a capital offense. And the shrill insistence that we begin and end with the claim that blacks are victimized worst of all and give ritual obeisance to the liturgy of empty slogans is—for all the militant posturing by McKesson, Garza, Tometi, Cullors et al.—in substance a demand that we not pay attention to the deeper roots of the pattern of police violence in enforcement of the neoliberal regime of sharply regressive upward redistribution and its social entailments. It is also a demand that, in insisting that for all intents and purposes police violence must be seen as mainly, if not exclusively, a black thing, we cut ourselves off from the only basis for forging a political alliance that could effectively challenge it. All that could be possible as political intervention, therefore, is tinkering around with administration of neoliberal stress policing in the interest of pursuing racial parity in victimization and providing consultancies for experts in how much black lives matter.5

Another revealing datum regarding the imagery of an unbroken history of racist denigration of black “bodies” stretching back at least to 1619 as explanation of the current racial disparity in police killings is that, as Mike Males has shown, police killings of black men under 25 years of age declined 79% between 1968 and 2011, and 61% for men over 25 during that same period.6 Nor is that quite surprising. The victories won by the civil rights movement were real, as were the entailments of the Voting Rights Act. Things were generally worse with respect to everyday police terror in inner-city black neighborhoods than they are now. One of the few of the Black Panthers’ slogans that wasn’t simply empty hyperbole was their characterization of the role of police as an “occupying army” in black communities. (When I first saw The Battle of Algiers in the late 1960s, I felt an instant shock of recognition, a sense that I’d lived some of the film.) Racial transition in local government and deepening incorporation of minority political interests into local governing coalitions had a moderating effect on police brutality in black communities.7

My point is not in any way to make light of the gravity of the injustice or to diminish outrage about police violence. (I realize, however, that some will impute that intention to me; for them and all who would take the charge seriously, see note 1 below.) However, noting a decline—or substantial change in either direction for that matter—in the rate of police killings does underscore the inadequacy of reified, transhistorical abstractions like “racism” or “white supremacy” for making sense of the nature and sources of police abuse of black Americans. Racism and white supremacy don’t really explain how anything happens. They’re at best shorthand characterizations of more complex, or at least discrete, actions taken by people in social contexts; at worst, and, alas, more often in our political moment, they’re invoked as alternatives to explanation. In that sense they function, like the Nation of Islam’s Yacub story, as a devil theory: racism and white supremacy are represented as capable of making things happen in the world independently, i.e. magically. This is the fantasy expressed in formulations like racism is America’s “national disease” or “Original Sin”—which, incidentally, are elements of the liberal race relations ideology that took shape in postwar American political discourse precisely as articulations of a notion of racial equality that was separated from political economy and anchored in psychology and individualist notions of prejudice and intolerance.8

Nevertheless, putting to the side for a moment those ways in which causal invocations of racism and white supremacy are wrongheaded and inadequate and accepting for the sake of argument that the reified forces can do things in the world, if their manifest power can vary so significantly with social, political, and historical context, wouldn’t the objective of combating the injustice be better served by giving priority to examining the shifting and evolving contexts under which racism and white supremacy are more or less powerful or that condition the forms in which they appear rather than to demonstrating that those forces that purportedly cause inequality must be called racism or white supremacy in particular? One problem with the latter objective is that it is ultimately unrealizable. There is no definitive standard of what qualifies as racism; like terrorism or any other such abstraction, it is in the eye of the beholder. In fact, an illustration of the great cultural victory of the postwar civil rights struffle is that “racism” is negatively sanctioned in American society. No one with any hope of claim to political respectability—not even Maine governor Paul LePage, who leaves one struggling to imagine what he assumes would thus qualify as racist, (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/us/profane-phone-message-has-gov-paul-lepage-of-maine-in-hot-water-again.html?_r=0)—embraces it. In addition, advocates of antiracist politics argue that debate over the name that should be attached to the injustice is important because acknowledging the existence of racism/white supremacy as a causal agent is a necessary first step to overcoming its power. But that claim rests on shaky political ground. It is at bottom a call for expiation and moral rehabilitation as political action. In that sense Black Lives Matter is like its rhetorical grandparent, Black Power; it is a slogan that has condensed significant affective resonance but is without programmatic or strategic content. Also like Black Power, in response to criticisms of its lack of concrete content, BLM activists generated a 10 Point Plan—https://millermps.wordpress.com/2016/07/12/blacklivesmatter-10-point-program-called-campaign-zero/, in part clearly to address criticisms that they had no affirmative agenda beyond demands that the slogan be validated and the names of selected victims of police killing be invoked. This was followed more recently by an expanded document featuring roughly sixty items called “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice”—https://neweconomy.net/resources/vision-black-lives-policy-demands-black-power-freedom-and-justice.

Some, perhaps many, of the items propounded in the initial 10 Point Plan are fine as a statement of reforms that could make things better in the area of criminal justice policy and practice. Many, if not most, of those assembled under the rubric “Vision for Black Lives” are empty sloganeering and politically wrongheaded and/or unattainable and counterproductive. However, the problem is not a shortage of potentially effective reforms that could be implemented. The problem is much more a political and strategic one. And the focus on racial disparity both obscures the nature and extent of the political and strategic challenges we face and in two ways undercuts our ability to mount a potentially effective challenge: 1) As my colleague, Marie Gottschalk, has demonstrated in her most important book, Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2016),9 the carceral apparatus in its many manifestations, including stress policing as well as the many discrete nodes that constitute the regime of mass incarceration, has emerged from and is reproduced by quite diverse, bipartisan, and evolving complexes of interests, some of which form only in response to the arrangements generated and institutionalized by other interests. Constituencies for different elements of the carceral state do not necessarily overlap, and their interests in maintaining it, or their favored components of it, can be material, ideological, political, or alternating or simultaneous combinations of the three. Challenging that immensely fortified and self-reproducing institutional and industrial structure will require a deep political strategy, one that must eventually rise to a challenge of the foundational premises of the regime of market-driven public policy and increasing direction of the state’s functions at every level toward supporting accelerating regressive transfer and managing its social consequences through policing. 2) It should be clear by now that the focus on racial disparity accepts the premise of neoliberal social justice that the problem of inequality is not its magnitude or intensity in general but whether or not it is distributed in a racially equitable way. To the extent that that is the animating principle of a left politics, it is a politics that lies entirely within neoliberalism’s logic.

But comparisons to Gandhi and prophets belie Sharp’s complexity. As I showed in Part One of this article, Sharp was no peacenik wilderness-wandering prophet, but one of the most important U.S. defense intellectuals of the latter twentieth century, who furthermore possessed surprisingly neoliberal politics. Sharp developed his core theories about nonviolent action between the 1960s and 1980s, with Department of Defense funding, at the elite Cold War institute, the Center for International Affairs at Harvard. “The CIA at Harvard,” as it was cheekily termed, was co-directed by Henry Kissinger and future CIA chief Robert Bowie. The U.S. defense establishment was interested in the weaponization of protest tactics as part of asymmetrical Cold War counterinsurgency strategy. Sharp was based out of this “academic home” for thirty years, and collaborated closely with Nobel prize-winning game theorist, and progenitor of the “madman theory of international affairs,” Thomas Schelling. Sharp was motivated by a desire to fight tyranny, which he associated with government “centralization” of all kinds. With the USSR and the New Deal in the background, Sharp argued that nonviolent methods were the most effective way to undermine and collapse regimes marked by dangerous economic “regulation,” “state ownership,” and other “controls” over the economy.

Sharp would not simply theorize from the sidelines—he personally strove to promote his “politics of nonviolent action” globally, and left an indelible mark on geopolitics. In 1983, with the rise of Reagan’s foreign policy of communist “rollback,” Sharp founded the Albert Einstein Institution (AEI), whose mission was to promote Sharp’s theories worldwide. Sharp co-led AEI with Peter Ackerman, a passionate neoliberal who would champion the privatization of social security, serve as a Cato Institute board member, and, parallel to his work at AEI, work as right hand man to “junk bond king” Michael Milken at the notorious investment house Drexel Burham Lambert. AEI regularly sought and received funding from U.S. government pass-throughs like the International Republican Institute, and brought on as consultant Colonel Robert Helvey, a former Defense Intelligence Agency attaché and Dean of the National Defense Intelligence College.

Throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, AEI trained activists around the world in Sharp’s methods. But AEI consistently avoided dictator-run U.S. client states. Instead, it focused on countries with administrations opposing the austerity, deregulation, and privatization-obsessed “Washington Consensus,” spearheaded by the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and U.S. Treasury. AEI’s methods would prove decisive in the destruction of the USSR and Yugoslavia and in regime change operations in places like Ukraine and Georgia. All these events featured the involvement of U.S. soft-power organs like the National Endowment for Democracy and USAID. Where these nonviolent revolutions succeeded, neoliberal “structural adjustment,” also known as “economic shock therapy,” followed: selling off state assets, deregulating and privatizing state- or worker-owned industry, removing price controls, establishing free trade zones, and making cuts to social spending. Such policies delivered the kind of state “decentralization” that Sharp romanticized—but human development indicators tanked.

In order to understand Sharp, and the historical context in which he is embedded, it is vital to see beyond the story told in the mainstream press. We must understand Sharp’s relationship to the U.S. defense, intelligence, and security establishment in and beyond the Cold War, the pattern of his work internationally, and how his personal neoliberal politics harmonize all the above with his commitment to nonviolent action.

All of that would have been legacy enough. But the story of Sharp’s impact on history doesn’t end there.

Gene Sharp also made a dramatic impact closer to home: on the U.S. protest left. Within the protest left, Gene Sharp and his “politics of nonviolent action,” even when unknown by name, serve as political bedrock. By “protest left,” I am talking about that milieu of relatively recent origin that focuses on fomenting, training, and growing nonviolent social movements. The protest left spans numerous issues, but is unified by a passionate belief in the unique power of “nonviolent direct action” or “strategic nonviolence,” as it is sometimes called—a strategy culled from Sharp’s pages. The power of such actions lies generally in their public symbolism and ability to capture media attention, rather than in any disruption to production. There is often a desire for radical decentralization of movement organization, and consensus is a common decision-making method. Its politics tend (though this is changing) to be concerned with “good” and “bad,” rather than interests. Though it has a revolutionary élan and invokes “people-power,” the protest left has a middle-class character and tends to be grounded in institutions like nonprofits (and the foundations that finance them), rather than, for example, labor unions.

Sharp’s ubiquity on the protest left is thanks, above all, to the efforts of a little-known activist network from the 1970s: the Movement for a New Society (MNS). Though Sharp was never a member, he was a mentor to MNS founder George Lakey, and his theory of nonviolent action was essential to MNS’s political strategy. In the 1970s and 1980s, MNS widely promoted Sharpian strategic nonviolence throughout the anti-nuclear, anti-war, environmental, feminist, LGBT, and Central American solidarity movements, using then-novel mass activist “training” programs. MNS alumni and trainees in turn trained activists of the 1990s and 2000s, notably those of the anti-WTO “Battle of Seattle,” the movement against the Iraq War, and Occupy Wall Street. Mass training in Sharpian strategic nonviolence continues into the present.

In protest left quarters, Sharp’s popularity stems in part from his supposed non-ideological, “transpolitical” character. His ideas are billed as mere tactics and strategy. But within the protest left, Sharp’s “strategic” ideas about nonviolent revolution actually nose activists under the tent of an ideology, usually termed “revolutionary nonviolence.”3 Revolutionary nonviolence is relatively young, only loosely configured, and rarely named as such, but it is hegemonic on the protest left. Libertarian in orientation, it is frequently antagonistic to mass politics, to historical materialism, to political strategies that aim to use or take state power, and most critically, to class struggle itself, often implying that it is inherently violent.

One core assertion of revolutionary nonviolence, and a key way it is spread, is consensus decision-making. The manifest function of MNS protest movement trainings was usually building Sharpian nonviolent action skills. But MNS also used and taught consensus decision-making, an ultra-democratic group process wherein all members of a group must come to agreement before action can be taken. Consequently, on the U.S. protest left, Sharpian “strategic nonviolence” has historically operated hand in glove with consensus process. Consensus may seem just cumbersome procedure, but it is actually highly ideological, hinging on revolutionary nonviolence’s implied assumption that it is “violent” to ever impose anything on anyone. This “domination anxiety” ends up hamstringing organizations and helps explain revolutionary nonviolence’s discomfiture with, among other things, the state and class struggle. And so perhaps it is not surprising that the spread of revolutionary nonviolence and rise of the protest left parallels the decline of worker power, class politics, and the “embedded liberalism” of the New Deal state.

There are good reasons for social movements to maintain a commitment to nonviolent action. And as is clear with the rise of movements for Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, U.S. left activists are rapidly evolving beyond the limits of Sharpian revolutionary nonviolence. Indeed, we are in the midst of a world-historic stirring of class-consciousness in the U.S. This is precisely the reason we must understand the malaise from which we are rousing—lest we get knocked out again before we’re even back on our feet.

Gene Sharp and the Shift to “Hard-Headed” “Nonviolent Social Change”

The story begins in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This was the high point of U.S. labor’s power. Wealth was distributed more equally than ever before in U.S. history, or ever since, thanks to the robust provisions of the New Deal and Great Society programs. Such achievements flowed from, and were defended by, a raucous politics emanating from left organizations like labor unions and political parties.

While activists of this era employed plenty of “nonviolent tactics,” they were, by and large, skeptical of any hard and fast commitment to nonviolence. As Malcolm X said, “Concerning non-violence: it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks,” and “I don’t think when a man is being criminally treated, that some criminal has the right to tell that man what tactics to use to get the criminal off his back. When a criminal starts misusing me, I’m going to use whatever necessary to get that criminal off my back.”4

This was a generation of leftists battered by assassinations: Lumumba, Medgar Evers, JFK, Malcolm, King, RFK, Fred Hampton, Allende, Amílcar Cabral. Unsurprisingly, it had a hard edge—not unlike the left of the 1880s or 1920s. Riots followed assassinations. The Weather Underground bombed the U.S. Capitol and the Pentagon. The Black Panthers armed young people trapped in ghettos. Activists broke into FBI offices and exposed COINTELPRO, forcing Congress to hold the Church Committee hearings.

In this era, Gene Sharp was working on his theory of nonviolent action alongside, and at the behest of, U.S. security, defense, and intelligence leadership at the CIA at Harvard. Recall from Part One that the CIA at Harvard would find itself targeted by anti-war protests and even a Weather Underground bombing. But Sharp was also trying to appeal to this unruly American left. In 1970, for example, he published a slim book marketed toward political activists, Exploring Nonviolent Alternatives, its groovy cover featuring a hand held in a peace sign.5 Sharp would sometimes attend protest demonstrations, and for several years he would attend the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change annual nonviolence summer school.6 Coretta Scott King would even write an introduction to one of his books.7

There was no contradiction between Sharp’s work within the CIA at Harvard for the Department of Defense, and his public efforts to appeal to social movements—the U.S. security establishment, after all, wanted pacification of domestic militants. And for this task, regardless of his own agenda, Sharp offered something uniquely valuable: the argument that nonviolent commitment was more “strategic” than violence.8

In April 1970, the New York Times ran an illuminating story titled “Nonviolence Making Quiet Gains in U.S. Despite Disorders.” The Times reported that “the trend to violence as a means of protest has continued both in the Negro revolution and among alienated white youths,” but “the nonviolent movement, nevertheless, has survived and in some respects is now undergoing a revival.” The Times distinguished this new “nonviolent movement” from pacifism: “The renewed interest in nonviolence appears to have gone considerably beyond that aroused by the old-line pacifist organizations that have embraced the concept for years.” The Times quotes one “Gene Sharp of the Center for International Affairs” as saying, “I think we are on the verge of a very realistic interest in nonviolence. … It is a much more hard-headed approach, without the emotionalism and naiveté we have seen in the past.”9

As evidence of this growing movement, the article cites the spread of university courses on nonviolence, and the establishment of new centers dedicated to promoting nonviolence like the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. Also noted was the Center for Nonviolent Conflict Resolution at Haverford College, a Quaker school just outside Philadelphia. This new “trend” had well-heeled champions, like sociologist Paul E. Wehr, leader of the Haverford center, whom the Times described as “an enthusiastic young Quaker.” Wehr—who is variously referred to in the press as Paul Wehr, Paul Hare, A. Paul Hare, and Alexander Paul Hare—held a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and had previously taught at Princeton, Wellesley, Yale, and Harvard.10 He was famous for his work on small group dynamics, and would help found “peace psychology,” a field that “emerged as a distinct area of research and practice during the Cold War” in response to concerns about nuclear deterrence.11 In the early sixties, the Kennedy administration had appointed Wehr deputy representative to the Philippines in the newly formed Peace Corps. Wehr was “fascinated by third-world transformations” and would do teaching stints at Makerere University in Uganda, the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, the University of Rhodesia (now the University of Zimbabwe), and the University of Cape Town in South Africa. He would finish his career at Ben-Gurion University in Israel.12 Clearly, this “nonviolent movement” had some pedigree.

Government and liberal philanthropic dollars alike flowed to support outfits like Wehr’s Haverford center. For example, the Haverford center received a $97,000 a year grant from the National Institute of Mental Health—that is over $600,000 a year in inflation-adjusted dollars—“for recording and analyzing techniques.” As part of this project, “a team from the center participated in and observed the training of marshals for the massive peace march on Washington [in November 1969].”13 Haverford center researchers would also be on the ground for the Kent State shootings, which occurred about a month after publication of the Times article in question.14

Even more impressively, in 1970 the Ford Foundation awarded $180,000–approximately $1.2 million when adjusted for inflation—to Wehr’s Haverford center. In the submitted project, “students go to the poor neighborhoods of Philadelphia, live among the people and work in nonviolent community projects such as consumer and tenant organizations. They learn both about urban problems and how change can be achieved by nonviolent protest.”15 Ford cut this check while under the leadership of the famously shrewd McGeorge Bundy, who played a pioneering role in developing modern liberal philanthropy’s strategy of financing social movements.16

Just a year after this Times article was published, in 1971, another nonviolence initiative was born out of the Philadelphia Quaker milieu: the Movement for a New Society (MNS). MNS was itself profiled by the New York Times in 1972: “Members of the community, not all of whom are formally associated with the Society of Friends or have a Quaker background, live in a half-dozen communal houses in West Philadelphia”—a poor, majority black part of the city. The Times writes, “Unlike most communes, [MNS is] designed not simply to provide an alternative lifestyle for youths who want to drop out of middle-class society but as instruments of bringing about nonviolent social change.” In addition to running the housing co-op, the article notes that the Movement for a New Society also ran a health clinic, “work[ed] with neighbors on nonviolent ways of dealing with the problem of crime in the streets,” offered courses on “building alternative institutions,” organized peace demonstrations, and refused to pay their local telephone tax in protest of the Vietnam War. More ambitious still, they were “trying to build a network of ‘nonviolent revolutionary groups’ around the country.”17

This small organization, a powerful but understudied element of the New Left, would popularize the work of the little-known Gene Sharp throughout progressive American social movements.

Gene Sharp and George Lakey, Intellectual Companions

The Movement for a New Society had been established by George Lakey, William (Bill) Moyer and George and Lillian Willoughby, all former members of A Quaker Action Group (AQAG), a pacifist direct action outfit best known for its protest sailing of the Phoenix to Vietnam in 1967.18 For MNS, the modern problems of war, racism, sexism, ecological degradation, and poverty were systemic and interconnected. Big change was needed. As MNS saw it, “in an age when the American government has troops in over one hundred countries, and the income of one multinational corporation is greater than the gross national product of any African country, real change must be effected on a global level…”19

But MNS was unsatisfied with existing revolutionary theories. In 1973, the same year as Sharp’s The Politics of Nonviolent Action came out, MNS co-founder George Lakey published Strategy for a Living Revolution, one of the “primary statements of MNS politics.”20 Gene Sharp is footnoted throughout and is one of eight people thanked in the Acknowledgments.21

Though other MNS members would also have personal relationships with Sharp—MNS member David Hartsough would, for example, join Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution for their anti-Soviet protest trainings in Moscow in November and December 1991, a tour that immediately preceded the Soviet Union’s collapse—Lakey was the main conduit between Sharp and MNS.22 In 1959, twenty-one year old Lakey, then a young mover-and-shaker activist, had moved to Norway to marry a woman he met at a Quaker student program.23 In Oslo, one of his professors introduced him to Sharp, who was then working at the university alongside deep ecologist Arne Naess, researching Norwegian nonviolent resistance to the German Nazi occupation in World War II. As Lakey recounts, “One of my teachers there who knew of my interest in the peace movement said that I might like to meet [Gene Sharp].”

I dropped by his office and found a 30-year-old in jeans and sneakers with a quick smile. We both welcomed the chance to speak English, although his Norwegian was much better than mine. My eyes widened when he told me he was not only digging into stories of Norwegian resistance, but was going to conferences where he interviewed Africans in anti-colonial struggles who told him of nonviolent tactics being used there, sometimes alongside armed struggle.

Lakey was struck by Sharp’s interest in nonviolence for strategic purposes, rather than moral ones. “At first I couldn’t make sense of it,” Lakey writes. “What happens to moral choice when we research violent and nonviolent methods as if they are alternative means to an end?”

In dialogue with Gene over time I realized he was not closing the door on ethics. Instead, he saw much more promise through opening the door of practical advantages of nonviolent struggle. He and I wanted the same thing: maximum attraction to nonviolent struggle to win justice.

It would prove the beginning of a long collaboration, with Sharp coming to serve as an important mentor to Lakey. As Lakey writes, “it wasn’t hard for Gene to convince me that I should write my own thesis on nonviolent struggle.”

We stayed in touch after I returned to the United States, and—with his encouragement—I persuaded the University of Pennsylvania’s sociology department to allow me to write that thesis…. Gene then adopted [some of my ideas] for his own work.

In 1964, Sharp invited Lakey to join him “to present a paper at the first international conference on civilian-based defense, or CBD, at Oxford University,” where together they rubbed shoulders with defense top-brass like famed British military theorist Sir B.H. Liddell Hart.

That same year, Lakey cited Sharp in a guide he co-wrote to help train Mississippi Freedom Summer participants, A Manual for Direct Action: Strategy and Tactics for Civil Rights and All Other Nonviolent Protest Movements.24

The intellectual admiration was reciprocated: Sharp would thank and cite Lakey in books of his as well, including Exploring Nonviolent Alternatives, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, and Social Power and Political Freedom.25

“Training” for a Nonviolent Revolution

Lakey’s 1973 book, Strategy for a Living Revolution, remains one of the most important texts in the ideological canon of revolutionary nonviolence. In it, Lakey describes MNS’s vision of revolution as “fundamentally different from any before proposed.”26 Theirs would be a “revolution for life” based on “changed lives and changed values.” This revolution would “confront[] lies with openness and repression with community,” and usher in “a decentralized, democratic and caring social order,” an order “decisively on the side of life against death, of affirmation rather than destruction.”27 Translated, the MNS revolution would be perfectly nonviolent, in means and in ends.

Lakey broke down the “nonviolent revolution” into five overlapping “stages”: cultural preparation, building organizational strength, propaganda of the deed, political and economic noncooperation, and finally, intervention and parallel institutions. One practical application of this strategy was building ranks through urban communes where member-activists lived, worked, and campaigned together. These were called “Movement Action Groups.” The largest was in Philadelphia—per the Times profile—which was home to the “Philadelphia Life Center,” a number of communal houses, the New Society Land Trust, a grocery co-op, health clinic, and publishing house, New Society Publishers. As described in a 1977 profile, “The Philadelphia Life Center is the hub of the Movement for a New Society (MNS), a network of nonviolent revolutionary groups in the United States and a half dozen other countries. In West Philadelphia, the 150 or so members—who range in age from sixteen to sixty and also include some twenty preteen children—live in about twenty communal houses. MNS members in Chicago, Seattle, Madison, Minneapolis, and many other parts of the United States do not always choose to live communally, but they all participate in common direct-action projects and in building alternative institutions.”28 Other MNS chapters included ones in San Francisco and Kansas.29

Building communes was only the beginning of MNS’s revolutionary efforts. MNS strategy also hinged on driving a “nonviolent training movement.”30 Even at its height, MNS had only 300 members. But according to Andrew Cornell, an activist, academic, and sympathetic historian of the group, it “bore an influence on 1970s’ radicalism disproportionate to its size,” owing in part to “the strategy and skills trainings in which the group specialized.”31 Indeed, MNS helped “establish a culture of training within the antiauthoritarian Left that continues to the present day.”32

Gene Sharp’s rationalized and routinized “politics of nonviolent action,” still little-known, were a key source of direction and inspiration for MNS’ training activities. As Lakey recounted in 1974, “We’ve come to see ourselves as leavening agents…. Like Gene Sharp in Politics of Nonviolent Action, we are demystifying nonviolence. We are transforming it into skills that can be learned by anyone who cares enough.”33 In 1982, Lakey would write, “Rather than being the only expert marshal trainers in town, we pass our skills along to others so that they can do the work as well as we can. We regard the campaigns of today as important for themselves, but also as training grounds for the campaigns of tomorrow, so that skills learned in Take Back the Night marches can be used in a Reagan protest rally or an El Salvador march.”34

Though common now, in the 1970s “training” remained a somewhat novel pedagogy.35 It stood in contrast to “political education,” or “PE” in the lingo of the sixties and seventies. Political education tended toward cultivating a mass, class-oriented intellectualism, and was generally candid in its ideological purposes. MNS was “not impressed” by this tradition.36 Instead, their trainings purported to be non-ideological, emphasizing immediately actionable skills over history or political theory, and the direct life experience of participants over the “expertise” of facilitators. Ostensibly, this would disrupt the hierarchical student-teacher dynamic and better empower participants.

MNS offered trainings on an array of topics, but of central importance were those trainings on “nonviolent direct action” (NVDA), alternatively termed “strategic nonviolence.” Supplementing NVDA trainings were guides and manuals on the topic. Here, Gene Sharp’s new quasi-scientific and seemingly secular theorization of nonviolence was essential to presenting nonviolent action as a credible, “strategic” route to revolutionary change. Throughout MNS resources on NVDA, Sharp’s theories are highlighted. Butcher paper from 1970s MNS trainings, transcribed and digitized by Swarthmore College, include discussions about “Gene Sharp’s Theory of Power” and “Gene Sharp’s Categorization of Methods of Nonviolent Action,” with no other intellectual given similar treatment.37 In a 1976 organizational assessment, MNS co-founder Bill Moyer notes that Sharp’s work had been “really helpful” to developing MNS nonviolence training.38 In 1977, Moyer recommends Sharp’s work in his MNS-published book A Nonviolent Action Manual: How to Organize Nonviolent Demonstrations and Campaigns.39 Sharp’s ideas buttressed the widely distributed 1978 MNS pamphlet Why Nonviolence? Introduction to Nonviolence Theory and Strategy.40 Sharp is prominently featured in MNS member David Albert’s 1985 book, People Power: Applying Nonviolence Theory.41 Though it was principally focused on group process, Sharp also comes up in the 1977 MNS book Resource Manual for a Living Revolution: A Handbook of Skills & Tools for Social Change Activists—sometimes termed the MNS “Monster Manual.”42

Through its Sharp-inspired NVDA trainings and materials, MNS developed a “distinctive strain of nonviolent direct action in the United States…”43 MNS famously trained much of the anti-nuclear movement, including many of the 1,400 activists of the Clamshell Alliance who were arrested at the historic action at Seabrook Nuclear Power Plant in 1977.44 In the 1980s, MNS would train activists in the “feminist, gay rights, antiapartheid, and Central American solidarity movements.”45 By the 1990s and 2000s, MNS’s training methods had proliferated, and its “norms and tactics would run through the major environmental, global justice, and anti-war mobilizations.”46 And, as we will see, MNS’s training methods live on yet today, still billed as non-ideological opportunities for “skill-building.”

“Revolutionary Nonviolence”: An Alternative to “Marxist Revolution”

MNS avoided talk of “ideology”—but that’s not to say they didn’t have one. As historian of MNS Andrew Cornell puts it, “Revolutionary nonviolence formed the bedrock of MNS’s political analysis and strategy,” infused into all the group’s activities, including its trainings.47

It is not easy to find a straightforward definition of revolutionary nonviolence (sometimes referred to simply as “nonviolent revolution”).48 In 1979, Gene Sharp described it as “still very much a direction of developing thought and action rather than a fixed ideology and program.”49 Sharp and MNS alike cite Gandhi, the 1946 Committee for Nonviolent Revolution, and the American civil rights movement as touchstones for revolutionary nonviolence.50 A 1978 MNS pamphlet “Why Nonviolence?” describes Committee for Nonviolent Revolution founder A.J. Muste—the famous Trotskyist labor organizer who, on the eve of World War II, became a pacifist and anti-Marxist campaigner, and for whom Sharp had served as secretary during the 1950s—as “perhaps the chief pioneer of revolutionary nonviolence in America….”51

One core assertion of revolutionary nonviolence is that violence in the world is borne of deeply-rooted “structural” or “systemic” failures. Thus, ending violence requires fundamental, revolutionary change. In this way, revolutionary nonviolence distinguishes itself from mere pacifism. As Gene Sharp put it, “‘Nonviolent revolutionaries’ believe that the major social problems of today’s word have their origins at the roots of individual and social life and can therefore be solved only by a basic, or revolutionary, change in individuals and society.”52 In the aforementioned MNS pamphlet, MNS notes that Muste “demanded of pacifists who were critical of the violence in some labor actions that they recognize ‘the violence on which the present system is based.’” The same pamphlet quotes anarchist philosopher Paul Goodman arguing, “‘Pacifism is necessarily revolutionary…. We will not have peace unless there is a profound change in social structure.”’ “But,” the pamphlet continues, “this conclusion has by no means been obvious to everyone—or at least, most pacifists have shied away from the size of the task it implies.” More recently, in the 2012 edited volume Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution, War Resisters League activist Matt Meyer writes that, “revolutionary nonviolence suggests that…any popular movement must push beyond mere reformist change that leaves structures of oppression intact, even though this requires active confrontation.”53

Despite efforts to distinguish itself from pacifism, revolutionary nonviolence retains pacifism’s commitment to nonviolence. As Gene Sharp writes in Gandhi as Political Strategist, one important aspect of a “nonviolent revolutionary program” is “combating what are regarded as social evils by nonviolent action.” According to Meyer in Beautiful Trouble, revolutionary nonviolence “proposes a militant nonviolent praxis based on revolutionary transformation and mass civil resistance.”54 But proponents of revolutionary nonviolent often emphasize, in Sharpian fashion, that their commitment to nonviolence is for “strategic,” rather than moral, reasons. In Strategy for a Living Revolution, Lakey emphasizes that for MNS, a nonviolent commitment was a strategic choice: “Bourgeois pacifism is clearly an inadequate ideology for a revolutionary program. But nonviolent struggle as a strategic commitment is something else again.”55

Like pacifism, revolutionary nonviolence still interprets history in moral terms—good and evil—rather than in terms of material interests. And like pacifism, the key world-historical problem revolutionary nonviolence seeks to solve, the great evil, is “violence” — albeit “violence” in a more systemic sense than traditional pacifism. As Cornell writes, MNS believed that “war is inherent to capitalism and social inequality is itself a form of violence, maintained by the threat of direct state violence; this requires those who morally reject violence to become social revolutionaries.”56 MNS similarly emphasized that ecological problems, sexism, and racism were also expressions of violence.

Revolutionary nonviolence has a clear libertarian orientation. As Sharp wrote in Gandhi as a Political Strategist, revolutionary nonviolence seeks to build “a more equalitarian, decentralized, and libertarian social order,” “largely or entirely without use of the State machinery.” MNS “promoted the idea of a ‘decentralized socialism,’” and hearkened to the “nonviolent, libertarian socialism” of the New Left magazine Liberation.57 Though in disagreement with the average anarchist on the question of violence, MNS studied anarchist thinkers like Murray Bookchin, whose tract “Listen Marxist!” was a particular favorite. In its “macro-analysis seminars”—MNS’s version of political education—MNS also relied on “selections from the Black Rose volume The Case for Participatory Democracy, edited by Dimitri Roussopoulos, early works on libertarian socialism by Michael Albert and Robin Hahnel, and even selections from [19^th and 20^th century anarchists] Alexander Berkman and Kropotkin.” 58

Somewhat incongruously, Lakey—whom the late anarcho-pacifist political scientist Geoffrey Ostergaard compared to Muste, in terms of importance within the revolutionary nonviolence tradition—also admires state-centric Scandinavian social democracy.59 A comment of Lakey’s from 2012 illustrates the odd tension: “The anarchists claim me but I’m always a little surprised when they do because I’m fond of social democracy as it’s been developed in Norway….” Yet Lakey continues, saying, “I like decision-making to happen on the lowest possible level. I think that’s why I missed out on Communism because of their preference for putting a lot of power on the state level, even of very large states.” 60 Though few would mistake Norway for a fully communist country, its economy features enormous amounts of centralized state planning and management. Lakey’s frequent celebration of Sweden and Norway, as well as Sharp’s, seemingly incongruous with their otherwise libertarian politics, can’t help but call to mind the Eisenhower administration’s insight that Scandinavian countries were “valuable in international organizations and for general [anti-communist] propaganda purposes” since they were regarded “throughout the world as prime examples of Western democracy.”61 This peculiar combination of MNS’s pacifist roots, anarchist methods, and selective embrace of liberal democracy may distinguish MNS as a critical antecedent of the tendency described by Bhaskar Sunkara as “anarcho-liberalism.”62

MNS’s revolutionary nonviolence may have been a loose and sometimes contradictory worldview, but one feature was clear: it was consistently and explicitly opposed to Marxism. In notes, MNS’s “nonviolent revolution” is distinguished from “Marxist revolution,” and early forums were held on “Marxist revolution vs. nonviolent revolution.”63 MNS emphasized it was not trying to organize a “proletarian vanguard party.” In notes, the question, “Why isn’t MNS Marxist-Leninist?” is marked for discussion. Why indeed?

Some answers are found in MNS member David Albert’s 1979 essay, “Working Toward a New Society and a Critique of American Marxism.”64 In this piece, Albert initially suggests that his critique of Marxism is narrow and merely practical: Marx’s ideas were an “an alien import which flies directly in the face of a specifically American cultural ideology.” Plus, the American ruling class had successfully suppressed “the best which Marxist analysis and vision has to offer.”

But Albert quickly moves on to more substantive issues, like the state. For the vast majority of political projects, including Marxism, the state is an essential, if fraught, political vehicle. But Albert, like Gene Sharp, and consistent with revolutionary nonviolence’s worldview, demurs. He writes: “We need to learn how to reject governmental ‘solutions’ to our problems.”65 Instead, Albert urges us to advocate only for “alternatives which increase control over our lives by empowering us to meet our own needs.” For example, Albert suggests, activists’ “main energies should not be directed toward National Health Insurance…” but rather toward something described as “complete community-based control” of medicine. Similarly, and very pessimistically, Albert writes, “campaigning for higher government expenditures for solar energy research…is bound by its very nature to…result in the production of ‘solar weapons’ and an increase in the possibilities for satellite warfare.”

In Strategy for a Living Revolution, Lakey describes states as “bullies,” which is odd given his professed fondness for Nordic social democracy.66 More paradoxical yet, Lakey also casts states as too pathetically ineffectual to actually impose limits on corporations: “The efforts of labor movements and others in the past century to force some responsibility on corporations through political structures, never very effective, are now hopeless because the corporations have outgrown their political structures.”67 It seems, according to Lakey, that states are, by turn, too forceful, not forceful enough, and great if in Scandinavia. Lakey declares that the “egalitarian world revolution will not be led by large nation-states no matter what their ideology or how frequent their cultural revolutions. Such a task must rightly belong to the peoples movements with a genuinely transnational vision.” Lakey cautions, “such movements must remain keenly aware of the mistakes of revolutionists who were caught in the nation-state framework.”68 Instead, in Sharpian fashion, after the nonviolent revolution there would be no states, but rather a new, world society.

Neither did MNS share Marxism’s emphasis on parties and mass politics. Lakey asserts that “mass politics is very thin,” because “the search for the common denominator deprives it of cultural richness.” Plus mass politics were “sexist” and “macho.” Lakey feels the nature of mass politics contradicted the “massive revolutionary consciousness” needed for nonviolent revolution. Instead, “the decline of the old culture, felt differently but increasingly in our society, means that a counter-culture is essential.”69

Parties, according to Lakey, were the exact opposite of this counter-culture: “Working within the party means endless compromise as party leaders shift among the coalitions, looking for votes by means of the lowest common denominator. With occasional exceptions, party workers cannot hope to do much radical education and survive with any influence in the party… the arena of mass party work is not an environment for the discovery or even the transmission of new, compelling symbols of identity.”70

Parties were also viewed as untrustworthy. For example, as Lakey writes, “The tragic failure of the socialists in Europe to strike against the First World War is more understandable when we remember that most of them had taken the parliamentary road.”71 Though Lakey selectively quotes the likes of Marx and Mao in Strategy for a Living Revolution, he charged the party-bearing Bolsheviks with a willingness “to manipulate their way into influencing mass movements.” Though MNS would come to understand itself as a “cadre organization of…basically full-time revolutionaries,” MNS “said no to manipulation.”72

There were also objections to Marxism’s historical materialism. David Albert was uncomfortable with the “materiality” of historical materialism. He conflated it—incorrectly, and quite dimly—with consumerism: “The major problem with materialism as an ideology,” he writes, “is that it leads to massive resource scarcity, creating conditions for mass conflict.”73 As another MNS member put it, “I worry about those who try to provide for men’s material needs without a spiritual dimension.”74

To deal with ecological problems like resource scarcity, MNS proposed “de-development”—reversing industrialization.75 Lakey argues the nonviolent revolution should “check population growth,” a policy that would supposedly reduce “mass violence.”76 Lakey quite correctly notes, “Traditional Marxism does not take kindly to population control, much less to the needed reduction in population to an optimum size in relation to resources and quality of life.”77

Incidentally, MNS shared its view of “de-development” with Sharp’s former Norwegian supervisor and father of deep ecology Arne Naess. In the 1980s, the matter of “de-development” drove an acute, movement-dividing conflict between deep ecologist Naess and social ecologist Murray Bookchin. In 1987, Bookchin wrote an essay, “Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology,” in which he criticized Naess as “pontiff” of a kind of “eco-brutalism” that, in advocating for policies like “de-development,” cast humanity as a “malignant product of natural evolution,” and which disconcertingly shared a fair amount with “blood and soil” style political programs.78 That summer, at the first national meeting of the U.S. Greens, Bookchin was to give the keynote speech. In advance of his lecture, he laid a copy of his article in every seat. It was not well received. The deep ecologist poet Gary Snyder accused Bookchin, an anarchist, of acting “like a Stalinist thug.” After the event, Bookchin was “effectively read out of the green movement,” being “much too radical for the mainstream NGOs, and much too politically principled for the lifestyle and direct action greens.”79 As for Naess, “he did not feel the need to confront the social ecologists.” Deep ecologists and de-developmentalists did, however, “face[] embarrassment…when activists of Earth First used its concepts to justify violent action, green Luddism, and a campaign to enforce sterilisation and end food aid to developing nations.”80

There was something even more fundamental that estranged MNS from Marxism: the issue of class itself. MNS was skeptical about the world-historic importance of workers. In notes from 1977, it is deemed “paternalistic” and “imperialistic” to suggest that “only the working class can do revolution.”81 Despite it being the 1970s, a period of historic labor militancy, MNS possessed “grave reservations” about “re-radicalizing the labor movement.”82 Albert, echoing the right-wing monetarists of the time, cautions, “We must… remain unmoved by the tendency to uncritically support unionized worker demands for more ‘bread and butter’ simply because they are put forward by fellow workers.”83 The implication was that such demands were misguided expressions of mindless consumerism.

Furthermore, MNS thought class struggle required violence—which of course it does not. In its widely circulated pamphlet “Why Nonviolence?” MNS celebrates Muste for abandoning “class war” in search of a politics that could be “simultaneously revolutionary and nonviolent.”84 Lakey charges liberals and Marxists alike of trading in a “John Wayne” culture where power is “equated with violence.”85 (This turn of phrase is deployed in Gene Sharp’s 1970 Exploring Nonviolent Alternatives as well.86 ) Socialism had failed to end “organized mass violence,” “national competition,” and “relationships of domination,” Lakey writes.87 Albert claims “American Marxists have long criticized those openly committed to nonviolent direct action as a means of struggle as either lacking in a theoretical framework or as simply naïve.” But tellingly, Albert has to concede, “there are very few even among Marxist Leninists today who advocate for the need for violence in the present.”88

Nevertheless, MNS’s opposition to Marxism was fundamental to the group’s identity. Consider this letter from David Albert giving feedback to comrades about an MNS brochure: “Imagine giving [this MNS] brochure to a committed Marxian socialist: will s/he recognize the deep fundamental commitment of MNS to revolutionary nonviolence, including a specific critique of violence in all spheres of American life which isn’t class-bound…[and MNS’s] proud rooting in a nonviolent revolutionary heritage beyond national borders which we fully own as our own, commitment in the present…to specific nonviolent modes of conflict waging and resolution from the interpersonal to the international level, specific ideas about how decentralism, community control, de-development, non-materialism and personal empowerment relate to nonviolence, and the importance of the development of concrete nonviolent alternatives in the here-and-now.”89

From Class to Classism, from Class Consciousness to Cross-Class Movements

Perhaps the most significant expression of MNS’s attitudes about class was its ambivalence about class consciousness. In Strategy for a Living Revolution, Lakey imagines that the nonviolent revolutionary movement would need to adopt a “world consciousness” that “transcends sectional loyalties such as class….”90 Though Lakey claims his idea of world consciousness “is different from the old appeal to the common good which has been the ideological stock-in-trade of capitalists who want to deny the reality of class conflict,” he cautions that “the exaggeration of group differences to the exclusion of our common humanity would make likely our common destruction. We are, even when fighting with each other, sisters and brothers.”91

Important members of MNS would build on Lakey’s notion of a “global consciousness,” and come to argue that “cross-class movements” were actually the most effective way to make “social change.”92 As Lakey writes in the forward to the 2012 edition of Strategy for a Living Revolution, “Activist-sociologist Betsy Leondar-Wright [an MNS alumna] compiled a list of social movements in the U.S. history (sic) and analyzed them by class composition; she found that success went more often to those that were cross-class rather than composed of only one class.”93

But there was an obstacle to these cross-class movements: “classism.” Classism, a then-novel category, referred not to the exploitation of workers by owners, but rather to prejudicial attitudes and hurtful behaviors constituting “class oppression” and “class domination,” like the “stereotyping [of] working class people as ‘Archie Bunker’ types or as racist or dumb.”94 As defined by MNS in 1979, “Classism is the systematic domination of working class people by rich and upper middle class people and their institutions, corporations, governments, etc. Middle and lower middle class people are caught in this system also, sometimes being in oppressor roles and often being oppressed themselves.”

The solution to classism was not necessarily an end to the class system through socialized ownership of the means of production, but a “non-classist movement” that “reached out to working class people” and featured the “inclusion” of “working class issues.”95 The concern to “include” workers seemed mainly tactical, and was often framed in therapeutic terms: as written in a 1979 MNS network newsletter, “We will find in the coming years that the movement for fundamental change will involve more and more people from the working class… To facilitate this development and build unity among all people working for change, we need to combat classism. A non-classist movement needs to give space for working class people to get in touch with our own intelligence and power. It needs support groups of working class people to nurture and help each other…”

MNS’s fixation of class as a cultural category, rather than as an objective relationship to the means of production, calls to mind Sharp’s Dictionary of Power and Struggle, where the entry for “Class” is subdivided into two concepts, “Political Class” and “Social Class” — no mention anywhere of class as an economic category.96 It also calls to mind Sharp’s “social theory of power,” which, as I write in Part One, “is preoccupied with the way the ‘centralized state’ possesses political power. In this theory, there is little recognition of how power is articulated through the material process of production…[and] if the base relations of production are invisible, the objective reality of class also becomes obscured, relegated to mere cultural identity.”97

MNS’s unusual emphasis on “classism” corresponded to the beginning of a decades long campaign by liberal social scientists to naturalize the “identity” of class, reformulating it into a category of culture, rather than political economy. According to Google Ngram, the term “classism” was virtually non-existent in the late sixties, but in the 1970s, experiences a meteoric rise. Meanwhile, “bourgeoisie” and “proletariat” begin plummeting in the mid-1970s, with no end in sight.

MNS struggled earnestly to theorize “classism”—in large part because class was a sore spot in the organization.98 There was conflict over the “middle-class-ness” of the group. Lakey writes, “It would be years before working class people came out of the closet in MNS.”99 Lakey counts himself among these “closeted” working class members.100 Betsy Raasch-Gilman reflects that MNS spent lots of time mulling the question, “…why middle-class and upper-middle-class values are so important even in the movement. How do working-class and poor people claim their rightful place in a movement organization?”101 There were disagreements over MNS’s unusually involved, only quasi-voluntary process of cost-sharing. The process required an uncomfortable level of exposure for low-income members, to whom MNS offered as remedy “cost sharing support groups.” As one member recounted, “The combination of feeling poor, having to prove I was poor enough to be worthy of reduced payment, and sensing a begrudging spirit from the upper income people, all felt like I was again applying for welfare in mainstream America with my mother.”102

The theoretical limits of revolutionary nonviolence became an ever-tougher bone of contention too. In group notes from the 1970s, an upstart named “Nancy” raises disruptive points like, “MNS not looking at real problems…Unrealistic to fight oppression on personal basis; is material base for sexism, etc…. Have to change mode of production, way we produce things…Base for new society exists in working class due to cooperative work. This makes workers revol. …Can’t look to oppressors for change because is no material base for them to fight for change.”103 It seems Nancy’s highly salient points were chalked up to her being a grump. Later in the notes, under an “Energizers” section, someone thought it worthwhile to record the seemingly patronizing observation, “Nancy smiling!”

Apparent dismissals of Nancy notwithstanding, throughout the 1970s, many MNS members grew increasingly aware that class was a blind spot in the organization. In a 1977 profile of MNS, a member named Pam reflects the following: “I think that MNS simply has to reach a broader constituency to achieve its real purpose of social change… Some of us here have formed a group to study Marxism and we see many strengths in it. We do recognize that it has serious drawbacks… But it does provide a very clear and compelling analysis of the forces operating in society. It also deals directly with the issue of taking power. Finally, it fuses us with the majority of ordinary real people in the country. Not all but certainly most of us here have a middle-class background. We need to be speaking to black people, welfare recipients, blue-collar workers, clerical workers. We believe in de-development. What most workers and the poor see in such a program is self-denial—which is all they have known… We must come to understand our own class consciousness… We should be devoting more time to studying the labor movement… We need to be finding better ways to move from training into practice…”104

Some MNS members even decided to take jobs as workplace union organizers. But this created dissonance in the communes. The organization was increasingly divided into two groups: the “hard-bitten shop floor organizers,” and the “new age hippie flakes.”105 As Lakey describes, “[The organizers would] want to come back and talk at the dinner table about this happened at the break, or that happened at the break and the people at the dinner table weren’t necessarily all that interested, because there was a tone in the community of middle-class-ness, even though a lot of the leadership was working class.”

MNS did not substantively adjust its analysis or strategy in effort to overcome its internal class contradictions. Instead it redoubled its efforts to address “classism” within its membership. A “Working Class Identity Group” was formed, as was something called the “Working Class Strategy Support Collective.”106 There were working class speak-outs and in 1979 a whole issue of the MNS newsletter Dandelion was dedicated to “Classism.” MNS developed “anti-classism” trainings, inventing these workshops “from whole cloth” as “no one else was running them, or ever had run them.”107 The anti-classism efforts were not just for the rich: working class members worked on undoing “internalized” class oppression and focused on “separating personal hurts from classism,” so that they might “act powerfully and not out of our own painful emotions.” There was a “cross-class dialogue group” that met for six hours every month for six years.108 Members of this group included “Felice Yeskel, Jerry Koch-Gonzalez (who identifies as lower-middle-class), Linda Stout (a working-class activist and author), Jenny Ladd (a multi-millionaire inheritor) and some other owning-class people who have not wanted to publicly identify themselves.”

MNS felt that classism—like sexism, racism, and homophobia—was individually internalized, and needed to be purged at that level. Indeed, according to Gene Sharp in Gandhi as a Political Strategist, one key focus of revolutionary nonviolence was “improvement by individuals of their own lives.” According to Cornell, MNS’s commitment to individual transformation “was perhaps the most ambiguous aspect” of their project.109 It combined New Age spirituality, counter-cultural lifestyle politics, and “the unlearning of oppressive behavior through a variety of radical therapy practices…”110 MNS members regularly engaged in “Reevaluation Counseling,” a therapy method that purported to liberate people from the childhood trauma that underlay their oppressive behaviors. Reevaluation Counseling, now considered by some professionals to be a psychotherapy cult, was created by a man named Harvey Jackins, who developed the protocol according to Church of Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard’s theory of dianetics.111

The Lost Critique: Howard Ryan’s Essay, “The Nonviolent Movement and The Working Class and A Critique of Movement For a New Society”

In 1980—the year that Ronald Reagan would be elected—MNS’s challenges around class would become more interesting still. That year, a young man named Howard Ryan, an MNS trainee who had “been active in anti-nuclear, anti-draft, and anti-sexist issues,” dropped a bombshell: a thoroughgoing Marxist critique of MNS entitled, “The Nonviolent Movement and The Working Class and a Critique of Movement for a New Society.”112 Ryan’s essay and the ensuing correspondence with MNS, all housed in the Swarthmore Peace Collection, should be noted as first-rate primary texts for illustrating leftwing activist consciousness in the U.S. at the moment of the neoliberal turn.

On November 30, 1980, Ryan submitted his 30-page type-written manuscript to MNS’s own New Society Publishers, seeking its publication: “It is my hope that you will find my critique to be an affirming and supportive one,” he writes, optimistically. “I have been a firm admirer of your group since being introduced to it in 1977 and, honestly speaking, I would most likely be living and working with you folks today were it not for your approach to class issues.”

In his essay, Ryan first recounts his own process of coming to class consciousness, all thanks to his girlfriend, Margo: “It’s been ten months since that fateful evening when Margo, a new acquaintance, had asked me about my class background…. I hardly knew my father—they divorced when I was two. My mother worked in a cleaners when I was younger; later, she ran a parking lot business. My grandfather worked a drill press at Hughes Aircraft and my grandmother cleaned houses, part-time. ‘I had a feeling you were working class,’ [Margo] said…. [She] proceeded to tell me things that really turned my head around. Things that struck deep. For example, she had picked up on my tendency to hold knowledgeable people in awe…. Over time I begin to grasp the significance of people’s class background in shaping their character and their relationships. I was becoming class conscious—at least on an interpersonal level.”113

Ryan then describes finding the “nonviolent movement,” and becoming “fascinated” by—surprise, surprise—Gene Sharp’s book, The Politics of Nonviolent Action.114 Clearly a young man with an organic intellectualism, Ryan wrote a paper about Sharp, and presented it to Margo. Alas, “she was very critical of it.”

“I was admittedly hurt,” Ryan writes. “Margo was a Marxist. She said that my theory didn’t start with the ‘material conditions,’ that it was ‘idealist.’ I staunchly defended my paper.” But Margo gave Ryan some books that explained the distinction between “materialism” and “idealism.” “I had to admit,” Ryan writes, “Marx’s materialism made a lot of sense. I’ll tell you what really won me over though; it was the class stuff.” In plainspoken yet powerful prose, Ryan goes on to describe the history and current nature of the class system as he saw it after his ten months of study: “The constituency of these social classes are determined not so much by their income brackets as they are by their relationship to the means of production. Are you an owner? Or not an owner? Do you make a living off of other people’s labor? Or do other people make a living off of your labor? These are the bottom questions which determine your relation to production and, consequently, your class position.”115

Ryan then proceeds to critique the class politics of the “nonviolent movement.” He focuses on Movement for a New Society because “their abundant books and pamphlets are well-disseminated,” they “offer what is perhaps the most thorough and explicit expression of the politics that I wish to challenge,” and because his own politics “were strongly influenced by MNS’s materials.”116

For one, Ryan was skeptical of MNS’s emphasis on “classism.” He writes: “I keep wanting to put ‘classism’ in quotations because whenever I see the term being used…I feel like its meaning has very little to do with class struggle…. The Winter ’79 issue of the MNS Dandelion newsletter was devoted to the question of classism…[but] nowhere in any of the articles are the most important aspects of class oppression talked about, such as the exploitation of working people at the workplace. There is no discussion about doing workplace organizing, or on the need to organize working people as a class in order to overthrow the capitalist class. Instead the articles focus almost exclusively on the interpersonal oppression of working class people by middle class people…Thus classism is seen as another form of prejudice that needs to be overcome like racism, sexism, ageism, etc.”117 Ryan, by contrast, says he believes that “the class nature of how production is organized is the most fundamental aspect to our social existence.”118 Ryan is earnestly complementary of MNS’s efforts regarding class analysis; his “hope” is that MNS will “begin to move beyond the limits of ‘non-classism’ and toward a full support and involvement in the working class struggle.”119

Ryan also picked up on, and objected to, Lakey’s invocation of “world consciousness.”120 In Ryan’s view, “there can be no basis for achieving world peace and justice, or for the development of ‘world consciousness,’ until the class relations that dominate our planet have been done away with. In order for this to happen, the working peoples of the world must engage in class struggle against the ruling classes. Until the time that such a struggle has been won, I see a world-consciousness, or the notion that we are all sisters and brothers, as standing in contradiction to the very pressing need for an international class-consciousness…”121 Ryan acknowledges that Lakey “supports the recognition of group differences and of conflicting interests,” but does not like that Lakey “prioritizes the stressing of our ‘common humanity’ (read: our common humanity with our ruling class oppressors) over the recognizing of differences…”

“Unlike the capitalists,” Ryan writes, “Lakey does not deny the reality of class conflict. Rather, he subordinates it.” Ryan explains that he is “wary of this subordinating of the class struggle to a ‘higher calling’ for the embracing of all humanity…I think the working class needs now, more than ever, to embrace their class sisters and brothers…they need to realize that 98% of us (or thereabouts) share a common oppression, and a common interest in struggling together.”

Ryan also takes to task David Albert’s characterization of the American working class in his aforementioned MNS paper “Working Toward a New Society and a Critique of American Marxism.” Ryan writes, “Albert assails Marxists for uncritically supporting workers’ demands for higher wages. He claims that we should not necessarily give our support to such demands just because they are being made by our fellow workers. As Albert sees it, the majority of American workers are being paid sufficiently to meet their essential needs and that the excess wages are being used to meet artificial, capitalist-induced ‘needs’ such as campers, 4-slice toasters, color TVs, etc.”122

Using an impressive degree of statistical detail, Ryan deflates Albert’s characterization of an opulent American working class, and sensibly points out that “it is essential to include a wage demand” in worker organizing “to ensure the broadest possible participation.”123

Ryan further illustrates how Albert’s rhetoric mirrors the anti-worker, inflation-obsessed tropes of the mass media: “Wage demands are frequently pitted against inflation-fighting, as in a Time article (July 24, 1978) entitled ‘Labor Looks to Some Big Gains—loss for inflation fighters.’”124

Ryan was a prescient young man. The 1940s through the 1960s was global capitalism’s “golden era.” But as Christian Parenti lucidly describes in his classic Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis, “By the early 1970s…postwar growth and industrialization meant chronic excess capacity on a global scale. It was a classic crisis of ‘over-accumulation.’ In other words, capitalism was suffering from industrial success. In this economic environment, American manufacturing and merchandising firms found it increasingly difficult to maintain their amazing (if not aberrant) postwar profitability.”125 At the same time, the victories of the New Deal and Great Society programs had translated into an empowered working class capable of winning higher wages and defending them from cuts. The upshot was “stagflation”—a stagnant economy, coupled with price inflation—economist code for rising wages. Consequently, profits were falling, from a high of 10 percent in 1965, to a low of 4.5 percent in 1974.126 What was the owning class to do?

As Parenti writes, “The solution, according to New Right theorists like Milton Friedman, Lawrence Mead, and George Gilder, was to cut government. That is, cut taxes on the corporations and the wealthy, deregulate health and safety regulations, and slash state spending on education, welfare, and social programs. And to initiate this the government would have to plunge the economy into a ‘cold bath recession’ to scare and discipline labor.”127 That is precisely what happened—with little resistance from the New Left, unsurprising given its own “poststructural” turn away from class analysis and political “truth claims” altogether. In 1979, President Carter appointed Paul Volcker as Chairman of the Federal Reserve. “Late in 1979 Volcker dramatically tightened the money supply by boosting interest rates, thus cutting borrowing power and buying power, and diminishing economic activity in general…. As a direct result, the U.S. economy plunged into its most severe recession since the Great Depression.” The “Volcker Shock” also triggered a debt crisis throughout the developing Third World, creating political openings for bank-mandated neoliberal “structural adjustment.”

No matter the pain, Volcker’s maneuver worked to stop and reverse wage growth, which was his priority. “Before the 1980-82 cold-bath recession, wage freezes and pay cuts in unionized industries had been almost non-existent…. By 1982, 44 percent of new contracts conceded wage freezes or outright cuts.”128 Most economists agree that the power of the American wage still has not recovered.129 The gap between wages and living expenses was covered by the expansion and loosening of consumer credit markets. Consumer indebtedness deepened, and economic inequality with it. Profits, meanwhile, shot back up, and “[b]y 1987 Reagan had delivered the richest 1 percent of the population a next tax saving of 25 percent, while the poorest tenth of workers saw 20 percent more of their incomes ‘swallowed by taxes.’”130

Ryan’s final critique of MNS is its fixation on “simple living”: “It is my contention,” he writes, “that the vast majority of working people are living a heck of a lot simpler than is often suggested by simple living advocates.”131 Ryan also takes issue with MNS’s call for “de-development”: “I think that modern industry is a potentially liberating force, provided it is shifted toward ecologically sensible technologies. As I see it, if workers planned production then they could take satisfaction in what is otherwise alienating factory work.”132 Plus Ryan has a “broader strategic concern…regarding counter-institutions, such as co-ops and community energy projects.” He argues it essential that “they not be seen as a substitute for a mass political movement that directly challenges the big companies and the capitalist system as a whole.”

Ryan concludes with this: “Any discussion of the working class experience is incomplete if it fails to consider internalized oppression: the guilt and self-hate which are encouraged by society and which permeate our thoughts.” He offers this moving hypothetical to illustrate the average working man’s situation. As it remains so strikingly relevant to our modern political situation, and as it did not get published back in 1980, it deserves quotation at length.

“By the time he’s old enough to walk,” Ryan writes, “little Johnny gets into mischief—he’s a bad and naughty boy. A few years later Johnny’s friends notice that he doesn’t like rough games or fighting—bad little Johnny’s also a sissy. In school Johnny gets restless and can’t pay attention, and so falls behind—bad little Johnny the sissy gets labeled a ‘slow learner.’ On through his teens the bad messages continue to get compiled in Johnny’s head—Johnny’s fat, Johnny’s got pimples, Johnny jacks off, Johnny can’t get girls, Johnny’s a faggot. Later, he’s married, with kids, a blue collar job—Johnny’s a nobody, his family lives in a crummy apartment, his wife has to get a job to make ends meet, Johnny’s not a good provider. Johnny’s not a real man. Being of American working class stock, Johnny has bought into the myth that it’s his fault that he’s poor. It’s his fault that his family doesn’t have a nice home in the suburbs. By American standards, Johnny is a failure…. If he had only tried harder in school, he might have gotten a scholarship and went to college. If only he wasn’t so dumb, or so lazy, if he hadn’t fooled around so much, etc.

“Johnny’s quite a failure, all right. But there is one thing that he can do, and he can do it better than anyone else he knows (with the possible exception of his wife, who feels just as guilty as he does). Johnny can sacrifice. He sacrifices so much; puts in all the overtime he can. He works 55, sometimes 60 hours a week. Johnny’s dream is to save up enough to make a down payment on one of the new tract homes. His wife would love it. But every time he manages to get a little ahead, something always seems to come up. One of the kids breaks an arm or needs braces; his mother gets sick and needs help; the car needs an overhaul; he gets into an accident and his insurance won’t cover it; a temporary layoff at work; the union goes on strike; on and on. Still, he continues to plug away…. Johnny’s life may not be the grandest. Most of it’s spent busting ass on the job…. He may not be the greatest success, but Johnny’s determined to prove to himself and to the world that he can do something good in his life, something important. He’ll work and work, and save and save; and if he’s very lucky maybe he’ll get his family one or two of the good things in life, something they can be proud of. Maybe it’ll be a color TV; maybe a second family car. Or, maybe he’ll be among the fortunate few who lands a promotion to supervisor. Then they might talk about the possibilities of a camper, or a house, or—most importantly—the possibilities of getting his kids into college so that they’ll be educated and not have to go through the same crap that he’s been through.

“Can we expect Johnny to be open to our telling him that he shouldn’t demand higher wages? That he and his family could live comfortably on his present income—and their life would be much more fulfilling—if they turned to a simple lifestyle? That the things Johnny wants for his family and for which he slaves—the new car, the color TV, the tract home—are artificially induced needs which will bring them no happiness and which will spoil the environment, besides? My guess is that he will not be open to hearing us, but he will respond angrily and defensively, and that he will be justified in doing so. In a sense we have colluded with the capitalist by denying Johnny his humanity. The capitalist denies his humanity by refusing to allow him to be anything other than a piece of production machinery; we deny his humanity by telling him that the things that he wants are not legitimate wants.

“Before we decide unequivocally that the material things which the working class family strives for are artificially induced needs, I think we should look beyond the commodities themselves and toward the actual social functions that they serve. We might then find that capitalism has not so much created artificial needs as it has touched upon peoples real, gut-level, human needs and then developed various perverted, inefficient, ecologically unsound, and highly profitable ways of filling them.”

But, Ryan says, MNS has instead “placed themselves on a political pedestal, established an impeccably pure, revolutionary code of conduct, and announced that they will refuse to support the struggles of American workers until they begin living up to MNS’s standards of politically correct living. They have attacked workers’ values as regressive, illegitimated their needs, and offered no validation of the real concerns and truly human aspirations toward which working people strive. At the same time, they have asked of workers to sacrifice those precious material prizes which represent to the worker their sense of well-being; the sense of their human individuality which their working lives otherwise deny them.”133

At the very end of his essay, Ryan offers a few suggestions: workers organizations MNS could work with, and the idea of supporting rank-and-file wildcat strikers. He signs off with this: “As for myself, I’m not quite sure what my political future has in store for me. At present, I’m trying to find a union job (I’m a school bus driver). But whatever activity I end up doing, you can bet that it’ll be working class-oriented.” Indeed, Ryan would go on to work at Labor Notes, and in 2017 published a book with Monthly Review Press, Educational Justice: Teaching and Organizing Against the Corporate Juggernaut, based on his experience organizing to defend public education.134

Copies of Ryan’s paper were made available throughout MNS, and a month later, on January 7, 1981, the “MNS Working Class Strategy Support Collective” met to discuss it.135 By and large, members of this group found Ryan’s piece stimulating, if a little harsh. But tellingly, there was an effort to distance MNS from Ryan’s critiques by pointing to the organization’s free spirit of ideological diversity. As MNS member Joan Nikelsky wrote in her five-page response to Ryan on behalf of the group, “MNS is a network of collectives and in each collective are individuals with varying shades of political opinion. We have no ‘party line’ or ‘central committee’… Although MNS publishes a lot of literature, most of it is not meant to be an ‘official’ MNS position.”136

Ryan quickly responded to Nikelsky with an eight-page letter, and disagreed politely but pointedly: “About your claims that MNS has no ‘party line,’ I don’t agree. When I was applying to join an MNS training program back in ’78, they had a very clear set of political and personal requirements which I would have to meet in order to be accepted. Not the least of these is that I was expected to have a commitment to nonviolence as a means of social change. Yes, I’ll admit that the party line is applied somewhat flexibly, if you’ll admit that the party line does exist….”137 According to Ryan, MNS’s party line is observable in “Albert’s pamphlet [on Marxism], MNS’s current packet, and nonviolent philosophy in general” — and, Ryan continues, “all blame the victim [i.e. worker].”

Ryan goes on to issue a much more specific critique of Gene Sharp’s theory of power (very similar to the one I assert in Part One of this essay), which was so central to MNS’s program: “The problem in Sharp’s analysis—and in all nonviolent theories that I have seen—is that the emphasis is on the subjective factors and there is no understanding of how our subjective consciousness is determined by our objective existence…. Sharp makes me mad because he offers analyses and prescribes solutions for the problems of the oppressed, yet it seems to me that he has little understanding—and has made little investigation—of the concrete situations of working people’s lives.”

In response to this letter, George Lakey, one of MNS’s co-founders and among its most important ideological leaders, weighed in with a personal missive of his own to Ryan: “At last I have the chance to turn my attention toward the dialogue you’ve been conducting with MNS via Joan Nikelsky and the Working Class Strategy Support Collective,” Lakey writes.138 “I like the quality of the dialogue; it seems that people are proceeding on the basis of mutual respect, expressing points of unity, acknowledging areas for growth, and expressing differences in direct and clear ways.”

Lakey does not so much respond to the larger argument Ryan is making, but proceeds to explain why MNS isn’t Marxist—though, he clarifies, “I’ll [just] speak for myself.” Here, Lakey is perhaps at his most candid about his and MNS’s rejection of class politics.

Lakey objects to an “abstract adherence to a strategic conception (say, Leninism) which prevents learning from history-as-it’s-happening-in-the-present.” He disagrees with the idea that class is the “primary contradiction,” quoting Sheila Rowbotham. He believes an economic class must first become a “status group” before it can in engage in revolutionary struggle, citing Stanley Aronowitz. Lakey believes that the “prefigurative tradition” is more dynamic than doing politics through unions, parties, or the state.

Lakey also tells Ryan that Ryan misunderstands his meaning of “world consciousness”: “You criticize my thinking in Strategy as being insufficiently supportive of class consciousness because I want in addition a ‘world consciousness.’ Since, you say, ‘world consciousness’ prevents polarization of workers vs. capitalists, it stands in the way of revolution…. You missed most of my book, for it is mostly about polarization, how to induce it and how to manage it!” But Lakey does not comment on the specific merits of “inducing” and “managing” polarization between workers and capitalists via class consciousness — i.e. Ryan’s critique.

Finally, Lakey writes, “another whole area where [MNS] would like to be inventive, daring to depart from the assumptions of mainstream Marxism, is in the means of struggle.” By this, Lakey means “departing” from mainstream Marxism’s supposed insistence on violence. He quotes the Italian then-Marxist Lucio Colleti: “My basic aim in writing my essay on ‘State and Revolution,’” says Colleti, “was to confront and attack a conception that Stalinism had entrenched in the workers’ movement, that simply identified revolution with violence. For this tradition, it was only violence that was the real hallmark of a revolution; everything else—the transformation of the nature of power, the establishment of socialist democracy—was of no importance.” Setting aside the incorrect implication that class politics can be reduced to the Soviet experience, and specifically to Stalin’s reign, Colleti is a strange person to rely on for any definitive interpretation of Marxism, as he “ended his days as a parliamentary deputy for the party of [right-wing and famously corrupt] premier Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s richest capitalist.”139

Lakey’s conclusion is dramatic: “Not only does exploration of nonviolent revolution defy Stalinist orthodoxy, it goes against the prevailing assumption of our whole culture! Howard, we are proposing nothing less than a paradigm shift in how people look at power, as fundamental as the idea that the earth goes around the sun instead of vice versa.”

Lakey’s response, with its invocation of ideological flexibility, the multiplicity of identity, the “prefigurative tradition,” and “paradigm shifts,” is poetic and appealing. But bear in mind its date: May 11, 1981.

The following month, Fed Chairman Volcker would turn the economic screws tighter than ever, jacking up the federal funds rate to a shocking 20 percent.140 Three months later, on August 5, President Ronald Reagan would fire 11,359 air traffic controllers, crushing the Professional Air Traffic Controllers’ Organization (PATCO), and sending a menacing shot across labor’s bow. On August 13, Reagan would sign the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, slashing the top marginal tax rate from 70% to 50%; the rate would be cut again from 50% to 33% just a few years later. In October, Reagan reanimated the B-1 bomber program, and construction on the Pershing II missile system began, signaling a turn away from disarmament, and toward renewed nuclear build-up and a more aggressive posture of Communist “rollback.” That year, Reagan would also deepen U.S. support for the rightwing Contra guerillas trying to overthrow the socialist Sandinistas in Nicaragua. In February 1982, Mexico was the first Third World country to succumb to the Volcker-induced debt crisis, and within the year, the International Monetary Fund would be using its leverage to force free market reforms. In June 1982, Reagan would launch the War on Drugs from the White House garden.

Neoliberalism had arrived.

Over the next two decades, U.S. labor would be steamrolled by off-shoring, deindustrialization, and right-to-work laws, immiserated by stagnant wages, ballooning consumer debt, and the roll-back of healthcare, education, and housing subsidies. The Soviet Union would fall, thanks in part to the helpful trainings provided by Sharp and the Albert Einstein Institution to secessionists. Under Clinton, the party of Roosevelt would sign the free trade agreement NAFTA into law, slash welfare, and expand the police and prisons system further. U.S. military interventions around the world would multiply. They would be launched to advance “freedom,” “democracy,” and “peace,” but more often, they would produce failed states. The solar panels would be taken off the White House and climate change would accelerate, unabated.

How would MNS theorize and respond to this assault? Howard Ryan’s simple, admittedly old-fashioned class politics could have offered tools for analyzing and understanding these material conditions as they were evolving, and pointed a way forward.

But New Society Publishers would not publish Ryan’s work. Rather, while Reaganomics crushed labor and dismantled the welfare state, MNS would spend the 1980s training what remained of left movements in the young tradition of revolutionary nonviolence.

As I concluded in Part One, Gene Sharp’s politics of nonviolent action segued easily with the global neoliberal turn,which produced the “state decentralization” Sharp favored. His own Albert Einstein Institution was, in fact, key to this global political shift. But, as I write in Part One, “tellingly, and perhaps somewhat tragically, it takes only a quick glance at the news to recognize it is very hard to argue that neoliberal hegemony has produced, as Sharp hoped it would, more democracy, more freedom, or more peace.”

MNS found itself in a similar situation. It is true that many MNS members seemed genuinely distraught by the Reagan Revolution. Clearly no force proved capable of stemming the neoliberal tide. But MNS’s ideology of revolutionary nonviolence – with its state-phobia, skepticism of mass politics, and aversion to class struggle – rendered it uniquely ill-equipped to fight back against the one-percenter ambush. Distressingly, their politics, like Sharp’s, were to some degree even simpatico with neoliberalism’s assault on the state and workers.

But there was another way that MNS’s politics hamstrung it in the face of the 1980s “riot of the rich,” an issue that would be key to MNS’s undoing: the group’s insistence on the supposedly nonviolent group process of consensus decision-making.

The Challenge of the Consensus Method

MNS’s impact on social movements extended beyond spreading the gospel of nonviolent direct action. According to MNS historian Cornell, MNS also trained activists in “democratic group process,” a specialty that would be among “MNS’s primary and most enduring contribution[s]….”141 Thanks to MNS, anyone who has been involved with protest activism over the last thirty years will have almost certainly encountered this “democratic group process”—consensus decision-making.142

Consensus decision-making requires unanimous agreement among group members before a decision can be made or action taken. For MNS, it was a form of prefigurative politics, an immediate expression of supposedly nonviolent social relations that could model, and so deliver, the fully nonviolent world to come. As Lakey described it, “Consensus is a structural attempt to get equality to happen in decision-making, so it’s very much about equality. So again, back to Gandhi: where we are pushing equality, we are pushing nonviolence. Where we are allowing or encouraging inequality there is a violent back up there somewhere, even though it might be masked.”143

The consensus method was supposed to be equalizing, nonviolent, and empowering, featuring no coercion, and allowing for the perfect wisdom of the group to emerge by honoring all voices in same measure. But by the 1980s, it was creating serious problems for MNS. Strangely, MNS discovered that consensus was a “conservative influence, stifling the prospects of organizational change.” 144 Consensus made it difficult to get work done, and even harder to develop shared programs and positions. MNS used consensus in pursuit of decentralized social relations wherein each individual would be equal and honored, but in practice, it thwarted individuals’ voices and creative energies, thus asphyxiating the group imagination. It would pathologize leadership, and render collective action itself suspect. Despite MNS’s role in popularizing consensus in social movements, alumni interviewed by historian Andrew Cornell are admirably candid about the process’ downsides. Lakey himself mused to Cornell, “I think that one of the reasons that MNS isn’t still around is the downside of consensus.”145

Indeed, though consensus was not developed as counter-insurgency strategy—it goes back to the Quakers—its effects, highlighted below, tend toward paralysis. They call to mind a 1944 Office of Strategic Services how-to field manual on sabotage, which has a section on organizational obstruction. Its advice includes, “Never permit shortcuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions,” “Refer all matters to committees… Attempt to make the committee as large as possible—never less than five,” and “Be worried about the propriety of any decision—raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group…”146

Requiring unanimous agreement within large groups before taking action was a serious procedural burden, making it difficult for MNS to establish formal collective positions, much less formulate ambitious programs capable of responding to the political tire fire that was the 1980s. According to MNS historian Cornell, “Members of MNS elected to use consensus in making all decisions that impacted the network as a whole—including the writing of ‘official’ literature…This sometimes slowed work to a snail’s pace. The refusal to delegate tasks and decisions led, for instance, to MNS taking more than two years to update a brief pamphlet describing the organization’s politics.”147 Lakey makes the salient observation that “culturally, working class people…are more likely to get impatient with the time amount of time that consensus characteristically takes….”148 Setting aside questions of “culture,” working people often simply and literally do not have the time to endure consensus decision-making.

Debate, or even the recognition of disruptive facts, became a time-consuming obstacle to the uniform opinion required for the group to move forward, discouraging people from “stating clearly where they thought the organization should be moving.”149 Under these circumstances, dissent could become taboo.150 In a 1994 essay, Murray Bookchin himself recounts how in the MNS-trained Clamshell Alliance, supposedly consensus-based decisions were actually reached by “pressuring dissenters into silence.”151

On the other end of the spectrum, Lakey points out that consensus could empower anti-social elements to block group actions just for kicks. “What about when we needed to make really big changes…? We weren’t able to do it because the ability to block consensus was available to, really, anybody. I got really frightened about this when I heard some of our newer members explaining that the main benefit of being a member of MNS was, ‘You get to block consensus!’”152

Consensus decision-making both sprung from and exacerbated anxieties about hierarchy, which revolutionary nonviolence often associated with “violence.” Member Pamela Haines reflected, “Another thing that holds us back is our attitudes about leadership. We have identified the dangers of authoritarian leadership and exposed the sexism that intertwines with it. We have developed more human forms of working together. We have demanded that people change oppressive behavior. But giving up on leadership altogether is a step backward. The world needs all the good leadership it can get. If each of us avoids taking leadership because we identify it with male chauvinism or authoritarianism or elitism, them we give up part of our human potential—and we give in to our feelings of powerlessness.”153 Haines noted that MNS’s attitudes about leadership, and impliedly its rigid commitment to consensus, had meant that “people have at times held back from taking initiative….” Thus “hardheaded decisions about the most effective use of energy have not been made.”154

Member Betsy Raasch-Gilman described the problem in even more perfunctory terms: “MNS had a positive allergy to leadership.”155 Those with expert knowledge were suspect, complicit in the maintenance of hierarchies and part of the problem. Lakey recalls that one of MNS’s catch phrases was “The wisdom of the whole is wiser than the wisdom of the wisest member.”156 But, Lakey said, “It’s really different when a group is seeking wisdom through consensus, and when a group is making a decision, and it’s like, ‘You’ve said enough. This is the third time you’ve spoken!’ ‘Yeah, but he happens to have done co-ops for twenty years, and we’re talking about the co-op now!’ ‘It’s the third time he spoken!’”

MNS’s commitment to consensus decision-making brings to mind modern calls for “leaderless revolutions.”157 Of course, groups are not actually leaderless; rather, leaders simply exist outside of formal structure. Sometimes such leaders may have self-seeking agendas, but often they are stepping forward simply to help the organization avoid total immobilization. Regardless, the effect is that sources of power in the group are somewhere between murky and hidden, and power struggles go underground. Confusion, exhaustion, and resentment accumulate.

Consider Lakey’s reflection on how leadership functioned in MNS: “At one point, an organizational development consultant volunteered to work with MNS because it seemed as an organization we were getting sick. She had us do an exercise where she said, ‘All of you who are leaders in the organization, you go over there.’ So like three people, blushing, go across the room. And she smiled and said, ‘Ok, all of you who do covert leadership, you go over here.’ And about a third of the room gets up, including me, and goes over there. So it turned out there was this group of covert older male leadership—and this is so traditionally male, too, like we’re holding the family together. So that’s what we were doing, but not even talking to each other about it. It was just so fucked up. So I got us to be a men’s group for two years and we cried a lot with each other about how we didn’t want to be covert and have to manipulate to keep an organization afloat because we can’t come out of our closets as resourceful people.”158

Even more incisively, MNS member Nancy Brigham reflected that MNS’s structure belied more fundamental anxieties about the very use of political power itself: “I think we may have a fundamental contradiction between our agreement to be a movement building organization and a deep belief that having influence is elitist or a misuse of power.”159

Unable to devise substantive political programs and allergic to leadership, the organization was left spinning its wheels politically. “An unspoken ‘do-your-own-thingism’” set in.160 In fact, some members became hostile to the idea of common programs and positions. Efforts to plan collectively were sometimes decried as the imposition of unjustly coercive “blueprints.” Lakey recalls, “I do remember sometimes when people would say, ‘No blueprints, we’re not going to have any blueprints. You know, that kind of anti-blueprint thing.”161 Efforts to establish common positions confronted similar challenges. Robert Irwin recounts an attempt to “take certain items from our literature list and designate them as representing our ‘official’ positions as an organization.” But when the proposal was brought forward, someone forcefully said, “We don’t want to have a party line!”162 Irwin describes this charge as “a bullet to the brain.” He felt that “‘Party line’ put an ugly label on a perfectly legitimate function: telling the public, and those in other organizations who might have allied with or joined us, where we stood. Amazingly, the remark effectively ended the discussion, killing the proposal.”

Revolutionary nonviolence was discomfited by the centralized state, but in 1982, Lakey lamented the practical contradictions of MNS’s “laissez-faire” policy: “The approach to [the MNS] program has been laissez faire; ‘each for herself, and good luck!’”163 According to Lakey, it was as though “Adam Smith’s invisible hand was presumably left to guide the network.” But, Lakey argued, “Our genuine wish for cooperation is undermined by our Adam Smithian ‘free market’ laissez-faire design…Other radical organizations find us difficult to understand, because we do not have a well defined set of political tasks for the short and medium term.”

Tellingly, as the 1980s wore on, the only thing that MNS could get group agreement on was the importance of training ever more activists in nonviolent direct action and consensus decision-making. Indeed, this became the organization’s central priority in its waning years.164 Increasingly, MNS came to think of itself as a “‘movement building’ cadre organization”—not so much an organization with a political agenda of its own, but simply one seeking to spread “skills.”

This phenomenon brings to mind Liza Featherstone, Doug Henwood, and Christian Parenti’s idea of “activistism,” an ideology wherein political means are confused for political ends, in which “…all roads lead to more activism and more activists.”165

Indeed, when not buttressed by substantive political education and a clear political program, protest can begin to assume a dangerous, cynicism-inducing hollowness, leaving movements with a politics that feels all cage and no bird.166 In a word, protest can become instumentalized, turned into an aesthetically revolutionary, but strangely bloodless cargo-cult style liturgy. For example, in Virginia Hotchkiss’s 2017 article “Ritual Protest and the Theater of Dissent,” she describes the creeping superficiality she has observed within U.S. social movement mobilizations over the course of the 2000s.167 As a protest producer, she is hired “to choreograph events intended to appear as manifestations of dynamic, broad based social movements,” but “many of the protests that make headlines are less a coalescing of organized dissent than manufactured feel-good content for an activist’s social media feed.”

Unsurprisingly, an instrumentalized politics of protest can lead to a simplistic, and dangerous, romanticization of regime change. As Lakey himself acknowledges, when he began writing Strategy for a Living Revolution, he was “enamored by regime change.”168 Wherever the heart-trending symbols of “people power” appear—crowds in streets, colorful banners, raised fists, buttons on backpacks—celebration ensues. To inquire into the interests that may be at work is deemed conspiratorial or, even worse, apologizing for dictators.

Where lack of consensus forecloses the possibility of political program, lifestyle politics also become an easy substitute. As Raasch-Gilman acknowledged to Cornell, “We did so much difficult internal work because we had such a hard time confronting the larger social, political, and economic world in which we lived. It was easier to try to change ourselves and our immediate comrades than it was to devise long-term campaigns and strategies for changing the outside world.”169 This “internal work” led increasingly to MNS dropping away into “subculture”: “MNS’s commitments to simple living, expanding intramovement jargon, and counterculture-derived social norms created a subculture that served to glue members together, but also threatened to alienate nonmembers in the broader left and the public at large.”170 Cornell writes, “As the MNS subculture solidified, members noted with growing anxiety that ‘the center of gravity was no longer in work in popular movements…. A quality of introspection became dominant.’ In part, this inward turn resulted from the increasing focus on what MNS called ‘oppression/liberation work,’ or ‘fighting the –isms.’”171 According to Cornell, “MNS became one of the first organizations to insist that members’ ‘working on their shit’…was a central task of every radical group…. At times, internal discussions evidenced a tone ‘shrill in moral judgment,’ where tendencies soon to be identified with political correctness—such as guilt-tripping righteousness—began to emerge and test the bonds of many local MNS collectives.”172

MNS and its Sharpian revolutionary strategy by no means invented the mode of group dysfunction described above. Jo Freeman described it in a feminist New Left context in the 1970 essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” And just like Freeman warned, these entropic dynamics take a toll.

In a 1994 essay, Murray Bookchin recounts the role of consensus decision-making in the disintegration in the MNS-trained Clamshell Alliance.173 He describes how the organization’s de facto leadership—among them unnamed “cynical Quakers”—“manipulated many Clamshell members into subordinating their goodwill and idealistic commitments” to “hidden,” “opportunistic” agendas. This had the effect of “undermining morale and will.” Bookchin observes that such conditions contradicted leadership’s genuflections to “democracy.” In fact, it was “precisely because the Clamshell was not sufficiently organized and democratically structured,” that the collective could not “countervail the manipulation of a well-organized few.” Bookchin concludes grimly: “Consensus practices finally shipwrecked this large and exciting organization.”

MNS itself befell a similar fate. According to Raasch-Gilman, “The decline and eventual disbanding of MNS can be attributed to four interrelated factors: a growing emphasis on lifestyle over strategic organizing, the manner in which members carried out antioppression work, weakness in the group’s decentralized structure, and a fetishization of the consensus decision-making process.”174

Despite a re-organizing attempt—called a “Five Year Plan,” redolent of the Bolsheviks efforts in the Soviet Union, it seems un-ironically—MNS dissolved in 1987.175

The Achilles Heel: “Domination Anxiety”

Consensus decision-making may appear to be mere idiosyncratic procedure, but it is, in fact, highly ideological. Within nonviolent direct action training, it is one of the most potent political lessons, transmitting one of the core assumptions of revolutionary nonviolence: that all “domination” is “violent.”

Recall that though proponents of revolutionary nonviolence distance themselves from pacifism, “violence” remains for them the key world-historical contradiction.

Readers of Part One will remember that Gene Sharp’s official definition of “violence” is an inch deep: he defines violence only as directly injurious acts. As I discuss at length in Part One of this essay, this definition has the serious problem of obscuring indirect forms of injury, such as those inflicted by market forces. With such a thin definition of “violence,” it is no puzzle how Sharp’s AEI co-founder Peter Ackerman can shift seamlessly from boostering nonviolent action to calling for the privatization of social security. Like a Yankee financer of the Triangle Trade who never cracked a whip, Ackerman sees no suspect connection between his political efforts to impose bare-knuckled “free market” policies around the world, the consequent intensification of inequality and human immiseration, and his fortune.

But throughout the writings of Sharp, MNS, and other proponents of revolutionary nonviolence, one also notices a tight association, even a slippage, between the concepts of “violence” and “domination” — the latter is sometimes signaled as “inequality,” “hierarchy,” “elite controls,” or “political violence.”176 For example, as Lakey tells Cornell, “…I think hierarchy promotes violence internally in order to maintain itself.”177

“Violence” and “domination,” while related in a general way, correspond to quite different phenomena. Violence, derived from the Latin vis, implies using one’s strength to injure or insult, to commit an affront or an indignity. Perhaps there are instances of “just” violence, but the fundamental concept suggests an anti-social abrogation of commonly observed norms, something illegitimate. That is why it shares a cognate with “violation.”

Domination, by contrast, is from the Latin dominatio, to rule. Effective domination is the capacity to force people to do things they would not otherwise do, and features the possibility of uncomfortable direct coercion. Domination is frequently morally fraught, and can be and often is unjust and cruel. And so it has, not unfairly, assumed a negative cast.

But the root of dominatio is revealing: dom, the home. From this root likewise springs concepts like “domicile” and “domestic.” Unlike “violence,” “domination” invokes themes of home management, rules for shared living. And indeed, domination can serve pro-social ends: insisting children turn off screens and go to bed, requiring drivers stop at red lights, regulating pollutants, enforcing taxes to provide universal K-12 education, or imposing wind farms upon second-home owners who would prefer unobstructed vistas.

Of course, the question of when and how much to “dominate,” is one of the oldest moral and philosophical quandaries known to man. In fact, struggles to define “violence” might well be thought of as struggles to determine what types of domination should be censured as anti-social, and what types permitted.

But if all domination is flatly pathologized as “violence,” we get problems. Revolutionary nonviolence’s conflation of the two implies a practical and moral equivalence, rendering the meaning of “violence” not just an inch deep, but also a mile wide.178 This is a kind of philosophical bait-and-switch that produces what I call “domination anxiety”: a subconscious and exaggerated terror of ever imposing one’s will upon another, as doing so feels it would be the moral equivalent of inflicting some kind of malicious bodily injury upon them. Management of this anxiety requires indulging in the fantasy that it is possible for large communities of people to regularly come to perfect agreement on a wide variety of topics, and on timescales of practical lengths, so that hierarchies, leadership, plans, and rules—all of which risk the need for domination—can be avoided.

“Domination anxiety” has a number of negative effects, one of which is the highly entropic impact on internal political life. As happened with MNS, activists are taught that it is “violent” to ever impose anything on anyone. And so, wanting to “be the change,” they enthusiastically and optimistically agree to a “leaderless” group structure based on consensus.179 MNS is an excellent case study in the probably insurmountable challenges that flow from that endeavor.

Domination anxiety also produces problems with political theory and strategy: namely, squeamishness about the state, and power more generally. We are a social species. Living together requires contribution and guidelines, which inevitably entail some degree of force. This is the basic stuff of Rousseau’s social contract. Especially in a modern, urbanized society full of potentially dangerous technologies like airplanes and the electric grid, regulation of economic behavior—that is, pro-social domination—is reasonable, and frequently essential. Without it, catastrophe comes sooner rather than later. As Max Weber observed, the organization that possesses this right of force in a given territory—a right granted to it by the consent of those it governs—is called the state.

But if domination is ipso facto violative, exercise by the state of its regulatory powers becomes taboo. Indeed, recall from Part One of this essay that Sharp, in libertarian fashion, understood there to be a positive, causal relationship between the degree of a state’s centralization, or hierarchy, and the amount of violence in the society. And what marked a state as too centralized? Not a secret police, but “government regulation, state ownership, and other forms of ‘State intervention’ and ‘controls over the economy.’”

Pathologizing the state and its definitional power also strikes a blow at the effectiveness of class struggle. The vast majority of people, while prepared to defend the individual liberties established by the Bill of Rights, also intuitively recognize that collective life necessarily imposes certain restraints upon the individual, and they are comfortable with this—or at least begrudgingly tolerant—where the “dominator” is operating with legitimacy.

But those who own and control the means of production generally do not like submitting to regulation by the collective, even where the need for it is clear. It cuts into profits and they reason that if there is a crisis, they can buy their way out of it. Even if an owner is socially minded, the dynamics of private competition being what they are, she too is often drug into bad behavior. If she is virtuous, but her competitors continue to cut corners and undersell her, she is at risk of a takeover.

This is one of the most fundamental ways class struggle presents itself: how are the many to proceed in the face of the anti-social but powerful few? Historically, the most effective response is for people to straighten their backs, get organized, get disciplined, struggle, and win political power at the level of the state. If in possession of the state, the laboring public can impose pro-social rules upon the market, especially recalcitrant members of the owning class. Indeed, the public can “dictate” terms through regulation, taxation, and sometimes outright expropriation and decommodification.

But if suffering from domination anxiety, workers are at risk of feeling bad for wanting to do “dominative” things like this to the owning class. The very act of winning and wielding political power is pathologized. And so political solutions will remain in the field of the voluntary. Recall from Part One that Sharp endorses worker ownership—as does revolutionary nonviolence generally— but “argues for the use of ‘purely economic means—as distinct from political means’—to ‘resolve economic problems and to restructure economic institutions’ in a cooperative fashion.” In other words, “Sharp wants firms and markets to voluntarily transition to a cooperative economy, rather than be forced to cooperatize as an outcome of political struggle.”180 It is no surprise that many MNS alumni went on to pursue market-oriented change-making strategies that allow owners to choose to do the right thing.181

Domination Anxiety and the Return of the Repressed

A final problem with domination anxiety is this: in politics, domination cannot be avoided. Where denied, it nevertheless ends up appearing, spectre-like, in even more jarring form.

In the first two-thirds of Strategy for a Living Revolution, Lakey warns against centralized, dominative states, and those leftists who would seek to control them. But then, at the end of his book, Lakey does a remarkable about-face. He recommends—like the Freudian “return of the repressed”—what sounds like an expert-driven world state.182

As if straight from the pages of Quinn Slobodian’s Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Lakey proposes that after the nonviolent revolution fells all nation-states around the world, affairs should be managed by a suite of “transnational institutions”—global “Commissions” led by “respected and public spirited” “experts.”183 They would make “humankind-sized decisions,” and their decisions would be “supreme.”184

Lakey concedes, vaguely, “The question of enforcement of decisions remains an awkward one.”185 “The major means of enforcement of decisions,” as well as the “main check against centralized tyranny,” would be public engagement in nonviolent action.186 But local police would still be necessary, as would “world marshals,” though only a “small force,” as “only extraordinary circumstances [would] require them.” And there would be a “world ombudsman,” i.e. prosecutor, to investigate abuses of power.187 (There’s no mention of public defenders in this new order.)

Eventually a “world legislature” might be elected and “world referenda” held. But in Bolshevik fashion, Lakey counsels patience: these bodies would come “at a late stage of development because the revolutionary process is ragged and uneven.”188

To achieve this system, Lakey recognizes some “re-education” of “those accustomed to authoritarian styles and violent purposes” might be necessary.189 Also, Lakey notes, the Revolution should “check population growth,” a policy that would supposedly reduce “mass violence.”190 How such a program will be undertaken without use of force is not explained.

It turns out Lakey’s 1973 book had been published by World Order Books, printing house of the one-world-government-seeking World Federalist Movement, described as a “transnational effort to free the future from the past, and to shape a new world order.”191

Strategy for a Living Revolution is now in its third edition, its concluding call for world government effectively unchanged.192 Its new, more conservative title is Toward a Living Revolution: A Five-Stage Framework for Creating Radical Social Change. It, like Sharp’s Politics of Nonviolent Action, remains a lodestar text in the U.S. protest left, one of Movement for a New Society’s many important legacies.

Movement for a New Society’s Legacy

MNS may have disbanded in 1987, but its members’ work of advancing revolutionary nonviolence continued, shaping the U.S. protest left in dramatic ways from the 1990s up to the present.

An important word about the following account: my description of the broad ramifications of MNS’s Sharpian methods and theories throughout the U.S. protest left is included to help establish MNS and Sharp’s widespread impact so that readers might better understand our political circumstances—not to imply that relevant organizations or individuals are terminally “tarnished” by association with the ideas in question. That would be ridiculous, as I anticipate nearly all activists reading my essays on Sharp will be able to identify multiple themes salient to their own political experience. I myself spent years protesting with groups that use Sharp and MNS’s theories, studying activist books from the revolutionary nonviolence canon, earnestly inflicting consensus on long-suffering comrades, and experiencing the interpersonal and ideological dysfunctions that flow from domination anxiety. Even as I see the contradictions and cul-de-sacs, I also see the moments of victory and I remain proud of much of this work, as I think all such activists should be. In general, people do their best with the ideas available to them. But it is not enough to congratulate ourselves for best efforts and carry on with business as usual. Intellectual responsibility calls us to probe the contradictions, even when it ruffles feathers, because this is how we improve our shot at more profound political success. That is my work here.

Back to the story: after MNS’s closure, alumni like George Lakey, Bill Moyer, Betsy Leondar-Wright, Chuck Collins, Felice Yeskel, Jennifer Ladd, Betsy Raasch-Gilman, Nancy Brigham, Bob and Lynne Irwin, Shel Horowitz, and Stephen Zunes continued their work in U.S. social movements, promoting nonviolent revolution by Sharpian means. Some wrote new social movement tracts, like Moyer’s popular 2001 social movement primer, Doing Democracy: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements.193 Some wrote books about “classism,” and founded new organizations focused on combatting it, like United for a Fair Economy, Class Action, and Bolder Giving.194

Others started new Sharpian strategic nonviolence training organizations for activists, like Future Now, New Society Trainers, and most importantly, George Lakey’s Training for Change. Since its founding in 1992, Training for Change has worked with hundreds of organizational clients around the world, including major unions like SEIU.195 In turn, the late 1990s and 2000s saw the creation of new strategic nonviolence training institutes informed by Sharpian and MNS strategy, often with relationships to Lakey’s Training for Change: the Ruckus Society, Social Movement Technologies, the UK-based Campaign Bootcamp, The Wildfire Project, and the Center for Story Based Strategy (formerly smartMeme).196

Thanks in large part to this training network, Gene Sharp and MNS’s ideas have influenced a wide array of activist leaders: examples include Cesar Chavez, founder of the United Farm Workers Union; David Solnit, key organizer for the 1999 Battle in Seattle and 2003 San Francisco anti-Iraq War mobilization; Starhawk of the Alliance of Community Trainers; The Yes Men; writer and activist leader L.A. Kauffman; and climate leader Bill McKibben.197 References to Sharp, Lakey, and other Sharpian trainees like Otpor!, feature throughout the popular 2012 activist handbook, Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution.198 MNS references are common in the online activist news site Waging Nonviolence, whose tagline is “For nonviolent revolution,” and whose masthead includes George Lakey, as well as Albert Einstein Institution executive director Jamila Raqib.

Thanks to all the foregoing, Gene Sharp’s politics of nonviolent action, as refracted through the MNS experience, have become ubiquitous in U.S. social movements, shaping ACT UP, the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle and other “global justice movement” mobilizations, the anti-Iraq War mobilizations, Occupy Wall Street, the climate movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, the new women’s movement, and the #Resistance.199 Activist and journalist Nathan Schneider recalls Occupy comrades “eating well, singing protest songs, and debating the theories of Gene Sharp, the scholar who from his home office in Boston helped inspire revolutions as far away as Serbia and Egypt.”200 In 2012, Lakey, while a professor at Swarthmore College, helped some of his students organize the very first fossil fuel divestment campaign in the country.201 In 2015, Daniel Hunter, a trainer with Lakey’s Training for Change wrote an organizing guide to accompany Michelle Alexander’s 2010 book, The New Jim Crow, endorsed by Alexander herself.202 In 2016, Sharp’s ideas helped shape the 2016 coalition effort “Democracy Spring.”203 Just this year, Sharp’s official biographer wrote, “Through Occupy Wall Street, the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, the new women’s movement and, increasingly, constitutional defenses against Trump administration policies, Gene’s work has been a rich resource.”204 Indeed, Sharp’s regime change protocol has been frequently invoked in the Trump era.205

Frequently, these movements struggled with the same domination-anxiety-wrought contradictions as MNS. For example, the consensus-based Occupy movement had a conspicuously indeterminate quality, and activists’ lack of program and demands was subject to considerable public debate.206 Some Occupiers defended their demands-free environment, arguing, “The process is the message,” “Demands are for terrorists,” “Demands are disempowering,” “The notion of demands connotes…hostage-taking,” and “The government shouldn’t need us to make ‘demands,’ because it should be of us.”207 Other Occupiers felt differently. Some of them created a Demands Working Group. Their initial proposal: calling for “a massive public works and public service program” that would create “jobs for all.” But the effort was tabled “after a heated and messy deliberation.”208

Gene Sharp and MNS have had a broad impact, but their most important American descendants are likely the brothers Mark and Paul Engler, progenitors of Momentum, the popular activist “training institute and movement incubator.” Like Sharp and MNS, Momentum’s focus is on “training movements” that will, according to one representative, “wake millions of people up to our power” and transform “our entire government to reflect the will of the people for the first time in U.S. history.”209 Momentum seeks to build “decentralized” movements in the tradition of “international civil resistance,” and so bring about “structural change” — a type of change, Momentum says, that “won’t come from within the political system.”210

A long and admiring profile in Vice Magazine titled “These Activists are Training Every Movement that Matters,” describes Momentum’s start: “The seed for Momentum was planted in 2013 at the [inaugural] James Lawson Institute….” The James Lawson Institute is an elite North American strategic nonviolence training program launched in 2013 by Peter Ackerman’s International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, at the invitation of James Lawson, the famous civil rights minister. At the Institute, Carlos Saavedra, a high profile immigrant rights activist, got to know Paul Engler, the director of the Los Angeles based non-profit, the Center for the Working Poor. Saavedra describes himself to Vice “as a ‘movement nerd,’ constantly reading books about protest theories by academics like Erica Chenoweth, Gene Sharp, and Rick Falkvinge.”211 (Chenoweth is another of Sharp’s important intellectual descendants. Falkvinge is a tech entrepreneur and the founder of the Swedish Pirate Party.)

“‘I mean, you have to understand, I eat them for breakfast,’” Saavedra said. “‘But when I met Paul I was like, OK, you’re the nerd. You’re way more obsessed.’ Momentum was born.”

The ideas and persons of Gene Sharp and MNS co-founder Bill Moyer star in Momentum’s social movement theory, which is outlined in the 2016 book, This is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt is Shaping the 21^st Century, co-written by Paul Engler and his brother Mark, a journalist. The Englers’ theory is grounded in Sharp’s theorization of nonviolent revolution, and also draws from MNS co-founder Moyer’s “Movement Action Plan,” Alinksy’s community organizing theory, Frances Fox Piven’s theorization of civil disobedience, as well as the work of Gandhi and King. It is illustrated with familiar examples: the freedom struggle in India, the American civil rights movement, Otpor! in Serbia, and the Arab Spring.212 Naomi Klein praised the book as “Absorbing… Ambitious… Indispensable. A genuine gift to social movements everywhere.”

According to Vice, since its 2015 founding, Momentum has trained 1,500 activists in at least 30 states, many of whom “have gone on to be at the center of protests that have ricocheted throughout the nation.” Some of the activist organizations Momentum has coached include #AllOfUs, Black Lives Matter, BYP100, Cosecha, Dream Defenders, #IfNotNow, National People’s Action, Standing Up for Racial Justice, the Sunrise Movement, United We Dream, and 350.org. As a measure of Momentum’s growing influence, “several of Momentum’s co-founders and trainers have become high-ranking staff at the Justice Democrats, and on Bernie Sanders’ and Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaigns.” Also of note, “Democratic presidential candidates are mimicking…language used by Momentum…”

Some of Momentum’s trainees appear to have shaken off at least some of the state-phobia and class-ambivalence of their predecessors. For example, “[Momentum] training was pivotal in the rapid rise of the Sunrise Movement, the environmental activists who deployed Momentum’s methods to put the Green New Deal on the map after organizing demonstrations at Dianne Feinstein’s and Nancy Pelosi’s offices in 2018 and 2019.” The Green New Deal, though still only loosely construed, calls for massive government action within the economy, redistribution, and worker rights. Sunrise’s example illustrates that it is of course possible to use nonviolent tactics within a class program. This should come as no surprise: nonviolent tactics have been used in all manner of struggles throughout history. Sharp did not invent nonviolent action, after all, but merely theorized it, embedding it in his anti-“centralized government,” class-confused social theory of power.

Momentum itself also notes “the growing gap between the 1% and the rest of society,” and “the increasing concentration of wealth and power” in the hands of a few.213 But like MNS, what these facts mean exactly for Momentum’s politics is ambiguous. The Englers’ book This is an Uprising, which builds explicitly upon Sharp’s social theory of power, is conspicuously silent on questions of political economy. In a 2016 radio interview with the Belabored podcast, Mark Engler was asked why. He explains on the show: “You’re right, this book doesn’t do everything. You have to make a choice as to what your intervention is…. What we are talking about is at the level of organizing traditions and movement strategy…”

And according to Engler, “socialism is not an organizing tradition.”214 He concedes, “No doubt that there are social, economic conditions that are going to determine and arguably predetermine the success or failure of a movement.” Also, “political and economic trends very much affect the outcomes of movements.” But the nature of such conditions and trends is, according to Engler, “not a question that is useful for organizing because you have to deal with the situation that you have.”

Engler’s contention that socialism “is not an organizing tradition” is ridiculous, and echoes MNS’s ambivalence about class politics. Even socialism’s critics recognize that it has an organizing tradition, one that flows directly from its goals, emphasizing unionization, strikes, political parties, and campaigns that champion the working class, up to and including taking state power. In fact, Bernie Sanders was reminding the whole of America about the power of socialism’s organizing tradition at the very moment of Engler’s interview.

Engler’s comments also call to mind one of those major risks that stalk Sharpian movements: the risk of instrumentalizating protest. As the MNS experience illustrates, pretending there is a firewall between practical “movement strategy” and supposedly esoteric matters of political economy is a recipe for political aimlessness, threatening to elevate mere protest into an ends unto itself. Of course organizers need to understand the political economic terrain upon which their movements operate. The power of a given mobilization depends on the strength of the organizing from which it springs, and the strength of the organizing is in large part a function of the quality of internal political education.

For Ideological—and Class—Struggle

Thanks in large part to Movement for a New Society training programs in the 1970s and 1980s, and those established by MNS descendants in the 1990s and 2000s, Gene Sharp’s politics of nonviolent action have become the modus operandi of the U.S. protest left. It is important to bear in mind that since labor’s defeat in the 1980s, the protest left has constituted an extremely significant proportion of the politically engaged left at large.

It is true that strategic nonviolence training institutes and the movement organizations they educate are brimming with intelligent, committed, creative, and very courageous people standing up against all manner of injustice. But Sharp’s un-interrogated ubiquity is a problem. It is not a problem merely because Sharp had unseemly political associations with the U.S. defense, intelligence, and security establishment. Nor is it a problem because nonviolent tactics are a ruse—far from it.

Sharp’s unquestioned influence on the U.S. protest left is a problem because his supposedly neutral theories are not neutral. They are a constitutive, legitimizing mainstay of a rarely named post-war, anti-communist ideology, revolutionary nonviolence — an ideology which has been consistently antagonistic to political strategies that cultivate class consciousness with an eye to state power. In practice, Sharp’s “tactics and strategy” have served to obscure, scramble, and ultimately sideline such class politics. Unsurprisingly, revolutionary nonviolence has a very weak record with respect to effectively confronting capital. Its “domination-anxious” fixation on consensus decision-making leaves activist groups hamstrung. Its ideologically-shrouded “trainings” reproduce “skills” without cultivating commensurate capacities for independent, critical thinking. It seems highly improbable that this ideological framework will be capable of supporting the clear, enormous, and sustained political pressure necessary to shift the balance of class power globally in an era of intensifying contradictions.

Lest we think phenomena like Bernie Sanders’ rise mean revolutionary nonviolence is no longer a relevant political force, or that its proponents have since resolved all the issues noted in this essay, consider this. In 2016, with Sanders’ historic campaign in the background, MNS alumni and progressive stalwart Chuck Collins—a grandson of Oscar Meyer’s who famously gave away all his wealth as a young man—published a book, favorably reviewed by Barbara Ehrenreich and Ralph Nadar, titled Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good.

Collins begins thusly: “The extreme levels of inequality in our society are personally painful to behold. As someone who was ‘born on third-base,’ I watch these polarizations and know that no good will come of them. In the jostling and shrill voices, I hear the dogs of war approaching, a war between the classes. Actually, there are two class wars, though they are not comparable. There is a top-down class war against the non-rich…. But there is also a bottom-up class antagonism expressed in rhetorical attacks against the rich…. Does rich-bashing move us forward? As Gandhi said, ‘An eye for an eye is making the world blind.’ Can we suspend the economic class hostilities long enough to consider what would move humanity forward?”215 Collins advises that there are “limits to fomenting ‘class antagonism’” because the rich, who are merely “disproportionately” advantaged in the current system, “are no different from the rest of humanity.”216

Collins invites his “fellow wealthy” to “come home,” to “make a commitment to place, to put down a stake, and to work for an economy that works for everyone.”

Collins also makes an invitation to “the 99 percent.” “…We need to stand in solidarity against the rapacious rich. But to succeed, we need allies among the reachable wealthy. We must find ways to engage and invite the one percent home, back to the table, to be partners in transforming the future… Instead of a class war of shame, I advocate an appeal to common humanity and empathy.”

Collins has some sensible stuff in his book about how the rich need to pay their taxes, and about how charity is of next to no political use. And it was nice that Collins gave away most of his wealth. But his suggestion that the American working class—only recently reminded of its interests and potential power by, most notably, Sanders—really ought to tone it down and “invite to the table” enlightened elements of the owning class to forge a future together is so stunningly misguided it takes the breath away.

Collins’ proposal is ahistorical. Major victories for the working class have been achieved when class-consciousness and class polarization are high. Also, Collins’ misunderstands the requirements of class struggle. By invoking the specter of a coming “war between the classes,” Collins implies, as revolutionary nonviolence so often does, that class struggle is synonymous with violence. This is not true and has been one of the most insidious and damaging class messages of revolutionary nonviolence.

Nor does class struggle require hating the rich. It requires understanding that the owning class has material interests that are in opposition to workers—interests that owners, as a class, feel entitled to, and that they will, as a class, defend and extend, by dent of force if necessary. Consequently, the working class also must feel entitled to a dignified lot, and struggle to defend and extend its rights as well.

Indeed, this struggle does require recognizing that the owning class is different. They own and control the means of production, far exceeding what is necessary for their own existence, and on the basis of that ownership, can live off of rents, profits, interest, etc. Everyone else must labor to survive. Indeed, the rents, profits, interest, etc. that flow to the owning class all derive from the surplus value generated by this work which everyone else does. These are stubborn, objective differences between owners and workers. This is not to deny the humanity of the owning class, nor to say they are “evil.” It is not even to say members of the owning class are condemned to anti-worker politics.

But Collins’ implication that workers’ engagement in trenchant, spirited struggle is politically misguided, or somehow evidence of moral failure, is disturbing. Workers are taught to shut up and do our jobs. As a class, we have been getting hammered for forty years. And just as proletarian fury starts to rise, just as labor is finally, and somewhat spontaneously, gathering its forces after decades of body blows, Collins urges moderation in tone and reminds workers that the world is really one. Really? It looks like an effort to spread domination anxiety.

The substance and timing of Collins’ argument shows that Howard Ryan, the working class MNS trainee who wrote that “Lost Critique,” was right to be skeptical of revolutionary nonviolence’s notion of “world consciousness”—that is, a cross-class consciousness. In 1981, at the very moment of the neoliberal turn, Lakey reassured Ryan that “world consciousness” was compatible with class struggle; after all, Lakey pointed out, Strategy for a Living Revolution was all about polarization. But MNS alumni Collins watches the class polarizations of the present and claims to know “nothing good will come from them.” At the very least, this suggests there persists a very real, and from a class perspective debilitating, ambiguity among adherents of revolutionary nonviolence as to the political merits of class-consciousness and class struggle.217

But whether adherents of revolutionary nonviolence like it or not, class struggle is back. And just in the nick of time. Because despite the extremely encouraging incursion of movement-driven democratic socialist candidates and legislative aspirations in the U.S., the left political bench is thinner, less ideologically developed, and its technical capacities more rudimentary, than is generally admitted.218 Meanwhile, since the 1950s, the hard activist right, led by the Birch Society Koch clan, has been focused and busy with its multi-generational political project of training and installing judges, building think tanks, developing and passing model legislation, taking over pulpits, taking over economics departments, and generally vacuuming up political power. They control the Senate, the presidency, the Supreme Court, and nearly enough U.S. states to hold a Constitutional Convention.

Meanwhile, carbon concentrations stand at 415 parts per million, and global climatic changes continue to accelerate.

This political moment require that all ideas on offer before the left, regardless of popularity or patina, get their proverbial tires kicked—now. To make it through the accelerated historical phase that we are by all appearances entering, we must accept only the sturdiest.