Happy Birthday, America?
by Carl W.
In the Year of Our Lord 2026, the vibes are extremely fucked. They are disgusting.
Oh say can you see, from the rancid green Reflecting Pool, to the open construction pit of the Crypto Bribe Ballroom in the ruins of the White House, next to the Monster Energy Drink sponsored UFC octagon where CTE-addled transphobes bludgeon each other into oblivion; we come to the last sad vestige of this pathetic, limping “celebration” of the empire: the Freedom 250 Great American State Fair.
It’s kinda perfect, isn’t it? It’s like they built a physical metaphor or something.
There are more people in our General Meetings than at this Fair. The cheap plaster hides an empty, hollow affair celebrated by no one; the simulacrum of dignity and power. Just like Trump’s fake golden Oval Office, bought at Home Depot and spray-painted. A fake on a fake, it’s fugazis all the way down.
This entire affair reeks of desperation, of AI-generated fantasy crashing into the reality of the moment. The banks are out of money, the oil wells are running dry, and the people of this country are finally seeing the empire for what it is: a casino run by pedophiles ripping the copper out of the walls, meanwhile half a million don’t know where they’ll sleep tonight. The decrepit rapist president makes over a billion dollars in Pisscoins
while people pay $5 a gallon and go bankrupt from toenail infections.
Nationally, the decaying facade has gone stupid, a pathetic display of cheap white masculinity, the imperial combover hiding the growing bald spot. Wait until the Cybertruck with the Joker car wrap shows up. The rants from the front seat about woke Star Wars will be epic.
We made it, chat. 250 years of pretending this isn’t some failed experiment: a dead strip mall with crypto billboards built atop a mass grave. The liberal impulse is that Trump is some uniquely destructive force, and everything before that was great, hunky-dory, and the Bad Orange Man ruined everything! A DANG CHEETO ruined it! The centrists and liberals of America think he’s some kind of video game boss, and if we can just beat him, all the fascists NPCs will despawn.
Nothing could be further from the truth. This implosion was always built into the making, a straight line from theft, rape, and murder to international laughingstock. It was rotten from the start; the thieves arriving on these shores eager to grab everything they could, slap down a clapboard world, and kidnap people from the across the ocean to do all the work. Then a constant string of war, coups, economic sabotage, and mass exploitation of the entire world. Every right that the working class has gained has cost lives, we’ve had to retcon rights for women and people of color in every generation into a framework that was intentionally designed to exclude them. Every battle for worker rights has been costly, its victories temporary, and the results stolen by the liberal political class as trophies.
And now, the forces of AI want to take the final ounce of power we have left: our labor and our literacy. They want drones, a calcified underclass of powerless, illiterate consumers living in tents at the edge of their gated communities.
There is a certain romanticism to the story of American progress, however, some fantasy of the ideal America of freedom, truth, and justice that belies an uncomfortable truth: any rights granted by this rotten structure can be taken away just as easily.
Another uncomfortable truth lies unspoken, that the foundations of this building are rotten, an open construction pit paid for with bribes, the Reflecting Pool liner is being stripped away, and meanwhile the front lawn is a Monster Energy drink ad.
Yet the liberal fantasy of democratic renewal is not coming, there is no Obama 2.0 waiting in the wings to be the dumpster of our hopes and dreams. For all of MAGA’s revanchist frothing, the cosmopolitan capitalism of American liberalism is equally as farcical. Competent imperial management is not the answer. Some techno-utopian vision of “capitalism with guardrails” is concept art, nothing more.
You can’t build a lasting stable society of democratic values while the entire economic under-girding is about ripping as many people off as possible and hoarding gold like Scrooge McDuck. You can’t have a permanent underclass of invisible, exploited workers and precarious castoffs and then expect them to turn around and sing God Bless America.
The death rictus grin of denial is slipping, the spell of the empire is fading. The contradictions are intensifying to a shrill degree, the capitalist veneer peeling off in chunks, just like the bottom of the rotting Reflecting Pool. And the people in charge are just dumping single bottles of bleach into it. There’s something so perfectly emblematic of the Reflecting Pool debacle, something that illustrates a greater crisis. Demand a fix to something that wasn’t broken, go for cheap, hollow spectacle, overpay a corrupt ally to do a shitty job, and when it goes terribly, pay another crony to an equally bad job at twice the price.
A core function of the American bureaucracy is to transfer as much public money into private pockets as humanly possible. That is the purpose of all wars, all projects, and all technology: to take as much as quickly as it can.
America as a political institution is becoming more and more a society of empty gestures, failed promises and half-assed attempts to do a landlord special and paint the veneer of strength and respectability when $36 billion of war money floats at the bottom of the Strait of Hormuz. There goes your school, your healthcare, your housing, your roads, your future. The National Anthem is now a rusty toilet flushing sound.
This spectacle is also exhausting and boring. No one’s buying this shit anymore. And for many, especially black and brown folks, the decay of the empire never bothered them because the empire wasn’t meant for them anyway.
Do you think those who bled and died for their rights and freedoms would feel celebrated by the Fourth of July Monster-themed energy drink? Which rumpled, overpriced football jersey speaks to the soul of America? What Freedom Truck best represents the spirit of… whatever?
But a sinking ship drags everyone down, even those in third class. And we’re all drowning just the same. Yet still, the discontent remains. The feeling continues, doesn’t it?
Hello, it’s us, your friendly neighborhood socialists. We’ve got some good news: it doesn’t have to be this way. We’ve got answers to your questions, and even answers to questions you may not have thought to ask.
The answer is not “better capitalism”, because there is no such thing. A varying shade of shit is still, well, shit. A New Deal 2.0 would be nice, but capable of the same dismantling that the current New Deal has undergone. It’s not enough. We should fight for those benefit and then keep going. Everything good about America is because of the working class, its greatest force for change and its greatest victim of the empire’s abuses. 3% tax credits and Trump Bad platitudes are over.
A tectonic shift is necessary. A reckoning with the sins of this country’s past and present.
The accelerating extremism of American fascism, now automated in technology with AI slop and outrage farms, powered by the full faith and power of the American police state, would laser target a tepid reformist agenda just like it has wiped away decades of legal precedent, benefits, and rights most people thought were settled.
This Fourth of July, everything must go. We’re holding a fire sale on the White House lawn, next to the demolition zone, passed-out podcasters and the discarded vape cartridges. DSA is the most promising vehicle for socialism that we’ve seen in our lifetimes; the best, most vibrant chance for a real future to believe in.
Socialism isn’t the answer because it’s just any alternative, it’s the answer because of what it does. A working class movement understands the truth: that your power comes from your labor, your body, yourself and melds it together with countless others who share the same truth. Capitalism rips us apart, makes us tiny little specks, powerless in front of the machine. Socialism binds us together in that amazing human family of an entire class of people.
It’s not just about universal healthcare and winning elections, it’s about demanding tomorrow and the possibility that it holds.
DSA is now over 116,000 members, growing every day with every victory, making it officially the largest socialist organization in American history. Now that’s something worth celebrating.
We’re workers just like you, tired of the mess we’ve been handed, tired of the failed promises and clownish spectacle, so fucking goddamn tired of the static and bullshit being pumped into our brains. We’re tired of being powerless. And we know you are too. So join up. The future is out there waiting.
So Happy 250th Birthday America, we got you a little something: class consciousness. Hope you like it.
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Reflections of independence
Jewish Pacifism & Religious Resistance with Elliot Ratzman
Congratulations Adam Bojak – Winner of the AD149 Democratic Primary
The Buffalo Chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America congratulates Adam Bojak on his victory in the Democratic primary election for the 149 NY Assembly district, and extends immense gratitude to everyone responsible for making his victory possible.
So, what next? Why join DSA? For a decade, Buffalo DSA has fielded these specific yet important questions. Last Tuesday, with chapter co-founder Adam Bojak’s primary night victory, we received the resounding affirmation that when we fight, we win! 25,000 doors knocked. Thousands of phone calls. Six figures of fundraising from the average person, the worker, those who share the belief, “a better world is possible.”
What does this win mean? We hold the firm belief that electoralism isn’t “the answer,” no matter how exciting or gratifying it is to win, but rather another step along the way. It’s a catalyzing step, a way to draw people in and organize them, but winning an election is never the end goal. We don’t believe in the mentality that you should “just vote.” To be a serious organizer and Buffalonian interested in a more just and equitable society, controlled democratically by the working class, we must do more. An election result is only as good as the power we can build and the priorities we can win.
In this moment, we step onto a much bigger stage for our chapter and broader movement for working people. Ask yourself: what can I do? Then, let’s do it. Nothing is stopping us but ourselves!
The work is an ongoing struggle, and we need you to achieve our vision. If you’ve ever felt ready to take on the establishment, the time to join the largest socialist project in American history is now.
Thank you to the people of the 149th Assembly District. We continue to fight for you, the people of Buffalo, Erie County, and workers of the world.
Solidarity is Not a Crime
This is an opinion piece written collaboratively by the Immigrant Solidarity Working Group and was not voted on at a general membership meeting. Opinion pieces from sub-bodies do not reflect the opinions of all members and are not chapter approved statements.
It is with no stutter and no hesitation that Salt Lake DSA stands with the 15 defendants facing charges for anti-ICE organizing in Minneapolis. Their stance is part of a proud, long-standing tradition of resistance against law enforcement overreach in this country. Faced with the indiscriminate violence of this winter’s ICE/DHS activity in the Twin Cities, these neighbors banded together in an inspiring and powerful model. After these feral agents murdered two and celebrated their own impunity, the regime attempts to contort law and morality to punish their real enemy: our unwillingness to submit.
There is risk in taking a principled stance. It is in that spirit that we also condemn the charges faced by two former court clerks in Logan that allegedly helped individuals evade ICE agents at the courthouse. When faced with an opportunity to perform the moral, righteous act, these clerks took it—at their own personal risk. They acted against a vindictive and thoughtless regime intent on tearing apart families, and for that we salute them.
It is not enough to point out the blatant hypocrisy of the Trump regime, as it is not only painfully obvious, it is expected and routine. They decry the “weaponization” of the law while also rewarding loyalist felons with pardons. The hypocrisy and double-dealing are markers of a system in a permanent tailspin. Trump and his cronies find themselves in the criminal trough of our economic system, resorting to merely demanding submission and collecting bribes. They are rapidly running out of distractions, and soon, the lid will tighten yet further.
As the administration criminalizes dissent in America, we implore all Utahns: do not consider yourself exempt from this assault on your civil liberties. Stand with us, or stand beside us, but at least stand up and be seen in opposition to this continued erosion of freedoms. In this capitalist system, law is merely a weapon in the hands of the powerful, completely divorced from morality and righteousness. As a weapon of the powerful, once you stand crosswise to their goals, the law will be used to hammer you back into place. It is time for us to seize the hammer.
We know we stand firmly on the right side of history, because between solidarity and hate, we will always choose the former. In time, we will win; the only question is, for how long will we all need to suffer until we can put an end to this madness? How many of us will be caught up in the gears? When the working class has unified to fight this fight together, we will no longer have to wonder. We will have already won.
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River Valley DSA Opposes Rent Control Compromise Legislation
Atlantic Aviation Hosts Twice-Weekly ICE Flights While Catering to the Luxury Jet Set
The private jets, limousines, and tanned vacationers coursing through Atlantic Aviation’s exclusive lot mask a grim reality. Every Tuesday and Friday, the private company facilitates the transportation of residents detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in and out of Las Vegas. They sometimes come, and sometimes go, chained at the wrists, waist, and feet, shuffling single file between white caged-windowed buses and unmarked aircraft supplied by major commercial airlines.
Taylor Swift’s $54M Falcon 7X
Canadair Jet ICE plane by @buffysphotography
The members of Las Vegas Democratic Socialists of America (LVDSA) demand that Atlantic Aviation terminate contracts with DHS and immediately end its participation in these flights. With support from the Habeas Flight Watch Network, LVDSA’s Abolish ICE Campaign is taking steps to ensure they do. LVDSA is conducting habeas flight watches and hosting a National Day of Protest against Atlantic Aviation on June 27th.
Located at Harry Reid International Airport, Atlantic Aviation reserves its runways and hangars for the luxury jet set. No doubt, the private company enjoyed a boost in positive press when Taylor Swift chose to park her private jet at Atlantic upon breezing into town to celebrate Travis Kelce’s Super Bowl LVII victory. Today, the company promises to whisk World Cup spectators to games in style, offering gourmet in-flight dining and wrap-around concierge services. Unsurprisingly, it does not flaunt its frequent flying of ICE victims among its first-class services.
While Atlantic Aviation caters to celebrities and sports pros to rake in profits, they are also fattening their bottom line on the injustices our neighbors suffer. People are rounded up based on their skin color, language, and clothing, exploited by the city’s shady 287(g) agreement, and targeted by Flock AI mass-surveillance technology. Denied due process, they are deliberately displaced in the expanding network of concentration camps and the routes that connect them. We are taking action for the victims, their families, and the attorneys who are unable to secure their clients’ habeas rights.
A team of flight watchers from LVDSA and the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) meets outside Atlantic’s runways with cameras, documenting the arrival and departure of ICE victims. The goal is to capture footage of the individuals getting on and off buses and planes— their faces, clothing, and shoes—so that their families and lawyers might find them. A Habeas Flight Watch Network volunteer flight dispatcher keeps the team notified of the ETAs for Las Vegas-bound ICE flights, and, just like commercial flights, these schedules are subject to frustrating last-minute changes.
Friday, June 12th, is no exception. At 6:44 am, our Las Vegas flight watch team receives an ETA from the dispatch: today’s flight arrives from Fort Hood via Reno on a Canadair CRJ-200 operated by Air Wisconsin; it’s scheduled to land at 12:22 pm. We set up early in case the plane arrives ahead of schedule, which happens. Stationed outside the Atlantic Aviation fence with cameras and tripods, we learn the flight is delayed until 12:51, then 1:13. It is now over 100 degrees.
Buffy Taylor, a member of PSL, sighs and walks under a tiny tree in the lot’s perimeter for a sliver of shade. She’d arrived on her bike, a duffel bag containing several ice-cold water bottles and her Canon T7 strapped over her shoulder. “I’ve been tracking and photographing planes for years as a hobby, and I figured I could help people find their family or friends and expose the illegal actions of the government,” she explains. “Put my skills to good use.” By the time the team receives their final status update – ETA 1:21 pm – their phones are overheating, and Taylor’s waters are hot to the touch.
As with other Las Vegas ICE-related activity, the arrival of the ICE plane is quiet and understated. Our team learns it has touched down on Atlantic Aviation’s Runway 19, the same one used to welcome visiting celebrities. Moments later, a dull gray aircraft, serial number N455AW, devoid of any colors or logos except a tiny US flag, rolls toward us before turning slightly to let a taxiing private jet by. We can’t believe our luck– we now have a clear view of the plane’s stairway, the white prison bus, and the stretch of pavement between them.
When its doors open, four men in neon vests spring to action, neatly setting about 20 bright orange bundles in a row on the ground. “Prison jump suits?” I ask Taylor.
“Nope, their personal belongings.”
Uncertain whether people are held prisoner on the plane, on the bus, or both, and seeing no movement from either, we focus on the four yellow-vested staff bustling about, bounding up and down the airplane stairs. Are they Atlantic ground crew? ICE agents? They eventually form an assembly line between the bus door and the plane’s stairway. Finally, the victims step off the bus, stooped and resigned, shackled at the wrists and feet, a long chain linking them at the waist.
Taylor abandons her tripod and darts around on foot, zooming in on captives, as I dictate a physical description of each man boarding the plane after he is frisked from head to toe. Twenty-two in all, mostly young, 20s and 30s, though one man appears to be old, perhaps in his 70s. Once the last has boarded, a pilot inspects the plane’s exterior as the caged-windowed bus slowly drives off the tarmac. We wonder about the victims, whether they’ve eaten or used the bathroom, and what they must be thinking.
As we spot the white bus exiting Atlantic’s parking lot, Taylor sprints, zigzagging through parked cars, and snaps photos of the bus’s driver and license plate. “It’s astonishing how many people have to be complicit for this to happen,” observes Audrey Hines, a co-steward for LVDSA’s Abolish ICE Campaign.
Not all habeas flight watches are this successful. Some sessions have yielded pictures of the plane or bus—still helpful—but no people. Other times, planes and utility vehicles have arrived unexpectedly, suddenly blocking the view. Organizers leave hot and exhausted, but determined to catch useful images on the next one. “Each new flight watch has the potential to help even one person, help one family be reunited, so it is so worth it,” says Hines.
“Even if we don’t have the best shot, we keep trying— you kind of feel like a spy,” adds 19-year-old Mikey LaFrambois, a lead organizer in UNLV’s Young Democratic Socialists of America.
Hopefully, these ICE flight watches won’t last too long. On Saturday, June 27th, at 6 pm, LVDSA is joining the National Day of Protest against Atlantic Aviation and other airlines abetting ICE activity. We are hosting a protest outside Atlantic Aviation, in a united demand that they cancel their contracts with DHS and the federal government. We stand in solidarity with cities around the country that are speaking up. We salute Dallas, a World Cup host city whose organizers and faith leaders are taking Atlantic Aviation to task for courting wealthy ticket holders while preying on the powerless. As Rev. Neil Thomas, lead pastor of Cathedral of Hope, noted on June 10, 2026:
As people arrive for the World Cup and other major events, we will proudly showcase our city as a place of hospitality and opportunity. Yet, at the very same time, through these very same airports, on these very same streets, within sight of celebrations, immigrant members of our community are being removed from their homes and families. This contradiction forces us to ask difficult but necessary questions about who we are as a city.
Atlantic Aviation caters to the indulgences and excesses of billionaires while actively participating in and profiting from the crimes against our neighbors. All professional athletes, celebrities, and customers using Atlantic Aviation’s services are part of the problem. Pilots transporting victims of ICE arrests, ground staff loading cargo —all are agents in perpetuating this nightmare.
In solidarity with local immigrant rights efforts, we urge readers to demand that Atlantic Aviation terminate these inhumane flights. This company will be held accountable for its actions.
By Jill Glass, LVDSA Abolish ICE Campaign Co-Steward
Images by Buffy Taylor @buffysphotographs
References
American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada. (2026, April 8). ACLU of Nevada files notice of appeal to continue challenge of LVMPD 287(g) agreement with ICE. https://www.aclunv.org/press-releases/aclu-of-nevada-files-notice-of-appeal-to-continue-challenge-of-lvmpd-287g-agreement-with-ice/
American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin. (2026, April 2). Racial profiling rampant after Supreme Court ruling. https://www.aclu-wi.org/news/racial-profiling-rampant-after-supreme-court-ruling/
Atlantic Aviation. (2026, June). World Cup. https://www.atlanticaviation.com/world-cup/
Balas, R. (2026, January 17). Inside Taylor Swift’s $54M Dassault Falcon 7X: 2026 Eras Tour & flight tracking controversy. The Flying Engineer. https://theflyingengineer.com/taylor-swifts-private-jet-inside-look/
Immigration Policy Tracking Project. (2025, April 8). Reported: ICE contracts with commercial airlines to facilitate deportation flights. https://immpolicytracking.org/policies/reported-ice-contracts-with-commercial-airlines-to-facilitate-deportation-flights/
Instagram. (2025). Post by @habeasflightwatch [Instagram post]. https://www.instagram.com/p/DYXLGP7AI7E/
Lexington Alarm. (2026). Habeas Flight Watch. https://lexingtonalarm.org/habeas-flight-watch/
Schilken, C. (2024, February 9). Will Taylor Swift be able to park a private jet for Super Bowl? Vegas airports are full. Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/sports/story/2024-02-09/super-bowl-private-jets-parking-las-vegas-airports-49ers-chiefs-taylor-swift
Velotta, R. N. (2016, May 18). Jet Suite to offer luxury travel between California and Las Vegas. Las Vegas Review-Journal. https://www.reviewjournal.com/business/jet-suite-to-offer-luxury-travel-between-california-and-las-vegas/
ICE takes 240 from Clark County jail under new pact; ACLU fights deal. (2026, March 11). Las Vegas Review-Journal. https://www.reviewjournal.com/local/local-las-vegas/ice-takes-240-from-clark-county-jail-under-new-pact-aclu-fights-deal-372339
Cleveland Safety Committee Denies Renewal of Flock “Safety” Contract
by Serge S
(Note: This is a corrected version of a previous post.)
Cleveland joined several communities nationwide who are changing their stance on Flock surveillance technology.
During the Cleveland City Council Public Safety Committee’s June 17 meeting, members voted 3 to 1 against renewing their Flock “Safety” surveillance contract which expires on June 29.
Voting against were Stephanie Howse-Jones, Niki Hudson, and Kevin Conwell, leaving Committee Chair Mike Polensek as the sole member to vote for the agreement.
According to News 5 Cleveland, council members, police administrators, Public Safety Director Wayne Drummond, fifteen community members and more than two dozen people from Flock No were involved in the discussion, which lasted nearly two hours.
Flock cameras were first installed in Cleveland during the summer of 2023 and have spread to nearby communities including Euclid, Richmond Heights, Willoughby Hills.
The $250,000 contract would have extended the system for another year.
The fight isn’t over. Although the safety committee declined to renew the contract this time, another council committee may take up the legislation, although no date has been set.
Flock isn’t the only surveillance system in Cleveland. The city also operates 3,400 video surveillance cameras, most of which have AI tracking capabilities.
This isn’t the first time that Mayor Justin Bibb’s administration has tried to sneak funding for surveillance technology through backroom channels. In the past he has bypassed the Safety Committee by extending contracts through the city’s Board of Control which effectively sidesteps council’s ability to review, approve, or deny them.
In one such instance Bibb extended the city’s $850,000 contract with SoundThinking, the vendor of their gunshot-detection technology ShotSpotter in April of 2026.
Several organizations have risen in response to Flock and other tracking systems which have flooded Cleveland in recent years as city’s including Dayton have cancelled or declined to renew contracts with Flock.
One of them, “Flock No CLE” formed last year when the city tried to push an emergency proposal to expand Flock systems and replace their ShotSpotter system in 2025. The legislation would have authorized a $2 million three-year contract with Flock’s version of the “shot spotting” technology by using microphones in their already existing automated license plate readers, according to Signal Cleveland.
According to Axios Cleveland the Cleveland Clergy Coalition spoke in favor of the contract on safety grounds while police argued the technology improves response times and claimed that there has been no misuse of data by Cleveland officers – although there is no way to verify these claims as officers can use a login system that does not always have two-factor authentication – meaning that logins could be shared to avoid tracking.
Sources in order of use:
https://www.axios.com/local/cleveland/2026/06/18/cleveland-council-flock-contract-renewal-vote
https://www.axios.com/local/cleveland/2026/05/19/flock-cleveland-bibb-council
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Socialism Wins In DC
For immediate release
Socialism Wins In DC
Date: June 17, 2026
Media Contact: For all press inquiries, please contact media@mdcdsa.org.
Washington, DC: Yesterday the people of DC voted resoundingly for Democratic Socialist candidates across the board! Though we still have to wait for ranked choice voting to be fully tabulated, Metro DC DSA endorsed candidates Janeese Lewis George and Aparna Raj hold commanding leads in their races for Mayor and Ward 1 Council respectively. We also want to congratulate long time Metro DC DSA member Oye Owolewa on his strong position in the Democratic nomination for At-Large council seat.
This election cycle Metro DC DSA played a leading role in building and mobilizing a working-class coalition that withstood a torrent of dark money spending on behalf of corporate candidates. Our 3,500 chapter members knocked on over 120,000 doors for Janeese Lewis George and Aparna Raj combined. Last night’s results prove that voters are demanding leaders that put working people over billionaire profits.
At this critical junction in human history, people must choose if they will sleepwalk down the path of Trumpian fascism or fight for a better world based on the values of Democratic Socialism. If you want to be part of the fastest growing left-wing movement reshaping politics across this country, it is time for you to join the Democratic Socialists of America! We are fully funded and democratically run by our membership. With the looming threat of the Trump administration, it has never been more important to get organized. It is not enough to just win elections, that is why we are building a political organization that is ready to fight for working people every day, in apartment blocks, at the workplace, and on the streets.
Join DSA
Curious about DSA? Thinking about joining but want to hear more info first? Our next virtual new member orientation is being held tonight at 7pm; RSVP here.
This election cycle is not over! Next Tuesday, 6 Metro DC DSA endorsed candidates will face Maryland voters. We need your help to make sure they win. Look for a DSA canvas near you.
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War (&) Bodies: The Labor of Race and Gender in Fighting and Resistant Subjectivities
Author’s note: This paper, which was presented in April at Historical Materialism Istanbul 2026 at Bilgi University, was written in the context of both a series of seminars on liberatory psychoanalysis and ongoing study with the TDSA Trans Rights & Bodily Autonomy (TRBA) reading group. I am deeply grateful for the dedicated participation of the members of this reading group, and look forward to what our study continues to yield.
In what ways are war and resistance, revolution even, gendered and raced? What work does an economy of war require of the bodies and psyches of those subject to it? (How) can logics of domination be interrupted via the labor of (transing) gender, or the lens of blackness? That is to say, how do we critically engage race with gender against logics of marginalization? How do we approach race and gender as axes and sites of hegemonic ideological production — as well as the sites for the possible liberation from supremacist hegemony?
Paul Preciado, writing in his epilogue to Guy Hocquenghem’s Homosexual Desire, and assessing the conditions of feminist and gender-revolutionary movements in the prior half century in Europe, highlights a warning in Hocquenghem’s text — “Hocquenghem alerts us,” he writes, that “’it is possible that revolutionary politics are in themselves repressive processes.’” The “provisional lesson” that Preciado derives from this is that revolutions may not be just what they seem, raising the possibility that “causes capable of becoming logics of power are not really the most revolutionary ones” and that “revolutions also construct their own margins” (AT 130-131).
For Preciado, the “micropolitics of fags, dykes, queens, and trans people [travesti] are opposed to the traditional model of politics as war… and [these micropolitics] propose a new model of politics as relation, fiesta, communication, self-experimentation, and pleasure” (138). The re-publication of the text of the epilogue as a zine (Anal Terror) by the baedan journal of queer time travel includes an introduction by the baedan collective wondering if Preciado’s portrayal is an overly rosy one. They write that “there is a remarkable elision of violence, perhaps even of force, in Preciado’s text” representing “a kind of historical positivism or optimism that we are not inclined to share” (AT 120-121). This is the tension within which we are reading and working today — just as, for the baedan collective, it is important to “see what in [Preciado’s text] responds still too much to the production and reproduction into which every citizen-subject in a society like ours is interminably seduced and coerced” (AT 121), so too are we investigating the flows, seductions, coercions, into the production and reproduction of hegemonic normativity — even in what are cast and understood as revolutionary or liberatory struggles.
The thesis here, and what is under investigation, is that there are ideological currents which are manifested and projected on, in, and through the body — its ornamentation, its movement, its sound, its relations… and that the apprehension of the functioning of these ideological currents — their utterly real effects on our lives, relations, deaths— is possible through the terms and sites of race and gender. Judith Butler, in a lecture at the University of Cambridge, enumerates that gender has as its topics life and the body, and thus implicates broad “zones of passion and fear, of hunger and illness, vulnerability, penetrability, relationality, sexuality, and violence” as well as “distinct or differentiated modalities of embodiment [including] modes of porosity and closure, dependency, relationality, relations to food, protections from unwanted intrusion, from assault, from exposure to the elements, hunger.” [30:00, LGBTQCam]
Thus treatments of gender and of race illustrate and implicate in a material way treatments and interpretations of other social, political, and economic phenomena, and provide a quotidian lens and context for liberatory political projects— which we delineate here as commitments to life, care, autonomy, and their conditions.
One of the tasks of the hegemon, as the baedan collective’s comment alerts us to, is the production of subjectivities that are conducive to its particular ideological reproduction and expansion. The means by which hegemonic normativity accomplishes this vary — from discipline to propaganda to coercion to medicalization to segregation to force to colonization of the very modes of being, relation, and language that we exhibit to one another. In W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, he details the confluence of conditions during the American Civil War that resulted in the extension of the legal classification of citizenship to the formerly enslaved black population. He writes:
“It had been a commonplace thing in the North to declare that Negroes would not fight. Even the black man’s friends were skeptical about the possibility of using him as a soldier, and far from its being to the credit of black men, or any men, that they did not want to kill, the ability and willingness to take human life has always been, even in the minds of liberal men, a proof of manhood” (BR 129). This “proof of manhood required of the [black man]” was, in Du Bois’s words, “to seize a bayonet and rush mad with fury or inflamed with drink, and plunge it into the bowels of a stranger” (BR 129). Let us pause on this constellation: the challenge of manhood, as a conditional status to be proved; this proof taking the form of seizure, rush, inebriation, inflammation, plunging, and lack of other relation; the directionality of proof, to white men, already citizens (made such through genocide), who doubt and other the black subject, and thoroughly devalue his labor, autonomy, speech, and care. Du Bois makes clear that it was only through this proof that the black man in Civil War-era United States was able to accede to citizenship — ‘citizenship’ then, too, is manifestly constituted by this gendered and raced constellation.
Du Bois notes that the black man “might plead his case with the tongue of Frederick Douglass” yet “the nation listened almost unmoved” (BR 129). Speech, Du Bois observes, resulted in (almost) no motion; it was madness, fury, the ability and willingness to take human life that had a legal effect. This is another relevant question to our inquiry into the conditions and traits valorized in revolutionary life. What are the conditions required for motion, or a change of motion? What do we do if e.g. speech yields (almost) no motion? What labors in this (almost),
prohibiting motion, or concealing micromotions? Du Bois shows us that the American nation, the status of citizenship, and the gender category ‘man’ are directly related to the failure of Reconstruction via the devaluation of care, the denigration of black life, and the hostility of privileged subjects toward groups which ‘threaten’ to dislodge the superiority and supremacy around which their subjectivity is organized.
Let us turn to the text of Frantz Fanon’s under consideration, from the chapter on “Colonial Wars and Mental Disorders” in Wretched of the Earth. While Fanon lucidly formulates that “imperialism… sows seeds of decay here and there that must be mercilessly rooted out from our land and from our minds” (WoE 181), we also see in the text the difficulty of this task, for these ‘seeds of decay’ labor to invisibilize themselves, to contour the ‘normal’ – and recruit the body and the mind toward their propagation. One of the case studies Fanon writes about concerns a 26 year old Algerian man working with the FLN (Front de Liberation Nationale). When a raid goes wrong, the patient goes “underground… without ever going home” (WoE 186). It takes several months for any news to arrive of the patient’s wife and toddler daughter. After the patient goes underground, French soldiers go to his residence and kidnap his wife for interrogation. She is beaten for days, and then raped, both alone and in front of other soldiers. In the case study Fanon reports, second-, third-, fourth-hand that the colonial soldiers tell her “If you ever see that bastard your husband again, don’t you forget to tell him what we did to you” (WoE 186). Despite the violence to which the patient’s wife is subjected, in this case study, Fanon is concerned with the patient’s “dignity as an injured husband” (WoE 187), and with his inability to have sexual intercourse (it is not detailed with whom, but we infer that it is not the patient’s wife).
How is the act of rape — the epitome of gendered violence— figured here? It is an attack on the husband, who is ‘injured’; it is a medium of communication between the colonial soldiers and the resistance fighter— tell him what we did to you. This attack, then, takes place via the body of the wife as property of or as extension of the husband. Notably, the wife is not considered or referred to as a militant (as the husband is) and her work is excluded from the content of the liberation struggle. Yet the text makes clear that she is a significant material support to this struggle, cooking the meals to which he sits down every night in silence, raising a child, protecting her husband. Indeed, she displays a great commitment to the relations she is imbricated in, refusing to inform on her husband or other FLN associations; which is punished directly with rape. Her body, her marriage, her quotidian routines— as well as those of her young daughter— are the very field of war, and this fact is summarily repressed. The husband, who is legible as a member of the resistance, is protected underground; the wife, who is not legible as such for the extremely obvious reason of her gender, gets tortured. What margins appear here? Who is acceptable collateral damage in the contention of power? Fanon’s case study here illustrates precisely the seeds of decay he muses on earlier — the importation of hegemonic gendered violence into the schema and behaviors of the anti-colonial revolutionaries.
The task before us, to follow another decolonial psychoanalytic theorist, Ignacio Martín-Baró, is one of de-ideologization; of the rigorous rooting out of ideologies that keep us located in the motion of colonial, imperial, supremacist logics of domination. These examples have shown us
how the site of the body is colonized, and violence doled out on the basis of a strict supremacist ordering of race and gender relations. I will now bring in the work of Marquis Bey, and their essay in their book Cistem Failure to look at the work of blackness and transness as radical invention — against the politics of war, which are the politics of gendered and racialized violence, the politics and logics of supremacy and extermination. Projects of liberation worthy of the name cannot include or utilize sexual violence, cannot utilize exclusion or extermination of the ‘other’, we opine.
In their essay “Heart of Cisness”, Marquis Bey interrogates the qualities and behaviors of a cisgender system of bodily regulation, including the co-constitutive racialization of the gender ‘cistem’, and theorizes blackness and transness as “assert[ing] radical invention” (CF, 26). Blackness, for Bey, is “the written name given to an open ‘imagining of things’ that converges astoundingly with the abolitionist imaginatory jailbreak that must include all vectors of violence” (CF 28). Bey goes beyond the epidermalization that constitutes so much discussion of race, and the gender policing that appears even in discussions of transness. Bey synthesizes “whiteness as necessarily subtendant of cisgender” and asserts that “blackness as a critique of [cisgender] [questions] the very notion of cisgender itself” (CF 25). Reflecting on their experience in the American high school football locker room, and the exhortations of their coach toward masculinity as toughness, ability to withstand and dole out abuse, Bey distills that it was “conquest, via violent means, [that] was how we got our currency” as boys-becoming-men. What an echo of Du Bois, writing of events now 175 years past, where conquest and violence was also what made manhood possible and legible, and what permitted subjects to accede to the violent category of citizen (even as the fruits of this category continued to be systematically denied on the basis of race, via the dismantling of Reconstruction through new legal mechanisms)!
Responding to this status, Bey conceptualizes “black and trans, then, as radically non-exclusionary” (CF 26), and invites non-racist, non-cisssexist reconceptualizations of blackness and transness. This “invitational pull of a capacious, ‘inexclusive’ blackness” represents for Bey “an expansion, not a dilution, of its radical abolition of the violent tethers of this world” (CF 27). I follow Bey here in insisting on a “hell-bent liberatory refusal of the violences that have been inscribed into us and that we’ve been told we must perpetuate” (CF 40).
In contrast to what white supremacist organizations of power demand, we do not have to endorse or utilize schemas of domination and supremacy in our struggle toward liberation — in fact, liberation as such depends precisely on being able to interrupt these schemas and on discovering, rediscovering, inventing, reinventing modes of relation that radically include the ‘other’ and refuse power whose engine is marginalization.
By Caitlin Murphy
Works Cited:
- baedan collective & Paul Preciado. Anal Terror: Notes on the First Days of the Sexual Revolution [zine]. Seattle, 2015.
- Bey, Marquis. Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender. Duke University Press, 2022.
- Du Bois, W. E. B. Black reconstruction in America: An essay toward a history of the part which black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in America, 1860-1880. Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935.
- Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove Press, 2004.
- LGBTQ Cam (University of Cambridge). Who’s Afraid of Gender? | Judith Butler’s public lecture at University of Cambridge 2023 [Video]. YouTube. June 2, 2023.