chapotraphouse

What we have to understand is this: the police are occupational forces in the neo-colony. The neo-colony is no longer confined to the Black Belt. It's metastasized. In effect, the neo-colony is the working class. The neo-colony is the proletariat. The toilers. The neo-colony is the toilers. And among the toilers, the capitalist seeks to create the same division that spurred the development of capitalism in North America in the first place—a racial hierarchy that divides the working class. This hierarchy is being created by means of state repression: through kidnapping, through disappearing, through forced surgeries and torture, through cages labeled as "detention centers" but functioning as black sites.

When you see a woman ripped from her baby and carried off by three dozen heavily armed men, while you—the people, the community—are chanting, "No! You cannot! Show us a Warrant!" that is the state acting to create the hierarchy. The regime wants you to think this woman is a hardened criminal.The state wants you to see her as alien, as dangerous, as disposable. They want to isolate her, erase the worker behind the label, sever the class bond between you and her. They want you to reject solidarity as workers in order to create a separate class of the hyper-exploited.That's why politicians like Jasmine Crockett speak of needing an underclass—one that can be exploited harder, longer, without question. She's not speaking for Black people—she's speaking for capital. She's gesturing to the fact that Black people in America are—despite increasing capitalist opportunities allotted to those like Jasmine—the hyper-exploited underclass. She's not disrupting the hierarchy; she's reinforcing it. We do not need a hyper-exploited underclass. We need a war against the very concept. We need to obliterate the architecture of hierarchy they're building atop our broken backs.

But make no mistake: we are all exploited by this regime. No one is safe. This entire country functions as a factory farm for capital. From the sacrifice zones of the Delta Basin, to the inner-city poverty of upstate New York, to those who lost everything in the L.A. wildfires only to find themselves priced out of rent in new developments there. From prison kitchens to fast food sweatshops—it's all one economy: extraction, exploitation, alienation, division. What you see with ICE is the hyper-exploitation laid bare. It is the chickens coming home to roost—trained on occupied lands. Gaza is their classroom. Your city is the final exam.

It's all connected. You can't ignore it. You can't turn off the phone and look away when it's your neighborhood, when it's your community facing down a platoon of armed soldiers for the regime, when it's the friend who babysits your kids being beaten down by armored regime thugs. It's a class war, and ICE are the insurgents of the regime.

We need to be realistic about what it will take to rebuke the regime—what level of community organizing will be required to neutralize these attackers before they can kidnap more people. We need to get on a war footing. The regime already is.