By Steve Halpern
Michelle Alexander and August Nimtz have both dedicated their lives to liberating humanity from the exploitative system we live with today. In doing this, they have both worked to unmask the reality that working people routinely experience. Saying that, they both have differing perspectives on the strategies needed to advance the interests of those who have been victimized by the political economic system. In order to begin to look at those differences, it is useful to look into the background of these two leaders.
Michelle Alexander
Michelle Alexander is a Vanderbilt graduate and received her law degree from Stanford University. She briefly practiced corporate law, but then took a sharp wage cut to work representing people who had been abused by the police.
One day Alexander interviewed a nineteen-year-old Black man who thoroughly documented all of the numerous times he had been abused by the police. Initially Alexander thought that this young man would be an excellent spokesperson for all those who experienced police brutality.
Then, she learned that this young man had a drug conviction. Alexander told this young man that she couldn’t represent him because those who defended the police would argue that his drug conviction entitled law enforcement officials to harass him.
This young man then became enraged and argued that the police initially beat him up and framed him. They threatened him with ten years in prison if he didn’t confess to the drug charge. Clearly, because he feared a long sentence in prison, this person pleaded guilty to the drug charge and was sent home.
Then, this young man found out that by pleading guilty to that charge, he would be denied a job, housing, food stamps, and even the right to vote for the rest of his life. So, understanding his reality, he accused Michelle Alexander of being no different from the police. While the police framed him, at this time Alexander didn’t believe he had the right to a defense because of his drug conviction. Alexander would later discover that the officers who framed this young man had been exposed for routinely abusing and framing young Black men on drug charges.
This encounter made Alexander reflect on the effectiveness of what she was doing. Eventually she began to do the research for her book The New Jim Crow – Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness.
Alexander found that police departments all over the country were being rewarded by the federal government for the high numbers of drug related arrests. While all nationalities were affected in these arrests, the police routinely targeted Black men.
So, the numbers of people who live in the dungeons of this country skyrocketed from about 300,000 in the 1970s, to about two million today. In all, there are about six million people who are in prison, parole, or probation. In the city of Chicago, about 80% of the Black male population has a prison record. These policies were promoted by both Democratic and Republican politicians.
Alexander concluded from this reality that the Black community was experiencing a, “New Jim Crow.” The old system of Jim Crow segregation denied Black people of basic citizenship rights in this country. They were prohibited from using the same restaurants, hotels, bathrooms as people who had a light skin color.
Alexander pointed to the facts that today millions of Black people continue to be denied basic rights, not because of Jim Crow, but because of the system of mass incarceration.
Alexander argued that the reason for this new Jim Crow was the backlash by white workers to the advances of the civil rights movement. Because of those advances, many white workers needed to compete for jobs with Black people.
In an atmosphere where millions of jobs were being automated or sent overseas, many white workers unjustifiably felt that the cause of their problems were those Black people who were now competing for jobs. We might also say that the unions in this country failed to educate workers to the fact that the loss of manufacturing jobs was about the corporate drive for profits.
Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow had an initial printing of 3,000 books. Then it stayed on the New York Times best seller list for about 250 weeks. Alexander was invited to speak to thousands of people all over the country.
However, while speaking to those large audiences Alexander thought about the words, “sound and fury signifying nothing.” In other words, she was coming to grips with the fact that while many people wanted to hear her arguments, nothing was changing significantly with respect to the so-called criminal justice system.
In fact, Alexander stopped educating people about their so-called rights. Clearly people have the right to refuse to allow the police to search an automobile. However, experience has shown that when people exercise those rights, they have been brutalized by the police. So, while people need to know their rights, they also need to be fully aware of what might happen when they demand that those rights be respected.
In Alexander’s opinion, Black people represent a cast, or a permanent underclass in this country. That opinion is supported by Supreme Court decisions that have defended chattel slavery, Jim Crow discrimination, as well as the mass incarceration we see today.
When asked if she is a socialist, Alexander argued that she is friendly to many things that socialists support. However, she believes that socialists are fixated on the idea of class, and that fixation compromises the legitimate struggle against discrimination and the unconditional liberation of Black people.
So, from what I can tell, Michelle Alexander argues that we need a mass movement in this country to abolish the prison system. She believes this will happen because there will be a movement similar to the civil rights movement, and that will create a moral awakening making the prison system in this country intolerable.
August Nimtz
August Nimtz is a professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. He specializes in African and African American studies. Throughout his adult life, Nimtz has supported the politics of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. One of the reasons for this political orientation was the fact that Nimtz was born in 1942 and experienced the Jim Crow segregation of New Orleans, Louisiana.
One of Nimtz main activities has been solidarity with the struggle to end the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba. Because of his academic credentials, Nimtz has been able to legally travel to Cuba since the 1980s. Most people in the United States are prohibited from travelling to Cuba because of restrictions by the Treasury Department. Since the 1990s, Nimtz has been active in a Cuba solidarity organization in Minneapolis.
Nimtz has written several books. His primary concern has been to expose the myth that the capitalist system consists of a genuine democracy. He agrees with the Marxist viewpoint that capitalism can only exist when a small minority of the population effectively controls political power. To correct this problem, Nimtz has documented how throughout history Marxists have made it their goal to organize a political movement that gives political power to the toiling masses, who comprise the overwhelming majority of the capitalist world.
Currently, I’m reading Nimtz’s book, The Ballot, or the Streets, or Both – From Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution. In this book, he argues that Marx, Engels, and Lenin were primarily political activists who worked to empower the working class. Their theoretical writings were focused on unmasking the numerous myths promoted to rationalize support for the capitalist system. They believed that by advancing this kind of movement, the working class would gain the confidence to organize and put in place a political economic system that made human needs and not profits the central priority.
Today, we routinely hear capitalist politicians argue that their brand of politics supports the interests of everyone. That argument ignores the reality that most people need to go to work in order to make a living. At work, employers have control of what we do during the time we are laboring for them. We receive a bundle of life-sustaining commodities, while they receive the profits derived from our labor. This is the reality capitalist politicians are determined to ignore.
Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow gives evidence of the fact that millions of Black people in this country have been disenfranchised because of the so-called war on drugs. We can also say that the government denies citizenship rights to twelve million immigrant workers living in this country. The Department of Agriculture argues that there are about 42 million people in this country who don’t have enough food to eat. Yet, with all these people being denied basic human rights, politicians argue that we live in a democracy where there is “liberty and justice for all.”
In the summer of the year 2020 millions of people from all over the world demonstrated against the routine murders of Black people by the police in this country. Because of his experiences in Cuba, Nimtz has argued that there are no George Floyd’s in Cuba. While the Cuban government has made determined efforts to combat racist discrimination, eliminating all forms of discrimination that existed on the island for 400 years has proven to be difficult. However, today no Cuban fears the use of lethal force because of a conversation with a Cuban police officer. Why is the Cuba reality so different from the reality in this country?
In the year 1959 the Cuban Revolution erupted. One of the first measures of the revolutionary government was to take over all the police stations. We might consider that in pre-revolutionary Cuba tens of thousands of people were murdered by the police. Thousands more were tortured. So, when the revolutionaries took over the police stations, that measure was immensely popular on the island.
I can personally testify to the fact that on May Day in the years 2017 and 2019 I viewed over one million Cubans marching in Havana enthusiastically supporting the government. Seeing this, I asked myself the question: Why is it that so many Cubans support their government, while in the United States more and more people are losing all trust in the government?
The answer I came up with has to do with the idea that because of the Cuban Revolution, the people on that island now have a government that makes the needs of each and every Cuban its top priority. Clearly Cuba is an underdeveloped country that lacks in many of the material commodities workers in this country take for granted. However, when it comes to health care, and education literally every Cuban has a lifetime right to those services. The fact that there are significantly fewer numbers of COVID-19 deaths in Cuba is clear evidence that the Cuban initiatives have been effective.
So, when we look at the Cuban reality and the history of the Marxist movement in the world, we see that there is no permanent underclass in the United States. Cuba has a similar history of racist discrimination as this country. Yet the facts show that there are no George Floyds in Cuba. This means that if an effective working class movement advances in this country, we can realistically expect that there will be the beginnings of an unconditional liberation of Black people as well as the entire working class.
The liberation of the working class will not happen without an uncompromising struggle against discrimination
So, now we can come back to Michelle Alexander’s point where she feels that when socialists emphasize class, they are undermining the struggle against discrimination. I agree with August Nimtz when he argues that we can gain insight into this question by looking at the politics of Frederick Engels, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, and Malcolm X.
In his pamphlet The State and Revolution Lenin quoted from Engels when he argued that the state, as we know it, was invented as a “special instrument of repression” to enforce the rule of capitalists over the working class.
Malcolm X asked people to place the system of Jim Crow segregation in perspective with his statement, “Stop talking about the South. If you’re south of Canada, you’re in the South.” In my opinion, these two statements reflect a similar point of view. We might also argue that Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow also advances a similar perspective.
However, the question remains, why is the Marxist perspective in harmony with the struggle against discrimination?
Lenin answered this question in a pamphlet he authored on the many nationalities in tzarist Russia. During those years Russia had the reputation of being a prison house of nations. In fact, the tzar supported the organization known as the Black Hundreds who murdered thousands of Jews in raids known as pogroms. Those raids were similar to raids on the Black community by the Ku Klux Klan.
Lenin argued that the Russian revolution could only succeed if it advanced the demand of self-determination for all those nationalities that routinely experienced vicious discrimination. The new name of the nation that used to be known as Russia became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Clearly, the goals of the Revolution were compromised with the betrayal and counter revolution of Joseph Stalin, but the initial efforts attempting to establish a genuine democracy are there for all to see.
When we look at Michelle Alexander’s arguments, she rarely talks about the politics of the world. August Nimtz supports Lenin’s argument in his pamphlet Imperialism – The highest stage of capitalism. Today, we can do a Google search of the question: How many people in the world live on ten dollars per day or less? The answer is about 70% or 80% of the population of the world.
Lenin understood that imperialism doesn’t happen because capitalists made mistakes. No, imperialism is a necessary consequence of the normal functioning of the international capitalist system. So, Lenin concluded that supporting the rights of immigrant workers was a necessary part of the struggle to advance the interests of the working class of the world.
So, while both Michelle Alexander and August Nimtz are a part of the struggle to liberate humanity, in my opinion Nimtz gives us a better idea of the kind of movement that has the potential to liberate the working class and smash all forms of discrimination.
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