US, The Utopian, Journal of Anarchism & Libertarian Socialism December 2014, Vol.13

Contents ---- 4 Who We Are ---- 7 Current Events ---- 7 Heroic Ferguson, Black Death, and 
the Need for Utopia... Christopher Z. Hobson ---- 17 Defend Ukraine! Fight Russian 
Imperialism!...Mike Ermler ---- 27 Poetry ---- 28 Mount Saint Rosalie (Three Poems)...Bob 
McGlynn ---- 31 Movement (The Pentagon, 1967)...Paul Bernstein ---- 33 Theory and Debate 
---- 33 Heretical Thoughts, or Why I Am an Anarchist...Ron Tabor ---- 51 Anarchism and the 
Philosophy of Pragmatism...Wayne Price ---- 69 Review of Ronald Tabor, The Tyranny of 
Theory...Peter Rush ---- Heroic Ferguson, Black Death, and the Need for Utopia By 
Christopher Z. Hobson ---- As all the world knows now, on November 24 the St. Louis County 
prosecutor announced that a grand jury that had been sitting for three months had decided 
not to indict Ferguson, Missouri, police officer Darren Wilson for shooting and killing 
Michael Brown, 18, who was unarmed, on August 9.

Residents of Ferguson, a suburbof St. Louis that is about 2/3 Black, began protesting
at Police Headquarters immediately after the announcement, and in a short
time began breaking windows in parked police cars, then moving
through nearby streets trashing stores, looting, and setting fires.
The protests echoed those in August, when residents, mostly young
and male, fought police for several nights, while more orderly
protests occurred in daytime. People in Ferguson, from elsewhere
in the St. Louis area, and across the country kept up the protests all
through the autumn months.

------------------------------------------
so
the body
of one black man
is rag and stone
is mud
and blood
the body of one
black man
contains no life
worth loving
so the body
of one black man
is nobody
— Lucille Clifton, from
“4/30/92 for rodney king”
-------------------------------------------

Brown was shot after Wilson ordered him to the side of a street he and a friend were 
walking in the middle of, shortly after a bulletin went out about shoplifting at a 
convenience store. Brown fit the description, and Wilson later testified that he stopped 
him on realizing that. All accounts agree that some kind of struggle followed with Brown 
outside and Wilson inside the police vehicle, at which point Wilson shot twice from inside 
the car, nicking Brown with one shot. Brown and his friend fled in opposite directions and 
Wilson ran after Brown. Witnesses differ on when Wilson shot again, and whether Brown was 
then still running away, had stopped, was facing Wilson, or approaching him, whether at 
some points he had his hands up, down, or out at his sides, and whether, at the end, he 
was trying to surrender, was staggering, or was charging toward Wilson. The story the 
grand jury accepted—Wilson’s—was that Brown threatened Wilson, who then fired. Six shots 
hit Brown, killing him. Physical evidence shows some of Brown’s blood farther down the 
street from where he died, but whether he was approaching Wilson, charging him, or trying 
to go past him depends on whom you believe.

The basic facts remain: (1) Someone who potentially stood to be charged with petty larceny 
(and possibly assault if shoving the shopkeeper is included) was shot dead. And (2) an 
armed and trained police officer fired 12 times at an unarmed man who fled after the first 
shots, may have still been running when the officer resumed firing, and, in the last 
moments, may or may not have been running at or trying to run past the officer. The 
officer did not back off or wait for backup, though there is no claim at all that anyone’s 
safety (except Brown’s) was at risk when Brown ran away from the police vehicle. It’s 
unexplained how an unarmed man threatened an armed and trained officer, but police have 
learned that “I felt my safety was in danger” almost always brings a finding of 
justification. (More on this later.)

The terrible events in Ferguson—both in August and November—with many more like them,
embody the reality of continued American race oppression behind the wishful talk of 
achieved civil rights. These same events have stirred up, more than in many years, the 
conscience of that part of the American public that still has a conscience, a group that, 
importantly, is Black at its core but significantly white. After November 24, marches, 
“die ins,” and other protests have continued every day, joined by a new wave after a New 
York grand jury failed to charge officer.

Daniel Pantaleo in the chokehold/chest compression death of Eric Garner, 43, in Staten 
Island last summer. The outrage goes far beyond the protest movement as such, as shown 
when 70 New York high school students, denied support by their school administration, 
walked out of East Side Community High School in Manhattan to march for justice across the 
Brooklyn Bridge (Dec. 9), or when five St. Louis Rams football players, Tavon Austen, 
Kenny Britt, Jared Cook, Stedman Bailey, and Chris Given, appeared on the field making the 
now-universally recognized “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture on December 1. When indignation 
and determination spread to professional athletes and other citizens, these ideas are 
gaining traction and we have the beginnings—only the beginnings—of a mass movement.

Managing Protest instead of Fighting Injustice

From the moment of Brown’s killing
on August 9, the state—from the local
level, i.e., the city authorities in
Ferguson itself, through the state level,
Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, to the nation-
al level, President Obama and Attorney
General Holder—have been concerned
above all with managing the protests
and not with changing or even naming
the conditions that led to the protests.
This “crisis management”—of the
wrong crisis—has largely taken the
form of contrasting peaceful with vio-
lent protest, an issue I’ll return to
below. It has also involved reinforcing
the Ferguson police with state police and National Guard units, and, at the same time, 
planning for the grand jury report. It has involved liberal, not fascistic, tactics, 
notably, making sure that the police didn’t fire on the crowds protesting the November 24 
ruling. It also obviously involved Darren Wilson’s job—announcing his resignation right 
after the grand jury report, he stated, “I have been told that my continued employment may 
put the residents and police officers of the City of Ferguson at risk.” (The most 
significant words are, “I have been told.”) All of this was clearly aimed at damping down 
and minimizing the inevitable protests.

At the same time, the state authorities, up to and including the president and his 
Attorney General, have not proposed any program to curb the rampaging police violence that 
daily claims more Black, Latino, and some white lives. They have also not proposed any 
plan to increase jobs, equal opportunity, equal access to health care and other services, 
or—in general—to pick up the stalled movement for equal opportunity, rights, and justice 
that last scored real gains 40 years ago. They have not even named these as problems. 
Instead, with careful impartiality, Obama speaks of “distrust...between law enforcement 
and communities of color” due to “the legacy of racial discrimination” (Nov. 24), a 
“legacy” that stalks the streets taking new lives every day. Obama has always been a 
political calculator, but the problem is not his personal or even political qualities, but 
rather than he presides over a society that cannot and doesn’t want to provide any of 
these changes or even to admit the need for them. So he is like an office manager with an 
angry employee in his office—from his viewpoint, the problem is that an unruly worker has 
come into his office and the solution is to get the employee to leave.

(Obama however does bear personal responsibility for part of this situation: His backdown 
from mild criticism of the police after Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates’ arrest 
outside his own home, in 2009, signaled the six years of absolute inaction on Black rights 
that have followed. See my “Professor Gates in Handcuffs,” Utopian 8, 2009.)

This “crisis management” approach in turn comes from the lack of any overall vision of a 
possible change toward real justice. That vision seems, today, to very many people, 
old-fashioned and romantic.

In the absence of a vision of change, the real-life limit of protest is the right to 
protest: citizens have that right, but it is taken for granted that no real change is 
possible. That attitude—held not only by the authorities but by many, probably the 
majority, in the population, may be starting to change. A friend spoke hopefully of a 
“tipping point” on police violence, similar to the “tipping point” that may have occurred 
some time ago on Gay marriage, such that even quite moderate people feel the level of 
police violence is intolerable. On the other hand, many or most white Americans apparently 
feel the police are justified and that the problem is the protests themselves, made 
worse—in these people’s view—by “the media” which favor African Americans, wrongly play up 
race issues, and create a race problem where none really exists. So the jury is out on my 
friend’s hopeful scenario.

The Police and Social Justice

Most of the media attention to Ferguson, in August and now, has been focused on one issue, 
police conduct. There has been less attention to the issue of broad-scale racial and 
social injustice that lies behind police misconduct in Ferguson and elsewhere.

Ferguson is not an especially poor community. There are substantial middle-class and 
upper-middle income African American areas alongside poorer areas. But schools are 
lower-quality and overcrowded, students who make it to college generally attend nearby 
community colleges (as Brown was scheduled to do had he lived), and jobs are low-status 
when available. These characteristics, too common among even better-off African American 
communities—let alone apocalyptically devastated areas like the east side of Detroit—are 
matched by oppression in and by the courts and police that can only be described as 
bloodsucking on the community.

According to Richard Rosenfeld, criminology professor at the University of Missouri at St. 
Louis, African Americans in Ferguson are 37 percent more likely to be stopped by police 
than they should be given their share in the population, and that disproportion is 
actually less than the statewide average, 59 percent. In nearby Maplewood, Missouri, the 
New York Times noted, African Americans are searched or arrested during stops at more than 
twice the rate for whites, yet whites and Blacks are about equally likely to be carrying 
illegal items; in Hazelwood, another St. Louis suburb, African Americans are twice as 
likely as whites to be searched in a stop, and three times as likely to be arrested, but 
searches of whites are 11⁄2 times as likely to find illegal goods.

Compounding this situation is what some call “making the rounds” and others the 
“mini-shuffle” or “jail hop” — African Americans arrested or convicted on traffic charges, 
if unable to pay the fines and administrative fees that may double or triple their 
payments, are jailed in place of payment (or are jailed on top of payment) and then, 
before release, passed around to any other jurisdiction that has a warrant for them or 
where they owe money. “If I know I have warrants in five or six different places,” says 
Nikos Chatman, who is employed full-time at a St. Louis airport, “and I get pulled over, 
the first thing I do is smoke a cigarette, because I know I’m gone. I’m going to do the 
rounds.” (Campbell Robertson and Joseph Goldstein, New York Times, August 27.) In reality, 
this is nothing but a money-making operation: many smaller towns’ financing depends 
heavily on fines and court fees that fall heavily on poor, especially Black and Latino 
people, who are less likely to be able to pay at once, and more likely to miss a court 
date, adding hundreds of dollars to their payments. Race prejudice, in one sense, is only 
a byproduct of a corrupt system that finances itself out of the emptiest pockets, and yet, 
race is central when police judge—or misjudge—who is likeliest to be a perpetrator.

Same story, basically, all over the United States: a survey of over 250,000 traffic stops 
in Durham, North Carolina, from 2002 to 2013 showed that Black males under nineteen are 
nearly twice as likely to be searched (one in six stops) as white males of the same age; 
older Black males are more than twice as likely to be searched as white males in those age 
groups. Police defenders respond that Black areas are higher-crime areas, which is true 
and turns the question back to why this is so, that is, to the failure of the civil rights 
revolution of the 1960s to win social, as opposed to legal, equality.

The Police and Black Death

With all this in mind—African Americans along with Latinos as disproportionally oppressed 
and exploited—it might seem as if police conduct were a distraction from the “real” issues 
of class and economic justice. But police conduct deserves all the attention it is getting 
both because it is the most concrete example of overall class and economic injustice and 
because, by itself, it means that fifty years after the civil rights movement, Black and 
Latino lives are at risk every day in confrontations with the official power of the state.

Above I referred to a “rampage” of police violence. If confirmation is needed, look at 
these news stories from the weeks just before and after the Michael Brown and Eric Garner 
grand jury reports:

• November 20—Akai Gurley, 28, was shot and
killed in the stairwell of a Brooklyn project building
by Peter Liang, 27, a probationary officer conduct-
ing a security patrol of the building. It isn’t clear
whether Liang fired on seeing Gurley or by accident
while trying to open a door. However, it is common
practice for officers to draw their weapons during
“vertical patrols,” as they are called, because they
are considered dangerous. (The case has been
referred to...a grand jury.)

• November 22—Tamir E. Rice, 12, was shot sec-
onds after a police cruiser arrived on a 911 call
that someone was waving a pistol or toy gun in a
Cleveland park. (It was a real-looking toy.) The
911 caller identifies the person as “probably a
juvenile, you know,” says he is “sitting on the
swing right now,” and says three different times
that the gun is “probably fake...probably fake...
I don’t know if it’s real or not,” but also says it is
“scaring the shit out of me.” In a surveillance
video, available at http://www.wkyc.com/story/news/local/cleve-
land/2014/11/26/tamir-rice-shooting-video-released/19530745, Rice can be seen walking up
and down on an empty sidewalk near some picnic tables, striking poses with the “gun.” The 
scene is completely deserted except for a figure sitting at one of the tables during the 
first few minutes, apparently unconcerned. (In other words, Rice was not waving his “gun” 
in a crowd.) Later, with this person gone, Rice sits at the table for several minutes, at 
one point putting his head down on the table, appearing bored stiff. He gets up again and 
walks out toward the sidewalk as a cruiser stops on the grass, an officer exits the right 
side of the car, and Rice goes down, all within 3 seconds and before the driver is out of 
the car. Rice died the next day.

• November 28—A six-person jury in a Bronx lawsuit found New York City and police
sergeant Robert Barnett liable in the October 30, 2005, shooting death of Leonel Disla,
who was 19. At the time, Sgt. Barnett testified that Disla was “coming at me with a
knife. I was in fear for my safety.” But forensics showed that Barnett’s bullet went
through Disla from the side and the main witness testified in the lawsuit that he never
saw Disla with a knife and said so at trial only because detectives threatened him with
parole violations. The case shows what anyone with a brain knows are routine police
false testimony and coercion. Disla’s family will get a still-undetermined award, but
Disla remains dead.

I don’t think there is a spike in police killings right now; rather, they are getting more
media attention because of the terrible killings in Ferguson and Staten Island and the
protests against them. A ProPublica analysis of FBI statistics shows that for the three
years 2010-2012, African American males between 16 and 19 years old were killed by
police at a rate 21 times greater than for white males of the same ages (31.17 per mil-
lion of population versus 1.47 per million). Related to officers Wilson’s and Barnett’s 
testimony, the report also found that claims of “officer under attack” went from 33 
percent of cases, before a 1985 Supreme Court ruling that deadly force could be used only 
in a threat to an officer’s or someone else’s safety, to 62 percent in the five years 
before 2010. (The report is at 
www.propublica.org/article/dead-ly-force-in-black-and-white.) None of this is new, but the 
conditions are gaining exposure because of people’s determination now to fight back. 
Finally, adding incomprehension to injury, whites, who do not face the danger daily, are 
significantly more likely to explain it away than African Americans, who do face it 
daily—in a poll released before the Ferguson grand jury report, 62 percent of American 
Americans believed Wilson was at fault, 22 percent of whites. Those 22 percent are 
significant, showing this is an issue of justice and not only race, but they are only 22 
percent.

There is a moment in Toni Morrison’s Beloved when the protagonist, Sethe, realizes that 
her master is training his apprentices to differentiate between her “human” and “animal” 
traits: “No, no,” the slavemaster says to them. “I told you to put her human 
characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right.” Something like this, not 
exactly the same, happens between police and the people they patrol: certain types of 
people are seen as dangerous, violent, or simply expendable. Because of the whole history 
of the United States and its white-dominant (culturally, not individually), violent, and 
official-violence-prone culture, these people are most often poor, Black, Latino, or other 
“low-class” ethnicities. They are certain lifestyles and economic groups as 
well—prostitutes, cross-dressers, street youth, petty vendors like Eric Garner with his 
“loosey” untaxed cigarettes. There’s a whole police culture, the “broken windows” policy, 
that starts by harassing such people and keeping them off balance, a policy ending in 
arrest and days in “the system,” or injury or death, for Black and Latino people much more 
than whites. It’s a culture shared by police of all races but worst, of course, across 
racial lines. And when something goes wrong, as it must sometime when everyone is on edge, 
the Black, Latino, or street person is likely to be seen, instantly, as a menace or simply 
an obstacle to be overpowered. Something like what Morrison describes (“Her human 
characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right”) happens when police, 
patrolling among people they despise and fear, pull up by a Black youth and shoot within 
three seconds. The gun and threat are processed as real because of the black face where a 
white face might have been processed as belonging to a pre-teenage boy.

Social Heroism and a Possible New Movement

In the possible new movement that has been growing in recent weeks the call for 
nonviolence has been paramount. But I think the violence by Ferguson residents, on and 
after August 9 and on November 24, was heroic, as well as inevitable. Those who have read 
The Utopian over the years know that I have never advocated violence, but I have often 
defended it as a community’s first response to outrage. (See “British Riots: It Is Right 
to Rebel,” Utopian 10, 2011.) But in this case it is more. Far from the mindless rage 
portrayed in the media, people in Ferguson did what they knew was necessary to not let 
Michael Brown’s killing go by. “If it wasn’t for the looting,” one man who remained 
anonymous told reporters, “we wouldn’t get the attention.” He was right, and, as much as 
the orderly day-time protests led by church and civic groups, the nighttime faceoffs with 
police and the trashing and looting were acts of social heroism.

That said, there are plenty of people in Ferguson and elsewhere who do oppose violent 
protest, including most of Brown’s immediate family. (Brown’s stepfather, Louis Head, 
repeatedly screamed out “Burn this bitch down!” the night of November 24, after his wife, 
Brown’s mother Lesley McSpadden, broke down while trying to address the crowd. Head has 
since apologized, whether sincerely or tactically only his lawyer knows for sure.) So if 
it is a mistake to reflexively condemn violence and promise only peaceful protest, it is 
also wrong to make a fetish of confronting the police or stepping past the boundaries of 
legality.

The main point I want to make is that—if I can use this expression—a rare and delicate 
flower has taken root and begun to grow. It is the flower of a real mass movement and it 
has not bloomed in more than thirty years. Anything, anything at all that encourages that 
movement is precious. This must mean following the discipline of nonviolence in many of 
the protests that I hope are coming, not because nonviolence is necessarily right but 
because people are beginning, hesitantly, to be drawn into a mass movement for the first 
time in decades. By the same token there will be points when the movements will square 
off, push past the police, throw things and break things. If that is part of the movement 
it is good; if it’s the act of determined groups trying to “up the ante” and lead by 
example, it will hurt more than it helps. Absolutely nothing matters except that a real 
movement takes root, grows, and maintains its independence.

One point to be made about this movement, so far, is that it is Americanist. I don’t mean 
simply in invoking ideals of fairness, open protest, and free speech, although these 
appeals have been frequent. This movement, so far, is Americanist in a much more profound 
way: It is claiming the right of people of color to an absolutely equal part in the United 
States. Much more than in the movement of fifty years ago, there is no ideology of 
separatism, a distinct Black political entity, or even a separate, culturally Black sphere 
of U.S. society. (Rather, culturally, people are fully African American and fully 
American.) The protesters are claiming full justice for people of color because they live 
in the United States as Americans and assert full citizenship as an unqualified right. 
That attitude can change of course, but it is consistent with the dominant demand of Black 
movements over the last two centuries for full inclusion in the United Sttes on their 
terms, not on white Americans’ terms, a tendency I’ve defined elsewhere as “prophetic 
integrationism” (The Mount of Vision, 2012). And the rioting and looting of the Ferguson 
militants, as much as the nonviolent marching of others—and as paradoxical as this might 
seem—is an expression of this same prophetic integrationism. It is an assertion of 
ownership over the streets where people live and will go on living, in the face of and in 
defiance of those who treat citizens as dirt.

At the same time, while I generally agree with this idea of full participation in 
equality, it’s crucial not to be limited by what the U.S. political and economic systems 
can give. Justice is a whole; it is a right and not contingent. And, as I’ll argue in a 
moment, it requires going beyond police conduct to issues of full social equality.

I hope very much that a self-sustaining movement has begun and will grow through the 
winter, reach a new height next summer, grow again and expand again in another year. All 
that is required is courage and a lack of cynicism and despair, because—to the shame and 
curse of America—the causes will not go away, that is, the police will not cease to kill 
new Black, Latino, poor and outcast people.

In prophetic theology, which I study, there is a concept of redemption. Those who have 
suffered and died without justice are redeemed by acts of justice. Nothing can bring back 
Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Leonel Disla and so many more. But a 
movement for justice can redeem them so that no more will the body of a Black man be mud 
and blood.

The Need for Utopia

No movement to curb police violence alone can curb police violence. The reason is that 
police are never more corrupt or brutal than the society they are rooted in and serve. 
Anyone with a reasonably open mind knows the profile of police, as a social group, the 
world over: fawning and subservient to those they perceive with power; careful and polite 
to the middle class (good clothes and speech); arrogant and edgy at best, brutal and 
trigger-happy at worst, toward those they see as their inferiors; enraged and violent when 
they feel defiance or opposition. (I myself once spent 24 hours in “the system” after 
saying to a plainclothes cop, “How the fuck did I know you were a cop?”) And everywhere, 
in all countries, the arrogance and brutality are worst toward whatever ethnic group is 
outcast and despised—one always is. In this structure police are the petty enforcers and 
in most cases are linked both to the local ruling elites and also to the local criminal 
bosses. But the particular groups they push around are supplied by the structure of the 
society.

So, the people the police brutalize are always those already brutalized. The Black body 
that is “rag and stone / is mud / and blood” (Clifton) was already pushed down in school, 
in jobs, in the medical clinic, in the street. There is no police injustice that is not 
already social injustice. So to end police injustice against the African American, the 
Latino, the bums, the street people, the higglers, the petty criminals, the outcasts, has 
to mean ending social injustice. And this means expanding the fight for street justice to 
one for economic justice, educational justice, health justice, immigration justice, and a 
just and equal social structure. And these goals, seemingly so utopian and so far beyond 
the possibilities of the moment, will arise naturally and inevitably if a new movement for 
justice gets off the ground. Then, as half a century ago, all the basic questions will be 
on the table and all questions open for discussion.

Many years ago the founding statement of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 
(1960) declared that organization’s aim to be “a social order of justice permeated by 
love.” The words were written in a reform context—the struggle against segregation and for 
voting rights—but went beyond that context into a utopian context, as the then-young 
activists well knew. They are beautiful words still, in their simplicity and sweep. 
Getting even to the beginning of a movement that can fight for this vision will not be 
simple. It will mean confronting the weariness and cynicism that bear down when protest 
follows protest with no tangible change. It will mean avoiding the seductive call for an 
easy change through the electoral system—through electing the right people to forget the 
people’s needs for those of managing the system. (Obama!) And it will involve interminable 
debates over goals, strategies, methods—between liberals, anarchists, remixed Marxists, 
and others—that can themselves be wearisome and alienating to ordinary people who don’t 
breathe politics and want to live their lives. But the words, and the utopian change they 
envision, are worth calling to our minds now. Nothing less than this is what we should be 
dreaming of, and working for.