EXCERPT

The New Class War of the Managerial Elite

by THOMAS KLIKAUER – NADINE CAMPBELL

 

Ever since Frederic Taylor’s falsely labelled “Scientific Management”, the managerial elite has been on a stratospheric rise. Rather cunningly and often even deceitfully, Taylor named his book “scientific” even though it does not contain a single scientific experiment. What he presented was an engineering ideology – not science. Despite this and together with French factory administration expert Henri Fayol, modern management was born. But managers are not only the people who control workers and tell employees what to do, but they are also a powerful group of corporate apparatchiks and worse, they have established themselves as an ever more powerful social class.

Trained in one of the world’s 13,000 business schools, the managerial elite has slowly but steadily and rather relentlessly taken over ever more institutions of society. Bit by bit, they are replacing democracy with anti-democratic Managerialism, managerialist knowledge and managerialist ideology. Managerial knowledge is about the administration of companies and corporations; managerialist knowledge represents the ideology of Managerialism. Unlike simple management, Managerialism is an even more dangerous ideology. While management is mostly concerned with the managing of a workplace, Managerialism is different.

It spreads fast and into social institutions such as hospitals, schools, universities, etc. Managerialism replaces bureaucracy that previously was there to serve the public. By contrast, managerialist knowledge is based on profit thinking. And in those cases where there is no profit-making (yet), such as primary schools, Managerialism operates as an “as if” ideology. That means Managerialism and its ideological henchmen treats such an organisation as if it were a profit-making enterprise.

Beyond that, the power of Managerialism and the managerial elites infiltrate three key areas of society. These are the government, the economy, and the sphere of culture and the media. In the sphere of the economy, capitalism developed large size companies during the first half of the 20^th century, making it impossible for individual capitalist like Henry Ford to control large groups of workers. It demanded a new class of overseers – the modern manager. As capitalism moved on, it also created corporations owned by invisible shareholders. This furthered the power of a class of managers needed to run corporations on behalf of their owners.

As time went on, special commerce schools that trained managers were established and in a rather genius move, these commercial-administrative schools that teach the simplicity of business administration assigned themselves to universities. With that, they gained the reputation of science for a subject that has been, from its interception onwards, never been a scientific subject. Since Taylor, its clams to “science” remains a fake. Still, management sells itself as management sciences.

Year after year after year, these business schools churn out thousands of corporate apparatchiks trained in the simplicity of corporate administration. Today, their preferred degree still shows management’s origins in factory administration. The “A” in MBA stands for administration. As such, college-educated managers and administrative professionals have succeeded old-fashioned bourgeois capitalists as the dominant elite. Today, this managerial business class has even established its special resting areas found in the airport – the business lounge. The managerial elite and corporate apparatchiks also sit in front of the rest, in an aircraft’s business class. All of that makes them feel unique, privileged and a class of their own. The new rulers of the world. What they have replaced – democratic pluralism – has become managerial neoliberalism.

Unlike neoliberalism that pushes capitalism from upstairs, from the economy, the managerial elite pushes capitalism from downstairs, from companies and corporations. While neoliberalism uses democracy, Managerialism replaces democracy. There is no democracy inside companies and corporations. For corporate apparatchiks, there is no need for democracy. It is a hindrance for Managerialism’s drive to so-called efficiency – one of its preferred ideologies.

With that, the managerial elite marches forward. Many of the powers of democratic legislatures have been usurped by or delegated to, executive agencies, courts, or transnational bodies. College-educated professionals and among them the managerial elite have far more influence than the working-class majority in these institutions. In other words, as the managerial elite moves in, the working class and the general public is moved out. We see this not just in economic institutions – IMF, world bank, Davos, WTO, NAFTA, EU, etc. – but also in hospitals, schools, universities as well as in what was previously seen as the watchdog of civil society: the media.

Simultaneously, corporate mass media have made sure that the issue of class has virtually disappeared from public discourse. So have words like trade unions, strike, revolution, working class, etc. Corporate mass media have almost completely eliminated them from our vocabulary. If we no longer have words, we no longer can think in these terms. It eliminates any revolution long before it is even thought of. In addition, corporate mass media always works hard to make sure that race and nationalism overlay class. It shifts vertical class thinking – bourgeoisie-vs.-workers – onto horizontal thinking. Now it is white workers against non-white workers and domestic workers against foreign workers – the in-group against the out-group.

Meanwhile, the managerial elite has achieved domination. It is the true new ruling class of society. Next to the owners of companies and corporations, these corporate apparatchiks are the people who effectively control the means of production. They run Tesla while Elon Musk travels into space and appears on TED talks. They run Amazon while Jeff Bezos counts his billions.

The managerial elite has crushed the working class and is about to re-organise society in their image. This image is set up through the way they have been trained in business schools. Crucial to all this is access to the corporate managerial elite which is almost exclusively granted to those certified by a managerialist accrediting agent – usually an elite university or business school. This is where the new “uber-class” is trained and certified. Not surprisingly, access is via money – more than $200,000 at the top schools.

Membership in the college-educated managerialist uber-class represents no more than 10% or 15% of the population in a typical OECD country. It remains highly exclusive and a relatively small minority. This credentialed uber-class of the managerial elite owns roughly half the wealth in the United States.

One of the most important issues is this: American college students tend to have one or more college-educated parents. In other Western democracies as well, membership in the university-educated managerial class is also partly hereditary. As social mobility declines, the managerial elite reproduces itself.

In other words, there is a class ceiling, and it pays to be privileged. However, the managerial elite also remains, at least partly, open to talent from below. In other words, occasionally, non-elite people enter into the elite, but those are the exceptions – not the rule. Overall, the following has to be understood,

it may be true that college degrees are tickets out of poverty, but most of the tickets are passed out at birth to children in a small number of families with a lot of money. In the United States, students with math scores in the bottom half who come from families with the highest socioeconomic status are more likely to finish a college degree than students from families with the lowest socioeconomic status who have math scores in the top half of the range.

Worse, the median family income of the parents of a typical student from Harvard is $168,800. The average income of an American is $40,000 – one-fourth of that. Not surprisingly, 67% of Harvard students come from the highest-earning 20% of American households. The rest of the Ivy League will be rather similar.

The business school trained managerial elite not only gets training is special universities and flies business class, but it also lives in special geographical areas, in so-called “hubs”. These are the locations of the homes of the managerial uber-class. In these hubs or special suburbs, we find people engaged in high-end business services. They work in software, finance, insurance, accounting, marketing, advertising, consulting, and others whose clients are often corporations, including global corporations managing supply chains.

This has devastating impacts on cities as they become gentrified. The gap between the richest and poorest in New York City, for example, is comparable to that of Swaziland. Los Angeles and Chicago are slightly more egalitarian. Both are comparable to the Dominican Republic and El Salvador.

All this is possible on the back of poor workers mostly elsewhere – in the Global South. The fortunes of many San Francisco IT executives and corporate apparatchiks, for example, depend on legions of underpaid factory workers in China and other countries, on energy-hungry server farms located in remote rural areas, and on massive communications and transportation infrastructures stretching over vast distances among cities and nations and maintained by blue-collar workers.

Together with the economic elite representing neoliberalism, the managerial corporate elite has underscored a move away from regulation and thereby weakened organised labour at home and elsewhere. This, of course, has helped to boost corporate profit margins. Increasingly, the money generated, administered and overseen by the managerial elite is held in tax havens. Today, roughly one-fourth of all the world’s wealth is held in such tax havens. Worse, 43% of foreign earnings are parked in just five tax havens: Bermuda, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. The infamous Panama Papers are a very small part of an operation that deprives OECD countries of much-needed taxation, resulting in underfunded schools and hospitals.

Beyond that, the managerial elite works in international institutions that have largely eliminated democracy while simultaneously keeping a democratic cover alive in order not to be accused of being non-democratic. The managerial elite, in the form of corporate lobbyists, keeps this up in order to secure a positive regulatory framework supportive of profit maximisation.

In the European Union, for example, there has been a deliberately engineered erosion of national democracies. With the 2008/2009 Global Financial Crisis, this process has only been accelerated. From its interception, the EU has always displayed a chronic and deliberate bias in favour of business and finance and against organised labour. European labour has been pacified with European Works Councils. These councils have virtually no power. They follow German Works Councils that have some powers over rather inconsequential issues – the infamous colour of the toilet door – and next to no powers over serious issues like wages, CEO salaries, plant re-locations, etc. At the EU, the pacification of labour moves on while the EU is giving capital an almost free hand. It signifies the greater ability of capital, investors, and corporate managers to lobby and organise themselves rather successfully across national boundaries.

In Europe as in the USA, for every dollar spent by labour unions and public-interest groups on lobbying, large corporations and their lobbyists spend $34. With a 34:1 ratio, it is not surprising that EU and US laws favour corporations – not workers. In return for their lobbying, companies and corporations receive low or no corporate tax bills, easy access to tax havens and rafts of pro-business regulation – euphemistically labelled as deregulation. This disadvantages workers systematically. For their meagre $1 for lobbying, workers get low wages, high job insecurity, mass unemployment, horrific working conditions, the rise of precariat, wage stagnation, gig jobs, etc.

For decades, the EU has demonstrated an enduring predisposition in favour of capital, business, finance and against organised labour. It sows the greater ability of investors, corporate managers, and the managerial elite to lobby politicians and to bypass democracy. Next to this, the non-democratic judiciary has also been highly supportive of the managerial elite, corporations, and corporate capitalism. Like the state as such as the police force, in particular, today’s juristocracy – a democracy guided by the judiciary – has been important to the managerial elite because it shields it as well as companies and corporations from the democratic majority.

In short, the reliance on the legal system and courts instead of a democratically elected legislature is shaping public, economic, and labour policy while shifting power away from working-class voters. It is shifted ever more towards an un-elected uber-class of – often elite – university certified judges. They are the new rulers in robes representing yet another credentialed uber-class assisting the rise of the managerial elite. Of course, all of this adds up to what Warren Buffett admitted in 2006,

There’s class warfare, all right,

but it’s my class, the rich class,

that’s making war,

and we’re winning.

Buffett’s statement only shows how to secure corporate capitalism and its managerial elite is in what it is doing: class warfare. The only reasonable challenge to the power of the managerial elite during the last few years did not come from the working class. It came from right-wing populism. This challenged the managerial uber-elite but not corporate capitalism. Still, one might not see the managerial elite as a unified entity. It consists of, at least, three factions:

The Right: The first group is the right-wing hardcore neoliberal managerial elite representing the ideology of Hayek’s neoliberalism, extreme anti-unionism, deregulation (i.e. re-regulation for business), taxation only of the working class and not the rich, etc. This faction is represented by the ideology of Milton Friedman and financed by the infamous Koch brothers. Ideologically, it is supported by the likes of the Cato Institute.

The Moderates: The second faction of the managerial elite is the more moderates like the Clintons, Obama, etc. They represent a slightly more restrained version of market-friendly neoliberalism living in the eternal hope that capitalism can be nice.

The Centre: Finally, there is the centre of the managerial elite which consists of the Bush dynasty, former British prime minister David Cameron, Germany’s Merkel and France’s Macron. These represent a centrist form of neoliberalism.

Meanwhile, the rise of right-wing populism is a fight against these three groups of the managerial elite. The right-wing counterrevolution of the populists comes from the outside using forces that are generated from below – those Donald Trump calls the poorly educated. In short, today’s right-wing populist demagogues target the uber-class and thereby the establishment. These are framed as the enemies. The fight of right-wing populism takes place in all three realms of power currently run by the managerial elite: politics, the economy, and the culture-media-industry.

It attacks the managerial elite’s cosmopolitanism, and its drive towards globalisation by being staunchly nationalistic – America First! In Europe, right-wing populists are resolutely anti-Europe. Their most outstanding triumph remains Brexit. In the sphere of culture and the media, right-wing populist politicians deliberately ignore the elaborate political etiquette of managerialist and political uber-class. Right-wing populism uses crude, insulting, and aggressive language. Right-wing populists hate, reject, and fight against political correctness.

While Karl Marx saw religion as the opiate of the masses, right-wing populism has found a few new and plenty of old opiates to conjure up, like xenophobia, racism, sexism, antisemitism, nationalism, etc. Unlike the Catholic Church in the year 1622, Stalin and Hitler in the early 20^th century, today’s propaganda can be distributed quickly and widely through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. Then as today, the question of whether socialism or barbarity is still with us.

If banana republicanism is to be avoided as the fate of Western democracies, it demands a fight against both the managerial elite as well as right-wing populism. Besides, right-wing populism tends to be somewhat self-destructive. Right-wing populists are by far better at campaigning than at governing. Rather quickly, Trump discovered how difficult it is to staff his administration with competent technocrats from the legal, political and managerial elite willing to serve under a politician despised by many experts and officials. In short, the Washington managerial-administrative elite not only rejects Donald Trump it did not even want to work for him.

Whether the managerial elite, corporate apparatchiks or right-wing populists, they are a bit like homoeopathic medicine. The alleged cures that are proposed to treat our social, economic, political and environmental illnesses that capitalism’s free-market has causes are to be fixed with a hefty dose of more free market. This is not going to work.

Instead of the faked solution of the managerialist uber-class and right-wing populists, real empowering can only come from organised labour. This empowerment should be based on something like a tripartite business-labour-government arrangement that engages in collective bargaining. Only such a mechanism can provide real checks on the managerial uber-class and keep right-wing populists at bay. For democratic pluralism, free and fair elections remain essential, but these are by no means sufficient condition for genuine democracy.

Tripartite labour-business-government wage-setting institutions need to resemble one-person-one-vote democracy. There must be economical and political checks and balances in addition to political checks and balances to reduce and perhaps eventually eliminate the power of the managerial class.

Today, this managerial uber-class is still in the minority. But it has assembled a near-monopoly of wealth, political power, expertise, media influence, and academic authority. Given its power, it can completely and successfully repress the numerically greater but politically weaker working-class majority. If this continues in North America and Europe, both may very well look a lot like present-day Brazil. A country run by nepotistic oligarchies clustered in a few swollen metropolitan areas surrounded by neglected hinterlands that are rundown, depopulated, and loathed.

Notes.

Michael Lind’s The New Class War is published by Penguin.

Washington Schemes to Heat Up the Arctic
by BRIAN CLOUGHLEY

Photograph Source: Silvan Leinss – Own work – CC BY-SA 4.0

One of the more bizarre indications that Trump Washington is interested in the Arctic was made a year ago when he said he would like to buy Greenland, a vast territory that is administered by Denmark.  It is about the same size as Saudi Arabia, and slightly smaller than India — a big country in which there is a Pentagon base at Thule which, among other things, as Defence News tells us, is “the U.S. military’s northernmost base and the only installation north of the Arctic Circle. It is home to the 12th Space Warning Squadron, a cadre of Air Force officers and enlisted personnel that provide 24/7 missile warning and space surveillance using a massive AN/FPS-132 radar. Besides being a critical site for missile defence and space situational awareness, Thule hosts the Defence Department’s northernmost deep-water seaport and airfield. Those assets would come into play in any sort of military conflict in the arctic, giving the Pentagon forward-basing options if needed.”

In the Pentagon’s “New Arctic Strategy” it is stated that the Space Force will “develop new technologies and modernize existing assets in the Arctic necessary to ensure access to and freedom to operate in space,” while Air Force Secretary Barbara Barret announced in July that “U.S. air and space forces value the Arctic. Access and stability require cooperation among America’s allies and partners, along with a commitment to vigilance, power projection, and preparation.”

Barrett’s observation that the region should be “a free and open domain for benevolent actors” would be more credible were the Pentagon indeed a benevolent actor — and while Washington always declares that other countries are indulging in military adventurism when developing defences in their own territory, it is a different call when the Pentagon indulges in “forward-basing.”  For example, it is believed to be sinister that in its own Arctic territory, “Russia has refurbished airfields, invested in search and rescue, and built radar stations to improve awareness in the air and maritime domains” while U.S. military expansion in the Arctic is considered essential because “it is a critical domain to protect America’s homeland.”

This was raised by Trump during his fantasising about buying Greenland when, although acknowledging that “Denmark essentially owns it” he claimed that this hurts Denmark “very badly” because it loses “almost $700 million a year” (which is not so) but that he wants to continue “protecting” Washington’s “big ally.”

Denmark and the rest of the world laughed at Trump’s silly fantasy which caused the usual Trump reaction, in that he promptly cancelled a scheduled visit to Copenhagen and tweeted childish abuse about Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen.  His reason for scrapping the visit and insulting the Danish people was that the prime minister had “no interest in discussing the purchase of Greenland”.  As with the entire Washington establishment — and most notably the Machiavellian Pompeo — Trump considers that when a country is presented with demands made by the United States then there has to be speedy and totally compliant action on the part of the targeted government.

Trump’s petulant insult was laughed at by the Danes and everyone else, but then he turned his attention to another part of the Arctic.  As pointed out by Juan Cole, on August 18, the same day that scientists produced a research analysis concluding that the Greenland ice sheet is losing 500 billion tons of ice each year (equal to a million tons a minute), the real estate agent in the White House finalised his plans to encourage oil and gas drilling in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

You have to hand it to Trump, in that he rarely fails to make a complete idiot of himself when an opportunity arises.

The wildlife refuge was first protected by legislation brought in forty years ago, but has been under constant threat from oil and gas companies which are faithfully supported by members of the Republican Party whose Congressional legislators in 2017 (when they controlled both Houses) approved a tax bill that opened the area to oil and gas leasing.  It has been calculatedthat the oil and gas sector contributed $84.4 million in the 2018 election cycle. Koch Industries was the largest single donor, at $10.5 million. Total campaign spending by the oil and gas sector since 1990 has totalled $625 million.

Trump and the people who fill the pockets of legislators — and the pocket-filled legislators themselves — are not in the slightest concerned about the effects of gas and oil drilling in the Wildlife Refuge, which are likely to be catastrophic.

Which brings us to the military expansion equation, in which the Pentagon is to the fore in explaining in its Arctic Strategy that “U.S. interests include maintaining flexibility for global power projection, including by ensuring freedom of navigation and overflight; and limiting the ability of China and Russia to leverage the region as a corridor for competition that advances their strategic objectives through malign or coercive behaviour.”

Russia and China wish to develop economically, and the Arctic is an area that can be beneficial to their interests.  Russia, as even the Pentagon has to admit, “is the largest Arctic nation by landmass, population, and military presence above the Arctic Circle”, although of course it is regarded as deplorable that its “commercial investments . . . have been matched by continued defence investments and activities that strengthen both its territorial defence and its ability to control the Northern Sea Route.”

As to China, the summation is that it is “attempting to gain a role in the Arctic in ways that may undermine international rules and norms, and there is a risk that its predatory economic behaviour globally may be repeated in the Arctic.”  In other words, Washington, which fancies it does not indulge in predatory economic behaviour, does not want either Russia or China to continue their initiatives in developing the region.

Neither Russia nor China is furthering schemes whereby northern wildlife will be destroyed by their economic activities, and there is no evidence that their military activities are in any way confrontational or aggressive.  But the Pentagon is determined to find justification for its own posture in the region and is developing a “U.S. Arctic deterrent” which “will require agile, capable, and expeditionary forces with the ability to flexibly project power into and operate within the region, as the Joint Force must be able to do elsewhere globally.”

Trump’s emphasis on expanding fossil fuel production and throwing open the Alaskan Arctic to drilling and associated coinstruction will imperil endangered species and contributemassively to the climate change crisis.  The Pentagon’s military strategy for the region will increase international tension and inevitably lead to confrontation, as it expands its presence in order to “project power.”  Washington’s schemes for the Arctic will heat the place up to the point of crisis

Brian Cloughley writes about foreign policy and military affairs. He lives in Voutenay sur Cure, France.

The Short Life and Long Afterlife of Fred Hampton

by GENE GLICKMAN

Fred Hampton, 1968.

The events described here happened during my lifetime, but to many, they’re “history.” Fred’s life, and the principles he lived by, still have much to teach us today.

Life

Fred Hampton (1948-1969), leader of Chicago’s Black Panther Party (BPP), was one of the most brilliant and creative people the USA has produced. And that’s why he was assassinated by the FBI, in conspiracy with the Cook County States Attorney and the Chicago Police. This article commemorates Fred and his achievements.

Fred grew up in Maywood, a majority-Black Chicago suburb. After graduating high school with honors, he attended and graduated from junior college, majoring in pre-law. The rest of his formidable knowledge was acquired out of school.

He first led the Maywood NAACP Youth Council, where he demonstrated extraordinary organizing ability. In a town of only 27,000, the Council’s membership soared from seven to 700. It succeeded in improving Maywood’s recreational facilities and its schools’ educational quality. Then the Panthers’ Ten-Point Program grabbed him. Fred moved to Chicago.

The BPP’s Ten-Point Program:

1) We want freedom. We want the power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.

2) We want full employment for our people.

3) We want an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our Black and oppressed communities.

4) We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

5) We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day society.

6) We want all Black men to be exempt from military service. [This was during Vietnam.]

7) We want an immediate end to POLICE BRUTALITY and MURDER of Black people.

8) We want freedom for all Black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

9) We want all Black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their Black Communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

10) We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.

Fred joined in November, 1968. Chicago’s Panthers were undergoing stress, caused by the FBI’s COINTELPRO (COunter-INTELligence PROgram): tactics devised by Director J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972). Combining various “dirty tricks”—lying anonymous letters, forged documents, informers/provocateurs, illegal wiretaps, etc. —eroding trust and producing enmity. During the Sixties it focused on Black groups. The Chicago BPP’s original director, Bob Brown, resigned, creating a power vacuum. Fred’s abilities were quickly recognized and he assumed leadership. CONTELPRO dirty tricks continued throughout his tenure. But, largely because of his peacemaking style and superb leadership skills, they failed.

Shortly after Fred took office, the Panthers inaugurated their Free Breakfast Program for Children, soon health clinics and ambulance services were added. Sll this earned them a good name. These nation-wide programs were especially successful in Chicago, where blood banks and buses to prisons for relatives were also included. The chapter’s prestige and membership grew.

Fred had another idea—original and powerful: He organized a meeting of gang leaders. Turf wars were counterproductive, he argued. The real enemies weren’t other ethnic gangs, but the rich, who ran Chicago for their own benefit. Minds started to change. Fred’s being their age probably encouraged his listeners’ receptivity, but his case made sense on its own merits. The Young Lords had begun as a gang. José “Cha-Cha” Jiménez’s (1948- ), their leader, recognized the danger of losing their turf to developers. Fred’s assistance was crucial. Cha-Cha explains: “Fred took the Young Lords under his wing. He gave us the skills that we needed to come right out of the gang and start organizing the community[.]” (quoted in “Fifty Years of Fred Hampton’s Rainbow Coalition,” by Jacqueline Serrato, Southside Weekly:10/6/2019)

As thinking changed, Hampton built a broad coalition. Besides the Panthers and the Lords (Puerto Ricans), it included the Brown Berets (Chicanos), the Young Patriots (white migrants from Appalachia), the Red Guard Party (Chinese-American Maoists) and the Blackstone Rangers (a Black former gang, now politicizing). Fred dubbed them the “Rainbow Coalition.”

Hoover had long feared the emergence of “a Black Messiah, fomenting revolution in the ghetto.” In the Twenties, he focused on Marcus Garvey. During the Sixties, his eye fixed in turn upon Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, and Fred Hampton. (Not coincidentally, all three died violently.) But in Hampton’s Chicago, COINTELPRO’s usual tactics weren’t working. Hoover made a new, escalatory plan.

Death

He contacted the Chicago Police, who rebuffed him. He turned to the Cook County State’s Attorney, Edward Hanrahan (1921-2009), an up-and-coming Democratic politico—Mayor Richard Daley’s protégé—who dreamed of succeeding Daley as mayor. They talked. Hanrahan agreed. Hoover placed an informer, William O’Neal (c.1948-1990), in the Panthers; Hanrahan prepared a raid on Hampton’s apartment. He selected fourteen police who worked out of his office, rehearsed them and chose a time and date: 0430, 12/04/69. O’Neal drew a floor plan, an “X” denoting Hampton’s bed.

The night before, after Fred taught a nearby class, he and other Panthers adjourned to his apartment, where O’Neal had prepared a meal (surreptitiously druggimg Hampton’s drink). Afterward, some, including O’Neal, left; others stayed the night in the guest room. Fred and Deborah Johnson (1950- ), his fiancée, retired to their bedroom.

Promptly at 0420, the police appeared, silently dividing into two groups. At the zero hour, Group A pounded on the front door, Group B waiting at the rear. Mark Clark (1947-1969), on guard duty, asked, “Who’s there?” A cop yelled, “Tommy Gunn,” and Group A burst in, shooting. Clark died instantly. As he fell from his chair, his finger reflexively tightened on the trigger and a bullet flew into the ceiling. The cops, now all inside, continued firing. In a report by Allie Yang, ABC News (5/14/2019), Deborah (now known as Akua Njeri) continues:

“I saw bullets coming from…the front of the apartment…Sparks of light. I had slid over on top of Chairman Fred. I don’t know what I was thinking, or what I was doing, I just moved over and covered his body,” she remembered. “He didn’t move. Just lifted his head up. It was like he was going in slow motion.”

Hampton “never said a word, he never got up out the bed,” Njeri said. An independent autopsy later determined he had been drugged with secobarbital.

She said it felt like the shooting lasted for hours when it was only minutes because “you don’t know if you’re going to live or die.”

“[Someone] kept calling out, ‘Stop shooting! Stop shooting! We have a pregnant woman, a pregnant sister in here.’ At the time, I was 8 and a half, 9 months pregnant. Pigs [police] kept on shooting.”

Eventually the shooting stopped, Njeri said. She slid out of bed and into Hampton’s house shoes and thought to herself, “Keep your hands up. Don’t stumble. Don’t fall. They will kill you and your baby.”

She said she saw “two lines of police, they were laughing. [They] grabbed me by the top of my head, slung me to the kitchen area.”

“Somebody said, ‘He’s barely alive, he’ll barely make it.’. . .The shooting started back again. The pigs said ‘he’s good and dead now.’”

Several Panthers had been seriously wounded. Wounded or not, all were arrested—charged with aggravated assault and attempted murder (all charges were later dropped). Fred had just joined the National BPP’s Central Committee, as its Spokesman.

Afterlife

The raid was flawless; the cover-up a disaster. The cops unanimously claimed they’d been in a shootout. Hanrahan brought a life-size model of the apartment to CBS-TV, where the police “reenacted the shootout,” while he “explained what happened.” Hanrahan showed photographs of the apartment, with “the Panthers’ bullet holes” circled. But analysis proved the cops had fired at least ninety bullets, the Panthers’ one—Clark’s reflex shot. Negligently, the blood-splattered apartment was unsealed, so the Panthers gave tours, showing those “bullet holes” were actually nailheads.

The Coroner’s inquest dutifully decided the murders were “justifiable homicide.” The Black community’s community’s evolving reaction: confusion, skepticism, disbelief, outrage, fury. When Hanrahan ran for reelection, it voted almost unanimously for his Republican (!) opponent, who won. Hanrahan’s career was over. (Hoover remained invisible.) He ran several other times, always losing badly—a victim of Fred Hampton’s ghost.

In 1971, Fred’s ghost whispered to eight Pennsylvania peace activists: “Concoct a ‘Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI.’ Filch its documents; analyze and publicize them.” On March 8^th they burgled the Media, PA FBI office, stealing a thousand documents. Analysis revealed that, according to Margaret Kimberley (The Burglary and COINTELPRO: How Citizen Action Exposed FBI’s Covert, Illegal Program to Crush Dissent, published by Global Research [1/18/2014]):

FBI informers reported on every meeting, every word and every action of members of the Black Panther Party, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and other groups. FBI agents used informers to create dissension among activists and succeeded in weakening and destroying many organizations. . . .Hoover had a special animus against black people and left no stone unturned in his efforts to destroy the freedom struggle.

The Citizens’ Committee’s bombshells eventually led to a Senate Investigating Committee, chaired by Frank Church (D, Idaho) (Authorizing Resolution passed 82-4: 1/27/1975, Final Report issued: 4/1976). COINTELPRO was (supposedly) dead, though some suspect it continues. (Hoover again avoided criticism, dying in 1972.)

The raid’s survivors, plus the families of those killed in it, sued the perpetrators. The suit was a novelty. Till then, Panthers had been defendants, the State the prosecutor. Now the tables were turned: the State was the defendant! Though they filed suit in 1970, the trial took place years later. It lasted eighteen months. After its 1977 conclusion, the jury deadlocked; the Judge dismissed the case. That seemed the end . . . until the plaintiffs appealed. In 1979 the Court of Appeals ruled that the Government had withheld relevant documents and ordered a new trial.

By 1982, Njeri writes, “it got to the point that the plaintiffs didn’t trust each other; we were sick of the lawyers and they were sick of us. . . .The survivors just wanted this nightmare to be over.” (From Akua Njeri: My Dance with Justice, published by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, 1991). Meanwhile, the defendants were panicky, anticipating more damning facts emerging in open court. Both sides agreed to settle. Each government entity—City, County, Federal—paid ⅓ of the $1.85 million settlement amount. Fred’s ghost approved.

About O’Neal, the informer: He’d played an active role—slipping the knockout drop into Fred’s drink; making the apartment diagram. But he seemed genuinely surprised, even horrified, at the actual murders. He’d returned to Chicago from California in 1984, moving in with his uncle, Ben Heard. Before dawn on Martin Luther King Day, 1990, O’Neal, becoming extremely agitated, rushed from Heard’s apartment, ran onto the nearby Eisenhower Expressway, jumped in front of a car and was killed—a suicide. Fred’s ghost had struck again.

According to Heard, as quoted in the Chicago Reader (The Last Hours of William O’Neal: 1/25/1990, by Michael Ervin): “I think he was sorry he did what he did. He thought the FBI was only going to raid the house. But the FBI gave it over to the state’s attorney and that was all Hanrahan wanted. They shot Fred Hampton and made sure he was dead.” The article continues: “Heard says he was with his nephew the morning after the ambush [raid] when he saw the inside of Hampton’s apartment. ‘There was papers strewn all over the floor, blood all over. There was a trail of blood from where they had dragged Fred’s body. Bill [O’Neal] just stood there in shock. He never thought it would come to all this.’”

Posthumous Recognition

+ Two days after the assassinations, the Weathermen, in one of their first actions, burned several Chicago police cars as payback.

+ Roy Wilkins and Ramsey Clark co-chaired a “Commission of Inquiry into the Black Panthers and the Police.” It asserted the police had killed Hampton without justification or provocation and had violated the Panthers’ Constitutional rights against unreasonable search and seizure. Finally it stated that Hampton and Clark had been summarily executed.

+  In 1990, the Chicago City Council unanimously passed a resolution commemorating December 4, 2004 as  “Fred Hampton Day in Chicago.” That commemoration has continued annually.

+ A public pool in Maywood was renamed in Fred’s honor. It had been built in response to Youth Council pressure under his leadership. On September 7, 2007, Fred’s bust was placed outside it—a very different sort of payback.

+ In March 2006, supporters of Hampton’s charity work proposed naming a Chicago street in his honor. The Fraternal Order of Police blocked this action.

+ In 2019, The Chicago City Council voted 41-9 to commemorate the Fiftieth Anniversary of Fred Hampton’s death (eight “no” votes cast by Aldermen from white districts).

+ A 27-minute documentary film—Death of a Black Panther: The Fred Hampton Story^. was made shortly after his killing.

+ In the 1999 TV mini-series The 60s, Fred appears, serving free breakfasts.

+ Another documentary, from 2015, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution, features footage of Fred.

+ Eyes on the Prize, Episode 12 (“A Nation of Law?”) devotes much of its first half to chronicling Fred’s leadership, his rise to prominence, Hoover’s targeting him and his extrajudicial execution.

+ Judas and the Black Messiah, a feature film about Hampton and O’Neal, is scheduled for 2021 release.

+ A dozen or more songs are either about Fred or refer to him.

Conclusion

These tributes suggest a reluctance to let Fred go. Many Chicagoans must wonder as news stories break, “What would Fred be thinking and doing now?” His life and death offers four perspectives to ponder:

The FBI: It’s our Secret Police. In an Intercept article (10/22/2019), Alice Speri writes: “Since 2010, the FBI has surveilled black activists and Muslim Americans, Palestinian solidarity and peace activists, Abolish ICE protesters, Occupy Wall Street, environmentalists, Cuba and Iran normalization proponents, and protesters at the Republican National Convention. And that is just the surveillance we know of. . .”

Racism: Hampton pushed neither integration nor nationalism. Instead he favored “Solidarity” through multi-racial coalitions based on shared revolutionary ideology. This interesting approach merits much more study and thought than it has received.

Socialism: Recruits joined Fred’s Panthers because of their prestige. Similarly, due partly to Bernie Sanders’ campaigns, the Youth views Socialism positively. If that’s you, and, like Fred, you didn’t receive a Socialist grounding in school, educate yourselves, like Fred did. Form study groups. Some curricular suggestions (all, except the first, American): Read the Communist Manifesto, John Reed’s Ten Days that Shook the World, a biography of Eugene Debs. Listen to Richard Wolff’s talks. Study David Harvey’s approach to Marx’s Capital. Watch the film Salt of the Earth. Read W.E.B. DuBois’, Malcolm’s and MLK’s writings and speeches from their last years of life. Think critically. Speak with others; consider their thoughts. Then act!

Fred Hamptons are all too rare. When they do appear, we must recognize, treasure, and crucially, protect them, so their full potential can be realized!

Fred Hampton: A Dozen Statements

(It’s appropriate that Fred have the last word.)

“If you walk through life and don’t help anybody, you haven’t had much of a life.”

“We [Panthers] don’t think you fight fire with fire best; we think you fight fire with water best. We’re going to fight racism not with racism, but we’re going to fight [it] with solidarity. We say we’re not going to fight capitalism with black capitalism, but we’re going to fight it with socialism. We’ve stood up and said we’re not going to fight reactionary pigs and reactionary State’s Attorneys like Hanrahan with any other reactions on our part. We’re going to fight their reactions with all of us people getting together and having an international proletarian revolution.”

“We say that we will work with anybody and form a coalition with anybody that has revolution on their mind.”

“You can’t build a revolution with no education. Jomo Kenyatta did this in Africa, and because the people were not educated, he became as much [of] an oppressor as the people he overthrew.”

“With no education, you have neocolonialism instead of colonialism, like you’ve got in Africa now and like you’ve got in Haiti. So what we’re talking about is there has to be an educational program. That’s very important.”

“We say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class. That Marx and Lenin and Che Guevara and Mao Tse-Tung, and anybody else who ever said or knew or practiced anything about revolution, always said that a revolution is a class struggle.”

“We’re not a racist organization, because we understand that racism is an excuse used for capitalism, and we know that racism is just – it’s a byproduct of capitalism.”

“Black people need some peace. White people need some peace. And we are going to have to fight. We’re going to have to struggle. We’re going to have to struggle relentlessly to bring about some peace, because the people that we’re asking for peace, they are a bunch of megalomaniac warmongers, and they don’t even understand what peace means.”

“A lot of people think the Breakfast for Children program is charity. But what does it do? It takes the people from a stage to another stage. Any program that’s revolutionary is an advancing program. Revolution is change.”

“I believe I’m going to die doing the things I was born to do. I believe I’m going to die high off the people. I believe I’m going to die a revolutionary in the international revolutionary proletarian struggle.”

“If you ever think about me, and you ain’t gonna do no revolutionary act, forget about me. I don’t want myself on your mind if you’re not going to work for the people.”

“Nothing is more important than stopping fascism, because fascism is gonna stop us all.

Gene Glickman is a retired college professor of music. He now conducts a progressive chorus, called “Harmonic Insurgence,” and makes choral arrangements for it and other choruses. He lives in Brooklyn, NY and can be reached at eugene.glickman@ncc.edu.