Philly Anti-Capitalist Philly Anti-authoritarian News

from Serve the People PHL

With the nation’s eyes turned towards militant resistance in Baltimore, Saturday, 25 April, STP – PHL took to the streets of West Philadelphia, joining comrades from SOUL and other organisations to voice collective outrage over the acquittal of the off-duty police officer who murdered Rekia Boyd.

Under SOUL’s directive, comrades used the internationally-attended sporting event known as the Penn Relays to cause major disruptions to automotive traffic on the University of Pennsylvania’s campus, performing sit-ins, die-ins and street blockades in direct confrontation with the festive atmosphere of the events. “We are not sorry for inconveniencing you,” demonstrators asserted. “Being Black in this country is an inconvenience.”

SOUL is a radical student group, based at UPenn, which routinely employs militant tactics on that campus in broad opposition to the manifestations of structural white supremacy within the local and national scheme of settler-colonial oppression and exploitation.

Comrades originally expressed disappointment at the meager turnout to this impromptu action, as many Philly-area activists and revolutionaries had gone to Baltimore in solidarity with the uprising there; but we found as we took 34th, and then Spruce Streets, that our small numbers made us a flexible and dynamic force of disruption, enabling us to easily wash over street traffic, dance circles around the cops, and engage with the masses. The passion and the organising skill of the action’s progenitors also kept it cohesive; we spoke with a united voice about our outrage over the society’s systematic abuse of Black women and girls.

Rekia Boyd, whose name was lifted high over Penn’s grotesque celebration of privilege and exclusivity, was a Black woman murdered by an off-duty Chicago pig, Dante Servin, early on the morning of 21 March, 2012. The pig cornered Rekia and her friends in an alley, and fired indiscriminately into the crowd; Rekia died from a bullet to the back of her head. The pig’s attorney is aptly quoted as saying that Servin “did exactly what he was trained to do.”

In listening to the voices of Black women and girls, we can see, in their lived experiences, how their super-exploitation is manifest in unimaginable everyday violence; from sexual assault to police brutality and incarceration, Black women and girls bear the disproportionate brunt of violence in our society.

It may be useful to analyse and contextualise this situation, to understand this extraordinary violence as arising out of a social and economic basis, wherein Black women and girls are disproportionately performing the reproductive labour that fuels capitalist accumulation and production; in other words, that fundamental reproductive work which keeps the white supremacist and cisheteropatriarchal capitalist system from falling apart.

Globally, this reproductive work is comprised of various forms of labour such as domestic work/cleaning, nursing, elder care, child care, sex work, food services, and subsistence agriculture. These forms of work are immediately recognisable as intensive, undervalued and isolating, reflecting the society’s subordination of reproduction to production in the form of super-exploitation.

Adding to this, many single Black women and young Black girls also find themselves stretched to a breaking point in disproportionately providing informal care (unpaid reproductive work) to family members, friends, neighbours and community members. This situation of overwork and underpay for Black women sets them up for super-exploitation – so that, while the reproductive crisis offloads the state’s responsibility for reproducing the working class onto communities and individuals, Black and Brown women and girls globally find their work, and violence against them, intensified to outrageous and incredible levels.

With this analysis in mind – two points:

1. an intersectional revolutionary analysis and praxis is vital to overturning the white supremacy and cisheteropatriarchy that serve as the foundation for capitalism’s international, racial, and sexual divisions of labour, and
2. in their position at the very social and economic base of the system, Black women and girls can, must, will, and do lead the way to this revolution. The society will not be liberated until Black women and girls achieve their liberation.

(The author would like to pay special and comradely recognition to Levi Gikandi, whose work provided the photography included in this piece.)