Chairman Fred and Political Realism
Everyone should go watch Judas and the Black Messiah (2021). It is a punchy, sharpened, and clarifying piece of cinema. The two central performances by Daniel Kaluuya as the great Fred Hampton, and LaKeith Stanfield as the titular Judas, an apathetic car-jacker turned FBI informant Bill O’Neill, are exceptional. Stanfield’s jocular shiftiness provides his lead with the necessary pathos, which makes those scenes in which O’Neill is truly torn ever more compelling — his alliances throughout the film always ambivalent. Kaluuya was right to have won the Best Supporting Oscar for his embodiment of the affectionately-known Chairman Fred. It’s commonplace that slapstick or action films demand a certain physicality from actors; such physicality is perhaps less considered in channelling rhetorical skills like that of Hampton: the projection, the rhythm, the conducting of the crowds. This could have been overplayed, but Kaluuya at once offers a finesse, capturing the paradoxical shyness and studiousness of this most powerful of firebrands.
The editing and direction is propulsive; this is not a film of contemplation. This does not mean that it is thematically mute; on the contrary, the film forces the viewer to confront the reality of racial violence, of the sacrifice involved in building a better world, and of the apathy that might scupper it. Rather, the film wants to embody the energy of the time, the energy of Hampton himself. The whole thrust of Hampton’s life, and the project of the Black Panther’s he devoted it too, was action, praxis. “If I were free,” Hampton’s gravestone reads, “what would I spend my life doing?” Judas depicts the Panther’s famous free breakfast programmes — what they called, with no exaggeration, survival programmes — and the form of deep political organising it embodied. We see the Rainbow Coalition, as Hamptons attempt to build revolutionary solidarities across racial lines, assisting the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the poor white Appalachian Young Patriots in setting up their own programmes. We get a sense, at least in passing, of Hampton’s avowed Marxism, which conceptualised racism as a divide-and-conquer technique that serves no one but the ruling-class, and of his belief in the necessity of proletarian agency to shatter it. Such organising was what made Chairman Fred such a legendary figure; it is also why the United States government murdered him.
The film ends with the assassination. As Simon Balto relays in the Baffler:
In December 4, 1969, in a coordinated effort by Hoover’s FBI, the Chicago Police Department (CPD), and the Cook County (Illinois) State’s Attorney’s office, a cadre of CPD officers stormed Hampton’s apartment in a pre-dawn raid and emptied nearly one hundred bullets into it. They shot dead Mark Clark, a member of the Panthers from Peoria, Illinois, who was staying in the apartment. They injured other party members who were also sleeping there. And, finally, they shot Fred Hampton execution-style in his head while he lay beside his almost nine-months-pregnant partner, Deborah Johnson (now Akua Njeri). He was twenty-one years old […]
O’Neill, it should be said, was commanded by his handlers to drug Hampton the night before. He did not wake up before they killed him.
There are lots of things that one could say about this. The first is that it was unjust. It is true that the Panther’s were not nonviolent; this was of course the whole crux of the disagreement between Malcom X and Martin Luther King Jr. Their full name was the Black Panther Party for Self-Defence, but this qualifier is important. To the extent they bore arms it was as a defence against the lynchinings, from state and non-state actors alike (the latter of course defended by the wider system of racial domination), that posed an immediate threat to black lives in the 60s (and continue to do so). Despite the moral panic whipped up against the Panther as a marauding gang, murdering whites willy-nilly, they were instead exercising their constitutional-right to armed self-defence. This does not justify a state assassination. We might also say that Hampton’s project was the just one, such that his murder was doubly unjust: unjustified, since he posed no immediate threat to anyone, and morally unjust, since executing a man fighting for racial justice does not exactly put you on the right side of history.
This would be correct. What cannot be held, I don’t think, is that it was surprising. Chairman Fred was a preternaturally gifted black leader, capable of mobilising broad class-based solidarities, constructing institutions of dual-power, and activating revolutionary tendencies amongst armed sections of the proletariat — of course they killed him! I don’t want to be misunderstood here: once again, I think it was thoroughly unjustified, in the two senses above. Nonetheless — and here we get to the crux of this piece — I want to distinguish between what we think is morally justified, and the demands of real politics. I do not believe in the system of racial capitalism that murdered Hampton, spied on MLK, assassinated Patrice Lumumba, conducted countless coups against Third-World governments with the gumption to contest capitalist interests — in fact, I orient my entire political beliefs against it. But politics is ultimately about power, and when threats like Hampton arise, that system of power had to crush him. It cannot let revolutionary projects — violent or nonviolent — forment.
In a way, then, if you share the kind of politics that Hampton had, you can’t blame capitalism for murdering him, no more than can you blame a lion for killing a gazelle (or perhaps more accurately, for a lion killing gazelle revolutionaries). It is what it does. If we want it to not do this, we have to abolish it, plain and simple. This, in a nutshell, is the distinction between left realists and liberals. Liberals will hear the Hampton saga, or indeed the aforementioned FBI surveillance of MLK, and lament that this is somehow a contradiction of liberal principles. It does not respect the rights to equality, to free association, etc etc. Left realists, by contrast, know that this romanticised vision of liberalism does not exist: that those putatively equal rights under the law have never, and will never, exist, so long as the wider system of racial, gendered, class-based domination persists. And indeed, that it is precisely a belief in these moral principles that serves an ideological function in legitimating this order. If liberalism assumes that questions of power have effectively been solved by the institutions of constitutional democracy (individual rights, representative elections, divisions-of-power, etc), then Marxism holds that modern society exists in a state of ‘suppressed civil war’, and liberal-democratic institutions are but fig-leafs serving to reproduced systemically entrenched hierarchies. Hampton — and his executioners, whether they realised it or not — were of the latter persuasion.
There are two thinkers who can help us understand this hardened picture. The first is Thomas Hobbes. For Hobbes, all politics is about power. The state’s primary function, its raison d’etre, is to wield coercive power so as to secure order, to stabilise human relations so that the anarchic ‘state of nature’ — defined by a ‘war of all against all’ — does not arise. Hence the Leviathan — Hobbes mythical name for his preferred political model of an all-powerful Sovereign — which is permitted to, effectively, do whatever is necessary to secure social order. Hobbes is particularly worried about factionalism, in which forms of collectivity emerge within the body politic that may challenge the authority of the sovereign. The sovereign must then, naturally, crush such challenges. Hobbes attempts to legitimate the Leviathan on the basis of laws of nature. Because any man could kill another in the state of nature, this creates a state of perpetual fear and potential violence, such that it is in everyones best, rational, interests to alienate our authority to a single coercive agent, the Sovereign, which can protect us from the other. But this legitimation criterion also opens up a proto-radical element in Hobbes. The first law of nature is ‘to seek peace when it can be had; when it can not, to look for aid in war.’ If the Leviathan cannot in fact keep the peace, cannot guarantee ones security, then rational agents are actually legitimate in contesting its authority and usurping the Sovereign. Indeed, Hobbes was castigated by the Bishop Brammal as offering a ‘rebel’s catechism’ in this respect. At points, as the folks at What’s Left on Philosophy? point out, he can almost be read as offering a handbook for revolution:
‘There are four things that are indispensable to this hope [of revolution]: numbers, tools [weapons], mutual-trust, and leaders. If these four things are available to men who can barely tolerate their present conditions, and who measure the rightness of their actions by their own judgement, the only other thing needed to create sedition and turmoil in the commonwealth is someone to rouse them and incite them to action.’
Chairman Fred was no doubt frighteningly capable at assembling these four components, and so the Leviathan had to act swiftly. Indeed, the films title comes from the crystal-clear directive issued by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in 1968: “Prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify and electrify the militant black nationalist movement.”
With Hobbes, then, three things are apparent. First, politics is not primarily about the kind of rational moral consensus that liberals, from Rawls to Habermas, like to envisage. The modern state is not legitimated by justice, but by power, the legitimacy of which depends upon its capacity to secure social order. Second, to secure order means to crush dissenters, to mute ‘sedition’ and ‘turmoil’ — a fact which the United States knows too well. Third, whether such order is indeed forthcoming, and thus whether the power-system is legitimate, is then the primary question. For the oppressed peoples that Hampton roused to action, it emphatically was not: a state whose actors murdered people for the crime of being black, that allowed its children to starve, that systematically excluded people from the basic necessities and rights of life that others were smothered with, was not a state who meets Hobbes own criterion. To overturn the present order, then, meant resisting disorder, challenging the system of power that depends on the exploitation of millions.
The second thinker useful here is Carl Schmitt. Schmitt is rightfully notorious for his out-and-out Nazism, but he has proved a provocative and fruitful thinker for the concept of politics set forth earlier in his life. Politics is not about the just or unjust, or the true or false, beauty or ugliness; rather, it pivoted on a friend-enemy distinction. Liberalism — which he saw epitomised in the Weimar Germany in which he wrote — in attempting to be maximally inclusive, ended up creating a vapid system unable to defend itself. It is necessary, he argued, to step outside the boundaries of liberalism to defend it; and so Schmitt becomes the philosopher of the ‘state of exception’, invoked by those defending US human-rights abuses in Guantanamo and the the Patriot Act against the threat of Jihadism, but also a point of reference for many leftists concerned with social antagonisms, with how politics is defined by sharp cleavages between ‘us’ and ‘them’, with who is excluded and included depending on where one sits within the system of power. For capital, Hampton — and MLK, and Mossadegh, Allende, Lumumba, and so on and so forth — are all the ‘them’, the out-group that must be exterminated or pacified so as to maintain order for the ‘us.’ Chairman Fred’s Marxism inverts this: with Balto again,
“We have to understand very clearly,” he told one audience, “that there’s a man in our community called a capitalist. Sometimes he’s Black and sometimes he’s white.” Describing said capitalists as “anybody who comes into the community to make profit off the people by exploiting them,” he called for their expulsion from the community.
Hampton’s ability to draw a distinction around class, rather than race, was absolutely central to the potency of the threat he posed. Resisting the trap of reproducing the oppressors favoured divisions, he instead targeted the system of power at its core, illuminating the connections between different forms of domination and exploitation that constitute the capitalist order.
Where does this all leave us? First, there are legitimate questions about the pessimism that underlies both Hobbes and Schmitt’s theories. Hobbes’ apparent state-of-nature is not an empirical reality. As multitudes of ethnographic and archaeological research has disclosed to us, hunter-gatherer politics without an absolute state is not his famous war-of-all against all, but in fact looks something like what Marx called ‘primitive communism.’ Bands were fiercely egalitarian, both in decision-making and in resource distribution. They were so egalitarian, in fact, that those members who had a taste for power, and attempted to consolidate it, were excommunicated or killed for threatening the social peace. But I think this actually demonstrates the core truth of both theorists. Politics — even a radical democratic or socialist politics based on collective power — is still about power. Such a social state must identify mechanisms of disciplining its subjects into this order, and excluding those — or those potentials — that contest it.
This is not, of course, a simple fact of coercion. As Gramsci argued well, hegemonic orders depend on consent too; and as Foucault demonstrated, modern power is more a matter of socialising, subjectivating, individuals — of constructing their dispositions and capacities in line with the social order — rather than threatening them into submission with the power over life and death. Nonetheless, as Gramsci (via Perry Anderson) can also be read as offering, such forms of power — even if they are the most predominant aspect in circulation, as it were — are ultimately back up by coercive force, in the same way fiat money used to be, in the last instance, backed up by the value of gold. Bureaucratic imperatives are really diffused legal (and thus coercive) ones; social norms exert the force of exclusion and excommunication. In a post-capitalist society, the Leviathan — in whatever form it takes — must be vigilant against the resumption of Hampton’s image of the enemy Capitalist, as “anybody who comes into the community to make profit off the people by exploiting them.” Emancipation then rests on power, wielded against the threat of domination recurring.
Second, and against the conservative bent of these two canonical realists, capitalism is not impenetrable. Whether it will be successful in crushing its enemies is always an irreducibly open-question, a matter that cannot be known before-hand, and one that is dependent on the balance of forces and historical contingencies. What I want to argue instead is a basic fact, but one that is often lost in liberal pearl-clutching: politics is, fundamentally, an attempt to defeat the powerful before they defeat you. There is little room for civility in this discussion, with such demands invoked to protect the veneer of respectability a brutal system must erect; nor, certainly, is there any hope for appeals to better-nature and universal consensus. The capitalist state has no qualms about murdering an unarmed, 21 year-old Fred Hampton lying next to his pregnant girlfriend. What might we have to do in return? What might it take to be free?
