The following statement was prepared for a rally held August 20 in support of reinstating Dr. Anthony Monteiro to the African American Studies program at Temple University. After standing up for the integrity of the African American Studies program and the centrality of the Black radical tradition, Monteiro’s contract was not renewed, sparking massive outrage from Temple students and the working class African American community of North Philadelphia. Dr. Monteiro, a third generation resident of North Philly’s African American community, was arguably the foundation of Temple’s African American Studies graduate program. But as the many speakers at the rally made clear, from graduate students to civil rights activists who led similar struggles in the 1960s, the rally for Dr. Monteiro was, at heart, a rally for the Black radical tradition and for the revolutionary overthrow of the white supremacist, capitalist system of which Temple and the American university system is increasingly a central component.
As an education professor and union leader at West Chester University, I came here today in solidarity with Dr. Monteiro. I also came here today as a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation and a Marxist scholar in solidarity with the indispensability of the Black radical tradition that Monteiro, before his termination, advanced at Temple University since 2003.
As Monteiro has noted in a recent interview, the attack on radical scholarship and the Black radical tradition in particular, which he correctly situates within a critique of capitalism and the struggle for communism, is a growing phenomenon within the U.S. academy and beyond. An interracial, radical resistance movement to this and other troubling trends is growing, that includes what Monteiro has referred to as a new radical student vanguard, which this gathering here today is evidence of.
While the actual, physical lives of all workers, even white workers, do not matter to abstract capital beyond their useful effect as the augmenter of value, in the current context of white supremacist capitalist America, Black Lives matter *least*. Let me be clear, capitalism can only value capital, and new capital can only be created by exploiting labor power, and the greater the rate of exploitation, the more new capital is accumulated. So the consequence of capital’s internal drive to create ever-larger sums of capital is a tendency to mangle and prematurely exhaust the lifespan of the laborer. However, like capital and its historic drive for accumulation more generally, the tendency to devalue Black life is not static, but developmental. For example, in post-slavery “America” African Americans, already devalued and discriminated against, served the role of the super-exploited labor force, keeping the price of labor in the United States suppressed, and thus the rate of exploitation high.
As if this era was not bad enough, the situation for working class African America has deteriorated. That is, as neoliberal global restructuring has led to new waves of Latin American immigration, African American working class communities are being reduced from the status of super exploited laborers to increasingly no longer needed as a source of cheap labor and thus the target of deadly state violence. Consequently, African American communities, like those here in North Philly, are seeing dramatic defunding in schools, the deterioration of basic infrastructure, rising rates of incarceration, and the growing militarization of an increasingly deadly police force aimed at Black lives. If these potentially genocidal trends are not subverted through mass, militant resistance, African American communities could eventually vanish. The growing Black Lives Matter movement is evidence that people are fighting back.
The Black radical tradition and the work of Monteiro is indispensable here in providing the intellectual tools needed to understand the current situation and successfully fight back, which includes both refuting the capitalist propaganda that blames the victim and agitating for a communist horizon that replaces the insatiable quest for profits for the insatiable quest for full emancipation and human dignity—each according to his or her ability and each according to her or his need.
And like many privatized or privatizing universities like Temple, the school is playing a central role in the attack on Black lives by gentrifying the African American communities of North Philly itself. Education, especially privatized corporate education, therefore not only serves the interests of capital, it functions as personified capital itself. Monteiro, and the black radical tradition he is a part of, from Temple’s bourgeois administrations’ perspective, are therefore in the way, they have to go. Indeed, while Temple, appropriately referred to by Monteiro as a neoliberal behemoth, relates to the residents of North Philly as an evicting predator, Monteiro, while at Temple, opened its doors to the community by creating a Saturday Free School called Philosophy and Black Liberation. This Free School, according to Monteiro, was an attempt to make the university an ally of the poor, which was probably not the administration’s first tactical choice in advancing their gentrification agenda.
But the current situation is not just the result of some rogue power-hungry capitalists gone wild. It is an example of how capitalism operates
according to its own internal laws of accumulation. The goal of the system is to expand value through the production process. Producing is done for the sake of producing. What is produced, how it is produced, and what was done to ensure production can take place on an extending scale are irrelevant from the perspective not of individual capitalists, but for capitalism itself. If entire communities have to be “cleansed” or gentrified to restore profit margins, then capitalists, in severe competition with each other, will be compelled to support and/or carry out such actions. This is not a matter of policy, but rather, it is an example of how capitalism itself compels individual capitalists to behave in particular, monstrous ways.
It is therefore clear that the front lines of capital’s deadly assault on labor in the U.S. resides within working class communities of color, especially African American communities located in U.S. inner cities. Black Lives Matter should therefore be viewed, in my judgment, as the frontlines of labor’s pushback against capitalism’s terrorist state. If capital’s tendency is to distort the role of labor in creating new value, we must make our mission to better understand how new value is made in order to best subvert the process. We must therefore not only never forget the names of those Black and Brown lives who die at the hands of state terrorists, but we must also not forget that without organized resistance, stopping capital and its cynical recklessness is not likely.
Well, the people are fighting back, and rightfully so. The call to reinstate Monteiro, from the Black radical tradition, in my estimation, is thus also a call to end the white supremacist, imperialist, capitalist system. Together, we can, not only get Monteiro reinstated, but we can defeat capitalism, white supremacy, all manner of bigotry and win. Black Lives do Matter!`
