The TVA fails. Attempts at state legislation purport as a way of reform, but are actually tactics for criminalization of Black and Queer bodies, failing to address structural issues of discrimination.

The second half of the twentieth century saw a major upsurge in radical and revolutionary organizing in oppressed communities in the United States and around the world. This powerful organizing posed a significant threat to the legitimacy of US power and capitalist empire more broadly, and therefore needed to be contained. These movements were undermined by two main strategies: First, the radical movements of the 1960s and ’70s were criminalized, with the US government using tactics of imprisonment, torture, sabotage, and assassination to target and destroy groups like the Black Panthers, American Indian Movement, and Young Lords, among others. Second, the growth of the nonprofit sector has seen social movements professionalizing, chasing philanthropic dollars, separating into “issue areas,” and moving toward social services and legal reform projects rather than radical projects aimed at the underlying causes of poverty and injustice.17 These developments left significant sections of the radical left traumatized and decimated, wiping out a generation of revolutionaries and shifting the terms of resistance from revolution and transformation to inclusion and reform, prioritizing state- and foundation-sanctioned legal reforms and social services over mass organizing and direct action.

EXAMPLE: The FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) is a notorious example of the US government’s use of infiltration, surveillance, and violence to overtly target dissent and resistance. COINTELPRO was exposed when internal government documents were revealed that detailed the outrageous work undertaken by the federal government to dismantle resistance groups in the 1960s and ’70s. Although the program was dissolved under that name, the tactics continued and can be seen today in current controversies about wiretapping and torture as well as in the USA PATRIOT Act. Overt action to eliminate resistance and dissent here is as old as the European colonization of North America

EXAMPLE: In the wake of decades of radical organizing by people in women’s prisons and activists on the outside decrying systemic medical neglect, sexual violence, and the destruction of family bonds, California legislators in 2006 proposed a so-called “gender responsive corrections” bill that would allow people in women’s prisons to live with their children and receive increased social services. To make this plan work, the bill called for millions of dollars in new prison construction. The message of “improving the lives of women prisoners” and creating more “humane” prisons—rhetoric that is consistently used by those in power to distract us from the fundamentally violent conditions of a capitalist police state—appealed to liberal, well-intentioned feminist researchers, advocates, and legislators. Anti-prison organizations such as Oakland-based Justice Now and others working in solidarity with the resounding sentiment of people in women’s prisons, pointed out that this strategy was actually just a back door to creating 4,500 new prison beds for women in California, yet again expanding opportunities to criminalize poor women and transgender people in one of the nation’s most imprisoning states.19