Every time Florida ends up in national headlines – whether it be new hijinks from the elusive Florida Man, video footage of 15-foot alligators on a Sunday stroll, or the passage of shockingly reactionary legislation – folks will declare “I am never going to Florida! That place is a terrifying heap of garbage!” As a native Floridian I have to say: we are a collection of many ever-growing heaps of garbage called “trash mountains” and unfortunately, you may all be living in Florida soon. I don’t say this because that is the ambition of developers and real estate investors, or because Governor Ron DeSantis could be the president of the US in a couple of years, but because Florida is an incubator for right-wing politics and policies that get implemented across the country.  There are tensions playing out within the ruling class over how to deal with the economic crisis that this moment of capitalism has brought us to. Production is bumping up against the natural limitations of a finite planet as it attempts to keep pace with the crazy profits from speculation and debt, throwing the global economy and ecology into instability. Neither side can actually resolve the crisis, but they can try to secure gains and political power for their own reproduction. Conservative and liberal sections of the capitalist class may be opposed to each other as far as specific policy goes, but they are unified in pushing towards fascism as the answer to our current predicament. States like Florida and Texas are testing grounds for conservative policy and ideology that start as “model policy” in billionaire-funded think tanks and board rooms in their coordinated effort to wrench open markets and squeeze the dominated and exploited classes (that’s us) for every penny they can get.  Unorganized and isolated from each other, we have no choice but to be cannon fodder in this inter-capitalist conflict while they destroy our planet, our cultures, our societies. It’s time we build the power on our side of this class war and begin pushing back for our own interests and needs to be met. To do this, we have to come together to understand the landscape we’re fighting in.

Welcome to Florida!

Ron DeSantis has been courting the more reactionary end of the Republican party for a long time and across different platforms, be it education, law enforcement or public health. Through the toxic vitriol attacking “wokeness” or communism or Biden, the clear goal is for the weakening of public services and the expansion of privatization. This is most evident in his approach to education, where Florida has recently gotten a lot of national attention. Under the guise of “parental choice”, DeSantis has proposed legislation allowing parents to sue schools for teaching “critical race theory”, has rejected dozens of math textbooks that he falsely claimed teach CRT and has signed a bill that restricts sex and gender-identity education for children under third grade in public schools, HB 1557. This has attracted rich Republicans like the Devos family who have been advocating for funneling tax money away from public schools and into private schools or school voucher systems for decades. Betsy Devos, Trump’s former secretary of education, recently featured DeSantis on a Michigan tele-town hall promoting defunding public schools, where she said: “With your signature on the Let Michigan Kids Learn petition, we can bring some of that Florida success here to Michigan.” He also came out swiftly and staunchly against transgender athletes being allowed to participate in sports in public schools. The reality is whether you’re horrified by Florida’s public education system because it forces your children to be gay or because it is more about politics than teaching kids, you probably don’t have to worry about it if you send your kids to a charter or private school. So it’s a win-win for the school privatization camp, and is a shining beacon for other states who want to enrich private entities with their citizen’s tax money.

This conflict in education also sets the stage for a specific inter-capitalist conflict taking place in the sunshine state. Disney, after radio silence followed by a half-assed statement that the massive company’s strongest defense of people’s rights is “inspiring content”, succumbed to public pressure, came out against HB1557 (Don’t Say Gay or Parental Rights In Education) and paused political donations in Florida. Florida politicians retaliated by revoking the special privileges Disney receives via the Reedy Creek Improvement District. Basically Walt Disney World has had it’s own “special taxing district” surrounding its theme parks that has most of the benefits of a city government. Disney controls the taxation, land use, building codes, waste treatment, utilities, roads, bridges, fire protection, emergency medical services, etc. This has been the arrangement in the state since the 60’s and Disney went about it in a pretty shady way, buying up land with a bunch of shell companies to ensure control over the businesses that popped up around the parks. Now the cities that would absorb Disney’s municipal and resource operations are concerned about how they’ll be able to afford it. Florida says no worries, Disney is going to owe us $1 billion. Disney says nuh-uh, you owe us $1 billion. Meanwhile Floridians are like….didn’t this start as us trying to defend our basic rights?

But see, that is what the ruling class will do any time we place our struggles in their hands. They use it for their own economic and political benefit, throwing us whatever concessions suit them once their conflicts are resolved. This has always been the case, but now as we see capitalism confronted with its own structural failure, the concessions are fewer and the masses are in fact losing ground. Hard-earned rights are being threatened and we are so far struggling to organize ourselves to pose meaningful opposition.  We’re told the “right way” to go about it is by voting in Democrats​​​​​​​; but what about the democrats? The DNC remains the faithful controlled opposition to the more outwardly repressive Republican party.

• Democratic hopeful for FL governor, Nikki Fried, presents a supposed alternative to conservative repression. Recently, she has prepared a lawsuit against the Biden administration to block a law that would prohibit medical marijuana users from purchasing guns or having concealed-carry permits. How does she make her case? She argues that it “violates the so-called Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment, which prohibits ATF from enforcing anti-cannabis policies in states that have opted for legalization.” Makes sense, right? She is appealing to the court on their own terms and using their own legal precedent to call out them out for contradicting themselves. But therein lies the problem. This places the power in the hands of the courts to decide whether or not they want to uphold their former concession of rights or roll it back. And as we have all seen these last few weeks with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the courts can roll back their decisions, even if they had legal precedents. ​
• Locally, Miami-Dade’s democratic mayor Daniella Levine Cava has acknowledged the “affordability crisis” in the housing market, but her proposed solution is to build more housing. Anyone who has driven around Miami for a day can tell you there is plenty of housing being built, the problem is that landlords are charging whatever the hell they feel like.
• Nationally, we’ve seen the democratic party under Biden push for more funding to police in response to police brutality, approve $54 billion to fund an imperialist proxy war in Ukraine, fail to follow through on economic relief following a national lockdown, fail to follow through on student debt relief. That they have the gall to present themselves as anything but another tool of our disorganization, further fueling the consolidation of fascism, is frankly insulting at this point.

An appeal to a repressive government on their terms will not give us an alternative to their repression. ​​​​​​

In 2021 with HB1, Florida restricted our right to protest, and just recently this year the state made it illegal to protest outside of people’s houses. Meanwhile Governor DeSantis is emphasizing raises for law enforcement in his 2022 legislative budget and inviting cops from all over the country to move to the “law and order” state. It seems like he’s making it harder for people to speak out against a state where public services are trash, unemployment benefits are some of the lowest in the country, public spending per capita is the 5th lowest in the country. In Miami over the past two years, rent has gone up an average of 58% and wages have not kept up the pace. And it doesn’t stop there! We are watching gas, groceries and rent become increasingly unaffordable and are left waiting on the moment when we get squeezed out. Our communities fractured, our lives upended because our cities rise and fall at the whim of capitalist speculation and drive for profit, and we better not say shit about it or risk the consequences. This is fascism, a political and ideological response to an economic crisis unavoidable at this stage of capitalism. There is no “going back” or building a “kinder capitalism” that doesn’t destroy the planet and continue to brutalize populations of people. Different brands of fascist ideology may blame a different “other” for our shared economic woes – like jewish people, Black people, immigrants, women, communists, foreign enemies of democracy, etc – but they will share solutions of strict repression to obscure the immense private profit that is at the core of our suffering. All of the money that was drained from our public services go to tax breaks for big corporations to operate in the state. That 58% hike in our rent is enriching landlords and anyone who is getting rich off of property speculation, which is practically all capitalists. Florida politicians can say that it’s the “woke mob” or the LGBTQ community or Republicans or whoever else making it harder to live a good life here, but as far as we can tell its landlords, real estate developers, massive investment firms, and the politicians in all of those people’s pockets. And those come in all shapes, sizes, identities and political leanings.

This is Flor-merica?         

This is clearly not a condition unique to our swampy southern state. Capitalism and imperialism have toxified the global economy and in the absence of an organized resistance, features of fascism are gaining power in all different aspects of our society, in part bolstered by the advancements that can be made in states like Florida. ​​​​​​​The FL department of education appointed a QAnon conspiracy theorist to its ranks, while the wife of one of the lifetime members of the “highest court in the nation” tried to help overturn the last election. On the local, state and national level fascism is the prevailing alternative ideologically and politically.

Fascism attempts to resolve the structural crisis of capitalism through repressive measures that are justified politically and ideologically with ideas like nationalism, xenophobia, racism, sexism or even interpretations of progress, democracy and sustainability. The capitalist class can’t come to an agreement on how to deal with the contradiction of limitless speculative capital that needs to be anchored down by the backbone of capitalism, productive capital. But production has to exist in reality on a planet that has already been poisoned to a catastrophic degree by these systems. So the different economic spheres of the capitalist class try to scrape in profits where they can while they can, gutting regulations to lower costs or privatizing services to create new markets. This is always done in the name of freedom and efficiency, but workers, laborers and the masses suffer the costs while wealth increasingly flows to a smaller and smaller group of people. So what used to be a “strong middle class” is now saddled with debt, juggling multiple jobs, no prospect of home ownership, no hopes for retirement, wondering how much longer this planet is going to be hospitable to human life. This reality is not an inevitability, it is not some natural progression of humanity because of greed or survival of the fittest. Capitalists and imperialists are sucking us and our beautiful planet dry, and there are way more of us than there are of them.

So what do we do? We have to get organized.

What the capitalist class has is historically developed global forms of organization, to where they can come up with theories in their fancy gilded offices and implement them across states and countries to find what works. We can and have done this too, but we are in an up-hill battle because they know the danger of our organization and so they put a lot of time and money into making it harder for us to do so, for example with insanely militarized local police forces. But look at what got us Roe v. Wade in the first place. The late sixties saw the construction and coordination of organizations all over the country connecting struggles of class, race, sexuality and ethnicity. The movement that succeeded in pressuring the court to “grant us” that freedom was developed over decades, like in the 1940s when women were striking to keep their factory jobs after WWII. It built depth, power and unity through the sustained struggle of the civil rights movement, with women organizing in their neighborhoods, workplaces and social circles to meet their needs and understand the moment. When we recognize the relationship between the many forms of domination and exploitation that we suffer and come together to push back, that is when the real progressive change happens. We are in a fight for the future of humanity, here in Florida but also all over the world. Its time we take the fear and rage of living in this moment and use it to fuel a movement to end the reign of capitalists and imperialists and bring about true democracy and liberation.

If you’re ready to stand up and fight back, get in touch!