In July 2026, hundreds of masked members of the white supremacist Patriot Front marched through the streets of Washington, D.C. The Patriot Front operates within a broader American tradition of white vigilante organizations working outside of conventional electoral politics to police the color line. Throughout the 2010s, the resurgence of white militias have coincided with the Black Lives Matter movement’s vigorous contestation of the contours of “law and order” in the wake of the extralegal killing of Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood-watch vigilante in south Florida and the police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri—two deaths, at the hands of two nominally distinct arms of “public order,” both nevertheless expressing the logic of the same underlying white supremacist order. The 2010s urban rebellions and rise of the insurrectionary right have kindled renewed interest in the history of American policing and its role in constituting whiteness as a form of negative solidarity against the racialized strata of the working-class and occupied indigenous nations. This dialectic between extralegal militias, conscripted slave patrols, and waged police departments has drawn great interest from socialist organizers working to understand and counter the emergent strategies and tactics on the right for consolidating power at the federal level and instituting tighter control at the local level.

American historian Gautham Rao’s White Power illustrates how the consolidation of state power was driven by the “permanent emergency” of curtailing, policing, managing, and administering the existential threat posed by the millions of subjugated Black Americans within the borders of the American Republic.^[1] Most admirable in Rao’s account is his capacity to convey the groundlessness of the social order undergirding white supremacy. From the late-17th century to Emancipation, each political “settlement” reached and every court case adjudicated in favor of the planters only deepened the crisis of policing, in turn further driving the planter class to further tighten its grip over the federal government, and heightening tensions with the North. This sectional crisis was driven and leveraged by Black enslaved and freedmen throughout both North and South to force the abolition of slavery during the Civil War and the de facto refounding of the American Republic.

One thing that’s striking about Rao’s historical narrative of white power, however, is the uneven presence of capitalist production and its role in determining the diversity of forms slave resistance took. I do not mean that Rao discounts capital as a structural element of racial domination; Rao’s account is more sophisticated than earlier waves of historiography interpreting the planters as pre-modern, affirming throughout his history that the planters “played a central role in American capitalism.”^[2] Rather, Rao’s account risks leaving ambiguous how exactly capital structured the forms enslaved resistance took, driving the legal and social development of the plantation complex. This ambiguity has significant consequences for periodizing how the settler garrison—the middle- and working-classes who most directly benefit from colonial dispossession and command of racialized labor—has been forced to reconstitute itself.

Marx’s conceptualization of class struggle helps to materially ground Rao’s thesis in a manner that clarifies the stakes underwriting colonial and antebellum state formation. Enslaved rebellion, insurrection, and revolt lose their political weight when decontextualized from the distinct social relations through which they crystallized. Without identifying the fractures, discontinuities, and ruptures within the American settler state’s distinct phases of capitalist development, we risk flattening the very struggles of the enslaved we are working to re-center. This neglect of discontinuity in the shape of class struggle not only threatens to grant the “legal” sphere an autonomous logic, but incapacitates our ability to identify the field of possibility through which enslaved struggle emerged. More pressing, decentering class struggle, labor regime, and capital accumulation leaves concepts like “public order” and the state reified, enabling both progressive and conservative factions of the imperial settler state to more easily adopt “public order” as their banner and reconsolidate the international imperial state in its present phase of crisis. Furthermore, doing so allows us to strengthen Rao’s thesis: that the struggle of the enslaved did more than infringe upon or drive the concept of “public order” into existence, but in fact constituted the truth of public order—command over racialized labor-power. Racialized labor-power was, and continues to be, what public order was erected to subordinate and dominate, and thereby constitutes the very ground upon which public order depends even as it disavows that dependence.

THE UNSEAMLY ORIGINS OF “PUBLIC ORDER”

Rao’s training as a legal historian and *White Power’s* legal-institutional framing—focusing on the colonial state in the Chesapeake Bay and South Carolina Low Country and the antebellum state in the Upper and Lower South—allows him to depict how “public order” was legally constituted by the planters’ need to assert command over racialized labor-power. The state-sanctioned linkage between skin color and the status of enslavement served to establish the state as a central node of the racialized policing of labor-power as such. However, the disciplinary limits of legal history prevent Rao’s account from illustrating how concepts taken for granted within modern legal theory—“public” order and “private” interest—were themselves historically specific products of the struggle waged by the enslaved against the emergent plantation complex. This disciplinary limitation runs against Rao’s intent of asserting the protagonistic role of the enslaved in constituting “public order” at the center of the American settler project.

Symptomatic of this disciplinary limitation is Rao’s use of “public” space and “private” property in the rise of slave codes in the British Atlantic. “[Enslavers] demanded white vigilance to surveil, inspect, and arrest Black enslaved people suspected of running away, whether on private property or in public spaces…”^[3] Rao makes this point to emphasize how the consolidation of white power required the emergence of government institutions to ensure that enslavers would look after each other’s slaves in case they ran away, as they so often did. “It was clear that for the Virginia General Court, runaways were a public problem because they disrupted public order.”^[4] In discussing the planters’ need for “public order,” Rao points to a generative contradiction: the governmental institutions that existed to police the planters were themselves constituted by those very same planters. “So, the Chesapeake tobacco oligarchs created their own government and institutions. They didn’t have to look very far because, for the most part, the masters were the government.”^[5] The intra-class market competition among tobacco planters compelled them to found government institutions within which they could cooperate to ensure that competition did not jeopardize the conditions for accumulation that no single planter could secure alone. Namely, these institutions were erected to stabilize and guarantee access to dispossessed indigenous land and politically immobilized enslaved labor.

As attentive as Rao is to the emergence of laws that police the late-17th century colonial color line, his passing over this contradiction of governance and self-policing risks leaving unclear what exactly drove the emergence of this qualitatively new type of government enforcement. Per Rao, “there were ‘few English precedents’ about runaway servants and slaves,” which left planters in the position to enact state institutions that could handle policing on a level more adequate to the new form of public order emerging out of 17th century colonial life.^[6] Rao’s discussion of the rise of “pass” laws to more closely monitor the movement of Black slaves exemplifies how he at times uncritically employs the notion of public space. Rao briefly links the emergence of the pass laws with the growing need to control the large amount of space between plantations. “The basic idea behind the pass laws was to control movement. Plantations were big, and enslaved people often had to move across great distances within and between them…the laws imposed a public requirement on masters to ensure that any of their slaves [emphasis Rao’s] moving about in public had a written document.”^[7] Rao rightfully points to how the “shared” public problem rendered the state’s intrusion into “a private master’s obscure concern” necessary, but leaves unanswered why these categories of “public” and “private” gain the salience that they do. Enslaved persons move through public space, but Rao leaves ambiguous the role that their activity played in negatively constituting public space—in constituting public space by temporarily exceeding the “private” bounds of the master’s authority. The planter class’s urgency to monitor individual slaves who, out of necessity, left the bounds of the private plantation forced it to constitute what would become public space—the spatio-legal realm which no planter owned but all were obligated to protect, uphold, and maintain. Through their struggle, privately-owned slaves increasingly constituted the public order that grounded planter rule. But Rao is structurally limited by the legal discipline in what he can claim, leaving the enslaved’s protagonistic role in driving the emergence of public order underdeveloped rather than absent.

The reified state in which Rao leaves the “public” and the “private” places his argument at serious risk of objection from both conservative and liberal interlocutors, in particular his claim that the “enslavers’ old slave policing system…never quite died,” whether in the form of extralegal white militia organizations like the Ku Klux Klan or through the logic of racial domination still structuring police departments and sheriffs’ offices.^[8] The dissenting historian may counter that Rao’s argument connecting white power and policing is at best simply documenting a formal connection. The historian can concede that policing was once guided by racist assumptions and, in more regressive parts of the country, still is, while affirming that white power is not constitutive of modern policing as such. The historian can leverage Rao’s reified notions of public and private against him, arguing that racism may have played a central role in shaping American governance, but that governance itself—namely policing—is not itself constituted by racial domination. Neglecting to historicize “public order,” a socially constituted and historically specific phenomenon, leaves Rao’s central thesis vulnerable to this line of attack.

At the level of historiography, and notwithstanding my agreement with his central claim, Rao’s argument regarding the centrality of racialized policing in the development of modern policing shares the same limitation as much of the New History of Capitalism (NHC) historiography: the under-theorization of capitalist production and racialization.^[9] Here I do not mean the importance of profit, but the relations that constitute the colonial and antebellum “public” order and “private” interest. Reading the public and private as phenomena constituted by the various regimes of unfree labor (indentured servitude, master and servant laws, enslavement) allows us to more adequately ground Rao’s chief claim that white power did more than influence the rise of policing, but constituted it; the rise of state policing sanctioned the power of white supremacy in the making of public order, which in turn legitimated white rule. It is insufficient to discuss the Virginia planter elite or the autonomous public order it defended without showing how either the planter class or public order is constituted through and on the basis of the social relations of enslaved production. Per Marx: “the population [of a region] is an abstraction if I leave out, for example, the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn are an empty phrase if I am not familiar with the elements on which they rest. E.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These latter in turn presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc.”^[10]

In this sense, Rao does not spend the requisite space drawing out the contradiction of how a “public” order may emerge from the clashing and competing “private” interests of the enslaving planter elite. To circle back to an earlier example of the pass law, Rao inadequately describes what made the “great distances within and between [the plantations]” so politically or spatially insurmountable. After all, the Virginia colony remained relatively compact on account of the powerful indigenous Powhatan serving as a countervailing force to the west. More specifically, Rao spends insufficient time unpacking how the plantations as private regimes of racialized labor exploitation oriented towards commodity-production constituted the public space between them. The plantations were “agrarian enterprises [and] commodity-producing farms fueled by bonded labor” whose production was privately oriented.^[11] Yet the narrow, formally private orientation of commodity production drove the emergence of an overarching, external authority that legitimated the political subjectivity of the planter class—a political subjectivity that privately-minded individuals, left to their own private interests, could not have constituted on their own. The tightening link between Black labor and enslavement within the plantation complex increasingly subjected dark-skinned laborers as objects of “public” interest—excluded from the “public” benefits conferred by membership within the white settler garrison, and treated as an ever-present danger of stirring up rebellion among fellow slaves on ostensibly “private” plantations.

In this sense, Rao at times insufficiently illustrates how the enslaved did not just influence or draw out the salience of public order, but in fact constituted it through their struggle and existence. Underwriting the privatized tobacco and rice production of the individuated units of the plantation complex was access to a dependable and immobilized pool of labor. But the private export-oriented plantation could not directly surveil slaves beyond the border of the complex; accentuating the problem was the westward expansion of the planter colonies of Virginia and South Carolina, which mobilized Black labor “to distant locales such as swamps and thick woods to chop down trees, strip down and cut timber, before planting fields and beginning cultivation.” The privatization of planter production socialized Black labor, with slaves leveraging kinship relations and language beyond the plantation to politically outflank the planter class in organizing plots, insurrections, and coups. As “conspiracies and insurrectionary plots” grew rife in the opening decades of the 18th century, slave codes abounded, serving not only to cast each laborer with Black skin as a potential insurrectionary, but to bind members of the settler garrison—from laboring whites to elite planters—in negative solidarity against the enslaved working-class.^[12] The activity of the enslaved laborer beyond the private bounds of the plantation constituted what would come to be known as the public space. It was the publicly-vested responsibility of all white men to ensure that the privately-owned dark-skinned slave or laborer did not pose a threat to the overall plantation regime of accumulation.

Rao’s under-thematization of public space blunts his otherwise insightful account of the early to mid-18th-century rise of the slave patrol and the class fissures within the white settler garrison. He attributes the primary challenges of the Virginia and South Carolina slave patrol system to “geographic difficulties,” where white Virginians’ westward and southward movement led to “smaller, more dispersed plantations.”^[13] But there is little reason to think that quantitative size alone would dictate the strains of the patrol system. Thinking through the social relations of the colonial plantation complex, the crisis of the 18th-century patrol system could be more radically formulated as the widening fissures within the settler garrison itself—between the property-owning planters and propertyless poor white laborers and small farmers. As Rao writes, the poor whites had little direct “incentive to perform the onerous labor that ultimately benefited the elite.”^[14] This fissure lay not in the available quantity of white labor-power in reserve for Black surveillance, but in how white labor-power was organized and related.

In a society constituted by private property, where production is materially socialized but privately owned, the “public order” appears as an alien institution even for members of the hegemonic settler garrison. In turn, the rise of the external “public” authority reified and affirmed the “private” interest of the planter as an individualized political subject, even as the planter depended both upon the state for his protection and the labor of the enslaved for his wealth. As the plantation complex grew, more white labor had to be expended to strengthen the links between private subjects of the settler garrison and the “public order” of perpetuating and stabilizing access to enslaved labor. Yet the more the southern planters grew to depend upon poor and middling white labor to police Black slaves, the more politically aggravated the poor whites grew, alienating strata of the settler garrison vital to the maintenance of “public order” that Black slaves exploited and leveraged against the planter elite.

The unexamined dynamics that drove the modern development of the private and public work against the thrust of Rao’s analysis of the state-sanctioned constitution of white power. Rao more than adequately argues that the social imposition of white power constituted a form of negative solidarity against the indigenous nations and Black labor, but leaves unclear *why* white power had to take the form of public order as it did. For instance, in deputizing all white colonists with the task of policing Black enslaved labor, the South Carolina Assembly “immunized all white people from legal liability when they were acting as deputies to capture runaways.”^[15] In doing so, the Assembly was forced to ask “Where did [public] vigilance end and [private] greed begin?” In order to formally police the consolidation of the white settler garrison, the South Carolina Assembly was nevertheless forced to “acknowledge that slave policing would require police institutions.”^[16] Deputization of power over policing among white settlers was inadequate without external institutions with the power to police this power. These publicly vested institutions—primarily the slave patrol—would dialectically instill within settler garrison subjects their own private domain, as both wealthy planters and small farmers understood their duties as taking them away from their own private domicile and into the “public” body of the patrol. Rao, however, leaves unclear why institutions whose purpose was to police the process of white policing became increasingly necessary. Consequently, Rao leaves unexamined the collective struggle of the Black enslaved, responsible for the political necessity of these institutions, and thereby the notion of public order itself.

THE RISE OF THE SLAVER STATE

The same transhistorical treatment that structures Rao’s antinomy of public order and private interest also structures his rendering of the “foreign” and “domestic” in the emergence of the American imperial state. Rao writes on how the war between Britain and Spain in North America (Queen Anne’s War) in 1702-1713 exposed the Carolina planter regime’s crisis of allocating enough white labor-power to both defend against “foreign” enemies like the Spanish and police “domestic” enemies like the enslaved population.^[17] Rao passes over an excellent opportunity to delineate how the struggle of a spatially immobilized and racialized labor population segmented by private plantations producing for a globalizing economy gave rise to the very antinomy that constituted “foreign” and “domestic” enemies—an antinomy that in turn drove the construction of a centralized state that could stabilize and facilitate capital accumulation against both. Taking the “foreign” and “domestic” for granted, Rao overlooks how the proliferation of private plantations drove the need for an overarching institution through which the planters as a class may constitute their political subjectivity through policing: not just domestically, within the borders of the settler colonial state, but internationally as an imperial interest working to expand the plantation complex westward while securing the centrality of the plantation economy southward in countries like Brazil and Cuba.^[18]

Like the dialectic between public and private, the “foreign” and “domestic” remain unexamined in their relevance as moments constituting the emerging imperial colonial state. These moments were constituted as moments because of the insurrectionary activity of the enslaved within the United States. This fear had grounding in 1693, when the Spanish King Charles II pronounced that all fugitive slaves from the colonies would gain their freedom in St. Augustine, Florida.^[19] This fear resurfaced with force during the War of 1812, when the British Navy actively enticed thousands of American slaves to escape the plantations to British lines and bear arms against their masters.^[20] The very possibility of the Spanish and later the British leveraging the enslaved population against the United States drove the planter elite in the South and merchant elite in the North to further consolidate a national interest whose duty was to preserve the public interest, i.e., the maintenance of the settler-planter order. Foreign and domestic threats became salient for settler-colonial state formation precisely out of their analytic inseparability and mutual threat to the Slavers’ Republic.

This renders Rao’s account of the settler-colonial state’s historical development until the late-19th century more difficult than it should be. Rao illustrates the overarching historical irony of the "individualist" planters’ consolidation as a class directly contributing to the progressive centralization of the American federal government and local county system. But reading Rao’s argument, it was at times difficult to discern the qualitative historical breaks separating the United States government of the 19th century and the colonial governments of the 18th. Clearly, there was quantitative expansion in the scope of responsibility over vast dispossessed territory—the expanding plantation regime in the South, and expanding free labor in the North. “[The enslaver class] faced a familiar dilemma: The greater the number of enslaved people they forcibly relocated to the plantation economy, the greater became the number of runaways and the possibility of rebellion.”^[21] Rao’s account never loses sight of the enslaved’s struggle against the enslavers, nor of how that struggle’s threat drove the enslavers’ construction of policing institutions. However, because these qualitatively distinct labor regimes—wage labor in the North, diversified rented and waged slavery in the Upper South, enslaved task labor in the Low Country South, and gang labor in the Deep South—fade into the background, both the ruptures in state formation and eruptions in slave resistance lose their material grounding, which unintentionally deprives the enslaved of the very agency Rao intends on restoring.

Rao’s treatment of the fugitive slave laws emergent from the rising conflicts between free and slave states exemplifies this ambiguity in historical periodization and material grounding. For example, Rao writes that Maryland was a “conflict zone” where “the escape of enslaved people to neighboring Pennsylvania would become a defining crisis.”^[22] Enslavers “complained that the lure of freedom in neighboring ‘free’ states enticed their enslaved captives to run away and that citizens of the free states nullified their right to recover fugitive slaves.” Such conflicts led to the increasingly urgent interest on the part of the slaver class in capturing the federal government and enshrining the duty incumbent upon all whites within the settler garrison to police, surveil, and capture any slaves or suspected fugitives. But Rao’s account begs the question of what exactly the conditions were that enabled slaves to escape into the North. Geographic proximity, while important, is insufficient because proximity is itself socially mediated and means nothing outside of the social relations through which it is constituted. By decentering the shifting role the Upper South came to play in the political economy of slavery—the shift from staple crop production to the exportation of slaves to the rapacious Mississippi Valley—Rao leaves unanswered the question of why the concern of policing took the regional form that it did.

Enslaved men came to leverage the Upper South’s turn to the exportation of slaves to fight their way into wage-labor and craft labor, forms of labor that afforded above-average mobility for the North American slave. As Ira Berlin writes, “By the middle of the nineteenth century, slave hiring had become a distinguishing feature of chattel bondage in the Upper South. Slaveowners rented their slaves for every conceivable purpose and in every conceivable arrangement, by the day, week, month, year, or job.”^[23] Upper South cities like Baltimore became magnets for rented-out domestic and artisan slaves like Frederick Douglass, facilitating their escape to freedom in the North. The different configurations of unfree labor conferred different expectations of mobility, thereby reshaping public order, as compared to the unwaged and unrented slave labor of the Upper South over a century before, where the presence of Black slaves traveling through public space was far more closely scrutinized by whites. Decentering these different regimes of labor command limits Rao from distinguishing how modern policing is not only racially constituted, but is itself driven by internal contradiction mediated by distinct demands wrought by different regimes of capital accumulation.

This reconstitution of state power to more adequately enforce white power, and the resulting contradictions, is what Rao’s account gestures toward but struggles to explicitly name owing to the boundaries of the discipline within which he is working. The establishment of the slave codes yoked dark-skinned laborers to lifetime enslavement, but immediately introduced a crisis in policing among the southern settler garrison. Slave patrols made up of white settlers were launched to ensure that whites within the settler garrison were performing their duty, but such patrols exacerbated fissures within the garrison itself. Every attempt to institute universal “public order” across an increasingly heterogeneous labor regime only further betrayed its narrowness, pressing the Southern planter class to generalize the contradiction in order to preserve its mode of accumulation. The escape of Black slaves to Spanish Florida and later the free North compelled the planters to bind northern settlers to return fugitive slaves on a national level, antagonizing the free North and consolidating it as a hostile sectional power against the slave South. Southern Black enslaved, through refusal to work and flight, and Northern Black freedmen, through the courts and organizing, leveraged the poverty of southern public order to draw the North into intensifying conflict with the South, creating the conditions for the mass self-emancipation that led to the abolition of institutional slavery.^[24]

Read this way, Rao’s narrative of "dilemma" is, in truth, a *contradiction*.^[25] The dilemma in which a quantitative expansion of Black slaves mechanically increased the abstract “possibility of rebellion” is really the contradiction of a diversifying collection of unfree labor regimes buckling under the weight of a progressively national struggle on the part of the enslaved, until the settler garrison’s final attempt at resolution required the abolition of the very regime it dedicated two centuries building public institutions to preserve.

RECONSTITUTING WHITE POWER

Rao’s White Power is useful not only as a fine work of legal scholarship, but as an exercise for socialist organizers to identify and relitigate so-called “public order.” Rao’s thesis already argues that public order is racially constituted. Yet by decentering the capitalist social relations through which the white settler garrison is consolidated and the logic of racial domination is constituted, Rao’s thesis is left vulnerable to critique by conservatives and liberals with a stake in preserving the settler status quo. Rao’s commitment to centering struggle is admirable, but must be extended further if it is to preserve its radical kernel: that the trifecta of white power, public order, and modern policing may only be understood when command over racialized labor is shifted from the periphery to its center.

The critique of an autonomous “public order” becomes politically central at a moment where the federal government is working to fuse local and national policing with the purpose of more adequately surveilling and policing the racialized working-class. Taking public order for granted is dangerous if only because it presupposes that there exists a space where all classes may cooperate in common for an identifiable national interest. Marx’s admonition that the proletariat is “not a class of civil society”—because its existence poses a threat to civil society as such—demands a critical stance towards any history or political vision that takes public order for granted.^[26] Even those left-liberal or progressive visions that critique the police in the name of “public safety” must be corrected for the sake of clarity of program and action.^[27]

Clarity concerning the degree to which the maintenance of white supremacy is constitutive of “public order” is progressively necessary as the police continue to shed what remains of their allegedly nonpartisan and universal character. The police emerge in the present conjuncture precisely as civil society’s formal arm of violence in the name of preserving public order. The narrowing vision and increasingly counterinsurgent character of American policing is symptomatic of civil society’s own retreat amid the growing militancy of working-class struggle throughout the United States.^[28] The “external” threat of immigration and “internal” threat of urbanized and suburbanized rebellions are not an echo of the opening decades of the 18th century, but an expression of the same contradiction—between the private interest of the settler-subject and the “public order” that secures it by estranging it further—in a more alienated form. Where the colonial and antebellum slave patrol bounded the southern planter and white small farmer to the labor of “public order,” the professional modern police have completely monopolized this violence, driving the explicitly reactionary political formations of the white settler garrison to wield civil society in more explicitly partisan fashion, intensifying border militarization and localized policing in the name of “public order.”

If socialist organizers within the imperial core intend to work towards a revolutionary transformation of American society, then they must stand for the ruthless critique of everything civil society stands for. With the temporary closure of revolutionary possibility amid the counter-revolution of property, the American left cannot afford to cede even an inch of ground. Contesting every concept, including each bit of “common sense,” bears tremendous importance in establishing a vision with the strength to counter that of the fascist international.

The American left must therefore look towards those acts of resistance that exceed the narrowing limits of public order—the urban rebellion, the street movement, and the suburban uprising. These moments constitute the most advanced forms of working-class organization at the present conjuncture. While further work must be conducted to carry their energy into more durable organizational forms that resist cooptation by the non-profit industrial complex, American leftists must take these eruptions seriously as expressions that are at once acts of self-defense against police brutality and offensive acts against a public order and civil society that continue to take on increasingly carceral and hostile forms.

1. Gautham Rao, White Power: Policing American Slavery. University of North Carolina Press. 8.

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2. Rao, White Power. 72.

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3. Ibid., 28.

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4. Ibid., 21.

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5. Ibid., 20.

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6. Ibid., 20.

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7. Ibid., 22-23.

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8. Ibid., 222.

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9. See my earlier review of David McNally’s critique of the NHC in Cosmonaut: https://cosmonautmag.com/2025/12/process-and-totality/

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10. Karl Marx, Grundrisse. Penguin Classics. 100.

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11. David McNally, Slavery and Capitalism: A New Marxist History. University of California Press. 53.

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12. Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves. Belknap Press. 68.

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13. Rao, 52.

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14. Ibid.

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15. Rao, 25.

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16. Ibid.

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17. Rao, 35.

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18. See Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy. Harvard University Press. 70-102.

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19. Adam Wasserman, Forming a Nation: the Free Black Settlement at Fort Mose. Libcom. https://libcom.org/article/forming-nation-free-black-settlement-fort-mose

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20. Rao, 86-90.

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21. Ibid., 90.

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22. Ibid., 113.

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23. Berlin, Generations of Captivity. 213.

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24. For an account of the mass general strike on the part of the enslaved, see W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction. Free Press. 55-84.

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25. Rao, 90.

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26. Karl Marx, The Marx-Engels Reader: Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction. W. W. Norton & Company. 64.

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27. Richard Hunsinger and X. Rivera Maya, Public Safety or Public Defense. Negation Magazine. https://www.negationmag.com/articles/public-safety-self-defense

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28. Julian Assele, Abolish Blue Power. Cosmonaut. https://cosmonautmag.com/2026/06/abolish-blue-power/

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