Erica Caines is a mother and organizer. She is the Membership Coordinator of the Black Alliance for Peace and a member of BAP-Baltimore, a member of the Ujima People’s Progress Party, a member of Friends of Latin America, co-editor of Hood Communist, and founder of Liberation Through Reading.
“We must start to really understand that there’s a primary contradiction here that is affecting all of us – imperialism. It may affect people in different ways, because conditions materially, dialectically are not the exact same all the time, but it affects us all nonetheless, and it has such a stronghold on everyone’s ability to self-determine what their lives are going to be.” – Erica Caines
Introducing part ii of the conversation
This is the second and final part of a two-part interview series coming from a conversation that I had with Erica in April as part of my recently completed masters thesis (see part I here). Because the conversation was so insightful and I couldn’t include most of it in the thesis itself, I’ve decided to publish a slightly edited version of our conversation, in two parts.
In this second part, Erica and I discuss the relevance and meaning of democracy under a imperialist-capitalist state, the need for an alternative conceptualization of democracy and human rights, the ways that economic sanctions represent a war against our communities domestically and globally, and how to build power in our neighborhoods and with colonized and marginalized peoples throughout the world. Specifically, Erica highlights the connections between the deprivation caused by sanctions of our communities, colonization of our peoples, and the rapid growth of ‘Cop Cities’ across the country, as well as the active and growing struggle against these forces. In all of this, Erica is clear that our movements and work cannot be siloed, must be holistic, and need a focus on the primary contradiction of imperialism because that is the common system of domination and oppression.
Again, love, appreciation, and admiration for Erica for her organizing and the opportunity to delve more into her work and perspectives here. Check out some of Erica and her comrades’ local work (linked in her bio).
Conversation with Erica Caines, pt. ii
Austin: So, when we think about economic development as a concept under a capitalist state, in a capitalist system, I feel like it’s also useful to think about this idea of liberal democracy which is really based on ideas not necessarily based on people’s actual conditions. Because as you said, a lot of the economic development piece is about the politics behind it and responsiveness to people and the ability to kind of like having people at the center. And democracy can be a loaded word that means nothing sometimes, so what do you think about democracy in economic development, how have you seen that play out on a local level and is it something you’re concerned about building.
Along those lines, how do you think about democracy in all of this?
Erica: I think a lot of things about democracy. I’m trying to think about the best ways to talk about it. I think that the idea and concept of democracy has been so Westernized, so when you’re talking about democracy, it really depends on who’s talking about it. When we look at the U.S.’s use of democracy, for instance, we are in an election year [note: after this interview took place, Donald J Trump was re-elected President in the 2024 elections], and they say that what’s on the line is U.S. democracy, and there is this idea that voting for one means the end of democracy, while voting for the other would not.
But if you take a broader bird’s eye view of both candidates, you see one who obviously is nuts, but the other, who is, a little more self-contained, but just as sociopathic in terms of the dealings, specifically the war mongering and never-ending wars. I mean currently under the Biden administration the U.S. is engaged in the proxy war in Ukraine, is sending more weapons to Israel, is propagating the Global Fragility Act both in Haiti and the “Western Coastal African region”, as they like to call it. All this simultaneously, and the U.S. is sanctioning Nicaragua and Venezuela, they still have the blockade on Cuba, they’re still interfering or supporting coup regimes like in Peru, they still have a very heavy presence in the Core Group [in Haiti] and with NATO. These are the people who are talking about democracy, but everywhere that they go or have been you’ll be hard pressed to find any democracy that they’ve left behind.
So, for me, the concept of democracy is about who is speaking to it. We really must be critical about what’s meant by democracy. For me, having that framework of a people(s)-centered human rights has really honed in the idea or concept of what democracy could be, or even if democracy is actually useful. So those are still questions that I’m thinking through. But the people(s)-centered human rights essentially offer a true alternative to all that we’re hearing about “human rights”, that are really these hypocritical claims from these imperialist nations that are just exploiters throughout the rest of the world. People(s)-centered human rights emphasize a particular need from the oppressed people to define and secure rights for themselves through social struggle and countering the top-down approach of traditional human rights frameworks. I think that speaks more to what we all think democracy is than how it’s playing out in terms of the West.
Austin: I’m wondering how you’ve also thought about democracy beyond the political or human rights arena and in terms of economics. For example, the ability to not be under the dictatorship of capital, which I think also connects to sanctions internally and even domestically. Especially thinking about the ability to have democracy if you don’t have self-determination over resources and if you’re always being curtailed by these oppressive outside forces. Could you speak to that a little bit?
Erica: To that point, no, there is no real democracy when you’re always under attack. That is the reason why we particularly emphasize understanding ourselves here within the U.S. empire as colonial subjects. Because what does that mean when we cast a vote? Why do we never see any fruits of that? And it’s not that there are no benefits, but there’s no real, true material shift in the conditions that we find ourselves in. In fact, it’s arguable that our conditions continue to worsen.
Despite all that, we are always only encouraged to take part in this one specific democratic process, which is a democratic process that was constructed by the same system that is undermining democratic processes throughout the Third World. Take the example of the way that the U.S. and its imperialist allies are inserting themselves in places that they deem at the drop of a dime to be authoritarian, without any sort of introspection of their own processes. Ask yourself, “why would the U.S. do that?”. I think there is a reason that we see a particular push around voting as the only means for obtaining democracy or obtaining self-determination, and why we see voting so completely separated from the concept of building political power.
I like to think of a comrade Max Rameau, when he talks about community control of public safety or community control over the police, and he talks about the efforts to get that and the efforts to build that movement and to build that struggle up. If this is a campaign that we’re wanting to take to city council or we’re wanting to run someone for a city council position to hold our line on community control and raise that within the city council, and in the time that we’re doing that, we have won over half the neighborhood, half the section of the city to our struggle but we lost that seat, did we lose? I think those are really important ways to think about the use of obtaining and building political power as a democratic process. Because the way that democracy is Westernized, or the way we’re propagandized to understand democracy due to the limited ways that we’re able to participate, has really blurred the lines and the understandings of what is necessary in the efforts for self-determination as a people.
Austin: I like that you point out that in the West, especially in the U.S., these supposedly democratic processes are intentionally separated because the elites here in the imperial core don’t want you to see that they are connected. They want to keep voting separate from the actual exercising of popular power, and so with voting campaigns you don’t see people really building long-term power through electoral politics because we are conditioned against that and this system is set up not to incentivize that.
Erica: Right. Oh, I don’t think I responded to your sanctions question, did I?
Austin: No, you didn’t. I guess within this question of democracy and ability to have self-determination, how you see economic sanctions playing out locally? And connected to that, how do you think about building real solidarity across cities, and across borders with other African peoples? Do you think there’s opportunity in that?
Erica: I guess I could start by saying that economic sanctions are tactics of war. We always like to say that, but it’s not simply a slogan. Sanctions do target a particular nation with financial and economic pressure by leveraging U.S. dominance over the global financial and trade system. So sanctions work by essentially strangling the economy of a targeted nation. And this is important because this circles back to understanding ourselves as a colonized people.
The system of global capitalism largely uses the U.S. Dollar. All international transactions are routed through U.S. banks, and this allows U.S. banks to block or freeze individual transactions or all transactions initiated by or for a particular nation. So, they’re able to confiscate billions of dollars held by a targeted government. We see them do this with Venezuela, they still have Venezuela’s gold, I believe. U.S. global financial dominance also means that the U.S. Government can demand that banks in completely uninvolved countries comply, by threatening them with sanctions as well. We see that happen continuously with Cuba, with the blockade. I think a company just got hit with a penalty for dealing with Cuba, and so it’s important to center around what sanctions are because I always, in my work, attempt to connect what’s happening locally or domestically, with what’s happening globally. And that includes, one, what do we mean when we say the sanctions are an act of war.
But then, second, how do we understand sanctions here domestically. We could see that sanctions regime in the welfare application, and we could see that in the food deserts, we could see that in for-profit healthcare, we could see that in the privatization of our water and power and internet, we could see that in our low wages that stifle us, we could see that in the underfunding of public education, we could see that in the lack of affordable housing. All of these things restrict us as a people, and not only do they restrict us economically as a people – which, again, is one of the ways that we can understand ourselves as colonized, there are day-to-day consequences for our sanctioned communities where there is massive inflation within our communities. In Atlanta, Baltimore, New York, these are cities with high inflation rates, this inflation interacts with the domestic or local sanctions and policies of austerity. That in itself affects working class Africans (Black people) and working-class African communities.
We should probably be clear on that that it does not drastically affect our communities the same way that we would see it impacting nations like Haiti or Zimbabwe, or the Democratic Republic of Congo, or Afghanistan, or Cuba, or Nicaragua, or Yemen, or the DPRK – the list goes on and on. I think the U.S. has a third of the world under sanctions. It is not the exact same, but that list also includes our communities, our neighborhoods. This emphasis on economic sanctions of our neighborhoods is important, just as it’s important to emphasize that when we see this rise in crime in our neighborhood as a pretext for occupation or more police, it is not disconnected from the fact that paramilitary gang violence in Haiti is a pretext for the occupation and militarization of that of that nation. Or when we talk about things like the Global Fragility Act, and we see the exact same language in this Safe Communities Act under Biden. These are the ways that we must understand our struggles’ connections and stop being so disjointed. We must start to really understand that there’s a primary contradiction here that is affecting all of us – imperialism. It may affect people in different ways, because conditions materially, dialectically, are not the exact same all the time, but it affects us all nonetheless, and it has such a stronghold on everyone’s ability to self-determine what their lives are going to be.
Austin: It’s funny, I’ve obviously heard you talk about this a lot before, but I think one thing that just clicked for me or at least that I’m thinking about differently after what you had said earlier, is around sanctions in our neighborhoods in our cities, and how we see our neighborhoods and communities as internal colonies. If you combine those then you see that the way that sanctions work is to deny you things that are yours, right? With Venezuela, the U.S. still has their gold [note: after this interview took place, the U.S. continues to further undermine Venezuela’s sovereignty by refusing to acknowledge Nicolas Maduro as the elected President in the 2024 elections]. The U.S. has also denied sovereignty and stolen from Cuba, from Nicaragua, from Haiti. Whether it’s through welfare restrictions or taking people’s resources here through over-priced utilities or through regressive taxation or mass evictions or many methods, there’s other ways of sanctioning us. And I’m thinking about how we change our relationship to our resources and our power and recognize that these are things that we should have ownership over.
So, I want to know if you have any reflections or thoughts about recognizing that these struggles are connected, and how we can think about our struggle toward liberation in a connected way, given that there are similarities in the conditions that we’re in but for Africans here in the U.S. while we may be colonized, we are dispersed. Since African communities and other colonized people throughout the world are connected but dispersed, what are some of the ways that you think about making those connections and building towards collective leverage for our liberation?
Erica: I think that is the beauty of organizations, even with being dispersed. If we look at Cop City, for instance, what we understood as solely being Atlanta, two years later, this phenomenon is in 46 different cities across the country, whether it is a proposal, or they have broken ground or it’s just about complete. That reality has pushed an effort towards coalition building. People are making these connections, but that’s not to say that we’re flattening particular experiences.
The efforts to build out coalitions, to connect struggles, especially around efforts like Stop Cop City, does that. Yes, there are clearly particularities across the country in these cities. What’s happening in Baltimore is a $330 million dollar project that does not look like what’s happening in Atlanta, where they’re cutting down a forest. In Baltimore it is still about land clearly, but the land they’re using for it is on an HBCU campus. Then the question is what does organizing locally look like?
Regardless, ultimately, we need to understand that these Cop Cities are popping up across the country or have already been built across the country. It is not unique to Atlanta or Baltimore. We’re seeing this mass construction of Cop Cities throughout the country because there’s a primary contradiction. While we may look at the differences in locality, the long game of the U.S Government is not really concerned with the fact that they’re shooting in Chicago but they’re not shooting as much in Baltimore, or that this is happening in San Diego but it’s not happening somewhere else. No, they’re putting Cop Cities everywhere, regardless.
Because, again, when we talk about the sanctions that are our communities are afflicted with, when we talk about this sort of language around economic development for these “under resourced” and “neglected” communities, when we talk about the austerity policies that promote a particular disenfranchisement, the result of that is the revolts that we’ve seen. These uprisings that we’ve seen in recent years, are not just because of George Floyd. One could really argue that those uprisings were largely because of the conditions people were finding themselves in during the pandemic. To circumvent uprisings, we’re seeing cop cities built, we’re seeing more budgeting go towards the 1033 program, and all this has nothing to do with our particular local areas.
We can understand that in the coalition-building that we’re doing here within these borders, then we should be able to make a broader argument around that and around coalition-building outside of these borders. Some might argue that we don’t necessarily need to be in solidarity with Palestine or Haiti, or support the positive developments in the Sahel, and that we are doing it because of unique things happening in our particular situations. No, we’re in solidarity because we understand there’s a primary contradiction – imperialism – that is catapulting us all and that is denying us all our self-determination. So that is the basis. We do not try to force unity, and we do not necessarily have to be the best of friends, either because it’s not an altruistic thing.
This is an attempt to try to understand ourselves objectively. What is it that we’re trying to obtain? Liberation for all people, and that does require a particular strategic approach around solidarity.
Austin: Wow. Yep, I don’t think there’s anything more to say. Thank you, comrade.