In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Oliver Baker. Baker is Assistant Professor of English and African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University. His book is No More Peace: Abolition War and Counterrevolution.
Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?
Oliver Baker: In No More Peace, I study the history of abolitionist and anticolonial rebels who waged wars of liberation to overturn slavery and settler colonialism in the nineteenth century. I argue that this strategy of abolition war served as a motor force for calling into existence white counterrevolution. The necessity to save US class society from abolition war, I emphasize, compelled enslaver and settler capitalists to cultivate white counterrevolution as a cross-class, mass-based project. White counterrevolution drew on the power of widespread participation among Europeans across class and difference to conduct repressive violence both extending and exceeding centralized state power.
Today US imperialism is in a stage of terminal crisis. It is also embattled, weakened, and injured in response to the last decade of powerful uprisings, revolts, and mass mobilizations. The 2020 George Floyd Uprisings alarmed the US bourgeoisie. At the periphery of US imperialism, Palestinian national liberation struggle, through unfathomable sacrifices, has fully exposed the vulnerabilities and contingency of US imperialism. Responding to crisis and resistance, US imperialism is lashing out and going on the offensive against workers and oppressed peoples to maintain its power. It is turning to ultra-reaction to uphold its power. No More Peace helps us understand our moment of rising reaction not as exceptional, anomalous, or unprecedented in US history. Rather, the forms of escalating state repression and terror, counterinsurgency, mass white reaction and neo-fascism that we witness today are extensions of the long history of white counterrevolution on which rests the United States. My book contends that abolition war thinkers developed crucial insights on white counterrevolution precisely through their militant practice of waging war to defeat it. I unearth their thinking and theories to help us better understand the long history of white counterrevolution and its role in upholding US imperialism.
What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?
No More Peace is informed, in large part, by what I have learned from community organizing. In fact, I treated the composing of the book as an effort to return to the community the solidarity I have received while doing anti-imperialist and community defense organizing. As I say in the acknowledgments, I wrote the book in the aftermath of surviving state repression in 2022 for my anti-imperialism activism. It was my duty, as I saw it, to compose a work that could be useful in some way for advancing the very movements that the state repression I endured had sought to weaken.
I hope activists and organizers are inspired by the history of abolition and anticolonial wars studied in the book. Anticolonial and abolitionist rebels were not singular or elite leaders but rather ordinary in that revolutionary way in their determination to wage wars of liberation to destroy settler colonialism and slavery. As mentioned above, anticolonial and abolitionist rebels also developed crucial but often overlooked theory and analysis of class society and counterrevolution precisely through their militant confrontation with these projects. For the class struggles that lie ahead in our era of imperialism in crisis, there is much to learn from how abolition war thinkers understood US class society and its strategies of repression.
We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is there a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?
My book works against critical frameworks, theories, and methods that reject the centering of class struggles in the critique of systems of oppression like slavery, settler colonialism, and capitalism. Those who reject class struggle as a method of study often characterize capitalism and imperialism as totalized, completed, and all-powerful systems that are invincible to resistance. Capitalism and imperialism are viewed as inevitable for which we can only hope to demand reforms but never anything more to better our conditions or win a different future. Such theories produce a consciousness of passivity, disorganization, and individualism that turns discontent and frustration at the injustices people face into inaction rather than organized resistance.
In No More Peace, I demonstrate how abolition war thinkers both engaged in and studied closely the class struggles of their context. Through this, they perceived the vulnerabilities and weaknesses of settler colonialism and slavery in ways that exposed their historical contingency. The history of abolition war reveals how slavery and settler colonialism were always uncertain projects—vulnerable to defeat, collapse, and ruin by those who resisted. That enslaver and settler capitalists were forced to construct white counterrevolution as a mass reactionary project to save class society from Black and Indigenous rebellion for collective life, illuminates how US class society was always an embattled project in a protracted class struggle whose outcome was and is undecided. It was, in part, this analysis of the historical contingency of settler colonialism and slavery—the view that these systems were not invincible or inevitable—that inspired people to support or directly participate in the strategy of abolition war. Abolition war rebels modelled methods of study and critique that remain relevant and crucial for us today. They can help us see that the intensifying reaction, repression, and counterinsurgency of our context are not signs of imperialism’s strength and triumph but symptoms of its embattled status.
Which intellectuals and/or intellectual movements most inspire your work?
Gerald Horne’s work is a major influence on my book. Horne’s analysis of the American revolution and later Texas Revolution as counterrevolutions against Black and Indigenous resistance is foundational to my book’s study of escalating abolition war during the antebellum period and how it prompts further consolidation and expansion of white counterrevolution.
My book is also informed by the long tradition of historical materialism as the science for understanding class society and revolution. Marx and Engels’s critique of capitalism and theory of working-class revolution are placed in dialogue with anticolonial and abolition war rebels like Nat Turner, leaders of the Seminole Wars, Martin Delany, Harriet Tubman, Osborne Anderson, and John Brown, among others. Marx and Engels were contemporaries of abolition war thinkers, and from afar paid close attention to the abolition movement and its relationship to European communism. I suggest that the work Marx and Engels are doing in Europe of producing a scientific analysis of capitalism in service of the working class’s struggle for emancipation is also being done in similar yet distinct ways by abolition war thinkers in the context of North America. Abolition war thinkers are arriving at similar conclusions about capitalism that Marx and Engels are discovering. I also point out how abolition war thinkers offer a theory of US capitalism in the North American context that Marx and Engels don’t fully approach with their focus on capitalism as it develops in Europe. In this way, I place abolition war thinkers in the tradition of revolutionary anti-capitalist thought where they often are not considered.
Which two books published in the last five years would you recommend to BAR readers? How do you envision engaging these titles in your future work?
I would like to highlight a few books published recently that I find very useful and compelling for thinking about topics informing my future work: Dylan Rodríguez’s White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide, The Black Belt Thesis Study Group and Eugene Puryear’s The Black Belt Thesis: A Reader, Alyosha Goldstein and Simón Ventura Trujillo’s, For Antifascist Futures: Against the Violence of Imperial Crisis, and Mumia Abu-Jamal and Jennifer Black’s Beneath the Mountain: An Anti-Prison Reader. These books offer crucial analysis on the role of state violence and white supremacy in enforcing and managing imperialism in crisis. The methods, approaches, and frameworks of these books are also informed by a centering of revolutionary class struggle among the colonized, unfree, and exploited. Guided by these books, in my next work, I am interested in studying the role of Black militancy and community self-defense in combating white ruling class terror and the intersection of this history with the rising revolt of industrial labor following the era of Reconstruction. This intersection of Black anti-fascism and the rebellion of industrial labor of the late nineteenth-century offers an important history that I would like to put in dialogue with current conversations about the relationship between national liberation struggles and revolutionary anti-capitalist movements today in the united effort to fight back against an increasingly reactionary imperialism.
Roberto Sirvent is the editor of the Black Agenda Report Book Forum.
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