Assata Shakur and the Capitalist State: Revolution, Repression, and Remembrance
An Expanded Theoretical Analysis
Assata Shakur was not simply a defendant in a criminal trial. She was a living symbol of resistance—a revolutionary Black woman, a target of state violence, and, in death, a martyr. To grasp the meaning of her 1977 trial (and its consequences), we must place her within the long lineage of U.S. racial capitalism, imperialist counterinsurgency, and class rule, while illuminating this trajectory through the theoretical frameworks of revolutionary thought.
This expanded analysis incorporates the foundational theories of Karl Marx and V.I. Lenin on the state and revolution; Antonio Gramsci's conception of hegemony; Louis Althusser's structural analysis of Ideological and Repressive State Apparatuses; and W.E.B. Du Bois's penetrating insights into racial capitalism and the "wages of whiteness." Through this synthesized theoretical lens, we can comprehend how Assata Shakur's persecution functioned as a coordinated strategy to neutralize a potent challenge to capitalist and white supremacist power structures.
Theoretical Framework for Analyzing State Repression
From COINTELPRO to the Courtroom: The Machinery of Repression
The FBI's Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) was never a neutral law-enforcement scheme; it was a domestic war machine directed in particular at Black nationalism, socialist currents, and allied movements. As documented by revolutionary communists, its tactics extended a long historical practice of infiltrating and destroying working-class organizations.
COINTELPRO Tactics
Surveillance, infiltration, fabricated evidence, and provocation to decapitate revolutionary organizations.
Targeted Organizations
Black Panther Party, Black Liberation Army, socialist movements, and anti-war activists.
Historical Precedent
Continuation of state practices against labor organizers and radical movements throughout U.S. history.
COINTELPRO deployed surveillance, infiltration, fabricated evidence, and provocation to decapitate revolutionary organizations. Assata Shakur, as a cadre of the Black Panther Party and later the Black Liberation Army, was squarely in its crosshairs. Her case stands not apart from but as a direct product of this campaign of repression, a modern incarnation of what communist movements have historically faced from the capitalist state.
Althusser's Framework
In the theoretical vocabulary of Louis Althusser, the state maintains itself through a combination of Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs) like schools, media, and culture, and Repressive State Apparatuses (RSAs) like police, courts, and prisons. Her trial reveals how the two operate in unison: the courtroom appears as a neutral venue, but it enacts state violence through the law, while the media and public discourse frame her as a demon, not as a challenger to order. This "combined operation" of RSA and ISA ensured that the physical repression of Shakur was accompanied by an ideological campaign to strip her of political legitimacy and present her conviction as the just outcome of a neutral legal process.
The Trial as Ideological Theater: Hegemony, the Jury, and "The Wages of Whiteness"
The formal record of the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike in 1973 is contested, but certain facts are shared by both sides. The defense presented compelling medical and forensic testimony showing that Shakur's injuries made it biologically impossible for her to have fired a weapon as alleged. In a system less shaped by class and race, such contradictions might have produced reasonable doubt—but not in the logic of bourgeois law enforcing class rule. Her conviction was not the result of evidence triumphing; it was the result of a system committed to disciplinary spectacle.
Gramsci's Cultural Hegemony
Antonio Gramsci teaches us that power is not secured only by force; it is legitimated by ideology, through a process of cultural hegemony where the ruling class projects its own worldview as the common sense of society. The trial of Assata functioned as a mass pedagogical event. The media portrayed her as monstrous and irrational, while the legal setting—the relocation of the trial venue to a white-majority county, the selection of an all-white jury—ensured that the ideological verdict matched the legal one. This was the Gramscian "war of position" in reverse: the state worked to maintain its hegemony by dismantling the counter-hegemony embodied by Shakur and the Black Liberation Movement.
Du Bois and Racial Capitalism
W.E.B. Du Bois's concept of the "wages of whiteness" sharpens our understanding of the jury dynamics. Even as white workers are exploited under capitalism, they receive a psychological wage—status, privilege, identity—from aligning with whiteness rather than solidarity with Black workers. In this context, a white juror faced with a Black woman revolutionary confronted not just a legal question but a symbolic one: to side with the defendant would be to acknowledge that the state, policing, and the racial order are complicit in oppression. Most would reflexively side with the state. Thus the jury was not simply biased; it was functionally complicit in the reproduction of racial capitalism. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction showed how poor whites in the post-Civil War era were bribed (materially or symbolically) to police Black freedom. The same dynamic operated in 1977: white jurors, feeling themselves psychologically aligned with the trooper and the state, reinforced the racial order by convicting Shakur despite overwhelming contradictions in the evidence.
Lenin, State Violence, and the Illusion of Reform
Lenin's State and Revolution argues with crystalline clarity that the bourgeois state is not a neutral mechanism but "an instrument for the exploitation of the oppressed class". For Lenin, the state is fundamentally a repressive apparatus—including courts, police, and prisons—that the ruling class uses to maintain its power. This framework shatters the liberal illusion that the law can be a reliable shield for the oppressed. Shakur's trial fits this model perfectly: the reformist idea that law is a neutral arbiter is shattered when political defendants are tried not by the evidence but by the structure of the system itself.
Procedural Manipulation
In this light, the judge's procedural rulings—the refusal to allow evidence of COINTELPRO operations, the constraints on defense resources, the venue change—were not judicial mistakes but conscious tactical maneuvers. They ensured that the repressive apparatus of the state would not be exposed in the courtroom. The trial was never about investigating a crime; it was, as Lenin would have recognized, a counterinsurgency campaign waged under legal guise, designed to criminalize dissent and eliminate a political threat to the established order.
A Genealogy of Legal Repression: Situating Assata in History
Assata's trial does not emerge from a vacuum. It belongs to a lineage of what might be called juridical terror, a tradition of using the legal system to punish and make examples of those who challenge the dominant power structure:
The Scottsboro Boys (1931)
Nine Black teenagers, falsely accused of raping white women, were swiftly convicted by all-white juries despite contradictory evidence. The courts functioned as instruments to uphold the white supremacist order during an economic crisis, demonstrating how the legal system enforces racial control.
Angela Davis (1972)
As a Black communist and activist, Davis was put on trial for alleged conspiracy connected to a courtroom takeover. Her case was constructed around the fear of radicalism, and the state worked to frame her as a dangerous revolutionary to erase her political identity. Her eventual acquittal was a rare victory, but the spectacle of her prosecution served the state's pedagogical purpose of intimidating the left.
The MOVE Bombing (1985)
While not a courtroom drama, the bombing of the Black radical collective MOVE by Philadelphia police demonstrated the state's willingness to use extreme violence to crush communal autonomy. The subsequent imprisonment of survivors shows the continuum between legal repression and outright state violence.
Assata's case is situated among these acts of violence and legal theater. The aim is always the same: to neutralize those who propose not merely reforms, but revolution.
Exile, Memory, and Resistance
Escaping from Clinton Correctional Facility in 1979, aided by BLA comrades, Assata made her way to Cuba, where she was granted political asylum in 1984. Her exile was not a retreat but a strategic refusal to submit. She lived out her days under the constant threat of extradition, a fugitive from the world's most powerful empire, yet she never capitulated.
Legacy and Influence
Over time, she evolved into a powerful global symbol. Her writings, particularly her autobiography, became "a rallying cry" for subsequent generations of activists, including the Black Lives Matter movement. Her famous words, "It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win... We have nothing to lose but our chains," echo Marxist thought and resonate as a timeless revolutionary commitment. She demonstrated that even when physically exiled, a revolutionary's ideas and example can continue to expose the hypocrisies of imperialism and inspire struggle. She showed that the state would never negotiate with its most determined opponents—it could only seek to silence or lock them away. Even in death, she remains a living critique.
It is with profound sorrow and revolutionary love that we acknowledge the passing of Assata Shakur (Joanne Deborah Chesimard) on September 25, 2025, in Havana, Cuba—still a political exile, still unbowed. The world has lost a fearless freedom fighter, a woman who bore bullets, chains, and the full weight of state repression, yet refused submission.
Her life was a testament to the power of resistance. From the Black Panther Party to the Black Liberation Army, from a New Jersey prison to political asylum in Cuba, she walked a path of unwavering commitment to the liberation of her people. The state intended for her to be forgotten, to die in a prison cell as a nameless convict. Instead, through her courage and her words, she transcended their brutal performance of power. She became an emblem of survival, of exile, of revolutionary fidelity.
Her legacy is that of a "revolutionary fighter" whose teachings continue to inspire those in the struggle for justice. We must honor her legacy by "recognizing our duty to fight for our freedom". Her memory is a baton passed to all who dare to struggle, who dare to speak truth to power, and who dream of a world beyond capitalist domination and racial oppression.
May her courage permeate through every dimension of our ongoing fight and guide us. May our work be as righteous and brave as she was. Her chains are finally broken, but her message of liberation echoes eternally.
Source List
This article synthesizes theoretical frameworks from foundational thinkers. The following list provides authoritative sources for their works.
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