Their Violence and Ours

By Nathaniel Flakin

Republished from Left Voice.

Capitalist politicians of all stripes are condemning “violence.” But they never mean the daily violence committed by the police. They are condemning resistance against state violence.

Bourgeois society has a very funny way of talking about violence. In the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd, as thousands poured into the streets to demonstrate their anger and demand justice, the bourgeois press was publishing articles with headlines like this: “Violence erupts in Minneapolis following black man’s death in police custody.”

What a strange formulation! Not only does the headline conceal how this “death” happened. Apparently it is not “violence” if a state functionary chokes a restrained man to death. No, “violence” only began after that. 

This bias underscores the way that bourgeois society operates. A Black man being murdered by the state is just a normal day; but people taking things from a Target store without paying is a catastrophe. People are expendable; but property is sacred. 

Indeed, capitalist society treats all kinds of systemic violence as so completely natural that it does not even deserve the term. A police murder in broad daylight might, if there are sufficient protests, be condemned as “excessive force.” But what about when police do follow all rules and regulations? When they evict a family from their home, for example — is that not violence? What about a store preventing hungry people from getting food? What about a government allowing 100,000 people to die of a pandemic? Is that not violence?

The German communist poet Bertolt Brecht put it succinctly: “There are many ways to kill. They can stab a knife in your guts, take away your bread, decide not to cure you from an illness, put you in a miserable house, torture you to death with work, take you to war, etc. Only a few of these are forbidden in our state.”

In response to the protests, bourgeois politicians are speaking out against violence. But of course they do not mean the daily violence committed by the police. They are not referring to the massacres committed by the U.S. military or the economic havoc wreaked by American corporations. No, their main concern, almost inevitably, is property damage.

The U.S. Representative from Minneapolis, the progressive Democrat Ilhan Omar, for example tweeted out on Thursday: “We should and must protest peacefully. But let us end the cycle of violence now.” Atlanta’s Democratic Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said: “This is not in the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.”

But what was the spirit of Martin Luther King Jr.? He was not a socialist, but he understood that oppressed people must stand up to their oppression. For this, he was condemned by the powers that be for his supposed “violence.” On April 12, 1963, a group of eight clergymen called on King to cancel planned demonstrations for civil rights in Alabama. They called demonstrations “unwise and untimely” because they  “incite to hatred and violence, however technically peaceful those actions may be.” They denounced the mobilizations as “extreme measures” and proposed that Black people should “peacefully obey” while relying on courts.

King, of course, did not follow this advice. He defended riots as “the language of the unheard” and went on to denounce the U.S. government’s horrific violence in Vietnam. It was only after his murder that King was transformed into a harmless icon — an angelic figure who supposedly preached nothing but passive resistance

Progressive Democrats like Omar are not calling for peace — they are calling on people to peacefully obey the system that is murdering them. Omar wants the U.S. federal government to investigate police murders. Yet decades of police “reforms” have only shown that this institution cannot be reformed. The Minneapolis Police Department is headed by a Black cop who once sued the department over its racist practices. And yet: the capitalist police, even with the most enlightened leadership, can have no other function than protecting capitalist property. This means oppressing the poorest sectors of the working class, especially Black people.

As socialists, we do condemn violence — we condemn the violence that the capitalist system commits against billions of people every day. We do not condemn it when working-class and poor people begin to defend themselves against the system’s violence.

A riot serves to get the attention of the ruling class. It might even force them to make concessions. But a riot cannot end the system of oppression and exploitation. For that, we need to combine the rage on the streets of Minneapolis with socialist organization. Democratic Party politicians (even the ones that call themselves “socialists”) will always call on people to accept the institutions that oppress them. Real socialists, in contrast, want to build up organizations that are independent of the ruling class, their state, and all their parties.

A tiny minority of capitalists exploits the labor of the huge majority of people. In order to maintain their rule, they maintain an enormous repressive apparatus, including police, jails, armies, judges, etc. — that is their state. The capitalists are driving our entire civilization to a catastrophe. But they will never relinquish power voluntarily. Throughout history, no ruling class has ever given up without being toppled. As Karl Marx wrote, “Violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one.” This is why the working class needs to confront the capitalists’ bodies of armed men.

When working people set fire to a police station, the capitalists’ media will call this “violence” — but it is nothing more than self-defense against the daily violence perpetrated by capitalism. We must get rid of the capitalists’ state, and replace it with a society run by working people themselves. That is the essence of socialist revolution. And the fires on the streets of Minneapolis show that the deepening crisis of capitalism is pushing U.S. society just a little bit closer to that end.

The Minneapolis Uprising and the Heavy Stick of Reaction

[PHOTO CREDIT: David Gannon/AFP/GETTY]

By Ashton Rome

Republished from Left Voice.

Vladimir Lenin is once supposed to have said, “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” The events following the murder of George Floyd prove the dictum. Floyd was murdered on May 25, and less than a month later, the world looks completely different. The cops who killed Floyd were fired, and Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes, was charged with second-degree murder. The other three officers, Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane, and Tou Thao, were charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Floyd’s murder happens in the broader context of the murders Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and now Rayshard Brooks. Within the first 10 days after Floyd’s murders, protests spread from Minneapolis to cities around the country and internationally, to Germany, England, and elsewhere. Not surprisingly, it has also inspired state and reactionary responses. This rebellion has quickly gone to phase 2 — the heavy stick of the state.

The Carrot and the Stick

The protests are going on during a period of economic and social crisis, exacerbated by a global pandemic and fueling — and being fueled by — a historic decline of U.S. global hegemony. The crisis is marked by a collapse in confidence in traditional institutions of power in the United States, and growing approval of “socialism,” especially by young people and people of color. It is yet to be seen how much the capitulation of Bernie Sanders’s campaign and his endorsement of Biden has affected people’s political consciousness, but it is likely a significant factor. It has at a minimum prompted reflection on the political expediency of inside-outside and similar strategies. When the old rules and traditional institutions of a society can no longer deliver stability amid crisis, the ruling class is prone to rely on naked violence from the state and “stormtrooper”-like elements.

In the face of crisis, the capitalist class maintains power by using a combination of “carrots” and “sticks,” reform and repression. The exact ratio depends on the ruling class’s ability to contain the crisis at particular moments. The stick is often used during a crisis of legitimacy, in which the ruling class feels itself under existential threat. The reforms are meant to placate the most moderate wings of the movements. They are also an ideological tool to convince a movement that the system is “reformable,” which means that more confrontational approaches to politics are not needed. The stick, on the other hand, is meant to serve both an ideological and coercive goal — to show what happens when individuals and movements verge outside of acceptable boundaries.

A good example of these tactics is found in response to the unrest in the 1960s. In response to the challenges against what Martin Luther King called the “three evils” (racism, poverty, and war), the state combined repressive initiatives like the Counter Intelligence Program (Cointelpro) and LBJ’s Omnibus Crime and Safe Streets Act with reforms like the War on Poverty and initiatives that supported “Black capitalism” and Black elected leadership. In his book Black Awakening in Capitalist America, Robert Allen argues that the ruling class was terrified by the mass movements and promoted the ideas of “Black capitalism” and community development programs to redirect current and potential radicals into safe channels. By contrast, Cointelpro was the stick — surveilling, infiltrating, discrediting, and disrupting organizations deemed subversive.

As the U.S. economy shifted toward neoliberalism, the carrot has been significantly impoverished, consisting now mainly of favorable media attention, foundation funding, and positions within nonprofits. “Black capitalism,” embodied in the 1960s slogan “Black Faces in High Places” — now called “trickle-down social justice” — was promoted as a way of integrating a section of Black Americans into mainstream society. These “representational demands” were placed in contrast to the revolutionary aims of the Black Left like the Black Panther Party.

Under neoliberalism, nonprofits have also proliferated, existing within a set of relationships that link political parties and the state, donor foundations and educational institutions, leftist movements and capitalist enterprises. Because this arrangement involves class collaboration instead of class conflict, nonprofits are ripe for co-optation. The number of nonprofits in the United States has risen from 3,000 in 1960 to more than 1.5 million in 2016. Individuals and charities typically fund the bulk of these organizations, alongside philanthropic foundations redistributing a micro-percentage of the wealth accumulated by the 1 percent.

Funding from the 1 percent and nonprofits’ needs for funding have helped the financial backers direct and moderate organizations and movements. In her essay “The Price of Civil Rights,” Megan Francis shows how the NAACP’s early civil rights litigation agenda was redirected from a focus on white-supremacist violence and lynching during the crucial Red Summer of 1919 and redirected toward education and integration. The author discusses a phenomenon called “movement capture,” which she describes as “the process by which private funders use their influence in an effort to shape the agenda of vulnerable civil rights organizations.”

The usual co-option will unlikely hold in the face of the current level of social instability, anger, and scale of the protests. As Lara Putnam, Erica Chenoweth, and Jeremy Pressman point out in the Washington Post, protests are even spreading to conservative towns in rural and suburban America. They have likely occurred in more places and in greater numbers than even the Women’s Marches of 2017. The twin crises of the pandemic and economic downturn have the potential to incite protests beyond even what occurred after the 2007–8 economic crisis. Currently, just 19 percent of Americans say they can trust the government always or most of the time, among the lowest levels in the past half-century. The burning of the 3rd Precinct police station in Minneapolis is more popular than Biden and Trump. Though May’s unemployment figures may look positive due to “cooking the books,” the unemployment rate is the worst since World War II, with some estimating that 42 percent of recent layoffs could become permanent job losses.

Fascism

Political and economic crises spur mass action and sometimes even revolution, but they also provoke state reaction and counterrevolution. At the same time, fascism, a political movement that uses brute force to eliminate workers’ organizations and liberal democracy, unfolds in a way corresponding to the crisis that creates the conditions for it. The intense state reaction to the current rebellion, alongside the political violence and increased organization of the Far Right, should be cause for concern. Fascists seek to use the mass anger of a crisis situation like the one we now face — a crisis that under the right circumstances can lead to mass class action — and divert it through appeals to racism, xenophobia, and conspiracy theories.

During the 1960s, the Far Right grew substantially, waiting in reserve for when things got out of hand. It is important to remember that the massive civil rights movement was accompanied by the rise of far-right groups like the Minutemen, the KKK, and the John Birch Society. The latter had in 1966 an estimated 80,000 members, operating with a revenue of $5 million. According to Eckard Toy in The Right Side of the 1960s, the John Birch Society’s inaugural meeting included among its luminaries President Eisenhower’s first commissioner of Internal Revenue, a former personal aide of General Douglas MacArthur, two past presidents of the National Association of Manufacturers, a banker, and a University of Illinois professor and rich businessmen. These far-right groups and others aimed to figure out how to mobilize the white working class in the interest of a reactionary and violently oppressive racial order. This goal subsequently became central to the remaking of the Republican Party, reaching its apotheosis in the current presidency.

Protests by heavily armed conservative activists against the Covid-19 lockdowns suggest what can be expected if traditional state means of controlling the working class fail. The protests included an array of explicitly far-right groups, including the Proud Boys and militia groups like the Boogaloos. The majority of the attendees were small-business owners but also disgruntled workers upset by the economic devastation due to the pandemic and lockdown.

The Michigan Freedom Fund, cohost of one such rally, received more than $500,000 from the family of Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, which includes among its luminaries the far-right businessman and mercenary-supplier Erik Prince. It was also assisted by Fox News, which ran favorable coverage, and President Trump, who used Twitter to mobilize his base around the protest.

State Repression

Scenes reminiscent of Ferguson have appeared throughout the country as states have deployed the National Guard and militarized police to enforce curfew orders and protect private property. So far, the National Guard has been activated in 15 states and Washington, DC, and 40 cities have imposed curfews. While police in militarized gear like tactical uniforms and utilizing armored personnel carriers were seen in previous events like Occupy and the Ferguson Protests, the Blackhawk helicopter at a DC protest on June 1 and a Predator droneat a protest in Minneapolis, are emblematic of the escalation in state repression. Equally threatening, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy active-duty soldiers if governors do not themselves violently crackdown on the protests.

Such a deployment would be the first since the 1992 Rodney King riots and the 1967 riots in Detroit. From January 1965 to October 1971, guard units were used in 260 disturbances, whereas from 1945 to 1965 they were used to handle 88 disturbances. Ironically, the Kerner Commission, which produced a presidential study of the riots of the 1960s, determined that instead of calming communities, the National Guard (as well as inadequate housing, high unemployment, and voter suppression, and racial discrimination) contributed to the years of rioting. The death of David McAtee calls into question their effectiveness in restoring “law and order” currently.

Even before the current protests, Trump and the DOJ were looking for more ways to indefinitely detain people in order to curb the protests. Importantly, Trump and Attorney General William Barr used the DOJ to help whip up the far-right and “angry middle class” protests against social distancing policies. The DOJ’s actions under Trump makes it harder for it to serve the same role as it did in response to rebellion under Obama with Eric Garner. This is because Barr’s predecessor, Jeff Sessions, severely restricted prosecutors’ ability to seek consent decrees and court-enforced agreements.

Simultaneously, Trump has again invoked the threat of “Antifa” and “anarchists,” promising on May 31 that “the United States of America will be designating ANTIFA as a Terrorist Organization.” Terrorist organizations, not ideology, are typically designated by the secretary of state, and once selected, they become illegal to join. Even if Trump and the security apparatus of the state do not have the constitutional authority to designate Antifa a terrorist group, there are several essential considerations. Simply threatening to label Antifa a terrorist group may signal to law enforcement that they are expected to investigate and aggressively single out one section of protesters.

The threat could inspire the creation of a category such as “Black Identity Extremist (BIE),” which was cooked up after the Ferguson Protest. Then, it was used to justify assessments or informal investigations by the FBI, subjecting protesters to physical surveillance, informants, and other means. By singling out “anarchists” and “outside agitators,” the state can likely pursue harsh charges against one section of protesters and follow up with others.

In response to inauguration protests led by DisruptJ20, an umbrella coalition of groups, 234 people, including activists, journalists, medics, and legal observers, were arrested and charged with felonies, including inciting to riot, assaulting a police officer, and conspiracy to riot, all of which carry long prison sentences. The case of Ferguson activist and live streamer Michael Avery, who was arrested by the FBI for a social media, post is worrying. They claim that he encouraged looting in Minneapolis. Such an incident, unfortunately, will not be isolated.

Relying on police and the coercive state to subdue movements is complicated. As the degree of conflict intensifies, and the police assume a greater role in repressing demonstrations, strikes, and other forms of resistance, pressure may grow among law enforcement officers to break with the state. During times of mass action and reaction, law enforcement’s everyday functions and legitimacy are called into question, and police experience broad public hostility. This development is embodied by recent calls to “Defund the Police” as a means of curtailing departments’ coercive power. Protests tend to cause splits, as seen in the wave of Black police associations created across the country to deal with racism during the civil rights era. It has also inspired police organizations to react to crisis conditions by using trade union tactics to advocate benefits or defenses against cuts. Repression is not automatic. All these reactions by the police challenge the ordinary functioning of class rule and create another reason for the state to rely on an auxiliary of far-right militants.

The “Anarchist Threat”

Within the first couple of days of the George Floyd protest in the San Francisco Bay Area, “calls to action” were posted online, some of which could easily be attributed to right-wing trolls. The “calls” have no political content and typically call for looting. These likely fake posts created local hysteria that has whipped up the right-wing reaction, up to and including armed citizen patrols, and contributed to a wave of curfews and other restrictions on freedom of movement for activists.

Across the country, news articles have detailed the violent reactions in this environment of hysteria. Only recently, a multiracial family of four visiting Forks, Washington, was confronted by cars full of people, some with semiautomatic weapons, spouting allegations that they were Antifa. There have also been social media posts alleging buses full of Antifa protesters coming to local areas. These posts are tailored to even rural counties throughout the country. These social media posts seems to be in line with a white-supremacist strategy called accelerationism, which says that supremacists should foster polarization to “accelerate” its destruction of the current political order.

Tactics

Aside from the provocations launched through fake accounts, genuine anger has led to looting. This has led to renewed conversations on the Left about tactics. The article “In Defense of Looting,” published by the New Inquiry during a wave of “riot shaming” in the Ferguson Uprising, makes some very good points. Importantly, it shows that the distinction between violent and nonviolent protesters stems from a long-standing discourse about Black criminality and ignores that, historically, change has not come through nonviolence. The author correctly points out that the attention produced by property destruction reflects the primacy of private property for the rich. In this context, the author questions the often-repeated attack that “protesters are burning down their communities”:

Although you might hang out in it, how can a chain convenience store or corporate restaurant earnestly be part of anyone’s neighborhood? The same white liberals who inveigh against corporations for destroying local communities are aghast when rioters take their critique to its actual material conclusion.

But what is the usefulness of looting as a tactic? The article says that “it represents a material way … to help the community by providing a way for people to solve some of the immediate problems of poverty and by creating a space for people to freely reproduce their lives rather than doing so through wage labor.” This could be true at an individual level, but when we talk about a capitalist system and a state that serves the ruling class, we are talking about a question of power.

Spontaneous action like looting and rioting can help disrupt business as usual. Relying on spontaneous action, however, doesn’t get past pressuring those in power to alleviate the issue. Spontaneous action may get the ruling class to pay attention. It does not answer tactical questions like how to turn a temporary rebellion into a movement by bringing in new people. Riots bring increased attention to immediate grievances, which means funding for nonprofits, career opportunities, media appearances, and VIP visits; but by failing to address the root causes of the crisis, it results in a worsening condition for Black people.

At many protests, voting has been a major theme. In November, there will be elections for all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 35 of the 100 seats in the Senate, and, most notably, the presidency. Joe Biden likely hopes that this uprising can be captured to bring much-needed enthusiasm to his campaign. The election might be why demands like “Dismantle/Defund the Police” have gained popularity among some elected Democrats, at least in word.

If this election cycle is anything like 2016, the Democratic Party will be cautious not to offer concrete proposals, as was recommended in a memo to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. We must also be realistic and understand that no single election decides questions of power, and that the threat of fascism is not a short-term problem. The Democratic Party’s identity as a capitalist party, albeit one based in the labor and other social movements, means that it can not offer radical solutions willingly.

The risk of fascism highlights the need for a multiracial working-class movement. Though legal support, countersurveillance, and physical defense are important, it is essential to transform the current rebellion into a movement. The economic and social crisis can be exploited to grow the ranks of the Far Right, but it can also be used to build the workers’ movement. The Left can do more than demand the conviction of the four officers who murdered George Floyd. It can and must lay out a program that will address the root causes of the current crisis.

In Our Flag Stays Red (1948), Phil Piratin, an MP for the Communist Party of Great Britain, describes how the party used its tenant associations and trade union work in the 1930s and 1940s to undercut inroads by the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in his borough of Stephaney, London. The BUF, led by former Labor MP Osward Mosley, held meetings throughout the country and was making advances into working-class communities. The party organized unemployed workers in the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement and did work to strengthen the trade union movement. As well, the party famously organized counterdemonstrations like the one that led to the Battle of Cable Street on October 4, 1936.

The CP deduced that the BUF’s anti-Semitic propaganda struck a chord among some workers, but especially in areas of East London where people were living in miserable conditions and facing unemployment and low pay. The party organized demonstrations like the famous “Battle on Cable Street” that used direct action to limit the spread of the BUF and show that it could be defeated. They also organized in working-class areas where the BUF was creating a base. In the midst of its tenant organizing, the CP discovered that one of its families were members of the BUF. Piratin wrote,

I discovered that in both cases they were members of the BUF and obviously wanted no truck with us. The other was prepared to listen. We pointed out to them, so far as we could judge … that the bailiffs had the law on their side and the only thing to do was to prevent the bailiffs gaining access. This might mean a fight, but we convinced them that it would be worth while. … We called a meeting of as many tenants as possible in one of the rooms, put to them our proposals, and they agreed to make the fight. As a result of this solidarity the other family the next morning decided to take part. Meanwhile, in conversation, we asked this member of the BUF about to be evicted what the fascists had done for him. He said that he had raised the matter, but they had no intention of doing anything. This was a very valuable piece of information to be used by us in disillusioning many of the BUF supporters.

What this historical example shows is that we can undercut the basis of fascism before it forms by appealing to economic interests. This would be much easier if we had an actual left political party and left leadership in this country that could expose the limitations of right-wing populism and fascism. Unfortunately, in its absence we are left with milquetoast Democrats who dress in kente cloth and put forth Band-Aid reforms.

Conclusion

This historical example does not mean that socialists should reduce the unique oppression of the Black working class into a “secondary contradiction.” The anti-Blackness of capitalism is the skeleton key to unlocking all the contradictions of this system for ordinary working people. It exposes the role of the police and state violence in maintaining capital’s domination of society, it exposes how race and class determine who will die from the Covid-19 pandemic, and it exposes the primacy of property in our society.

This period brings profound opportunities and dangers. The crises that define this period have created openings for the Left to grow and challenge the legitimacy of traditional institutions of power and capitalism itself. Already a majority of Americans support the protests, and white Americans’ favorable perceptions of the police have dropped by 10 points to 61 percent. This is particularly noteworthy because “riots” in the United States typically cause pro-police beliefs to rise. But we must also be attuned to, and weave into our tactics, the unique conditions that exist today for the emergence of a fascist movement.

The 1992 Rebellion in Los Angeles: The Context of a Proletarian Uprising

Originally published by Aufheben Group (1992).

April 29th, 1992, Los Angeles exploded in the most serious urban uprising in America this century. It took the federal army, the national guard and police from throughout the country five days to restore order, by which time residents of L.A. had appropriated millions of dollars worth of goods and destroyed a billion dollars of capitalist property. Most readers will be familiar with many of the details of the rebellion. This article will attempt to make sense of the uprising by putting the events into the context of the present state of class relations in Los Angeles and America in order to see where this new militancy in the class struggle may lead.

Before the rebellion, there were two basic attitudes on the state of class struggle in America. The pessimistic view is that the American working class has been decisively defeated. This view has held that the U.S. is - in terms of the topography of the global class struggle - little more than a desert. The more optimistic view held, that despite the weakness of the traditional working class against the massive cuts in wages, what we see in the domination of the American left by single issue campaigns and "Politically Correct" discourse is actually evidence of the vitality of the autonomous struggles of sections of the working class. The explosion of class struggle in L.A. shows the need to go beyond these one-sided views.

Beyond the Image

As most of our information about the rioting has come through the capitalist media, it is necessary to deal with the distorted perspective it has given. Just as in the Gulf War, the media presented an appearance of full immersion in what happened while actually constructing a falsified view of the events. While in the Gulf there was a concrete effort to disinform, in L.A. the distortion was a product not so much of censorship as much as of the total incomprehension of the bourgeois media when faced with proletarian insurrection. As Mike Davis points out, most reporters, "merely lip-synched suburban cliches as they tramped through the ruins of lives they had no desire to understand. A violent kaleidoscope of bewildering complexity was flattened into a single, categorical scenario: legitimate black anger over the King decision hijacked by hard-core street criminals and transformed into a maddened assault on their own community." Such a picture is far from the truth.

The beating of Rodney King in 1991 was no isolated incident and, but for the chance filming of the event, would have passed unnoticed into the pattern of racist police repression of the inner cities that characterizes the present form of capitalist domination in America. But, because of the insertion of this everyday event into general public awareness the incident became emblematic. While the mainstream television audience forgot the event through the interminable court proceedings, the eyes of the residents of South Central L.A. and other inner cities remained fixed on a case that had become a focus for their anger towards the system King's beating was typical of. Across the country, but especially in L.A., there was the feeling and preparation that, whatever the result of the trial, the authorities were going to experience people's anger. For the residents of South Central, the King incident was just a trigger. They ignored his televised appeals for an end to the uprising because it wasn't about him. The rebellion was against the constant racism on the streets and about the systematic oppression of the inner cities; it was against the everyday reality of racist American capitalism.

One of the media's set responses to similar situations has been to label them as "race riots". Such a compartmentalisation broke down very quickly in L.A. as indicated in Newsweek's reports of the rebellion: "Instead of enraged young black men shouting `Kill Whitey', Hispanics and even some whites - men, women and children - mingled with African-Americans. The mob's primary lust appeared to be for property, not blood. In a fiesta mood, looters grabbed for expensive consumer goods that had suddenly become `free'. Better-off black as well as white and Asian-American business people all got burned." Newsweek turned to an "expert" - an urban sociologist - who told them, "This wasn't a race riot. It was a class riot." (Newsweek, May 11th, 1992).

Perhaps uncomfortable with this analysis they turned to "Richard Cunningham, 19", "a clerk with a neat goatee": "They don't care for anything. Right now they're just on a spree. They want to live the lifestyle they see people on TV living. They see people with big old houses, nice cars, all the stereo equipment they want, and now that it's free, they're gonna get it." As the sociologist told them - a class riot.

In L.A., Hispanics, blacks and some whites united against the police; the composition of the riot reflected the composition of the area. Of the first 5,000 arrests, 52 per cent were poor Latinos, 10 per cent whites and only 38 per cent blacks.

Faced with such facts, the media found it impossible to make the label "race riot" stick. They were more successful, however, in presenting what happened as random violence and as a senseless attack by people on their own community. It is not that there was no pattern to the violence, it is that the media did not like the pattern it took. Common targets were journalists and photographers, including black and Hispanic ones. Why should the rioters target the media? - 1) these scavengers gathering around the story offer a real danger of identifying participants by their photos and reports. 2) The uncomprehending deluge of coverage of the rebellion follows years of total neglect of the people of South Central except their representation as criminals and drug addicts. In South Central, reporters are now being called "image looters".

But the three fundamental aspects to the rebellion were the refusal of representation, direct appropriation of wealth and attacks on property; the participants went about all three thoroughly.

Refusal of Representation

While the rebellion in '65 had been limited to the Watts district, in '92 the rioters circulated their struggle very effectively. Their first task was to bypass their "representatives". The black leadership - from local government politicians through church organizations and civil rights bureaucracy - failed in its task of controlling its community. Elsewhere in the States this strata did to a large extent succeed in channeling people's anger away from the direct action of L.A., managing to stop the spread of the rebellion. The struggle was circulated, but we can only imagine the crisis that would have ensued if the actions in other cities had reached L.A.'s intensity. Still, in L.A. both the self-appointed and elected representatives were by-passed. They cannot deliver. The rioters showed the same disrespect for their "leaders" as did their Watts counterparts. Years of advancement by a section of blacks, their intersection of themselves as mediators between "their" community and US capital and state, was shown as irrelevant. While community leaders tried to restrain the residents, "gang leaders brandishing pipes, sticks and baseball bats whipped up hotheads, urging them not to trash their own neighborhoods but to attack the richer turf to the west".

"It was too dangerous for the police to go on to the streets" (Observer, May 3rd 1992).

Attacks on Property

The insurgents used portable phones to monitor the police. The freeways that have done so much to divide the communities of L.A. were used by the insurgents to spread their struggle. Cars of blacks and Hispanics moved throughout a large part of the city burning their targets - commercial premises, the sites of capitalist exploitation - while at other points traffic jams formed outside malls as their contents were liberated. As well as being the first multi-ethnic riot in American history, it was its first car-borne riot. The police were totally overwhelmed by the creativity and ingenuity of the rioters.

Direct Appropriations

"Looting, which instantly destroys the commodity as such, also discloses what the commodity ultimately implies: The army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state's monopoly of armed violence."

Once the rioters had got the police off the streets looting was clearly an overwhelming aspect of the insurrection. The rebellion in Los Angeles was an explosion of anger against capitalism but also an eruption of what could take its place: creativity, initiative, joy.

A middle-aged woman said: "Stealing is a sin, but this is more like a television game show where everyone in the audience gets to win." Davis article in The Nation, June 1st.

"Looters of all races owned the streets, storefronts and malls. Blond kids loaded their Volkswagon with stereo gear... Filipinos in a banged up old clunker stocked up on baseball mitts and sneakers. Hispanic mothers with children browsed the gaping chain drug marts and clothing stores. A few Asians were spotted as well. Where the looting at Watts had been desperate, angry, mean, the mood this time was closer to a maniac fiesta".

The direct appropriation of wealth (pejoratively labelled "looting") breaks the circuit of capital (Work-Wage-Consumption) and such a struggle is just as unacceptable to capital as a strike. However it is also true that, for a large section of the L.A. working class, rebellion at the level of production is impossible. From the constant awareness of a "good life" out of reach - commodities they cannot have - to the contradiction of the simplest commodity, the use-values they need are all stamped with a price tag; they experience the contradictions of capital not at the level of alienated production but at the level of alienated consumption, not at the level of labor but at the level of the commodity.

"A lot of people feel that it's reparations. It's what already belongs to us." Will M., former gang member, on the "looting". (International Herald Tribune May 8th)

It is important to grasp the importance of direct appropriation, especially for subjects such as those in L.A. who are relatively marginalized from production. This "involves an ability to understand working-class behavior as tending to bring about, in opposition to the law of value, a direct relationship with the social wealth that is produced. Capitalist development itself, having reached this level of class struggle, destroys the `objective' parameters of social exchange. The proletariat can thus only recompose itself, within this level, through a material will to reappropriate to itself in real terms the relation to social wealth that capital has formally redimensioned".

Race and Class Composition

So even Newsweek, a voice of the American bourgeoisie, conceded that what happened was not a "race riot" but a "class riot". But in identifying the events as a class rebellion we do not have to deny they had "racial" elements. The overwhelming importance of the riots was the extent to which the racial divisions in the American working class were transcended in the act of rebellion; but it would be ludicrous to say that race was absent as an issue. There were "racial" incidents: what we need to do is see how these elements are an expression of the underlying class conflict. Some of the crowd who initiated the rebellion at the Normandie and Florence intersection went on to attack a white truck driver, Reginald Oliver Denny. The media latched on to the beating, transmitting it live to confirm suburban white fear of urban blacks. But how representative was this incident? An analysis of the deaths during the uprising shows it was not.

Still, we need to see how the class war is articulated in "racial" ways.

In America generally, the ruling class has always promoted and manipulated racism, from the genocide of native Americans, through slavery, to the continuing use of ethnicity to divide the labor force. The black working class experience is to a large extent that of being pushed out of occupations by succeeding waves of immigrants. While most groups in American society on arrival at the bottom of the labor market gradually move up, blacks have constantly been leapfrogged. Moreover, the racism this involves has been a damper on the development of class consciousness on the part of white workers.

In L.A. specifically, the inhabitants of South Central constitute some of the most excluded sectors of the working class. Capital's strategy with regards these sectors is one of repression carried out by the police - a class issue. However the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is predominantly white and its victims massively black and Hispanic (or as P.C. discourse would have it, people of color). Unlike in other cities, where the racist nature of the split between the included and excluded sectors is blurred by the state's success in co-opting large numbers of blacks on to the police force, in L.A. capital's racist strategy of division and containment is revealed in every encounter between the LAPD and the population - a race issue.

When the blacks and Hispanics of L.A. have been marginalized and oppressed according to their skin color, it is not surprising that in their explosion of class anger against their oppressors they will use skin color as a racial shorthand in identifying the enemy, just as it has been used against them. So even if the uprising had been a "race riot", it would still have been a class riot. It is also important to recognize the extent to which the participants went beyond racial stereotypes. While the attacks on the police, the acts of appropriation and attacks on property were seen as proper and necessary by nearly everyone involved, there is evidence that acts of violence against individuals on the basis of their skin color were neither typical of the rebellion nor widely supported. In the context of the racist nature of L.A. class oppression, it would have been surprising if there had not been a racial element to some of the rebellion. What is surprising and gratifying is the overwhelming extent to which this was not the case, the extent to which the insurgents by-passed capital's racist strategies of control.

"A lot of people feel that in order to come together we have to sacrifice the neighborhood." Will M., former gang member, on the destruction of businesses. (International Herald Tribune May 8th, 1992.)

One form the rebellion took was a systematic assault on Korean businesses. The Koreans are on the front-line of the confrontation between capital and the residents of central L.A. - they are the face of capital for these communities. Relations between the black community and the Koreans had collapsed following the Harlins incident and its judicial result. In an argument over a $1.79 bottle of orange juice, Latasha Harlins, a 15-year old black girl, was shot in the back of the head by a Korean grocer - Soon Ja Du - who was then let off with a $500 fine and some community service. While the American State packs its Gulags with poor blacks for just trying to survive, it allows a shopkeeper to kill their children. But though this event had a strong effect on the blacks of South Central, their attack on Korean property cannot be reduced to vengeance for one incident - it was directed against the whole system of exchange. The uprising attacked capital in its form of property, not any property but the property of businesses - the institutions of exploitation; and in the black and Hispanic areas, most of these properties and businesses were owned by Koreans. But though we should understand the resentment towards the Koreans as class-based, it is necessary to put this in the context of the overall situation. In L.A., the black working-class's position deteriorated in the late 1970s with the closure of heavy industry, whereas at the end of the 60s they had started to be employed in large numbers. This was part of the internationalization of L.A.'s economy, its insertion into the Pacific Rim center of accumulation which also involved an influx of mainly Japanese capital into downtown redevelopment, immigration of over a million Latin Americans to take the new low-wage manufacturing jobs that replaced the jobs blacks had been employed in, and the influx of South Koreans into L.A.'s mercantile economy. Thus while Latinos offered competition for jobs, the Koreans came to represent capital to blacks. However, these racial divisions are totally contingent. Within the overall restructuring, the jobs removed from L.A. blacks were relocated to other parts of the Pacific Rim such as South Korea. The combativity of these South Korean workers shows that the petty-bourgeois role Koreans take in L.A. is but part of a wider picture in which class conflict crosses all national and ethnic divides as global finance capital dances around trying to escape its nemesis but always recreating it.

Class Composition and Capitalist Restructuring

The American working class is divided between waged and unwaged, blue and white collar, immigrant and citizen labor, guaranteed and unguaranteed; but as well as this, and often synonymous with these distinctions, it is divided along ethnic lines. Moreover, these divisions are real divisions in terms of power and expectations. We cannot just cover them up with a call for class unity or fatalistically believe that, until the class is united behind a Leninist party or other such vanguard, it will not be able to take on capital. In terms of the American situation as well as with other areas of the global class conflict it is necessary to use the dynamic notion of class composition rather than a static notion of social classes.

"When Bush visited the area security was massive. TV networks were asked not to broadcast any of Mr Bush's visit live to keep from giving away his exact location in the area." (International Herald Tribune, May 8th, 1992.)

The rebellion in South Central Los Angeles and the associated actions across the United States showed the presence of an antagonistic proletarian subject within American capitalism. This presence had been occluded by a double process: on the one hand, a sizeable section of American workers have had their consciousness of being proletarian - of being in antagonism to capital - obscured in a widespread identification with the idea of being "middle-class"; and on the other, for a sizeable minority, perhaps a quarter of the population, there has being their recomposition as marginalized sub-workers excluded from consideration as a part of society by the label "underclass". The material basis for such sociological categorizations is that, on the one hand there is the increased access to "luxury" consumption for certain "higher" strata, while on the other there is the exclusion from anything but "subsistence" consumption by those "lower" strata consigned to unemployment or badly paid part-time or irregular work.

This strategy of capital's carries risks, for while the included sector is generally kept in line by the brute force of economic relations, redoubled by the fear of falling into the excluded sector, the excluded themselves, for whom the American dream has been revealed as a nightmare, must be kept down by sheer police repression. In this repression, the war on drugs has acted as a cover for measures that increasingly contradict the "civil rights" which bourgeois society, especially in America, has prided itself on bringing into the world.

Part of the U.S. capital's response to the Watts and other 60s rebellions was to give ground. To a large section of the working class revolting because its needs were not being met, capital responded with money - the form of mediation par excellence - trying to meet some of that pressure within the limits of capitalist control. This was not maintained into the 80s. For example, federal aid to cities fell from $47.2 billion in 1980 to $21.7 billion in 1992. The pattern is that of the global response to the proletarian offensives of the 60s and 70s: first give way - allowing wage increases, increasing welfare spending (i.e. meeting the social needs of the proletariat) - then, when capital has consolidated its forces, the second part - restructure accumulation on a different basis - destructure knots of working class militancy, create unemployment.

In America, this strategy was on the surface more successful than in Europe. The American bourgeoisie had managed to halt the general rise in wages by selectively allowing some sectors of the working class to maintain or increase their living standards while others had their's massively reduced. One sector in particular has felt the brunt of this strategy: the residents of the inner city who are largely black and Hispanic. The average yearly income of black high school graduates fell by 44% between 1973 and 1990, there have been severe cutbacks in social programs and massive disinvestment. With the uprising, the American working class has shown that capital's success in isolating and screwing this section has been temporary.

The re-emergence of an active proletarian subject shows the importance, when considering the strategies of capital, of not forgetting that its restructuring is a response to working class power. The working class is not just an object within capital's process. It is a subject (or plurality of subjects), and, at the level of political class composition reached by the proletariat in the 60s, it undermined the process. Capital's restructuring was an attack on this class composition, an attempt to transform the subject back into an object, into labor-power.

Capitalist restructuring tried to introduce fragmentation and hierarchy into a class subject which was tending towards unity (a unity that respected multilaterality). It moved production to other parts of the world (only, as in Korea, to export class struggle as well); it tried to break the strength of the "mass worker" by breaking up the labor force within factories into teams and by spreading the factory to lots of small enterprises; it has also turned many wage-laborers into self-employed to make people internalise capital's dictates. In America, the fragmentation also occurred along the lines of ethnicity. Black blue-collar workers have been a driving force in working class militancy as recorded by C.L.R. James and others. For a large number of blacks and others, the new plan involved their relegation to Third World poverty levels. But as Negri puts it, "marginalization is as far as capital can go in excluding people from the circuits of production - expulsion is impossible. Isolation within the circuit of production - this is the most that capital's action of restructuration can hope to achieve." When recognizing the power of capital's restructuring it is necessary to affirm the fundamental place of working class struggles as the motor force of capital's development. Capital attacks a certain level of political class composition and a new level is recomposed; but this is not the creation of the perfect, pliable working class - it is only ever a provisional recomposition of the class on the basis of its previously attained level.

Capitalist restructuring has taken the form in Los Angeles of its insertion into the Pacific Rim pole of accumulation. Metal banging and transport industry jobs, which blacks only started moving into in the tail end of the boom in late 60s and the early 70s, have left the city, while about one million Latino immigrants have arrived, taking jobs in low-wage manufacturing and labor-intensive services. The effect on the Los Angeles black community has not been homogeneous; while a sizeable section has attained guaranteed status through white-collar jobs in the public sector, the majority who were employed in the private sector in traditional working class jobs have become unemployed. It is working class youth who have fared worse, with unemployment rates of 45% in South Central.

But the recomposition of the L.A. working class has not been entirely a victory of capitalist restructuring. Capital would like this section of society to work. It would like its progressive undermining of the welfare system to make the "underclass" go and search for jobs, any jobs anywhere. Instead, many residents survive by "Aid to Families With Dependent Children", forcing the cost of reproducing labor power on to the state, which is particularly irksome when the labor power produced is so unruly. The present consensus among bourgeois commentators is that the problem is the "decline of the family and its values." Capital's imperative is to re-impose its model of the family as a model of work discipline and form of reproduction (make the proles take on the cost of reproduction themselves).

A Note on Architecture and the Postmodernist

Los Angeles, as we know, is the "city of the future". In the 30s the progressive vision of business interests prevailed and the L.A. streetcars - one of the best public transport systems in America - were ripped up; freeways followed. It was in Los Angeles that Adorno & Horkheimer first painted their melancholy picture of consciousness subsumed by capitalism and where Marcuse later pronounced man "One Dimensional". More recently, Los Angeles has been the inspiration for fashionable post-theory. Baudrillard, Derrida and other postmodernist, post-structuralist scum have all visited and performed in the city. Baudrillard even found here "utopia achieved".

The "postmodern" celebrators of capitalism love the architecture of Los Angeles, its endless freeways and the redeveloped downtown. They write eulogies to the sublime space within the $200 a night Bonaventura hotel, but miss the destruction of public space outside. The postmodernists, though happy to extend a term from architecture to the whole of society, and even the epoch, are reluctant to extend their analysis of the architecture just an inch beneath the surface. The "postmodern" buildings of Los Angeles have been built with an influx of mainly Japanese capital into the city. Downtown L.A. is now second only to Tokyo as a financial center for the Pacific Rim. But the redevelopment has been at the expense of the residents of the inner city. Tom Bradley, an ex-cop and Mayor since 1975, has been a perfect black figurehead for capital's restructuring of L.A.. He has supported the massive redevelopment of downtown L.A., which has been exclusively for the benefit of business. In 1987, at the request of the Central City East Association of Businesses, he ordered the destruction of the makeshift pavement camps of the homeless; there are an estimated 50,000 homeless in L.A., 10,000 of them children. Elsewhere, city planning has involved the destruction of people's homes and of working class work opportunities to make way for business development funded by Pacific Rim capital - a siege by international capital of working class Los Angeles.

But the postmodernists did not even have to look at this behind-the-scenes movement, for the violent nature of the development is apparent from a look at the constructions themselves. The architecture of Los Angeles is characterised by militarization. City planning in Los Angeles is essentially a matter for the police. An overwhelming feature of the L.A. environment is the presence of security barriers, surveillance technology - the policing of space. Buildings in public use like the inner city malls and a public library are built like fortresses, surrounded by giant security walls and dotted with surveillance cameras.

In Los Angeles, "on the bad edge of postmodernity, one observes an unprecedented tendency to merge urban design, architecture and the police apparatus in a single comprehensive security effort." (Davis, City of Quartz p. 224) Just as Haussman redesigned Paris after the revolutions of 1848, building boulevards to give clear lines of fire, L.A. architects and city planners have remade L.A. since the Watts rebellion. Public space is closed, the attempt is made to kill the street as a means of killing the crowd. Such a strategy is not unique to Los Angeles, but here it has reached absurd levels: the police are so desperate to "kill the crowd" that they have taken the unprecedented step of killing the toilet. Around office developments "public" art buildings and landscaped garden "microparks" are designed into the parking structures to allow office workers to move from car to office or shop without being exposed to the dangers of the street. The public spaces that remain are militarized, from "bum-proof" bus shelter benches to automatic sprinklers in the parks to stop people sleeping there. White middle class areas are surrounded by walls and private security. During the riots, the residents of these enclaves either fled or armed themselves and nervously waited.

We see, then, that in the States, but especially in L.A., architecture is not merely a question of aesthetics, it is used along with the police to separate the included and the excluded sections of capitalist society. But this phenomenon is by no means unique to America. Across the advanced capitalist countries we see attempts to redevelop away urban areas that have been sites of contestation. In Paris, for example, we have seen, under the flag of "culture", the Pompidou centre built on a old working class area, as a celebration of the defeat of the '68 movement. Here in Britain the whole of Docklands was taken over by a private development corporation to redevelop the area - for a while yuppie flats sprang up at ridiculous prices and the long-standing residents felt besieged in their estates by armies of private security guards. Still, we saw how that ended... Now in Germany, the urban areas previously marginalized by the Wall, such as Kreuzberg and the Potzdamer Platz, have become battlegrounds over who's needs the new Berlin will satisfy.

Of course, such observations and criticisms of the "bad edge of postmodernity", if they fail to see the antagonism to the process and allow themselves to be captivated by capital's dialectic, by its creation of our dystopia, could fall into mirroring the postmodernists' celebration of it. There is no need for pessimism - what the rebellion showed was that capital has not killed the crowd. Space is still contested. Just as Haussman's plans did not stop the Paris Commune, L.A. redevelopment did not stop the 1992 rebellion.

Gangs

"In June 1988 the police easily won Police Commission approval for the issuing of flesh-ripping hollow-point ammunition: precisely the same `dum-dum' bullets banned in warfare by the Geneva Conventions." (Mike Davis, 1990, City of Quartz, p. 290.)

We cannot deny the role gangs played in the uprising. The systematic nature of the rioting is directly linked to their participation and most importantly to the truce on internal fighting they called before the uprising. Gang members often took the lead which the rest of the proletariat followed. The militancy of the gangs - their hatred of the police - flows from the unprecedented repression the youth of South Central have experienced: a level of state repression on a par with that dished out to rebellious natives by colonial forces such as that suffered by Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. Under the guise of gang-busting and dealing with the "crack menace", the LAPD have launched massive "swamp" operations; they have formed files on much of the youth of South Central and murdered lots of proletarians.

As Mike Davis put it in 1988, "the contemporary Gang scare has become an imaginary class relationship, a terrain of pseudo-knowledge and fantasy projection, a talisman." The "gang threat" has been used as an excuse to criminalise the youth of South Central L.A. We should not deny the existence of the problems of crack use and inter-gang violence, but we need to see that, what has actually been a massive case of working class on working class violence, a sorry example of internalised aggression resulting from a position of frustrated needs, has been interpreted as a "lawless threat" to justify more of the repression and oppression that created the situation in the first place. To understand recent gang warfare and the role of gangs in the rebellion we must look at the history of the gang phenomenon.

In Los Angeles, black street gangs emerged in the late 1940s primarily as a response to white racist attacks in schools and on the streets. When Nation of Islam and other black nationalist groups formed in the late 50s, Chief Parker of the LAPD conflated the two phenomena as a combined black menace. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy, for the repression launched against the gangs and black militants had the effect of radicalizing the gangs. This politicization reached a peak in the Watts rebellion, when, as in '92, gang members made a truce and were instrumental in the black working class success in holding off the police for four days. The truce formed in the heat of the rebellion lasted for most of the rest of the 60s. Many gang members joined the Black Panther Party or formed other radical political groupings. There was a general feeling that the gangs had "joined the Revolution".

The repression of the movement involved the FBI's COINTELPRO program and the LAPD's own red squad. The Panthers were shot on the streets and on the campuses both directly by the police and by their agents, their headquarters in L.A. were besieged by LAPD SWAT teams, and dissension was sown in their ranks. Although the Panthers' politics were flawed, they were an organic expression of the black proletariat's experience of American capitalism. The systematic nature of their repression shows just how dangerous they were perceived to be.

As even the L.A. Times admitted, the recrudescence of gangs in L.A. in the early 70s was a direct consequence of the decimation of the more political expressions of black frustration. A new aspect of this phenomena was the prodigious spread of Crip sets which caused the other gangs to federate as the Bloods. As Davis puts it, "this was not merely a gang revival, but a radical permutation of black gang culture. The Crips, however perversely, inherited the Panther aura of fearlessness and transmitted the ideology of armed vanguardism (shorn of its program). But too often Crippin' came to represent an escalation of intra-ghetto violence to Clockwork Orange levels (murder as a status symbol, and so on)...[the Crips] achieved a "managerial revolution" in gang organisation. If they began as a teenage substitute for the fallen Panthers, they evolved through the 1970s into a hybrid of teen cult and proto-mafia".

That gangs, even in their murderous mutation as "proto-mafia" Crips and Bloods, have been an expression of the need for political organisation is indicated in a few instances where they have made political interventions. In two major situations, the Monrovia riots in 1972 and the L.A. schools busing crisis of 1977-79, the Crips intervened in support of the black community. These gangs, as an expression of the proletariat, are not in the grips of a false consciousness that makes them think all there is to life is gold chains and violence. Whenever they have been given a chance to speak, for instance in December 1972 at the beginning of the transformation of the gangs into the ultra-violent Crips and Bloods, they have come out with clear political demands. Every time they have been given a chance to express themselves, similar demands have been voiced. The LAPD does everything in its power to stop the gangs being given a voice so as to maintain its war against them.

Still, if the gangs wanted to appeal to people's sympathies, they have done themselves no favors by dealing in crack. However, if we look closely at this we find that the mass move into this trade is pushed on them by capital. Young blacks moved into the alternative economy of drugs when traditional occupations were destroyed. We are dealing with material pressures.

For a member of South Central's youth proletariat, the only rational economic choice is to sell drugs. While the internationalization of the Los Angeles economy has meant a loss for working class blacks, what the Crips and Bloods have managed to do is insert themselves back into the circuit of international trade. While the international trade in legal commodities decided that the Los Angeles blacks were expendable another branch found them eminently useful. Southern California has taken over from Florida as the main route of entry of cocaine into the United States. When in the early 80s the cocaine business found the market for its product saturated, its price falling and profits threatened, it, like any other multinational, diversified and developed new products, the chief one being crack - "the poor man's cocaine". Young proletarians participate in this business because it is the work on offer. It is not them but capital that reduces life to survival/work. We can see, then, that selling crack is in a sense just another undesirable activity like making weapons or cigarettes that proletarians are forced to engage in. But there is a significant difference. Within most occupations proletarians can organize directly within and against capital; but the drug dealing gangs do not confront capital as labor. Gangs do not confront the capital of the enterprise, they confront the repressive arm of capital-in-general: the State. In fact, to the extent that the gangs engage in the cocaine trade and fit firmly into the circuit of international capital, they are the capitalist enterprise. This is a problem. The drive-by shootings and lethal turf wars of the black gangs is the proletariat killing itself for capital.

It is necessary to see, then, that the murderous gangbanging phenomenon which is presently halted has not been, as the bourgeois press would have it, the result of the breakdown of "family values" and the loss of the restraining influence of the middle class as they left for the suburbs; rather it resulted from: 1) the economics of capitalist restructuring (the replacing of traditional industries with drugs) and 2) the active destruction of political forms of self-organisation by state repression. The solution to the problem of the murderous crack wars is the rediscovery of political self-activity of the sort shown in the rebellion. The solution to inter-proletarian violence is proletarian violence.

The irrepressible nature of the gang-phenomenon shows the pressing need for organisation on the part of the youth proletariat of L.A. For a while in the 60s it took a self-consciously political form. When this manifestly political form of organisation was repressed, the gangs came back with a vengeance, showing that they express a real and pressing need. What we have seen in and since the uprising is a new politicization of gang culture: a return of the repressed.

Political Ideas of the Gangs

Since the rebellion, some attention has been given to the political ideas and proposals of the gangs (or, more precisely, the gang leadership). The proposals are mixed. Some are unobjectionable, like that for gang members with video cameras to follow the police to prevent brutality and for money for locally community controlled rebuilding of the neighbourhood; but others, like replacing welfare with workfare, and for close cooperation between the gangs and corporations, are more dubious. The political ideas from which these proposals spring seem largely limited to black nationalism. So how should we understand these proposals and this ideology?

The attempt by the gang leadership to interpose themselves as mediators of the ghetto has similarities to the role of unions and we should perhaps apply to them a similar critique to that which we apply to unions. It is necessary: 1) to recognise a difference between the leaders and the ordinary members 2) to recognise the role of the leadership as recuperating and channelling the demands of the rank and file.

Some of the gang leaders' conceptions are, quite apart from being reactionary, manifestly unrealistic. In the context of capitalist restructuring, the inner city ghetto and its "underclass" is surplus to requirements - it has been written off - it has no place in capitalist strategy, except perhaps as a terror to encourage the others. It is extremely unlikely that there will be a renegotiation of the social contract to bring these subjects back into the main rhythm of capitalist development. This was to an extent possible in the 60s and 70s, but no longer.

Understandably, in the light of the main options available, there is a desire in the inhabitants of L.A. for secure unionized employment. But capital has moved many industries away and they will not come back. Many of the people in these areas recognise the change and want jobs in computers and other areas of the new industries. But, although individual people from the ghetto may manage to get a job in these sectors (probably only by moving), for the vast majority this will remain a dream. Within capital's restructuring, these jobs are available to a certain section of the working class, and, while a few from the ghetto might insert themselves into that section, the attractive security of that section is founded on an overall recomposition of the proletariat that necessarily posits the existence of the marginalized "underclass".

But, leaving aside the change in the conditions which makes large scale investment in the inner cities very unlikely, what do the gang leaders proposals amount to? Faced with the re-allocation of South Central residents as unguaranteed excluded objects within capital's plan of development, the gang leaders present themselves as negotiators of a new deal: they seek to present the rebellion as a $1 billion warning to American capital/state that it must bring these subjects into the fold with the gang leaders as mediators. They are saying that they accept the reduction of life to Work-Wage-Consumption, but that there is not enough work (!) i.e. they want the proletariat's refusal of mediation - its direct meeting of its needs - to force capital to re-insert them into the normal capitalist mediation of needs through work and the wage. The gangs, with their labor-intensive drug industry, have been operating a crypto-Keynesian employment programme; now in their plans for urban renewal the gang leadership want fully-fledged Keynesianism, with them instead of the unions as the brokers of labor-power. But, even apart from the fact that capital will not be able to deliver what the gang leaders seek, the rebellion has shown the whole American proletariat a different way of realising its needs; by collective direct action they can take back what's theirs.

These demands show the similarity of gang and union leadership: how they both act to limit the aspirations of their members to what can be met within the capitalist order. But for all the negative aspects to the union/gang organization, we must recognise that they do originate from real needs of the proletariat: the needs for solidarity, collective defense and a sense of belongingness felt by the atomised proletarian subject. Moreover the gangs are closer to this point of origin than the sclerotic unions of advanced capitalist countries. The gang is not the form of organization for blacks or other groups, but it is a form of organization that exists, that has shown itself prepared to engage in class struggle and that has had in the past and now it seems again to have the potential for radicalizing itself into a real threat to capital.

Black Nationalism

The limitations of the practical proposals of the gang leaders are partly a result of their conflict of interest with the ordinary members but also a function of the limits of their ideology. The gangs' political ideas are trapped within the limits of black nationalism. But how should we view this when their practice is so obviously beyond their theory? After all, as someone once observed, one doesn't judge the proletariat by what this or that proletarian thinks but by what it is necessary impelled to do by its historical situation. The gangs took seriously Public Enemy's Farrakhan-influenced stance on non-black businesses and "shut 'em down". Although Farrakhan does not preach violence as a political means many in the black gangs agree with his goal of black economic self-determination and saw the violence as a means towards that goal. In reality this goal of a "black capitalism" is wrong but the means they chose were right. The tendency of separation and antagonism shown by the rebellion is absolutely correct but it needs to be an antagonism and separation from capital rather than from non-black society. It is necessary that as the marginalized sector rediscovers the organisation and political ideas that were repressed in the 60s and 70s that it goes beyond those positions.

But, just as blacks were not the only or even the majority of rioters, the Crips and Bloods are not the only gangs. Chinese, Filipinos, Vietnamese, Salvadorans and most other Latin American immigrants have all evolved the gang as an organizational form for youth. Now, just as these gangs are far less involved in the international side of the drug business - selling indigenous drugs such as marijuana, PCP and speed at much smaller profit - they also do not have the nationalist leanings of the black gangs. Before the rebellion, a level of communication was reached between black and Latino youth through the shared culture of rap music and the experience it expresses. The tentative alliance between blacks and Latinos that emerged during the uprising shows a way forward. Los Angeles and America generally does need a rainbow coalition, but not one putting faith in Jesse Jackson; rather, one from below focusing on people's needs and rejecting the mediation of the existing political system. For [working-class] blacks, a leap is required, but it will not happen through some "battle of ideas" with the black nationalists carried out in the abstract, but only in connection with practice; only by and through struggle will the [working-class] blacks of L.A. and the rest of the American proletariat develop a need for communism to which the direct appropriation of goods showed the way.

"In one crowded apartment building 75% of the tenants were found to possess looted goods and were swapping goods among themselves." LAPD Lieutenant Rick Morton (International Herald Tribune, May 8th 1992.)

We might say the proletariat only sets itself the problems it can solve. Only by and through a new round of struggles such as began in L.A. will there be the opening for the American working class to find the ideas and organizational forms that it needs.

Conclusion

"Let us please not go back to normal." Distressed caller on radio talk show during the riots. (Understanding the Riots, LA Times book, 1992.)

The rebellion in Los Angeles marked a leap forward in the global class struggle. In direct appropriation and as an offensive against the sites of capitalist exploitation, the whole of the population of South Central felt its power. There is a need to go on. The struggle has politicised the population. The truce is fundamental - the proletariat has to stop killing itself. The LAPD is worried and are surely now considering the sort of measures they used to break the gang unity that followed the Watts rebellion. The police are scared by the truce and by the wave of politicisation which may follow it. That politicization will have to go beyond black nationalism and the incorporative leanings of the gang leadership - another leap is required. In the multi-ethnic nature of the uprising and the solidarity actions across the country, we saw signs that the proletariat can take this leap.

For years, American rulers could let the ghetto kill itself. In May '92 its guns were turned on the oppressor. A new wave of struggle has begun.

Understanding the Role of Police Towards Abolitionism: On Black Death as an American Necessity, Abolition, Non-Violence, and Whiteness

{Photo credit: Ashley Landis/AP}

By Joshua Briond

In Blood In My Eye, the late great George Jackson writes: “the purpose of the chief repressive institutions within the totalitarian capitalist state is clearly to discourage and prohibit certain activity, and the prohibitions are aimed at very distinctly defined sectors of the class—and race— sensitized society. The ultimate expression of law is not order—it’s prison. There are hundreds upon thousands of laws, yet there is no social order, no social peace. Anglo-Saxon bourgeois law is tied firmly into economics[...]Bourgeois law protects property relations and not social relationships.”  And while thousands across the country take to the streets to protest state violence, in the aftermath of the public lynching of George Floyd, we have been seeing the structural reality the likes of George Jackson (amongst other Black political prisoners and revolutionaries) brilliantly and elegantly theorized on and experienced, once again holds true. 

In this moment, it is crucial to understand the role of the police at their core, as merely a hyper-militarized bottom of the barrel armed force of the ruling class. Our ruling class owned media tries to portray both state and federal level police as neutral actors enforcing public safety—when in fact their role has always served to disrupt (radical) political activity by any means necessary. The past few days have sprung speculation regarding the police and media conspiring and exporting counterinsurgency—which is clearly happening. But what if, instead, we saw policing under white supremacist capitalism as inherently and in a constant state of counterinsurgency—because such an act is how empire sustains itself—especially if we know that, historically, police have surveilled, repressed and infiltrated individuals, organizations, and political parties that they have deemed ideological enemies because their interests represent a legitimate threat to the capitalist white supremacist status quo. 

“Power responds to all threats. The response is repression. If the threat is a small one, the fascist tactic is to laugh it off, ignore it, isolate it with greater the corresponding violence from power. The only effective challenge to power is one that is broad enough to make isolation impossible, and intensive enough to cause repression to affect the normal lifestyle of as many members of the society as possible[...] Nothing can bend consciousness more effectively than a false arrest, a no-knock invasion, careless, panic-stricken gunfire.”

—George Jackson (Blood In My Eye)

The issue is not simply “police brutality.” But, the mere existence and functionality of the inherently anti-black, subservient to capital institution of polic[e/ing]. “Police brutality” like many liberalized frameworks, individualizes structural oppression and power. Such framing leaves space for reformism, as if there’s only certain aspects of policing that needs to be readdressed. It’s an undeniable fact that technically “not all cops kill” but instead of moral posturing, we can focus on the political and ideological functioning of policing in service of whiteness, capital(ism), and settler-colonialism, as being in direct contradiction of the lives and well-being of racialized, colonized, and working-class people. Focusing the problem on the mere existence of polic[e/ing], as an institutionalized direct descendant of chattel slavery previously branded ‘slave patrolling,’ we’re able to discuss the inherent (racialized & class-based) violences within the institution at-large. And it allows us to reckon with the entire institution instead of individual actors, their political or moral standing, as well as individualized notions of “justice” in the face of terror, violence, and death at the hands of the police. “Justice” under this racial capitalism, is an impossibility—an ideological liberal mystification. The scarcity in the realm of political imagination that [neo]liberalism champions leads to a reality in which many people’s analysis and understanding of “justice” is merely individualized imprisonment and tepid-at-best liberal reforms. Advancing our collective understanding beyond the individual “bad” or killer cop toward an understanding of structural violence, is crucial to building an abolitionist politic grounded in empathy and community.

We have been bombarded with dozens of videos and photos of cops kneeling, crying, giving impassioned speeches, and public displays of some of the most shallowest forms of performative solidarity—an age-old tactic wielded to “humanize” officers and neutralize the perceived threat in the protesters, while also attempting to control the media narrative —only for these same cops to turn around and within minutes unleash terror on the self-proclaimed “peaceful” protesters as they chant and march in-advocacy for the ending of Black terror and death at the hands of the police. If the mere pleading for the ruling class and its on-the-ground agents to stop massacring Black people with impunity is enough of a crime to be met with chemical warfare, “rubber” bullets, harassment, beatings, and mass imprisonment—what does that say about the functionality of these institutions? 

When we see agents of the ruling class in militarized “riot” gear, oftentimes comment sections filled with disapproval, American liberals claiming “they look like they’re in war,” and viral tweets from imperialist veterans not-so-subtly declaring that type of militancy should be preserved for Black and brown people and countries abroad—and not home. We must counter these liberal narratives by highlighting that there is no significant political, ideological, or moral difference between domestic police and the military. Both serve the same class and ideological apparatus and represent an occupying force wherever they’re stationed. The military predominantly operates as the global police of the world, or as George Jackson would call it the “international wing of repressive institutions.” But, when the domestic police are overwhelmed, they call in their big brother (US military) to help fight their battle—hand-and-hand as enemies of the people—in a mission to terrorize and politically repress racialized, colonized, and working class people. So when Trump says “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” and grants the military immunity to terrorize and shoot protesters that is nothing more than the head of empire simply carrying on the legacy of terrorists-in-chief before him, reaffirming the purpose of the mere existence of the military, as fascist enforcers of capitalist, colonial, and imperialist violence and their right to do what they already do to colonized and oppressed people in third world and global south countries. 

We must realize that we mustn’t give cops, in all forms, the benefit of the doubt or go out of our way to plead to their conscience—in which most, if not all of them lack—because their articulation of the situation at hand, as evidenced by their preparedness and tactics, is that of war. And in all of its possibly well-meaning glory, going into battle with the mindset of pleading to their (lack of) conscience or going out of your way to prove you’re one of the “good” and “peaceful” protesters—through chants and other means—won’t stop the terror of chemical warfare that will transpire when the political performance ends. The police are uncompromising in their belief in the current oppressive social order, they have legally, morally, and politically pledged their lives to it, and we must be uncompromising in our fight towards tearing it down and building anew. There’s a reason cops show up to even the most “peaceful” of protests with militarized riot gear prepared at any moment to immobilize activists, organizers, and journalists while conspiring with the media apparatus to demonize protests and all of its participants.

 “The political act is defined as criminal in order to discredit radical and revolutionary movements. A political event is reduced to a criminal event in order to affirm the absolute invulnerability of the existing order.”

 —Angela Davis (If They Come in the Morning)

The nearly non-materially existing dichotomy between “good protester” and “bad protester” or “non-violent” and “violent” are not only useless identifiers, but an unfortunate fundamental misunderstanding of the structural powers that be, at-large. The ideology of Black liberation is inherently violent to the forces of capital and white supremacy. We must move beyond the media fueled tropes rooted in colonial moral posturing, that serves no one but our ruling elites. History has shown us, it does not matter whether or not you’re a “good protester” or “bad protester,” “non-violent” or “violent,” and/or “innocent” or “guilty.” If you are for liberation for Black people, you are a threat to the interests of capitalism and white supremacy, and must be systemically repressed, by any means. To fight for the liberation of Black people, especially but not limited to the skin that has historically marked criminality, makes you an enemy of said nation who’s global economy is predicated on the terror and death of the colonial, namely Black, subject. Liberation, and the pursuit of it becomes a racialized affair under a system of colonial and imperialist domination in-which whiteness—a system of racial othering—is exclusively depicted as proximity to power and capital, which Black and other subjects of said domination have neither. It is crucial for the sustainment of this moment that we, first of all, not allow media political discourse to divide and conquer the wide variety of effective tactics that have been wielded by activists and organizers since the beginning of time; while also collectively understand the functionality of police and prisons as they are: inherently anti-Black politicized tools of the ruling elite to maintain their hegemony.

“The legal apparatus designates the Black liberation fighter a criminal, prompting Nixon, Agnew, Reagan et al. to proceed to mystify with their demagogy millions of Americans whose senses have been dulled and whose critical powers have been eroded by the continual onslaught of racist ideology. As the Black Liberation Movement and other progressive struggles increase in magnitude and intensity, the judicial system and its extension, the penal system, consequently become key weapons in the state’s fight to preserve the existing conditions of class domination, therefore racism, poverty and war.”

—Angela Davis (If They Come in the Morning)

Our understanding of non-violence should be that of an organized and meticulous tactical approach exercised by the oppressed, as opposed to a moral philosophy, endorsed and preferred by the ruling class and its agents. We never hear the ruling class, advocate for non-violence with their singular approach when they are hegemonizing and tyrannizing oppressed peoples across the globe, while being cheered on and thanked by many of its citizens. Non-violence, as a moral philosophy, in a society where violence against the marginalized is the norm—where millions are incarcerated, houseless, subjected to state sanctioned violence, and live in poverty—is, in and of itself just another form of colonial physical and ideological subjugation and therefore, violence. But, so much of non-violence is predicated on the premise of legality—despite its social and political limitations. Laws are only laws because we, whether knowingly or not, coercively consent to them. At any given time our government can utilize and maneuver the boundaries of legality and illegality as applicable to the material interests of the ruling class. What we’re seeing on live display is the state and all of its willing agents and participants are very much willing to terrorize and self-detonate than grant Black people even the slightest bit of freedom; and history has shown us it is not only appropriate but necessary to meet them with the only language that they understand. 

As Kwame Ture has noted, public pleas and non-violence only works when your opponent has a conscience, and the United States of America has none. Therefore, we must move beyond public outcries for vague calls for “love,” “unity,” and “peace,” waxing poetic, and pleading for our oppressors to somehow manage to adopt a conscience and do what goes against the very ideological and economic foundation of all their colonial institutions: stop terrorizing and killing us. We must move beyond the cycle of inaction and emotional appeals, through stagnantly and continuously debating the semantics of ‘Black Lives Matter’ and other moral and political posturing, when the reality of our situation is clear: Black lives can never truly matter under captivity of white supremacist capitalism and colonial patriarchy that directly and consequently begets Black oppression. How can it, when Black death is a necessity of racial capitalism and the institutions (such as policing and prisons) that exist to uphold it? So instead of public appeals to the ruling class and its agents to recognize the “humanity” in those relegated to slave; we recognized the reality in which racialized terror and violence is quite literally the point—as the mere existence of Black lives are in direct and inherent contradiction with the forces of capital—and a necessity for the continued maintenance of the current white supremacist capitalist, imperialist, (settler-)colonial order. It is crucial for us to remember that these institutions, namely policing and prisons, that continue to so violently persist, are merely an extension of European colonialism and slavery. 

“...with each reform, revolution became more remote[...]But if one were forced for the sake of clarity to define [fascism] in a word simple enough for all to understand, that word would be ‘reform.’” 

—George Jackson (Blood In My Eye)

The only realistic solution to a reality in which anti-Black terror, violence, and death is an inevitability to the functionality of a system, is abolition. Yet, ironically enough, the lack of political imagination, beyond the electoral strategy and reformism, and the inability to envision a world, or even country, devoid of police and prisons is rooted in (anti-Black), racialized colonial logics of the biologically determined criminal, slave, and savage. The notion that an (uncivilized) people must to be, at all times, patrolled and policed, or else chaos and violence would reign, has been used as a justification for countless structural violences on the part of European peoples since the origins of colonialism. If we know criminality is inherently racialized, one must ask themselves: when you envision the criminal and/or “evildoer,” what do you see? What do they look like? More than likely it is someone who is non-white and/or poor. This is something we have to seriously grapple with, even amongst abolitionist circles. The vast majority of people who, for whatever reason, are incapable of envisioning a world without police and prisons, are simply unwilling to interrogate the dominant ideological apparatus that we have all, in one way or another, internalized. 

Emphasizing the largely classed and gendered based nature of crime, is of the utmost importance. Crime is not an “inevitable” aspect of society, but an inevitable reaction to socio-economic and political structural forces at-large; specifically poverty being an inevitability of capitalism while sexual, gendered, and domestic violences are an inevitability of colonial patriarchy. If we combat the systems, we combat the social reactions. 

Another thing we’re witnessing is white people moralizing the looting, destruction of, and “violence” towards inanimate objects (despite the fact that white history is that of constant looting, destruction, and violence) as result of their moral, spiritual, and political ties to land, property, monuments, and capital built on genocide and slavery. Whiteness being so inextricable to the foundations of capital(ism) and ultimately property, inhibits white people’s ability to extend such an empathy to the lives of Black people. Property and capital, being so inextricable to the foundations of whiteness and the construction of race, as a whole, ushers in the reality in which they become God-like figures. White people’s existence on this planet and their understanding of the world makes so much more sense once you realize that, white people, globally, are the police. Whiteness allows and entails them the “monopoly on morality” to be such a thing. Whether it’s with foreign affairs, and their paternalistic analysis of non-white countries, which ultimately leads to the justifying the actions of their imperialist government—even from “socially conscious” white folks. Or, in the case of how they overwhelmingly believe they maintain the prerogative to dictate the ways subjects of white oppression retaliate against said oppression (though, to be fair, they technically do). But, the point is: the entire logic of whiteness, as a deliberately political and social invention, makes it such a construct that’s—under white supremacy—inseparable from the role of the state. therefore, white people assume these roles as agents of the state globally—whether subconsciously or not.

And, of course, this is why we have been subjected to countless imagery on social media of white people (and those aspiring to be white by-way-of proximity to capital, power, and “respectability”) putting their bodies and lives on the line to protect capital (and physical embodiments of it) and private property—in a way that they would never sacrifice their bodies or even time for Black lives and liberation. Such an imagery should serve as a spit in the face to not just Black people, but all persons concerned with our liberation from the chains of capital. If persons of the white race are willing to put their lives on the line for their god: property and capital, but wouldn’t bother doing such a thing for Black people: what does that say about how they see us? We’re beneath inanimate objects on the hierarchy of things worthy of protection. But, it also just goes to show that as much as the white American is willing to die for property relations and capital—by any means necessary—we must be willing to live and die for our collective liberation. Let this be a moment in which we’re reminded that if there’s ever scenario in which our ruling elites are ever in-need of more armed protectors of the white supremacist status quo there will be countless ordinary white people, at the front of the line, fully prepared to live out their white vigilante idealizations and sacrifice their lives and bodies to save settler capitalism.

Understanding the Riots

By Devon Bowers

Given light of the nationwide protests, especially in Minneapolis regarding the death of George Floyd, as well as other victims of police violence, this is a revised and updated version an article I wrote in 2014, defending the Ferguson uprising.

 “Now, let’s get to what the white press has been calling riots. In the first place don’t get confused with the words they use like ‘anti-white,’ ‘hate,’ ‘militant’ and all that nonsense like ‘radical’ and ‘riots.’ What’s happening is rebellions not riots[.]”

- Stokley Carmichael, “Black Power” speech, July 28, 1966

"The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, is convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar."

- Karl Marx, "The Civil War in France" (1871)

In light of the uprising in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Washington DC, and other places across the country, many people have come out of the woodwork to condemn violent protesting and the destruction of buildings. However, we have to ask ourselves, what do they mean by violence?

When talking of violence in this context, it is rather strange. What people are condemning is property destruction, not violence. One can’t act in a violent way towards an inanimate object. Burning a building, whether it be a Target or a police precinct, isn’t violence, but in this context is pushback against a system where that has destroyed people for years. The murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor is actual violence. Two people’s lives were abruptly ended due to the maliciousness of the police. Storeowners have insurance, stores can be rebuilt and revived, we can’t revive Floyd, Taylor, or Ahmaud Arbery.

On a deeper level, this is where capitalism and racism intersect. One of capitalism’s main tenets is the dominance of private property and how it must be protected. We can see that this has been transcribed in law, such as with the Stand Your Ground laws. Yet, also within the larger society there is a lack of caring for black life. In any situation, the media and general public regularly engage in victim blaming and look for anything, anything at all to assassinate the character of those who died at the hand of the police.

This can be seen in the recent past, where the media bought up Akai Gurley’s criminal record when discussing his death at the hands of a police officer or when the New York Post published an article discussing Arbery being arrested for shoplifting in 2017. The publication of such information is done with the intent to demonize victims of police and white supremacist violence, allowing supporters of such violence to have an excuse as how the victims ‘deserved it’ and ‘simply got what was coming to them.’

We have also seen that the police will flat out lie to push their narrative. In the case of Breonna Taylor, police argued that her residence “was listed on the search warrant based on police's belief that Glover [Taylor’s boyfriend] had used her apartment to receive mail, keep drugs or stash money.” However, a postal worker noted that the police “did not use his office to verify that a drug suspect was receiving packages at Breonna Taylor's apartment” and that when a different agency asked in January 2020 if Taylor’s home was receiving suspicious packages, the answer was no. The no-knock raid went on unabated and then was justified based on knowingly false information.

With regards to the riots themselves, the larger society is asking why protesters don’t remain peaceful. The answer is two-part: peace has been tried and we are going to be condemned no matter what.

We have to ask this: Why would you think that people would remain peaceful in the face of constant violence? Why would people remain peaceful cases of police violence and police murder continue with no end in sight and usually no punishment for the offending officers?

Black people have tried peace before. We were peaceful in the 1960s when we were peacefully protesting for our civil rights and were met with racist mobs, fire hoses, and dogs, we had crosses burnt on our lawns, lynchings, and a bomb put in a church. During all of that time we remained peaceful even as society enacted massive violence and repression against us. Yetviolenc, violence against the black community continues today.

The situation is currently such where if a black person is killed by the police, people immediately come out and find any way in which they can besmirch or blame the victim. This occurs even when it adds insult to death, as is the case with Floyd where the autopsy noted that his “being restrained by the police, along with his underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in his system, ‘likely contributed to his death.” Such a statement partially puts the blame on Floyd himself for dying rather than entirely at the hands of Derek Chauvin and the other officers who sat there and watched Floyd die.

The conversation drastically changes when oppressed people fight back. Not only is the violence denounced, but then it is used as an excuse to use massive amounts of violence against the oppressed, as we see currently with not only the National Guard being called up to suppress the uprising in Minneapolis, but also active duty military police units from all over the country are being prepped.

When people lash out against one incident, one may be inclined to call that violence, but when violence against your community has been going on for decades and people lash out, that’s no longer violence on the part of the oppressed, that’s called resistance.

When the question is raised of why aren’t there peaceful protests, it is also extremely hypocritical. Many have spoken out in person and on social media condemning the riots, but at the same time they are silent on the constant police brutality that the black community deals with and they are silent on the economic violence done against black communities, pushing them into ghettos where not only is there economic poverty but also a poverty of expectations.

At the heart of this is how society condones state violence, but condemns violence by individuals. This mindset is a serious problem as it only gives more power to the state and consistently puts state forces in the right, with the victims of state violence being forced to prove their innocence, a situation made all the harder due to people already assuming that the victim is in the wrong.

Many have pushed for peace, but peace and safety are not something the black people in America receive, whether we are just looking for help after a car accident, as was the case with Renisha McBride, or we are carrying a toy gun around, as was the case with John Crawford.

This is not the time to ask for peace. This is the time to say “No justice, no peace.”

Fueling the Mob: Differences Between the London Riots and Ferguson

By Kelly Beestone

For many in the United Kingdom, watching the news of the riots unfolding in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014, brought to mind images of the aftermath of Mark Duggan's death in London in 2011. In both cases, police officers responsible for the death of an unarmed black man were investigated and found guilty of no wrongdoing. In both cases too, the aftermath entailed widespread destruction of property, violence and a deepened distrust of police.

Beneath the surface, however, there are significant differences between the rioting in England and the Ferguson unrest. Most significantly, the English working-class has maintained a greater ability to collectively confront police injustice due, at least in part, to the history of class-based political organization in England. This is in stark contrast to the American context where elites have attempted (with a great deal of success) to divide its working-class through racism.

On August 4th 2011, police gunned down Mark Duggan, a twenty-nine year-old resident of Tottenham, London. Newspapers reported that police had killed Duggan in self-defence after they discovered he was carrying a gun. The Independent Police Complaints Commission [IPCC] revealed that Duggan was under investigation by Operation Trident and that two shots were fired by a policeman, known only as V53, which resulted in his death. Ultimately, a lack of forensic evidence proving that Duggan had ever been holding a gun at all caused several newspapers, including The Guardian, to issue an apology for misinforming the public but not before widespread community outrage boiled over into violence.[1]

On August 6th more than one hundred people protested in Tottenham. Two police cars were attacked. Rioting quickly spread from London to Birmingham, to Leicester, to Nottingham, Liverpool, and Manchester and to Bristol. The inquest into Duggan's death was adjourned on the 9th; the unrest lasted until the 11th (with some minor "aftershock" incidents even later in the week).

According to the BBC, at least 3,000 people were arrested for crimes relating to the riots during this period. [2] Many of these were in London where the riots initially broke out and manifested, as Ann and Aisha Phoenix note in their paper Radicalisation, Relationality and Riots: Intersections and Interpellations, as a "multi-ethnic" uprising. [3] That claim is, in fact, bolstered by Ministry of Justice statistics that listed 33% percent of those facing charges for riot-related incidents as "white," 43% as "black" and 7% as "Asian."[4]

Even more interesting is that while the above statistics reflect the riots overall, the arrest figures fluctuate wildly depending on the ethnic make-up of individual neighborhoods. For instance, white defendants in London made up 32% of those appearing in court, while in Merseyside, which also experienced significant rioting, the percentage of whites arrested in connection to the riots is closer to 79% of total arrests. [5] Of those convicted for riot-related crimes, 35% were claiming working benefits (the national average in the UK is 12%) and of those juveniles convicted, 42% were claiming free school meals (compared to an average of 16% nationally). [6] This uprising drew support across racial lines in the UK, but the overwhelming number of participants were still working-class people.

While the public reacted against the police, media coverage was quick to condemn the rioters. Several news outlets (including the BBC) attempted to place the blame for the unrest on the "black influence" on the (white) British working class. Historian David Starkey used his appearance on Newsnight to theorise that "the chavs have become black. The whites have become black" and to condemn the "nihilistic" attitudes of the rioters. [7] For all the problematic (and racist) implications of Starkey's commentary, however, he is one of the few commentators who attempted to link the white working-class response to Duggan's death to the black community's response.

Many media outlets highlighted incidents of individuals attempting to incite others to riot in areas such as Newcastle via social media, fixating on a narrative of opportunistic rioters interested primarily with mindless "battle" with the police,[8] because they were, somehow, inherently "violent"[9] and prone to behaving like "thugs" because of poor parenting.[10] The Telegraph went so far at one point as to call the children involved "feral." [11] At another point, conversely, the Telegraph's editors suggest that this disorder "was an assault […] on the established order of benign democracy" itself, no small feat for a mob of feral chavs, it would seem. [12]

Perhaps most telling of all however, was the media's exoneration of the police dealing with the Duggan case. An in-depth study by the BBC asserted that police were so stretched in London that volunteer police entered the fray without riot gear or training in order to defend against the rioters. This is intended to create a binary opposition between the 'brave' police who attempted to supress the violence and the 'hooded teenagers' [13] who perpetuated it. Meanwhile, the policeman who killed Duggan was found to be acting in self-defence by the investigation and cleared of the murder. Despite being pressured into resigning, no further action was taken against him and the final decision of a lawful killing due to an 'honestly held' fear for police safety was delivered on January 8th 2014. [14]

The situation in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014 echoes that of Duggan in-so-much that Michael Brown, an unarmed black man, was shot on August 9th 2014 by white police officer Darren Wilson in dubious circumstances. Witnesses claimed Brown had his hands up in surrender when he was shot yet police claimed Brown was reaching for a gun, while simultaneously charging through a hail of gunfire, and that Darren Wilson acted in self-defence.

This state of affairs led to widespread public outrage that culminated in rioting in Ferguson. However, in this case, it is not the "multi-ethnic" reaction witnessed in the UK but an overwhelmingly African American protest that emerges. Scenes of unrest from the protests show US police in riot gear firing canisters of tear gas and pepper spraying protestors. Several photos also demonstrators in defensive positions, kneeling before advancing police who were using these particularly aggressive tactics in order to pacify the protestors.

In the UK, police were called in to monitor demonstrations and to arrest those involved in riot-related crimes. In areas where there were rumours of riots brewing, such as in Newcastle, police stood outside train stations in order to deter potential rioters. In Ferguson however, the streets were patrolled by armoured cars and officers who were armed with assault rifles and stun grenades who fired rubber bullets into crowds of unarmed demonstrators.

Media reactions to the violence in the US varied. The right-wing media organization, Fox, included headlines calling for rioters to pay for the damage caused[15] and several headlines focused on the moral failure of the "rioters." Indeed, Fox's coverage seemed to imply that the police were acting with justifiable force to prevent what it characterized as criminal, not political, violence. CNN took a more nuanced view of the "protestors" (rather than "rioters"), even as the focus of their coverage was the violence and destruction of property resulting from the protests.[16] CNN also made an attempt to focus on the larger issue of public outrage at the police response in Ferguson, focusing on peaceful 'die-in' protests made by students in high schools and universities across various states. The August 26 th edition of the New York Times, often described as a liberal journal, featured a prominent photo of Michael Brown's family sitting behind Brown's coffin with the headline "Amidst mourning, call for change."[17] Largely absent from this coverage, however, were corresponding images of white rioters or of police reacting to white rioters with the sort of force that was marshalled against the people of Ferguson.

As far back as Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, we see racial legislation emerge to counteract the emerging solidarity between indentured white servants with indentured black servants which culminated in Jamestown burning to the ground with its colonial governor fleeing for his life before the crowd. In particular, the passing of the Virginia Slave Codes in 1705 severely limited interactions between white and black people and it was this type of legislation that would determine the parameters of interracial engagement amongst the working classes for decades to come in the English colonies in America. Historian Paul Finkleman notes in his book Slavery and the Law that this sort of legislation would ensure that white people, regardless of class, would occupy a privileged caste position in relation to black people. These legal limitations imposed on black people--including constraints on intermarriage, owning weapons and baptism--created a hard and fast caste order in which black people would always be considered inferior to white people, a state of affairs that inhibited class solidarity across (racialized) caste lines.[18]

Historian Eric Foner argues that the New York City Draft Riots of 1863 remains "the largest civil and racial insurrection in American history" outside of the Civil War.[19] The riots were caused, initially, by resentment that wealthy citizens could pay $300 to escape the draft. Yet, in the wake of white bosses' decision to import African American scab labour to break (Irish) union organization on the docks in the weeks prior, the violence that consumed New York City between the 13th of July and 16th of July in 1863 took on a disturbingly racial quality. Black citizens, exempt from draft laws, were scapegoated and as (predominately Irish) white rage erupted over competition for jobs, more than a dozen were killed in race-related incidents.

Working class whites in New York did not perceive working class blacks as comrades.

Unions such as the Longshoreman's Association believed the danger that James Gordon Bennett, editor of the (WHAT CITY?) Herald, evoked of a black population that would permanently undermine the interests of the white working class if Abraham Lincoln pursued universal emancipation. "Are you ready to divide your patrimony with the negro? Are you ready to work with him in competition to work more than you do now for less pay?" Bennett asked. [20] Rather than engaging them in solidarity, white working class rioters in 1863 New York chose instead to hang innocent, working class, African Americans from city lamp posts and burn an orphanage for coloured children to the ground.

Bennett's anxieties were not unreasonable. Lorenzo J. Greene and Carter G. Woodson observed in 1930 that after the Civil War, the American working class was economically weakened across the board, regardless of the individual skill of the worker. This was in part due to the increased competition generated by immigrant workers, but also because of the wide availability of a large, perpetually under-employed African American population which was a result of the "unwillingness of employers to hire Negro mechanics, and the keen competition for jobs, in which the white workmen were usually given the preference." [21] This arrangement often forced black workers to seek the most dangerous and distasteful of jobs, when they could find work at all. And when they could not find work, they remained as an ever-present (and perpetually resented) reminder to white workers to remain servile, replaceable as they were.

Economist Warren Whatley noted that throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, African-Americans were called upon for "almost every major confrontation between capital and labor." For many American entrepreneurs and businessmen, the boogieman of black scab labour was wielded as the perfect deterrent against strikes. As a result of racially discriminatory union policies that rejected class solidarity between white and black workers, African Americans had no incentive to respect white picket lines. Even when unions did not exclude African-Americans by constitutional provision, often the racism of the rank-and-file members made it impossible for black workers to earn union membership.[22] In modern-day America, there are still lingering traces of this divide.

While the working class as a whole has lost stability and security since de-industrialization, African-Americans continue to disproportionately suffer the effects of economic disenfranchisement when compared to whites. Bureau of Labor Statistics show that unemployment rates amongst African Americans in the last decade is consistently higher than it is amongst whites.[23]

The increase in financial instability and insecurity among working class people in the wake of de-industrialization is not unique to the US; in fact, this pattern has is not so dissimilar to the socio-economic and political realities of post-industrial Britain. In both places, this increased financial instability and insecurity among working class people has grown in tandem with an increase in police repression of working class people. In one way, the slaying of Michael Brown of Ferguson, Missouri represents a manifestation of this dynamic that is mirrored by the slaying of Mark Duggan of Tottenham. However, and significantly, the UK has manifested a capacity for meaningful transracial solidarity based on class identity, which does not exist in the USA. Through organizations such as Class War, ANTIFA and NUS, the UK allows for a more multi-racial foundation for protesting grievances amongst the working class, while in the US, the systematic destruction of multi-ethnic relations across the class system makes this impossible. As a result, when the UK protestors felt they had nowhere to turn to, the nation became aware that this was a riot founded in these economic problems. While in Ferguson, where such political organization did not occur, the riots were portrayed exclusively as a product of black rage and despair, shored up by the fact that no other outlets existed to channel the anger in a less destructive way.

Both Ferguson and the London unrest should give us pause for thought. In both cases, people have felt driven to destruction by the ineptitude of the judicial system. Yet for all their surface similarities, the significant differences between the two riots proves that the insidious racism preserved amongst the working-class in America continues to drive a wedge between the very people who ought to be united in their grievances. Until the disproportionate suffering of black citizens is addressed, it is clear that incidents like Ferguson will continue to be the only way many Americans believe they can let their voices be heard.

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Footnotes

[1] Vikram Dodd "New Questions Raised Over Duggan Shooting" The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/nov/18/mark-duggan-ipcc-investigation-riots [date accessed 14/05/2016]

[2] BBC News "England Rioters 'Poorer, Younger, Less Educated'" http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-15426720 [date accessed 15/05/2016]

[3] Ann and Aisha Phoenix "Radicalisation, Relationality and Riots: Intersections and Interpellations" in Feminist Review, no.100 [2012] p.61

[4] BBC News "England Rioters 'Poorer, Younger, Less Educated'" http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-15426720 [date accessed 15/05/2016]

[5] Ibid

[6] Ibid

[7] TruthCauldron, "David Starkey-BBC Newsnight 'The Whites Have Become Black'" Filmed 14/08/2011, Youtube Video, 10:36 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVq2bs8M9HM

[8] Vikram Dodd and Caroline Davis "London Riots Escalate as Police Battle for Control" The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/aug/08/london-riots-escalate-police-battle [date accessed 14/05/2016]

[9] Lee Moran and Allan Hall "British Youths are 'the Most Unpleasant and Violent in the World'. Damning Verdict of Writer as Globe Reacts to Riots" Daily Mail Online http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2024486/UK-RIOTS-2011-British-youths-unpleasant-violent-world.html [date accessed 14/05/2016]

[10] Ryan Parry "Young Thugs Got a Lift Home With Mum When They Finished Looting" The Mirror http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/london-riots-young-thugs-got-a-lift-146673 [date accessed 14/05/2016]

[11] Mary Riddell "London Riots: The Underclass Lash Out" The Telegraph http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/8630533/Riots-the-underclass-lashes-out.html [date accessed 14/05/2016]

[12] Mary Riddell "London Riots: The Underclass Lash Out"

[13] Ibid

[14] Gov.uk "Transcript of the Hearing 15 October 2013" http://dugganinquest.independent.gov.uk/transcripts/1207.htm [date accessed 14/05/2016]

[15] Cal Thomas "Ferguson Unrest: Make Protestors Pay for Riot Damage" Fox News.com http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2014/12/02/ferguson-unrest-make-protesters-pay-for-riot-damage.html [date accessed 16/05/2016]

[16] Moni Basu and Faith Karami "Protestors Torch Police Car in Another Tense Night in Ferguson" CNN.com http://edition.cnn.com/2014/11/25/justice/ferguson-grand-jury-decision/ [date accessed 16/05/2016]

[17] Monica Davey "Amid Mourning, Time For Change," New York Times, August 26, 2014 p.1

[18] Jonathan A. Bush "The British Constitution and the Creation of American Slavery" in Slavery and the Law ed. Paul Finkleman [Maryland; Rowman and Littlefield, 2002] p.392

[19] Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877 [New York; Harper and Row, 1988] pp.32-33

[20] Albon P. Man Jr. "Labor Competition and the New York Draft Riots of 1863" in Journal of Negro History 36.4 [1951] p.379

[21] Lorenzo J. Green and Carter G. Woodson, The Negro Wage Earner, [Chicago; The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1930] p.4

[22] Warren C. Whatley "African-American Strikebreaking from the Civil War to the New Deal" in Social Science History 17.4 [Winter, 1993] p.529

[23] Bureau of Labor Statistics "Table A-2. Employment Status of the Civilian Population by Race, Sex, and Age" United States Department of Labor http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t02.htm [date accessed 16/05/2016]

Why Comparisons Between the Boston Tea Party and Baltimore Riots are Wrong

By Colin Jenkins

The comparisons being made between the Baltimore riots this past week and the historical Boston Tea Party are wrongheaded. Baltimore residents have much more to fight for than the American colonists of old.

The Boston Tea Party

In 1767, British Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, which included a tax on the American colonies for tea imports from Britain. For the next six years, in order to avoid paying this tax, colonists established a significant smuggling ring with the Dutch, which amounted to approximately 900,000 pounds of tea being shipped into the American colonies per year. This was viewed as a crime by British authorities. So, in 1773, British Parliament passed the Tea Act. Contrary to a popular misconception, the Tea Act did not create a new royal tax on the American colonists. Rather, it was implemented for three reasons: (1) to help boost the East India Company, which had fallen on hard times, by granting them the right to ship tea directly to the colonies as a duty-free export, (2) to undercut the price of smuggled tea the colonies were receiving from the Dutch, and (3) to bolster and reinforce the tea import tax placed on the colonies due to the Townshend Acts.

Since the Tea Act indirectly served as a way to enforce the tax established by the Townshend Acts, colonists were up in arms. Not because they were being denied basic necessities like food, water, clothing and shelter. Not because they were terrorized by British authorities patrolling their neighborhoods. Not because they were forced to live in constricted areas with no jobs, no resources, and no ownership over their communities. They were up in arms, ready to rebel, prepared to destroy the property of another, because their sipping tea was suddenly going to cost a little more.

New England merchants who had constructed profitable businesses with the help of a complex and illegal smuggling scheme were suddenly worried about their bottom lines. Artisans worried about their rising costs of tea. Silversmiths began fretting about the prospect of falling demands for teapots. These material concerns grew fast. Town hall meetings were called to address this issue. Merchant meetings ensued. Talk continued throughout the New England colony until this disdain developed a political context falling under the banner of "no taxation without representation."

On the fateful night of December 16, 1773, over one hundred colonists, some of whom were disguised as Native Americans, jumped aboard the three ships docked at Boston Harbor and proceeded to smash open 340 chests of East India Company tea with axes. The colonists dumped every single tea leaf, 90,000 pounds (45 tons) in all, into the ocean. None of the tea belonged to them. Yet, over the course of three hours, they destroyed all of it. Its value, in today's dollars, was roughly one million dollars.

The men who took this rebellious, "criminal" and incredibly destructive stand that night must have been distressed, even hopeless. After all, what kinds of conditions would have to exist to drive people to destroy $1 million worth of someone else's property? And tea nonetheless. So, who were these desperate men? They were Paul Revere, a "prominent and prosperous" Boston Silversmith. They were Thomas Young, a Physician. Elisha Story, a Physician and the son of the Register of the Court of Admiralty, William Story. Edward Proctor, a "prominent citizen," military officer, and importer. They were Thomas Mellville, a Theologian and Princeton graduate. Abraham Hunt, a business owner involved in importing and exporting. They were David Kinnison, a farm owner. Nathaniel Barber, a wealthy merchant and insurer. Charles Conner, a coastal trader, Innkeeper and horse trader.

The list goes on and on. All men of privilege. All men of wealth. All products of a multi-generational, state-protected, feudal system of 'nobility.' All benefactors of the very empire they now opposed. Willing to riot, commit severe "criminal" acts, and destroy a million dollars worth of property in order to prevent a rise in the cost of tea.

The Baltimore Resistance

In the modern US, the state of Maryland is the standard-bearer of rising inequality. As the wealthiest state in the country, with a median income of $71,707, over 13 percent of Maryland's children live in poverty. And in this sea of extreme inequality and poverty, Baltimore has been drowning for decades, so much so that the city's socioeconomic landscape resembles that of a Third-World country, and in many cases, is much worse.

36.5% of Baltimore's children have grown up in poverty. In a city where one needs to make $24 an hour in order to sustain themselves adequately, a large majority simply cannot. The lack of living-wage jobs has forced 35% of the population to rely on food stamps to supplement their diet, and 84% of children must rely on the government supplemented reduced lunch program in order to eat in school. Since the arrival of the Great Recession in 2008, things have gotten progressively worse. Between 2008 and 2013, the participation rate in Baltimore's Food Supplement Program increased by 59 percent.

A recent study published by the Journal of Adolescent Health examined the living conditions of 15-19 year olds in poor areas of five cities across the world. Baltimore happened to be one of those cities. The others were Shanghai, China; Johannesburg, South Africa; New Delhi, India; and Ibadan,Nigeria.

In comparison to the other cities, Baltimore teens showed "poor perceptions about their physical environments, their sense of social cohesion, and their sense of safety within their neighborhoods." Teens from Baltimore and Johannesburg, the cities that received the lowest ratings, are generally "fearful" and "don't feel safe from violence."

This fearful existence is the result of impoverished economic conditions that have been shaped by historical occurrences of institutional racism, racial segregation, and "White Flight." During the housing boom of the 2000s, real estate agents pulled out the "White Flight" operating manual and capitalized on "racial fears," convincing large amounts of white residents near expanding black neighborhoods to sell their houses only to turn around and "sell them to black families at a much higher price," regularly approaching 69 percent markups and fueled by the widespread illegal activities by banks leading up to the Subprime mortgage crisis. In all, the Department of Justice exposed 4,500 cases of mortgage fraud directed at residents in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. This predatory and highly-racialized housing scam was built on decades of similar practices, creating intensely segregated neighborhoods. Like most large cities in the US, a majority of Baltimore's African American residents have effectively been corralled into ghettos with deteriorating infrastructure, substandard schools, and nonexistent jobs, opportunities and resources. "The city's black population had nearly doubled between 1950 and 1970 as whites reactively began moving away: Almost a third of the city's population left the city between 1950 and 2000." When teenagers from East Baltimore were asked to describe their neighborhood, they spoke of "big rats going around in people's trash, vacant houses full of squatters and needles on the ground."

Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old black man who was brutally murdered by police, grew up in similar surroundings. "In Sandtown-Winchester, more than half of the people between the ages of 16 and 64 are out of work and the unemployment rate is double that for the city at one in five. Median income is just $24,000, below the poverty line for a family of four, and nearly a third of families live in poverty. Meanwhile, somewhere between a quarter to a third of the buildings are vacant, compared to 5 percent in the city as a whole." These material conditions create a desperate reality when compounded with draconian drug laws and increased policing aimed at predominantly poor, black, and working-class communities.

Higher Stakes

To be fair, for the American colonists who staged the riot at the Boston Harbor, relations with King George III had been deteriorating over time. The Boston Massacre had occurred three years earlier when five colonists were killed by British soldiers who were confronted by a mob. Tension surely existed, even animosity; however, most of the American colonists' still maintained privileged lives, owned prosperous businesses, enjoyed positions of prominence and power, and owned property. They were elitists in every sense of the word.

In contrast, Black residents of Baltimore have been forced to endure a bleak landscape - one shaped by centuries of white supremacy, institutional racism, and uneven development. The creation of the black ghetto in the US is the culmination of this development - a desolate and barren landscape that often resembles more of an open air prison than a community. Despite valiant efforts on the parts of many in this community, these historical developments have been difficult to shake. Joblessness continues. A lack of resources persists. A general indifference on the part of state and federal government is now chronic.

The change that was willed by great Civil Rights leaders of the past never arrived. It's been suspended in mid-air, surrounded by empty celebrations of de-radicalized revolutionaries, de-contextualized ideas, and empty promises made by a Black "leadership" class that has continuously sold its constituents out. This once-promising change is now held forever out of reach, serving as nothing more than a mockery of our present reality. The hopes accompanying the election of the first black President proved to be a mirage. We not only failed to land in a "post-racial America," we drifted further away. Domestic military and police forces have taken on the role of a foreign occupier, patrolling the streets in armored cars, recklessly smashing in doors of homes, harassing and intimidating community members, and even referring to them as "enemy forces." Constitutional rights are regularly overridden by "stop and frisk" policies that scoff at any minimum standard for being stopped and questioned, let alone reasonable suspicion. The fact that Freddie Gray ran for his life after officers "made eye contact with him" is understandable. Unlawful stops that turn into deadly encounters have become the norm in Black neighborhoods across the US. Thus far in 2015, on average, three people are killed per day by the police.

Police officers have been become more militarized than ever, more aggressive than ever, and bolder than ever. Not only do they murder young (and unarmed) black Americans daily, they do it on national television, while laughing and gloating, for all to see. Surreal debates ensue about whether this murder was justified or that murder was acceptable. White racists flood social media with a robotic vileness that seems worthy of Stanley Kubrick's direction. And the desperate people of Baltimore - who are treated as strangers and outsiders in their own neighborhoods, allowed no vested interest in their communities, and given no say over how their lives unfold - are labeled "animals," "criminals," "savages," and "thugs," even by the kowtowing Mayor they elected, as they fight, by any means necessary, to gain an ounce of dignity or respect. The American colonists had it easy. The people of Baltimore are fighting for their lives.