Put simply and in my own words, I'm willing to defend spontaneous acts of property destruction/theft because they are visible proof of the power ordinary people could wield at any time, and the hostility behind them is directed at systems that do, in fact, need to be destroyed.
This is not to say that rioting or looting are the best or most effective form of political action. In fact, it's almost the complete opposite: they're just one step up from doing nothing. But that one step is still important.
Even a reformist social movement, if it wants to succeed, needs to threaten the interests of the ruling class in a material way -- money, safety, delaying their long-term ambitions, etc. If this can be disarmed with empty gestures, it will be. Riots are a sign that it can't.
A reformist movement, by definition, never wants to go any further than threatening. They want to be taken seriously by the system, not dismantle it. But with real pressure even this is still enough to create the New Deal or the victories of the Civil Rights era.
Talk of "incremental progress" or "harm reduction" are thoroughly poisoned wells at this point, but widespread social programs to end poverty and expansion of the political franchise *are* real victories; their shortcoming is in sustaining them, not the goals themselves.
A revolutionary movement, by contrast, has two interrelated and much more difficult goals: the destruction of existing social relations, and the building of new ones to replace them. They have to take place at the same time, and in a fundamentally hostile environment.
One of the most threatening things the Black Panther Party ever did, in the eyes of the United States government, didn't involve property destruction or even the threat of violence -- it was giving school children free breakfasts.
By supplanting the role of the government in providing for people's material needs -- even though it was their own money and personnel, even though the government was happy to neglect this duty -- they threatened the *legitimacy* of the government as such.
A riot is just a bunch of angry people. But a bunch of angry people united by bonds of common loyalty, able to provide for each other materially, able to enforce their own internal customs, is a government in larval form. A competitor.
The United States government has put tremendous effort into squashing or capturing any social movement, reformist or revolutionary, that threatens its interests. Left-wing leaders are smeared, blackmailed, and murdered. Right-wing ones are courted and bribed.
This dynamic is, incidentally, exactly what created Donald Trump: decades of integrating right-wing extremists into our "legitimate" political apparatus has eventually led to them being the dominant political faction. Meanwhile, the DNC is owned by out-of-touch aristocrats.
The same dynamic is also the exact reason we are having riots. Both hierarchical leadership and horizontal organizing have been crippled and disrupted for longer than I've been alive. Anyone and anything that could direct our grievances strategically has been destroyed.
But the most important part of this suppression, the part that makes all other aspects of it possible, is the suppression of class consciousness -- simply put, people's awareness of their own interests, who they share them with, and who is against them.
People who have achieved this consciousness, however dimly, however intuitively, but who don't already have the structures, the relationships, the plan of action to act on them effectively, can still be moved to action if desperate enough and if social norms break down.
Every time this happens, they realize, through immediate experience, that they are not alone. They see the people around them; they recognize them as kindred spirits. Impromptu alliances form; people learn to prepare, to connect, to plan.
This is what's really interesting about the ongoing protests. Black Lives Matter protestors are developing strategies, designating people to be medics or logistics, coordinating enough to both rein in senseless violence *and* to effectively fight back against armed opposition.
There's no guarantee that it'll ever become anything more than this -- a kind of distributed expertise in looking out for each other -- but the potential is there. The trust being built here, the tactics being learned, could be perfected and expanded into other spheres of life.
Imagine if people used the same tactics they use to stay safe at a protest when the cops try to disperse them to, say, prevent an eviction from proceeding. Ideally by just making the optics too bad for the sheriff to proceed, but if need be with shields and a human wall.
Imagine if that impromptu network of medics, message-carriers, and so on stuck around in the long term, solidified their ties, and helped distribute resources and services in poor communities.
To some extent, these things already happen. Tenants' unions exist. Food banks exist. Credit unions exist. Labor unions exist.
But unfortunately they're often very atomized and often modeled more as charities or accomplices to capital, mitigating its effects but reliant on its continued existence to remain relevant.
We need to bind these disparate functions together and understand them, properly, not as charity but as democratic institutions for distributing the fruits of our own hard work. And we need to be prepared to defend them, because they *will* come under attack.
As an aside, one of the reasons racism is such an effective tool for disrupting this kind of activity is that white people, by and large, have priority access to existing social safety nets.
Our welfare programs, universally inadequate though they are, are designed (often indirectly, using seemingly arbitrary criteria) to favor family, work, and living arrangements that just happen to be more common for whites. Same goes for our tax code.
A simple example: a one-worker, one stay-at-home parent nuclear family gets way more tax breaks than virtually any other arrangement. (Obviously there are class and, until quite recently, LGBT implications here as well.)
Segregation helps promote mutual misunderstanding, sure, but it also means that poor white people are the beneficiaries by proximity of municipal governments, rules, and programs that affect wealthier white people.
None of this is universally true for everyone and obviously it's still possible to be white and live in crushing poverty with no way out. But the aggregate effect is to dangle the possibility of safety and comfort in front of us if we buy in to and defend existing systems.
And it's a trap. The only fucking reason these allowances exist are so that the group of people with nothing to lose is made a little smaller, and is permanently distinguished from and set against the people who stand to lose a few scraps.
White people, and especially people like me who have an education and a middle-class family and so on, need to reject this alliance with property. Not just because it's the right thing to do, but because frankly, it's there to fuck us. To fuck us and to use us as a bludgeon.
Every single thing the United States government does to black people, that it does to the Third World, every war it wages, is practice. Developing and maintaining mastery. And the *minute* it's more convenient to crush us than to bribe us, they'll use the very same tactics.
Our project isn't uplift, it's not assimilating people into our enlightened society -- there's no such thing. It's just a pretty excuse for imperialism. Our project is severing our own incestuous relationship with capital before it kills us all.
To get back to my original thesis, there's no better symbol of that relationship than how upset we get when property is damaged. We imagine something we have a stake in is being harmed. Kind of, a little bit, we do. But we don't need it, and should discard it as soon as we can.
So yeah. I think riots, broadly speaking, are the first stumbling steps towards an organized response to oppression.
I think it would be much better if all that energy and militancy were focused and aimed instead of just spilling over.
But it still beats the hell out of voting.
I think it would be much better if all that energy and militancy were focused and aimed instead of just spilling over.
But it still beats the hell out of voting.
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