George Floyd, US and international protests

Neel Patel on South Asian anti-blackness:

We picked the wrong side

zugzwang:

Anti-capitalist politics are not supposed to emerge from agitating for and pursuing capitalist reforms - reformism, dressed up as an "anti-capitalism" compatible with social democracy, Keynesianism or state capitalism, ie something that appears to be different from neolliberalism, is supposed to emerge from these so-called anti-capitalist politics. Of course, if these struggles are independent and self-directed then an anti-capitalist "politics" could emerge but only if such anti-politics explicitly critiques the miserable and hierarchical content of what, for example, "free health care" does, would or did mean in such non-neoliberal capitalist economies (eg a critique of allopathic medicine and the pharmaceutical industry). Or asserts a radical notion of what "quality education" may mean (ie not something that takes place in school or university unless it's to occupy it or to wreck it). Or, re. "antiracist job strategies" critiques the whole notion firstly of jobs (ie the division of labour, wage labour as such and the division of leisure time from time spent on necessary and/or desirable tasks directed to transforming nature, things and social relations in general) and secondly what anti-racism means within capitalism (which is at best tokenism or cosmetic).

But then Stalinists only hope to become popular by not expressing their more radical critiques (if they have any) for fear of not being able to recruit people or for fear of putting people off with the subversive truth. And I, for one, don't want to repeat that history - ie the history of Stalinism and its ideological precedents in Lenin etc.

Nice, that'll teach me for thinking that the militant phase of this uprising seemed to be pretty much over. Although on the other hand, perhaps this is just me being a soppy liberal, but:

Sounds like something that could have backfired really badly - the practice of forcing the cops to abandon certain areas and destroying their buildings, equipment, etc, is a good way of pushing back against their role and institution, but trying to trap people in a burning building just makes me think of Greece 2010 and everything that followed from that.

Anyway, a bit belated, but for anyone who's interested in hearing more first-hand reports from Capitol Hill, there's another interview here.

Terrorism charges in Oklahoma now - including, if I'm reading this right, one for someone who's not alleged to have actually done anything beyond talking overenthusiastically in a facebook video:

From here:
https://dialectical-delinquents.com/contestavirus/june-2020/

28/6/20:

US, St.Louis: a calm stroll through a gated community

Eyewitness account says:

"The march proceeded to the Mayor’s house which was surrounded by metal barriers and these were promptly removed and used to block off the intersection. Some protesters lounged on the lawn and some relieved their bladders on the house. Others busied themselves by painting the street with calls for the mayor to resign. Some neighbors were sympathetic and confused while wanting to protect their property. Others were hostile and aggressive while wanting to protect their property. A few tried to drive their Lexuses and Mercedes Benzes through the repurposed metal barriers but were unsuccessful. One guy ventured into the crowd with his phone filming, was surrounded and then extracted by his family or neighbors. Another guy almost pulled a gun to prevent people from touching his luxury car and spent the rest of the night sitting on his steps protecting his property which is only a few doors away from the Mayor’s house. Later as everyone was leaving he apparently threw M-80’s at the dispersing crowd (1/4 sticks of dynamite that make a loud bang but not much else) though I didn’t see this myself. That prompted a standoff with the remainder of the crowd with some returning fire with fireworks of their own and others breaking up a huge landscaping stone to throw at his house. At which point he began waving his gun around. Luckily no one was shot. It is illustrative of the disconnect with poor and working class realities that people like this and the McCloskey’s think they can act that way in front of their own homes. Doing so in a poor neighborhood would undoubtedly have consequences. Time will tell if the upper crust gets a real education in what life is like for the rest of us.

Despite these components of visceral class antagonism, the movement still hasn’t escaped the limitations imposed by the “organizer” role and its attempt to provide exclusive “leadership.” Many of the faces controlling the crowd are the same faces that controlled crowds in 2014, 2015 and 2017. While the protest side of the movement is more multi-racial than it was in 2014, the division between protester and rioter is still just as real. This time around there is no united front among the mostly young, black protest organizers and they are openly airing their conflicts in the street. Some “veterans” of Ferguson who haven’t maintained their roles seem somewhat jaded and disillusioned with the power struggle and general approach to movement of the new groups while others have doubled down and are attempting to recreate what they, somewhat narrowly, see as the successes of the protest component of the previous rebellions."

This - https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/29/couple-point-guns-protesters-calling-st-louis-mayor-resign/3277310001– claims ""When the victims observed multiple subjects who were armed, they then armed themselves", but according to an eyewitness, "the claim that they armed themselves in response to anything but a mob of angry black and white working class people in their neighborhood is.... bullshit designed to deflect the hostility that is coming their way. There were armed protesters but they were asked to show up in response to the unhinged behavior of richie rich and his coked out wife and did not appear until much later."

Legal charges latest:
Fundraiser for a defendant facing serious charges in Seattle
Nice little graphic publicising the case of Sam, the NYC defendant who seems to have less of an organised support campaign:

Oh, two bits of media for if anyone has some time on their hands:
I've not listened to it all yet, but the new Final Straw is great so far - after a Sean Swain bit about confederate monuments (always skippable, although he has some good lines in this one), there's a 20-minute interview with Najiyyah Avery Williams, the mother of Lil Jerry Williams who was brutally murdered by the Asheville Police Department in 2016, which is absolutely harrowing but very powerful, a 10-minute audio report from a protest in a small town with a population of about 800 in rural North Carolina, and then a long interview with someone from the Prosecution Project analysing repression and charges against uprising participants. Also I'd not encountered the expression ACAB Spring before, but it's great.

Sub.media's style always walks a fine line between impressive and irritating for me, and their new show falls down on the "gratingly gimmicky" side imo, but is worth a watch, and has an interview with Oluchi Omeoga from the Black Visions Collective in Minneapolis. The interview starts at a bit after 16 minutes in, if anyone just wants to watch that and can't be bothered with watching sub.media doing sub.media stuff for a bit first.

Urooj Rahman and Colin Mattis are now out on bail.
The Prosecution Project puts the numbers at 123 federal, felony cases, and 208 non-federal, felony cases related to the current uprising.

Immigrant Race Traitors, the International Hotel, and Media Solidarity

Current fundraisers for people facing charges connected to alleged participation in the uprising:
Support for Marge C in Seattle
Lore Elisabeth in Philadelphia
Dylan Robinson facing arson charges for the Minneapolis Third Precinct building

Addresses that I'm aware of:
Samantha Shader, #83823-053, MDC Brooklyn, Metropolitan Detention Center, P.O. Box 329002, Brooklyn, NY, 11232

Margaret Channon, #49955-086, FDC SeaTac, Federal Detention Center, P.O. Box 13900, Seattle, WA 98198

Lore-Elisabeth Blumenthal, #70002-066, FDC Philadelphia, Federal Detention Center, PO Box 562, Philadelphia, PA 19105

Not really sure if there's any point having the CHAZ/CHOP argument again, that Michael Reagan piece is decently nuanced imo.

I have a couple questions about property damage and looting:

1. What happens to small businesses that are damaged and/or looted?

2. What happens to employees of both small and large businesses that are damaged and/or looted?

There's this, which was written by a solidarity network of service industry workers in 2015: Smashed Up: Young service workers on the sanctity of small business.

As to the answer to 1, I was able to find these with a quick search:
Retailers take stock of insurance coverage after looting
Civil disorders and insurance

Since I think I know some of the white authors of this piece, I think its major flaw is because they hadn't lived in Oakland very long when they wrote it. Most graduated from university elsewhere and migrated to the Bay Area over the last decade. Meaning they missed the major shifts in class composition due to drastic changes in the political economy of the world over the last several decades.

I lived in north Oakland for 3 years in the early 1990s, and for the second half of the decade of the 1980s I lived in adjoining south Berkeley. What the SolNet comrades got wrong are the major demographic changes over a longer historical arc. Which has to account for deindustrialization that hit stride in the 1980s, which was exacerbated by the military base closures starting in 1988. Lots of the civilian workers at the Oakland Naval Hospital (closed in 1993), Oakland Naval Supply Center (also closed in 1993), and Oakland Army Base (closed in 1995) -- the latter 2 located in the midst of the Port of Oakland -- were people of color, mostly black, who often had unionized civil service jobs with good pay and benefits. When tens of thousands of those workers were laid off, Oakland and the surrounding East Bay, the local economy began to shift away from heavy industry and towards being even more of an entrepôt, increasingly receiving consumer durable goods from East Asia and shipping California's agricultural products to the Pacific Rim as they ramped up their market share in developing economies. This made Oakland more of an appendage of San Francisco, with rising service industries engaged in capturing more of the surplus value created elsewhere rather than generated locally through manufacturing.

As a case in point, when a black home-owning family (many of whom came during World War II to work in the defense industry and bought their houses then) who lived in West Oakland -- next to the port -- found fewer and fewer decent paying jobs, many realized their equity in their house was a cash cow -- especially in the early-mid 2000s -- and sold out and bought larger brandnew tract houses in outer suburbs like Vallejo to the north, or distant East Bay suburbs like Pittsburg, Antioch, Brentwood and Oakley to the east. Some went even further to the adjacent parts of the Central Valley in Sacramento, Stockton, Modesto and Merced. Those in the last category suffered the housing crunch the worst, as the market in these towns faced the double tragedy of the highest foreclosure rates and unemployment in the country from 2008 and carrying on for the next half decade.

My point is that the SolNet comrades don't seem to realize that this process of hollowing out happened over decades and wasn't due to the "push" of white gentrifiers moving in, but rather was due to the "pull" of people of color -- mostly black families -- moving out. But it does reach a tipping point, where demographic changes drive market housing prices so high that the last survivors of a previous generation of industrial working class people of color are driven out. But that's the last phase of the process, rather than the dynamic force driving the whole process. Also, East Oakland -- which had once been the site of even more heavy industry -- went through a process where it shifted from being predominately black to being a immigrant ghetto for working class migrants from Latin American and Southeast Asia.

As in any arrival zone for immigrants anywhere in the world, petit-bourgeois businesses rise up to serve the specific needs of these communities. Many of the "mom-n-pop" stores in Oakland are run by immigrants. In North Oakland, it's mostly Ethiopians and Eritreans closer to the Berkeley border, and real estate developers have tagged the nearby area as "KoNo," as in Koreatown North Oakland. Whole parts of East Oakland are full of small, medium-sized and big businesses operated by immigrants from China, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, as well as the Fruitvale District and "Deep East" Oakland that's heavily immigrants from Latin America. What nearly all these recently arrived immigrants do is have their whole families work in the shop, only hiring employees if they expand. And given astronomically high real estate costs in the region, all businesses operate on razer-thin margins, even the large global chains. Many won't survive the present economic crisis -- and we'll have another round of business turnover and transformations in class relations.

What I'm reacting to is an account of naïve newcomers, who translate their own white guilt into a false narrative of changes in class composition, driven by major shifts in the political economy of the whole planet.

As for property damage, it takes you down a moralistic rabbit hole worrying about whether a business is suitable target or not. Sure, it sucks seeing some immigrant getting their tiny shop burned down or looted, but that's one of the risks of doing business in capitalism. During riots I've seen shops that I'd patronized get trashed, but I didn't lose any sleep over it.

Your posts are always an education! In some ways I'm reminded of the "poor fetishes, poor critiques" article from a few years back, which may or may not be relevant here.

Whenever protestors smash windows or steal stuff people always act as if it will ruin small business owners. However I always thought property damage is covered by insurance and that protestors try to avoid attacking small businesses in the first place anyway.

According to the “Insurance Information Institute” blog you linked basic insurance plans SHOULD cover damages, looting and even potentially lost sales. In addition a spokesperson from the III is quoted in the slate article claiming that it’s highly unlikely premiums will go up. So from this it seems like small business owners themselves should be unaffected by the riots.

The first article makes it seem like there’s a potential that some businesses have weird plans that don’t cover riots or may have stopped paying insurance because of Covid 19 (which makes no sense to me unless they literally couldn’t afford it). Some places are offering businesses money to pay for damages if they need it. I wonder if maybe some businesses will be getting some bailout money because of Covid 19?

The article mentions something about how businesses can “claim catastrophe “because of the riots. But does this mean that businesses that have bad insurance plans or stopped paying insurance can claim this? The article is unclear.

Yeah there’s that. I don’t mean to glorify small businesses, especially ones that exploit workers. They can sometimes be even worse than big businesses because they’re at a competitive disadvantage and the owners can be just as greedy. You could argue it might even be better for the average worker since big businesses create more jobs, provide more stability, and are easier to unionize and hold accountable for discrimination and other things.

On the other hand there are still some “mom and pop” stores that make modest incomes so I can understand not really wanting to see them suffer financially. The median retail store owner makes way more than the median American but obviously half of them make below this. Plus many at the lower end make thousands of dollars less than the median US income.

Thanks for the links btw.

I get this. For example I can imagine workers being upset because their workplaces were shut down during the riots. But wouldn’t their workplaces be shut down because of the protests regardless of whether there was rioting? Does this mean there shouldn’t even be so-called “peaceful protests”?

I was worried about the employees of the burned down Wendy’s but apparently they are being paid. I don’t know how much or what may have happened to other workers at damaged stores though.

Before I heard about this arson I never really thought that workers could be negatively affected by riots. Normally when I hear about stores getting smashed I imagine that workers still continue to work there because all they have to do is clean up and take inventory. In fact you’d think workers could even get extra hours because of this!

A little while ago I was skimming a book I have about the black bloc tactic. It talked about how in Toronto some of the people who engaged in black bloc tactics held a fundraiser for businesses they thought shouldn’t have been attacked. I wonder if they can also do stuff like this for any employees negatively affected; sort of like a strike fund.

Hey Ugg, I hate to come off as dickish and realize that you're only the messenger, but this is a really stupid idea.

Let's play this out: organize a punk show and all the proceeds (today, it would more likely be something like GoFundMe) go to the businesses. Money from activists and their friends (who I'd imagine are waged workers) is handed over to some petit-bourgeois shopkeeper who's, let's say for example, an immigrant that owns a liquor store. What's the money for? So they can replace the plate glass windows, replace doors with heavier more secure ones, install heavier grade steel roll down security gates, install security cameras at various angles around the building perimeter, and then . . . oh yeah, restock all the malt liquor, fortified wine, cheap liquor, junk food and cigarettes? Or will they use it for mortgage payments for their house in the suburbs? Or their kids tuition at college? Or a down payment on a new car?

While on the sidewalk in front of that shop, homeless people are huddled in tents, trying to eke out meager survival, while panhandling and living in squalor. If I had my druthers, I'd rather join the homeless comrades to loot some 40 oz.ers, booze and food from nearby stores.

But coming back to the question about trashing businesses, looting a liquor store makes complete sense. Just breaking the plate glass window without looting something to drink seems pointless. But who cares if a bank or the local franchise of a global chain gets destroyed? Actually, my feelings are indifferent about almost any kind of business. But damaging places of habitation is much, much different and is completely inexcusable.

Here I'd suggest being strategic. In the winter of 1970 in the beachside student ghetto of Isla Vista, right next to the University of California at Santa Barbara campus, there were a series of riots that was part of the global youth revolt of that era. There's the famous graphic of the burning of the Bank of America branch:
The most strategic targets were real estate offices, as there were just a handful of slumlords in Isla Vista at the time. Insurgents broke into these office and dragged all the rental records into the street and burned them in bonfires. After the riots, with no records remaining (this is well before the era of computerization) student -- and non-student -- tenants engaged in a de facto rent strike as the landlords had no legal documentation of the rent agreements. So radicals refused to cooperate in reestablishing rental contracts. And if you've ever passed through this micro-college town, it's still a shithole today. By all sociological definitions, it's a slum. Rioters chose a target that was the most vulnerable -- and did it with great precision and effectiveness.

So the next time you've chased the pigs off the street and have a brick in your hand, think twice before throwing it through the mom-n-pop immigrant-owned donut shop. Think about where the developers, real estate agents and landlords have their offices. You won't wipe out all their records like the rebels of Isla Vista, but they are more unambiguously our class enemies.

Anatomy of a counter-insurgency: Efforts to undermine the George Floyd uprising

I hope I’m not being redundant in posting the following, which is excellent: https://brooklynrail.org/2020/07/field-notes/Prelude-to-a-Hot-American-Summer

Revisiting this, I just read this local news story: "The Hidden Toll of California’s Black Exodus" that said:

Detailed coverage of Portland from Robert Evans here: https://www.bellingcat.com/news/americas/2020/07/20/what-you-need-to-kno...

New Phil Neel text over at the Brooklyn Rail, seems relevant to both this thread and the general Coronavirus one: https://brooklynrail.org/2020/07/field-notes/Crowned-Plague

Also, Final Straw has a new interview with Portland GDC folk up: https://thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org/post/2020/08/02/keep-calm-and-get...

Greasy reformists fill the ideological and organisational vaccuum.
https://mobile.twitter.com/People4Bernie/status/1290867044011749376

There's now a support site up for Minnesota defendants: https://mnuprising.wordpress.com/