Introduction

I am completing this article, in mid-November, as news reports indicate that the grand jury’s decisions will be announced in the near future. Unlike perhaps too many others, however, I do not intend to offer unsolicited advice to the young activists who have maintained a steady presence on the streets about what they should do next. They did well enough on their own at the beginning and they have undoubtedly learned from the events of the last two months. By way of example, a recent article on VICE described developments within the movement this way:

Some protesters had never really thought much about the civil rights movement before, let alone imagined that their activism would be likened to it.

“I thought it was just a protest, but my brother, who’s a little older than me, was like, ‘No, this is a civil rights movement,” Dontey Carter, a leader of the Lost Voices and a regular presence at the protests, told VICE News. “I was like, ‘Really?’ I didn’t really put it in that perspective. I thought I was just a protester, but he’s like, ‘No, you’re a civil rights leader,’ and I was like, ‘Wow…’ ”

Carter, a 23-year-old former Crips member and a father of two small children, had never been to a protest prior to August 9, when Brown was shot. He was at a friend’s house in Ferguson when he saw television news broadcasts of the crowd assembling on Canfield Drive.

“I went down there and people started protesting and standing up, and I was like, ‘This is where it’s at,’ ” he said. “Me being there by myself felt kind of weird, but when we all did it together, it was amazing.”

By the time Brown was buried at a funeral attended by thousands of people, Carter and nine others he met on the streets had formed the Lost Voices—a group of Ferguson youth that camped out on West Florissant Avenue, the epicenter of the protests, for weeks before police eventually removed them, as Carter put it, “because we were taking too much of a stand.”

But that was just the beginning.

“It went bigger than camping out. Camping out was just to make a statement, to show that we would not be moved,” Carter said. “The officers talked to the business owners, saying that they would get some type of violation, but we still kept the movement going.”

The group was at “ground zero,” as its members called it, every night—facing SWAT teams, tear gas, and even a noose that someone left in a parking lot near their encampment. When VICE News spoke with two girls from the group at Brown’s funeral, they told us they called themselves Lost Voices because they wanted to speak for a generation of poor and marginalized black youth who had never been listened to.

Less than two months later, the group had gained dozens of friends in Ferguson and hundreds of supporters on Facebook. In October they dropped the “lost” and changed their name to Found Voices.

“Once we were lost but now we are found,” Carter said. “We were the Lost Voices but then people got a hold of who we really are, what this movement is truly about. It became our voice. We’re not lost anymore.”

Carter described the past two months as a “spiritual awakening.”

“My life changed radically,” he remarked. “I had friends die left and right—drugs, gangs, violence—and I’ve pulled away from all of that working for the movement.”

He’s not the only one. Ferguson’s black community became united during the protests, with groups setting beefs aside to march on the streets with a common purpose. Protesters recognize that police brutality is just one form of violence that intrudes on their lives. As they work to redress this, they have also come together in other ways.

“There was so much depression going on around here. It’s hard for you to actually think straight, to do something with yourself, cause there’s so much around you that’s negative,” Carter said, adding that the movement has changed that. “It wasn’t all about me. Other friends that were all about gangs and violence, they let all of that go, and they stood together. They weren’t too concerned about any of the stuff that was going on beforehand.”

“People are gonna wake up, they’re gonna take the wool off their eyes, and they’re gonna see the truth, cause only the truth can set you free,” he went on, switching into the protest leader role he naturally adopted. “I’ve seen the truth. I understand what’s going on. I understand how the system works, and I just want the people that’s unaware of what’s going on to be conscious of how the system works.”

On the other hand, I do have some ideas about the larger set of circumstances that resulted in Michael Brown’s murder and some suggestions for things that might be done to bring the fight where it needs to be fought beyond the streets of Ferguson.

My major points will be the following:

• There are, somewhat predictable, scripts of reaction, which the police, their organizations, the prosecutors, the elected officials, and even many of those who oppose what the police do follow in the aftermath of police killings and it would be wise if we recognized their unfolding.

• The events surrounding Michael Brown’s murder are the product of a complex set of historical developments in the St. Louis area. Those developments include: the central place of Missouri in the struggle over slavery; patterns of racial discrimination across the better part of the twentieth century; deindustrialization and the emergence of the financial and real estate sectors as centers of economic activity over the last forty years; policing practices; and the development of a “new whiteness” in the post–Civil Rights era.

• The key to mounting a fight against police harassment, assaults, and killings is to break up the social bloc that supports the cops. In the case of the St. Louis area, this bloc largely resides in the suburbs with large numbers of white residents that are the legacy of almost one hundred years of making segregation.

The Scripts

As most readers will probably know, police killings are not all that uncommon. When they occur, a somewhat typical train of events ensues. The authorities (at the local and federal levels) promise investigations. The police unions quickly insist that no one should pre-judge the cop involved. Indeed, they usually claim that there’s a good chance that the victim had been involved in some kind of criminal behavior and/or that he (almost always) had engaged in threatening behavior. In the Michael Brown case and that of Eric Garner in Staten Island (in New York City), those arguments needed to be softened a bit because of the availability of video evidence about what had actually happened.

In any case, after the killing has occurred, legal proceedings are initiated which stretch out for as long as possible—to buy time for the anger that emerged in response to the killing to die down. In Ferguson, this approach has not worked very well because those on the streets have been determined to refuse to let the anger “die down.” Michael Brown’s reputation was still fair game, however. During the drawn-out proceedings, leaks from various sources are used to suggest that, once again, the victim was not a law-abiding citizen in the past and that perhaps there is good reason to suspect that he got what he more or less deserved. Meanwhile, efforts to support the accused killer are put into full gear—support organizations are formed, funds are raised, buttons are sold and rallies are held. Not surprisingly, relatives and friends of police officers play a prominent role in these efforts. And everyone waits to see what the grand jury will do.

Which brings us to the moment that we’re at now. Many are convinced that no charges will be made against Officer Wilson; some (including this writer) think that the grand jury will return a number of less than really serious indictments with the expectation that Officer Wilson will be found innocent of the most serious and possibly guilty of the least serious; almost no one seems to believe that he will face serious charges.

Different groups are preparing. The police equip themselves with more weapons to use against protesters and develop plans for how they’re going to deal with various scenarios of violence and the governor considers calling out the National Guard.^[1]

Some, mostly well-meaning folks, offer suggestions for how to keep things under control. See, for example, the statement of the Don’t Shoot Coalition

Other radical groups are preparing to urge the activists in Ferguson to return to the streets and engage once again in rebellious, if not riotous, actions. As I mentioned above, I’ll abstain from giving advice to the activists on the streets of Ferguson. But I do have some advice for others:

1. They should not cooperate with the government.
2. They should pay more attention to the social base of the support for Officer Wilson and try to imagine how they might mount a challenge to that support in the communities where it is concentrated. In other words, they should think about confronting not just the police on the streets of Ferguson but their supporters across the white belt of suburbs around St. Louis.

Which is why I’ll now turn to an effort to understand the historical development of that base of support.

Historical Developments

Missouri—Not Far From the Center of the Country

If we leave out Alaska and Hawaii, the geographical center of the United States is in northern Kansas, but Missouri, its neighboring state, has probably played a more central role in the nation’s history. Missouri was among the territories claimed by the United States under the terms of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, part of the fallout of the defeat of Napoleon’s army by the free people of Haiti. From soon afterwards, slavery was the defining issue.

In 1820, Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state along with Maine as a free state. At the same time, the so-called Missouri Compromise prohibited the extension of slavery to any other parts of the territory covered by the Purchase (territory that includes what is now Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, northeastern New Mexico, northern Texas, Montana, Wyoming and Colorado, as well as Louisiana west of the Mississippi River). Here’s a map with.a bit of an explanation of the geography:

While slavery was legal in the state, not all African Americans were enslaved. This seems to have especially been true in St. Louis. Furthermore, as was the case in many Southern cities, slaves who could perform various kinds of skilled labor were often “rented out” to individuals or businesses. To some extent, these workers were able to move around the city. As a result, both free and enslaved individuals were in frequent contact with each other. At the same time, this hardly meant that slavery was not a permanent reality, and St. Louis became a major center for the buying and selling of slaves. By the 1840s, about 5 percent of the population in St. Louis was black—approximately two-thirds of whom were enslaved. As elsewhere, the stage was set for a battle between the supporters and opponents of slavery.

The Road to the Civil War

Elijah Lovejoy moved to Missouri in 1827 and became the editor of the St. Louis Observer He subsequently became a.Presbyterianminister and established a church. His Observer editorials criticized slavery (he identified himself as an abolitionist—in favor of the abolition of slavery) and other church denominations for their failure to do the same. In May 1836, after anti-abolitionist opponents in St. Louis destroyed his printing press for the third time, Lovejoy moved across the Mississippi River to Alton, Illinois (a free state). He began publishing the Alton Observer On November 7, 1837, a pro-slavery mob attacked the warehouse where the printing press was housed. Lovejoy and his supporters exchanged shots with the mob and he was fatally wounded. He became an abolitionist hero.

In 1846, Dred Scott (a slave who had often been “rented out”) sued for his, his wife’s and their two daughters’ freedom in St. Louis. Scott had traveled with his owner John Emerson, a surgeon in the United States Army, who was frequently transferred to different army bases. During these transfers, Scott spent time in Illinois, a free state, and the Wisconsin Territory, now Minnesota—where slavery was prohibited because of the terms of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. .^[2] Subsequently, the army transferred Emerson to St. Louis and then to Louisiana (places where slavery was legal). After getting married in Louisiana, Emerson commanded the Scotts to return to him. They did so.

The Emersons and the Scotts returned to Missouri in 1840. In 1842, Emerson left the army but died soon afterward. His widow inherited his estate, including the Scotts. For three years after Emerson’s death, she continued to hire out the Scotts. In 1846, Scott attempted to purchase his and his family’s freedom, but Mrs. Emerson refused, leading Scott to file his suit in St. Louis Circuit Court. The Scott v. Emerson case was first tried in 1847. The judgment went against Scott but the judge called for a retrial because of problems with the evidence. In 1850, a second jury found that Scott and his wife should be freed since they had been illegally held as slaves during their time in the free jurisdictions of Illinois and Wisconsin. Mrs. Emerson appealed. In 1852, the Missouri Supreme Court struck down the lower court ruling, and ruled that the precedent of “once free always free” was no longer the case, overturning 28 years of legal precedent.

Under Missouri law at the time, after Dr. Emerson had died, the powers of the Emerson estate were transferred to his wife’s brother, John Sanford. Because Sanford was a citizen of New York, Scott’s lawyers argued that the case should be brought before federal courts. After losing again in federal district court, they appealed to the United States Supreme Court.

On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Taney delivered the majority opinion. The Court ruled that any person descended from Africans, whether slave or free, was not a citizen of the United States and that neither the Ordinance of 1787 nor the Missouri Compromise legislation could grant either freedom or citizenship to non-white individuals. The Court also ruled that because Scott was the private property of his owners he was subject to the provision of the Fifth Amendment that prohibited the taking of property from its owner “without due process.”

Following the ruling, Scott and his family were returned to Emerson’s widow. Due to changes in Mrs. Emerson’s circumstances (she had married into an abolitionist family), the Scott family was set free less than three months after the decision. While the consequences of the decision were not devastating to the Scotts, the decision nonetheless made clear the determination of the slave power to preserve the bondage of millions of people.

Scott went to work as a porter in a St. Louis hotel but died less than two years later. He was originally interred in Wesleyan Cemetery in St. Louis, but his coffin was later moved to the Catholic Calvary Cemetery.^[3]

A video filmed in the cemetery offers a moving appreciation of the significance of Dred Scott and the decision that bears his name.

Scott’s wife survived him by 18 years and there are descendants of the family still living in the St. Louis area.^[4]

The prohibition against slavery in the Louisiana Purchase territories had already been effectively ended by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, which stipulated that the slave or free status of those states would be decided by the popular sovereignty (votes) of white males. That legislation opened up the chapter now known as Bloody Kansas, in which slavery supporters from Missouri served as shock troops to terrorize those who had moved to Kansas to oppose slavery. Which brings us to John Brown in Missouri.

In December 1858, Brown heard that a slave named Daniels from Missouri had crossed into Kansas looking for assistance in rescuing his family from sale to another slave owner. By the next day, Brown had organized a raiding party of nearly twenty abolitionists. The band split up into two groups so that they might be able to free other slaves on the same trip. Brown’s group captured Daniels’s owner, Harvey Hicklan, and rescued the Daniels family. All told, the two groups freed eleven slaves. Slave owners and their supporters were outraged by the theft of property and the killing of one of their own that had taken place during the raid. The governor of Missouri offered a $3,000 reward for Brown’s capture immediately afterward.But Brown was not done. For three winter months, he led the rescued slaves across Nebraska and Iowa. Along the way, anti-slavery folks provided food, clothing, accommodations and protection for the fugitives. The freed people secretly boarded a train to Chicago and another one to Detroit. Finally, they took a ferry to freedom in Windsor, Canada. But John Brown did not rest. The Missouri raid launched him on the last great deed of his life—the assault on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859. Although the assault failed and Brown was executed, it “startled the South into madness” and led step by step to the war of slave emancipation.^[5]

The Civil War

While Missouri had been a slave state, it was not clear which side it would be on during the Civil War. In part, this was the result of the arrival of large numbers of German immigrants in the St. Louis area during the 1850s. Some of them were refugees from the failed German revolution of 1848, and some were followers of Karl Marx, including Joseph Wedemeyer.^[6] They began to make their presence felt in 1861. On New Year’s Day, German immigrants stormed a slave auction to stop it from going forward. At the same time, the St. Louis Arsenal housed a large supply of weapons and ammunition. The pro-slavery governor of the state launched a plan to seize it. German immigrants with some Irish and native-born allies mobilized against the plot. Eventually more than 5,000 men assembled to protect the arsenal. When the Confederate supporters attempted an attack on the arsenal, they were overwhelmed by a superior force and surrendered without a fight. Soon afterward, many of those German immigrants volunteered to serve in the Union Army, but not much actual fighting took place in Missouri.

After the end of the war, Missouri adopted a new state constitution that prohibited slavery and required that African-American children be enrolled in schools (that would only enroll black children). Soon afterward, the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution and the establishment of Reconstruction governments across the South appeared to herald a new day. But the promise would not last and the end was tragic. Instead, the Reconstruction era launched at the end of the war ended in tragedy, with all of the promise of emancipation squandered, and, as W.E.B. Du Bois commented, “Democracy died, save in the hearts of Black folk.”^[7]

The Making of a Segregated Metropolitan Area

During the last third of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the black population of St. Louis grew. Black and white residents mostly lived in separate parts of the city but housing conditions were not necessarily worse in the black sections. But soon enough, whites adopted a method to their madness. In 1915, voters approved a local law that prohibited any one from moving to a block where more than 75 percent of residents were of a different race. When the law was overthrown by a court decision, the St. Louis Real Estate Board supported the establishment of neighborhood associations whose members signed fifty-year covenants forbidding sales to non-whites. That practice would not be outlawed until a Supreme Court decision in 1949.

In the years before fair housing laws passed, black real estate brokers faced death threats, assault and bombings of their residences by angry whites intent on policing the color line. Furthermore, white vigilantes frequently attacked blacks that were attempting to move into white neighborhoods or to use whites-only recreational facilities. According to George Lipsitz,

When the city of St. Louis announced the desegregation of its municipally owned and operated swimming pool in Fairgrounds Park in 1949, thirty Black children showed up for a swim. More than two hundred whites brandishing weapons and shouting racist epithets surrounded the pool to drive them out. Police officers escorted the Black youths to safety, but whites began attacking Blacks they encountered in and around the park. By nightfall, five thousand whites assembled at the site. They cornered Black pedestrians, attacking them with lead pipes, baseball bats, and knives. Two white men advised the crowd to “get bricks and smash their heads.” Police officers restored order temporarily but in response to the upheaval the city rescinded the desegregation order and closed its pools entirely.^[8]

In that same year, the American Housing Act dramatically expanded the role of the federal government in urban renewal and the construction of public housing. In St. Louis, the Land Clearance and Redevelopment Authority expanded the Gateway Mall (a green belt that stretches from the Arch at the Mississippi River through downtown) by tearing down what were considered to be slums, and the Housing Authority quickly launched plans for the building of 5,000 units of low-rent public housing in five major locations—Plaza Square, Cochran Gardens, Darst-Webbe, the Vaughn Apartments and the Pruitt-Igoe Apartments. While the “projects” were initially welcomed as a great benefit and were somewhat integrated, they quite rapidly lost their appeal; the white residents left and, as the developments filled with black tenants, they were effectively abandoned. Soon enough, many of those black residents left for other dwellings.^[9]

By the end of the 1960s, blacks had been crowded into the north side of the city. In How Racism Takes Place, George Lipsitz summarized the developments:

In a city where direct discrimination confined Blacks to an artificially constricted housing market, landlords and real estate brokers were free to charge them high costs for inferior and unhealthy dwellings. Slum clearance, urban renewal, and redevelopment programs made a bad situation worse by bulldozing houses inhabited by Blacks without providing adequate replacement housing. The majestic Gateway Arch on the river-front, the corridor of municipal buildings and parks near City Hall and Union Station, the midtown redevelopment area near St. Louis University, and the downtown baseball and football stadia all stand on land formerly occupied by housing available to Blacks. Seventy-five percent of the people displaced by construction of new federal highway interchanges in the downtown area were Blacks. Redevelopment in the Mill Creek Valley area alone displaced some twenty thousand Black residents, creating new overcrowded slums in the areas into which they were able to relocate.^[10]

From the 1930s through the 1960s, the Federal Housing Administration used strict “redlining” guarantees to determine eligibility for its subsidized home mortgage loans. In the 1950s and 1960s, the federal government’s highway building program increased the value of homes in racially exclusive suburbs. Lipsitz writes about St. Louis:

Even after direct references to race disappeared from federal appraisers’ manuals, race remained the crucial factor in determining whether borrowers receive federally supported mortgage loans. Only 3.3 percent of the 400,000 FHA mortgages in the greater St. Louis area went to Blacks between 1962 and 1967, most of them in the central city. Only 56 mortgages (less than 1 percent ) went to Blacks in the suburbs of St. Louis County. Three savings-and-loan companies with assets of more than a billion dollars worked together to redline the city effectively, lending less than $100,000 on residential property inside the city limits in 1975. The local savings-and-loan institutions made loans totaling $500 million in the greater St. Louis area in 1977, but just $25 million of that total (less than 6 percent ) went to the city, almost all of it to the two mostly whites zip codes at the municipality’s southern border.^[11]

A 1990 survey reported that St. Louis was the eleventh-most segregated city among the more than two hundred largest metropolitan areas in the United States. (The stark character of the segregation is well known in St. Louis and is reflected in the common use of the term “Delmar Divide” to specify the boundary between white and black St. Louis. The “Divide” has even become the topic of a BBC documentary.)

While the disadvantages of segregation for blacks are often enough acknowledged, what is not usually acknowledged are the advantages for “whites.” Lipsitz argues:

Although many of the practices that secured these gains initially were outlawed by the civil rights laws of the 1960s, the gains whites received for them were already locked in place . Even more important, nearly every significant decision made since then about urban planning, education, employment, transportation, taxes, housing, and health care has served to protect the preferences, privileges and property that whites first acquired from an expressly and overtly discriminate market [emphases added].^[12]

For the white folks, their relative advantages led them “to believe that people with problems are problems, that the conditions inside the ghetto are created by ghetto residents themselves.”

Not surprisingly, many of the black people held more or less captive in undesirable circumstances in the city of St. Louis looked to get out. But they did not escape the effects of segregation. Once again, Lipsitz:

Since the 1970s, Blacks have gradually started moving to the suburbs. Yet Black suburbanization is largely concentrated in areas with falling rents and declining property values, most often in older inner ring suburbs. For example, census tracts that had more than 25 percent Black populations in St. Louis County in 1990 were concentrated in one corridor adjacent to the city’s north side. Suburbs with Black populations above 60 percent (Bel Ridge, Berkeley, Beverly Hills, Hillsdale, Kinloch, Northwoods, Norwood Court, Pagedale, Pinelawn, Uplands Park, and Wellston) lay in contiguous territory outside the city limits.^[13]

Things have not changed much since. Earlier this year, researchers at Washington University and St. Louis University reported that African Americans constituted between 45 percent and 97 percent of the population in the zip codes covering the northern part of the city and the suburban cities just north of them (including Ferguson). At the same time, in the zip code areas south and west of the city, African Americans constituted less than 5 percent of the population.

This profound cleavage and the sharp differences in living conditions and life possibilities that it both creates and symbolizes has left its marks in the minds of the residents of both the white and the black communities. Here’s an illuminating, and contemptible, recent video by a white man traveling in his car through the heart of the black community of St. Louis.

I wasn’t able to find any comparable travelogue produced by a black journey through the white suburbs, but I believe that it’s not too hard to imagine why we have witnessed the extraordinary solidarity on the streets of Ferguson. That solidarity “stems not so much from an abstract idealism as from necessity. Pervasive housing discrimination and the segregation it consolidates leaves Blacks with a clearly recognizable linked fate. Because it is difficult to move away from other members of their group, they struggle to turn the radical divisiveness created by overcrowding and competition for scarce resources into mutual recognition and respect.”^[14]

Deindustrialization, the FIRE Economy and Policing in the Post–Civil Rights Era

At more or less the same time as the segregated world of St. Louis was being solidified, momentous changes began to change the shape of the United States economy and the lives of people across the country. St. Louis was in the center of the maelstrom.

Let’s go back. By 1900, St. Louis had a population of 575,000 people (the fourth largest in the country at a time when New York City’s population was about 3.5 million) and had become a large manufacturing and transportation center. By 1930, it had grown to about 820,000 people while New York had doubled to just under 7 million. The city was still a vibrant center of manufacturing. But, starting with the beginning of the Depression, the city lost half of its manufacturing production; more than 30 percent of the population was unemployed and black unemployment was at 80 percent. Only with the introduction of large scale war production in anticipation of the entry of the United States into World War II, and the further expansion of that production once the United States joined the conflict, did the number of jobs and residents increase again. But the uptick was short-lived and, as soon as Japan surrendered, war contracts were terminated and thousands lost their jobs. By 1960, the city’s population had declined to about 750,000. To some extent, the decline within the city was offset by the rapid suburbanization that took place afterward—made possible by the construction of new highways and thereby spreading the population ever further away from the center of town.^[15] However, a relatively high level of industrial employment was maintained until the 1970s. But then the bottom started falling out—between 1979 and 1982, St. Louis lost 44,000 industrial jobs. This led to the loss of still more people from the city.

The decline of St. Louis reflected the emergence of a new era in American social and economic life—an era characterized by:

• factory closures and plant transfers to lower-waged locations;
• elimination of jobs through automation;
• extensive technical innovation in communication, transportation and production—resulting in still more job losses;
• the development of finance as a major source of profits (even for industrial firms);
• a rise in part-time or temporary jobs as primary employment;
• the depopulation and physical destruction of cities (such as St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore);
• gentrification in many urban neighborhoods and the rise in political importance of the social groups formed by that gentrification (although this is not much of a reality in St. Louis);
• sharp decreases in unionization rates in the private sector;
• lowered wages and reduced benefits;
• the establishment of credit (at either normal or usury rates) as an indispensable way of life for many members of the middle and working classes.

These large developments have had specific features in St. Louis.

Land and property have been important for a long time. The importance they have in cities is quite different from the importance they have elsewhere. Within the cities, the value of the land has little to do with its fertility or the resources hidden beneath its surface. Instead, it has a great deal to do with relative desirability. Residential real estate speculation within cities has been preoccupied with manipulating desirability—most recently symbolized by gentrification. But gentrification, at least in the forms that it has taken in cities like Washington and New York, has not been a major development in St. Louis. At the same time, commercial real estate speculation has been preoccupied with the value of attractions—things that bring people with money to places where they will spend it—museums, monuments, theaters, parks and sports arenas. This speculation has constituted the predominant model of urban economic development for the last few decades and has fostered intense inter-city and intra-city competition to provide developers with the most favorable terms. Which brings us to professional sports.

Lipsitz begins his third chapter, “Spectatorship and Citizenship,” with a sports story—the St. Louis Rams’ win in the 2000 Super Bowl over the Tennessee Titans:

When the St. Louis Rams defeated the Tennessee Titans on January 23, 2000, to win the National Football League Super Bowl championship, the team’s players, coaches, and management deserved only part of the credit. Sports journalists covering the games cited the passing of Kurt Warner and the running of Marshall Faulk as the key factors in the Rams victory. Others acknowledged the game plan designed by head coach Dick Vermeil and the player personnel moves made by general manager John Shaw. But no one publicly recognized the contributions made by 45,473 children enrolled in the St. Louis city school system to the Rams’ victory. Eighty-five percent of these students were so poor that they qualified for federally subsidized lunches. Eighty percent of them were African-American. They did not score touchdowns, make tackles, kick field goals, or intercept passes for the team. But revenue diverted from the St. Louis school system through tax abatements and other subsidies to the Rams made a crucial difference in giving the football team the resources to win the Super Bowl.^[16]

While the schools were starving, tax deals like the one for the Rams were taking away seventeen million dollars every year from public education.

Lipsitz argues that the stadium “would have never been built without government funds and subsidies—because stadiums don’t make money,” and he explains that recovering the costs involved in the debt for the construction would require the scheduling of a total of more than 500 “events” in the stadium each year—an obviously impossible possibility. But Lipsitz reminds us that the actual debt is only part of the story—debt demands interest. He writes, “At least twenty-four million dollars a year in city, county, and state tax dollars will continue to be spent on the St. Louis stadium project through the year 2022.” But even that’s not enough—provisions of the contract that the Rams have with the city allows the team to leave for still another city if the subsidies don’t match what other teams are getting or if the stadium’s attractions are considered not as good as those in other places. Lipsitz bitterly comments:

The Rams can always move again. After all, they were the Cleveland Rams before they were the Los Angeles Rams. Even inside Los Angeles, the team moved from the Los Angeles Coliseum to Anaheim Stadium after officials in that suburban city expanded the size of their facility from 43,250 to 70,000 seats, constructed new executive offices for the team’s use, and built 100 luxury boxes for use by Rams fans.

…

Subsidies to previous franchises did not prevent St. Louis from losing the basketball Hawks to Atlanta or the football Cardinals to Phoenix. In fact, by using subsidies to provide the Rams with more profit in a metropolitan area with three million people than they could get in one with more than nine million, the backers of the stadium have unwittingly increased the number of their potential competitors. With subsidies like these, professional football franchises can move virtually anywhere and make a profit. The Tennessee Titans, defeated by the Rams in the 2000 Super Bowl, previously played in Houston as the Oilers, until a subsidized stadium in Nashville persuaded team owner Bud Adams to move his operations there. He could make more money in a smaller city because of government subsidies.^[17]

In 1975, state and local governments sold $6.2 billion of tax-exempt bonds for commercial projects; by 1982, the total was $44 billion. At the same time, bond sales for the construction of schools, hospitals, housing, sewer and water mains, and other public works projects declined. According to Lipsitz:

Twenty-nine new sports facilities were constructed in US cities between 1999 and 2003 at a total cost of nearly nine billion dollars. Sixty-four percent of the funds to build those arenas—approximately $5.7 billion—came directly from taxpayers. In Philadelphia, construction of a new baseball stadium for the Phillies and a new football stadium for the Eagles cost $1.1 billion. City funds supplied $394 million, and state tax revenue contributed an additional $180 million.^[18]

Just recently, the City of Detroit, in spite of being bankrupt, agreed to contribute $200 million in tax increment financing to subsidize the construction of a new arena for the Detroit Red Wings hockey team.^[19]

This pattern reflects an intense competition between different cities which “produces new inequalities that can be used in a race to the bottom by capital, promoting bidding wars between government bodies to reduce property taxes and other obligations while increasing subsidies and the provision of free services to corporations.” Lipsitz argues:

The subsidies offered to support structures like the domed stadium in St. Louis proceed from this general pattern. In the Keynesian era, St. Louis financial institutions invested in their own region. But since the 1980s they have been shifting investments elsewhere, exporting locally generated wealth to sites around the world with greater potential for rich and rapid returns. Building the domed stadium offered them an opportunity to create a potential source of high profit for outside investors in their region. Large projects like this generate some new short-term local spending on construction, financing, and services. They clear out large blocks of underutilized land for future development. But because they are so heavily subsidized, projects like the domed stadium wind up costing the local economy more than they bring in while they funnel windfall profits toward wealthy investors from other cities.

The ability of local and state governments to sell these projects depends fundamentally on the genuine popularity of professional sports, especially football. Lipsitz has something interesting to say about this:

[P]rofessional sports fill a void. They provide a limited sense of place for contemporary urban dwellers, offering them a rooting interest that promises at least the illusion of inclusion in connection with others. The illusion is not diminished by contrary evidence, by the fact that every St. Louis Ram would become a Tennessee Titan and every Tennessee Titan would become a St. Louis Ram tomorrow if they could make more money by doing so, by the fact that team owners preach the virtues of unbridled capitalism while enjoying subsidies that free them from the rigors of competition and risk, by the fact that impoverished and often ill schoolchildren are called upon to subsidize the recreation of some of the society’s wealthiest and healthiest citizens.^[20]

Policing in the Post–Civil Rights Era

Everyday in Ferguson, its surrounding areas and all across the country, the police stop, mostly young, black men. Most of the everyday encounters are not recorded—other than in the memories of the young people themselves and, in quite different ways, in the memories of the cops involved—for others to see. If recordings were available, what we’d likely see are encounters that include verbal and physical abuse designed to intimidate and humiliate—cops reaching into the young men’s pants, pulling down their pants, throwing them to the ground or against a wall. In virtually all of these instances, the cops have the upper hand—they have the handcuffs, clubs and guns; they have their fellow cops ready to back them up; they have the ability to fabricate charges and they can rely on the slow administration of justice to make sure that they will face no consequences. Perhaps others can understand why the young people are outraged at what happens to them and why the cops may very well be terrified because of their understandable concern that the young people have not forgotten and, as they have done in Ferguson, that they might take things into their own hands and that others might join with them.

Perhaps it’s this fear that we see when we look at what happens when shots are fired and the cops are involved—a cop shoots somebody or, less often, somebody shoots a cop. In either case, lots of cops arrive in minutes, with sirens screaming, from all directions—they put up their yellow tape and they tell everyone to keep away. They answer no questions and they threaten anyone who keeps asking. They make sure that the cop involved is quickly removed from the scene. The contrast with what the cops did after Michael Brown was shot is excruciating—there they arrived in their usual numbers and they made sure that people stayed away but there was no urgency about Michael Brown—he was just left lying on the ground for hours. It would be a really good question to ask them—WHY? Dead was not enough?

In the aftermath of the shooting, the National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO) was quick to come to Darren Wilson’s defense. It purchased newspaper ads and wrote letters to people like Attorney General Eric Holder. Its arguments were not vulgar ones—they insisted that the facts were not yet known and that people should wait to see what the investigations revealed. Its messages are clearly designed to shape the ways in which cops across the country think about and talk about the issues and, in turn, to shape the ways in which the supporters of the police think and talk about them.^[21] NAPO is no two-bit operation. It currently includes organizations that represent approximately 240,000 police officers (including cops in Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, New Orleans, New York and Portland, as well as St. Louis) and 100,000 civilian supporters. They all stand ready to defend cops just about anywhere.

As is often the case, the details of the regularly awful things that happen everyday only emerge into daylight when something “really awful” happens—as with the killing of Michael Brown. In the cities north of St. Louis and in Ferguson, in particular, the everyday routines of police harassment of black people have taken on a particularly mercenary character. It appears that, because Ferguson is a small city and does not have the real estate tax base that it needs to support its budget (in spite of the fact that the city is home to a Fortune 500 corporation, Emerson Electric), the city relies heavily on public safety and court fines that have skyrocketed in recent years.^[22] A recent review of the city’s financial statements indicated that court fines accounted for twenty percent of its revenue. The city took in more than $2.5 million in court revenues in the last fiscal year, an 80 percent increase from two years earlier. This is no accident—it’s a business plan. A local law professor, Bryan Roediger, estimates that the court—which only holds three sessions a month—heard 200 to 300 cases an hour on some days. A recent report also argues that the court routinely begins hearing cases 30 minutes before the scheduled start time and then locks the doors 5 minutes after the official start. Those who arrive late face an additional charge for failing to appear. According to Governing, “the Ferguson Municipal Court disposed of 24,532 warrants and 12,018 cases in 2013, or about 3 warrants and 1.5 cases per household.”

Ferguson is not the only city that plays the traffic stop game. Often enough, when someone is stopped in one jurisdiction, it’s discovered that there are outstanding warrants in other ones. As a result, the person gets sent first to one jail until a bond is posted, then to another and then to another—with money being collected at each stop along the way.

The anger that is fueling the rebellion in Ferguson has been shaped day in and day out by these experiences for many years. A reporter from. VICE suggested that the scope of the anger is “best captured by one of the protesters’ favorite slogans: ‘ The whole damn system is guilty as hell.’ ”^[23]

A New Whiteness

As many have argued, whiteness is historical. It is not a natural condition—like being left-handed. Over time, groups once excluded from it were allowed in. The only group permanently excluded was the blacks. But these last two decades or so had provided a good deal of evidence to suggest that whiteness is not quite what it used to be—such as on the one hand, the presence of black individuals at the head of Fortune 500 corporations and, perhaps needless to say, the election of Barack Obama to the presidency and, on the other hand, the ineffectiveness of the traditional privileges of whiteness in protecting white workers from being thrown out of their jobs when the factories shut down. However, I’d like to suggest that the white question has not been settled.

In addition to the more or less open white supremacist groups on the far right, there are many who want to preserve, if not enhance, the privileges accorded to those considered white. Their convictions and their assumptions reflect the material circumstances of their lives as well as a good deal of absent-mindedness and historical amnesia. As George Lipsitz has convincingly argued, the legacy effects of previous discrimination are very significant and they are, in many ways, crystallized in the sharp demarcation between the concentrations of blacks in hollowed out center cities and in inner-ring suburbs and the wide dispersal of “whites” across the broad suburban landscapes around the cities. Lipsitz:

Racialized space enables the advocates of expressly racist policies to disavow any racial intent. They speak on behalf of whiteness and its accumulated privileges and immunities, but rather than having to speak as whites, they present themselves as racially unmarked homeowners, citizens and taxpayers, whose preferred policies just happen to sustain white privilege and power.

With or without being asked, many police officers have been actively engaged in enforcing the racial separations defined by space. At the same time, it is clear that there are some, perhaps many, in the highest political and economic circles who would prefer that policing be conducted in accordance with the protection of civil rights and civil liberties but, at least in this instance, they do not always have the last word.^[24] The police’s jobs are to protect property and to deal with the all but inevitable consequences of the immiseration that has become pervasive in the last forty years—as a result of the transformations in the American economy described above. To a not insignificant extent, however, the police often act autonomously and they are seldom called to account when they do so. In that context, the power of police unions (especially as reflected in their ability to influence politicians seeking their support) plays a major part in maintaining their protection. These unions have come a long way—they seldom have any need for any recourse, at least publicly, to explicit pronouncements of any racial intent. The “new whiteness” is perhaps the lie that does not have to speak in its own name.

Conclusion

By way of a conclusion, I would repeat my earlier point about the central task of confronting the social bloc that the police count on for support. At the same time, it remains essential to support and defend those who have taken the lead in Ferguson. But, we should also not underestimate the need to address the profound shaping of the lives of the people involved by the larger set of circumstances created and sustained by the particular ways in which capital rules St. Louis.

1. ^[1] In what might be considered a parallel process of attempting to control the situation (or to win over at least some local residents), institutions, such as Emerson Electric and St. Louis University, have committed themselves to various improvement efforts. See, for example, “Emerson donating $4.4 million for Ferguson scholarships, job training,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch and “Here’s the Agreement that Ended the Occupation of Saint Louis University,” Riverfront Times ↩
2. ^[2] . The Northwest Ordinances of 1787 and 1789 had prohibited slavery in the territory that now includes Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota. ↩
3. ^[3] William Tecumseh Sherman, the Union Army General whose March to the Sea broke the back of the Confederacy and led to the North’s victory, is buried in the same cemetery. ↩
4. ^[4] The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, the defining feature of the city’s landscape, was designed as a memorial to the westward expansion of the United States (initiated by the Louisiana Purchase) and to the early European explorers. No memorial was built about the consequences of that expansion for the Native American peoples who were pushed off their lands. Subsequently, the Arch was incorporated within the Jefferson National Park to also include the city’s Old Courthouse (the scene of the two Dred Scott trials). The whole project seems to be a fitting symbol for the ways in which the writers of what we might consider the “good” version of American history want to have it both ways—celebrating the frontier and freedom while obscuring the ways in which, for many years, it was the official policy of the United States government to implement the genocide of the Native Americans and the slavery of those of African descent. ↩
5. ^[5] For more on John Brown, see W.E.B. Du Bois, John Brown, Modern Library Classics (2014). ↩
6. ^[6] Marx and Engels closely followed the developments in the United States leading up to the Civil War and during it. They wrote numerous articles about the events, a limited number of which are available online More important, they played a major role in ensuring that the International Workingmen’s Association would be a mainstay in the effort to prevent England from entering the war on the side of the South and to enforce a boycott of Southern cotton—even when it meant lost jobs for English factory workers. ↩
7. ^[7] . W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America (The Free Press: 1988), p. 30. ↩
8. ^[8] George Lipsitz, How Racism Takes Place (Temple University Press: 2011), p. 26. Lipsitz’s book was an invaluable source for most of the information and analysis in this section. ↩
9. ^[9] At this point, only Plaza Square, which had been sold to private owners, remains standing. All of the others have been demolished. Most infamously, one of the Pruitt-Igoe buildings was blown up for the world to watch in 1972 (less than twenty years after they had been built). What remains in most instances are empty, and over-grown, lots. ↩
10. ^[10] Lipsitz, p. 76. ↩
11. ^[11] Lipsitz, p. 75. ↩
12. ^[12] Lipsitz, p. 3. ↩
13. ^[13] Lipsitz, pp. 55–56. ↩
14. ^[14] Lipsitz, p. 56. ↩
15. ^[15] These trends have continued for the last fifty years. In 2013, St. Louis’s population was down to approximately 318,000 (making it the fifty-eighth largest city in the country). At the same time that the city’s population was declining, the population in what is called the Metropolitan Statistical Area (that includes the suburbs) had grown to about 2,795,000. This means that the city itself only constitutes a bit over 10 percent of the population in the area. By comparison, New York City constitutes about 40 percent of the population in its area. ↩
16. ^[16] Lipsitz details the grim realities in the St. Louis public school system that were exacerbated by underfunding—underpaid and inexperienced teachers, a low high school graduation rate and a dropout rate that, at times, was more than three times the state average. See pages 73–74. ↩
17. ^[17] Lipsitz, pp. 90–91. In spite of all this, I suspect that George Lipsitz might be a Rams fan. If I’m right, I admire his willingness to share his analysis with the rest of us who are fans of other football teams or not fans of any. ↩
18. ^[18] Lipsitz, p. 86. ↩
19. ^[19] On Detroit, see “New Detroit Red Wings Arena: Plenty of Public Subsidies; Few Public Benefits,” Planetizen. ↩
20. ^[20] . Lipsitz, pp. 92–93. ↩
21. ^[21] The text of the message that NAPO sent to its members is available ↩
22. ^[22] . In 2009, Emerson Electric received state income tax credits and local property tax abatements to support its construction of a new computer center on its headquarters campus. Perhaps that’s why traffic stops had to increase ↩
23. ^[23] In 1941, CLR James wrote about the attitudes of sharecroppers who were fighting against their conditions in southeast Missouri that: “[T]hese workers, in a fundamental sense, are among the most advanced in America. For, to any Marxist, an advanced worker is someone who, looking at the system under which he lives, wants to tear it to pieces. That is exactly what the most articulate think of capitalism in southeast Missouri.” Perhaps the same might be said of the people on the streets of Ferguson in 2014. ↩
24. ^[24] I’d suggest that the dispatching of Attorney General Eric Holder to Ferguson to express his concerns and to promise an investigation was not just an exercise in going through the motions—they would really prefer that the cops be equal opportunity upholders of the law. It’s also the case that many of these same people have been responsible for and supportive of the equipping of police departments with battlefield quality weaponry and equipment—such as were seen on the streets of Ferguson and during the police occupation of Boston after the Boston Marathon bombing. Whatever their views might be on the question of race, there is no question about the extent of their commitment to the preservation of the rule of capital—by any means necessary. ↩

The weeks following the Ferguson non-indictment of Darren Wilson have resulted in a wave of protests all over the country, alongside the new array of new tactics, slogans, and nominal “movements” that tend to accompany major political events. However, as with many cities in the United States, the mobilizations in New York City between November and December surpassed what many had thought possible. Activists, politicians, police alike have been scrambling to make sense of the constellation of events that have followed the highly publicized police killings (and grand jury decisions) of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, as well as countless less-publicized murders. Moving from specific events toward a larger understanding of the recent national wave of struggles, several questions remain: are the recent mobilizations in NYC part of the movement signified by #blacklivesmatter and its vague tactical imperative (#shutitdown)? In other words, what is behind the general dynamic, whose local manifestations include a succession of spontaneous actions of thousands in direct response to the non-indictment of officers Darren Wilson and Daniel Pantaleo? And most important: what are the larger anti-systemic possibilities (and limitations) of these apparently new political orientations? Our account can only pose such questions in our brief (and inevitably partial) account. However, we believe provisional answers emerge from a close analysis of the shape and patterns of the post-Ferguson cycle of struggles that has unfolded across American cities since late November.

***

While brutal, high-profile police murders of unarmed black men in New York City are far from uncommon,1 the actions on the night of the verdict were more spontaneous, massive, and aggressive than most NY protests in recent memory. Although protest chants are often little more than rhetoric (“whose streets?”), the strategy of this movement is eloquently summed up in one of its primary slogans: #shutitdown. In practice, shutting it down has meant employing a wide arsenal of tactics to bring to a halt the normal functioning of the city. Most often this taken the form of large and simultaneous marches blocking major traffic arteries or transportation hubs: bridges, tunnels, highways, freeways, major avenues and intersections, as well as Grand Central Station and the Staten Island Ferry. Also included in this implicit strategy are attempts to shut down major public events; marches through or disruption of department stores; small groups of people blocking bridges or commuter train lines; and, to a lesser extent, simply dragging barriers into the street (the general tension within these tactics is explored in section two). As other comrades have pointed out in previous contexts, it is no surprise that this surge of spontaneous intervention was directed toward shutting down the capillaries of commodity and human circulation and sites of “social reproduction” more generally.2

As in many other cities, the first major night of protest immediately followed the verdict not to indict Darren Wilson for the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown. Hundreds, and then thousands, gathered tensely in Union Square to await the grand jury announcement. As news spread throughout the crowd of the non-indictment, people began to pour into the streets, disobeying NYPD injunctions to remain on the sidewalk. Despite the energy in the air, the night at first began to follow an all too familiar sequence: a rowdy and potentially unpredictable march weaves its way through the city, blocking traffic and gathering energy, before being led to Times Square—confronting blaring advertisements, confused tourists, and hordes of cops before the momentum dissipates and people begin to disperse (or the police decide to disperse them). Instead, the evening took a dramatically different turn, providing a glimpse of what was to come. While the march milled about Times Square, one protester spotted Police Commissioner William Bratton, responsible for implementing the controversial broken-windows and stop-and-frisk policies, and doused him and the officers surrounding him with fake blood. Soon after, in an apparently spontaneously decision, the huge crowds decided to break with the organizers and continue marching. By the end of the night they had blockaded the Triborough Bridge, connecting Manhattan to Queens and the Bronx, and marched over the Brooklyn Bridge.

Although national attention was rightly focused on the responses in Ferguson, the scale and militant tone of the mobilizations in New York City surprised many, and continued to intensify. The next evening, thousands of people comprising several different marches moved through the streets of the city, blockading major choke points (large avenues and entries, and moving on before the police could interfere). If on the previous night protesters had shut down bridges in a spontaneous or impulsive fashion, by now blocking major traffic arteries had become a widely held and articulated strategy.3 While some assert that the actions, targets, and routes were discussed in advance, the bulk of what unfolded appears to have been largely improvised. By the end of the evening, traffic at numerous tunnels, bridges, highways, freeways, and major intersections was brought to halt, with only 10 arrests taking place.

One group marched through the housing projects on Avenue D in the Lower East Side, to cheers of residents and—road flares ablaze—flooded onto the FDR Expressway, the major thoroughfare along the east side of Manhattan. They later clashed with police trying to take the Williamsburg Bridge, before marching over the Manhattan Bridge into downtown Brooklyn, blocking one of the busiest intersections in a four-and-a-half-minute-long moment of silence. Another group marched over the Westside Highway and Riverside Drive. Yet another blocked the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, connecting Manhattan and New Jersey, and then marched across the city to also block the FDR after the first blockade had proceeded over the bridge. This duplicate blockade of the most important east-side highway in NYC appeared utterly remarkable to those who had left the FDR moments before. Before November, it would have been inconceivable to think that this syncopated blockade could be pulled off, especially as a largely spontaneous action (such is the nature of the current moment).

****

With another grand jury decision slated for the following Wednesday, few predicted how (or if) the mobilizations associated with #blacklivesmatter would continue. This time, the legal decision was much closer to home: Officer Pantaleo’s killing of Eric Garner in front of a grocery store, which had already prompted a well-publicized protest months before, stewarded by Al Sharpton. Just as in Ferguson, the grand jury announced (on December 3) that no criminal charges would be pursued against Officer Daniel Pantaleo. This time, the slow, excruciating strangulation of the asthmatic 43-year-old man was filmed and had gone viral in the preceding days. Garner’s final plea (“I can’t breathe”) would become the new slogan in the emergent anti-police brutality discourse signaled by “#blacklivesmatter” and the tactics signaled by “#shutitdown.”

In nearly identical fashion to the previous week, the night following the announcement of Pantaleo’s non-indictment saw thousands flooding the streets in semi-spontaneous fashion, followed by second night of large-scale marches coordinated by various NYC political groups. As in the previous week (and the weeks to follow), the marches did not follow a predetermined route, nor were the targets of the huge marches plotted in advance. Once again, the actions in New York City were the largest instances of the tactical arsenal implied by #shutitdown: massive marches that closed roads and highways for hours, temporary blockades of public infrastructure, and transient disruptions of businesses and public spaces (performative boycotts labeled “die-ins”).

It is difficult to convey the enormity of the marches and blockades on the nights of December 3–4. Multiple marches of thousands gathered in lower Manhattan and fanned out across different parts of Manhattan to a common group of targets, including the West Side Highway and the FDR Highway (the two major arteries of vehicle traffic in the city), as well as the bridges that connect Manhattan to Brooklyn and Queens (the Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queensboro bridges were strategically blocked by massive marches). Major streets and avenues were also shut down in Manhattan and Brooklyn, bringing vehicle traffic in much of lower-and mid-Manhattan to a standstill into the early morning on both nights.

Added to this was the attempt on Thursday night to storm the Staten Island Ferry. Aside from its symbolic and real connection to Garner (where Garner allegedly sold untaxed cigarettes for a living), the Ferry is an important node of transportation in the metropolitan area. Although there were more arrests than the previous week, by NYPD standards arrests were on the light side, with around 100 per night. The sheer energy of the bridge takeovers surprised and impressed everyone who followed them, with thousands of protestors bearing #ICantBreathe signs, symbolic caskets, and pure rage shutting down traffic for hours,4 while drivers honked or blasted music in solidarity.

The Monday following the Eric Garner verdict activists in Staten Island surprised many by blocking the Verrazano Bridge, which connects Staten Island to Brooklyn.5 However, the density and militance of street mobilizations declined sharply after December 4, as smaller actions continued night after night (as we will see, these actions moved away from blockades and toward die-ins). For radicals in NYC, many of whom have been organizing against state violence for years, the Millions March appeared to be a decisive moment in the #blacklivesmatter movement. In reality, the situation had already changed before December 13. The non-profit organizations and movement “managers” had made more headway leading marches after December 4. They were able to do so, in part, because the spontaneous energy had exhausted itself during the two successive weeks of response to the (non)verdicts on the murders of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. As the mobilizations in the streets waned, these same managers6 would be the beneficiaries of the NYPD’s absurd state of emergency (aided in doing so by NYC’s mainstream media outlets).

We must emphasize the extent to which the mobilizations in this period ran ahead of even the most radical wings of the organized left. One of the few exceptions—the break-away march that split from the Millions March—proves the rule: despite its high intensity and militant chants, it lasted little more than 20 minutes and failed to spread beyond people already affiliated with NYC’s radical scene. If anything, the Millions March served to highlight the increasing distance between the radical scene and militants that are organically part of anti-police (or anti-police brutality) movement. Moving forward, one of the pressing questions for the anarchist and left-communist milieu will be how to build tangible relationships with the new militants coming out of this cycle of protests.

In any case, the swan song of the bridge blockade in the November–December cycle was the unplanned finale to the Millions March. Following the media-friendly 40,000-person parade through mid-town Manhattan to City Hall, thousands overran the police barricades and stormed the Brooklyn Bridge. Continuing through Brooklyn, the massive group made its way past the Barclays Center on Flatbush Avenue, through Crown Heights via Eastern Parkway, and finally to the Pink Houses in East New York (where another unarmed black man, Akai Gurley, was killed outside his apartment weeks earlier). As it stood, the radical pole of #shutitdown entered into decline before any sustained blockade or occupation was attempted (or for that matter, before the formation of new networks capable of combating the ascendant non-profit groups).

At the time, many hoped that the burgeoning “shut downs” might lead to a larger social and political rupture that had not been seen in NYC for decades. Would the current movement open the first fissure in NYC’s incomparably powerful and extensive police-state? Unfortunately, subsequent developments have called such forecasts into question, as the density and spontaneous militance of the blockades ceded ground to the other tactic that has come to characterize #blacklivesmatter: the “die-in.” Although the die-in and the blockade have been continuous factors since the events in Ferguson exploded onto the national level, we note that the prominence of the latter (following responses to the verdicts on the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner) waned relative to the former. Both exhausted and lacking in any conceivable direction forward, the large mobilizations diminished in size and changed in character and tone.

****

For its part, the die-in aspires (on the one hand) to a disruption that re-enacts scenes of police murder within spaces of civil society that are normally sheltered from the regular barbarities of racial and class-based violence. On the other side, the tactic is a kind of didactic theater, communicating a message7 on police brutality to oppressors and oppressed alike. The common targets for die-ins have included luxury retails stores (like Macy’s or the Apple Store on 5th Avenue, or Brooklyn’s Barclays Center), hubs of human and commodity circulation like Grand Central Station and Times Square, and of course the blockaded streets themselves. To the surprise of many, it has progressively become common sense that “diversity of tactics” is an integral part of most historical movements that have changed society. Existing alongside and supplementing more aggressive forms of protest (road occupations, blockades, even urban riots), the die-in has played a useful role in the post-Ferguson cycle (and not only in NYC). However, as the more militant, “practical” dimension of the street protests faded, the preponderance of the die-in shows the extent to which the previous mobilizations had become largely symbolic; rather than spontaneous efforts at disrupting or challenging the police or the flows of commodities, these demonstrations risk becoming mere appeals to the state for reforms that it will not and cannot concede. Although we cannot explore the issue further in this account, considered strategically, we call attention to how the die-in might shed light on a fundamental tension within both the discourse of the movement emerging after the killing of Michael Brown (#blacklivesmatter) and its tactics (#shutitdown).

In any case, the enormous volume of demonstrators and the hydra-like multiplicity of actions—along with an unprecedented degree of broadly anti-police popular sentiment—largely neutralized NYPD efforts to control the demonstrations. Much has been made of the mayor and police chief’s “hands-off” response to the protests over the last few months; following the murder of two officers in Bed-Stuy December 20, mainstream political opinion would have it that de Blasio’s waffling and Bratton’s foolish benevolence simply allowed the protests to happen.8 Nothing could be further from the truth. If anything else, de Blasio was simply caught in the classic liberal double-bind: elected on the pledge to repair the enormous rift between police and communities of color through toothless reforms and pledges (e.g., community policing and formulaic officer retraining), he was powerless to contain the rage of his supposed constituents in the face of Ferguson and Eric Garner’s on-tape murder. On the contrary, the mayor’s middle-ground position simply made him an easy target for the aggressive reactionaries in the policemen’s union, especially after two officers were shot and killed in an unrelated incident in Bed-Stuy on December 22.9

Much has been made of the supposed “war” between city hall and the NYPD10 —far too much in our opinion. To be sure, the degree of police repression against New York activists and even anti-police sentiment is perhaps unprecedented.11 However, it is equally apparent that the wailing and fearmongering of the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association and local media outlets have not succeeded in turning the political tide in their favor. Two weeks of the farcical NYPD “strike,” whereby officers refuse to respond to petty crimes like parking violations and public urination, has not only failed as a political gesture; for many, it has also contributed to the broadly anti-police sentiment that continues to generalize within certain strata of the population following Ferguson.12 Within the current hostile police environment, it is clear that new developments may be required for the movement to regain its earlier intensity, whether at the level of tactics, ideology, or movement composition. It is difficult to say whether the spontaneous and militant series of mobilizations in NYC, following the logic of #blacklivesmatter, will continue to be such a vibrant force as has been seen in the past two months.

• 1The ratio of NYPD victims to indictments is 179 to 3.
• 2On the logic behind circulation-side struggles in the current historical moment, see Endnotes, “Logistics, CounterLogistics and the Communist Prospect ” and Theorie Communiste, “The Glass Floor.”
• 3The blockade, adopted from and in solidarity with Ferguson, had spread to 170 cities by late November.
• 4A communique made after December 4 evokes the general atmosphere.
• 5Besides housing many working-class people of color (like Eric Garner), Staten Island is also the home to a large number of New York’s finest.
• 6The group primarily taking the lead is called (without an ounce of irony) Justice League NYC.
• 7In this way it is similar in form and content to other recent initiatives arising in the wake of Ferguson, such as the Black Brunch protests. More on the larger question of new black activist organizations.
• 8The right-wing sycophants at the New York Post have pushed this incomprehensible notion the hardest. Recently, Commissioner Bratton has tried turning the tables, blaming the Bed-Stuy episode on the protests of November and December.
• 9Once again, the NY Post fired the opening shots.
• 10In light of the ongoing tension between the NYPD’s union and Mayor de Blasio, the present moment has also been compared to the anti-police riots and PBA publicity stunts of the early 1990s.
• 11As is well known, forms of surveillance based on social media have largely replaced the police tactics such as stop-and-frisk (this was one of Mayor de Blasio’s benevolent reforms). In NYC and Ferguson alike, expression of anti-cop sentiment has been enough to merit terrorism charges.
• 12In addition to the communities of color that have suffered from structural police violence for generations, this outlook become increasingly popular among the downwardly-mobile generation of “millenials.” See also Paul Mason’s analysis of the role of the “graduate without a future” in the Occupy movement in Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere.

Already #BlackLivesMatter protests in Oakland are being likened to the sustained unrest following the videotaped murder of Oscar Grant by cops. But this time something is different. In 2009, a looted Foot Locker flanked by a couple of burning dumpsters in downtown Oakland was described by an eager band of insurrectionaries as a riot, almost as if they were attempting to earn some kind of street cred from their Facebook followers. This time around, well over a thousand people―maybe even two thousand―would leave burning bins strewn for miles down Telegraph Avenue, tagging slogans along the way, and smashing the façades of (and frequently looting) chain stores across the East Bay.

Whereas in the 2009–10 arc of struggle in the East Bay, freeway blockades were notably controversial, they now occur nearly nightly, sometimes three to four times per night, sometimes with thousands, oftentimes with hundreds. During the March 4, 2010, freeway takeover against the privatization of public education in California, even some self-proclaimed radicals were wringing their hands over the loss of potential supporters and condemned the action. At this point, the tactic is so firmly entrenched in the repertoire of mainstream civil disobedience that it has become the de facto standard after the non-indictment of Daniel Pantaleo for choking Eric Garner to death on video. From Cleveland to Detroit to New York to LA, freeway blockades are now the norm.

The recent round of East Bay marches began on November 24 following the non-indictment of Darren Wilson for the killing of unarmed black teenager Mike Brown. As fires burned in Ferguson, more than two thousand took to the streets of downtown Oakland, shutting down the 580 freeway for hours and looting a handful of stores in the vicinity. The following night was more of the same, with the 880 and 580 blockaded, and the looting moving into wealthier parts of North Oakland, an area rarely touched by mass marches. A couple of nights later, protesters locked arms through PVC piping through an open BART car at the West Oakland stop, shutting down the transport system for hours.

The next few nights were more of the same: 880 blockades, snake marches through Piedmont and eastward to Fruitvale Station where Oscar Grant was murdered, and more window-smashing and looting. By December 5 or so, these actions had become nearly routine, with hundreds standing off against riot police, unsure of what to do next. What was provocative just a few years earlier had now become normalized, with even liberals joining in these nighttime marches.

The next night, a call was circulated for a mass march from the major intersection adjacent to the UC Berkeley campus. I didn’t think much of it at the time, assuming things were petering out. How wrong I was. After a standoff outside of the Berkeley PD station on Addison and the looting of a couple of nearby stores (the Trader Joe’s nearly across the street, the Radio Shack on Shattuck), the march made its way back to campus, growing exponentially and picking up students along the way. Berkeley PD called for mutual aid, with cops from small strip-mall towns around the Bay, untested in protest situations, deploying overhead baton strikes and firing so much teargas that Telegraph still smelled like mustard in the morning.

A couple of photographs showed police repression so incendiary that the following night was one of the most militant marches to date. One photo depicts cops in riot gear raising their batons to strike a black teenager, with onlookers shrieking in disbelief. Another shows countless rows of riot cops on the UC Berkeley campus, appearing far more like an occupying military force than a local police squad. Both were circulated widely on Facebook and Twitter. Thousands gathered on campus that night, attempting to march on the Berkeley PD headquarters yet again, though the police were mutually aided enough that they were able to prevent them from making it inside the fenced-off property. Not to be deterred, the march headed back up to Telegraph and then down Shattuck toward Oakland, culminating at the 24 on-ramp on 51st Street. About half of those gathered sat down in the middle of the intersection, with a sizeable faction of standing marchers urging them to take the ramp. By the time any discussion was had, cops were blocking both on-ramps, though they weren’t as deep as one would expect. Given the previous night’s bad PR, they appeared to be playing it low-key.

I was standing by the off-ramp on the southeast side of the intersection. Right in front of me, about a half-dozen younger marchers ran up to a cop car parked on the ramp and began kicking it and smashing out its windows. One jumped onto the roof of the thing and hopped up and down until it caved in. I saw a small explosion — someone later told me it was an M80 firecracker—and the hood began to smoke. I was then shoved to the side as a column of riot police ran through the crowd and nabbed a couple of the kids stomping the car; most got away. By this time, protesters were scaling the ivy, hoisting themselves onto the freeway. A couple hundred or so made their way on and blocked traffic briefly, before subsequently retreating without any arrests.

From there, the march snaked back toward Berkeley, where banks and a handful of other stores were looted along the way. At some point the Radio Shack was smashed and looted again, almost with impunity. The cops were certainly keeping their distance, though we heard sirens in the distance. Again, the march headed toward Oakland. I was shocked. The thing started at 5 pm, and it was now nearly 1 am, but the crowd showed no sign of dispersing. Most notoriously, a Whole Foods was looted, with cases of Prosecco distributed to anyone who wanted a bottle. “Garner Protests Marred by Violence, Stolen Champagne,” read a headline the following morning.

For all of those claiming that broken windows alienate those on the fence, the next night was even larger. At least a couple thousand marched onto the 80 at the end of University Avenue in Berkeley. I walked along the dark path next to the freeway—not even an on-ramp, but the actual freeway, low enough to the point where one could simply climb on. Hundreds did. The fence had been torn down, and even reluctant members of the crowd joined in. Another group blocked an Amtrak train a few hundred feet away for hours. Marchers on the freeway attempted to take the Bay Bridge but were forced off in Emeryville, where they were eventually kettled behind a Ross clothing store. A hundred-fifty or so were arrested that night, roughly a quarter of the total arrestees over the course of the period between the non-indictment of Wilson and the Millions March.

I couldn’t make it out the next night, but as I headed home, I saw columns of teargas a block from my apartment in Oakland. Marchers had taken the 24 again, and California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers were firing rubber bullets and beanbags from overpasses at protesters below. I would later hear about a few chain stores looted in Emeryville. Around 1 am, I walked over to greet a group of kettled marchers on Market.

The following night’s march was substantially smaller, but it wasn’t without controversy. After marchers outed a couple of obvious undercover cops in their midst, the undercovers did what all cops do: tackled the first black man in sight. A goateed CHP cop in a hideous Champion vest aimed his loaded pistol directly at the crowd. Another telling headline in the Chronicle the next morning: “Oakland Police: We Had No Idea CHP Officers Dressed as Protesters.”

After a few days off, about 6,000 marched on the Alameda County Courthouse, convening on its front steps. This was the Oakland iteration of the Millions March, taking place in cities across the country. That evening, a couple thousand reconvened downtown under a dark overpass. Unlike previous nights, the march didn’t seem to have any particular direction, despite having some of the most militant energy yet. It eventually made its way to a Whole Foods, smashing out the window with customers in the checkout line. Others burned an American flag in the crowded intersection. The march snaked along Lake Merritt, eventually making its way back to Telegraph, right in the middle of downtown Oakland. Shortly thereafter, protesters were kettled and reportedly tasered.

I could go on: a couple of high school walkouts in Oakland, a middle school walkout, a brief action by Oakland public defenders. On December 15, a small group of protesters shut down the Oakland PD headquarters, again locking arms through PVC piping. They were also able to remove the cop flag and hoist up a “Black Lives Matter” replacement, with the person responsible remaining at the top of the flagpole for hours. Hundreds of supporters gathered in the rain outside, despite the complete lack of notice and the fact that the action was organized during the workday.

While things have since calmed down a bit, calls are out for a noise demo on New Year’s Eve, and more significantly, early January marches downtown on the sixth anniversary of the murder of Oscar Grant. As previous East Bay struggles have demonstrated, from Oscar Grant to anti-austerity movements through Occupy, brief lulls are nothing to fear. The rain and the cold may have tamped things down briefly, but the marches will be back next month. As the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association does its anti–de Blasio dance in NYC and ramps up repression, even harassing “witnesses” (to what, a brief tussle or an allegedly tossed garbage bin?) in their homes, people in the East Bay are following events closely. With St. Louis in flames again after the murder of yet another unarmed black teenager, this time for pulling a gun that turned out to be a cell phone so that he could videotape the cops about to murder him, the rage hasn’t come anywhere close to dissipating. The months to come will see a revival of the late November and early December uprisings.

1. Saturday, August 9, 2014
   The unarmed Michael Brown is killed by police officers in Ferguson, Missouri.
2. Sunday, August 10, 2014
   Folks begin to riot in Ferguson, Missouri, and just don’t stop.
3. Monday, August 11, 2014
   Ezell Ford, an unarmed 25-year-old black man, is killed by LAPD while walking home on 65th Street in South Central, Los Angeles.
4. Thursday, August 14, 2014
   A march for Ezell Ford is held in South Central, from the intersection of 65th and Broadway to the LAPD 77th Precinct Police Station about 11 blocks away.
5. Sunday, August 17, 2014
   Hundreds of people stage another rally for Ezell Ford, outside LAPD headquarters downtown, and then march illegally to Union Station about 5 blocks away.
6. Monday, August 18, 2014
   The LAPD puts an “investigative hold” on the coroner’s investigation of Ezell Ford’s death, keeping the autopsy from the public.
7. Tuesday, August 19, 2014
   Black Democrat LA City Councilman Curren Price holds a “community meeting” at Paradise Baptist Church, at 51st and Broadway in South Central, inviting LAPD Chief Charles Beck to ease tensions over the shooting of Ezell Ford. The crowd heckles him. Ferguson, Missouri, is still burning.
8. Saturday, August 23, 2014
   A rally is held in Leimert Park, at the northern border of South Central, for both the shootings of Ezell Ford and Michael Brown, the strangling of Eric Garner, and the brutal beating of Marlene Pinnock by a California Highway Patrol officer on July 1.
9. Monday, November 10, 2014
   LA Mayor Eric Garcetti orders the Ezell Ford autopsy released—soon. Before the end of the year.
10. Monday, November 24, 2014
    The Missouri grand jury decides not to indict Darren Wilson, the officer who murdered Michael Brown. Activists in Los Angeles attempt and fail to block the I-10 freeway, protesters march around the Crenshaw district in South Central, Los Angeles, and rally outside LAPD headquarters downtown, whereupon they march to the University of Southern California (USC), whose relationship to South Central is like that of Columbia University to Harlem.
11. Tuesday, November 25, 2014
    Activists block the I-110 freeway for about an hour.
12. Friday, December 5, 2014
    A Hollywood Walk of Fame street performer known as “J” was executed by LAPD on the corner of Hollywood and Highland. He was wearing a Scream serial-killer costume with the attendant fake plastic knife.

The above is a basic and incomplete chronological overview. Protests and marches continued throughout the fall in Los Angeles, linking the Ezell Ford, Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Antonio Martin murders together.

Friday, December 12, 2014
My wife and I discovered the #FTPFridays Twitter hashtag and the Los Angeles Peoples Media and FTPFridays Facebook pages events and decided to go to the protests at Hollywood and Highland, where J, the Scream street performer was killed. We arrived around 7 pm. It was quite clear almost immediately that the main leaders of the action were a trio of young black women, and I would place money on none being over 30: the first, a babyfaced woman with with a bicycle. I will call her Babyface. The second, a smaller, waiflike woman with an extremely loud voice, was the most impassioned, so I will call her Fire. The third woman seemed, and has seemed, each time I have seen her, like she just came from a party, because she has never stopped dancing. I will call her Dancer, obviously. The only man in a position of leadership at the protest was a heavyset young black man. I’ll call him Smiley, because he was always smiling, and had a very mild personality to contradict his very large voice. This is not anonymization, but actual anonymity, because I know the names of none of the participants. There were mostly black and Latino young adults here, and the majority were women. There were between a dozen and 20 black men, closer to a dozen, and I am sure I was the oldest black man, or black person for that matter. I am pretty sure I was the oldest black person there, and I just turned 40. There were maybe a handful of older “veteran activist” types, people who might have party newspapers and things like that. Most of the white people were young marginal-looking types—scruffy, tatooed, costumed, etc. A few had explicitly political clothing bearing slogans like “Capitalism Kills.” A handful of actual teenaged boys, mostly Latino and one white, joined us shortly. There was one typical “black bloc” person, a white man with a scarf around his face and lots of riot kit dangling from his belt loops.

The crowd slowly built up over the next thirty minutes or so, and we had maybe 75 people by the time Fire announced that we were ready to block the intersection of Hollywood and Highland. My wife and I went out into the intersection, the far side of Hollywood. All the blockers were facing Hollywood traffic, either east or west. Therefore our bodies were perpindicular to north and southbound Highland traffic. The chants were a combination of “Hands up, don’t shoot,” “No Justice, no peace,” and “Indict, convict, send those killer cops to jail / The whole damned system is guilty as hell!” I sometimes tried to yell “Hands down, shoot back,” and this caught on only a few times. Fire and a few others had followed us to the far side of Hollywood, so that we had perhaps 6 people over there, maybe 8. But most of our people were clumped on the westbound side of Hollywood, and the lopsided density of the blockage was a weakness. Drivers started attempting to cross us, feeling that they could drive on the sparse eastbound side, pushing us out of the way. About 5 minutes after we began this traffic blockage, the driver of a car southbound on Highland—a light-skinned, curly-haired black woman—sped out behind the Hollywood blockers, and almost hit me, slowing only a little bit to swerve around me, so I hit her window with my hand as she sped on by. She shrugged strangely and looked sad. Babyface, tooling about on her bike, suggested that I should have broken her window. I would have, but for the proper tools. No one else attempted to cross us in any way again, though. I was focused on trying not to get hit, and yelling for sidewalkers to join us. We had stranded a motorist in the dead center of the intersection, and he had been sitting there for the whole time, and this also was a weakness. He divided the clumps of our people, so that communication was a little more difficult than it should be. It came to be that we were out there with maybe 3 or 4 people on the eastbound side, and the westbound folks had already gone back to the corner. Fire was yelling at us to come back. So we did. The police were arriving.

Shortly we experienced the first sign of a problem that I have never seen before, and which I hope will become clearer throughout this little piece. This crowd of militant, angry, mostly black and Latino youth began to harass and curse and heckle the police. I was filming them and heckling them as well. Several people actually walked out between the police cars parked there to curse and denounce the police in their faces. I stood back a bit from that. This lasted perhaps 15 minutes. Suddenly, Babyface and Fire were leading us out into the street again. An older white activist woman was unfurling a large graffiti-style (but quite legible) FUCK THE POLICE banner in the middle of the street. I went out into the street again, figuring that we were going to block the intersection again, but this was a march now. She asked me to hold one end of the banner, so I held the banner, and off we went.

Our first go-around was pretty successful and also uneventful. We had a relatively large crowd—around 75, like I said—so we felt quite powerful. We walked down Highland to Sunset, and then over toward Orange, and then La Brea, back up La Brea to Hollywood, and back over to Highland. A circuit of a couple of blocks, blocking traffic the whole way. We made it back to our destination, and some people dropped off.

We were down to perhaps 50 at the start of the second, much longer circuit, when we headed east on Hollywood toward Vine, where we turned south. I was still carrying the banner, and we were still chanting, blocking traffic the whole time. The police held up our rear, following us as closely as they could. The helicopter came out. Babyface was cycling about, corraling the crowd so that we wouldn’t split into discrete clumps and stragglers wouldn’t get snatched by the cops. It turns out that I and the other banner carrier, the older activist woman, kept falling behind, and there were many times when we had to speed up, because we were just a few yards from the police. An ambulance crossed us, lights flashing, in front, slowly, and it disrupted our progress for a couple of seconds. It didn’t seem to be on its way to an emergency.

I know this is sunny Southern California, but it was cold out that night, and my hand was swollen from hitting that car window, so I guess I was walking slow. A fellow with a loud portable soundsystem on luggage wheels joined our march, and kept blasting both Lil Boosie’s “Fuck the Police” and Ceebo’s “Fuck the Police” and “Mr. Officer.” Dancer was near the front of the march, dancing to the music, of course. I like both those songs, but the volume of the music messed up our chants and therefore our physical unity, so I asked him to turn it down. He did. I handed the banner to someone else and sped up to get to the center of the march.

We made it to Vine and turned south, perhaps down to 30-40 people now. There was a slowing for some reason near Selma, as Babyface did another corral run with the bike, and Dancer and a contingent of our people, including banner holders, ran into the Trader Joe’s there for a quick in-store protest. It was a real spur-of-the-moment thing, and while I was wondering whether it was a good thing to do, they went ahead and did it, and came back out within two minutes. Of course it was a good thing to do. I was worried that by dividing our number with the police so close to us, it would put our people in danger. There were no problems there, though.

We continued south to Sunset and turned west again, beginning the bottom half of our circuit. The streets are Morningside, Cahuenga, Wilcox, Schrader, Casil, Las Palmas, McCadden, Highland, Orange, and then La Brea. We took La Brea north to Hollywood on the first circuit. We had been blocking traffic in and around this area for about 90 minutes by now, and we were still going. Our chants were still strong, though our numbers continued to dwindle. Another disruptive ambulance was driven into our path to throw us off. The second one of the night. The group of teenage boys I mentioned above joined us on this bottom leg. We continued, lit up by the police helicopter, past supportive honkers, hateful drivers, various onlookers, etc., and a homeless looking fellow in our midst kept trying to get a word with Babyface as we passed Highland and came to Orange. Our numbers were falling off fast, and now we definitely were at or near only 2 dozen. As we passed Orange, we paused briefly to look up the street. It was pitch black, and some of the people wanted to walk back up Orange to Hollywood, so that we could stop the march. This is not verbal communication, of course, but more of a physical thing. But Orange was pitch black. We couldn’t see anything. The verbal knowledge filtered through our numbers that the homeless-looking man had run ahead scouting, and had told Babyface that the police were waiting in the darkness. The streetlights had been turned off on Orange, and we could just barely make out their outlines, as they were standing under a tree-lined part of the street anyway. So we moved on past that kettling attempt. The crowd still wanted to go back to Hollywood, so we stopped also at La Brea, and that was also the same kettling setup. We could not go north up La Brea to get back.

So we just headed south down La Brea. This is the second appearance of the problem to which I want to call attention. Our confusion at what to do when our way back “home” was blocked caused us to hesitate there in the intersection of La Brea and Sunset, and the police were able to arrange a cordon south on La Brea while we wondered what to do. We should clearly have broken up right there. We were down to perhaps 15 people now, as we decided to go south on La Brea to De Longpre Avenue. We marched slower now. The police had not disabled the streetlights here, and they were lit up like Christmas, in a line of maybe 20 across La Brea, right in front of the Jim Henson Company, home of the Muppets (which is police slang for “Most Useless Police Person Ever Trained”). Our crowd scattered across the width of the street, some on the sidewalks, some in the street, and we all reached the police line. My wife and I were on the west sidewalk, looking at the line of police, and I started to video the events. We were just a couple of feet away from them. A group of perhaps 6 of our people had gathered on the east side of the street and were attempting to continue to march past the line of police. They were yelling at the police to move, some were trying to push their way past them, not extra rough, but just squeezing between them. The police wouldn’t allow this. My wife and I walked over there to get a closer look. A mild tussle was developing between the through-pushers and perhaps 3 police officers, and then one man ran through the line of police to the other side of De Longpre street. And then he stopped there, like he had won a marathon. He had broken through the line. So a crowd of cops rushed to get him, they grabbed him up and tried to throw him to the ground, but then a crowd of perhaps 6 or 7 of our people ran in really quickly to unhand him. Now the other police from the other side of the line ran over, the 6 or 7 of our people retreated extremely quickly, the dearrest relinquished for the moment. I have never seen a dearrest, but the speed with which these things happen is extraordinary. The whole attempt, from cop hands on the man, to our people in and struggling, to the reinforcements running, to our people out and far enough from the scene to be ungrabbable was no more than 2 seconds.

So, that was one arrest for 2 hours of traffic interference. Not bad. My wife and I walked back as individuals, with Smiley and the teenagers, to Hollywood and Highland. Smiley got caught up with some other of our people, but relayed to us that there had been one more arrest. He hung back to get more information, and we kept on. It turns out the teenagers lived in the neighborhood, and when they heard the chants and saw the copter, they came out to join us.

Friday, December 26, 2014
We visited Hollywood and Highland the night after Christmas and found not a lot going on. Smiley was there, and some of the older activists were around. I asked Smiley whether he knew anything about the permitted rally planned for Saturday, December 27, the Millions March LA. I had discovered it on Facebook, but a long thread there with some activists asking who the heck the organizers were made me wonder what it was all about. The fact that it was planned in coordination with the LAPD made me wary. Smiley didn’t know anything about it really, other than it was happening, but he pointed me in the direction of an older white activist and said she might know more. I didn’t want to walk up to her and start asking her questions because I didn’t know her and had never seen her. My wife and I hung around for a little while, and then I tried to strike up a conversation with another older white activist. I asked “Hey, doesn’t look like enough people to march tonight, huh?” Just small talk. She jumped back about a yard and looked at me crazy. She looked around and answered, “Well that depends on what the people want to do.” I said “Yeah.” Clearly, she thought I was a police officer. Like I said, I was definitely the oldest black man around, and I can look like I mean business of some sort or another.

Saturday, December 27, 2014
My wife and I decided not to go to the Millions March LA, organized by a group called ((WE)), about which I still know very little, because it just didn’t seem right. However, it turned out to be enormous. It started in a park near a shopping center called The Grove, on 3rd and Fairfax. We watched it on ustream, and it was full of middle-class blacks, young, middle-aged, and old. Overwhelmingly black, and entirely decent if you get my meaning. The sort of people who vote for Obama and go to church, or tell people they do. And then there were celebrities like gangsta rappers The Game and Tyga, and basketball player Steve Nash.

One fun thing to note about the ustream video is the overbearing choreography of the march. The ((WE)) organizers stayed at the head of the march at all times, and passed out chant leaflets, congratulated themselves over their soundspeaker at every stop, and several times used their sound system to change chants. They wouldn’t even let people chant “No Justice, no peace / No racist police!”

When the march arrived at Wilshire and Masselin, in front of the building that houses both E! Entertainment Network and OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network, the organizers stopped it to whip the people back into the designated side of the street. By that point, the march had grown to multiple thousands. Bourgeois press reports cite 5,000, and organizers report 13,000.

At one point in the video, Bryan Hayes, the streamer, films ((WE)) organizers attempting to get some recalcitrant protesters to come back to the designated side of the street. They refuse, standing there, holding black power fists in the air, while the organizers wonder what to do. One is recorded saying, “We’re not talking about it any more. Let the police take care of them.” Meanwhile, the organizers had stopped directly beneath a billboard for the movie Selma, and announced over their soundsystem that media should take a picture of the marchers under the billboard.

Real spectacular.

So, the Millions March LA was a step backward in power and consciousness, though many thousands came out to participate. I still don’t know who ((WE)) are.

At the end of the video, Bryan Hayes mentioned another action taking place in Hollywood, and that many protesters from the Millions March were going to that one. My wife and I figured that must be the #FTPFridays group at Hollywood and Highland, so we checked Facebook, and surely, it was. We rushed right out, excited.

We expected hundreds, and there were dozens. Smiley was there, Fire, Dancer, and Babyface were all there. But we didn’t even have the 75 or so we had the night of December 12. Our dozens were milling about the corner, and Fire started rallying people to block traffic. Soon the third sign of the problem I seek to address appeared. Babyface had got the idea in her head to burn the flag while we blocked the intersection, so Fire went to go purchase one. I’m hardly patriotic, but I wondered why we should do that. I didn’t say anything, because what the hell, it’s just a flag, and if they want to burn it while blocking the intersection, we’ll still be blocking the intersection. Whatever.

It was really hard to ignite, and someone had to spray the flag with something or other to light it. Like the night of December 12, my wife and I went to block the eastbound side, most stayed on the westbound side, trying to light the flag. Nobody tried to cross us this time, but there were many more hostile pedestrians. We stayed blocking the intersection of Hollywood and Highland for perhaps 10 minutes, chanting “Fists up, fight back!” The weaker “Hands up, don’t shoot” had been replaced, and unambiguously, but not by “Hands down, shoot back,” Ismaaiyl Brinsley having performed his misguided exemplary action in killing those two NYPD officers.

Our people flowed back to the corner of Hollywood and Highland when the police arrived and parked in the middle of the intersection. Our numbers were certainly no more than 15 by this point as well, and the fourth sign of the problem I am outlining appeared again when almost the entire crowd rushed to heckle and harass the police cars. The police were taunting back childishly, pointing significantly at the people cursing them out. No finger-guns, but winks, middle fingers, and knowing nods. This heckling went on a good ten minutes, just shouting. Then most of the police left, and Fire wanted to go back into the street. Now we had only a dozen people. I thought that if my wife and I left, they would never attempt to block the street with only 10 people. So we decided to leave, in order to get them to stop. It seemed silly to try to block the street with those low numbers. It seemed like a recipe for getting arrested and beat up. So we left.

We checked social media that night to find out what happened. The small group we had left walked away from the intersection deeper onto Hollywood, and did indeed attempt to block the entire street, without having to worry about traffic from the intersection with Highland. They held hands across the width of Hollywood and held it for a good five minutes.

Bryan Hayes, the streamer, was hit by a very large Cadillac Escalade, as the video above shows. Our people left shortly thereafter to care for him. There were also some arrests, more than one.

The Problem

To state it plainly: We need to learn when to stop. I am not interested in getting arrested and wasting my time in the criminal justice system, or in having a record, or in getting beaten up. I am willing to risk it, as we do when we engage in illegal demonstrations, but I would rather avoid it. The group my wife and I have been demonstrating with is fiercely militant, courageous, and intelligent, as their actions over the past months show. But despite our effectiveness in actually disrupting business as usual, there is still a very large component of pure demonstration. This is why they wanted to burn a flag, why they wanted to heckle a gang of police, why they wanted to rush a line of 20 cops with a dozen people, and why they wanted to try to block a major street with 10. The way I figure it, the first night I went out with them, we had demonstrated our power to ourselves and anybody trying to drive that night with our first circuit around the area. We didn’t need to go back out a second time. The second time was just gravy. There was certainly no need to continue, randomly, down a street we hadn’t planned on taking to avoid a kettle. Better to disperse, regroup later, and fight another day. The same goes for the December 27 intersection blockage. I have not felt comfortable enough to raise my concerns yet.

Not the End Note: Monday, December 29, 2014
Ezell Ford’s autopsy was released, and showed that he was shot three times, and the last shot was fired into his back at such a close range as to leave muzzle imprints and burns on Ezell’s skin. The very same group of protesters my wife and I have been demonstrating with started at the place of Ezell Ford’s murder, marched up to the I-110 freeway, and succeeded in blocking it again briefly. Meanwhile, they’re beginning a series of sit-down strategy meetings. We will be there.

From our Atlanta correspondent.

In Atlanta, Black politics is contained by the churches and civil rights officialdom in a way that is very peculiar compared with anywhere else I have lived.

The Black church, along with the culture of Black sororities and fraternities, and the historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), produces the Black middle class and its uniform culture in the South. There is no Caribbean or Latin or African interpenetration as in NYC which internationalizes even Black popular culture.

There is an internalization of white supremacy in Atlanta among many Black people, which is processed as a culture of manners, even “pride.” It can be observed similarly in Alabama or Louisiana. “Success” is to be clean, pressed, and to get a job, and to showcase one’s professional title or resume. To be a reverend or doctor and not tell everyone is peculiar exactly because those associated with such titled people feel uplifted by association. For those who believe in class struggle or the idea that professional classes should be abolished as the embodiment of culture and government will have difficulty grasping the pervasity of this disposition.

At present, there is an almost uniform born-again, personally saved Christianity among African Americans in the South, which is illiterate in any prophetic interpretation of the Bible. It has been replaced by prosperity preaching and a spa disposition which heals and papers over burdens. Of course “chosen” peoples may have a great cost (even their very lives) to “discipleship” but people can never be affirmed if they don’t accept “the proper faith.” Accepting the proper faith, at least for the last couple of generations, means an abdication of the cost. But has racial uplift politics always distorted the cost for those who have been chosen to “succeed”?

While there are some Black Nationalists here broadly defined, nationalism really hasn’t touched the majority of the Black community. Not a nationalism which questioned who is qualified culturally, and who is qualified for full citizenship rights (as limited as these are). “Melting pot” theory, discarded in much of the country as racist, undermining a more thorough cultural pluralism, is still the norm among how youth in Atlanta are educated.

Black Nationalist theologies or engagement with Africa need not be critiques of the Black middle classes. Public Black Nationalist cultural events, broadly defined, rarely get many people. Revolutionary Black Nationalists in Atlanta do not criticize the Black Bourgeoisie in public. The Black United Front, generally a coalition theorized by Black radicals which subordinates themselves to Black Democratic Party politicians, is even more tepid in Atlanta. In Chicago, Detroit, NYC, Newark there are occasional visual ruptures, but not in Atlanta.

Perhaps this is because the Black Democrats owe the Black Nationalists in Northern cities for their ascendancy, at least in the early 1970s, where the Atlanta Democrats owe SCLC and moderate SNCC veterans animated by a corporate spin on Dr. King’s Christian outlook.

Of course there is a whole sector and generation marked by the “sagging pants,” which stands outside Black middle class sentiment and culture. Few in public can defend this sector wielding or subordinating themselves to the politics of respectability. And yet it was out of this sector that Ferguson seems to have erupted. This sector which stands outside respectability politics in Atlanta is waiting to explode. There is an attempt to contain them.

So what happens is the NAACP, SCLC, and surprisingly Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, combined with Jobs with Justice (mostly Teamsters down here, not SEIU), and AFSC/Quakers (most of whom, of course, are not Quakers) spreads money around to invent and contain “protest.” All of these people at their rallies are openly on the phone with the mayor or city council members—they have no shame, it is that direct.

There was “a respectability rally” in response to the first Ferguson wave. That is what church leaders called it. Young people were encouraged to come out wearing suits and graduation caps and gowns to show the police who should not be assaulted. There was a clear indication that some misbehave and get what they deserve. This, as I recall, was sponsored by Dr. King’s church—which is a modern cathedral on the federal goverment burial ground site (across the street from the original more modest location of Ebenezer Baptist Church). The recent tradition of SCLC is that they are the leader of the “moral Monday” coalition, which essentially organizes a united front around the Black-led Democratic Party. There really are no open progressives in this role. Though Nan Grogan (a former Maoist October League leader) is now Nan Orrock and is on the city council as a Democrat. She is one of three white women on the council; there is one white man and one Asian American. About 11 of the 16 council members are African American. There is a “public sector alliance” that claims to be independent of the “moral Monday” coalition, but it doesn’t ring true. Both wish to foist defense of the public sector budget on retreating Black Democrats.

While there have been some local copwatch programs, in the last five years there has been no significant march on the Black mayor, Kasim Reed, for any incident of police brutality in Atlanta. Before being elected, Reed was known publicly for his opposition to same-sex marriage, and defending the late Republican National Committee leader, Lee Atwater, and his place on the board of directors of Reed’s alma mater Howard University.

The previous mayor Shirley Franklin had a close relationship with Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital. But this type of collaboration is easily mystified in this overwhelmingly Democratic city with not one crusading tabloid or efficient bourgeois newspaper. In response to the second wave of Ferguson, various NGOs, some very faintly Stalinist, like Project South, and some new formations sprung up. But they were funded by the Democratic Party. One group was literally called the “Vote Mob,” which was meant to contain hip hop youth.

The political platform associated with Vote Mob is very similar to formulations used by the Democratic Party in the city of Detroit in contrast to the state of Michigan. The police terror state, we are told, is outside the city, in La Grange, in Macon, where black people don’t govern. They mean, in a time of crisis where people have their minds on police brutality, to rally people around the Black mayor and city government naming the enemy as the white-led state government.

There was some “civil disobedience” on the highways around October 22. No more than 100 people. But this was led by youth who intended photo-op arrests, and reports were that nobody was really charged, except one white activist outside the privileged circle. This was the first wave after Ferguson. I spoke to one of the students closely involved, and this was done as part of a formation that was still speaking of “getting out the vote.”

Two faculty members with radical social movement backgrounds spoke with a Georgia State student who participated in the highway action. She had to be disabused of the notion that anarchist provocateurs were out to ruin their action on the highway. Anarchism, as something to fear, was put in their ear. Anarchism, as a political philosophy that desires a stateless form of socialism, she was unfamiliar with.

Shortly afterward, there was a panel at Spelman College on “From Ferguson to Palestine.” Interestingly two professors they asked to come, one who speaks often on CNN, dodged them after initially promising to attend. There were two Palestinian students who were visiting from the West Bank that made outstanding presentations which made plain why nonviolent marches with placards don’t work there—they had videos of them being attacked by sound grenades and gas. They weren’t obstructing anything or menacing anyone. The development on Facebook between Palestinians and Ferguson rebels, advising how to avoid taking in tear gas, was noted.

One Georgia State faculty member who spoke at Spelman made clear the connection between Ferguson and Palestine, in the sense that both Black and Palestinian people are invented as bestial and irrational for resisting brutality. But also that both peoples’ official leaders were dividing their people between respectable and radical politics as a basis for maintaining good relations with President Obama. The point was also made that if you are going to do a Divestment from Israel campaign you have to be prepared to see as the enemy the Black woman university president and the Black mayor. The students will make the proposal, and it will not be granted and then what? The campaign must become a referendum on their legitimacy. This made a noted progressive woman of color professor in the audience uneasy. She was placed there to chaperone and police the new activist youth, interested in Palestine solidarity, at Spelman. The Georgia State speaker antagonized some, but most who attended were comfortable with their presentation. The burnings in response to the lack of indictment in Ferguson, and middle-class Black condemnation, came a week later, confirming the analysis.

Spelman’s student center is named for Bill and Camille Cosby. The politics of manners and respectability are a black patriarchy maintained mostly by middle-class women of color down here who speak of “service.” This ideology of service assumes the privileged nature of the Black middle class. In charity and social work, like Cosby, they are conditioned to work with class — as a social class above, toward the class below them among people of color.

We have yet to see a rally in Atlanta focused on what the Cosby scandal represents but we might. Spelman’s board made a statement minimizing their association with Bill Cosby, aware that if Cosby’s contradictions around respectability politics (and of course his numerous rape accusations) can be connected with political criticism of events of NYC and Ferguson, things could be more explosive. But the main trend in Black politics in Atlanta is “racial uplift” which assumes the unemployed and street force are “damaged.”

After the burnings in Ferguson, the SCLC and NAACP spokespeople and Vincent Fort, a state senator, who has replaced Hosea Williams’s role as the insider/outsider activist-politician from within the ruling elite, gave a speech to contain discontent. There was an official rally by the government courthouses a few days later, to which CNN gave coverage. The demonstration called by official leaders in response to Ferguson had the rally at nighttime, downtown, after rush hour had already dissipated.

In contrast, I heard there were some street uprisings, like in the Vine City and Bankhead neighborhoods, historically (and still) depressed districts before the fall of Jim Crow, this is where some of the most marginal Black people live, who have not been driven out to southern suburbs as a result of gentrification schemes. A relative of Michael Brown may have been visiting and stirring things up informally, but again another church preacher was able to contain and disorient things. For a brief time on the day of the announcement of no indictment in Ferguson, traffic in the downtown-midtown area may have been blocked. But no recognizable groups were leading it and things dissipated quickly.

Right after the burnings in Ferguson, I was on my way to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. I was asked to attend a meeting at Southern University, the HBCU near Louisiana State University, just before Thanksgiving break.

Most HBCUs I have seen, despite their elitist pretentions, are like rural poor high schools. Whatever genuine basis they had of maintaining the best and the brightest during the Jim Crow era is no more, though occasionally a good science program labors in obscurity.

The speaker at Southern University militantly criticized President Obama for his press conference, following the burnings, where he said that the police generally behave professionally and courteously in most cities. Most of the students there found this shocking, though the speaker had no problem keeping their attention.

In Baton Rouge they also have a Black mayor and their newspaper, like most places, is caught up with “black on black” crime.

“I Can’t Breathe” and “Black Lives Matter:” The Crisis in Political Thought

In response to the non-indictment of the police responsible for the death of Eric Garner in New York City, protesters across the nation have elevated the slogans “I Can’t Breathe” and “Black Lives Matter.”

Of course Garner died by chokehold and tried to communicate with his last breaths that he could not breathe. Perhaps thousands of people across the United States are shocked at the outcome of the Garner and Michael Brown case in Ferguson, and are exasperated at what appears to be a miscarriage of justice. Yet upon further consideration, these words on banners and slogans suggest a greater problem.

“Black Lives Matter” is merely an updated version of the 1968 slogan “I Am a Man,” of the Memphis sanitation workers associated with Dr. Martin Luther King. It is an improvement on the notion of men alone embodying human rights. But it is not an enhancement which transcends the problem of civil rights and human rights in normative terms. Civil and human rights strictly speaking are what nation-states promise obedient people. They are temporary privileges which can be recalled to maintain hierarchy and domination at any time.

The new generation of protesters are comfortable with slogans and banners that suggest they do not know exactly what they want.

“Justice” cannot come from a white supremacist system (even run by people of color). It can neither come from a legal system which favors those with a lot of property over those who labor, are unemployed, or those who are marginal and black-market street peddlers.

“Justice” cannot come from state power whose armies and police always act violently to coerce and yet whose domination is rarely said to be debatable or confirmed officially beyond a reasonable doubt or measure of integrity. Or maybe “justice” is all these things after all?

If that is the case, the next development in political thought will minimize cries for “justice” and start having discussions about what social revolution requires.

Uprisings by direct action are always welcome.

The question remains: Where is the popular revolt going? It can never be the subject of easy prediction. It is something those who are insurgent must decide for themselves.

But there are certain things which can be discerned. “Black Lives Matter” is a slogan directed at white racism, white police, and a white-led government. It is an appeal to those who are in charge. What type of people are in charge? What is the basis of their cultural authority? In fact “anti-racism” is the basis of President Obama’s, Attorney General Holder’s, and Mayor de Blasio’s authority—it is something that Obama, Holder, and the hastily added Captain Johnson added to sustain Ferguson’s antiquated overwhelmingly white police force.

This slogan “Black Lives Matter” cannot explain why the majority of police brutality and mass incarceration is carried out by people of color in majority people-of-color cities, or districts with Black mayors and police chiefs, and mostly cops of color. In Atlanta (like Detroit) it is very rare to see a white police officer.

In Stokeley Carmichael’s Black Power (1967), the proposition was placed forward that if Black people could elect their own mayors and police chiefs, police brutality would no longer exist. This was incorrect then (not in hindsight). What type of anti-racist strategies accepted this proposition for decades until President Obama came along to complete this poverty of theory?

We do not live in an era of a “New Jim Crow” (though careerist academics and journalists will come up with anything to sell books) and yet “Black Lives Matter” is not meant to lecture the Black president or Black attorney general.

De Blasio, the white mayor of New York City, has made a statement. The Garner case, whether the grand jury was right or wrong in not indicting the police who killed Garner, is a product of “centuries of racism.” No politician, black or white, can go further than that. It is not a statement which announces that the powers above society will be stepping down (and yet the ruling class paid for and affirm this statesman).

A white representative of the NYC police on CNN flummoxed professors of cultural studies by reminding them that “he can never know what it is to be black.” These vacuous professors did not know what to say or do in response to that—that is normally their cheap throw-away line.

Former Mayor Giuliani, acting like a fascist and arrogant racist, got into a debate with another professor and media pundit Michael Eric Dyson. Giuliani reminded all who would listen that in NYC black police were also present at the scene where Garner was killed and it is “racist” to suggest otherwise. Mr. Giuliani is of course carrying out a foolish agenda to justify state power above society. Dyson called him a “white supremacist”—and Mr. Giuliani is that. But Dyson did not remind his audience that a week before he had argued that Attorney General Holder did a great job in office! Dyson is also one of the “police of color” watching events and making excuses.

Attorney General Holder presided over disproportionate police brutality, mass incarceration, and surveillance of every American and world leader’s communications before Ferguson, and like President Obama, said “nothing”—he then added some throw-away lines that added up to less than that.

Obama and Holder are very concerned, we should be sensitive to the situation, and those who are angry should behave themselves and not act violently. But this moral lecture from a pulpit of bones cannot explain the perennial violence of the armed forces that they preside over. Dyson tried to paper over the fact that in response to white racialism and fascism, he supports the biggest imperial police state the world has ever known. Is he an “activist” voice?

Can we lash out at white supremacy and get out the vote for the President twice? Middle-age hustlers understand what they are doing, but what of our rising youth?

Are those protesting ready to break with the American police state? Can this regime acknowledge that “black lives matter”? Of course they can. That is what human rights rhetoric is all about. It is the progressive and compassionate veil of permanent terror and slaughter.

Those who have taken over the streets, as they have revealed how quickly the law can become irrelevant to the police state, as all of a sudden permits for marches and rallies are no longer necessary when the people by direct action outnumber the police and are furious at them, have some thinking to do.

For those who have never experienced this before, it can be like a prophetic moment of jubilee, where it seems like empires will crumble and chains will be broken. Yet most in the streets, when they say “Black Lives Matter,” do not mean lives in Africa, Asian, Latin America and the Middle East. They are outraged virgins with a sense that this is not supposed to happen in “America.” This is not their grandparents’ “Amerikkka.”

They now face the affirmative action empire with mild slogans directed at a ghost of a white power structure which no longer exists. White supremacy, a system which subordinates the multitudes of people of color still exists, and it is best managed by people of color and perhaps white people who can still convince others they are “nice.”

But those who voted for President Obama understood that both whites and people of color could be “nice” and also be an efficient leader for conquering the entire world. This outlook doesn’t understand the true ethic of policing, the meaning of justice, but if this seemingly perfect storm of events continues, the police (regardless of color) will begin to shoot the protesters down, and the slogans and political thought of ordinary people will again be compelled to take a great leap forward.

Reverend Al Sharpton, on his television program PoliticsNation, collegially discussing Ferguson and New York with police and statesmen, reminded that “there are many police in his activist organization.” It is very difficult to label someone an “Uncle Tom,” “a traitor to the race,” or a disruptive agent of the state when the masses of Black people (and the majority of the United States) voted for President Obama twice on the basis not of his policies, but that he was “bringing Black manhood back” and embodied “respectability.”

The future of a class struggle politics within the United States and among African Americans may be a revolt against respectability politics. “Respectability” is not just racially coded and gender coded. It is a justification for excluding people from access to economic necessities, which a lengthy police record justifies, but also something else.

It is an acceptance that sectors of the human family will never have access to a comfortable living. This is really what “middle class” identity means. This economic outlook (with the accompanying racism) may be “a New Jim Crow” but not how most use the term. This cannot mean protesting a phantom white power structure based on realities of many decades ago. We have to reconsider how African American “racial uplift” politics, whose foundations were crafted before the modern Civil Rights movement, contribute not just to betraying Black people. But how it has become a constituent element of justifying austerity, hierarchy and domination for the entire United States. At first, in the age of Booker T. Washington, it justified austerity, hierarchy, and domination only for the Black masses. Does it still?

“Racial uplift” politics has always been the other side of a mistaken idea that Black people are God’s humanizing agents, or a redeemer people. If African Americans contributed to democratizing American, Western, and world civilization, their contribution to prophetic integration helped sustain the American Constitutional creed of equality among property owners.

Embedded within notions of “jobs and justice” or “no justice, no peace” is an acceptance of an ethnically plural American Exceptionalism that sustains hierarchy and domination. We often forget that Dr. King’s legacy or his “dream” was that he patched up the American empire instead of kicking it while it was down. This is why he received the Nobel Prize in 1964. Some of the other candidates that year included the Shah of Iran and the foreign minister of Belgium.

Further, Atlanta, the city where he was raised, and the Black community which mentored him, though marked by Jim Crow, pioneered corporate anti-racism. This was before King came to prominence and Jim Crow officially began to be dismantled. In light of all this, while we must reconsider post–civil rights political thought, we may also learn something about contemporary problems by studying more closely the origins of the politics of respectability. Without this rethinking the best means to propagate class struggle within anti-racist politics in overwhelmingly Black communities will continue to be obscure.

IN interviewed a long-time Chicago activist.

Have there been any NY-style marches into and through traffic with improvised routes and unexpected turns in Chicago?

Yes—at least five that I’m aware of. When the failure to indict Darren Wilson was announced about 200 Chicagoans marched from police headquarters at 35th and Michigan to Lakeshore Drive, and we confounded the cops by moving from southbound lanes to northbound. They did not know what to do. I left at that point, but observed marchers continuing against traffic all the way downtown. I saw on TV that they continued to block traffic in the Loop later that night.

The next day, I believe it was very young people, college age, again disrupted traffic in the Loop.

A group of about 200, Latina-led, sat down for an extended period in the busiest white/Latino working class area on the Northside.

The Alliance marches on a Saturday blocked the Eisenhower Expressway and Lakeshore Drive again. This latter picked up a significant number of young Black marchers as it wound through Hyde Park.

How involved have you been and what have you noticed?

During Occupy, the open forums allowed me, with the assistance of some young activist friends, to participate in the formation of a left caucus that met about six times and engaged in distinct actions. Without my young friends, I have not been able to accomplish such.

Unlike during Occupy, and when you came to Chicago during Occupy, I have consciously avoided going to demonstrations here in Chicago. I have only been to three and, in those, retreated before the long marches.

So, I’m not in a position to report on the dozens of demonstrations here.

Just a few observations:

1. On Saturday, December 13, during the “Millions March,” Chicago had a comparatively small number of people in the streets, about 300. In New York there were apparently one hundred times that number. But, when the 300, as did the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, blocked the entrance to Nordstrom, the Chicago police snatched and struggled with dozens of demonstrators. And, as seems to be the case around the country, they have a knack for grabbing the Black activists.
2. We have a phenomenon here that is very different from Seattle and “The Bay.” There seems to be unity amongst ethnic groups. Unfortunately that takes the form of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist & Political Repression (The Alliance), largely consisting of Black and professional white organizers demonstrating in mutual harmony for reform: in this case, a civilian review board. A friend just told me on the phone that such a demand can have a revolutionary dimension depending upon the quality of the protest. (I recall that same friend first making that argument in a 1974 meeting—about Russian workers striking over tepid water in the samovar). I am afraid the professional organizers here will be quite happy with a civilian review board and not move from hot water to the Soviets.
3. We seem to have a good number of young Latinas and some Arabs involved in Chicago demonstrations.

What political challenges concern you?

I have never, perhaps since 1969, put much stock in civil disobedience, but even less in mixing modes and roles. Street fighting and civil disobedience are two different things. Further and most immediate and relevant: I believe that if one is going to play the role of street fighter, as in Paris and Tokyo in 1968, then one should go all out: helmets, shields, bats, and a certain degree of clandestinity. This “Oh, we were just protesting. I don’t see how they could arrest us” stuff drives me crazy. And I stay away from engagement with that ilk in Chicago.

An addendum: I realize in the cold unclear light of dawn that I was using “civil disobedience” in part as a term of opprobrium. This comes in part, however, not from my arrogance or “military-bent,,” but the distinction drawn amongst activists over the past 35 between civil disobedience and “direct action.” The latter denotes a certain military aspect: planning, preparation, a specific goal, and perhaps clandestinity. My shtick has to do with the mindset of young militants who may not be fully appreciative of the ramifications of fighting with police. Again, people have to be very clear when they engage in actions whether they are going to peacefully submit to arrest or fight the police. Mixing those results in the worst of both worlds, militarily and politically.

I understand that the massive improvised wandering marches in New York, at times shutting down three bridges, is a new category. But! The question is not one of definition. We can simply call the manifestations: “A,” “B,” and “C,” or whatever. I know you will agree that our role is to assess each and, perhaps even at our age, contribute to enhancing the political content.

Any other thoughts?

Two:

• The Bay Area seems to be almost a different animal: destruction and battling police night after night for about 10 nights.

• I am familiar with the expressway that demonstrators blocked in Miami. I found their doing so one of the more logistically significant actions around the world.

A rebellion first began in early August 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, following the police murder of black teenager Mike Brown. Militant solidarity protests spread across the country, and have since intensified following the non-indictment of the cops who killed Brown (also, Eric Garner in NYC). This wave of protests against the police represents the largest, most radical movement in this country since the 1960s.

This writing will analyze the techniques by which the Philadelphia Police Department (PPD) neutralizes and contains large protests, specifically public rallies and marches against police violence. Up until rather recently, the PPD has not been the most effective in managing resistance movements. During the North Philly rebellion of 1964, for example, every last officer in the city’s police force was needed to suppress the riots, which lasted several days.

The crowd-control and counter-insurgency strategies of the PPD are much different today even from just 15 years ago. During the protests against the Republican National Convention in 2000, the police not only infiltrated protest groups, but attacked protesters for simply taking the streets, and arrested hundreds at a time. This led to a media backlash which framed the police as violent and unrestrained. This was under the leadership of then–Police Commissioner John Timoney. However, a major strategic shift has taken place under the leadership of current Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey, who now leads President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.

When it comes to policing large protests, Ramsey tries to emphasize containment over direct confrontation. Rather than opposing the protests and trying to disrupt them, the strategy of containment aims to work with them, in order to better control them and prevent their radicalization. This was the policing strategy during most of the Occupy Philly protests in 2011, where the police avoided major arrests up until the very end. Police violence can radicalize people and make them more defiant of authority. That’s why Ramsey and other police leaders prefer to avoid open conflict if possible. This strategic approach to policing radical protests is gaining ground in police departments across the country.

A number of other cities have followed the lead of Ferguson, with street fights against the police, property destruction, looting, de-arresting protesters, occupying police stations, and disrupting major highways. However, in Philadelphia, for the most part, disruptive protest tactics have not been very popular, even as the police continue to brutalize black people with impunity (most recently, Brandon Tate-Brown). This is not to say that there haven’t been any direct action tactics here. There have been some. Early on, when the protests first began in Philly in late August in response to the murder of Mike Brown, there was a “Fuck the Police” march in West Philly. During the march, protesters threw trash cans into the street, balloons filled with paint were thrown at a cop car, and two protesters were quickly arrested. In another example in late November, following the non-indictment of the cop who murdered Mike Brown, protesters in center city attempted to take the major highway I-95, but were prevented from doing so by the police, and two were arrested. In the past few weeks, there was an unsuccessful attempt to take the highway in center city, and some anti-police graffiti was put up in West Philly. Why are militant protests in Philly not more widespread? For one, the PPD is a very large, well funded, and very effective organization. The PPD has nearly 7,000 officers for a population of almost 1.5 million. Compared to other urban areas, this is a lot of police, even for a major city. Phoenix has a higher population than Philly, 1.6 million, yet the Phoenix Police Department comprises only 3,000 officers, that is, less than half the amount of the PPD. In another example, the New York Police Department has about 35,000 officers, but for a population of 8.4 million. Another very important factor is the PPD’s containment strategy. When protests take place, the PPD arrive beforehand in large numbers which sometimes match those of the protesters, occupy strategic points in the streets, and closely follow the crowd with a loose police net (not a literal net, but a net of police bodies, ready to make arrests). Rather than antagonizing the protesters, as happened during the RNC in 2000, the protests are allowed to take place within reach of the police net (as occured during Occupy). Meanwhile the police guide the crowd, block off the entrances to any major highways or important buildings, and closely monitor the protesters. Regardless of how radical and inflammatory the rhetoric is, no matter how much militant posturing takes place, as long as protesters don’t block major highways, occupy buildings, or destroy capitalist property, then the police will avoid direct confrontation. However, if protesters do engage in disruptive tactics, then the police net tightens, and a snatch squad closes in to makes arrests, if not right away, then later on. It is very difficult, and takes considerable organization, to escape from within a police net after employing radical protest tactics.

With the police containment strategy, the capitalist state represses political challenges to its power, but also directly prevents such challenges from even taking place. The very threat of immediate arrest is often enough to prevent direct action tactics from happening. However, it is not enough to simply wield the baton. The Philadelphia police also attempt to win the hearts and minds of the protesters, which is often a much more effective method of policing. Specialized political police, the Civil Affairs Unit, attempt to form bonds with the more moderate protesters, especially those which are quick to throw the more radical ones under the bus. Using their relationship with moderate protest leaders, Civil Affairs officers often physically guide the direction of protests as they take the streets, and make sure that they stay within the purview of the police net. Of course, if protesters get out of hand, Civil Affairs will work with the regular cops to make arrests.

More important than the power of the PPD and the effectiveness of their containment strategy, the main factor behind the lack of confrontational tactics in the Philly protests is the lack of a revolutionary political culture. Although the city was home to very radical movements and struggles in the past (Abolitionists, the IWW’s Local 8, Revolutionary Action Movement, Black Liberation Army, etc.), today there is no revolutionary tendency willing to directly attack state power. There are elements in Philly which could form the embryo of future insurgent struggles, but they have yet to make their appearance outside of the small examples described above.

In recent years, nationally publicized racial murders (e.g., Trayvon Martin) sparked small protests in Pittsburgh, usually located in the Downtown area or in black neighborhoods like East Liberty or the Hill District. Local injustices, like the brutal beating of high schooler Jordan Miles, also garnered similar small protest movements.

In Pittsburgh, we’ve now witnessed a larger scale and broader social composition to protests against racist police violence.

On Wednesday, December 3, a small demonstration took place at the University of Pittsburgh. This looked very much like the usual small-scale (50–60 people) demonstration that might take place on Pitt’s main campus.

However, a Friday, December 5 protest in Oakland, a central Pittsburgh neighborhood and the site of Pitt’s main campus, easily exceeded 500 people. The protest started at 5 pm with people overflowing Schenley Plaza (a typical meeting place for student protests). At 6, the protesters broke off from intermittently standing in the road with signs and giving speeches and went into a full march. One comrade contends that this was planned, but it certainly wasn’t cleared with city officials. The crowd simply took to the streets and forced the police to react. The cops redirected traffic, and didn’t seem to take any action against the march. The march shut down traffic in Oakland, which is a main artery. What’s more, the march went down onto the freeway (376), blocking incoming traffic to downtown Pittsburgh. The same chants you’ve heard at other demos around the country on the Brown/Garner killings could be heard echoing through the air.

Friday, December 12: March beginning in East Liberty at 6 pm. Marches through mainly African American neighborhoods to Zone 5 Police Station, and demonstrates in front of station to protest for dismissal of a Police Officer (Dervish) who shot and paralyzed a young, unarmed black teenager (Leon Ford) in 2012. Leon Ford was at the demonstration, but was under a gag order and not permitted to speak.

These protests have been composed of university students (many black and white students), some intelligentsia types (lawyers, professors), and a heavily involved Black middle class (including a few black, Democratic politicians). The white working class has a very small presence. The black working class has a slightly larger presence (particularly during the march through East Liberty). Black working-class support for the marches is extremely high—in the march through East Liberty people were out on porches cheering marchers on, drivers were honking and screaming their support (even when the marchers were blocking them from getting to where they needed to go).

Some organizations whose involvement we must note:

• Alliance for Police Accountability: A small group of mainly African American activists that originally organized around the Leon Ford case, which had much less clout and notoriety before the Ferguson protests.
• Students for Police Accountability: A student wing of the Alliance for Police Accountability; far more moderate, less angry, seemingly less immediately affected by the issues at hand.
• Fight Back Pittsburgh: Remnants of the Occupy Movement in Pittsburgh. Mix of liberals, anarchists, and ISO cronies.
• Party for Socialism and Liberation: Seems to have gained a few members in Pittsburg; has been very active in organizing meetings and marches (the other Marxist-Leninist vanguardists—IMT and ISO—are far less active); trying to make the protests into larger demonstrations against “imperialist racism” at home and abroad; the Stalinist PSL was very active in Ferguson as well, much like their Maoist rivals, the RCP.

Conclusion: Overall, one important positive outcome is that people from different parts of the Pittsburgh community (which is geographically, economically, and culturally very segregated) have started to engage in dialogue, and at least are in proximity to each other, protesting together. Potential outcomes are highly uncertain. Some of the key organizers want to keep momentum going at least up until Martin Luther King Day. Yet it could easily lose steam, and the types of dialogues that have started may disintegrate. It mostly depends on how events outside of Pittsburgh (particularly in Ferguson and NYC) play out.

A big question to ponder here is why events in Ferguson and NYC (unlike the Zimmerman acquittal) generated so much outrage and active public support in Pittsburgh and elsewhere. I think each member of our group could offer different valid answers to that question.

Tonight, December 8, Lebron James came through on his promise to wear an “I Can’t Breathe” T-shirt during the warm-ups before the Cavaliers game with the Brooklyn Nets at the Barclay Center in Brooklyn. At the same game, the so-called royal couple, Prince and Princess whatever, came to see King James play. Unfortunately, he had said he was honored by their wanting to see him play. My guess is that he doesn’t understand that he’s earned his title but they haven’t. But we’ll leave that aside for more important news.

Before the Cavalier-Nets game began, a crowd of perhaps a thousand people had gathered in the plaza in front of the Barclay Center. They were packed closely together and had come up with what I think is a new chant: “Eric Garner, Michael Brown! Shut it Down!” People wanting to go to the game had to work their way through the crowd of protesters.

A bit after seven o’clock, the group began to walk in a circle in front of the arena—still on the sidewalk. In an odd encounter, a woman journalist with a European accent, and an accompanying camera person, asked me why I was there and if it had anything to do with the “royal” couple. I was not quite as prepared as I should have been but managed to say something about how I was as opposed to royalty in England as I was to the killing of young black men in the United States.

But my response didn’t matter. For, as if out of nothing, a couple of hundred people were walking down Flatbush Avenue and, as they were noticed, hundreds more followed them. The group marched just a short distance to the intersection of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues and stopped. After a few minutes of standing in place, several of the apparent organizers began shouting, in what I believe to be the softest shouts that I have ever heard, that people should start walking in circles around the now completely blocked intersection. Within thirty seconds, everyone started doing so. And they continued to do so for about twenty minutes—effectively creating an oasis of peace and quiet in the middle of what is the central intersection of Brooklyn.

Brooklyn does not have a Times Square but, if it did, it would be the intersection of Flatbush Avenue and Atlantic Avenue—Flatbush Avenue runs for miles from the foot of the Manhattan Bridge in downtown Brooklyn to the Gil Hodges Bridge to the Rockways and Atlantic Avenue runs for miles from the edge of Brooklyn Heights to East New York, close to Kennedy Airport. If you want to stop traffic in Brooklyn, you stop it at that intersection. And people stopped it tonight! Indeed, if you want to stop Brooklyn, you do it there. But, so far as I know, no one ever did it before tonight.

A couple of weeks ago, I spoke on a panel about “The Hunger Games and Revolution.” While I spoke, I read some passages from the books. In one instance, I read the thoughts of Katniss Everdeen (the young heroine of the books and movies) when she looked out upon the people of District 12:

I stand there, feeling broken and small, thousands of eyes trained on me. There’s a long pause. Then, from somewhere in the crowd, someone whistles Rue’s four-note mockingjay tune. The one that signaled the end of the workday in the orchards. The one that means safety in the arena. By the end of the tune, I have found the whistler, a wizened old man in a faded red shirt and overalls. Hie eyes meet mine.

What happens next is not an accident. It is too well executed to be spontaneous, because it happens in complete unison. Every person in the crowd presses the three middle fingers of their left hand against their lips and extends them to me. It’s a sign from District 12, the last good-bye I gave Rue in the arena.

What has been happening across the United States and even across the world in these last few weeks is “not an accident. It is too well executed to be spontaneous, because it happens in complete unison.” It suggests the beginnings of a new tomorrow. Tonight outside the Barclay Center was another small moment in that beginning.

First message:

I’m not on the ground so I can’t get a tangible feel for the Ferguson aftermath. What I can see from afar is a huge reactionary backlash, with people putting up “I stand with Darren Wilson” signs on their Facebook pages, comments on all the mainstream and even some liberal and libertarian sites being dominated by people “defending” Darren Wilson and spewing tons of race hate. The Oathkeepers have mobilized volunteers from around the United States for property defense in Ferguson in collaboration with the local multiracial petty bourgeoisie, and the KKK is actively recruiting in all of the surrounding areas. Plus the local and state police have mobilized actual military units in police drag, along with the National Guard. I’m not sure what the positives are. That downtrodden people are out in the streets acting out of sheer desperation? That leftist ambulance chasers are sweeping in to promote Bob Avakian? Jill Stein, of the Green Party, talking about “full and fair investigations”? The French foreign minister and Chinese, Sri Lankan and Iranian media getting in jibes that America needs to “look at itself before it points the finger at others”? That the petty-bourgeois black nationalist whiners like Sharpton and Jackson are giving speeches about voting and putting black people in police uniforms? Where’s the way forward? Where is the connection being made to a path toward socialism? Or even a mention that the police serve the role of defenders of bourgeois rule and don’t need to just be reformed, fixed, trained or integrated, but abolished? Any sympathy or solidarity strikes or labor actions of any kind? Maybe some would say this can help further disillusionment in Obama and “black faces in high places” among black people and liberals but, on the other side of it, major right-wing talking heads are steadily pushing the lie that these protests are secretly driven by an anti-American Obama-Holder radical black cabal (!). Then there’s terrible shit like., this with counter protests against “the little thugs.”

But like I said, I’m not on the ground. Maybe you have some positive info that would change my outlook. My early optimism for Occupy quickly turned to pessimism that turned out to be much more warranted.

Second message:

From what I’ve seen from non-political people, this is probably right.

Though his “95 percent” is probably more accurately stated as 95 percent of white people since America is about 12 percent black.

Leftists have a habit of looking at protests and telescoping what they see out to the population at large. Some leftists were convinced that Occupy was the start of a huge turning point but, at its height, it had the support of somewhere around 30 percent of the population while 45 percent opposed it according to polls. And now where is it?

This has more potential since it goes to the core of life for millions of people but I haven’t seen anything but the same old protest tactics and the same old protest leaders, not to mention the huge reactionary backlash that seems to go unnoticed. Not counting the marginalized RCP USA and Marcyite ambulance chasers, I haven’t heard a demand more radical than “more blacks in the police force” or “no more armed personnel carriers for police.”

I’d love to be wrong.

Read this to the end, seems to reflect what I thought.

Third message:

I have been keeping up with events there as well as I can considering where I am. A problem with “left communism” that I’ve seen since I started bouncing around it in 2008 or so is that it is so small. Because of this I think some forces and individuals are warmly welcomed when they come anywhere near it, even if their actual politics are totally off. There’s certainly a need for dialogue with people who may be “coming around” but there’s also a danger of opportunism and watering things down out of the desperation to make contacts.

This whole thing doesn’t look so promising to me, and I’ve been known to overestimate movements.

Obviously this is a huge issue that goes to the heart of American society, and this is the biggest rupture around it since the LA Riots of 1992. I remember a huge reactionary backlash against those events then and I see similar things now.

Despite the protests, I see a lot of backlash now. The shooting of the two cops in Brooklyn really helps this. Racist groups are apparently using all of this to recruit across the country and having a lot of success. The media is up in arms about the usual “burning their own businesses” and “looting.” How many times have they talked about “thugs” and marijuana smoke in the crowds? All the old ugly shit is coming back into the mainstream, albeit under sanitized terms (“urban,” “ghetto,” “thug” replaces the old racist terminology thanks to political correctness, but the underlying ideology remains). It really lifts the veil on decades of liberal identity politics, diversity, inclusion, post-racial, whatever-the-fuck.

On the protest side, we see many (but not all, or perhaps even a majority of) black people. That can be expected. Beyond them, we see some liberal protesters, some libertarians (who have made all sorts of arguments that this is not a race issue but one of “militarized police,” a “rising police state,” and a “loss of rights”). The usual fake-Marxist ambulance chasers are also there, including the presence of Bob Avakian’s cult in full force. But in all of this there hasn’t been any real connection to the class struggle that I can see.

The liberals are great at redirecting and actually using issues like this to drive the fabricated wedge between “races” even wider. It’s like the feminists who make men the enemy, thus alienating half of society. It was great to see Sharpton get booed when he pushed his get-out-the-vote shit to angry crowds, but any “split” seems to go towards more doomed liberal tactics. The soft end is pushing a vote for more Democrats and black faces in high places. The “hard” end is only pushing for the same kind of shit we’ve already been through like “community control and oversight,” “federal investigations,” “community policing,” justice through the courts, racist individual cops, etc. Short memory, absence of other ideas, absence of any kind of working class movement to assert itself and its tactics, or something more sinister?

Who is making the connection to capitalist society and the development of capitalism in the United States? Who is identifying the police as the armed apparatus of the state, a force that can’t be reformed to help workers and black people in the lower classes since its very purpose is to enforce the rule of the capitalist class? No one I see except for the usual small Trotskyist sects like the Spartacist League that are so ignored that they might as well not exist.

Plus the protests are oriented to “consumers.” Disrupting Christmas shopping sounds like some AdBusters shit. What’s the goal? To guilt people who work hard all year into not enjoying the longest holiday they have, something most look forward to all year? Liberal, “vote with your feet,” commercial boycotts, etc. Is there any connection being made to class struggle? Not that I see, though who knows what could be done in such an absence of open struggle anyway. You mentioned a connection with the part-time fast food workers. That has great potential if it can get beyond the grasp of professional “labor organizers” who thus far seem to be the ones in charge.

The organized labor movement is shit as we know. Even as some labor lieutenants were being pushed to the left by events, the police unions they welcomed into their federations long ago pooh-poohed any attempt to do anything remotely radical. Apparently, 1199 and the UFT were attacked for planning to protest against their “brothers and sisters” in the PBA at a demo in Staten Island. The matter was resolved by the union leaders who got the fence wedged nicely up their asses and handed out signs that said “Support NYPD, Oppose Police Brutality.”

The most promising connection I’ve seen anywhere is perhaps the adaptation of the “black lives matter” slogan by poor Afro-Colombians all the way in South America. They’ve picked up the slogan in poor Afro-Colombian areas including the Southwest coastline where a wave of protests and a general strike broke out earlier this year over decidedly political issues like healthcare, education, exploitation of local resources with nothing going to the local population, etc Who knows how much potential this has, but at least issues there have been approached from a rudimentary class position?

The biggest tragedy in the United States is that all this outrage may amount to nothing more than the release of some steam, with sections of the ruling class applauding it here and scolding it there, but nothing really changing. The murders go on as the protests increase for fuck’s sake. Cleveland, New York, etc. Plus.one of the most major attacks on the working class in the United States in my lifetime (if not THE most major attack) has taken place with almost no one taking notice

There are more black people involved here. Makes sense to me. It’s an issue of black people being locked up, beat down and killed. Rather than the participation of so many black people being a positive and nothing more, I see it as indicative of the way the race divide has been used. First, races were pitted against each with racism, i.e., we are all different and so we can’t live together; then the liberals came along and “redid” the split by pushing “diversity,” i.e., we are all different but we should live together. We’re still different you see, we’re still “others” and “apart.” Class? What’s that? Occupy was mostly white. This is mostly black. Seems the class is greatly fragmented. Where’s the class struggle that can supersede the artificial race divide like we’ve seen in big multi-racial working class struggles in the past?

Or maybe (even hopefully), I’m wrong and this could really lead somewhere. Maybe that’s why the media and bourgeois bobble heads are using the killing of the two cops in NY as an excuse to restrict, reroute and even end the protests. People are being arrested for posting really abstract anti-police slogans on the Internet. Preventative measures, using an excuse to crack down, or do they know something I don’t? Not to mention the open chasm this has opened between police and governors, mayors, and even the president.

The question goes—what happened to the class struggle? Is it in a lull or has so much production been outsourced that it has simply “relocated”? Asia has been a real hot box since I’ve moved here, and even before that. From reading the Western press, even from the left groups, this isn’t being paid much attention to.

For an academic work, this is a quite good, fact-packed, but flawed, book about a militant strike in the United States, the Detroit newspaper strike of 1995–2000, which took place during a generally bleak decade for class struggle. Clowns such as Bill Clinton’s then–Labor Secretary Robert Reich openly wondered whether unions still had a role in the much touted, “entrepreneurial,” (and now happily forgotten) “new economy” of the dot.com bubble. One must, of course, be wary of a book plugged by Kate Bronfenbrenner, who runs Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, and for whom Rhomberg’s book shows why “worker-community solidarity and filing legal challenges are no longer enough to win strikes.” That is indeed what Rhomberg’ s book shows, but ultimately not for reasons Bronfenbrenner, or perhaps Rhomberg himself, is about to discuss in a book pitched to a respectable audience of labor academics, labor lawyers and trade unionists. Another flashing yellow light is an endorsement by labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein, who in 1995 lent his voice to the bubbly enthusiasm among “progressive academics” for newly-elected and ultimately hapless AFL-CIO president John Sweeney.

Rhomberg, as he shows in this book and in an earlier work on Oakland, California entitled No There There1 , is anything but naive. His historical portrait of post-1945 Detroit, as background to the strike, is an almost textbook case of the race-class dynamic in America. Detroit, coming out of the mass CIO strikes of the 1930s and 1940s, was the American union town par excellence; in 1945, 60 percent of the population belonged to a union or was related to a union member. Yet, at the very height of the 1943 wildcat strikes in auto, against the no-strike pledge, Detroit was also torn apart by race riots in which 34 people died—17 of them blacks killed by police. The post-war era saw little respite, with white opposition to integrated housing an ongoing reality.2 White flight to the suburbs began in the 1950s and, as early as 1958, there were 25 new suburban auto plants; that flight accelerated after the 1967 riots in which 43 people were killed. By 1990, 2.9 million people, 95 percent white, lived in a suburban ring, surrounding a hollowed-out city of less than one million, majority black people and shuttered factories. (Contemporary propaganda blaming “overpaid auto workers” for the current devastation of Detroit is naturally silent on this dynamic.).

Militant late 1960s actions by the League of Revolutionary Black Workers had forced auto companies to hire black foremen and also forced the United Auto Workers (UAW) to hire black staff.3 In 1973, Detroit elected its first black mayor, Coleman Young, who remained in office for 20 years. The decline, however, was relentless: Detroit in 1950 had 1.8 million people and 300,000 manufacturing jobs; by 2000, 62,000 such jobs remained within the city. Following the 1967 riots, a much-trumpeted attempt to remake the dying downtown area, where unrented commercial space abounded, was a failure; it featured the ill-fated “Renaissance Center,” which lost $130 million in its first five years. By 1982, 250,000 auto workers had lost their jobs; 42 auto-related companies closed between 1978 and 1981 alone. Membership in the UAW fell by nearly half, from 1.5 million in the late 1970s to 800,000 by the late 1990s.

(A more up-to-date, undoubtedly ill-fated, renewal attempt is underway today, focused on the renovating powers of the so-called “creative classes”—yuppies—a renovation which of course offers nothing to the remaining long-term, overwhelmingly black residents except higher rents and further marginalization.)

The 1990s had also seen a small “rebirth” in the pathetic (and not only in Detroit) “post-industrial” turn to casinos and sports arenas.As background to the dynamics of the strike, Rhomberg provides interesting material on the history of the newspaper in the United States, tracing out the demise of the small town paper as well as of the multi-paper urban press; as early as 1960, 90 percent of newspapers had no local competitor. Total US daily circulation peaked in 1974 at 63 million and fell to 55.8 million by 2000. Detroit by the 1990s still had two papers, the News and the Free Press . In contrast to many of the “suburbs in search of a city” that had grown up in the Sun Belt in the postwar era, Detroit’s papers were rooted in gritty urban realities and by the very nature of Detroit provided labor coverage long after most big urban dailies had closed down their labor beats and were covering strikes primarily in terms of inconvenience to the “consumer.” By the mid-1990s, the News and the Free Press were the ninth and tenth largest newspapers in the United States, and still had strong ties in what remained of the local community. But they were hardly immune to the larger trends; in the 1970s and 1980s, technology eliminated more than half the jobs, wages fell by 25 percent, and finally the News and Free Press were forced to merge.

The 1990s were not as strike-free as they might have seemed in the hangover of the 1989–91 recession and the deceptive glitz of the Clinton years. Coal miners in Pittston, Virginia, had fought off an attempt to shred their UMW contract in 1989–90; the New York Daily News was also struck in 1990, as was Colt Firearms in Hartford, Connecticut; under duress, beleaguered unions were making more serious attempts at community outreach, as in SEIU’s Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles. In spite of all the downsizing, there were still 600,000 union members in southeastern Michigan in 1995, creating a broad base of sympathy, rooted in the history of the region, which would have been available to strikers in few other American cities. In 1997, around the time that the militant actions of the Detroit newspaper strikers had been rerouted into years of ultimately futile (and predictable) NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) and court proceedings, the Teamsters struck UPS nationwide for two weeks, one of the few winning strikes of significance against a backdrop of general rout. The UPS strikers won wage increases and the conversion of 10,000 part timers to full time, while holding the line on pensions, with very strong and visible support from the “public,” i.e., a good part of the working class which was reeling from nearly two decades of rollback.

One of the more arresting parts of Rhomberg’s book is his detailed description of how the management of the News and Free Press prepared for the 1995 strike for two full years in advance, far more carefully than the unions, spending $2 million in the process. Rhomberg frames his overall analysis in terms of a clash between a declining set of labor-management relations left over from the New Deal and the new open season on workers that took off in the 1980s, where management simply walked away from the “broken table.” Such a framing, while obviously of some validity, overlooks a long history, from the mid-1950s at the latest, of wildcat strikes and rank-and-file revolts,4 quite outside any postwar “accord.” But let that go for the moment. The fusion of the Gannett ( News ) and Knight-Ridder ( Free Press ) managements into the Detroit Newspaper Association (DNA) had brought on hardball tactics of a kind for which the multiple unions under contract with the two papers were ill prepared.5 The DNA carefully studied the two-week strike of the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner, involving 2600 workers in 1994. They enlisted Huffmaster, Inc., a private strike security firm. They cultivated ties with the police department of suburban Sterling Heights, where a new printing plant was located. (While there was a still more modern plant in Detroit itself, management felt that their strikebreaking activities would be poorly received in Detroit proper, and that the plant would be harder to defend.) Their goals were a much greater use of merit pay in the newsroom, elimination of overtime in the already downsized pressroom, replacing full-time with part-time staff in the mailroom (organized by the Teamsters), and further restructuring of the circulation department, whose work force had already been reduced by 80 percent since the previous contract. Even though the papers had turned a profit of $55 million the previous year, management was out to impose a “far more wrenching change” on the various unions involved. Plans for security guards, quasi-military equipment and blueprints for the Sterling Heights Police Department (SHPD) were worked out down to the smallest detail, such as providing hot meals for scabs on the job. The SHPD contacted police forces in the San Francisco Bay Area to learn more about the Chronicle-Examiner strike. The police were informed by DNA management that “a strike was likely, that it would be violent, and that the SHPD would need to develop anti-riot capacity.” Police trained in the use of riot gear outside Sterling Heights City Hall. In contrast to previous contract negotiations, sensing that new printing technology put them even more on the defensive, the unions did show unity against a management strategy to pick them off one by one. But as in other US strikes of the 1980s and 1990s, the Detroit newspaper unions, organized in the Metropolitan Council of Newspaper Unions (MCNU) were still trapped in the mindset of the superannuated postwar “accord,” such as it had been. Headed by chief negotiator John Jaske, the DNA stunned the unions with its opening offer, which amounted to a demand for almost total surrender. On April 30, 1995, contracts covering 2,500 employees expired. The DNA was partially successful in breaking the front of the several unions involved, and set a June 30 deadline for settling the contracts. As things moved inexorably toward a strike, hundreds of potential scabs (my word; Rhomberg’s terminology is more polite) “were being housed in hotels and motels across southeastern Michigan.” Prior to the strike deadline, the DNA offered most of the unions 10–11 percent wage increases over the three years of the contracts, but with so many clauses undermining the old relationships on the job that, as one member put it, “when it’s all over with, we’re not going to have enough membership to survive.”

On July 13, the unions struck. Given the DNA’s superior bargaining position and two years’ preparation, “for the newspapers, the striking employees were now perhaps little more than a problem of waste disposal, a hazard to be controlled.”

The unions organized in the MCNU did everything they were “supposed to do,” according to the long-superseded script of post-World War II “labor relations.”They got considerable material support from other unions in the region, especially the UAW; they organized a boycott of the two papers; subscriptions were cancelled, most newsstands stopped carrying both the News and the Free Press and circulation plummeted. Many businesses pulled their advertising. Many local politicians and religious leaders implored the DNA to come to its senses and restore the happy family of the status quo ante. There was picketing throughout the region, breaking down old professional and craft divisions among the strikers and broader parts of what Rhomberg problematically calls “civil society,” in a bow to post-Marxist academic jargon. (One presumes that calls for solidarity strikes in other sectors, which was never attempted, is not part of the vocabulary of “civil society.”) The AFL-CIO got into the act, and even then-President Bill Clinton “ordered his executive staff members to decline interviews” with the struck papers. Despite the excessive heat and storms of a Midwest summer, the unions managed to establish 24-hour pickets at far-flung sites. Most strikers, unfortunately, ran through savings fairly quickly and within a few months, the already-low union strike benefits were exhausted; strikers began seeking and sometimes finding other jobs for the duration.

One key factor in management strategy, which had already proved decisive in otherstrikes of the new era, was the 1938 Mackay decision by the United States Supreme Court allowing struck employers to use “replacement workers” (i.e., scabs) who could become permanent employees after the settlement, unless the NLRB ruled that “unfair labor practices” had provoked the strike. Mackay had rarely been invoked in the three decades of the postwar “accord” but was increasingly dusted off during long strikes, as in the “three strikes” of 1993–95 in Decatur, Illinois.6 Even militant post-1980 strikes, (in contrast to pre-New Deal “good old union tactics”) that stop short of physically preventing scabs from working, have been and continue to be defeated as long as workers, contained within the legalistic union framework, continue to play by the old rules. To break with those rules, as the Detroit strikers on occasion did, would mean breaking with a New Deal legal structure that, among other things, bans strikes (i.e., wildcats) during the life of a contract, and also means breaking with the union apparatus that enforces rules drawn up and approved by the class enemy. Immediately, the News and the Free Press had 500 scabs at work, including many flown in from other cities from elsewhere in the Gannett and Knight-Ritter newspaper chains. Some scabs received a $750 weekly bonus and slept and were fed on site; others were housed in dormitories and bussed in. Guards escorted the distribution trucks. Scab carriers were given cars, cell phones and beepers; the DNA “rented six hundred cars, occupied one thousand hotel rooms, and put nine thousand cellular phones into use.”

The workers and their allies struck back. “Vandals,” according to Rhomberg, damaged two thousand newspaper racks per week. All in all, however, the DNA “never missed a day of delivery,” however thinned down the papers were. Picketing at the Sterling Heights plant immediately led to violent confrontations with police and security guards, as the latter periodically opened gates for trucks to enter and exit. Strikers followed these trucks, and security guards followed these strikers, ramming cars and forcing them off the road. Thugs from the Huffmaster security services “verbally and physically taunted” strikers to the point of irritating the Sterling Heights police; Huffmeister thugs went to strikers’ homes to harass them, enough so that the DNA had to terminate them in early August. Large Saturday night pickets at the printing plant, intended to stop delivery of the Sunday edition, were attacked by police, with arrests and serious injuries. According to one estimate, the DNA was spending $600,000 a day in the early weeks to defeat the strike. The Knight-Ridder owners of the Free Press had had a more laid-back management style than the Gannett owners of the News ; in 1994, the Free Press had even criticized the defeat in Congress of a bill forbidding the use of “replacement workers.” By early August, 1995, however, Free Press management issued an ultimatum, threatening to use just such scabs, and by late August 40 percent of newsroom employees had crossed the picket lines and returned to work. The Free Press also criticized the unity of the unions which “yoked” reporters and other “professional” employees to solidarity with, God forbid, the Teamsters, and invoked such “class” distinctions in personal phone calls to strikers, with some (but by no means complete) success in getting people to cross the picket lines. By the end of August, the Free Press as well was hiring one new scab a day.

The ante was upped as both papers began calling the scabs “permanent replacement workers.” Newly-hired Vance security personnel increasingly replaced the weary Sterling Heights police (some of whom were friends and relatives of the strikers) at the plant gates, fully provided with riot helmets and bullet-proof vests. On the Labor Day weekend, a nearby rally of three thousand joined four hundred pickets at the plant gate, ultimately countered by reinforcements from twenty suburban police departments. In the early hours of September 3, a full-blown battle ensued as the strikers and their supporters rained bricks, bottles and picket signs on trucks attempting to leave the plant. The DNA countered with a convoy of semi-tractortrailer trucks attempting to ram another gate. Only the following morning, when the crowd had dwindled, did trucks manage to leave the plant. On Labor Day itself, Monday September 4, “big labor” brought in its heavy artillery, including then–AFL-CIO president Tom Donahue and his soon-to-be successor John Sweeney, then president of SEIU. Other luminaries were left Democratic Congressman John Conyers and the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. (Such spectacles, however well intended some of the participants may be, are usually a symptom that a struggle is losing momentum.) These luminaries led a march of 5,000 people. This peaceful mobilization of the left wing of the establishment did not prevent a battle involving three hundred pickets at the Sterling Heights plant that night, when they were attacked by police using batons and pepper spray, to which the pickets responded with sticks, rocks and ultimately five-inch steel rods found nearby. One striker, Ben Solomon, was “gassed, beaten, arrested and detained” and later hit with multiple charges, along with fifteen others. (Many years later, in 2000, after the defeat, Solomon won $2.5 million for punitive damages.)

The following weekend, two thousand pickets kept the plant shut for ten hours, after which the DNA brought in helicopters, managing to take out only one-fourth of the Sunday edition. At 4 AM, a caravan of tractor trailers exited the plant, some at considerable speed; there were, however, only a few minor injuries to pickets. Three days later, a judge issued an injunction restricting pickets to ten at the main plant entrance. This anticipated move nonetheless back-footed the union leaders, who claimed it was not clear how many people were willing to risk an escalation of possible fines and jail sentences.7 The decision to halt mass picketing as a result of the injunction provoked some serious opposition from rank-and-file militants; Rhomberg does not mention this,8 nor does he mention that both the recent Pittston strike of 1989–90 and a more recent Teamsters strike in 1994 had defied injunctions and won. Whatever its limitations and its immersion in exactly the New Deal “accord” touted by Rhomberg, the CIO in the 1930s was itself built by defying court injunctions.9 The unions instead fell back on their “corporate campaign” strategy of circulation and advertising boycotts, and pickets went to distribution centers around the city. The DNA ultimately lost $90 million in the first six months of the strike, but they had shown a willingness to escalate by “any means necessary,” an escalation the unions and their rank-and-file were, for better or for worse, unwilling and/or unable to match.

Rhomberg regrets the demise of the New Deal order, which “served to steer the actors toward a peaceful, negotiated settlement.” Again, he forgets a bit quickly the “dark underside” of that order, as in the showcase union, the UAW, where management granted wages increases and benefits while taking full day-to-day control of the shop floor, where banned wildcat strikes increasingly became the main practical alternative to a slow, ineffective grievance procedure and where the shop steward increasingly became a cop enforcing the contract against his or her own base. This dichotomy had erupted into plain sight as early as 1955 when Walter Reuther, then head of the UAW, came back from “Big Three” negotiations with what he thought was a great contract for wages and benefits, only to be stunned by wildcat strikes across the Midwest in response. This same downsized UAW had also not lifted a finger during the mass layoffs in the auto industry of the 1980s and 1990s, part of the general employer offensive of which the Detroit newspaper strike was one example. Neither does Rhomberg say much about the large sectors of the work force which had been specifically omitted from “peaceful, negotiated settlements,” starting with farm labor; for an author otherwise attentive to a race and class problematic, he does not mention other ways in which New Deal labor law had been written to remain virtually a dead letter in the Jim Crow South in order to keep the “Dixiecrats” within the New Deal coalition. The increased use of “permanent replacements” after 1980 under “Mackay” accelerated; in more than 300 strikes, “walkouts last an average of 217 days when permanent replacements were used”; 46 percent of “contract negotiations involving major violence” involved the use of such scabs. All this, of course, undermined workers’ legal right to strike, as enshrined in the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. Permanent replacement workers—scabs—increase management’s incentive to go to the mat in order to get rid of the previous work force; one Knight-Ridder spokesman said in October 1995 that the cost of the strike “would be recouped in long-term savings from operating with a smaller and more efficient workforce.” (A Detroit regional NLRB did later rule that DNA management had engaged in “unfair labor practices” at the outset of the strike, implying that all strikers must be rehired and scabs let go; that decision was, of course, overturned on appeal.)

Leaders of the unions at the international level in October 1995 “began informally to raise the possibility of the Detroit locals making an unconditional offer to return to work”10 ; local MCNU leaders rejected the move, along with many rank-and-filers, who rightly saw it as unconditional surrender. Instead, the MCNU offered a “conditional” return to work with a “good faith” agreement to negotiate job cuts and come up with $15 million in savings in labor costs for the DNA. Management rejected this proposal peremptorily, saying “it would not fire the replacement workers.” The DNA by October 1995 was intent on eliminating the striking work force, which remained on the picket lines; it also specified that it would take back no worker guilty of “misconduct” during the strike. Strains had developed between the DNA and Sterling Heights officials because of the increasing expense borne by the city for the “super bowl of labor disputes.” The DNA responded by immediately writing checks to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars for police overtime, riot gear and related costs, saying it was a “good corporate citizen.” When the payments became known, the strikers were further enraged, flashing signs saying “Bought and Paid For” at the Sterling Heights police. Ultimately, however, more than two hundred strikers were fired for misconduct during the strike; some of those cases were reversed “but only after years of litigation, and many fired workers never got their jobs back.” Firings occurred for alleged “punching and spitting on picket line crossers, vandalizing property, throwing rocks and star nails, and threatening persons with physical harm.” Many cases were dismissed because of “fabricated evidence, collusion by company witnesses” and “reports filed months after the fact.” Of these cases, 121 were only overturned in 1999.Violence intensified in the fall of 1995 at sites around the Detroit area. One striker had his skull fractured by a security guard; another was run over by a scab van, but survived. No one was charged in either case. Militant and sometimes violent demonstrations of several hundred strikers kept some distribution centers closed on Sunday mornings but such centers were only a fraction of the total, and the DNA stood fast. Individual violence increased on both sides. Then, in mid-November, just before Thanksgiving and “its anticipated heavy advertising volume,” the DNA charged the unions with conspiracy under the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act, with possible huge fines and expenses.11 DNA management was pushing for unconditional surrender. One striker said “I never thought in Detroit I would see the level of raw power demonstrated against ordinary working people….”

Finally, with the approach of Christmas, the Detroit mayor, a US senator for Michigan and a Roman Catholic cardinal pleaded for a resumption of negotiations. In a four-hour meeting in the mayor’s office, management insisted on the reduction of 650 positions, on its right to retain 1,400 replacement workers, and rejected amnesty for strikers accused of misconduct. Management further urged retirement for 289 workers who were eligible. Retirement or relocation was management’s main suggestion to the strikers. Nothing came of the meeting. (Dennis Archer, the mayor, had earlier defended the deployment of hundreds of Detroit cops to assure distribution of the Sunday papers, saying it was necessary to create a “good business climate” to attract investment to Detroit.)12 Having been checkmated on the picket lines by the fierce management offensive described above, the unions in early 1996 turned to what Rhomberg calls “new areas in civil society and the state.” However interesting some of these attempts may have been, they were clearly a fallback line of defense in what was shaping up as a near total defeat. A strikers’ newspaper, the Detroit Sunday Journal, was founded in late 1995. A coalition called “Readers United” (RU) talked, thank you, of “the responsibilities of the newspapers and their civic function in the community.” (To be fair, RU did carry out some militant actions later on.) The newspapers responded with their own attempt to frame the strike. The unions turned to the state to determine “whether (the strike) was an ‘economic’ one or an ‘unfair labor practice’ strike.” Rhomberg, with some justification but with some serious dose of apparent naïveté, once again posed his own overarching analysis of “the ascendant anti-union regime” and “a declining New Deal order.” That order was indeed breaking down, and “the institutions intended to reinforce negotiation gave way to litigation instead.” Does Rhomberg seriously think that the capitalist state (our term) was ever, when the chips were down, a neutral arbiter of class struggle?One can hardly quibble that outreach to other workers (as opposed to the “public”) in a long strike is a necessity in getting struggle beyond the “shop floor” and the plant gate. This was exactly what was missing—an attempt to broaden the strike to other parts of the Detroit and regional working class—from the strike strategy, and given the union leadership’s turf mentality, probably inevitably. Television played its mystifying role, showing slick presentations by management and counter-posing to them “the first person who would talk to them on the picket line,” as often as not a foul-mouthed Teamster. Top labor officials such as John Sweeney and Newspaper Guild president Laura Foley bankrolled the Detroit Sunday Journal, which by summer 1996 was self-supporting and ran 165,000 copies per week, ultimately becoming the “largest weekly and third-largest Sunday paper in the state.” This was followed by a “corporate campaign” of the kind which “Mr. Strikeout Artist” Ray Rogers had attempted in a series of losing strikes in the 1980s (such as the previously mentioned, ill-fated P-9 meatpacking strike in Minnesota). This involved an advertising and circulation boycott of management’s other newspapers, such as Gannett’s USA Today. In April 1996 strikers and supporters intervened—politely—in Knight-Ridder’s annual board meeting. Shortly thereafter, 500 strikers and supporters, including Teamster president Ron Carey, intervened at the Gannett board of directors meeting, with similarly little result. Corporate campaigners spread out through the country raising support. Back in Detroit, renewed pressure was brought to bear on advertisers and with “ambulatory picketing,” whereby pickets followed newspaper carriers on their routes. A Teamster organizer who had played a role in the 1989 Pittston coal strike, a relative (defensive) victory, was brought in.13 Several hundred strikers were trained in non-violent direct action tactics, and in the spring and summer of 1996 carried out militant demonstrations at the homes of DNA executives. With these and other tactics, in Rhomberg’s view, “the unions pushed their activity into the community and outward toward a larger public sphere…they challenged the distinctions between the private economy and the public good, the boundaries between commercial property and civic space.” Religious leaders became involved, deploring “the use of violence, both personal and institutional, by anyone involved on either side.” The previously mentioned Readers United and other groups staged a series of non-violent actions, involving arrest by high-profile religious and union figures such as a UAW regional director and retired UAW president Doug Fraser. Several hundred people were arrested in such actions. The DNA, for its part, predictably reacted to such protests with indifference and contempt, though it did put out reams of what one source called “company agitprop masquerading as news,” against what was deemed the pro-strike bias of local television and other media. The papers retailed the now-familiar mantra about the unions as “privileged” and “featherbedders,” a ploy that resonated with some after decades in which hundreds of thousands of other jobs had been eliminated. As has been seen in many later attacks on public employees, decades of gutting private sector industrial unions have made it easy for capital to portray the last unions standing as “privileged”; this does not absolve the workers in such unions from reaching out on a class-wide basis to the larger downsized and casualized strata to raise general wages and benefits and to counter the inexorable “race to the bottom.”

The DNA also played the race card in overwhelmingly black Detroit, which enraged black strikers but was not without its effects in the city at large. Rhomberg provides figures showing that of the 2,025 “replacement workers” hired during the strike, 487 were hired as part-time or casual employees, among whom blacks outnumbered whites 3:1 and of whom one-third were terminated by June 1996. A great majority of those blacks hired were enlisted as janitors and mail handlers, while only 8 percent of new reporters were black. But such figures were largely unknown at the time and the papers, which had only 18 percent total blacks on the pre-strike payroll, had some success in portraying the strike as “white” and “suburban” to the “large, dependent and low-wage labor pool” left over from massive industrial downsizing, especially given Detroit’s race and class dynamic since at least the 1940s, as previously presented by Rhomberg. The fact that the papers, and not the unions, were doing the pre-strike hiring was lost from view.

Starting in 1996, the struggle was, fatally, increasingly fought out at the NLRB and in the courts. In July of that year, an NLRB decision in Washington compelled the unions to sign an agreement promising to cease violence, coercion and threats against scabs. Some advertisers used the NLRB to force unions to stop “picketing, blocking entrances, intimidating customers, and engaging in an unlawful secondary boycott.” A “non-violent guerrilla war” was fought with police over the right to continue leafleting and residential picketing on public property. The UAW was added to the DNA’s RICO lawsuit. The unions had to disavow some non-violent direct actions by groups such as Readers United. The different fronts in the struggle, for Rhomberg, “signaled the extent to which contemporary labor disputes exceeded their traditional boundaries, spilling over into multiple areas of civil society and the state.” Detroit mayor Dennis Archer again proposed to mediate the strike, but the newspaper “categorically rejected” the proposal. More ritual ensued on Labor Day, 1996, when the new AFL-CIO president John Sweeney and secretary-treasurer Rich Trumka (former head of the United Mine Workers) came to town to be arrested for civil disobedience along with other high-profile union, religious and political leaders; everything in this gambit was choreographed in advance with the Detroit police.

Nonetheless, concludes Rhomberg, “for a year and a half, the strikers had fought and in many ways won the battle of Detroit, But the newspapers’ response raised doubts as to whether the struggle could be decided at the urban metropolitan level.” International leaders of the six unions were increasingly pushing for a “settlement.” Responding to this pressure, the unions in the MCNU in February 1997 decided to make an unconditional offer to return to work14 and to gamble on having the strike declared the result of unfair labor practices, which would require reinstatement of strikers and “back pay liabilities of $250,000 per day.” The papers insisted it was an economic strike and took back only certain strikers. Some of those taken back were generally downgraded and took major pay cuts while scabs took over their original jobs. Returning printers had to attend a week-long “orientation” that consisted of a large dose of “verbal abuse, gloating and sarcastic treatment.” They were later put in an isolation room with nothing to do, and “had to ask permission to go to the bathroom or get coffee.” They remained in what was dubbed the “decomposing room “ until February 1998, costing the company $1 million, before they were finally put back to work in the composing room. The focus turned to the NLRB. The unions were planning a huge march, “Action! Motown 1997,” beginning on June 20, with supporters coming from as far away as San Francisco. This was further pitched, says Rhomberg, as “part of the renewal of the United States labor movement under AFL-CIO president John Sweeney.”15 Emotions were further ramped up on June 19, the day before the weekend event was to begin, when a local NLRB judge ruled that the newspapers had indeed been guilty of unfair labor practices, implying almost total victory to the strikers: reinstatement with full back pay and all scabs laid off. Euphoria took hold. The weekend included a teach-in at Wayne State, benefit concerts for locked-out workers, an interfaith religious service and nonviolent protests (one at the home of a DNA CEO in upscale Grosse Pointe Farms); all of this was followed by a march of perhaps 100,000 people and a mass rally. Trade unionists came from 45 states and from twelve countries. It was in fact the largest rally in Detroit since the 1947 UAW demonstration against the Taft-Hartley Act, and was unfortunately destined to be no more successful. Sweeney spoke of “dignity and respect,” and Trumka called on the newspapers to be accountable to a “democratic public.” For Rhomberg, furthermore, the NLRB ruling “illustrated the power of the state to fix the meaning of events.” Indeed.With almost 20 years hindsight, and knowing what ultimately happened, it is hard not to be cynical. The culminating weekend event, Action! Motown 1997, impressive as it may have been, had the smell of respectability about it, what French militants call “la manif de l’enterrement,” i.e., the funeral demo. The institutions of official society—“civil society” in Rhomberg’s idiom—had held together, and justice seemed to be at hand, won ultimately not in the streets or at the plant gate, but through the NLRB. And even that eventually proved to be an illusion. Despite the euphoria, the newspapers were not beaten, and were preparing an appeal of the NLRB decision. Various contract complexities created a “shell game” that lawyers on both sides would fight out in a legal labyrinth. One might say that the unions and the papers had battled each other to a standstill “on the ground,” and henceforth everything would be in the hands of judges and lawyers. Where was the spirit of the old IWW, for which lawyers were “shysters” and barred from membership? Rhomberg is quite right that the institutions of the New Deal were confronting a new drive against workers, but was not the problem precisely those institutions’ ongoing ability to channel militant struggle onto the terrain where raw power—class power—was no longer decisive?

The legal labyrinth cannot be described here. Amendment 10(j) to the National Labor Relations Act under Taft Hartley seemed to promise expedited enforcement of the unions’ apparent victory at the local NLRB, thereby avoiding processes that could, and ultimately did, take months or years. The newspapers brought in new legal heavy hitters, including a lawyer who had authored a Wharton Business School manual entitled Operating During Strikes . Five weeks after Action! Motown 1997, the lawyers for the two sides confronted each other at an August 1 hearing. The key issue was the full reinstatement of the strikers and dismissal of the “replacement workers.” Two weeks later, after further shell games, the judge issued a decision saying that an “unfair labor practices” ruling would have to await completion of the full appeal process. This decision “tilted the balance of power toward those actors with greater resources and staying power,” namely the newspapers. Litigation would in fact continue for three more years. The DNA CEO had said “the companies would drag out the appeals for so long that the strikers would eventually get other jobs, retire, or die,” which is more or less exactly what happened. Only one-third of the strikers returned after the final settlement at the end of 2000; up to 20 died during the five years of the strike and the appeals. Protest actions, boycotts and publication of the strikers’ Sunday Journal continued through 1997 and 1998, by a group of rank-and-filers, but it was an uphill battle. James R. Hoffa, son of the late Jimmy Hoffa, was elected president of the Teamsters in December 1998, and promptly fired a Teamster activist who had helped keep the movement alive. The Detroit Sunday Journal ceased publication in November 1999, after four years’ publication. The strikers’ main remaining leverage was the huge back pay settlement, if the unfair labor practices ruling held through the final appeal. The end came in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals in May 2000, presided over by three judges appointed by Ronald Reagan. The court’s July 7 decision completely reversed the unfair labor practice ruling. In late 2000, the various unions signed contracts with open shop clauses, hefty wage reductions, and merit pay. Lawsuits were dropped, including the newspapers’ RICO charges. James P. Hoffa ended the circulation and advertising boycotts. The Detroit newspaper strike was over.

Rhomberg concludes his book with a balance sheet of the strike and attempts to generalize some of its lessons, above all in the post-1980 assault on the right to strike as supposedly codified in the National Labor Relations Act. He points to some of the specific factors in the length and depth of the strike, such as Detroit’s character as a “union town.” He reiterates his thesis about the “deinstitutionalization” of unions in the new era, and goes on to say that “bringing civil society back in illustrates how the meaning of strike action has changed in the post-accord era” (though apparently not enough to win anything). In this era, he says, the strike has become a “more basic struggle…to reconstitute the spaces governing labor relations and workers’ rights.” He points out, as indicated previously, that the newspapers benefited from the long-term racial divide in Detroit, and that despite support from “civil rights and liberal leaders…many ordinary black Detroiters felt distant from both sides and did not see the struggle as their own,” given the “disproportionately white, relative to the central-city population” work force. He contrasts it with the victorious UPS strike of August 1997 (which took place just as the Detroit newspaper strike had made its turn to the NLRB and the courts), and the factors that made it possible for the Teamsters to force UPS to make 10,000 part-time jobs into full time and to rescind its threat to pull out of the pension plan. He argues that “widening the scope of collective action” (as in the greater involvement of “civil society”) “can also enlarge the spaces for public engagement and civic mediation between management and unions.” He argues that Gannett’s “scorched earth” policy not only led to $130 million in expenses but questions whether such a stance “benefited the workplace, the community or even the shareholders in the long run.” After the final defeat of the strike in the courts, Detroit newspaper circulation was down 32 percent from 1995

And, by 2011, was down by half a million readers. This is to be seen in an overall crisis of the newspaper industry, as witnessed by the fall in Gannett’s stock for $91 per share in 2004 to $1.85 in the first quarter of 2009. “The past few decades,” Rhomberg writes, “have seen a profound reduction in the social accountability of private enterprise,” under the offensive of “unfettered market power.” Karl Marx wrote long ago ( Communist Manifesto ) that, win or lose, the real gain of struggles such as the Detroit newspaper strike was the “ever-growing unification of the working class.” In reality, the strike described by Rhomberg joined the long list of post-1980 defeats, beginning with PATCO, by way of the Greyhound strike (1983), the Phelps-Dodge copper strike (1984), the P-9 meatpackers’ strike (1985–86), the Jay, Maine pulp and paper workers’ strike (1987–88), and the “three strikes” in Decatur Illinois (Caterpillar, Bridgestone-Firestone, and Staley) of 1993–95. The period, however, was not entirely bleak. In addition to the above-mentioned Pittston coal miners’ strike of 1989–90 and the Teamster strike at UPS in 1997, other workers fought and won against the general rollback. A group of Latino cannery workers in 1985 in Watsonville, California, rejected a sweetheart contract full of givebacks, threw out the leadership of their Teamster local, and in 1987 finally won a contract restoring much of what management had tried to take away. Non-academic employees at Yale University struck nine times between 1968 and 2003, mostly successfully, and in the latter year won an 8-year contract with 5.8 percent wage increases per year. 750 Latino workers struck the food giant ConAgra in King City, California for two years and prevailed in 2001.

The post-1980 period has certainly been characterized by more defeats than victories, but a recomposition of the working class in the United States is in fits and starts remaking the class terrain. A new breakthrough will probably not be centered on the remaining auto or steel industries, as with the CIO in the 1930s, but will, in all likelihood, feature the Latino workforce, greatly expanded by immigration, militant nurses who have distinguished themselves at the likes of the California health care giant Kaiser, or the truckers in the west coast ports, who are increasingly organized and militant, or perhaps even the sped-up and fed-up workers at Amazon and Wal-mart.16

If and when such a breakthrough occurs, it will be essential to recall the wisdom of Marx’s advice regarding the growing unification of the working class—WIN OR LOSE. It is clear that such unification will seldom happen automatically; instead, militants must be prepared to advance the efficacy of strategies and tactics explicitly aligned with such a goal. More than anything else on offer, increased working class unity, as exemplified by the independent collective actions of workers across workplaces and communities (and not by ritualized performances orchestrated by union leaderships), might shift the balance of forces.Rhomberg cannot of course be faulted for not offering such a perspective on the years after the Detroit newspaper strike. Looking back, and taking account of the experiences of all the major defeats that preceded it, it is difficult to see how theDetroit newspaper workers could have won in the period 1995–2000 when they were forced to strike. One can fault Rhomberg, however, for paying little or no attention to the rank-and-file dissidents of the newspaper unions who did attempt to oppose the “corporate campaign” strategy that increasingly imposed itself after the September 1995 injunction against mass picketing at the Sterling Hills printing plant. There was in fact at least a militant minority that, contrary to the “unions” which Rhomberg discusses as an uncritical, undifferentiated whole, was prepared to take the risks of defying the injunction. The strike may well have been defeated anyway, but the injunction was clearly the moment at which it embarked on the road to more or less certain defeat. Raw class power, and not corporate campaigns, NLRB rulings and court decisions, not mass demonstrations led by the John Sweeneys and Rich Trumkas (not to mention scripted “arrests” of such notables) is, in the first and last instance, all the working class has.Rhomberg does not seem aware of the extent to which the New Deal “accord” of the three decades after 1945 shackled the American working class, in ways to which we have alluded. Even militant unions of the rank-and-file have to deal with 500-page contracts requiring teams of lawyers; eviscerated grievance procedures; Taft-Hartley restrictions on wildcat strikes, sympathy strikes and boycotts; and the Landrum-Griffin Act of 1959 giving the United States Department of Labor direct oversight of internal union affairs.The next upsurge of workers in the United States will look more like the classic IWW of the pre–New Deal period than like the CIO, which ultimately put such strictures in place.

Originally posted: August 12, 2014 at Insurgent Notes

• 1Chris Rhomberg, No There There: Race, Class and Political Community in Oakland (University of California Press, 2004). This book shows, against Gertrude Stein’s remark used in the title, that in fact a great deal happened in Oakland, from mass KKK rallies in the 1920s to the general strike of 1946 to the rise of the Black Panther Party in the 1960s.
• 2See Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, 1996).
• 3James A. Geschwender, Class, Race and Worker Insurgency: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (Cambridge UP, 1977).
• 4See Stan Weir, “The Rank-and-File Revolt,” in George Lipsitz, ed., Singlejack Solidarity, 2000.
• 5Gannett in particular owned many other newspapers around the country, most of them non-union, and had an eye on Wall Street’s evaluation of its profit margins. It represented the more hardball force in management, which the Knight-Ridder management of the Free Press did not oppose.
• 6See Stephen Franklin, Three Strikes (New York, 2001).
• 7They asked strikers and supporters as an alternative to drive around the plant and snarl traffic, which resulted mainly in lots of traffic tickets. (See Labor Notes, October 1995, p. 9.) Other union leaders argued against mass picketing at the plant with an eye to the Sterling Heights elections on November 7, in hopes of re-electing the majority on the city council which had forced the resignation of the city manager in charge of earlier mass police repression. (I bid .)
• 8One somewhat exasperating aspect of Rhomberg’s book is his use of the term “unions” with absolutely no critical attention to dissidence within them, In fact, a “Unity for Victory Caucus” had formed precisely to pressure union leaders to return to Sterling Heights (ibid). ACOSS (Action Coalition of Strikers and Supporters) was another independent pressure group pushing for national action.
• 9 One Teamster said later, in spring 1997: “[F]or much of the strike, (our energy) was bottled up by the old-style tactics of the presidents of the six striking unions. They seemed to feel we could win the strike by walking in circles outside the plant gates…in an era of replacement workers (this attrition strategy) no longer works. We made a huge error in the strike’s early months by not defying the injunction that prohibited mass picketing…We had crippled the papers’ Sunday distribution…when we let the courts open the gates, we took away our main weapon…” Labor Notes, April 1997, p. 9. No statement of this kind is quoted by Rhomberg.
• 10 This echoed, for example, the more intense pressure brought to bear on Local P-9 of the UFCW (United Food and Commercial Workers) meatpackers in Austin, Minnesota, in 1985–86, the only local to reject the shredding of the union contract, and which then struck for 18 months, with broad outside support, before going down to defeat.
• 11The RICO law was ostensibly created to combat organized crime, but it seems to have been used more against unions. The DNA lawsuits were only settled out of court in 2000.
• 12 Labor Notes, November 1995, p. 5, not quoted by Rhomberg.
• 13The 1989–90 strike was set off by an attempt of the Pittston Coal Company to halt health care and pension benefits to miners, their families and retirees, an attempt which was defeated by miner militancy at the pits and a solidarity campaign by the United Mine Workers that brought tens of thousands of working-class supporters to southwest Virginia. Despite Rhomberg’s occasional references to the non-violent character of the Pittston strike, there was plenty of low-key violence brought to bear in guerrilla actions by miners, often at night and primarily against company property.
• 14 Once again, Rhomberg omits a key “fact”: the New York Times reported, in early 1997, on the occasion of Clinton’s second inauguration, that Teamster president Ron Carey, CWA (Communication Workers of America) president Morton Bahr, and other top union leaders had decided to order the Detroit strikers back to work with no membership vote. Eric Chester wrote in the Industrial Worker (newspaper of the IWW) that “Last summer [1996 —LG] union leaders began secretly discussing a plan to end the strike. This fall, as Carey sought re-election in a hotly-contested campaign, he neither explained how he would win the Detroit strike nor did he reveal the ongoing discussion to end it. Once the election was over, and the votes counted, Carey joined two other international presidents in unilaterally ending the strike with an unconditional offer to return to work. This decision was not only made without consulting the rank-and-file, but over its adamant objection.” Reprinted in Impact, v. 5 no. 3, June 1997.
• 15One laid-off worker from the defeated Staley strike in Decatur, Illinois, asked the appropriate question: “Will the weekend be more than a symbolic display of unity?” Labor Notes, June 1997, p. 7. Unfortunately, given the high-profile labor principals involved in the mobilization, from Sweeney on down, that is exactly what it was.
• 16On the latter, see the concise book on the computerized and surveillanced work place by Simon Head, Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans (2014).

No regular reader of Insurgent Notes will be surprised by anything in this book, which portrays more vividly than most the take-no-prisoners barbarism of which the American capitalist class and its military are capable. Its subject is the war “that so many would like to forget, and so many others refuse to remember.” Younger readers, who did not live through the decade when the Vietnam War was tearing American society apart, will certainly get a better sense of that period, which already ended almost 40 years ago. The US Army, the Department of Defense and successive American presidents have collaborated to cover up and suppress the memory of the war crimes Turse recounts, essentially of a My Lai1 massacre almost every day from 1965 to 1975. Turse takes his title from a routine command that led to thousands of “search and destroy” missions.

Turse’s book neither raises nor settles any politically “cutting questions” for today. We review it because historical memory is also part of the revolutionary movement.The book itself has an interesting history. Turse was a student in public health when he became interested in Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD), and decided to study it in the case of Vietnam vets. His research took him to the Pentagon, where an archivist pointed him casually to some forgotten boxes, collecting dust. He opened them and found the documentation of what became this book, thousands of atrocity stories the Pentagon had collected and meticulously filed while relegating them to the usual oblivion of the United States of Amnesia. Much of what he recounts was never reported in the mainstream media, or even in the rather marginal alternative media of small presses and the “underground” newspapers of the “sixties.” Turse’s book is also the account of a handful of courageous whistleblowers, GIs who witnessed and sometimes themselves participated in atrocities, and who were subsequently ignored, harassed, threatened, calumnied or who on occasion received a bullet in the back of the head from “friendly fire” in combat for attempting tomake known what they had seen and done. Turse also tells how these stories underwent Hegel’s three stages of scandalous innovation, from 1) total silence and suppression to 2) furious denial to 3) “old hat,” “what everyone always knew” with stage 2) being astonishingly short. The revelations about My Lai actually made coverage of smaller everyday atrocities more difficult to publish, as the media was thereafter only interested in bigger stuff.

Only five years after the Viet Cong swept into Saigon in 1975, inflicting the largest debacle (to date) ever sustained by an American military effort, the election of Ronald Reagan, his “morning in America” and Cold War II somehow “rebranded” Vietnam as a “noble cause,” after which scholars and veterans began to “recast the war in rosier terms.” In the teeth of such blatant historical revisionism, Turse’s book is one sustained attempt to recapture the truth about Vietnam. The Pentagon’s mania for quantification of everything connected with the war, from air sorties to total tonnage of bombs dropped—many times greater than in World War II—was best known for the steady stream of “body counts” released to the American media. This technocratic impulse somehow never extended to the total Vietnamese dead, with a probable final count of 3.8 million Vietnamese military and civilian combat deaths. An additional 58,000 Americans were killed. These figures still leave out the Vietnamese wounded and maimed, estimated at 5.3 million people, many of them women and children.

Turse’s discovery of these forgotten archives led him to a years-long series of investigations and interviews, among them with several hundred vets as well as with Vietnamese survivors in remote villages. One of these vets was Jamie Henry, who for years attempted to break through the silence surrounding atrocities and war crimes, and was left to “twist in the wind.” Henry himself had no idea that there were detailed documents about some of the episodes he had experienced. Many other documents had been “disappeared.” But enough was there to show that massacres of civilians were “widespread, routine and directly attributable to US command policies.” Further hundreds of thousands were killed by 500-pound bombs from air force planes or 1,900-pound shells launched from Navy ships. This “real war,” says Turse, “barely appears at all in the thousands of volumes written about Vietnam.”

The direct perpetrators were usually 18-and 19-year-old GIs and Marines, barely out of adolescence, given automatic weapons, grenades and flame throwers, and thrust into a totally foreign terrain where they knew nothing of Vietnamese society, history, or the language; a terrain full of booby traps and occasional sniper fire. They had gone through weeks of dehumanizing, brutal basic training where a couple of perfunctory hours at most were devoted to regulations on treatment of civilians and to the definition of war crimes. Vietnamese were only referred to with racist (“gook,” etc.) epithets.2

Young women were commonly gang-raped. Massacre was made inevitable by a system where officers’ promotions depended on the body count, whose figures were fed into the Pentagon’s computerized “techno-war”3 and used to pressure the lowly grunts to increase “productivity” and “output.” Numbers were ramped up by the view that “If it’s dead and Vietnamese, it’s VC.” By that criterion, many dead women and even children were counted as Viet Cong. Whole regions were “pacified” by saturation bombing and artillery fire, aimed at driving the civilian population into squalid camps and “relocation centers,” far from villages where their families had lived for generations. The aim of such “pacification” was to deprive the Viet Cong of recruits and material support.

US forces in Vietnam used weapons “designed specifically to maim and incapacitate people, on the theory that horribly wounded personnel sapped enemy resources even more than outright killing.” These included fragmentation munitions, “unleashing small fragments—tiny pellets and razor-sharp flechettes—that did immense damage to human bodies.” The Pentagon never gave up its belief that this “technological prowess” would triumph over “poorly armed guerrillas in an agrarian country.” Financing all this was ultimately the more than $1 trillion (in 2012 dollars) the United States spent on the war. The equivalent of 640 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs used during the war was actually dropped more on South than on North Vietnam in the “most lopsided air war ever fought.” The Strategic Air Command launched 126,615 B-52 combat sorties, the majority of them over South Vietnam. Smaller fighter plans dropped 400,000 tons of napalm. Still others dropped cluster bombs containing thousands of lethal ball bearings. The United States “expended close to 30 billion pounds of munitions in Southeast Asia over the course of the war.” More than 70 million liters of herbicides, above all Agent Orange, were sprayed on forests and on 4.8 million Vietnamese. When the Viet Cong’s January 1968 Tet offensive blew away the perennial American prediction of victory close at hand, the United States responded with bombings of “great swaths of cities and towns.” “We had been trying for years to get them to come out in the open so we could slaughter them, and we slaughtered them…I’ve never seen so many dead people stacked up,” was one US commander’s comment.

In such circumstances, “what went on in Vietnam’s killing fields often stayed there…no one could bear to read a full listing of every village burning, hamlet bombing, cold-blooded massacre…in press accounts, military documents and personal testimonies.” One Marine offered his explanation of how many of these atrocities occurred: “You got an angry 18-year old kid behind the gun and he’s just seen his buddy getting killed. And he’s not gonna have no remorse for who’s on the receiving end of that 60 caliber machine gun.” And indeed it is hard enough to read through the “litany of atrocities” recounted by Turse himself.

Systematic bombing of the countryside and “search and destroy” missions on the ground, as indicated, drove millions of Vietnamese peasants into shanties on the edge of every city and town. One US commander had a policy of unleashing 1,000 rounds of artillery fire for every single hostile round. Major ideologue and then – Harvard professor Samuel Huntington opined that this “forced draft urbanization and modernization (sic)” could well be the answer to wars of national liberation.” For Huntington, the “urban slum…often becomes for the poor peasant a gateway to a new and better way of life.”

In these conditions of modernization, infant mortality in Saigon rose to 36 percent, and crowds of refugees volunteered for urban garbage collection in order to have first crack at the “edibles” that turned up there. 500,000 Vietnamese women turned to prostitution. Children became beggars, pickpockets and thieves. In newly captured areas, the Americans occasionally attempted the campaign to “win the hearts and minds” of villagers whose homes had just been ransacked and destroyed, and who had been herded into cow pens. One old man stood up in such a session and asked if this destruction was how Americans were going to help the Vietnamese people. He was promptly arrested as Viet Cong.

Occasional compensation was paid to families for members killed in some of these raids; the going rate was $35 per adult killed, half that for a child. Civilians were also run down daily by jeeps, trucks, tanks and armored vehicles. For some GIs driving the vehicles, this was called “gook hockey.” Many collected Vietnamese body parts for souvenirs. Yet another feature of modernization was the maintenance of official military brothels within base camps. Rape and gang rape, often followed by murder, was an everyday occurrence in both country and city. Torture as well was “routine in Vietnam’s massive incarceration archipelago.” One American officer said “…you’ve got to understand that this is an Asian country, and their first impulse is force…. Only the fear of force gets results. It’s the Asian mind.”

American intelligence personnel worked with South Vietnamese counterparts and often supervised while the latter tortured and killed. In one training program, an instructor said “If the prisoner is not disposed to talk voluntarily, it is hardly the time or place to be concerned with the Geneva Conventions.” In the infamous Con Son Prison, 10,000 inmates were kept in tiny “tiger cages,” often for years, inducing permanent grotesque physical deformities. Two US Congressmen were taken surreptitiously on a tour of Con Son and wrote a scathing report on conditions there; their congressional committee reduced it to an innocuous paragraph in a 70-page report.

US personnel also tortured directly, without South Vietnamese assistance. All this perhaps culminated in the Phoenix program, a counter-insurgency operation aimed at rooting out “Viet Cong infrastructure.” As with other such US military and intelligence programs in Vietnam, “Phoenix was a corrupt, informant-driven enterprise in which a significant number of non-combatants, some completely innocent, were captured, or assassinated—that is, kidnapped, tortured and killed—merely to meet quotas, win bounties or settle grudges.” Turse estimates that over 20,000 people were killed during the Phoenix program, a “program run amok.” Such things were “the very essence of the war: crimes that went on all the time, all over South Vietnam, for years and years.” The scale of suffering was “unimaginable,” and it is “almost as unimaginable…that somehow, in the United States, all that suffering was more or less ignored while it happened, and then written out of history even more thoroughly in the decades since.”

Turse recounts the stories of particularly noxious killers, such as Sergeant Roy Bumgarner, a career soldier who supposedly had 1,500 “KIAs” (Killed in Action) during his seven-year stint in Vietnam. Bumgarner, known as “the Bummer,” was ultimately charged with premeditated murder. One officer after another testified at his trial to Bumgarner’s exemplary military service as a “model combat leader.” He was widely expected to be acquitted under the MGR (“mere gook rule”), but instead was convicted, but “only of unpremeditated murder,” and did not spend a day in jail for his crimes. He managed to re-enlist and even appeared on the front page of the New York Times in 1972 with his arm around a young Vietnamese boy, with an article portraying him as a “lovable fighting man.” Bumgarner, recounts Turse, “killed innocent people simply because they were Vietnamese and then labeled them as enemy dead. He mutilated bodies and planted weapons on those he murdered to conceal his crimes. He instructed subordinates to take part in his misdeeds and then help cover them up. And he trained countless impressionable young men in his methods. The military knew all this and still welcomed his continued service.”

Turse also recounts the exploits of Colonel John Donaldson, whom a colleague described as “obsessed with having a good kill ratio and a good body count,” and who enjoyed strafing peasants from the air in his helicopter. Throughout, Donaldson was “racking up medals at a pace that may have rivaled even his rising body count.”In 1971, Donaldson, by then a general, was charged with six murders. Among his many defenders was the young Colin Powell,4 who had worked closely with Donaldson for eight months and defended his actions at the trial. Charges against him were dropped “based on mysterious ‘evidence’ that appears nowhere in the files.”Julian Ewell was a World War II hero and by the time of Vietnam a two-star general. Arriving in the Mekong Delta in February 1968, Ewell zealously made the body count “everything,” exerting pressure that reached down to the lowest ranks, if more pressure were needed. For Ewell, it was a competition with other army divisions. He raised the ratio of enemy casualties to US troops killed in combat from 8:1 when he began to 14:1 a few months later. He participated in Operation “Speedy Express,” which dwarfed anything done at My Lai, over a six-month period. The “kill ratio” jumped to 134:1. Dead children and water buffalo were added indifferently to the count. For his trouble in Operation “Speedy Express,” Ewell was promoted to three-star general and became the top US military adviser at the Paris peace negotiations.

Another interesting whistleblower in Turse’s book was a veteran, the “Concerned Sergeant,” who wrote anonymously to the United States commander in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, in May 1970, offering “eyewitness testimony about an atrocity far larger and more damning” than My Lai, “the mass killing of civilians in the Mekong Delta during Speedy Express, month after month, hamlet after hamlet.” The Concerned Sergeant detailed tactics and named names. His letter “was remarkable for the way it detailed a pattern of criminality far larger than any single incident”; it was about “nobody giving a damn about the Vietnamese.” The Concerned Sergeant pointed the finger at the highest command, even if “it always seemed to be enlisted men and low-level officers who ended up ‘getting into trouble.’ ” General policy had been to assume that anyone who ran was a Viet Cong, and civilians were forced to walk ahead of patrols to set off booby traps. Even these victims wound up in the body count. Mass killings were portrayed as combat by faked reports of weapons captured. The Concerned Sergeant ultimately blamed the constant pressure from above demanding a big body count.The Concerned Sergeant’s letter “created a buzz at the highest levels,” and top officials grudgingly conceded the truth of his charges, but launched no criminal investigation. After a year of inaction from the Pentagon, the Concerned Sergeant wrote to other high-ranking generals, threatening to take his story to Congressman Ron Dellums, a left liberal Democrat elected from Berkeley and Oakland, California, and known for his strong criticisms of the war, or to the New York Times . In response, the army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) did launch an investigation…into the identity of the Concerned Sergeant. They identified him as one George Lewis; before the CID sought him out, however, the Pentagon legal department decided that because his letters were anonymous, they could be “discounted.” Lewis’s letters were declassified and forgotten until Turse discovered them in his research. Lewis had unfortunately died in 2004; it is unknown why he did not follow through on his threats to go public with what he knew. All in all, “Westmoreland’s scuttling of the Speedy Express investigation spared the army from having to deal with another major atrocity scandal in the aftermath of My Lai and also served to shield his brethren from West Point.”

By 1969, writes Turse, the stuffing was coming out of the doll, and articles on atrocities began to appear in mainstream magazines, such as on the Phoenix program, the “Green Beret Affair,”5 and other outrages large and small brought to light by further courageous whistleblowers. “More and more stories were finding their way to a reporter, past a Saigon bureau chief, over the wire to New York, and then into a newspaper or magazine.” The growing stream of revelations turned the government and military cover-up into a “desperate scramble.” Top circles began to worry about the “Yamashita precedent,” Yamashita being a Japanese general executed for war crimes in 1946 for “failing to prevent atrocities by his troops.” Westmoreland, “apparently rattled” by the possibility of his own indictment as a war criminal, oversaw a task force to whitewash the war crimes allegations. This report, which Turse calls a “brazen rewriting of history,” asserted that “General Westmoreland demanded strict adherence to the laws of war.” The report was never made public.

By 1971, the United States Army in Vietnam was “on the verge of collapse.” Units were refusing combat, killing their own officers, and were riddled with drugs. An official assessment said the situation “was just shy of the ‘French Army’s Nivelle mutinies of 1917 and the collapse of the Tsarist armies in 1916 and 1917.’ ” Hundreds of underground newspapers by GIs had appeared. There were fourteen dissident GI organizations and six antiwar veterans’ groups. In April 1971 several hundred Vietnam vets threw their Purple Hearts and Bronze Stars over a barricade erected to keep them from reaching Congress, “perhaps the single most iconic antiwar act in American history.” These men, and hundreds of other vets like them, were “doing what no American fighting men had done for two hundred years: speaking out en masse against their own military.”

Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) had ten thousand members by the early 1970s. “Many had gone to Vietnam with their heads filled by visions of their fathers’ war, as seen through the prism of the John Wayne movies of their childhoods.” Some VVAW members carried out “mock search and destroy missions” in small towns around the United States, handing out flyers about what they might have done if the locals were Vietnamese. Medic Jamie Henry, who had witnessed atrocities during the Tet Offensive, had run into the same walls of silence as other whistleblowers; even radical Ramparts magazine shelved his story in late 1968. Beginning in 1970 and 1971, however, Henry’s story began to get out, as for example at the VVAW’s Winter Soldier Investigation.

The stream was turning into a flood. Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, “Robert McNamara’s secret study of US policy in Vietnam from the 1940s to 1968.” An international commission on US war crimes in Indochina, which brought together not merely American vets, but Vietnamese survivors, met in Oslo, Norway, and indicted US policymakers at the highest level.

The Pentagon responded with its tried and true methods of cover-up: “Drag out all investigations as long as possible, intimidate witnesses, obstruct courts martial, and hope that the public would eventually lose interest.” A key witness corroborating Jamie Henry’s statements received an intimidating visit at his home and fell silent; a major in charge of investigating other atrocities fell into a depression and committed suicide after telling his wife that “it goes all the way up to the highest.” Then-President Richard Nixon began his policy of “Vietnamization,” replacing US troops with South Vietnamese forces; American combat deaths declined, and the war itself ceased to be front-page news. Editorial cowardice ensured that further detailed investigation into Operation Speedy Express by two determined reporters wound up on the cutting room floor of Newsweek magazine, too hot to handle. In this context, with all the silenced exposés that Turse detailed, “the last best chance for the truth about the war to finally emerge” went out the window. Two commanders of Speedy Express, Ewell and Hunt, wrote a book commissioned by the army about their activities in the Mekong Delta that did not even mention the operation by name, yet another complete whitewash. Of the 30,000 published books on the Vietnam War, according to Turse, “only a tiny fraction focus on American atrocities.” My Lai ultimately came to “blot out” all others. “Buried in forgotten US government archives, locked away in the memories of atrocity survivors, the real American war in Vietnam has all but vanished from public consciousness.”

Turse has more than enough of a story to tell without getting into the larger political questions of the Vietnam War, such as the political character of the Viet Cong and North Vietnam,6 and the larger background role of the Soviet Union and China. To do so would change nothing about the barbarity of the American side of the war, and the moral outrage it provoked and still provokes, almost prior to any political thought. “US Out NOW!” was all the American anti-war movement in those years needed to know, but it is also important not to forget that both the Soviet Union and China, North Vietnam’s ostensible allies, received US President Richard Nixon in 1972 even as the United States was raining bombs on Hanoi and Haiphong, or that something on the order of 800,000 “boat people,” many of them from the Chinese Hoa minority, left Vietnam under duress in the years 1978 – 79, or finally that a serious inflow of Japanese capital began to arrive shortly after the victory of the North and the NLF. There is no discontinuity between the political forces, north and south, which defeated the United States, and the “doi moi” market reformers who since the early 1980s have transformed Vietnam into one of the Asian “tigers.” Much of the American (and more generally Western) New Left opposition to the Vietnam war was taken with Third Worldist visions of “socialism” as the goal of the Viet Cong and the North, visions which generally did not survive the late 1970s, when the front-line “progressive countries” Vietnam, Cambodia, China and the Soviet Union were all about to go to war with each other.

But to criticize Turse for neglecting these ultimate dimensions of the war would be, in light of what he has uncovered about America’s war at home, the most cretinous sniping. They are merely important to mention as a footnote. The truly troubling dimension of Turse’s narrative, is again, is how a decade of techno-war that killed upwards of five million people and maimed many more could, as he says, “have vanished from public consciousness.” We know that in the wake of Vietnam, the Pentagon expended great effort in not only whiting out the memories of the war, but also took great pains to assure that a perspective of “never again” would guide strategy on the home front to prevent a recurrence of Vietnam’s chilling television and press coverage, however incomplete it was. “Embedded” journalists and TV camera men, under careful tutelage, would henceforth prevent unwanted evening newscasts of decimated villages and homeless refugees. The Pentagon was obsessed with “controlling the narrative” of any future US adventures. And adventures there were: the “conquest” of the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada; the strangulation of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua and the cultivation of “muscular democracies” in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras; the “arrest” of Panamanian dictator Noriega, in which thousands of Panamanians died; the Navy’s “accidental” shoot-down of an Iranian civilian airliner in 1988; the naval shelling of Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, in revenge for some terrorist action or other; the truly Blitzkrieg first war against Iraq in 1990 – 1991, in which Colin Powell proved himself more than a worthy student of the mass killer Gen. Donaldson; the resulting punitive embargo of Iraq through the 1990s, in which hundreds of thousands of children died or were deformed by malnutrition; the 13-year-old war in Afghanistan, begun in 2001, in all probability a failure in its own terms; the second Iraq war, begun in 2003 and leading, with Afghanistan, to a debacle which will probably surpass Vietnam, as much of the Moslem world from Libya to Pakistan is crumbling into militia-and jihadi-controlled chaos.

If Vietnam has, once again, been largely forgotten, except for the sickening irony ofits offering the old US-built Da Nang naval base to the American navy in the new strategic chessboard that is the South China Sea, it has also been forgotten and covered over by new crimes of US imperialism in Central America and above all in the Middle East.

And yet, when all is said and done, Vietnam was still qualitatively different, to date, in the numbers of American troops and firepower committed over so many years, and in the impact on American society itself, which, despite everything, broke open something that has never been put back together again. Every new opinion poll shows more people in the United States deeply estranged from the government, not caring whether Republicans or Democrats control it; such estrangement began with Vietnam and more generally the “sixties.” One must however be careful: estrangement and cynicism are not yet revolutionary consciousness, and can move in many different political directions, some of them unpalatable.

And yet, walking around an American city or suburb or newly-gentrified neighborhood today, having just read Turse’s book, it is hard not to remember the conclusion of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (about of course a very different kind of war):

And then England—southern England, probably the sleekest landscape in the world. It is difficult when you pass that way…to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don’t worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday…the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear we shall never wake until we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

• 1In March 1968, “Charlie Company,” of the United States Army infantry, killed over 500 (mainly old) men, women and children in a Vietnamese hamlet, My Lai, suspected of harboring Viet Cong fighters. What happened there finally came to light in newspapers through the determined efforts of one GI, who passed the information about My Lai to journalist Seymour Hersh. Under the impact of public outcry, the Pentagon eventually tried one carefully selected fall guy, Lt. William Calley, who served a sentence of forty months of house arrest in his own quarters for war crimes ordered from far up the chain of command.
• 2This was codified in the “MGR”—mere gook rule—according to which all Vietnamese were less than human.
• 3The “concrete universal,” the Exhibit A for the Prosecution of the American techno-war was of course Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who had come up through the top management of the Ford Motor Company and who believed in the application of the same systems analysis to warfare that he had developed at Ford.
• 4Powell, as is widely known, wound up as a five-star general and head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, where he was able to apply what he had learned in Vietnam in the turkey shoot known as the first Iraq War (1990 – 91), which featured (among other things) the infamous “Mile of Death,” a stretch of freeway in Kuwait where hundreds of thousands of fleeing Iraqi soldiers were strafed and napalmed.
• 5A case in which seven members of Special Forces were implicated in the torture and killing of intelligence operative Thai Khac Chuyen. All charges were dismissed by the Secretary of the Army, Stanley Resor, thus preventing “a dossier of CIA and Special Forces assassinations” from being used as courtroom evidence.
• 6See for example my review of Ngo Van’s Vietnam 1920 – 1945: Révolution et contre-révolution sous la domination coloniale (Paris, 2000) for some historical background; see also Ngo Van’s autobiography In the Crossfire (Oakland, 2010).