This is what putting people in a pressure cooker of $8/hr minimum wage, state violence and $1500/mo rents yields.
Also, whatever you think of this action (I happen to be against it because it’s illegal.), acknowledge that mobilizing this many people is the result of invisible forms of organizing, not neccesarily legible to the “left” whose traditions cross-polinate with the professionalized activism of ngos, labor unions and political parties.
It’s just a shame that it was expressed this way. We need major social democratic reforms and avenues for disenfranchised people to exercise political power so these kinds of desperate actions don’t disrupt our lives.
The provocative title is a way to call attention to the ways that overseas reporting and domestic reporting on social conflict differ. A detournament of imperialist propaganda if you will.
This is unfalsifiable even in the best possible light. I think there’s a strong possibility this is more spontaneous than organized, and more opportunistic than political.
Yeaaa flash mob lootings are started mostly from mass sending Snaps or even Insta/Snap stories and people just show up
The only political group I can see organizing this are anarchists but I doubt it since they’ll show up in black bloc for anything, especially if they were gonna loot
OP is definitely right that the anger being spent on this is a waste though instead of being herded and organized by communists
It’s not a waste. It’s directly fighting back and putting pressure on the powerful to demand the city stop killing people so their businesses don’t get looted anymore.
Getting people accustomed to going into the cool zone as a community is also a plus
Has this worked in practice in America though? Looting causing change?
If it did I’d join in in a heartbeat but I haven’t seen evidence of it working like that
iirc widespread rioting pushed the Civil Rights Act to be passed
Yeah. Any time anything good has happened in this wretched country it’s because people burned shit down.
Pick up “This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed” by Charles Cobb. it’s a real eye opener about what was sanitized out of the official history of the Civil Rights movement.
Also countless labor actions in the early 20th. And it’s worth remembering - The US traditionally has used it’s vast amount of “free” land to let off the pressure of proletarian revolt. Whenever things came to a boiling point the government gave out a bunch of cheap land to white people to get them out of the cities. That situation doesn’t exist anymore. One of the tactics the US used in the past to shut down popular unrest is no longer available.
has anything else?
looting has been one portion of lots of movements that resulted in changes but I suppose no it hasnt solely or directly lead to changes on its own
If we have a few options that don’t work, that means we need to find new options. I don’t see how trying one thing that doesn’t work makes sense just because other things don’t work.
such as
?
That falls under options that don’t work, or at least don’t work very well.
We clown on libs for deifying elections despite how little they change. Protests and looting have a similar effect but we don’t hold them to the same level of scrutiny.
yes. see womens suffrage, civil rights movement, etc etc. read pacifism as pathology
Looting itself? No. In the past looting was often accompanied with organizations saying “you can stop this any time” - hell even JFK admitted that if the US kept oppressing other nations, violent revolution will be inevitable.
But nowadays every activist organization denounces anything that isn’t holding a sign and chanting, so there’s no cohesion. Is it any surprise there hasn’t been any meaningful changes in the past two decades?
We’ve seen back to back killings and protesting and rioting for so many years. Not a thing has changed.
it’s obviously political, otherwise it wouldn’t happen right after a police shooting
oh wait there’s so many police shootings that it’s impossible to observe any causality with them isn’t there
That could mean it’s political, or it could mean people anticipate a chaotic situation and see a chance to grab something. There’s almost certainly some of both, so the question is what’s the prevailing reason.
I think there’s a thin line between the opportunistic and and the political in working class politics. The goal of looting is to improve the lives of working class people. The goal of striking is to improve the lives of working class people. They both do it by taking from the profits of buisnesses and by disrupting norms like working-for-a-wage and purchasing-commodities.
When anarchists organize looting as political protest, they’re pointing out just how thin that line is.
This is an interesting point. Thank you.
Is there any evidence that anarchists (or other leftists) organized this? I’ve seen nothing along those lines.
Say there is, and say, for the sake of argument, all the 2020 protests (as well as the violence started by police) were planned by the left. Maybe one major city (Minneapolis?) slightly reduced its police budget in response to the protests and the modest demand to defund the police? It wasn’t effective. If we don’t evaluate what works and what doesn’t we’re just libs riffing off ideology.
You don’t need to read theory to understand mutual aid and property as theft. Lots of people know that stuff, they just don’t have an articulated theory to give names to it and put it in the frame of wider political action. Folks are smart. Minority communities live and die on mutual aid, even if they don’t call it that.
Minneapolis had a highly motivated anti-cop movement for as long as I can remember. Certainly by the time Black Lives Matter started during Ferguson. Burning down the 3rd Precinct wasn’t even close to the first community action against the police, it’s just the most dramatic. There was organizing against police violence going on the whole time. Large segments of the African American community, the Native American community, the Somali community, and a fair number of white people had been involved in it for years and years.
As for effects - I haven’t looked in to it because PTSD, but last I checked the Minneapolis Police Department was hemmoraging cops. Lots of cops quit, lots retired, and the city can’t find replacements because apparently the pay isn’t good enough to become a hated fascist. Their budget didn’t drop, but their operational capability was severely eroded by poor morale and overwork. idk if they’ve recovered, but Frey is deeply unpopular with the city and his blatant failures to control the cops are well known. It’s not like the cops have become any less hated. There’s currently a fight going on; The city wants to re-build the 3rd Precinct, the community absolutely does not want that, and politically organized communities are having it out with the city right now.
I don’t care if anarchists organized this or local teens organized it. Either way it’s working class self activity. We aren’t some special group floating above the working class and directing it, we’re workers fighting for our own interests.
This kind of thinking about the left as separate from the class comes from the professionalization of politics and while it’s sometimes neccesary to pay staff, we should not do it uncritically.