Ethnic Minorities and People of Color

2020: a spontaneous, leaderless, black-driven uprising burns down Minneapolis kkkop precinct after police murder a black man on live TV.  Establishment politicians and nonprofits successfully defang the movement with counterinsurgency techniques such as buying out organizers, and sending DemoKKKratic Party politicians in to claim ownership of the movement so they can walk the demands back from “abolish” to “defund” to “fund more and train better and reform” the police, and thence finally to “Woke 1 was craaaaaaaaaaaaazy!”.  But most of all, and a crucial part of that counterinsurgency: local police worked with feds and assassinated black radicals who were calling for more, who were more militant in their condemnations of the police, leaving the field clear for opportunists and “moderates” to mislead and betray the movement, squandering what revolutionary energy there was.  And yet, many white anarchists and rad-libs still held the whole thing as a moment of pride, as proof that decentralization is the way, that we got so close and we can again, that occupying a couple blocks to make an autonomous zone is a revolutionary strategy, because it shows that a better world is possible and we can dream bigger.  But what are they even talking about?  The protests and the burning of the precinct were not anarchist-led.  They were not led by leftists at all.  They were just unorganized people, some of whom were Leftists but most of whom were not politically conscious beyond “fuck the police”, showing up and taking out their anger at the system.  Praiseworthy, for sure, but not a feather in the cap of any organized movement.  The organization phase was attempted later, after, and the organization phase was soundly defeated.

2026: frozen water org abducts a bunch of African and Latine immigrants, shoots two white activists for interfering.  White-led opposition takes the helm and spreads a message of love, “radicalized by basic human decency”.  Anger is not allowed.  Hostility is not allowed.  Those who lead the opposition preemptively took out their own fangs and told everyone else to rip out their teeth as well.  So instead, activists go out and get arrested for standing in the way.  The operation in Minneapolis where people threw dildos at the frozen water org was funny and perhaps emasculating, but now they're making songs about it like it was some grand victory as opposed to a minor annoyance that showed the side with body armor and guns how powerless and how unwilling to fight the populace they're brutalizing is.  Anyone hoping for a repeat of the George Floyd uprising was sorely disappointed, as nothing came even close to it.  The act of throwing dildos at the frozen water org employees is turned into a heroic moment of resistance by musicians and the songs sung, as if singing is resistance.  The type of resistance that is espoused is a joyous one, the air one of whimsy.  “Resistance should be joyful” say people who I feel are unwilling to grapple with how evil the adversary is.  Why?  For fun?  For sustainability?  I feel no joy at the prospect of fighting these forces, only grim resolve and resignation that Evil must be opposed.  And look, I remember Jeremy Scahill’s interviews with the Palestinian resistance.  Those brave fighters were not talking about how joyous it is to have to fight against their people’s extermination!  They lamented, instead, that they were forced into resistance, that they couldn’t have just lived out their dreams of having a farm, of being a competitive football player, of raising families without having to worry that their children would be blown up next to them.  I contrast that with white-led resistance here and find the US left utterly lacking, and the attitude shows in the actions that are taken.  It’s like they aren’t taking this shit actually seriously.  A fight is a fight, not play.  Imagine facing murderers and tortures and simply throwing dildos.  Imagine being within throwing range of murderers and torturers and simply throwing dildos.  I’m supposed to feel inspired and empowered by that symbolic act?  No, it highlights how overwhelming the power imbalance is and suggests to me that facing off with them as a bloc is not the correct tactic.

I've seen white radicals -- usually anarchists and radlibs, but you know what, sometimes even PSL members! -- celebrating the accomplishments, the symbolic acts of #resistance, of consciousness-raising.  Celebrating such tiny baby steps, such empty gestures, as if they mean something, as if they're the start of something bigger, but they never prove to be.  And I haven't wanted to tear into them for it, because these acts certainly have been brave.  People have been arrested, beaten, and even murdered in broad daylight by the government for these acts.  But at the same time, what have they done?  What have they actually achieved?  Police are stronger than ever.  ICE is stronger than ever.  Their noses have not even been bloodied.

I just contrast the first world with the third world and I can’t take us seriously.  I called the George Floyd riots, which was the most consequential mass-movement against power in the US this century (so far), an “uprising”, and someone else laughed and said that’s just a normal protest elsewhere, not an uprising.  Correctly so!  In Pakistan, on the heels of the Biden-backed coup, people rose up in mass protests, burned a general’s mansion, and it took the Army brutally shooting, arresting, and torturing protestors en masse to quell the populace.  But here?  Here in the US, in the belly of empire, we do 1% of what the third world does and pat ourselves on the back for how glorious and revolutionary we were.

And so I feel forced to accept what a friend told me toward the beginning of the year, that I agreed with intellectually but could not yet accept in my heart: The US has no revolutionary potential.

I know doomerism is counterrevolutionary, and I feel bad posting this, but I fucking need help working through these feelings.  And I'm not saying do nothing.  And I'm glad to see more people are getting angry, albeit decades and decades later than they should have figured it out.  But I still don't see the US as having any positive revolutionary potential.  If we get a successful revolution here in the next two decades, I have no doubt that it will be a fascist revolution.  But since the US is already fascist as fuck, there's no actual need for them to have a fascist revolution, unless we get some succdem elected and then the fascists rebel against that to take power a la Franco.  The most “positive change” we are getting is electoral “victories” by careerist capitalists who are more than happy to let the DSA propel them into power on promises to provide welfare and safety nets that they have no intention of ever delivering, and the movements have so fucking little solidarity with the oppressed masses of the third world whose life-blood the US Empire drinks for sustenance that “leftists” and “socialists” fall over themselves to support these lying careerist fucks who still send weapons to iϟϟntreal, who still glaze US veterans who happily signed up to torture,removed, and kill their way across West Asia.  I’m supposed to believe these are the people who will build socialism here?

Or maybe not “socialism”, because the demsocs have stolen that word.  At this point I feel people have to use the big C word to show they’re serious.  Communism.