reward of crickets

There is this belief, at least amongst the Core Group and the public discourse, that there simply isn’t an understanding of the severity of the situation, and that if Governments could be convinced, they would change paths right away.

Nothing is going wrong. Nobody in power is irrational, or ignorant. The system is working as exactly as it should be. Can we really tell ourselves, that if only we all realised we are in the same boat, we would act? It is naive and insensitive to think that our system only now became capable of extinction. Tasmanian Aboriginal populations were the subject of a genocide from which their numbers have only recently recovered, and from which they suffered an almost complete loss of traditional tribal culture. When Belgium slaughtered 10 million black people in the Congo in order to extract and exploit its natural resources, a crime which the country struggles to admit to, even to this day. Shall we appeal to the humanity of governments and systems of the settler states that attempted to wipe out the Native Americans? We do not have the right to be amazed or shocked at a system that was catalysed by the appropriation of land and a magnitude of violence that reduced the population from ‘over 10 million Native Americans living there’ to an ‘estimated population […] under 300,000’ by 1900 in the USA alone. It is these events which have in fact placed us in the position we are now. Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin argue in their book The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene that the colonisation of the Americas in particular is the ‘the marker – in 1610 – that really defines the Anthropocene’. This logic and its methods were brought home in the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were exterminated by the Nazi Regime. Back then, a similar attitude to now was employed. Aimé Césaire noted the incredulity of the Holocaust happening in Europe, for the Nazis ‘applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the “coolies” of India, and the “n*ggers” of Africa’.

Good writing on international macroeconomics reads like a detective novel. There’s a suspicious event—hundreds of millions of dollars in phantom FX swaps, a container port’s worth of missing exports—and an enormous cast of closely-linked characters. But instead of a preternatural ability to see the clear-cut means, motive, and opportunity of fictional characters in a pulp whodunit, the macroeconomic detective is armed with the knowledge that balance sheets always balance. This simple insight, that every transaction has two sides, means that there are certain aggregate relationships between transactions that must obtain for the world economy. Knowing this, it’s possible to chase actors across seemingly unrelated balance sheets to find where the system as a whole was forced to balance. From here, the skillful economist can identify the long-run tendencies that a given balance is likely to create. (Wynne Godley famously predicted the Global Financial Crisis in just this way, following US mortgage debt around the world and back.) This kind of detective work is difficult, and often unpopular. The balance sheet approach cuts through political and media platitudes to reveal who the winners and losers are in a given regime. By taking this approach to examining trade policy, Michael Pettis and Matthew Klein have, with Trade Wars Are Class Wars, written the ideal book for understanding the long-run trends that have shaped our dysfunctional present.

Pettis and Klein tell a broad story about the last fifty years of global economic development, which links the dynamics of global supply chains and tax evasion, and the historical shift from wage-led to profit-led growth.

The book argues that elites in all countries want to capture economic output while developing the capital stock of their economies. To do this, they invest massively, which mechanically creates savings. Rather than sharing those savings with the household sector in the form of wage increases, the elites hoard and move them offshore. This destroys local demand for the goods produced by their capital investments. At this point, they turn to the export market to make up for the missing local sales. The problem is that, to be competitive exporters, they have to produce tradeable goods at a lower unit cost than their competitors. Capitalists must then further suppress domestic wages to ensure those lower unit costs, and thus increase their dependency on export markets.

The problem is, not every country—or bloc, in the case of the Eurozone—can be a net exporter. This spells trouble, if every country’s capitalists are dependent on the export markets to validate their investments. Absent a country willing to import everyone else’s surplus, this kind of arrangement would set the capitalists of all countries against one another before falling apart. It’s at this point, however, that the US steps in to backstop the global order as a hegemonic debtor, allowing nearly every other country to be a net exporter. As many have pointed out, this is the natural role for the US to play, given nearly all transactions the world over are denominated in its currency. To update Robert Triffin, if the whole world uses your currency for trade, then the whole world economy needs you to issue dramatically more debt than your domestic economy requires. This extra debt, combined with massive offshoring of profits, means that annual US investment flows abroad—in dollar terms, not physical ones—vastly outstrip the rest of the world’s annual investment in the US. This capital account surplus produces a matching current account deficit. The imports that make up this current account deficit are largely manufactured goods that the US used to produce domestically. Such an influx in turn hollows out domestic production in tradeable goods, and the industrial middle class of the US, brought into being by the second world war, falls apart into opiates, suicide, and nativism. By acting as debtor to the world, the US benefits from imported goods, while elites of all countries—the US included—win at the expense of all workers.

The Times quoted another Milwaukee barber as follows:

“I’m so numb,” said Jahn Toney, 45, who had written in Mr. Sanders. He said no president in his lifetime had done anything to improve the lives of black people, including Mr. Obama, whom he voted for twice. “It’s like I should have known this would happen. We’re worse off than before.”

There is a reason so many people, mainly black and indigenous people, have rejected the electoral process and are now refusing to vote. Calling us privileged for that choice or accusing us of being psyops for discussing our discussion doesn’t change reality; we are very aware that our existences are inconvenient and unwanted by both parties, and that no matter who we vote for, we end up losing.

We’ve seen a lot of people on social media spreading rumours and sharing conspiracy theories about the uprising currently going on South of the border. These might be rumours about potential white supremacist attacks and interventions or conspiracies about police agents being responsible for violence carried out by protestors. This kind of online behaviour is harmful and undermines the movements you’re probably trying to support, and we thought we’d take a minute to break down why we should collectively push back against this trend.

1) Riots, that includes activities such as throwing bricks and other things that could be classified as violent, are and have been historically part of inciting social change. For better or for worse, there is a long history of rioting in America (and elsewhere), some of the more popular U.S. examples include the Watts Riots, the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot and then Stonewall, the Rodney King Riots, and more recently events like the Ferguson Uprising. Riots happen for a lot of different reasons and under a variety of circumstances, but it is usually (at least in part) the result of nothing else working, of being ignored, unheard, and push to a breaking point. Sometimes they’re both unavoidable and necessary, and have an important role to play in struggle.

2) Rioting, brick throwing, and other violence does not and should not de-legitimize a movement. Often such events are the only thing that make those who are less impacted pay attention – police kill black people and others, all of the time and it doesn’t get the attention in deserves. Police in America have killed several black people since the COVID crisis broke out, for example Breonna Taylor amongst others, and business as usual continued. So many people are paying attention right now because of how people have responded to the death of George Floyd and how that response has spread. The fact that people are now paying attention is proof of the efficacy of these tactics.

3) Related to the first two points, violent protest can actually help and work in tandem with non-violent protest rather than detract from it. Many of the most common examples of pacifist resistance and its successes weren’t accomplished alone and in a vacuum. Rather, non-violent movements were taking place alongside other more militant movements working towards similar goals but pursuing different strategies and tactics. For example, you can’t look at the Civil Rights Movements in the U.S. and figures like Martin Luther King, without also considering the Black Panthers and other armed groups. It is common that the existence of more militant groups/events create a context in which those in power are forced to engage with other groups that appear more moderate in comparison. This isn’t necessarily desirable and cooptation is real, but this is part of understanding struggle and how society changes over time.

4) Many conspiracy theories are focused on bricks being left near protest sites, as if that is the only thing causing violence. But people having been using a range of tactics since the beginning, including many a lot more violent than throwing bricks. People have guns and are shooting police, people are committing arson and burning buildings to the ground, along with doing vandalism, looting, and more. And violence is certainly not only coming from anti-racist protestors, on the contrary the vast majority of violence is coming from elsewhere. White supremacy prevails – racist cops kill with impunity, white supremacists hold political office, and millions of black folks are locked behind bars, to say nothing about the intense socio-economic inequality. In the face of this reality, any way that those under attack decide to respond is both fair and legitimate, and it’s important to support rather than critique it.

5) The argument that violent and/or confrontational protest brings down state violence and repression is problematic on several fronts. First and foremost, it is simply untrue. There are many different factors that go into what the state’s response to protest will look like, and this isn’t just tied to whether it is peaceful or not. It also include things like the identities/social locations of those involved, perceived level of threat to the status quo, potential to spread etc. There are lots of examples of the state responding violently to completely peaceful protests and this is not something within the control of those fighting back. The ability of the state to use violence is a political reality – this movement has had broad support, and that has done more to restrain the police than the tactics chosen by demonstrators. Supporting people on the streets, rather than delegitimizing resistance does more to keep people safe.

6) Furthermore, the argument that conflictual demonstrations bring down state violence shifts the blame from those responsible and who should be accountable (i.e. those acting to violently suppress a movement) to those, who in this case, are fighting for survival in the face of intense, every day structural violence. To put it differently, if a woman was in a physically abusive relationship, decided one day to fight back, and was severely beaten or killed by her partner, the issue here and where the blame should fall would not be on the women, but the partner. The same applies here, the issue and where blame should be placed is on the state and white supremacy, and not those defending themselves.

7) Agent provocateurs, undercovers, and other state agents, absolutely exist, but that is beside the point. Emphasizing this fact shifts focus from other more important things, and creates several different issues. It helps to prop up and promote conspiracy theories that strip away black peoples’ agency, erases their experiences and actions, and gives way too much space and credit to police. Sure, state agents might agitate violence and maybe leave out and/or pick up some projectiles, cops do sketchy shit and try to entrap people all the time. That doesn’t really matter though, because the huge majority of people throwing bricks and engaging in other confrontational activities aren’t police. Police don’t start riots and they certainly don’t maintain/continue them, people do and for good reasons.

8) Building on the above point, not only is it untrue to attribute such activities exclusively to state agents, but it also damaging and potentially dangerous. It can make people think that only cops would do confrontational or violent things, so those who do that for their own reasons come to be seen as doing the work of the state or as harming the cause. This helps to perpetuate the good protestor vs. bad protestor narrative in which some people’s activities are viewed as inherently legitimate and other’s activities as inherently illegitimate. Instead of allowing space for a diversity of tactics and approaches, and creating opportunities for coalition building, solidaristic actions, and complimentary work, it sows seeds of distrust, creates divisions, and facilitates conflict. This is what the state wants, and is one of the central strategies (COINTELPRO is just one well-known example) through which it tries to disrupt, discredit, and otherwise hinder resistance. The state doesn’t want people rioting, it wants people infighting.

9) Beyond being damaging, attributing violence exclusively to state functionaries is actually dangerous and jeopardizes people’s safety in at least two different ways. In the first case, it can create a situation in which protestors attack other protestors on the basis that they think/assume (wrongly) that others are either police or working for police. So, if the rumour spreads and gains traction that police are instigating violence and throwing bricks, those who are not police and not working for police but choose to do such things, can be targeted and attacked in the heat of the moment by a crowd who thinks they’re cops. Bad-jacketing/snitch-jacketing without confirmation/concrete proof can get people seriously hurt.

10) In the second case, if it is believed that anyone who engages in certain activities (whether or not they’re state agents) is detracting from or harming a movement, overzealous folks may take on the role of trying to manage (i.e. like a work manager) a protest or even police other protestors. In such instances, “peace police” may actively try to stop somebody’s actions (usually through physical restraint) or in the worst cases, try to do a “citizen’s arrest” of a fellow protestor and turn them into the police (where they will likely face violence). A particular awful video was recently circulating in which a protestor was breaking up pieces of concrete from the road presumably to throw, when another group of protestors surrounded them, tackled them to the ground, and dragged them over to a line of riot cops.