Monday night in Oakland, protest of the Zimmerman verdict
So, shit went down Monday night in Oakland, as it does from time to time.
Liberal talking points: why u privileged white kids from the burbs / Ohio coming in and smashy our city, especially our benighted SMALL BUSINESSES, which are exactly what we lurve about Oakland.
Ultra-left talking points: fuck the outside agitator trope. Those small businesses are forces of gentrification! Also, there are a lot of different skin colors under the masks. Or, maybe our talking point is that Black youth were doing the smashy on Monday! How can you criticize the righteous rage of Black youth, and make this about a window instead of the devaluation of Black lives?
Critic's notes on this exchange so far: Fuck "small business" ideology. Yep, they are 100% part of gentrification. So are most majority-white worker coops, tho. The entire part of this conversation that is about gentrification sounds to me like two camps of second-wave gentrifiers fighting with each other. (And I know one when I see one, because I was a first-wave gentrifier.) Artists and punks with no money may not force people out financially, by paying higher rent, but they take up space, and landlords would still rather rent to a white punk kid than a financially stable Black person in many cases. Also ultra-lefts, many of you hang out at those hipster watering holes and cafes all the time when you're not smashing them. I've hung out with you there!
Some of the ultra-lefts in this conversation acknowledge this, and say, well, yes, I'm absolutely complicit in gentrification; I'm acknowledging that and struggling against it. Which is a stance I respect and would like to identify with, even, in principle. The thing is, they're really not struggling against it in any meaningful way. Bay Area anti-gentrification fights have not helped to keep a single person of color from being redlined out of a neighborhood or evicted, from all I can tell, and they certainly haven't reduced property values. There have been anti-eviction campaigns, which are great; but they have been distinct from the "anti-gentrification" work which all seems to be delusional bullshit from what I can tell. They've made a couple of hipsters (2010s) and yuppies (1990s) annoyed. Big fucking deal.
The fact that small amounts of property destruction doesn't have a negative effect on property values is an interesting one. Smashy helps local business by keeping a robust window repair sector afloat? That's probably superficial and inadequate. But in a broader sense, capital does rely on creative destruction, which takes the creativity of workers and non-capitalist social relations and either appropriates it (accumulation by dispossession) or exploits it (labor). What is at all anti-capitalist about low-level property destruction? Assuming social conditions in which we can smash some windows or temporarily occupy a building, but we haven't developed the social power to expropriate medium- to large-scale capital?
What social groups were smashing and when? This is a question of fact. Liberals assert (probably wrongly, in my experience), that it was mainly out-of-towners (a vaguely defined concept anyway) and white kids. Ultra-lefts assert in different places both that Oakland smashy is always multi-racial under the masks. They also suggest, without saying so clearly, that most of the Monday smashy was initiated by Black youth.
Let's take both of these in turn. Oakland smashy is always multi-racial under the masks? Somewhat true, but not as multi-racial as Oakland, probably not even as multi-racial as the student population at UC Berkeley.
Further, we've got to differentiate amongst groups of people who might participate in either smashy or physical confrontation with cops.
People who are there with a developed political crew, mainly anarchists and ultra-left communists, with a few people whose politics are mainly about anti-colonial struggles - but who are isolated from any base in any community beyond other radicals
Youth who are angry about the issue and wanting to manifest that, but who are not part of a developed, political crew
People who care about the issue to some extent, but are there to a pretty large extent because they enjoy mayhem (which is not necessarily a bad or even apolitical instinct ... but we should acknowledge that this type exists)
People who are there largely opportunistically to loot, some in a disorganized, personal way (I need / want some shoes, let me grab a pair from that fucking store!) some in a low-level organized way (let me grab 20 pairs of shoes to sell for knockoff prices in East Oakland).
Now, each protest is different, and I wasn't there Monday, but I've been at these kinds of things many times in the past. I was at one protest (I think in response to the Mehserle verdict, wouldn't swear to it), where ultra-lefts were standing off with the cops, not really breaking things initially, and that created a temporary zone of lawlessness, which allowed the lovers of mayhem and the opportunists, both disorganized and organized, to swoop in. Most of the property destruction was from these folks, until the larger crowd was pushed out of 14th and Broadway by the cops, at which point anarchists who were down for property destruction broke some windows. Other times, like the anti-capitalist march during Occupy Oakland, the property destruction was targeted and consciously political from the start.
Perhaps this is clear, but I don't condemn property destruction, nor do I particularly relish it under most circumstances or think it accomplishes much. I'm not cataloging the various kinds of property destruction and people's motivations to condemn some and laud others. Even small-scale organized crime ... people want to break into a Foot Locker and steal 20 pairs of shoes to sell at a small business or under the table in East Oakland? Eh, I don't find it very interesting to celebrate or condemn that. I think people who are trying to analyze politics ought to take note of what is happening, somewhat dispassionately on one hand, even if it engages a tremendous amount of passion on the other, so that's what I'm trying to do here.
But now there's a part of this which is beyond property destruction, in that a server at Flora got hit with a hammer. Which potentially changes the conversation about smashy quite a bit. There's this piece which identifies the worker, protecting his business's windows, as "the good worker" which I guess is supposed to allude to "the good German" syndrome. I found parts of it really intriguing, but it fails to ask the question, well, what if most workers today either identify with the boss like this (even if they aren't willing to take such a bold action) or don't care, expressing a sort of passive resistance that runs back to Bartleby and soldiering and shuffling? But very, very few identify with the communists or the anarchists? In this case, why would the communists and the anarchists just keep performing "riots lite?" What's the point?
The analogy with Germany here is interesting: fascism was a new development that people went along with; that's what the "good German" syndrome is about. By resisting it, people could have hung onto what they had, which was terrible, but not as bad as fascism: economic insecurity under liberal capitalism where racialized and political scapegoating were mostly under the surface rather than official state policy used to justify genocide. Capitalism, on the other hand, has been with us our entire lives. "The good worker" can't change course, resist and hold onto something that is terrible but objectively better than fascism. He would have to organize with fellow workers to confront the state, his boss, etc. etc. etc. to overturn the practices of the world he has known his whole life.
Does communization offer any resources for this? It tried, briefly, in the development of the precarious and service workers' assembly, which got rebranded as "workers against work" and then stopped meeting. But now it doesn't.
Commentary on this piece has been interesting. I've heard a suggestion that this wasn't anarchist property-destruction-as-usual, but was instead targeting property (by Black youths??) in order to provoke white liberals to show their true colors as opposed to their conscious crocodile tears for Trayvon Martin. I wasn't there, so I can't comment on whether that was the case. It's an interesting claim, and if true, it cuts against the narrative of this I've been hearing both in the mainstream media and radical circles to some extent.
Circling around to the communization current, though, this makes me think about how they / conscious ultra-lefts with a certain profile of endorsing confrontational tactics have come to hegemonize these actions and take up political space. If an organized crew of ultra-lefts hadn't called for Monday's action, would the RCP and ISO have called something again? Would a crew of older, pacifist-inclined liberals and progressives of color have called something? How would any of these groups have related to angry, but politically mostly unorganized Black youths? Would these youths have felt the freedom / opportunity to engage in property destruction if it hadn't been for the numbers of conscious anarchists / radicals? If the NGO crew had been at the helm, would they have policed youth themselves? Which of these scenarios would be "better?" Which would actually promote self-organization and politicization of youth of color in Oakland? Which to me is really what would matter in all of this. Fuck a window, fuck a small business, but also fuck a substitutionist anarchist or communist of whatever race who doesn't understand the difference between their own outrage and a political expression of a community that has had no choice but to be an object of policing and surveillance.
People in those Black and brown communities in Oakland are clearly angry about issues of safety, policing, profiling, and economic exclusion, but that anger doesn't at the moment have an organic, radical, political expression, and to the extent that it has any expression it is as much in something like OCO (which is confused about policing) as it is in nights of protest and mayhem around 14th and Broadway.
Does the hegemony of the ultra-left over these protests hold back the possibility of that organic, radical, politics? Maybe not - though I'm not convinced it drives it forward, either. It probably holds it back less than the hegemony of NGOs over organized POC politics in Oakland does, though the role of NGOs is mixed and would be a good topic for another post, since they hold back radicalism in some ways and ostensibly cohere it in others.
I'm not sure that the ultra-left is really holding anything back or creating a problem. I'm just tired of their self-righteous substitutionism and of their complete unwillingness to see that they are engaged in substitutionism. Also, if they had just slightly better politics, they could be a catalyzing force for an organic, radical politics in Oakland, including even in largely POC neighborhoods, if they were willing to dig in. It could be really, really interesting. Some of the post OO neighborhood barbecues and so forth pointed in that direction. But no, the ultra-left is mostly unwilling to dig into long-term, sustained organizing projects. Instead just fight with liberals and the hipsters over the legacy of another night of smashy. Wait six months, rinse, and repeat. Yeah, that's real interesting.
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