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.
I do too, but I don’t think that means we should denounce riots. If there was a leftist organization deploying its members to loot stores I might have some critiques, but riots over police violence are an organic result of US domestic policy.
I look at riots as an opportunity to talk to other leftist and leftish folks about how we got here. Namely, thousands of non-violent protests against the same institutions that these riots are against - all ignored, crushed or defanged. When we as a country purge every mass organizer we can find, it isn’t surprising that righteous anger is expressed in a mostly undirected way
This is actually the type of looting I’d support – explicitly political and to the benefit of a larger movement. The stuff I don’t think is worth supporting (note that this is different than condemnation) is someone seeing a chaotic situation and thinking “I can grab something for myself and probably get away with it.” I’m not losing sleep over Apple’s bottom line, but I’m also not eager to run coverage for opportunists.
Just as there are good things that aren’t leftism, there are responses to the pressures of capitalism that aren’t leftism.
I mean that there would be a set of tactics to critique in the first place, as opposed to a broader social phenomenon being exploited by the state. As it stands, police murder a person and people protest. Police show up and escalate things to riot conditions, and then a riot can break out among the mostly politically inactive lumpenproletariat
There are coherent and defensible sets of tactics for disciplined mass action already in use by leftist organizers, and they’re designed to prevent chaos under pressure. That’s what I would present to a socdem with doubts, not “we riot.” When a riot is incited in the US (always by the US), lumpens are callously used as tools to menace and energize the support base for our police state. Then they’re rounded up and punished.
That’s where I’m not willing to hide my indignation for optics. People who have systemically been pushed to the margins of our society and entrapped into a crime that couldn’t possibly matter less, then have their lives torn apart over some piece of shit’s storefront