Police Abolition is the Long Game

Notes from Minneapolis

Since I was a kid in the 1960s, racist police actions have gone on.  You don’t have to even read history if you are old enough or paying attention. Minneapolis has its own record.  The establishment of the American Indian Movement is the most obvious example of community resistance to racist policing in this town, and that was back in the 1960s.  As a result I support ‘police abolition’ which means that, while sometimes the existing police force does fight crime, they are at bottom an armed support for the capitalist system and the wealthy. But then who replaces them?

In the last few days in Minneapolis the police have shown their essential nature – circling the wagons around the 3^rd Precinct in my neighborhood like some Fort Apache and abandoning everything else.  This after a group of their members killed an unarmed black man for passing a fake $20 check or bill. They disappeared from the streets except for defending the home of the cop who cut the air from George Floyd.  Buildings burned, were looted, windows broken in a miles-long stretch of Lake Street and now in other parts of the city.  Hennepin County sheriffs and the state patrol were also absent.  There is footage that the first destruction on an Autozone store might have been carried out by a white accelerationist provocateur with a heavy gas mask and an umbrella.  Now other information from neighbors has come in that 4 white men in a car from Wisconsin torched a local bar that put out an anti-BLM note on the internet.  And that a new housing unit close to the police station was also torched by white men.  Black neighborhood defenders on the north and south sides have said white men were trying to burn businesses in their neighborhoods.  Will the press pick up on this?

It reminds me of 1968 after MLK’s assassination by a Memphis cop, but with a twist.  The Minneapolis north-side burned and did not recover for years, if ever.

In response now, neighbors and small business owners sat up all night defending some stores from destruction, with shotguns and without.  Stores that were left closed or abandoned were hit and hit again.  One book store refused to let the police use their lot and instead set up a medical tent and was preserved.  The 3^rd Precinct went up in flames after the police were ordered to abandon it, and now the 5^th Precinct just west has surrounded. As a result of this, the Democratic governor called in the National Guard, which CNN reporters were reporting had disappeared at 8 P.M., curfew time Friday.  They showed up at 11:00 P.M.  What?

If you don’t have police, what do you have?  Well the small business men, employees and neighbors protecting their stores – many of which I’ve used for years – hint that the replacement for the police is local neighborhood committees, armed if needed.  Community control in truth, not as liberal utopianism.  Similar to the Cuban block committees or the armed communes of Venezuela.  But the U.S. proletariat is nowhere near that level of organization yet.  Which is why even the protests are disorganized and leaderless, in spite of Black Lives Matter and other community types attempting to give them form.  The question of a missing, strong mass multi-ethnic proletarian organization is obvious.

In Atlanta the middle-class black mayor, doing her best Cosby, spent her time running down ALL the protesters, not just the ones burning cop cars or besieging CNN.  She said “Go home.”  Even Minneapolis’ liberal white mayor or St. Paul’s black mayor didn’t do that.  Obviously what is going on here is far bigger than George Floyd. Poverty, Covid-19 stresses like unemployment, Trump's criminality and general disgust at the capitalist system are also functioning.  After all, nothing changes even with body cameras, ‘training’, lawsuits, internal investigations or the hiring of more lesbian, Latino, Somali, Hmong, women or black cops. Nothing changes, as racist and anti-union policing is built into capitalism and will never go away.  The head of the Minneapolis police federation, Bob Kroll, is a known white-supremacist and Trumper who defends all the thumpers in his ranks.  You have to burn a precinct station to get a right-wing D.A. like Mike Freeman to indict a cop.  These are the bits and pieces of institutionalized racism, including courts that take the word of cops at face value.  Not to mention coddling by city councils, the cost of attorneys, the overloaded public defenders, the cash bail process and the millions paid out by the City of Minneapolis over police misconduct.

There are 4 groups of people in the streets opposing the system – mostly protesters, then looters, then provocateurs and rightists and then some criminals taking advantage of the situation.  The protesters are not all ‘black,’ even as the black nationalist leaders and the press want to hide this. Hiding the multi-ethnic side of the protests is a losing strategy. It just fuels the inevitable racist backlash.  In addition, no one loots a store who has enough money, so this is a function of poverty or lack of funds.  Even Somali women in hijabs were seen getting stuff for free.  Criminals are mostly looking for the cash from the cash registers and couldn’t care less about Floyd, which is why they are breaking into buildings. According to the mayor of St. Paul, most of the arrests last night were of people from out-of-state.  The governor thinks that 80% of the 'bad' people on the street now are from out of state, though we have to treat this ‘outside agitator’ line carefully as statistics are showing otherwise.  We must ask again, why does U.S. capitalism have such a large group of proletarians willing to rob stores?  The ugly underside of this class society is once again revealed.

The white supremacist Proud Boys from Texas and white accelerationist supremacists from places like Eau Claire, WI have arrived in the Cities, including the variegated Boogaloo Bois.  Licenses from Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas and Florida have also been sighted on numerous trucks.  These 'accelerationists' are mostly fascists and have to be stopped.  They have set fires in black-owned and public buildings, including attacks on the mid-Town Market.  This may be their attempt to start a race war in the neighborhoods.

African-American middle-class professors, lawyers and professional non-profit leaders all claim ‘white supremacy’ is the only problem.  However, what they ignore is that white supremacy is embedded in an economic system – capitalism and its class system.  It is an economic, political and social tool of exploitation and division and is almost universal.  As a result, it hurts so-called ‘white’ workers and proletarians too.  Otherwise how do these black nationalists explain the same techniques being used in countries across the world?  Against Muslims in India, against Turks in Germany, against Algerians in France, against Indians and Pakistanis in Britain, against Rohinga in Burma, against indigenous and black people in Brazil, against Philippine workers in Saudi Arabia, against indigenous people in Canada?  Someone has to be super-exploited for money and used as a divider among workers and the color or ethnic line is the place colonialism, then capitalism, then imperialism, has adopted.  After all, slavery wasn’t because people were mean – it was very profitable in more ways than one.  Just look at the South, even today.

What this also shows is how weak the state is when confronted by masses of people.  State power partly collapsed in Minneapolis.  The governor and mayors are now going to call in the whole repressive state apparatus but this is a bulky, clumsy project.  Will anything change after another disorganized rebellion similar to Baltimore and Freddy Gray?  Unless mass organized parties or organizations appear that are anti-capitalist and multi-ethnic and have enough authority to control a struggle, local Democrats will again preside over an aging, corrupt system with micro-reforms and nice words.  Another re-run of a very tired script.

May Day Books is ok, but bike shops and other businesses just above us have been broken into or windows smashed.  Most of the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood that May Day is in is now boarded up but guarded by citizen defense guards.

Red Frog

5/30/2020