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 3rd 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 3rd Precinct went up in flames
after the police were ordered to abandon it, and now the 5th
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
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