Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2001 13:52:07 +0100 (BST) From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Scott=20Hamilton?= <s_h_hamilton-AT-yahoo.com> Subject: Loren Goldner on LA Riots Full text of this essay is online at http://www.geocities.com/the_third_eye_website/Theory/los_angeles_rebellion.htm The Rebellion in Los Angeles: The Context of a Proletarian Uprising Loren Goldner The Rebellion in Los Angeles On April 29th, Los Angeles exploded in the most serious urban uprising in America this century. It took the federal army, the national guard and police from throughout the country three days to restore order, by which time the residents of L.A. had appropriated millions of dollars worth of goods and destroyed a billion dollars of capitalist property. Most readers will be familiar with many of the details of the rebellion. This article will attempt to make sense of the uprising by putting the events into the context of the present state of class relations in Los Angeles and America in order to see where this new militancy in the class struggle may lead. Before the rebellion, there were two basic attitudes on the state of class struggle in America. The pessimistic view is that the American working class has been decisively defeated. This view has held that the U.S. is - in terms of the topography of the global class struggle - little more than a desert. The more optimistic view held, that despite the weakness of the traditional working class against the massive cuts in wages, what we see in the domination of the American left by single issue campaigns and 'Politically Correct' discourse is actually evidence of the vitality of the autonomous struggles of sections of the working class. The explosion of class struggle in L.A. shows the need to go beyond these one-sided views. Contents: 1 Beyond the Image: What happened? 2 Race and Class Composition 3 Class Composition And Capitalist Restructuring 4 A Note on Architecture and the Postmodernists 5 Gangs 6 The Political Ideas of the Gangs 7 Conclusion 1 Beyond the Image As most of our information about the rioting has come through the capitalist media, it is necessary to deal with the distorted perspective it has given. Just as in the Gulf War, the media presented an appearance of full immersion in what happened while actually constructing a falsified view of the events. While in the Gulf there was a concrete effort to disinform, in L.A. the distortion was a product not so much of censorship as much as of the total incomprehension of the bourgeois media when faced with proletarian insurrection. As Mike Davis points out, most reporters, 'merely lip-synched suburban cliches as they tramped through the ruins of lives they had no desire to understand. A violent kaleidoscope of bewildering complexity was flattened into a single, categorical scenario: legitimate black anger over the King decision hijacked by hard-core street criminals and it transformed into a maddened assault on their own community.' Such a picture is far from the truth. The beating of Rodney King in 1991 was no isolated incident and, but for the chance filming of the event, would have passed unnoticed into the pattern of racist police repression of the inner cities that characterises the present form of capitalist domination in America. But, because of the insertion of this everyday event into general public awareness the incident became emblematic. While the mainstream television audience forgot the event through the interminable court proceedings, the eyes of the residents of South Central L.A. and other inner cities remained fixed on a case that had become a focus for their anger towards the system King's beating was typical of. Across the country, but especially in L.A., there was the feeling and preparation that, whatever the result of the trial, the authorities were going to experience people's anger. For the residents of South Central, the King incident was just a trigger. They ignored his televised appeals for an end to the uprising because it wasn't about him. The rebellion was against the constant racism on the streets and about the systematic oppression of the inner cities; it was against the everyday reality of racist American capitalism. One media set response to similar situations has been to label them as 'race riots'. Such a compartmentalisation broke down very quickly in L.A. as indicated in Newsweek's reports of the rebellion: 'Instead of enraged young black men shouting "Kill Whitey," Hispanics and even some whites - men, women and children - mingled with African-Americans. The mob's primary lust appeared to be for property, not blood. In a fiesta mood, looters grabbed for expensive consumer goods that had suddenly become "free". Better-off black as well as white and AsianAmerican business people all got burned.' Newsweek turned to an 'expert' - an urban sociologist - who tells them, 'This wasn't a race riot. It was a class riot.' Perhaps uncomfortable with this analysis they turned to 'Richard Cunningham, 19', 'a clerk with a neat goatee': "They don't care for anything. Right now they're just on a spree. They want to live the lifestyle they see people on TV living. They see people with big old houses, nice cars, all the stereo equipment they want, and now that it's free, they're gonna get it." As the sociologist told them - a class riot. In L.A., Hispanics, blacks and some whites united against the police; the composition of the riot reflected the composition of the area. Of the first 5,000 arrests '52 per cent were poor Latinos, 10 per cent whites and only 38 per cent blacks.' Faced with such facts, the media found it impossible to make the label 'race riot' stick. They were more successful, however, in presenting what happened as random violence and as a senseless attack by people on their own community. It is not that there was no pattern to the violence, it is that the media did not like the pattern it took. Common targets were journalists and photographers, including black and Hispanic ones. Why should the rioters target the media? - 1) these scavangers gathering round the story offer a real danger of identifying participants by their photos and reports. 2) The uncomprehending deluge of coverage of the rebellion follows years of total neglect of the people of South Central except their representation as criminals and drug addicts. In South Central, reporters are now being called "image looters". But the three fundamental aspects to the rebellion were the refusal of representation, direct appropriation of wealth and attacks on property; the participants went about all three thoroughly. Refusal of Representation While the rebellion in '65 had been limited to the Watts district, in '92 the rioters circulated their struggle very effectively. Their first task was to bypass their 'representatives'. The black leadership - from local government politicians through church organisations and civil rights bureaucracy - failed in its task of controlling its community. Elsewhere in the States this strata did to a large extent succeed in channelling people's anger away from the direct action of L.A., managing to stop the spread of the rebellion. The struggle was circulated, but we can only imagine the crisis that would have ensued if the actions in other cities had reached L.A.'s intensity. Still, in L.A. both the self-appointed and elected representatives were by-passed. They cannot deliver. The rioters showed the same disrespect for their 'leaders' as did their Watts counterparts. Years of advancement by a section of blacks, their intersection of themselves as mediators between 'their' community and US capital and state, was shown as irrelevant. While community leaders triedto restrain the residents, 'gang leaders brandishing pipes, sticks and baseball bats whipped up hotheads, urging them not to trash their own neighbourhoods but to attack the richer turf to the west'. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "It was too dangerous for the police to go on to the streets" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Observer May 3rd 1992 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Attacks on Property The insurgents used portable phones to monitor the police. The freeways that have done so much to divide the communities of L.A. were used by the insurgents to spread their struggle. Cars of blacks and Hispanics moved throughout a large part of the city burning their targets - commercial premises, the sites of capitalist exploitation - while at other points traffic jams formed outside Malls as their contents were liberated. As well as being the first multiethnic riot in American history, it was its first car-borne riot. The police were totally overwhelmed by the creativity and ingenuity of the rioters. Direct Appropriation "Looting, which instantly destroys the commodity as such, also discloses what the commodity ultimatly implies: The army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state's monopoly of armed violence." Once the rioters had got the police off the streets looting was clearly an overwhelming aspect of the insurrection. The rebellion in Los Angeles was an explosion of anger against capitalism but also an eruption of what could take its place: creativity, initiative, joy. A middle-aged woman said: "Stealing is a sin, but this is more like a television gameshow where everyone in the audience gets to win." Davis article in The Nation June 1st -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Looters of all races owned the streets, storefronts and malls. Blond kids loaded their Volkswagon with stereo gear... Filipinos in a banged up old clunker stocked up on baseball mitts and sneakers. Hispanic mothers with children browsed the gaping chain drug marts and clothing stores. A few Asians were spotted as well. Where the looting at Watts had been desperate, angry, mean, the mood this time was closer to a maniac fiesta". The direct appropriation of wealth (pejorativly labelled looting) breaks the circuit of capital - Work Wage-Consumption - and such a struggle is just as unacceptable to capital as a strike. However it is also true that, for a large section of the L.A. working class, rebellion at the level of production is impossible. From the constant awareness of a 'good life' out of reach - commodities they cannot have - to the contradiction of the simplest commodity, the use-values they need are all stamped with a price tag; they experience the contradictions of capital not at the level of alienated production but at the level of alienated consumption, not at the level of labour but at the level of the commodity. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "A lot of people feel that it's reparations. It's what already belongs to us." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Will M., former gang member, on the 'looting'. International Herald Tribune 8th May It is important to grasp the importance of direct appropriation, especially for subjects such as those in L.A. who are relatively marginalised from production. This 'involves an ability to understand working-class behaviour as tending to bring about, in opposition to the law of value, a direct relationship with the social wealth that is produced. Capitalist development itself, having reached this level of class struggle, destroys the 'objective' parameters of social exchange. The proletariat can thus only recompose itself, within this level, through a material will to reappropriate to itself in real terms the relation to social wealth that capital has formally redimensioned'. If the bourgeois press had to concede the class nature of the uprising, all the stranger that a part of the left here felt it necessary to insist that what happened was a race riot. Living Marxism felt it necessary to reduce this eruption of class anger to their narrow conception of the 'silent race war'. The fact that the multiracial rebellion by the proletariat of L.A. was a massive explosion of class struggle escaped the notice of the RCP; but then for followers of Living (Dying?) Marxism class struggle has no existence; certainly it is not something that can be allowed to get in the way of 'the battle of ideas'. The RCP's whole stance on this and other acts of class struggle (such as the poll tax rebellion) is evidence of their retreat to the realm of ideology. The SWP's response was more traditional. While they at least recognised the class nature of the events they did not bother to analyse the events themselves, just used them as illustrations of how their line on race and class was correct. Alex Callinicos, for example, subordinated his attempt at a serious analysis of the relation between 'Race and Class' to the more urgent task of giving a rather lame defence of their ANL strategy which is obviously in deep crisis. The RCP and SWP: mirrors of each other. What we saw in both cases was not a response to the riots - not an attempt to learn from the actions of the class - rather just the taking of them as an excuse to trot out the previously developed line. So for the RCP the uprising was a 'race riot' showing the correctness of their idea of a 'silent race war' while for the SWP it shows the validity of their ANL strategy. For both groups the significance of any outburst of class struggle is always just to show the problems of capitalism and the need for the(ir) party. The point with these and other Trotskyite groupings is that they already know what revolution is and what forms of organisation and actions it involves - it was what happened in Russia in 1917. They can only see the L.A. rebellion as evidence that their diagnosis of capitalism's sickness and their cure remain valid. But we on the non-Leninist revolutionary left should be wary of just repeating our line that the riots were just great and that we support them whole-heartedly. It is not enough just to support the events, we should try to understand them and the development they represent. 2 Race and Class Composition So even Newsweek, voice of the American bourgeoisie, conceded that what happened was not a 'race riot' but a 'class riot'. But in identifying the events as a class rebellion we do not have to deny they had 'racial' elements. The overwhelming importance of the riots was the extent to which the racial divisions in the American working class were transcended in the act of rebellion; but it would be ludicrous to say that race was absent as an issue. There were 'racial' incidents: what we need to do is see how these elements are an expression of the underlying class conflict. Some of the crowd who initiated the rebellion at the Normandie and Florence intersection went on to attack a white truck driver, Reginald Oliver Denny. The media latched on to the beating, transmitting it live to confirm suburban white fear of urban blacks. But how representative was this incident? An analysis of the deaths during the uprising shows it was not. Still, we need to see how the class war is articulated in 'racial' ways. In America generally, the ruling class has always promoted and manipulated racism, from the genocide of native Americans, through slavery, to the continuing use of ethnicity to divide the labour force. The black working class experience is to a large extent that of being pushed out of occupations by succeeding waves of immigrants. While most groups in American society on arrival at the bottom of the labour market gradually move up, blacks have constantly been leapfrogged. Moreover, the racism this involves has been a dampner on the development of class consciousness on the part of white workers. In L.A. specifically, the inhabitants of South Central constitute some of the most excluded sectors of the working class. Capital's strategy with regards these sectors is one of repression carried out by the police - a class issue. However the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is predominantly white andits victims massively black and Hispanic (or as P.C. discourse would have it, people of colour). Unlike in other cities, where the racist nature of the split between the included and excluded sectors is blurred by the state's success in co-opting large numbers of blacks on to the police force, in L.A. capital's racist strategy of division and containment is revealed in every encounter between the LAPD and the population - a race issue. When the blacks and Hispanics of L.A. have been marginalised and oppressed according to their skin colour, it is not surprising that in their explosion of class anger against their oppressors they will use skin colour as a racial shorthand in identifying the enemy, just as it has been used against them. So even if the uprising had been a 'race riot', it would still have been a class riot. It is also important to recognise the extent to which the participants went beyond racial stereotypes. While the attacks on the police, the acts of appropriation and attacks on property were seen as proper and necessary by nearly everyone involved, there is evidence that acts of violence against individuals on the basis of their skin colour were neither typical of the rebellion nor widely supported. In the context of the racist nature of L.A. class oppression, it would have been surprising if there had not been a racial element to some of the rebellion. What is surprising and gratifying is the overwhelming extent to which this was not the case, the extent to which the insurgents by-passed capital's racist strategies of control. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "A lot of people feel that in order to come together we have to sacrifice the neighbourhood." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Will M., former gang member, on the destruction of businesses. International Herald Tribune 8th May 1992 One form the rebellion took was a systematic assault on Korean businesses. The Koreans are on the front-line of the confrontation between capital and the residents of central L.A. - they are the face of capital for these communities. Relations between the black community and the Koreans had collapsed following the Harlins incident and its judicial result. In an argument over a $1.79 bottle of orange juice, Latasha Harlins, a 15-year old black girl, was shot in the back of the head by a Korean grocer - Soon Ja Du - who was then let off with a $500 fine and some community service. While the American State packs its Gulags with poor blacks for just trying to survive, it allows a shopkeeper to kill their children. But though this event had a strong effect on the blacks of South Central, their attack on Korean property cannot be reduced to vengeance for one incident - it was directed against the whole system of exchange. The uprising attacked capital in its form of property, not any property but the property of businesses - the institutions of exploitation; and in the black and Hispanic areas, most of these properties and businesses were owned by Koreans. But though we should understand the resentment towards the Koreans as class-based, it is necessary to put this in the context of the overall situation. In L.A., the black working-class's position deteriorated in the late 1970s with the closure of the heavy industry, whereas at the end the sixties they had started to be employed in large numbers. This was part of the internationalization of L.A.'s economy, its insertion into the Pacific Rim centre of accumulation which also involved an influx of mainly Japanese capital into downtown redevelopment, immigration of over a million Latin Americans to take the new low-wage manufacturing jobs that replaced the jobs blacks had been employed in, and the influx of South Koreans into L.A.'s mercantile economy. Thus while Latinos offered competition for jobs, the Koreans came to represent capital to blacks. However, these racial divisions are totally contingent. Within the overall restructuring, the jobs removed from L.A. blacks were relocated to other parts of the Pacific Rim such as South Korea. The combativity of these South Korean workers shows that the petty-bourgeois role Koreans take in L.A. is but part of a wider picture in which class conflict crosses all national and ethnic divides as global finance capital dances around trying to escape its nemesis but always recreating it. 3 Class Composition and Capitalist Restructuring The American working class is divided between waged and unwaged, blue and white collar, immigrant and citizen labour, guaranteed and unguaranteed; but as well as this, and often synonymous with these distinctions, it is divided along ethnic lines. Moreover, these divisions are real divisions in terms of power and expectations. We cannot just cover them up with a call for class unity or fatalistically believe that, until the class is united behind a Leninist party or other such vanguard, it will not be able to take on capital. In terms of the American situation as well as with other areas of the global class conflict it is necessary to use the dynamic notion of class composition rather than a static notion of social classes. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "When Bush visited the area security was massive. TV networks were asked not to broadcast any of Mr Bush's visit live to keep from giving away his exact location in the area." International Herald Tribune 8th May 1992 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The rebellion in South Central Los Angeles and the associated actions across the United States showed the presence of an antagonistic proletarian subject within American capitalism. This presence had been occluded by a double process: on the one hand, a sizeable section of American workers have had their consciousness of being proletarian - of being in antagonism to capital - obscured in a widespread identification with the idea of being 'middle-class'; and on the other, for a sizeable minority, perhaps a quarter of the population, there has being their recomposition as marginalised sub-workers excluded from consideration as a part of society by the label 'underclass'. The material basis for such sociological categorisations is that, on the one hand there is the increased access to 'luxury' consumption for certain 'higher' strata, while on the other there is the exclusion from anything but 'subsistence' consumption by those 'lower' strata consigned to unemployment or badly paid part-time or irregular work. This strategy of capital's carries risks, for while the included sector is generally kept in line by the brute force of economic relations, redoubled by the fear of falling into the excluded sector, the excluded themselves, for whom the American dream has been revealed as a nightmare, must be kept down by sheer police repression. In this repression, the war on drugs has acted as a cover for measures that increasingly contradict the 'civil rights' which bourgeois society, especially in America, has prided itself on bringing into the world. Part of the U.S. capital's response to the Watts and other 'sixties rebellions was to give ground. To a large section of the working class revolting because its needs were not being met, capital responded with money - the form of mediation par excellence - trying to meet some of that pressure within the limits of capitalist control. This was not maintained into the 'eighties. For example, federal aid to cities fell from $47.2 billion in 1980 to $21.7 billion in 1992. The pattern is that of the global response to the proletarian offensives of the 'sixties and 'seventies: first give way - allowing wage increases, increasing welfare spending (i.e. meeting the social needs of the proletariat) - then, when capital has consolidated its forces, the second part - restructure accumulation on a different basis - destructure knots of working class militancy, create unemployment. In America, this strategy was on the surface more successful than in Europe. The American bourgeoisie had managed to halt the general rise in wages by selectively allowing some sectors of the working class to maintain or increase their living standards while others had theirs massively reduced. One sector in particular has felt the brunt of this strategy: the residents of the inner city who are largely black and Hispanic. The average yearly income of black high school graduates fell by 44% between 1973 and 1990, there have been severe cutbacks in social programmes and massive disinvestment. With the uprising, the American working class has shown that capital's success in isolating and screwing this section has been temporary. The re-emergence of an active proletarian subject shows the importance, when considering the strategie of capital, of not forgetting that its restructuring is a response to working class power. The working class is not just an object within capital's process. It is a subject (or plurality of subjects), and, at the level of political class composition reached by the proletariat in the 'sixties, it undermined the process. Capital's restructuring was an attack on this class composition, an attempt to transform the subject back into an object, into labour-power. Capitalist restructuring tried to introduce fragmentation and hierarchy into a class subject which was tending towards unity (a unity that respected multilaterality). It moved production to other parts of the world (only as in Korea to export class struggle as well); it tried to break the strength of the 'mass worker' by breaking up the labour force within factories into teams and by spreading the factory to lots of small enterprises; it has also turned many wage-labourers into selfemployed to make people internalise capital's dictates. In America, the fragmentation also occurred along the lines of ethnicity. Black blue-collar workers have been a driving force in working class militancy as recorded by C.L.R. James and others. For a large number of blacks and others, the new plan involved their relegation to Third World poverty levels. But as Negri puts it, "marginalisation is as far as capital can go in excluding people from the circuits of production - expulsion is impossible. Isolation within the circuit of production - this is the most that capital's action of restructuration can hope to achieve." When recognising the power of capital's restructuring it is necessary to affirm the fundamental place of working class struggles as the motor force of capital's development. Capital attacks a certain level of political class composition and a new level is recomposed; but this is not the creation of the perfect, pliable working class - it is only ever a provisional recomposition of the class on the basis of its previously attained level. ====For "a ruthless criticism of every existing idea": THR-AT-LL, NZ's class struggle anarchist paper http://www.freespeech.org/thrall/ THIRD EYE, a Kiwi lib left project, at http://www.geocities.com/the_third_eye_website/ and 'REVOLUTION' magazine, a Frankfurt-Christchurch production, http://cantua.canterbury.ac.nz/%7Ejho32/ ____________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? 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