File spoon-archives/anarchy-list.archive/anarchy-list_2001/anarchy-list.0104, message 123


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/

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