Peter Gelderloos has written a set of three essays about the recent uprising in Ferguson and some of the issues involved. The analysis is informative about the US situation, and also relevant for thinking about social war over here. The essays are in the anarchist library. They are quite long, so here is a quick summary of some key points.
1. The nature of police, the role of the left
More people are waking up to the problem of the police. Cops affect us all, they will kill anyone who’s not wealthy. But they disproportionately attack black people. The US police is a “racist institution par excellence”, descended from patrols to hunt slaves and beat immigrant workers.
The left (“progressives”, “activists”, “NGOs”, “protest organisations”, liberal journos and academics, etc.) is another pillar of the system, it helps the cops by preventing a real debate. They mobilise against anyone who “challenges their basic tenets”.
“Those tenets are simple: all responses must be peaceful; and the only conceivable goal is piecemeal reform. Within this artificially fixed arena, we are allowed to squabble over all the details we want, from cop-cameras to citizen review boards, but we are never allowed to entertain opinions that transgress those limits.”
That’s how democracy works. The reformers join with “all the dominant institutions, including the bloody-handed cops they claim to oppose, to silence, marginalize, criminalize, or demonize anyone who chooses to fight back against the police.”
The reformers are also parasites. “They would not exist without those who fight back.” They only get on the news, or get paid as professional protesters and commentators, because “folks in Ferguson were setting fires, looting, throwing rocks and molotovs, and shooting at cops for ten days in August.”
If the reformers were sincere, they would thank the rioters for bringing the problem of the police to “the nation’s attention”, and then politely explain how their non-violent methods would solve it. But they can’t, because nonviolence doesn’t work. And anyway they’re not sincere: they are just professional “fire extinguishers”.
“it wasn’t the police or even the National Guard who succeeded in putting an end to the rioting, but these professional activists.”
The extent of their cynicism is shown by how they wheel out the families of kids killed by cops (so long as they say the right things).
It’s interesting, though, that the police response to the riots in Ferguson was relatively mild. The rioters started regularly shooting at the cops, and the pigs didn’t fire back (much). This is in contrast to how the US state has brutally clamped down on uprisings in the past.
“Why? What were they afraid of? It certainly wasn’t a peaceful protest or a little bad media coverage.”
The reformers wield the myth of Martin Luther King and the supposedly peaceful black Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. The real history of the Civil Rights movement shows this to be bullshit. MLK carried a loaded gun and his Alabama home was described as an “arsenal”.
PG gives a good run through of some of this history. E.g., an important turning point was the 1963 Birmingham (Alabama) campaign. MLK’ strategy was to fill up the prisons with non-violent protestors, until the cops couldn’t arrest any more. But the cops just bussed the prisoners out to other areas, and King was running out of volunteers.
“Then the riots started. Thousands of locals fought with police, injuring many of them, burned the very white businesses that were refusing to desegregate, and took over a large part of downtown, holding it for days. By fighting back directly, they instantly made a desegregated, cop-free zone in the center of their city. Anxious to keep other people from learning the same lesson, Birmingham business leaders and politicians immediately agreed to legislate the desegregation that rioters had already accomplished (in fact they had won something even more potent: not only could blacks enter white businesses, but they didn’t have to pay for anything). President Kennedy finally started paying attention and urged Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act. It was the rioters who won civil rights.”
The reformers cover up this history, and the wider history of black, native and other struggles in the US. Left and right, corporate media and the state all work together on this.
People of colour face greater risks when they fight back. White US progressives twist this into the “argument that fighting back is ‘privileged'”. Spreading lies about “white anarchist” infiltrators helps hide the explosive reality of people of different racial backgrounds fighting together on the streets. It also justifies the reformers’ own “comfort politics”.
“I think true solidarity can only exist between people or groups that have their own autonomous struggles. And while white people will never know what it is like for people of color in this society, I don’t think I can trust a white person who does not have their own reasons for hating police.”
The only real solution to the police is to get rid of them entirely.
Reformers say that police and prisons aren’t working well. Actually, they work very well, “they simply do not work for us and they never have”.
“police and prisons are only necessary in societies that are based on exploitation and inequality. The police are not an instrument fit to protect a society; on the contrary they are an instrument fit to protect an elite, parasitical class from society. Any society with a minimal practice of cooperation and solidarity can protect itself from individuals who would harm others.”
Yeah but can we really live without cops? What about the rapists, etc.? Apart from the anthropological discussion of how non-state societies have lived without cops for millenia, PG gives two examples from big industrial societies today. These are: Christiania, in Denmark; and the Oaxaca commune, in Mexico in 2006. Here is his bit on Oaxaca:
“The mutual relationship between police and crime was exquisitely revealed during the popular uprising in Oaxaca in 2006. In June of that year, police viciously attacked the massive encampment staged annually by striking teachers. But the teachers fought back tooth and nail, quickly joined by many neighbors. They pushed police out of Oaxaca City, which remained autonomous for five months along with large parts of the countryside. People built barricades, which became an important space for socialization as well as self-defense, and they organized topiles, an indigenous tradition that provided volunteers to fight back against police and paramilitaries as well as to look out for fires, acts of robbery, or assault.
“The defenders of Oaxaca soon learned that the police were releasing people from their prisons on the condition that they go into the city to commit crimes. In protecting their neighborhoods against these acts, the topiles did not function like Western police forces. They patrolled unarmed, they were volunteers, and they did not have a prerogative to arrest people or impose their will, the way cops do. Upon coming across a robbery, arson, or assault, their function was not only that of first responders, but also to call on the neighbors so everyone could respond collectively. With such a structure, it would be impossible to enforce a legal code against an activity with popular participation. In other words, the topiles could stop a stranger who was robbing the store of a local, working class person (as were many of the neighborhood stores in Oaxaca), but they couldn’t have stopped the neighbors themselves from looting a store they already had an antagonistic, classist relationship with, as was the case in Ferguson.
“People in Oaxaca also had to defend themselves from police and paramilitaries, and they did so for five months. The topiles and many others were unarmed. They had to fight back with rocks, fireworks, and molotov cocktails, many of them getting shot in the process. Their bravery allowed hundreds of thousands of people to live in freedom for five months, in a police-free, government-free zone, experimenting with the self-organization of their lives on social, economic, and cultural levels. All the beautiful aspects of the Oaxaca commune are inseperable from their violent struggle against police, involving barricades, slingshots, molotov cocktails, and thousands of people who faced down armed opponents, over a dozen of them giving their lives in the process. In the end, the Mexican state had to send in the military as the only way to crush this flourishing pocket of autonomy.”
PG also looks at the question: why did some US media, e.g., Time and Rolling Stone magazines, sometimes show some support for the rioters? He compares this to the way Greek media dealt with the uprising in 2008 after the killing of Alexis Grigoropoulos.
The basic media technique there was to create three stereotypes: young students who justifiably protest (good); anarchists who hijack their protests to burn copshops (bad); immigrants who take advantage of the chaos to loot shops (bad).
If there is widespread sympathy, the media can’t ignore this altogether. What they can do is divide “good” from “bad” protestors. And defining a revolt as a student (or black, etc.) issue discourages others (non-students, whites, etc.) from getting involved.
Also, the state and media are forced to move in response to the escalation of revolt. They are always in the business of setting limits, but these can be pushed back. In Greece:
“the intensity of street fighting over three uninterrupted weeks was forcing the government to consider calling in the military. They were willing to tolerate burning barricades and illegal protests if things didn’t go further. Likewise, when people start to bring guns to protests as in Ferguson, there will be those among the forces of law and order who begin to see the wisdom in tolerating the smashing of banks.”
PG then turns this same analysis on (well meaning) progressive academics and commentators who go beyond police reform and actually advocate abolition. Even police or prison abolition can be made “respectable”. So long as it stays as refined and isolated theorising and lobbying, and doesn’t actually involve taking to the streets and abolishing cops in practice.
“Even though the abolition of prisons is not a likely future, from the present vantage, democratic capitalism increases its chances for survival by exploring contingency plans for extreme cases, and by giving opponents employment opportunities. The advantage is increased if “prisons” or “police” can be discursively transformed from an integral element of a whole system into a particular appendage that can be discarded or modified.”
In conclusion: change only comes from the streets.
“If we learn from examples like Christiania, Oaxaca, and Ferguson itself, we can fight for a world without police and everything they represent, beginning here and now by creating blocks, neighborhoods, or even entire cities that are at least temporarily police-free zones. Within these spaces we can finally experiment and practice with solutions to all the other interrelated forms of oppression that plague us”
Of course, fighting is dangerous. And “there is nothing wrong with being afraid, so long as you have the courage to admit it.” Rather than try to cover it up with self-justifying bullshit.
“In the streets, we need to learn how to seize space, to make sure that those who fight back are never isolated, to make collective responses possible so no one has to react in an individual, suicidal way again, and to build a struggle that has room for young and old, for the peaceful and the bellicose, for those who know how to fight and those who know how to heal. It will be a long process, and in the meantime, there is a great need to speak loud and clear about a world without police, so everyone will know there is another way, beyond the false alternatives of obedience or ineffectual reform.”
