We support all demonstrators, who, fully aware of the risks, put themselves on the line anyway.
If the far-right protests were an act of pure contempt for other people’s lives, the social rebellion that is now setting the country ablaze is an act of collective love in the noblest sense. The capitalist “reopen” protests called for sacrificing workers to “the economy.” But this uprising today reminds us of Marx’s distinction between “making sacrifices for society” and the drive to instead “sacrifice existing society.” Sacrificing capital, rather than ourselves, would thus become “the common cause of all people who have outgrown the bourgeois system as a sacrifice that they make to themselves.” Our forces willingly put themselves on the line; their forces would like to sacrifice us against our will: the frontline workers constantly exposed to the pandemic, the poorest workers without adequate shelter or food or care. Their forces include fascist vigilantes, who have openly celebrated the deaths of Black people from COVID-19; they have attacked patients and the nurses who care for them, who fight for them. Black Lives Matter protests are nothing like “reopen” protests. These uprisings of society’s most vulnerable are a conscious struggle for survival. Fighting back is the only defense we have against death by cop, COVID, and capital. Rebellion is the most essential work of all.
We defend the burning of police precincts.
Police precincts are the vanguard of the prison-industrial complex. They are fortresses on the battlefront of the class war. Our forces take them over, make use of them, and empty them. Then redistribute the state’s ill-gotten arsenal, igniting celebratory fireworks along the way before burning the whole motherfucker to the ground. This expresses the always-present-but-usually-hidden power of the working class to control its own destiny despite the overwhelming force arrayed against it, against us. Because these tactics anticipate the revolutionary destruction of the state as a whole, they open a new horizon of freedom for all to see and imagine. We support hacking cop radios and playing “Fuck the Police” through every handset. Not only does mocking them undercut their ability to feel righteous in their brutality, but it interrupts their communications, making it harder for them to control us, to injure, maim, and kill even more people than they already have. Disruption can be life-saving and life-affirming. It, too, is essential work.
We welcome the redistribution of goods to the people who need them.
Whether those goods be food, medicine, diapers, clothing, or electronics. We remain confident that the workers who make flat-screen TVs don’t mind if they fall into the hands of people rioting against state-sanctioned murder. We stand with the Target workers who defended the riots while a Target store in Minneapolis burned to the ground. Target exploits its staff and has exposed them to the virus needlessly and regularly, contemptuous of their lives. In this particular city, Target donated a third of a million dollars to the city’s police department in order to install surveillance cameras in a forty-block radius of downtown. They funded a forensics crime lab on their own “campus,” creating high-res images from the data obtained from the cameras. It’s no wonder our forces cheered as the building was engulfed in flames. They systematically underpay us, leave us to fend for ourselves, stealing our labor-power and calling it profit, and then they have the audacity to give this money to those who harass us, beat us, spy on us, and kill us?