Black Lives Matter

The spark

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, was killed in Minneapolis during an arrest for allegedly using a counterfeit bill. A white police officer knelt on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes while Floyd was handcuffed and lying face down in the street, begging for his life and repeatedly saying “I can’t breathe”. A second and third officer further restrained Floyd while a fourth prevented bystanders from intervening.

The steam

George’s Floyd’s death was unremarkable; he was one of a thousand people killed by the police force every year. Of course the United States has a uniquely racist history; with a large part of its economy being based on the slave labour of black people for most of its existence and Jim Crow laws persisting within living memory. The rest of the world has racialised forms of oppression, and we have seen actions all over the world in response to the American spark. I won’t bore you with statistics about the unreasonable proportions of black people who are criminalised. But I will stop to mention that the UK, as a proportion of its population, has a worse record for racialised imprisonment than the United States; it is simply less visible because of the relatively tiny black population - again due to the different histories - we preferred to keep our slaves out of sight and out of mind and that did very well for us. In 1800 slavery was, in one way or another, responsible for 11% of our GDP. This quote in the FT’s article on the economics of slavery lays it out:

It is clear slavery was integral to the UK economy for more than a century, with proceeds enjoyed at home and misery parked offshore.

The current situation of black people in the States cannot be understood without going and looking at the history the Americas: colonisation, through the revolutionary and civil wars and, more recently Nixon. So I will recount this for you in the broadest strokes imaginable. The factors involved in the distribution of slaves were primarily economic. The economies of the colonies were quite different; the New England colonies mostly relied of furs, fish lumber i.e. not much in the way of agriculture. In the southern colonies, you had far more of the way in way of tobacco, corn, wheat and of course cotton. In general, the further south you go, the more agriculture there is, which makes sense; it’s sunnier down there which is for growing. This economic difference will play a major role in the conflicts to follow.

On to the American Revolution, specifically the aftermath of it when they set up the Constitutional Convention. When it came to the number of votes each state would get, broadly the northern states wanted only free people counted, and the south wanted slaves counted too. Of course when it came to working out how much tax the state should pay, the south wanted it to be paid according only to the number of white people, and the north wanted all races included. So they arrived at a compromise that pleased everyone: black slaves would be worth 3/5ths of a white free person.

But the compromise could not hold. A hundred years later and slavery was the primary source of conflict prior to and during the American Civil War. After the Union’s victory the thirteenth amendment was passed outlawing slavery for all reasons except as punishment for a crime. This, as well as having just lost a war, was devastating to the South’s economy (which wasn’t great to begin with). So they used their one route to acquiring free labour - they introduced harsher sentences for petty crimes and overwhelmingly enforced them on black former slaves. Once instituted, this allowed land owners rent labour in the form of ‘convict leasing’ so the black population were once more working cotton fields in chains. Through the 20th century prison labour was moved off the fields and into factories. This trend continued at a largely flat rate all the way up until Richard Nixon.

But before we get to Nixon, it would be remiss of me not to talk briefly of the Civil Rights movement which was a mass workers struggle for legal equality of blacks and whites in southern states. They won legal equality in the form of the Civil Rights Act after 10 years of arrests, lynchings and assassinations. But this was not the end of the movement; it continued to push for economic and cultural equality. And it went beyond this too. Much to the displeasure of many in the American establishment, Martin Luther King had a habit of saying things like this:

If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to hell.

That particular quote is from two weeks before his assassination. The reaction is coming at the next election and it takes the form of Richard Nixon. Spurred by many factors including profitable prisons, southern racism, and in reaction to the civil rights movements, Nixon starts the war on drugs, as one of his advisors said:

We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.

It worked. These movements were not a serious threat for decades. Since then the prison population has quadrupled, and even if you leave out the private prisons, the slave labour in the current US produces $2 billion worth of goods and is an effective tool for undermining workers rights. Just recently in New Orleans some garbage men went on strike over a lack of protective equipment. They were fired and replaced with prison labourers who work for 1/10th the price and still didn’t get protective equipment.

Founded in 2013, Black Lives Matter is a decentralised organisation which seeks to direct the energy of the workers into various actions against the state. Their first major actions were at Ferguson, again sparked by the unremarkable death of a black man at the hands of a police officer. On this occasion, as usual, the police officer responsible for this was not indicted, sparking a second wave of unrest. Since this, a number of people involved in the actions have died in suspicious circumstances. Far from being deterred by this, the group grew enormously on the back of these protests, and would continue to carry out demonstrations every year; of course they were in the background for most of the past 5 years. But in the weeks since the death of George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, and the international left as a whole have caused decades to happen.

The movement

A police station was torched, statues have fallen and even a Seattle Commune has been created. The wave of unrest sparked by the latest death has been incredible to see. Every single US state has seen major events, and by now most countries in the world have seen major events; they stretch from Trømso to Honolulu and from Pretoria to Kodiak; even in sleepy Leicester, we had a peaceful protest of roughly 4000 people; policed, thankfully, by only about four officers that I could see.

Back to Minneapolis, where the real action is, on the 29th of May, protesters invade and occupy the precinct where Floyd’s killer was employed before setting it ablaze in a historic first and an indication that the American people are rediscovering their revolutionary past. This act did what years of campaigning could not; on the 7th of June, a majority of the city council agreed to dismantle the police force, saying it was beyond reform. It will be interesting to see how Minneapolis evolves without this arm of the state at its disposal.

Closer to home, in Bristol, it was beautiful to see the statue of Edward Colston unceremoniously dropped into the harbour his slave ships had docked in 300 years earlier. In Tower Hamlets, another slaver was removed by the local council, Churchill and Victoria were defaced, but nothing had as much impact as Colston, for his splash was heard round the world. In Antwerp, Leopold II was set fire to and taken away. In Minnesota, Columbus was beheaded, burned and then thrown in a lake. This has been happening all over the place, statues have been falling in Florida, Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia and even Alabama.

One of the most blatant revolutionary acts has been the creation of the Capitol Hil Autonomous Zone, or CHAZ as I will be referring to it from now on. Set up by “ugly Anarchists”, or possibly “Radical Left Democrats” - it’s hard to tell from Donald Trump’s Twitter feed - this constitutes an occupied police station, a park, and a few other buildings. Temporary Autonomous Zones are an idea from the Anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey. The idea is to try out a new societal structure each time and just learn from what you can do with it; there isn’t any real goal of expansion, permanence or revolution. While the CHAZ is culturally significant, and the barricades can’t fail to elicit memories of the French Revolution, and it is a great demonstration of the limits of state power, but it is not a road to anywhere, merely a stop along the way.

The biggest industrial action in this movement so far is that of the ILWU who shut down major ports all along the western seaboard in action on Juneteenth, the anniversary of Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves. There have also been strikes by various technology professionals, but these pale in comparison to the efforts of the dock workers.

The reaction

Media

In its tradition of balance and nuanced debate, dating back around 90 years, the Daily Mail described Colston as a slave trader and philanthropist. At first objecting to the statue’s removal on the grounds that it was illegal, but later of course objecting to the lawful removal of similarly repulsive statues on the grounds that councils were “erasing the past”.

This has been a running theme whenever the media has objected to the protests. It’s never about the aims themselves, since the discrimination and brutality has been so plainly demonstrated to all who care to see; these media outlets invariably have a huge concern for the safety of the protesters during a pandemic. They also seem to think that statues are permanent, neutral (as in not necessarily celebratory) and educational.

The FT, took a rather different approach. In their major article on the unrest, the first person they quoted in their piece was Alex Vitale, the most prominent police abolitionist there is. While they did not advocate for any such position, it was worth noting that he was included as a voice to be listened to.

Popular Mechanics took a serious risk when they published a complete guide on “How to Topple a Statue Using Science”, including a handy guide to homemade thermite.

The street

In the UK we saw the usual sentient hemorrhoids marching to defend the statue of Winston Churchill while performing Nazi salutes, really doing exceptional work to discredit the idea that statues should be left up because they’re educational.

Other walking blood clots smashed up a black slave’s grave in Bristol as what they said was revenge for Edward Colston’s statue falling, but for a social movement, BLM is remarkably popular in the UK, with 49% of people supporting it.

Across the pond, some white Americans have been defending the cultural drip tray they call home by taking sniper positions on top of the local Gamestop, but generally there has been good support for it, with 64% supporting the protests. It’s likely these numbers have been helped by the totally insane acts of violence carried out by police over there, really exemplified by the video of an officer pushing an old man over for no reason, with no real reaction from his fellow officers.

Unfortunately it gets rather more sinister. In scenes reminiscent of the lynchings during the reconstruction, multiple black men have been found hanging from trees in the aftermath of protests; so far these have been ruled as suicides but are now being investigated further following an outcry from local activists.

The future

Without a continuation and extension of this movement, things will be bleak. The two primary motives for the sort of exploitation the US justice system exists for will continue to grow. As more and more industry moves abroad, the motive for American industry to keep lowering prices through prison labour will continue to grow. This is accompanied by the huge rise in unemployment; the American capitalist will see a great opportunity to turn the ‘surplus population’ into cheap or even free labour with the added benefit that these labourers are deprived of even the most basic of rights - even being unable to choose their favourite rapist in this year’s election.

But there is a little hope. This wave of unrest has been a powerful education both in the priorities of companies - Target was perfectly happy to close to protect their property from looters, but they have stayed open throughout the coronavirus, really showing their employees how much they’re valued.

There can be no doubt in any mind that we are in a period of massive economic and ecological instability, accompanied by explosive learning opportunities like this and movements powerful enough to take over regions and control them. This period is very reminiscent of many pre-revolutionary moments and it seems to have acquired a name: Welcome to the Cool Zone. This is a period of history where everything feels possible, for better or for worse.

The end

I’d like to end with a quote from noted abolitionist and former slave, Frederick Douglas, specifically his autobiography. It is in reference to his fight with Edward Covey, a small farm owner who specialised in ‘breaking slaves’. He would rent them for a year at cheap prices since the owners were counting on them coming back more obedient. Frederick Douglas remained a slave for some time after this fight, but you can tell it was a pivotal moment and while it wasn’t a total victory, it was a powerful one.

This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free. The gratification afforded by the triumph was a full compensation for whatever else might follow.