Some notes on the Uprisings against Anti-Black Racist Capitalism and the Possibilities for Hope: Resisting both Repression and Liberal Containment.
By Gary Kinsman
What a difference a few weeks makes when mass struggles explode
When I wrote my initial thoughts on the social organization of the COVID-19 Pandemic in March and May (see references below) I was at a bit of a loss to highlight what effective forms of struggle would be in the context of the pandemic and safe practices. While I was able to see that there would still be wildcat strikes and car cavalcades I thought much of the terrain of struggle would be on social media, through forms of popular education and remembering what we were learning during this crisis. Major mass struggles continued to break out in Lebanon, Chile and other countries but I did not see these forms of struggle breaking out in ‘Canada’ and the USA. But what a difference a few weeks makes when it is now very clear mass struggles can take place in this pandemic.
I am putting these reflections out as fast as I can since I fear the containment and curtailing of these uprisings is already in progress and we need to resist this now.
The Uprising Against Police Murder and Anti-Black Racism
The police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and others in the USA led to an explosion of not only a mass revolt against police anti-Black racism and violence across the USA but also shattered the relative passivity of people in the context of the pandemic and safe practices. Although there had been significant protests in the USA against immigrant/migrant detention, prison incarceration and by workers at Amazon and other companies during the pandemic these remained relatively localized.
While the uprising began in Minneapolis sparked by the police murder of George Floyd it was shaped by decades of intense anti-Black racism exacerbated by neoliberal capitalism in the long afterlife of slavery. It was not only a revolt against police murder and anti-Black racism (which it most certainly was) but also a revolt against racist capitalism itself. it quickly spread across the USA into almost a generalized insurrection against policing and racist capitalism. Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets led by Black activists who have learned a great deal since the emergence of Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives along with earlier struggles. Many other people joined these actions as accomplices and allies. This was also rooted In the the racist and anti-poor/anti-working class ways in which the social organization of the pandemic has been used against people and the increasing realization that there is currently no electoral way out of racist capitalism.
These rebellions forced charges to be laid against some of the police involved, led to the burning down of a police station, the closing of others and at least the temporary establishment of no go areas for the police, as well as the mass expansion of mutual aid the sharing and redistribution of resources. Most recently a wave of the tearing down of monuments to colonialism, slavery and anti-Blackness have taken place in the USA and Europe. People refused to be confined to the private realm or to “stay at home” and people in the streets developed their own autonomy from state and capitalist relations. Black autonomy in struggle was intensified as was autonomy from racist capitalism. The police were put under major attack as a key institutional site for racist capitalist state formation. This is a central challenge to white supremacy and racial capitalism and this critique must be deepened for the impact of the uprising to continue.
Hope for Radical Anti-Racist Social Transformation
This also opened up hope for the possibilities of a different world based on demolishing police racism and for being able to survive the pandemic which is having a major impact on Black people and other people of colour as well as Indigenous people. These sustained uprisings provided some hope against racist capitalism and this composition and circulation of struggle opened up cracks or ruptures with racist capitalist relations and at least for a period of time people were able to hold it open expanding its fissures. Forms of community and solidarity were recomposed in the context of the social organization of the pandemic that had dissipated any hope for solidarity and struggle for many people. This was a radical hope about imagining and catching glimpses of what the end of Anti-Black racism, colonialism and capitalism could begin to look like.
In ‘Canada’ and the US racist policing is not only anti-Black but also intensely anti-Indigenous. The police presence at the killing of Regis Korchinski Paquet a Black-Indigenous women in May in Toronto, the police killing of Chantal Moore an Indigenous woman in early June in Edmunston, as well as the police shooting of mental health survivor D’Andre Campbell in April in Brampton sparked major marches (with physical distancing and masks) in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, Halifax, London, Calgary, Edmonton, and much more in the first major mass actions since the pandemic in ‘Canada’ that gathered tens of thousands of people together. This included the largest actions for a long time in smaller urban centres. These actions also spread to London, Paris, Berlin, and other countries around the world producing a global movement and composition of struggle opposing racist policing and affirming that Black life matters.
This was a revolt that the vast majority of the white left could never have anticipated just as they never anticipated Black Lives Matter. At the centre of this resistance has been the politics of Black Lives Matter and the Movement for Black Lives, despite the dismissal of these organizations and politics as simply ‘identity politics’ by much of the white left ranging from the social democratic to the more ‘revolutionary.’ In struggle a new left is being composed on the ground which is led by Black, Indigenous and other people of colour and involves those white settlers who see our liberation as also bound up with the ending of anti-Black racism and racist capitalism. For these of us who are white settlers it means adopting a politics of responsibility and challenging anti-Black racism and setter colonialism from our locations within these practices. We need to become traitors to white supremacy and racist capitalism. This means actively disrupting white privilege and supremacy where we can and learning more about how to do this.
This is a revolt against white supremacy and its centrality to state and capitalist social relations. This is central to broader class compositions and recompositions that are taking place now. If white leftists do not see this than that ‘left’ is no longer relevant and another left in struggle is being made.
Fighting Police Repression and Liberal Containment Strategies
There have been two basic responses to try to close down the hopes for radical social transformation opened up by these uprisings. The first was mass repression by the police using all of their armaments. Although many were hurt and injured and a few killed by this mass police, and in some places, military repression this was largely unsuccessful in halting these rebellions as hundreds of thousands of people continued to fill the streets. In some major ways the repression fueled and expanded the uprising and many showed incredible courage in confronting the police and militarism.
Most of the activists organizing the rebellions supported abolishing the police and defunding and disarming the police as a way to get there. Abolishing and defunding the police moved quickly from being seen as ‘extreme’ demands to becoming widely accepted and even beginning to influence the mainstream.
A more successful strategy of confinement than police repression has been the growing attempts at liberal containment of these rebellions. This has taken a number of forms from the symbolic form of some police taking a knee with protesters, dancing with or for protestors, and even joining in a few of the protests.
One form this has taken is the police thanking demonstrators for being “peaceful” despite the violence saturating police actions, anti-Black racism, poverty and more. Given the situations all these protests take place within where social and police violence already defines the terrain to fetishize ‘peaceful’ protests is to actually operate on the terms of the police and to forget that effective protests will be defined by the police as not being ‘peaceful’ since to be effective and empowering we cannot play by their rules. It is important to remember that ‘violence’ is not introduced into a demonstration by the actions of demonstrators but that anti-Black racism and police violence is always already fully present before any demonstration even starts. Sometimes this strategy can even mean getting some protesters who want to be ‘peaceful’ to turn on other protestors engaging in a diversity of tactics of resistance.
But even more successful that this has been the shifting and limiting of the demands of the uprisings. The demand for defunding the police was first put forward as part of the process leading to the abolishment of the police as a social institution. Liberal and social democratic forces are now actively reworking defunding the police into a limited police reform severing it from disarming and abolishing the police. The liberal way it is now being put forward is often along the following lines — that given social program cuts the police have ended up taking on work that social agencies have been forced to abandon so we can now cut back the police budget in very limited ways and take some of this funding and give it to other state agencies also defined by the racist regulation of people’s lives. This will supposedly allow the police to focus on their ‘actual’ policing work. Some of these forces use the language of ‘anti-racism’ to argue for limited re-education and retraining of the police which has been tried countless time before with no success.
Some of these liberal and social democratic forces are arguing for even more funding for the police for ‘community policing’ which despite its nice sounding name is policing directed at surveillance of communities and activists and policing that goes after anti-racist and anti-policing activists. ‘Community policing’ is actually a more intensive and effective form of policing that draws sections of communities into policing their own members.
Keeping Radical Hope Alive: Preventing Closure and a return to racist capitalist ‘normality.’
In the face of these liberal containment strategies we need to keep the hope for radical social transformation alive for as long as we can by putting forward a clear abolitionist perspective which defunds the police by starting to make significant cuts to their armaments and means of repression and expanding no go areas whether they be geographical areas of cities or institutional sites (say a university campus) where the police are no longer able to intervene. This also leads to contesting the relations of racist capitalism.
‘Liberal’ forces are hoping to smother the hopes for radical social transformation that fueled the uprising. In so doing they want to limit any abolishing or serious defunding of the police, working to restore people’s commitment to racist and capitalist ‘normality,’ to only support ‘peaceful’ protest and to facilitate a return to the restrictions of electoral politics as the limit to our political imaginations. In contrast we need to defy and resist these containment strategies through expanding our radical imaginations as we hold open these cracks in anti-Black racism and racist capitalism. The struggle continues.
Many Black, Indigenous and other people of activists and scholars and other radical activists and scholars have influenced my writing and thinking here. I thank them all but I alone am responsible for what I have written here. Let me know what you think.
References to my previous work mentioned earlier.
Gary Kinsman, “Some Notes on Learning from AIDS Activism for our responses to the Cononavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic,” Radical Noise, March 18, 2020, https://radicalnoise.ca/2020/03/18/some-notes-on-learning-from-aids-activism-for-our-responses-to-the-coronavirus-covid-19-pandemic/
Gary Kinsman, “Learning from AIDS Activism for Surviving the COVID-19 Pandemic,” in Between the Lines Editorial Committee, Sick of the System, Why the COVID-19 recovery must be revolutionary, https://btlbooks.com/book/sick-of-the-system