More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Out of a population of roughly 21,000, over 16,000 Ferguson residents had arrest warrants issued. And this number only counts individuals with warrants, not the total number of warrants. In 2013 this figure was a staggering 35,975, roughly 1.5 warrants per person in the city.6 These warrants were part of a complex racket designed to impose unrelenting fines on the poor population in order to fund the city government, which itself had largely been redesigned to facilitate this predatory practice.
Councilman Jumaane Williams and non-profits such as Fathers Alive in the Hood (FAITH) arriving to blame people from “outside the community” for the violence, driving a wedge between the black youth who had been leading the riots night to night and the array of radicals who had come out to support them.19
In both New York and Baltimore, the hard repression of the police department is clearly accompanied by the soft suppression dealt by an equally vast and equally vicious apparatus of non-profits, progressives, churches, and reactionary religious, nationalist, or criminal groups, all of whom have strong vested interests in the currently existing distribution of power.
The key to understanding these dynamics is not attempting to sort such groups by their professed beliefs—which vary widely—but instead to analyze their actions when confronted with such uprisings. In this respect, they all behave in an almost identical fashion, as ancillaries of the police.
Due to its relative industrial density, the near hinterland will likely be the central theater in the coming class war, the most concise summation of which is simply the fact that large populations of people who have been made surplus to the economy live and work along its integral corridors. Dead labor, too, has a way of coming back.
This was part of a good cop, bad cop game played by the city government, in which the mayor’s office and a whole array of liberal NGOS would flock to the camp in the morning, handing out leaflets and offering to “host” the camp at City Hall, where it could “speak truth to power” directly and “begin the dialogue.” Then, at night, the police would move in, also under orders from the mayor.
In reality, decisions were made by relatively small groups of people operating outside the public eye, united by affinities that had either been present before the Occupation or had been built up haphazardly within it.
Those who capitulated to the city’s many offers of truce were gradually banished from these small decision-making bodies, and thereby failed to serve the function of a co-opted leadership despite their continued presence at the camps.
In some instances, the small grouplets pushing the Occupation forward were largely tactical in nature. In many cities these fractions were composed of juggalos and street kids, whose long-standing opposition to the police helped to advance various Occupations beyond the stage of marching on sidewalks and claiming that the police pepper-spraying us were also “part of the 99%.”
I therefore use “ultras” in the lower case to refer to all of those small grouplets enmeshed in larger struggles who wield some sort of “latent military strength,” unified by something other than basic political agreement and who operate to advance and defend the potentials opened by recent unrest. In this sense, the ultras are active, non-state forces that operate within the more volatile spaces of competitive control—but their true distinguishing feature is a self-reflexive connection to particular local sequences of struggle, in which their actions are specifically partisan actions aimed at
...more
The return of class is instead part of the unfolding of the Long Crisis over time. As class conflict intensifies, the traditional methods of separation and sequestration of struggles—as “issues” concerning particular “communities” or “interest groups”—will tend to strain and then shatter.
But it also occurs through the retirement and subsequent, well-deserved die-off of the elderly.
For these people, the urn cannot approach quickly enough.
when the insurgents manage to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya or in Wisconsin, it’s only to discover empty places, that is, empty of power, and furnished without any taste. It’s not to prevent the “people” from “taking power” that they are so fiercely kept from invading such places, but to prevent them from realizing that power no longer resides in the institutions. There are only deserted temples there, decommissioned fortresses, nothing but stage sets—real traps for revolutionaries.35
That insufferable local rapper Macklemore ran by me with a few members of his entourage and a handful of people from the black bloc, all pointing and yelling in the direction of some approaching but unseen contingent of police.
In the hinterland, by contrast, most oppositional forces are poorly organized, and the population is often actually in need of such services, particularly in times of ecological disaster. Service programs—suitable for the present but roughly analogous to the Black Panthers’ breakfast program, the IWW’s (Industrial Worker’s of the World) housing of itinerant laborers, or the social clubs of the early workers’ movement—are likely to be an essential component of any attempt to overcome the present limits of struggle in the U.S., as are emergency preparedness courses such as those offered by the
...more
The state will almost certainly ship in Klansmen from the exurbs or simply recruit angry whites with the promise of painkillers, just as Mubarak bused in scimitar-wielding conservatives from the countryside to lead gangs of poor men paid in free meals and Tramadol. In such a situation, the correctness of one’s political analysis is irrelevant.
Far-right solutions—even spectacular ones that might glory in some success over parliamentarians or armed federal agents—will tend in the final instance to fuse with the predatory party in this civil war, as is obvious in the case of groups such as Golden Dawn in Greece, bolstered by the votes and donations of police, civil servants, and nativist workers. Communist, or at least proto-communist, potentials will exhibit the opposite tendency, advocating an inclusive allegiance with the abject, including poor whites, and the absolute rejection of any “community” that denies such universalism.
