The Revolutionary Meaning of the George Floyd Uprising

Shemon Salam, Arturo Castillon

• Publisher: Daraja Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781988832951
• eBook ISBN: 9781988832968
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

3

Prelude to a New Civil War

Shemon Salam and Arturo Castillon

It was the proletarian general strike of the ex-slaves that truly put the final nail in the coffin of slavery.
It is precisely this lineage of an emancipatory, liberatory, but nonetheless violent,
civil war that needs to be updated for its second coming.

—Idris Robinson, “How It Might Should Be Done”^[1]

As indicated in poll after poll, op-ed after op-ed, more and more Americans are thinking about the present in terms of civil war. Why? The legacy of the US Civil War is an obvious reason, but why is the specter of civil war raised so vigorously today? Why do so many people see the escalation of partisan conflict as inevitable?

This sentiment cannot be separated from the fires of the George Floyd uprising, which itself has unfolded in the context of decades of deindustrialization, the rise of mass incarceration, the 2008 economic crisis, the Trump presidency, and now, the ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic, which triggered a deepening of poverty and unemployment, but also anti-police riots across the country. The conjunction of all these events reveals deep splits within American society which any strategy for revolution will have to account for.

Since the end of May we’ve seen that Black proletarians won’t hesitate to riot in response to the murderous actions of the police. The anti-police riot coalesces into a multi-racial insurgency, which, in turn, provokes repression and counterinsurgency, and not just from the police, but also from right-wing paramilitaries, and even from moderates and liberals. The deepening of this social conflict—between those who support the uprising and those who oppose it—raises the question of civil war in a concrete manner; it fractures the unified bloc of whiteness, but also the racial politics of other groups as well, including Black people, as shown in the division between Black partisans of revolt and Black counterinsurgents. In the fight for life and dignity, the Black proletariat in motion splits society in a particular way, resulting in a form of civil war which is not just a matter of rhetoric or metaphor, but a real material contradiction that encapsulates the American form of class war and which is inseparable from race.

For now, civil war remains latent; it has not yet become a historical event. Still, the signs of mass polarization are visible everywhere: the politics of fear, paranoia, contempt, and hate are manifest in the everyday behaviors and opinions of large swaths of US society. It is less the fact of civil war than the threat of its potential that attracts and repels, expands and limits, inspires and frightens the collective imagination. Few say it in public, but in the privacy of their homes, people again ask themselves: are we on the eve of a civil war?

Interpretations

As the far-right sees it, they are building the forces that can intervene and put an end to the threat posed by the uprising. These forces are even willing to break the law and engage in their own forms of insurgent tactics in order to uphold their vision of unbridled US capitalism. In fact, a substantial portion of right-wingers believe that the George Floyd uprising was the opening salvo in a new sequence of civil war. Militant formations like the Michigan Home Guard, the 3 Percenters, the Proud Boys, and the Boogaloo Boys are some of the most violent and radical forces on the right to take up the fight.

By contrast, the left generally avoids the question of civil war all together. Except for a tiny minority (e.g., Robert Evans’ “It Could Happen Here”,^[2] Kali Akuno,^[3] and the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement^[4]), most on the left do not conceive of the present moment in terms of civil war, because the potential dangers are too much to bear. Since the overwhelming majority of guns are in the hands of right-wingers, and they generally garner more sympathy from the state, many leftists worry that a civil war will lead to a massacre of the most oppressed. While one part of the left believes that the Biden presidency can prevent a civil war, another part is hoping that the riots will open up the possibility of revolution and that they can skip over a civil war entirely. Meanwhile, the far right continues to radicalize, becoming more militant, and continues to gun down BLM protestors and run them over with cars. It is no surprise that a minority of leftists have had enough and are also coming to protests armed.

There is no imaginable scenario in which an electoral or policy fix succeeds in resolving the long crisis of US capitalism, the devastation wrought by the pandemic, the persistence of racist police violence, and the heightening of political tensions. Proletarians are going to continue to riot against inequality and police violence, while the far-right is going to continue to become inflamed.

The Structure of Revolution in the USA

If the specter of civil war haunts the American political landscape, this is because the Civil War era was by far the most revolutionary event in American history. However, because revolution and civil war are often framed in opposition to each other, we forget that a revolution did indeed take place. Black former slaves and poor whites in the South temporarily united during the Civil War to carry out a revolution that overthrew slavery. As newly freed people struggled with former plantation owners, whites and Blacks even created something akin to a commune in the Free State of Jones in Mississippi, while freed people took control of their destiny on the Sea Islands. At the same time, this revolutionary current triggered a counter-revolution that played out over the course of the Reconstruction era, ultimately leading to the defeat of any semblance of interracial democracy.

While it is not remembered in this way, the US Civil War was just as revolutionary as the 1871 Paris Commune, the 1917 Russian Revolution, or the 1949 Chinese Revolution. Rather than anarchism, socialism, or national liberation, however, the synthesis of race and class in the United States revealed a unique form of revolution marked by the three-fold dynamic of civil war, abolition, and reconstruction. This emancipatory tradition is itself rooted in centuries of slave revolts, marronage, and everyday resistance to slavery.

We are a country that has never had an anarchist or communist revolution, but we have had a revolution in the form of a civil war against racialized capitalist slavery. Why was there never a communist or anarchist revolution in the USA? In our view, the answer to that question lies in the particular history of whiteness and the failure of working class struggles to overcome it. As WEB Dubois first argued in Black Reconstruction, the possibilities of multi-racial struggle were marred by “the wages of whiteness.” Even though their class realities sharply diverged, white workers struck a devil’s bargain with the white elite: in exchange for preferential treatment based on race, white workers would agree to police and discipline the Black proletariat and other proletarians of color. This amounted to a cross-class alliance between the capitalist elite and the white proletariat, against the rest of the proletariat. Although there were challenges to this racial structure, it nonetheless became the glue that held class society together in the US. As the movement and formation of the US proletariat became divided along the color line, the structure of class conflict in the US became centered around race.

While legal slavery was abolished, racial capitalism took new forms. The defeat of chattel slavery heralded a century of Jim Crow legislation, while the fundamental social questions that the Civil War had raised—land, housing, education, healthcare— continued to be denied to masses of Black people. As the 1960s Civil Rights movement managed to remove many legal barriers, this allowed the rise of a Black middle-class compatible with the needs of capitalism and the state, while Black proletarians were left to fend for themselves.

To this day, the revolutionary tasks of the US Civil War remain unfinished, and the fact that its specter has arisen again is no coincidence: race continues to mediate class, not only in people’s experiences, but also in the specific organization of class society. This tension is inherent to the United States. But while much of the radical left recognizes that race is inseparable from capitalism, as soon as this is applied to class struggle and revolution, race fades away and dogma comes to the front. If we really see race as central, this should change the forms that both class and revolution take. In the spirit of Fanon, we have to “stretch” our analysis of class in order to make sense of the dynamics of race. When we do so, we will see that race fundamentally shapes the contours of class conflict and revolution.

Then and Now

The structure of revolution in the USA is determined by the dynamics of the First Civil War, yet it is a mistake to superimpose the past on the present. The United States is very different than it was in the 19th century. The first civil war had a rising bourgeoisie in the Republican Party and the North. They were riding the expansion of capitalism, carrying them well into the 20th century. There is no foreseeable dynamic paralleling that process today. The US bourgeoisie and capitalism are in severe crisis. The pandemic has triggered a new recession and a deepening of the downward economic trends that began during the 2008 crisis. There was no V shaped recovery then and there will be none now. Furthermore, the Democratic Party is continuing its course of neoliberalism, and Biden has denied every plank of the popular social movements: universal healthcare, the Green New Deal, and #Defund.

During and after the first US Civil War, the federal government provided the troops and material resources that defended Black people during Reconstruction. This certainly closed many radical horizons, but at the same time, it was the only strategy free Black people could pursue. As long as masses of poor whites were not willing to fight alongside free Black people, the federal government was the devil Black people had to make alliances with. The legacy of Reconstruction has left behind a powerful “Black” social democratic tradition rooted in mass movements, one that ultimately needs to be overcome if we want a revolution. The only way masses of Black people can overcome this tradition is by seeing a new horizon open up through multi-racial insurrectionary struggle. This can simultaneously solve the race, the state, and the political economic question.

The first civil war was a contest between two distinct regions of the United States which both had industrial and food producing capacities. A modern-day civil war would have a radically different geography. It would not be North versus South. It would be a conflict within each metropolis, each city, each town, each suburb, in each state and region. Of course, an intense polarization is to be expected in places like Portland and Seattle, where political conflict has been particularly pronounced of late. But conflicts will also emerge in smaller cities, towns, and suburbs with very little recent history of rebellion, as we already saw during the George Floyd uprising. Smaller cities like Kenosha, Rochester, and Lancaster have a larger concentration of racist whites and smaller sized police departments, making them some of the most volatile sites of potential civil war. Whereas in big cities people of color are a larger section of society, and racist whites tend to hide behind the police, in the small cities and suburbs people of color can find themselves surrounded by a sea of whites who are often ready to engage in extra-legal action in defense of whiteness, capitalism, and the state. These geographies are less likely to have gone through the civil rights revolution that transformed the bureaucracy, police forces, and governance of larger cities. Furthermore, in smaller cities, towns and suburbs, working-class whites are experiencing a collapse of white privilege, often resulting...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Preface
• Class, Race and Gender in the 2020 Uprising
• Cars, Riots, and Black Liberation
• Prelude to a New Civil War
• Fire on Main Street
• Postscript on the 2020 Riots
• George Floyd memorial
• About the authors