One of my friends is very proud to have been arrested during a BLM riot. Flash bangs, tear gas, all that. Now he brings it up as some sort of arguing point: "YEA WELL WHERE WERE YOU?"
So they all got arrested and had to stay outside all night while being held. Today im talking to him and he claims they changed alot. He brought up "all those convictions" but only one cop was convicted last year while over 200 were killed. Then he mentioned Aubery who was murdered in Alabama, but they were private citizens not cops, and there was literally video of the murder. Naturally he didn't seem to take that fact well.
Defunding didnt happen much either. Is this just a liberal brain trying to convince themselves theyve done something useful? Because nothing really changed after they dragged Bernie away either.
if it helps, they also think only red fascism has existed and theres never been a successful communist country.
I got to throw a brick at a pig.
:brick-police:
In all seriousness:
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People of color asked for our support and the rest of the left answered. I used my body as a shield multiple times to protect my black comrades and I will do it again.
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It was a potentially revolutionary moment and had to be treated as such.
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It radicalized a lot of progressives and turned them into leftists quick. The boot of the state come at you instinctually makes you bare your fangs in a very visceral way. The fight is real and a lot of people previously privileged enough to be sheltered saw it first hand.
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The only way we win is if we fight. We will not win every time we fight, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't still try. "We only have to be lucky once, they have to be lucky every time."
Any concessions we got from the beast are icing in my opinion. I have zero faith in the government.
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Really simple. If you were a materially well off white liberal who wasn't rich enough to think you were above police retaliation, you stayed inside, avoided putting any kind of action towards your beliefs, avoided any situation where you might have to test and reinforce said beliefs, and wrote off the riots as meaningless because they meant you would have to go outside and actually do something as a leftist other than posting on a forum or participating in glorified reading groups.
There's no excuse for not taking action to defend lives unless you're physically unable.
Unorganized, unchanneled rage strikes/protests happened all the time in tsarist Russia and the Bolsheviks were at every single one they could be at. It took dozens before the fruit bore
this is hexbear, comrade. praxis is verboten. you may only criticize what others have done.
i did go there, and then i left before the shit got real bad and they all walked into the cop trap eventually. i guess the main gripe is i didnt stick around to get arrested?
I was recording my podcast with my friend amber idunno about you
I went out but there was just nowhere for me to be. I live in a big city, but there just wasn't much organization happening at all. Everyone in my town is just tired and depressed all the time and couldn't muster enough energy to do much. There were protests over maybe 2 days, but the pigs didn't do anything in retaliation except stand around. Even then the biggest protests were maybe a hundred, two hundred people at most. I did hand out some food to the homeless and try to talk to some everyday folk about what was going on. I got a single lib to agree to read Frantz Fanon.
I tried.
whats the point of being communist if i dont have communism right now :(( i just feel like a loser :(( where my communism treats :((
absolutely horrendous bit
most likely some bigot let’s just call a spade a spade. don’t pay them any mind
Outside of putting Chauvin in prison there was some growing pressure and public resentment against cops, but once dems got into power they quickly turned on BLM and joined hands with republicans in giving police everything they wanted. 1/6 was the perfect counter to the summer of 2020, liberals QUICKLY forgot all the documented nasty shit cops had done in tripping over themselves to congratulate them on being the protectors of democracy.
exactly, we're back where we are started. anyone who thinks they changed something by getting abused by cops and not fighting back is a fool. Sure cop convictions are now up to like 1 or 2 a year, but thats been happening for a while.
struggles are always on-going with an ebb and a flow. the victories those protests made were rolled back but that's not really the whole story. first, those protests were an expression of class rage and they found outlet and support through a network of tiny protest organizations around the country - medics, de-escalators, marshals, caregivers, etc.; these orgs exist in every city. those orgs got an influx of new members and much needed cash. that's not a small permanent gain. it means that the next time things heat up, our organizations are better suited to being a vehicle for the expression of that rage. a lot of the failures of the movement in '20 came down to the fact that the vast majority of the people on the streets had literally just joined the left and consequently lacked all political education. now anarchist & MLM orgs are each talking about how to do political education, so the influx of new people doesn't cause the same collapse in energy we saw last time.
so no, I don't think just being there and getting arrested is worth pride. but there's a lot of good work and sorely needed fresh blood that came out of 2020.
but there’s a lot of good work and sorely needed fresh blood that came out of 2020.
That's a great way to put it. I'm too doomer and see the negative in everything.
I don't want to diminish what the protestors did that summer, they did good work, but it stopped with Chauvin's conviction and Biden getting into the white house. Like you said, all that work has been undone and we're back to square one.
If you're challenging the person you respond to on that, they are clearly not saying that accomplished anything.
congratulate them on being the protectors of democracy.
Which is so bizarre because I remember the discourse at the time even libs were calling the cops complicit and saying rightly that they opened the god damn barricades for the mob. I swear liberals have the memory capacity of a goldfish, how did they seemingly forget that?? We watched it happen!
It was a flare-up, the strongest in fifty years. It wouldn't have happened without the previous flare-up in 2016, and we'll see what happens in the next few months/years.
Sometimes things are hard to trace, but I think one lasting effect is that a majority of people in the country now believe, one way or another, that our current state of affairs is untenable.
Sometimes things are hard to trace, but I think one lasting effect is that a majority of people in the country now believe, one way or another, that our current state of affairs is untenable.
at this point with the strikes we are seeing, i think covid is what helped cause this feeling.
It's more than Covid. It's Covid plus the last BLM wave plus the shortage of job fillings that's been building since 2019.
+the housing crisis (and really rental crisis too) +USED car prices up 40% in the last 5 years +climate change/climate crisis +all that, previously mentioned
seriously i dont see a way for this fucking country to recover (and this is a good thing, im just saying, because this means that a lot of people in the coming months and years are going to slowly realize what side theyre really on and what we need to do to solve, or mitigate the mentioned crises)
I don't think this counts, but every conservative I know believes there was some kind of genuine civil war in 2020 between cops and BLM. Like a hot, shooty kind of war waged conventionally with stuff like occupying and defending territory that resulted in a lot of large cities losing their police forces entirely.
A lot of my family members believe BLM set off bombs across the country and blew up a bunch of statues. They'll tell me wild stories about Seattle being under complete military lockdown and BLM enforcers roam the streets picking off white people. They think this is still occurring in some cities and there's a plot for BLM to infiltrate school boards with CRT in the red states.
They also believe Kamala Harris is herself a high level operative in this spy novel version of BLM.
My libertarian roommates believed:
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Antifa had taken over an interstate highway specifically an elevated portion where the speed limit is 75mph. They were killing anyone driving a truck and setting horses on fire.
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Antifa was storming the courthouse of a rural cattle town without a DSA chapter or SRA member
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Antifa was going to storm a literal one stoplight town and destroy all of the small businesses, which mostly consist of terrible restaurants and crystalmom shit. No orgs and it's essentially an evangelical colony.
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Antifa was stealing countless cars for some reason
Their solution to this was Kyle Rittenhouse shit. One wanted to stand in front of small businesses and defend them from Antifa, crying while he said this. Those small businesses wouldn't hire him because he's a felon and functionally illiterate. The other wanted to drive around with guns waiting for Antifa to try to carjack him.
Genuine children. We need a hunger games for libertarians where the winner is shot in the head. Right in the fucking head.
Thank you, I needed the term "crystalmom" to describe that particular species of gift shop which seems to be the 2010s pawn shop equivalent.
Some of them take it to the MD level and become crystalmomologists. They can cure every disease with the power of rocks.
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both the far left and the far right talk about the coming civil war but honestly i don't see a lot of people seriously thinking about what that would require and how much work it would be
because there's no convenient borders to draw anywhere. It would be another Cold War, and it kind of already is.
Wait, we aren't running for positions on school boards? Or is that just electoralism?
i think there's a qualitative difference in running for school boards to push a more progressive agenda and whatever harebrained conspiracy theories my cousins are cooking up
Nothing happened because capital has all the legitimate use of force, physical force, and literally most of the resources on Earth. It's not that the revolution didn't happen after BLM because your friends are incompetent or too lib. You should be mad at the system, not your friends. What a fucking prick. You have a leftist friend who went out and risked something yet you're here acting like you hate them because they disagreed with you. You should be grateful they put up with you.
Yes, if one views the BLM protests as part of a larger war of attrition against the carceral state.
if it's going to get brought up in a totally unrelated but still political conversation, and it's literally the only thing this person has done, then it's fuckin lame.
Gotta own your shit. If you could have gone and you didn’t that was some lib shit. Own it and promise to be there next time. The fact that you get this defensive about it is probably the reason he still throws it in your face.
nah i was there, just smart enough to not get arrested or tear gassed. am i just going to walk around for hours til police arrest me? the performative part was over. they had already launched tear gas at children. also next time i go back i bring eye protection.
Ah gotcha my bad. Had either of you talked about the possibility of getting arrested prior? There’s a reason we talk about red yellow and green
I think you should put that in post, I’ve read it much less charitably lol :meow-hug:
And any flare up is contradiction, it radicalized people, it’s just unseen from news, as a lot of comrades mentioned
Kinda? I got a lot more people into black liberation movements and ideology, and we started a bunch of mutual aid groups that didn't start before....but as an active organizer in the protests the first year, last year and this year....
The libs infiltrated the movement basically strangled the entire thing in its infancy and took up all the oxygen to either tone-police everyone to death or redirect the energy to limp-dick anti-Trump shit.
Eventually the lib shit will align with the left
No, it won't. Libs will always lie and pretend to be on your side because they "want the same thing", even though they very much do not. The lib infiltration will get worse unless a group is on-code and actively rejects lib shit.
building movements and organisation takes a long ass time & BLM definitely accelerated that. And its not like, dead yet. For what its worth a bit of meaningful reform got thru on local levels & we didn't always hear about it (and some of its already been rolled back)
its very defeatist to treat it as over and a total waste because it wasn't the revolution. there's gonna be many more struggles and moments between now and the revolution and they're all important and necessary
Sounds pretty cool that your friend got arrested for participating in the protests. If he put that much skin in the game then he's probably open to understanding why things didn't fundamentally change after the protests.
No, the protests were good. They might not have done something, but at minimum they demonstrated that the American left exists. That’s huge, from a tactical sense.
Hell, replace "American left" with "Queer people" and the exact same thing could have been said about the Stonewall riots. In the immediate effect, all that really happened is some cops got a bit beat up and a gay bar got fucking trashed, but the lasting impact was immense. And now in 2020, it's been shown that a community can come together to torch a police station and they can use that in order to attain justice
That is not the narrative going around Minneapolis though. We have lost that fight as well. Imo, the current narrative believed by the majority of the community is that the police pulled away from the police station on purpose to allow bad actors to burn it down and collect insurance payments.
Is this true? Idk. I wasn't at that particular section of protests. I certainly saw an absolute metric shitton of weird and destructive stuff those evenings. What was clear to me is that the police had decided that where they could not crack down and kettle they would abandon, and these areas are where the fires started. Who started them and why is, again, something I don't know, but the narrative is either white antifa or white supremacists, depending on who you talk to in the community.
There are few narratives of community solidarity and violence at this point in time (I.e. the small police free zone and George Floyd Square, good work is still being done there). But perhaps I am too on the outside to be privy to those conversations (it wouldn't be the first time someone mistook me for a cop), which is what I hope for, but at the moment it looks like the narrative battle is lost around BLM.
We will see what it is in another year or two when stuff inevitably pops off again.
Of course, the long term effects of this won't be visible only 18 months later
I think the biggest thing is a bunch of people got alot more experience protesting. I think the real pop off will occur once the larger organizers and medics are released from jail in a couple of years here. Who knows though, I certainly didn't see this particular BLM movement coming after the local police took down the last one and killed the organizers in Ferguson.
I am ace and the only thing I'm horny for is revolution. And public transportation. Two things.
