"Masses of Minneapolis Police from all precincts, including SWAT and a State Patrol surveillance helicopter, swarmed a protest for the police killing of Tyre Nichols as it was about to start in SE Minneapolis in single digit temps. No officers were seen getting out of their vehicles & no arrests. Crowd dispersed."
The worse they act, the more widespread protests get. I am NOT saying this is a good thing just hoping this will get libs off their asses
It won't . Shout-out to all the people on the streets but thinking these protests wil push liberals in power to go against their material interest is wishful thinking . The gains of the civil rights movement and the socialist labor movement before it during the FDR period had institutions and established leaders, caucuses and so on, something that these sporadic anti police protests largely don't have (and just having the slogan of"abolishing police" isn't something that's ever going to happen without a broader left movement literally taking state power, and hypothetically it arguably wouldn't lead to better outcomes with the vacuum that would occured in inner cities without said capture of state power). You'll never convince the bourgeoisie state to bend towards justice without that kind of organization. Now that dosnt mean protesting in a disorganized fashion is strategically meaningless (pigs are slightly more likely to get locked up now when the crime is blatant because the local government/small business owners fear riots) , and just as important it feels good and is very human to protest.
Just remember to not get your hopes too high . These kind of sporadic disorganized performative politics will always be easily swallowed by NGO's and the bourgeoisie state. That being said my clueless ass dosnt have any concrete answers in this age of alienation so if you can go out and tear shit up and/or hold a sign more power to ya lol.
...had institutions and established leaders, caucuses and so on, something that these sporadic anti police protests largely don’t have.
Unfortunately there is now historical precedent for what happens to socialists who organize to a certain extent in America. That time period you are speaking of came to an end when the state found the solution to de-fanging and destroying leftist organizations and civil rights leaders. They killed the leaders and the movements collapsed.
While groups and movements that exist now have the ultimate weakness of no clearly defined direction or leadership, that also is their greatest asset. The right can't outright kill these movements and it makes them furious. Right-wingers are constantly trying to figure out who "leads" Antifa or BLM so they can kill them. There isn't a need for a leader for the movement to exist because enough people strongly agree with these loose organizations nebulous ideas.
Not saying its ideal though. Until the left gets serious about protecting their leaders you won't see any.
Among all the failures yes unquestionably WW1, FDR's exit, COINTELPRO , the red scare, US army domestic psy ops and the wave of assassinations in the 60's had a huge impact . But that's a given, we know the bourgeoisie, the war lords and so on will do everything to subvert and kill the left .
So yes today , "they" [ the security state, the bourgeoisie the right] may not be able to completely kill multiple largely impotent disorganized movements, but what they can do is effectively the same or perhaps even worse . The state can marginalize them to irrelevance, coopt them, infiltrate them, create chaos and so on more effective then it even did through the "counter culture" era. Its simply a road to nowhere in the end but as you said yes it's something to start from . Any display of outrage is frankly welcome at this point .
The referendum to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department and build some kind of public safety department in it's place was 46% in favor. It's not impossible. Hell, that's probably part of the reason the Democrats have been pushing pro-cop propaganda so hard; 2020 really did break a lot of people's belief in the police.
Of course the public has a constituency for radical reform but people's opinion matters little when faced with raw power . Without proper organization police will never be abolished even if 99% of people favor it(it's also notable that it still wasn't a majority) . We've seen that over and over again in American politics alone . Policy's can be favored by the majority and they will not be passed no matter how much a liberals heart appear to bleed
And yet, not only did nothing happen, but in fact the police are even more entrenched than they were before, with protests cracked down on even faster than they can coalesce. Activist leaders are all still in jail and their communities infiltrated by undercovers.
2020 was the exception here, a small fracture that nobody was expecting. That fracture, for the meantime, is completely gone.
The time for that was 2020, now isolated instances of repression do just that: repress the locality
100% valid. But then what can get libs into the streets with us? What do they need to see. I'm just frustrated
At this point? I’m not even sure. It’s hard to see another breaking moment, but the things people need to survive (food, water, electricity) are usually pressure points.
If uvalde didn't get them to turn on the cops, nothing will. They see us a poison to be avoided until everything looks worse by comparison
Widespread food shortages? I can't picture anything else that would push them toward action without also intimidating them into inaction.
only something like that, yeah.
people got together to protest the death of eric garner and so many others. they didn't realize that the real message they were sending the government was 'get better at repression'. this tyre nichols case strikes me as the time the american government got ahead of a story and dismantled popular momentum before it got going.
I think there's a really good chance that Mr. Nichols had been murdered in July things would have popped off and we'd be in the Cool Zone right now. January is just a bad time for mass movements.
RE: Get better at repression; The same thing happened after the Battle of Seattle. The cops all got together and came up with the new operating doctrine that was used at the 2003 Miami RNC. They came up with the novel innovation of passing laws that were blatantly unconstitutional and shamelessly engaging in widespread civil rights violations, knowing that the courts wouldn't do anything about it until days, weeks, or years after the repression had been accomplished. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the police, military, and intelligence agencies at every level have been analyzing 2020 extensively and working out how to crush any further dissent.
the only thing which will "get them off their ass" is if they stop being liberal centrists, one way or another. Centrists are conservatives, they are on the same side as the conservatives even if they don't think they are.
Surely the :freeze-peach: "absolutists" will be up in arms over this, right???
