The RCP and the LA Riots

[KurtFF8]

I was on one of those internet tangents that lead me to this interesting article from the LA Times published in September of 1992


Fueled by the Flames : Revolutionary Communist Party Sees L.A. Riots as an Opening to Be Seized

September 11, 1992 (http://articles.latimes.com/1992-09-11/local/me-154_1_revolutionary-communist-party)|BOB SIPCHEN | TIMES STAFF WRITER



It was one of the more eye-catching newspaper headlines to appear after the riots.
"Wanted!" it declared in bright red print. "Frontline Revolutionary Fighters to Go to L.A. This Summer."
Inside the June 14 issue of Revolutionary Worker--the Revolutionary Communist Party's weekly paper--a fold-out, full-sized poster elaborated:
"If in the flames of the L.A. rebellion, you saw the first light of a whole new world, . . . then this call is to you. You should be in L.A.! And you should get down with, work with, live and fight the powers-that-be together with the Revolutionary Communist Youth Brigade this summer."
http://articles.latimes.com/images/pixel.gif

Members of the party and its "youth arm" made a noisy appearance Wednesday at a hearing of the so-called Webster Commission, the panel appointed by the Los Angeles Police Commission to investigate police response to the spring riots.
But there are few other signs that the call to revolution has been heeded. Leaders will not say how many young fighters have responded. Nor will they reveal the number of members already in the group, which for 17 years has stood out as a colorful, sporadically violent sideshow in the carnival of Los Angeles politics.
"Those who know don't say, and those who say don't know," says national spokesman Carl Dix, allowing himself a wisp of a smile that seems to acknowledge the melodrama of the phrase from Malcolm X.
Founded in 1975 as the self-described "party of the proletariat," the Maoist RCP is generally dismissed by political observers as an inconsequential extremist band that probably boasts fewer than three dozen active members locally.
Yet even as much of the world performs autopsies on toppled communist states, these revolutionaries see the potential for new vitality in the wreckage of Los Angeles.
When a Ventura County jury delivered its not guilty verdicts in the trial of the four police officers accused of beating Rodney King, Dix was at work on his speech for the party's annual May Day demonstration--an event with a history of unraveling into bloody clashes with the Los Angeles Police Department.
Dix immediately drafted a statement in support of "the rebellion" that members later distributed through the riot zone and at local high schools.
As he wrote, other members of the group rallied at Parker Center, where television viewers watched a multiracial crowd taunt the police and topple and torch a kiosk. From there, RCP members branched out, spray-painting their slogans on walls from South-Central to Chinatown.
"We tried to see to it that as much got up as could be done," Dix said during a June interview at a downtown restaurant.
He calmly ran through a catalog of RCP graffiti--mottoes that continue to pop up in media reports on the riots: "It's Right to Rebel," "La Revolucion Es La Esperanza de Los Desperados (Revolution is the Hope of the Hopeless)," "No More Rodney Kings."

http://articles.latimes.com/images/pixel.gif

http://articles.latimes.com/images/pixel.gif
"Anything else?" Dix asks the two men who accompany him.
"Murderers, Murderers, No More," one adds dispassionately.
Dix nods. "Right."
Police arrested several RCP and Youth Brigade members on a variety of charges during and after the riots, among them a supporter who allegedly struck a police officer with a flag stick. Beyond the actual arrests, there was "no question" that RCP members looted and set fires, Sheriff Sherman Block asserted as the rioting ebbed.
Dix won't say "yes" or "no" to direct questions about looting and arson. He terms Block's charges political and says that because the "rebellion" was righteous, no participation should be considered criminal.
"Our watchwords were, 'Unite with people in expressing their outrage,' and 'Determined resistance against the attacks of the enemy,' " he says.
While other groups and individuals have voiced the rhetoric of rebellion since April, most get mired in political, social and economic complexities when attempting to define just what sort of society they hope will supplant the one in place.
Not the RCP.
When the "dying monster" of capitalism has been destroyed, party literature explains, it will be replaced by "a new society free of exploitation and oppression of any kind"--a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist society.
The goal of the past four months, Dix says in a second interview, has been "rallying people to wage mass militant struggle against the powers today in preparation for doing what's really needed--and that's leading millions of people to rise up in mass armed revolution when the time is right."
As he talks, Dix is flanked by two youth brigade members on a concrete picnic table in a busy corner of MacArthur Park.
One is Youth Brigade spokesman Joey Johnson, the man whose arrest for burning the American flag at the 1984 Republican convention in Dallas led to a 1989 Supreme Court decision protecting such actions.


Thoughts?

[A Marxist Historian]

I was on one of those internet tangents that lead me to this interesting article from the LA Times published in September of 1992

<A href="http://articles.latimes.com/1992-09-11/local/me-154_1_revolutionary-communist-party" target=_blank>
Fueled by the Flames : Revolutionary Communist Party Sees L.A. Riots as an Opening to Be Seized

September 11, 1992 (http://articles.latimes.com/1992/sep/11)|BOB SIPCHEN | TIMES STAFF WRITER

Thoughts?

The LA Rebellion did, very briefly, look like a revolutionary crisis. I was around and remember it well. You had, for 24 hours, a massive rejection by a large part of the American people of the American government and ruling class. And not only in LA.

But the anger dissipated into, first, misdirected attacks on Korean-Americans, and then into ethnic hostility between black people and Latins, which has been a new, ugly, definite feature of California in the years since then.

Why? Well, in the immediate sense, because the LAPD is better armed than several small Central American countries, so nobody wanted to try to storm the police stations, because (and only because) people would have been slaughtered.

In fact, in the largest, bloodiest and most destructive urban semi-insurrection in American history, not a single policeman got killed! This is not accidental. People just didn't want to mess with the LAPD. They're armed and dangerous.

And more basically because there was no revolutionary leadership trying to link the outrage of people in the streets with the solid organizational support of the working class. There was never a better time for a general strike in LA, which the LAPD would have been totally unable to suppress. But that was the last thing the union leaders wanted.

And the RCP was not helpful in the situation in the least. Their streetfightin' approach was just not what the situation called for, and to the degree they had any influence, probably just fed into the disastrous attacks on Korean shopkeepers, the Reginald Denny disaster, etc.

-M.H.-

[Franz Fanonipants]

LA riots were aimed at Latinos and Asians

they were not a people's rebellion, they were an expression of xenophobia

[Ethics Gradient, Traitor For All Ages]

Even if it was viewed as a revolutionary moment, the call for young street fighters from outside of LA sounds like weatherman idiocy. What community would view outsiders coming in and trashing their neighborhoods as leaders?

[gorillafuck]

LA riots were aimed at Latinos and Asians

they were not a people's rebellion, they were an expression of xenophobiareally? I never heard that. interesting.

[Prometeo liberado]

If you keep on researching the archives of the LA Times and the LA Weekly you'll also find articles stating how after the situation died down the RCP was chased out of those neighborhoods by the local gangs. The reasons are many but for the most part young O.G.'s didn't like the RCP telling them what they could and couldn't do. The whole "look I'm not from here but I'm your proletarian-internationalist-brother-Maoist-Bob Avakianist. Got it?" line did not sit to well amongst the homies. The larger question one should ask is why?

[TheGodlessUtopian]

Not related, per se, but in regards to the RCP tactics: yeah, they are quite violent. Back during the late 70's in California the predecessor to my current party, known than as Young Socialist Alliance, had to physically defend themselves against RCP thugs when they went out to try and hawk their newspapers and books around the local campuses.

Eventually there was a street battle and the RCP brutes were beaten off and they never messed with the YSA again but it is interesting to note that during this time there was a Neo-Nazi group active in the area which would occasionally go to YSA rallies and intimidate people with their uniforms, yet, never actually engage the leftists in combat.

I found this absurd: people who are suppose to be comrades are fighting each other while the fascists look on and never attack. Maoist principals need something more than petty tendency conflict.

Anyways, rant over.

[Franz Fanonipants]

really? I never heard that. interesting.

Yeah. There's an article or two I read about it. Basically the worst violence in the riots was aimed at Mexicans, Central Americans, and Asians. A two year old Mexican girl had a bottle broken over her head while her parents were assaulted as they were going home.

Seeing the LA Riots as a revolutionary moment is pretty white.

[The Douche]

LA riots were aimed at Latinos and Asians

they were not a people's rebellion, they were an expression of xenophobia

I mean, there is an element of this, and always will be, when there are great social upheavals/tears in the social fabric.

But you are neglecting that many of the businesses owned in the heart of the insurrection, were owned by Asian immigrants, and so the image of "innocent Korean shop owners" defending their property and themselves from "roving bands of black rioters", plays very well into the capitalist media's narrative of the situation.

To say that the LA insurrection was just an expression of xenophobia is a pretty weak analysis, and smacks of racism. (not saying that you're racist, but you are essentially parroting the racist line of the capitalist press)

[Franz Fanonipants]

Not really bro.

Korean business owners mostly left. Meanwhile a Guatemalan immigrant was beaten severely (or to death I don't remember) and a Japanese tourist was similarly tore the fuck up. None of this shit nor other anti-immigrant violence was given any real attention in racist narratives around say Reginald Denny.

I'm pretty ok with focusing on the xenophobic realities of the riots cus they are the reality.

[Franz Fanonipants]

Calling it an insurrection is pretty wrongheaded too. Insurrections require planning and strategic goals "driving out spics and gooks" might have been the goal now that I reflect on it

[The Douche]

Not really bro.

Korean business owners mostly left. Meanwhile a Guatemalan immigrant was beaten severely (or to death I don't remember) and a Japanese tourist was similarly tore the fuck up. None of this shit nor other anti-immigrant violence was given any real attention in racist narratives around say Reginald Denny.

I'm pretty ok with focusing on the xenophobic realities of the riots cus they are the reality.

Korean business owners left?

(Trigger warning for violence behind the spoiler)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgCiC6qTtjs&feature=related

Now this video is particularly interesting because you can see in it, all the intricacies that arise in insurrections. Because, all an insurrection is, is a situation in which dispossessed people strike out for an extended period over some sort of politicized issue. Insurrection isn't necessary revolution.

You can hear comments like "everything is free" and "there is no justice in america, not for black people". Then you can also hear comments like "Koreans own this place anyways", and see seemingly random violence directed towards individuals.

Insurrections are messy things. But you take on it, to endorse the line that the LA insurrection was simply a "race riot" where black people attacked asians, latinos, and whites, panders to the bourgeois interpretation of the event, and ignores the class realities of the situation, where, the people holding the power/wealth were not black.

Next will you decry the way in which they fucked up "their own neighborhoods"?

It is not a symptom of racism that many victims in this scenario were not black, the majority of businesses in that area at the time were not black owned. The fact that years of capitalist "us vs. them" propaganda lead to some racial violence does not discredit the way in which the LA insurrection really was a tear in the fabric of this society.

The media framed a class issue as a race issue (they always do this to black people here in the US, just like they did it to arab/african muslims in France during the riots there a few years ago).

[Franz Fanonipants]

Fucking bullshit bro quit ennobling a riot that was outright open warfare between working people

[Franz Fanonipants]

You still haven't addressed systematic violence against Latinos

[The Douche]

How are the petite-bourgeoisie "working people"?

I'm not familiar with the "systematic" violence against Latino people during the LA insurrection. I also think the use of "systematic" is pretty fucking dubious, you're implying people actually got together and plotted and planned to ambush Latino people, which seems more than a little unlikely, and is not concurrent with my understanding of the events, and I know people who were around for it.

[Franz Fanonipants]

Who is defending the petite bourgeois?

I'll link an article later today that proves a systematic and regular pattern of violence against Latinos during the lol "insurrection"

[The Douche]

You said it was "open warfare between working people", which, aside from being an exaggeration (that was not open warfare), I see no support for, the only thing I can think of that you would be referring to would be the gun battles between store owners (petite-bourgeoisie) and workers.

So perhaps you're referring to incidents involving the latin community, so I'll wait for your update.

[Franz Fanonipants]

this (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2547422) is the link let me know if it works for you

[A Revolutionary Tool]

this (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2547422) is the link let me know if it works for you
The link you gave us only brings us to a preview that is one page long which does not provide us with any real data or logic behind your argument.

[Franz Fanonipants]

welp

i guess we'll ep thompson the la riots then

[RedHal]

If you keep on researching the archives of the LA Times and the LA Weekly you'll also find articles stating how after the situation died down the RCP was chased out of those neighborhoods by the local gangs. The reasons are many but for the most part young O.G.'s didn't like the RCP telling them what they could and couldn't do. The whole "look I'm not from here but I'm your proletarian-internationalist-brother-Maoist-Bob Avakianist. Got it?" line did not sit to well amongst the homies. The larger question one should ask is why?

Gangs are scum. Anyways good on the RCP in actually trying to engage with the rioters and if violence was used, so be it. Guess it's better to call an emergency meeting to discuss the situation with your fellow party members and do nothing.:rolleyes:

Many were complaining that the SWP and other Brit parties were nowhere to be seen during the London riots...

[Minima]

this (http://www.jstor.org/stable/2547422) is the link let me know if it works for you




https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7RxI6W9GEC2TW1DaTA3aGpXbkU/edit

there is the doc in full. sorry i forgot to make it public, it's public now.

"a closer look at the vicitms of violence at the corner of florence and normandie reveals the way in which the los angeles riots were fundamentally an anti-immigrant spectacle at it's very beginning... only one victim of the violence was white, a truck driver passing through the region. all the others were people of color, a mexican couple and their one year old child, hit with rocks and bottles, a japanese american man, stripped beaten and kicked after being mistaked for korean, a vietnamese manicurist, stunned and bloodied after being robbed and a latino family with five year old twin girls, who each suffered shattered glass wounds in the face and upper body."

[gorillafuck]

I think a lot of the misconceptions of the riots likely come from the white leftist perspective of violence in minority communities as a whole being violence directed at the white power structure and capitalism, as opposed to being xenophobia against different minority races, which is what it actually is most of the time.

[Prometeo liberado]

Gangs are scum. Anyways good on the RCP in actually trying to engage with the rioters and if violence was used, so be it. Guess it's better to call an emergency meeting to discuss the situation with your fellow party members and do nothing.:rolleyes:

Many were complaining that the SWP and other Brit parties were nowhere to be seen during the London riots...

You miss the whole point by simply dismissing the gangs.
1. The Black Panther Party back in it's day recognized that the same material conditions that caused so much inequality and oppression were also the guiding factors in which the urban youth organized a expressed themselves. Right or wrong. Engaging with these young workers, many of whom makeup the defacto leadership of their communities, is imperitive to organizing the community. The BPP new it, did it and it worked.
2.Coming into a community under seige and trying to dictate to people who don't know you and have no idea of who or what Mao is reeks of eliteism and opportunism. The "gang members" saw it and so did the community.
3. Without hard work, a constant presence in the community, and a clear understanding of the power dynamics in said communities no revolutionary organization has carte blanche to step in when and where they see fit.

[Franz Fanonipants]

well, fanon does speak to this pretty well

it IS liberatory violence on a level but that doesn't mean its directed correctly

like real talk hegemony makes class interest do crazy shit

[bricolage]

only one victim of the violence was white, a truck driver passing through the region.
I'm guessing this is reginald denny right?
I have to say I know very little about the LA riots so I'm asking everything here from a position of ignorance. on a cursory reading there is no denying the reginald denny incident was unbelievably brutal and from the looks of it he was just a working class guy who got stuck in the wrong place. that being said it seems it got massive attention, how much of this was due to the brutality of it and how much due to the fact he was white?

[Franz Fanonipants]

well like cmoney said earlier

liberal conceptions of this shit were purely about race. to most americans in 1992 and even today "race" means black-white.

[gorillafuck]

what's funny (not "haha" funny) is that after reginald denny was beaten, a hit was put out by MS-13 on the most well known black guy who beat him. MS-13 isn't a white gang, it's a latino gang.

but as I said before, I knew that specific detail but I didn't know that overall the LA riots amounted to such xenophobic riots. this is really interesting.

[Os Cangaceiros]

"We Demand Nothing" is an interesting pamphlet that's partially about the riot (and recent riots more generally), including IIRC an analysis of one of the more uglier forms of rioting, the "race riot". I think it's put out by "politics is not a banana", a group I'm not too big on, but that particular piece of work was alright.

[Franz Fanonipants]

the thing with all this is like there's a shitton of received history that just floats around on this forum and like "there's no arguing about it." or if there is arguing all it is = unproductive tendency bullshit and hero worship.

which isn't really history

we really need to work on embracing a dialectical process of discourse otherwise we're doing a disservice to ourselves

[bricolage]

what's funny (not "haha" funny) is that after reginald denny was beaten, a hit was put out by MS-13 on the most well known black guy who beat him. MS-13 isn't a white gang, it's a latino gang.
wikipedia says

Although the Denny beating received great publicity, Williams and his companions also assaulted and beat several Asian and Latino motorists who were passing through the area. Williams was charged with attempted murder as well as assault and mayhem.[2]
After the riots the Mexican Mafia had a "hit" out on Williams, the contract to kill him was picked up by the now infamous and then little known MS-13
you know if the hit was based more on the denny incident, the 'several Asian and Latino motorists' or both?

[bricolage]

"We Demand Nothing" is an interesting pamphlet that's partially about the riot (and recent riots more generally), including IIRC an analysis of one of the more uglier forms of rioting, the "race riot". I think it's put out by "politics is not a banana", a group I'm not too big on, but that particular piece of work was alright.
is this the one?
http://theanarchistlibrary.org/HTML/Johann_Kaspar__We_Demand_Nothing.html

[Os Cangaceiros]

yeah that's it

[gorillafuck]

wikipedia says

you know if the hit was based more on the denny incident, the 'several Asian and Latino motorists' or both?ah, I stand corrected then. probably based on the assault of latinos and asians, combined with the publicity achieved by the denny beating.

[Franz Fanonipants]

so nothing from the opposition?

like are all the people beaten and otherwise singled out just unfortunate side effects of worker's rage?

e: sorry that's not helpful

anyone want to discuss the article?

[gorillafuck]

so nothing from the opposition?

like are all the people beaten and otherwise singled out just unfortunate side effects of worker's rage?even people that used freedom writers as an excuse to sleep during their english classes know that racial tensions are high in urban areas between different minority groups, it's pretty obvious where it comes from in situations like this. it also shows how these things serve racial divide, hence serving capitalism.

edit: as for people being singled out in non-racist ways, it's basically a side effect of people who enjoy violence and chaos taking advantage of situations. pretty simple. people get a thrill out of this shit.

[Geiseric]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FYPplO0PwQ&feature=related

The difference between expropiation and looting can be tough to tell sometimes.

[Ocean Seal]

Why was the violence directed against Latinos and Asians though, with the police killing a black man?

[KurtFF8]

Just back to my original point real quick: I've seen it claimed (mostly on right wing conspiracy theory websites) that the RCP was "key" in instigating the violence that lead to the riots. Of course whether this is true or not is quite up in the air and likely not the case, but I've heard similar accusations about the RCP in terms of instigating violence in an area and then essentially abandoning the struggle after. So it's as if they forget to do the "Organize" part after "Agitate"

On a side note, I read this article back in undergrad and thought it was interesting, although I disagree with it for the most part:

LA '92: The Context of a Proletarian Uprising (http://libcom.org/library/la-riots-aufheben-1)

[Geiseric]

Not so much "anti asian," as "anti society." The level of repression towards black people in the U.S. has such a history that some explosion of anger is inevitable.

[Franz Fanonipants]

Why was the violence directed against Latinos and Asians though, with the police killing a black man?

White people don't live with blacks in Los Angeles or most places in the US

not with any frequency, anyway

e: less prosaically there's probably an argument to be made that under capitalism, unless organized explicitly against capital or the bourgeois, workers usually brutalize other workers since capitalism and hegemony really are about violence directed against the proletariat and so that's what happens

[Jimmie Higgins]

LA riots were aimed at Latinos and Asians

they were not a people's rebellion, they were an expression of xenophobiaSeriously? And the Katrina Hurricane was all just an excuse for black people to loot New Orleans.

Trying to describe the LA riots as some kind of pogrom is kinda insane. I mean gee, there's a major riot and some nasty pre-existing tensions other than the initial reason for the eruption come to the surface... you mean like every major riot in history?! Maybe then we shouldn't count on spontaneous and uncoordinated social phenomena to be the way workers organize themselves collectively. I mean, shit, again most riots are a whole mix of different events and reactions almost by definition.

There was a whole hell of a lot more examples of people looting during the riots than of ethnic conflicts - so if more people stole than there were black people attacking Koreans, then obviously theft was more commonly a motivation. In that case why don't we just join the right-wing in saying the riots were all just an excuse for black people and Mexicans "streaming over the border to get in and loot LA" (as a common right-wing argument at the time argued) to just steal things?

Personally I think there reason those riots happened when they did and how they did had more to do with years of LAPD "gang raids" and special gang units given carte blanche by the city. There were a whole series of high-profile cases of police brutality at that time and so the Rodney King case wasn't viewed as an isolated case at the time.

The LA riots are actually a riot with a pretty clear spark compared to many riots historically which can appear to be the result of a bunch of random things coming together - LA was what pretty much everyone agreed to at the time, a response to police brutality ratified and excused by the court system and an echo of Watts. I'd add that it was a reaction to a decade of police attacks and the recognition that after a short period of limited upward mobility for some blacks, things in 1991 weren't much different than in the 60s in regards to urban inequality and racism.

[NewLeft]

Let's not forget about Latasha Harlins. Judge Karlin on the case:


The district attorney argues that Latasha was justified in her assault on Mrs. Du. Our courts are filled with cases which suggest otherwise. Our courts are filled with defendants who are charged with assault resulting in great bodily injury as a result of attacks on shopkeepers, including shopkeepers who have accused them of shoplifting.
Source: Immigrants, racial citizens, and the (multi)cultural politics of neoliberal Los Angeles. (http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Immigrants,+racial+citizens,+and+the+%28multi%29cu ltural+politics+of...-a0194427858)

[Hiero]

But the anger dissipated into, first, misdirected attacks on Korean-Americans, and then into ethnic hostility between black people and Latins, which has been a new, ugly, definite feature of California in the years since then.

Weren't Black Americans in California being racial profiled by Korean shop owners? How could it be misdirected when Black Americans felt marginalised by the Korean-American petty bourgeoisie/middle class?

While the LAPD and White state apparatus' would be enemy number 1, usually in riots immediate conflicts are targeted first. In places like LA racial and class tensions are going to be more localised. But thoose conflicts are real and the violence that occurs between thoose groups is not misdirected.

[Franz Fanonipants]

words

did you read the article?

[Franz Fanonipants]

Weren't Black Americans in California being racial profiled by Korean shop owners? How could it be misdirected when Black Americans felt marginalised by the Korean-American petty bourgeoisie/middle class?

While the LAPD and White state apparatus' would be enemy number 1, usually in riots immediate conflicts are targeted first. In places like LA racial and class tensions are going to be more localised. But thoose conflicts are real and the violence that occurs between thoose groups is not misdirected.

holy shit did you also not read the article?

[Hiero]

holy shit did you also not read the article?

Which article, there are a few in this thread.

[Franz Fanonipants]

Let's not forget about Latasha Harlins. Judge Karlin on the case:


Source: Immigrants, racial citizens, and the (multi)cultural politics of neoliberal Los Angeles. (http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Immigrants,+racial+citizens,+and+the+%28multi%29cu ltural+politics+of...-a0194427858)

the most "lawl" thing in this article:


For example, Mrs. Choon Ah Song, who owned a small corner store that burned down during the unrest said, "We dreamed about America like we saw in the movies. The streets would be clean. People in America would all have big noses, their faces would be white, their hair blond. It was more like Mexico. It made more sense to call it Mexico. We hardly came in contact with white people. Even in the schools, most teachers were second-generation Japanese and Mexican."

[Franz Fanonipants]

Which article, there are a few in this thread.

any of them, even the hilarious RCP one

[Hiero]

any of them, even the hilarious RCP one

What was your problem with my post then? I am reading George Sanchez's aritcle now. I thought you and I were on the same page, that localised conflicts mediated the violence in the L.A riots.

[Homo Songun]

Only two "Asians" (Koreans, most likely) were shot to death during the riot. Most of the shooting deaths were Black (25 deaths) and Latino (16). From what I understand, the majority of the Black/Latino casualties were shot by Korean shopkeepers.

Source: http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~oliver/soc220/Lectures220/AfricanAmericans/LA%20Riot%201992%20Deaths.htm (http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/%7Eoliver/soc220/Lectures220/AfricanAmericans/LA%20Riot%201992%20Deaths.htm)

[Jimmie Higgins]

did you read the article?Relevence to what wrote? The antics and tactics of the radicals described in the LA Times article, don't negate my argument.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Weren't Black Americans in California being racial profiled by Korean shop owners? How could it be misdirected when Black Americans felt marginalised by the Korean-American petty bourgeoisie/middle class?

While the LAPD and White state apparatus' would be enemy number 1, usually in riots immediate conflicts are targeted first. In places like LA racial and class tensions are going to be more localised. But thoose conflicts are real and the violence that occurs between thoose groups is not misdirected.

I think the nature of riots are just undirected rage - it's like with the arguments you always hear after a riot "Well why did 'they' burn down their own neighborhood" well in the spontaneous explosion of a riot, people are just acting on their frustrations and so looting and arson or other anti-social actions are really an expression of social alienation and class anger. If you're stuck in a slummy apartment paying rent, who the fuck cares about property owners, if unemployment in your neighborhood is measurably and observably higher than the average, why the fuck should you care about the shops in your neighborhood that only hire their own family members or people from their own (different) ethnicity anyway?

Because of the way anti-black racism has functioned in the US, there has often been longstanding tensions between blacks and shop-owners from other ethnicity. In Harlem in the 1920s it was eastern European immigrants and jews mostly, in LA it's stereotypically been Koreans. Politically it's a petty-bourgeois resentment and desire for ending racial inequality through increased black shops and businesses - and in the lack of any workers movements, often these politics have been attractive to black workers too who then rally around these ideas in a sort of soft-nationalism. But in this more conscious form or in the spontaneous rage form of a riot, these attitudes may have real grievances behind them (even as a white guy I've been followed around in a store and I can see it's enough to make you want to put a brick through a window:lol:) but it's still misdirected anger and unproductive for the class struggle.

But none-the-less, the sort of inter-class or worker-vs-shopowner anger is not the REASON or motivation or defining feature of riots such as this, it's a side-effect: an explosion of built-up rage and resentment doesn't have a pre-decided programme for change by it's very nature so all the shit of this society and all the anger, not just what would be effective, pour out of the fissure of "normal" everyday resigned compliance to the order of society.

If the riots started because a Korean shop-owner shot someone, then maybe there'd be a case for this being primarily a kind of ethnic attack, but it's clearly the result of one of the more common sources of rioting (other than college sports) in the US: police brutality.

[A Marxist Historian]

LA riots were aimed at Latinos and Asians

they were not a people's rebellion, they were an expression of xenophobia

That's not the case. In fact, you had more Latin American rioters arrested than you did black. And a whole lot of white ones too! The center of the rebellion was mostly-Latin South Central, not Watts as in 1964.

And even the Koreans were just as mad about Rodney King as everybody else--till the rebellion was retargeted vs. them by the only "leadership" the people in the streets had, namely the Bloods and the Crips.

-M.H.-

[Geiseric]

I was wondering this as well, what role did the gangs in L.A. play during the riots?

[A Marxist Historian]

I was wondering this as well, what role did the gangs in L.A. play during the riots?

A big role. They were the ones who redirected the all-racial popular anger against the police in particular and the entire American system in general first into attacks against Korean shopowners, and then even into attacks against Latins, even though more of the people rioting in the streets were Latin than there were black.

A year before the riots broke out, the Bloods and the Crips signed a pact, and decided for a while to unite vs. the LAPD rather than murdering each other. The LAPD spent years trying to break up the alliance and get them killing each other again, and finally succeeded some 3-4 years after the riots ended.

But, as the Bloods and the Crips were both black gangs after all, and they knew better than anybody just how well armed the LAPD were, it was they who decided to misdirect the rebellion into ethnic conflict vs. their ethnic rivals.

Which was not how the rebellion started out, not at all.

An extreme example of the old Trotskyist truism that the main thing keeping capitalism going is the crisis in revolutionary leadership.

-M.H.-

[Hiero]

An extreme example of the old Trotskyist truism that the main thing keeping capitalism going is the crisis in revolutionary leadership.

Just need the enlightened to lead the way hey?

[A Marxist Historian]

Just need the enlightened to lead the way hey?

In popular insurgencies, somebody always takes the leadership, that's how things work. Even if things do start spontaneously.

The Bloods and the Crips, I am afraid, just did not turn out to be a good choice.

-M.H.-

[Hiero]

In popular insurgencies, somebody always takes the leadership, that's how things work. Even if things do start spontaneously.

The Bloods and the Crips, I am afraid, just did not turn out to be a good choice.

-M.H.-

Isn't that "Trotskyist truism" just laziness? It works well to legitimate inter party politics and time wasting spent on building pointless movements.It is a fantasy to imagine a radical proleteriat in slumber waiting that can be turned up leadership.

The decrepit parties (Stalinist and Trotskyist) do not ask the hard questions, that is "who would really want us?".

Thoose parties were created in a time when there was a proleteriat in Marx and Engels day, a mass of manual workers who shared common experiences. Now days there is a stratification of workers (blue collar, pink collar, white collar / ethnic, national, gendered) whose experiences are so multiple they do not fit the the proleterait that Marx, Engels and Lenin found. They truth is, workers aren't as docile as the Marxist program imagine. There is no large class waiting around for the leadership to light the way. But that belief is part of the reproduction of decrepit parties and their decrepit members.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Isn't that "Trotskyist truism" just laziness? It works well to legitimate inter party politics and time wasting spent on building pointless movements.It is a fantasy to imagine a radical proleteriat in slumber waiting that can be turned up leadership.

The decrepit parties (Stalinist and Trotskyist) do not ask the hard questions, that is "who would really want us?".

Thoose parties were created in a time when there was a proleteriat in Marx and Engels day, a mass of manual workers who shared common experiences. Now days there is a stratification of workers (blue collar, pink collar, white collar / ethnic, national, gendered) whose experiences are so multiple they do not fit the the proleterait that Marx, Engels and Lenin found. They truth is, workers aren't as docile as the Marxist program imagine. There is no large class waiting around for the leadership to light the way. But that belief is part of the reproduction of decrepit parties and their decrepit members.I don't think "slumbering masses" has anything to do with the formulation. If the proposition is that mass movements eventually cohere behind some set of agreements or tactics, then by definition of "a movement" the "masses" aren't slumbering but are already in motion. "Leadership" doesn't mean people lining up like robots and following orders, there's organic leadership and for grassroots kinds of movements organic leadership is often the only way to have "leadership" - not to mention it's the best way politically since this kind of leadership relies on democratic methods and empowers people. In the occupy movement, for example: for a short time you can have a kind of mass multi-class protest around some very broad issues but as the movement moves ahead or faces defeat, questions of class politics (if not explicitly) arise and so there is a struggle over "leadership". Should the movement do silent vigils to mark their moral opposition, should they try and organize a strike, should they try and get people elected... all these debates can reflect the political divides in the movement and maybe radicals will carry the arguments which opens the possibility for a more radical movement and more acceptance of radical arguments, or liberals win-out and the movement is co-opted and "led" in that direction.

I don't know that much about the direct involvement of the gangs in the L.A. riots, but I think where the question of leadership in this case is mainly a question of "lack of leadership" which in this sense would just mean lack of pre-existing organically grassroots organizations with the kind of politics to both understand the riots and suggest ways forward. This is normally how riots are in in the 1960s where there were black urban rebellions repeatedly for years, it wasn't until 4 years after Watts that organizations within the black urban communities began to organize their own kind of civil rights organizations such as the Black Panthers.

In L.A. in the early 90s there were some activists organizing around the police beating case before the riots and this was enough to start to knit together a receptive public for the arguments about systemic police brutality. They were able to have marches and other events, but when the explosion happened they were still way too small to have any influence in the outcome or direction of the riots or it's aftermath. So who ultimately provided leadership for the anger and sentiments exposed and expressed through the riots? A: Developers, the local black business elites, local politicians and soft-cultural nationalist liberals and so on who said the answer to the riots was more redevelopment, more chain stores in South-Central, more low-paid retail jobs for the black community.

After the riots, there was at least one black anarchist group founded and I think the New Black Panther Party gained some supporters and established themselves in LA at that time. But this is organizing after the fact. If there had been a group with roots in the community like the BPP had in Oakland at one time, then if an explosion happened, they may have been in a position of some prominence, established networks, and political trust among people who were angry to help organize something more concrete and sustained than the sudden burst of the riot alone. And I don't even agree with a lot of their political outlook, but the point is that even when someone's not explicitly getting up in front of the room and announcing their leadership and then ruling through bureaucracy or an iron fist, the question of leadership is important. Around what set of class assumptions and goals will a movement rally behind?

[A Marxist Historian]

Isn't that "Trotskyist truism" just laziness? It works well to legitimate inter party politics and time wasting spent on building pointless movements.It is a fantasy to imagine a radical proleteriat in slumber waiting that can be turned up leadership.

The decrepit parties (Stalinist and Trotskyist) do not ask the hard questions, that is "who would really want us?".

Thoose parties were created in a time when there was a proleteriat in Marx and Engels day, a mass of manual workers who shared common experiences. Now days there is a stratification of workers (blue collar, pink collar, white collar / ethnic, national, gendered) whose experiences are so multiple they do not fit the the proleterait that Marx, Engels and Lenin found. They truth is, workers aren't as docile as the Marxist program imagine. There is no large class waiting around for the leadership to light the way. But that belief is part of the reproduction of decrepit parties and their decrepit members.

You're describing LA pretty well here in your sociology. But nonetheless, you had a spontaneous revolutionary upsurge that fell apart into mutual ethnic conflict. Why? Lack of leadership.

Do you have other potentially revolutionary forces in LA besides workers at all those big auto and steel factories that closed down in Southern California in the '80s? Of course.

What does that mean? It means that Lenin was right when he said in What Is To Be Done that revolutionaries need to be tribunes of the people, not just trade union secretaries.

So what should have been done in LA in 1992 by a revolutionary party? Streetfightin' with the cops RCP style? No.

What was needed was to unite the social force of the organized LA working class with the anger in the streets of the oppressed minority communities. The ideal slogan would have been a call for a general strike vs. the LAPD.

If any union leader had issued such a call, it would have taken off like wildfire and totally changed the situation around. In the absence of that, well...

Nor is this anything at all alien to the consciousness of people in LA. Quite the contrary.

What was the one positive result of the LA revolt? A big upsurge in trade union organization, focused among the undocumented Latin workers the srvice sector in South Central who had been the central rebel force. First the drywaleros, then the janitors. During the '90s, LA was just about the only place in America where unions were advancing.

But then a union leader got elected mayor of LA, and that was the end of that, with militant union struggles repeatedly sold out in the usual fashion.

So now the main heritage is that LA is the only major city in America whose mayor is a former union leader closely connected to the LA union leadership.

Eh.

-M.H.-

[Prometeo liberado]

You're describing LA pretty well here in your sociology. But nonetheless, you had a spontaneous revolutionary upsurge that fell apart into mutual ethnic conflict. Why? Lack of leadership.

No one, I mean no one could have stopped the ethnic fighting once it had started because it was already going on for quite some time. The latino gangs had been at war with the black gangs going back to race prison wars. And as far as the Koreans were concerned they were just the convenient scapegoat for the last decade or so. All this was going on well before the riots. That is why the RCP could make no head way, save for a few poorly scrawled graffiti. They got chased out!

[coda]

<<https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7Rx...A3aGpXbkU/edit (http://www.anonym.to/?https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B7RxI6W9GEC2TW1DaTA3aGpXbkU/edit)
there is the doc in full. sorry i forgot to make it public, it's public now.>>

I didn't read the through the link, but I remember the rioting to be in reaction and response to the acquittal (4/92- 20 yrs ago this month!) of the cops involved in the Rodney King police brutality beating case of 1991. Not at all surprising to hear the RCP (minus Sunsara Taylor, who would have been just a wee tyke at the time) would have been on the scene to exploit the situation recruiting and selling newspapers or whatever they do best.

[tachosomoza]

I don't think "slumbering masses" has anything to do with the formulation. If the proposition is that mass movements eventually cohere behind some set of agreements or tactics, then by definition of "a movement" the "masses" aren't slumbering but are already in motion. "Leadership" doesn't mean people lining up like robots and following orders, there's organic leadership and for grassroots kinds of movements organic leadership is often the only way to have "leadership" - not to mention it's the best way politically since this kind of leadership relies on democratic methods and empowers people. In the occupy movement, for example: for a short time you can have a kind of mass multi-class protest around some very broad issues but as the movement moves ahead or faces defeat, questions of class politics (if not explicitly) arise and so there is a struggle over "leadership". Should the movement do silent vigils to mark their moral opposition, should they try and organize a strike, should they try and get people elected... all these debates can reflect the political divides in the movement and maybe radicals will carry the arguments which opens the possibility for a more radical movement and more acceptance of radical arguments, or liberals win-out and the movement is co-opted and "led" in that direction.

I don't know that much about the direct involvement of the gangs in the L.A. riots, but I think where the question of leadership in this case is mainly a question of "lack of leadership" which in this sense would just mean lack of pre-existing organically grassroots organizations with the kind of politics to both understand the riots and suggest ways forward. This is normally how riots are in in the 1960s where there were black urban rebellions repeatedly for years, it wasn't until 4 years after Watts that organizations within the black urban communities began to organize their own kind of civil rights organizations such as the Black Panthers.

In L.A. in the early 90s there were some activists organizing around the police beating case before the riots and this was enough to start to knit together a receptive public for the arguments about systemic police brutality. They were able to have marches and other events, but when the explosion happened they were still way too small to have any influence in the outcome or direction of the riots or it's aftermath. So who ultimately provided leadership for the anger and sentiments exposed and expressed through the riots? A: Developers, the local black business elites, local politicians and soft-cultural nationalist liberals and so on who said the answer to the riots was more redevelopment, more chain stores in South-Central, more low-paid retail jobs for the black community.

After the riots, there was at least one black anarchist group founded and I think the New Black Panther Party gained some supporters and established themselves in LA at that time. But this is organizing after the fact. If there had been a group with roots in the community like the BPP had in Oakland at one time, then if an explosion happened, they may have been in a position of some prominence, established networks, and political trust among people who were angry to help organize something more concrete and sustained than the sudden burst of the riot alone. And I don't even agree with a lot of their political outlook, but the point is that even when someone's not explicitly getting up in front of the room and announcing their leadership and then ruling through bureaucracy or an iron fist, the question of leadership is important. Around what set of class assumptions and goals will a movement rally behind?

Please don't mention the New Black Panther Party. The originals have distanced themselves from and condemn them. They're a bunch of insane black neo fascists.

http://www.cbpm.org/nbpp.html

[Jimmie Higgins]

Please don't mention the New Black Panther Party. The originals have distanced themselves from and condemn them. They're a bunch of insane black neo fascists.

http://www.cbpm.org/nbpp.html

I wouldn't call them (neo) fascists, but I also wasn't conflating them with the real BPP, I was just stating that anecdotally it seems like the New BPP actually developed a presence and some organization in LA after the riots. Also the new BPs to a sharp nationalist turn sometime in the late 90s which is when some of the original BPP members denounced them. At any rate if a group with mixed and nationalist politics grew out of some significant working class event, that is just as relevant and significant as when a more class-conscious political expression emerges.

Again the mixed politics (as well as a turn away from quazi-socialism and towards a more explicit nationalism by this group itself at the end of the decade) reveal something about consciousness surrounding the riots and this time period in general. That the de-facto poltical lead came from petty-bourgoise ideas about more political and economic autonomy for black communities, more redevelopment and "bringing in business" in black communities, more political oversight of the police. Of course adding a handful of grocery bagger jobs at Safeway isn't exactly the main demand of the embattled black (and latino) workers of central Los Angeles.

[A Marxist Historian]

No one, I mean no one could have stopped the ethnic fighting once it had started because it was already going on for quite some time. The latino gangs had been at war with the black gangs going back to race prison wars. And as far as the Koreans were concerned they were just the convenient scapegoat for the last decade or so. All this was going on well before the riots. That is why the RCP could make no head way, save for a few poorly scrawled graffiti. They got chased out!

jbeard, you really don't know what was going on in LA. At the beginning of the rebellion, you had racial unity vs. the cops, with everybody in LA, white, black, brown and for that matter yellow, united vs. the LAPD.

One of the ironies of all this is that the Korean-American community was initially quite divided. Quite a few of them were radical students from South Korea who had fled to America to escape right wing repression by the South Korean dictatorship -- and started liquor stores and whatnot in ghetto areas, precisely because they were less racist than your average white Angeleno and more comfortable with living among non-whites.

The Bloods and the Crips were able to redirect that into ethnic conflict, first against Korean shopowners, quite successfully, and then even into attacks vs. Latins, much less successfully. It took years really for black-Latin ethnic unity to break down. During the riots, there were a few no doubt gang inspired attacks on Latins, but this was minor, a blot on the overall atmosphere of anti-LAPD unity.

-M.H.-

[tachosomoza]

It is essential that black and Latino comrades' relations are rebuilt to a level of strong solidarity. Two of the most oppressed, pissed off, potentially revolutionary class conscious and numerous groups in America today, imagine what we could accomplish with a united front. Purge the petty bourgeois and racist gangs, get on one accord, and the sky's the limit.

[Prometeo liberado]

jbeard, you really don't know what was going on in LA. At the beginning of the rebellion, you had racial unity vs. the cops, with everybody in LA, white, black, brown and for that matter yellow, united vs. the LAPD.

One of the ironies of all this is that the Korean-American community was initially quite divided. Quite a few of them were radical students from South Korea who had fled to America to escape right wing repression by the South Korean dictatorship -- and started liquor stores and whatnot in ghetto areas, precisely because they were less racist than your average white Angeleno and more comfortable with living among non-whites.

The Bloods and the Crips were able to redirect that into ethnic conflict, first against Korean shopowners, quite successfully, and then even into attacks vs. Latins, much less successfully. It took years really for black-Latin ethnic unity to break down. During the riots, there were a few no doubt gang inspired attacks on Latins, but this was minor, a blot on the overall atmosphere of anti-LAPD unity.

-M.H.-
The racial unity versus the cops was represented by average no-gang affiliated citizens. And yes at first this was across the board. But as quite soon you had the OG's taking over and any sense of class/race unity soon dissipated. Black vs Latino violence would only cease when orders came down from the prison hierarchy. These orders have been much written about and publicized. Why is it that these gangs, collectively could stop it or redirect it, as you say. Because they gave the orders to start it. Yes there were progressive forces of all nationalities that agitated together, but if you know the geography of L.A. then you would know that they were on the periphery of the action. When you talk of anti-LAPD unity you must understand that within the confines of East and South Central L.A. there were also other dynamics that were in play and "unity" unfortunately didn't play out as well as leftist would like to imagine. The riots on the West-side looked and acted entirely different from those in South-Central and East L.A. As far as I know the only community to riot solely against the cops was north Long Beach, though I never saw students getting down with the mostly black community there.
I will assume then that you then were either in the Valley or Santa Monica. Probably more like Malibu.

[A Marxist Historian]

The racial unity versus the cops was represented by average no-gang affiliated citizens. And yes at first this was across the board. But as quite soon you had the OG's taking over and any sense of class/race unity soon dissipated. Black vs Latino violence would only cease when orders came down from the prison hierarchy. These orders have been much written about and publicized. Why is it that these gangs, collectively could stop it or redirect it, as you say. Because they gave the orders to start it. Yes there were progressive forces of all nationalities that agitated together, but if you know the geography of L.A. then you would know that they were on the periphery of the action. When you talk of anti-LAPD unity you must understand that within the confines of East and South Central L.A. there were also other dynamics that were in play and "unity" unfortunately didn't play out as well as leftist would like to imagine. The riots on the West-side looked and acted entirely different from those in South-Central and East L.A. As far as I know the only community to riot solely against the cops was north Long Beach, though I never saw students getting down with the mostly black community there.
I will assume then that you then were either in the Valley or Santa Monica. Probably more like Malibu.

As empirical description of what went down, everything you say may be accurate. But the explanation for how things went bad is still what I said it was, a vacuum of leadership filled by the Bloods and Crips. Nothing you say contradicts that as far as I can see.

I live in the Bay Area, and yes we had our own smaller Rodney King riots in SF. I got my info from the LA Spartacists, who I supported then as I do now. As well as of course obsessive reading of the press and anything I could get my hands on at the time.

The attitude of a lot of Americans, briefly, that they had had enough, was not exclusive to LA.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Here's some useful website info on how the whole thing went down.

A good reminder that the biggest, ugliest and nastiest gang in every American city is the one wearing blue.

http://hiphopandpolitics.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/we-remember-the-rodney-king-uprisings-and-the-historic-gang-truce-of-1992/

-M.H.-


The racial unity versus the cops was represented by average no-gang affiliated citizens. And yes at first this was across the board. But as quite soon you had the OG's taking over and any sense of class/race unity soon dissipated. Black vs Latino violence would only cease when orders came down from the prison hierarchy. These orders have been much written about and publicized. Why is it that these gangs, collectively could stop it or redirect it, as you say. Because they gave the orders to start it. Yes there were progressive forces of all nationalities that agitated together, but if you know the geography of L.A. then you would know that they were on the periphery of the action. When you talk of anti-LAPD unity you must understand that within the confines of East and South Central L.A. there were also other dynamics that were in play and "unity" unfortunately didn't play out as well as leftist would like to imagine. The riots on the West-side looked and acted entirely different from those in South-Central and East L.A. As far as I know the only community to riot solely against the cops was north Long Beach, though I never saw students getting down with the mostly black community there.
I will assume then that you then were either in the Valley or Santa Monica. Probably more like Malibu.

[Fawkes]

The whole "look I'm not from here but I'm your proletarian-internationalist-brother-Maoist-Bob Avakianist. Got it?" line did not sit to well amongst the homies. The larger question one should ask is why?

Cause they'd spent their whole lives having people from outside their hoods telling them what to do. They spent every day getting beaten by pigs, hell no they weren't about to tote the party line of some whiteboy obsessed with a dead Chinese leader most of them probably never even heard of

[Prometeo liberado]

I live in the Bay Area, and yes we had our own smaller Rodney King riots in SF. I got my info from the LA Spartacists, who I supported then as I do now. As well as of course obsessive reading of the press and anything I could get my hands on at the time.

Hate to be the barer of bad news, the Sparts are known in L.A. as difficult to work with and sometimes just dangerous in the, gonna get people arrested way. They once tried to start a gun club? Dont really see them too much as they tend to be very small and are more apt to judge from afar.


The attitude of a lot of Americans, briefly, that they had had enough, was not exclusive to LA.

I agree. My whole point is that a certain level of intra-working-class tension was bound to explode what within the air of rioting and mayhem.


Cause they'd spent their whole lives having people from outside their hoods telling them what to do. They spent every day getting beaten by pigs, hell no they weren't about to tote the party line of some whiteboy obsessed with a dead Chinese leader most of them probably never even heard

Ya, my point when I asked "why" were the people of that community so unwilling to hear anything about Marx or Mao was to point out how little headway the left has made into the most revolutionary minded communities. How much longer can we be afraid of our own class? With all the money that the PSL takes in in LA alone why is thier office not in the 'hood instead of the quickly to be gentrified area it's in? Standing in front of strip malls and the non-existent factories downtown selling papers on the newest ideological tendency war about the DPRK may not be the best way to get people to free themselves. In LA you got the, RCP, PSL, WWP, SP, Solidarity, SA, ISO, CPUSA, FRSO(FB), FRSO and god knows how many more are creeping up so if a city wide riot were to happen today not one of these organizations could lay claim to having either helped guide it, foster it, steer it or to have imparted any seed of Marxist class perspective to the working class, before or after.
And when it doesn't go down the way we would like we'll have a crisis meeting and talk about the need to get "in the community". Fucking head shaking.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Ya, my point when I asked "why" were the people of that community so unwilling to hear anything about Marx or Mao was to point out how little headway the left has made into the most revolutionary minded communities. How much longer can we be afraid of our own class? With all the money that the PSL takes in in LA alone why is thier office not in the 'hood instead of the quickly to be gentrified area it's in? Standing in front of strip malls and the non-existent factories downtown selling papers on the newest ideological tendency war about the DPRK may not be the best way to get people to free themselves. In LA you got the, RCP, PSL, WWP, SP, Solidarity, SA, ISO, CPUSA, FRSO(FB), FRSO and god knows how many more are creeping up so if a city wide riot were to happen today not one of these organizations could lay claim to having either helped guide it, foster it, steer it or to have imparted any seed of Marxist class perspective to the working class, before or after.
And when it doesn't go down the way we would like we'll have a crisis meeting and talk about the need to get "in the community". Fucking head shaking.
While I agree that trying to bridge the gap - reconnecting revolutionary politics to the working class in an organic way - should be seen as the primary task of radical workers, I find it a little off-putting to blame people, many who have been trying to do this work for much longer than I've been a revolutionary, for this divide. It would be one thing if we weren't attracting people but nationalist movements or other non-revolutionary politics were drawing tons of people in (aside from the Obama campaign which did create excitement and lots of false hope in black and latino neighborhoods), but working class and especially poor or minority working class life has been characterized by lack of political engagement and optimism for a generation. So lack of confidence and a sense that things can even change, on top of the usual anti-radical sentiments and a general attack on Leftism (radical or reformist) during the neoliberal era, has made things difficult.

But leaving aside these objective factors, it's hard enough to be a revolutionary and to establish yourself in any workplace or working class community, and the problem is compounded by the racial segregation and mistrust in this society or in communities under attack where many people lack stability and both of these issues make it very hard for groups to thrive in working-poor communities or in impoverished black, Latino, native American communities. I personally have been involved in trying to create branches in the Crenshaw district of LA and in an immigrant neighborhood in East Oakland. From my experience, there's no lack of interest in revolutionary ideas and compared to some more suburban-ish white working class audiences, there's more of an automatic recognition and knowledge of many of the things that revolutionaries talk about: economic realities and, probably obviously, racism in society. For example, anecdotally, non-white working class people in cities don't ever even question the concept of "the working class" whereas I've also organized on college campuses where people had no idea what that meant and would muse about "what does class mean, aren't we beyond class". The hurdle that's harder to overcome in my experience is convincing people it's possible to organize and agitate. If people don't think things should change, then why organize? On top of that is the negative legacy of white radicals in black struggles in the past, as well as just general (and justified IMO) suspicion of white people, radical or not, by black people in the US. Without movements for radicals to be involved in, from even a close distance a multi-ethnic group of radicals doesn't look all that different from a multi-ethnic team from some NGO people or a religious charity group. So there's a tension of, "why are you here anyway... would I actually be a member or would I be taking orders from a bunch of white people about what I should do in my own neighborhood?"

So organizing, specifically, in black working-poor neighborhoods is sort of a catch-22, people don't believe things will change resulting in a lack of grassroots organic organizations which then means that when there is a sudden class response to something, there is no outlet or ready vehicle for organizing (unless some liberal group decides to swoop in from above like NAACP or ACLU or whatnot) and so if there pressure and anger become too great, then the only outlet becomes a spontaneous outburst or some passive candle-light vigil type things.

At any rate, I think this is the main task for us as already radicalized workers, but it's not an easy one and it takes lots of baby-steps because basically we are trying to both win the trust of working class people through offering our views of how to forward working class struggle, but when people don't think that struggle is worth it or possible, this task takes a lot of patience and slow work.