The Awakening.

         Portland USA is not on our mainstream media news very much at all. The media have a habit of reporting rioting in places our lords and masters call "enemies" but seldom report much when it is happening on the streets of our "friends". So continuous riots being brutally attack in a "friendly" nation is just not news.  
        However, Portland USA has seen it citizens on the street in violent clashes with the authorities and the police since the daylight, public execution, by a police officer, of George Floyd, and it is still going on, getting met with ever greater military style police violence. This is surely worthy of reporting.

The following report from It's Going Down:

 A report from the front lines of Portland from Defend PDX.

by Misanthrophile
      In the beginning, we were many. We were thousands. Exploding into the street after watching a video of horror both strange and all-too-familiar: a video of a nine-minute murder, of a killer indifferent to the pleas of the bound man he choked and crushed to death. Broad daylight, on film, unprosecuted. Another police murder. Another black person dead.
     As the video circulated, things began to shatter. Hearts. Trust. Restraint. Patience.
     We marched through these streets–our streets–to the sound of shattered windows. We screamed the names of the dead to the heavens as though they might be able to hear, as though we might rouse them and reverse the brutality that ended their lives. From above: silence. Some crimes are unforgivable, irreversible. But the future is not yet written: we could stop this from happening again, we must stop it by any means necessary. Voices united in a pledge, a pact: “No Justice, No Peace.”
     There was no justice, and so there was no peace. The police quickly set aside their PR platitudes and came for us in force. The cacophony of flash bang grenades rattled windows, nerves, teeth. Thick, sputtering clouds of tear gas choked downtown and incapacitated passersby as the protesters scattered, terrified by this sudden brutality. The pain is unbearable. Your eyes swell and burn: you become blind. Fire in your lungs, your mouth, your stomach. You retch and spit. Every instinct screams that you are dying, panic fills you: you flee.
     We could not withstand it, at first. Mass protests disintegrated into terrified individuals, scattered to the winds.
     “We have to do better,” we told each other, clothes rank with mace and sweat. Sheltering with a friend, a stranger, a new comrade. Sharing a beer, watching Hong Kong YouTube videos. Thinking. Learning.
     Not all the protesters returned, but the ones who did learned quickly. With one voice we sang our lessons. “Slow in the front, protect the back!,” we chanted as we learned to march at a steady pace. “Walk, don’t run!” we called out as we learned to fight back panic and remain calm in the face of fire. “Stay together, stay tight!”: a song we knew from the start, soon augmented with a second line: “We learned to ride the terror. “Be Water,” we said to each other as we regrouped after the police broke the group with gas and fear. We learned painfully that debates on direction had to be conducted carefully to avoid splitting and quickly to avoid police attention. Hand signals I had learned in the Army discovered again by an army of Gen-Z warriors: stop, regroup, left, right, quiet down.
     After a week of this, the city passed an ordinance against tear gas. The cops now needed new tools to hurt us and so we learned the brutality of the police line. Of charging cops with batons. Of an entire canister of crowd control mace emptied into the faces of protesters. We learned that cameras save lives and so every phone became a weapon. The police knew this too. They began to target journalists.
      The police made the mistake all authoritarians and cowards make: because they are driven by fear, they believe others are too. We learned to ride the fear, live with it, transmute it into rage and commitment. We learned in lock step, we learned together.
     As we became accustomed to their tactics, the police tried new ones. Every time they escalated, we learned to become more resilient, creative, unpredictable. We went to their police union. They instantly declared a riot and drove us away with batons and thick clouds of gas. We went to the North precinct. They drove us into the residential streets and claimed we tried to burn them alive. Lies and lies and lies, mainstream media eating it up; we existed in a world no one seemed to know about or believe, we were alone but we had each other. We did not stop
    And then the feds arrived.
    We do this every night.” Same shit, different day. Nothing to be afraid of.

Read the full article with videos HERE:

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

We Are Many.

      Ever since the police public execution of George Floyd, the world has seen mass uprisings and protests. Everything from peaceful protests to violent confrontation with the state's enforcers, looting and the destruction of the symbols of this system of oppression. What has also been obvious that there are those on the supposed "left" who stand against all that is happening, except orderly, controlled peaceful protest. They have failed miserably to grasp the lessons of our history. In most cases peaceful protests procure little or no change to our freedoms or conditions. Only when the state feels that the protests are getting out of hand will it concede some ground and legislate to try and appease the anger of the people. If you want a better world for all, don't approach your adversary with a bunch of roses, for you will be met with batons and teargas. That's the nature of the beast, you're dealing with a system that relies on violence for its survival.

      The following from Acorn:

      Another political fault line has been opened up by the rapidly spiralling events of 2020.
        As we wrote yesterday, the Covid scare has found us sharing the anti-authoritarian analysis of people beyond the usual anarchic spheres, while many supposed comrades are bizarrely supportive of the official state narrative. However, the current street uprisings across the USA, sparked by the murder of George Floyd, have revealed a peculiar limit to some people’s opposition to the nascent global police state.
      Unlike us, they have not found hope in the sight of thousands upon thousands of people of all races reclaiming the streets of dozens of cities, overturning police cars, setting on fire the buildings used to oppress them. They apparently don’t think that it is reasonable, or helpful, to come together and physically resist the state and its hired thugs! In taking this stance, they reveal that they have understood nothing about the system which has controlled and exploited us for so long, and which is now dropping its liberal mask to reveal its true totalitarian nature. They have not grasped that its so-called “democracy” is fake, that the “reforms” it sometimes offers us are illusory, that the avenues it provides for us to try and change things are all time-wasting dead-ends. Most of all, they have failed to see that the whole of the system’s control of us is built on violence.

       As this article explains: “The capitalist state was created by violence, is maintained by violence and is always prepared to resort to all the forms of violence at its disposal to resist challenges to its power. “The ‘law’ itself, that foundation of its control over the population, is the flag of convenience under which this violence is carried out.
       “Physically attacking someone is violence, even if you happen to be dressed up in some fancy clothes provided by the state. “Physically confining someone in a locked space, with the constant use and threat of force, is also violence, even if you put on a stupid wig to announce what you are going to do to them. “Bombing someone is violence, as is shooting them, torturing them, spraying them with chemicals. “Wearing down someone’s resistance, forcing them to follow your rules, to live the way you tell them to, by means of a permanent, lifelong threat of violence if they step out of line is also, needless to say, violence”.
       We cannot hope to win our freedom by obediently playing by the rules the system has written to protect itself from us. We have to break through the barriers it has built to keep us in our place, not least the psychological ones. One of these barriers is the idea that it is “wrong” to resist state oppression, that “the law” must be respected. This deeply conditioned response even leads some to assume that breaking the law to fight the system must necessarily be some kind of cunning trap into which we must diligently refuse to fall!
      The biggest barrier of all is the notion, implanted in our minds virtually from birth, that we can never defeat the system. Resistance is futile, they tell us. There is no alternative, another world is completely impossible. There is nothing you can do about this. Stay home, shut up, submit.

        But this is a complete lie! If it was true, why would they invest so much effort into policing us, surveilling us, imprisoning us, constantly devising new laws and techniques to chain us?
       It is because the tiny ultra-rich elite, who run the system for their own selfish benefit, are very aware that they are hopelessly unnumbered. They are scared of us! They know full well that if ever we broke through the barriers of fear and disempowerment with which they surround us, if ever we overcame the divisions with which they separate us, we would be able to bring their capitalist prison-world crashing down.

We are many, they are few. We will be victorious!

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk 

BLM & The Green.

 

       Glasgow's mass BLM protest held on Glasgow Green Sunday 7th June, was a well attended and peaceful affair, and what's more and unusual for Glasgow, the weather was kind. I wasn't there but a report from a friend who managed to attend, said that their estimate put the attendance at between 2,000 and 3,000. My friend also said that on the whole most people kept a reasonable distance apart, as did the police, patrolling in twos around the crowd.

        Let's hope that this coming together of all shades of humanity to protest the injustice and brutality inherent in this economic system we live under, stays together as a cohesive body. Let's hope that they continue their presence on the street and in their communities, not just against the police brutality but recognizing that the police are just a strand of this system and one the establishment hold sacred. The system sees the police as a necessary force to allow the powers that be continue their looting of the public purse and the exploitation of the people. It should be our aim not to change the police, but to change this entire system of privilege based on wealth and power.  

      As with all Glasgow protests, there is a plethora of hand made placards, snappy slogans, short to the point statements, which I always find fascinating, opinions scribbled on cardboard, cheap, easily and quickly made.

      Here are some of the placards from Sunday's protest, thanks to my young friend.

 

  

Hope.

        As the mass protests and outrage at the public murder of George Floyd by the police, started to spread across the world, that little glimmer of hope that I always had, that one day all the single issue politics would disappear and become one mass worldwide protest movement against this savage, brutal and exploitative system and end it once and for all, that little hope grew brighter. Here at last the ordinary people of all the shades of humanity were coming together, this illusion of race was evaporating before our eyes. Perhaps now we would all see that the only real division in the human race is class. Though the hope is still there, I never underestimate the subterfuge, devious and brutal nature of the other class, the "establishment", the millionaires and billionaires the corporate bodies and their minders, the state. That is what we should be watching for, there underhand, hijacking and false propaganda to divide and undermine that unity.

The following is from FSP, (revolutionary feminism.)

The Barricades Are Burning.

       On Saturday, May 31, the world witnessed an historic event – the fires of mass rebellion broke out a few hundred yards from the White House.

Donald Trump, the political head of the most powerful imperialist state that economically and militarily lords over the whole Earth, was escorted to the secure bunker inside the White House fearing that the angry masses of Black, Latinx and poor white Americans would attempt to settle accounts with their president.

     Thousands of Black working-class youth have led massive protests composed of workers and the unemployed of all races due to the Covid-19 pandemic since the American dream has become a nightmare of growing poverty, the loss of housing, the lack of jobs, the super-exploitation of part-time employment, and the absence of adequate healthcare. Brave young people – both citizens and immigrants – faced off against brutal, murderous men in uniform to avenge the death of George Floyd by shouting, “No more police killings!”

      In a May 30 statement, the National Comrades of Color Caucus of the Freedom Socialist Party and Radical Women wrote that, “The police have always been in the service of capitalism and white supremacy since its origins as the slave patrols of the South. Ever since, the corrosive power of white supremacy has been used to delude working-class whites into thinking that their interests lie with rich whites instead of their own class brothers and sisters of color.”

       Now the monumental crisis that the capitalists have created in the world economy that delivers its most violent and terrible blows to the lives of most the humble and dispossessed has drawn a clear line between the rich and poor, the exploiters and exploited, the oppressors and oppressed. 

The class interests of workers in the U.S. are beginning to overcome the racial barriers that the U.S. bourgeoisie has maintained to divide poor whites from poor Blacks since the founding of the nation.

      The moving expressions of solidarity around the world clearly illustrate that the working class is a single class and international. Let no wall stand in the way of grief over the death of George Floyd, a Black man; nor impede solidarity with the oppressed and exploited in the United States. The same state that drains the livelihood of workers in other countries beats and strangles its own people.

        It is time for working people around the world, united in suffering and pain, to stand up against capitalism that destroys and kills and end all oppression by building a socialist world.

Workers of the world, let us unite!

Committee for Revolutionary International Regroupment (CRIR)

Partido Socialismo y Libertad – Argentina
Partido Obrero Socialista – México
Freedom Socialist Party – United States and Australia

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk 

Watts,1965.

        What we are looking at in the wide spread riots and mass protests following the public murder of George Floyd by the police, is a mirror of Los Angeles, 1965, only on a much larger scale. It becomes obvious that in this capitalist economy nothing changes in the relationship between the state and the general population. The only change seems to be in the growing inequality and the more brutal and draconian methods to keep the system going in the same ruthless manner. I have no doubt these events will keep repeating themselves until we finally get rid of the root cause, the state/capitalist economic system that is driven by greed and profit, and has shackled our lives for centuries.

    Some photos from those Watts riots, 1965.

Rare footage from Watts 1965:

      The following is an extract from quite a long article, but well worth reading, from "Bureau of Public Secrets" on those 1965 riots in the Watts district of Los Angeles.

The Decline and Fall of the
Spectacle-Commodity Economy
     

  August 13-16, 1965, the blacks of Los Angeles revolted. An incident between traffic police and pedestrians developed into two days of spontaneous riots. Despite increasing reinforcements, the forces of order were unable to regain control of the streets. By the third day the blacks had armed themselves by looting accessible gun stores, enabling them to fire even on police helicopters. It took thousands of police and soldiers, including an entire infantry division supported by tanks, to confine the riot to the Watts area, and several more days of street fighting to finally bring it under control. Stores were massively plundered and many were burned. Official sources listed 32 dead (including 27 blacks), more than 800 wounded and 3000 arrests.
        Reactions from all sides were most revealing: a revolutionary event, by bringing existing problems into the open, provokes its opponents into an inhabitual lucidity. Police Chief William Parker, for example, rejected all the major black organizations’ offers of mediation, correctly asserting: “These rioters don’t have any leaders.” Since the blacks no longer had any leaders, it was the moment of truth for both sides. What did one of those unemployed leaders, NAACP general secretary Roy Wilkins, have to say? He declared that the riot “should be put down with all necessary force.” And Los Angeles Cardinal McIntyre, who protested loudly, did not protest against the violence of the repression, which one might have supposed the most tactful policy at a time when the Roman Church is modernizing its image; he denounced “this premeditated revolt against the rights of one’s neighbor and against respect for law and order,” calling on Catholics to oppose the looting and “this violence without any apparent justification.” And all those who went so far as to recognize the “apparent justifications” of the rage of the Los Angeles blacks (but never the real ones), all the ideologists and “spokesmen” of the vacuous international Left, deplored the irresponsibility, the disorder, the looting (especially the fact that arms and alcohol were the first targets) and the 2000 fires with which the blacks lit up their battle and their ball. But who has defended the Los Angeles rioters in the terms they deserve?
        We will. Let the economists fret over the $27 million lost, and the city planners sigh over one of their most beautiful supermarkets gone up in smoke, and McIntyre blubber over his slain deputy sheriff. Let the sociologists bemoan the absurdity and intoxication of this rebellion. The role of a revolutionary publication is not only to justify the Los Angeles insurgents, but to help elucidate their perspectives, to explain theoretically the truth for which such practical action expresses the search.

Continue reading HERE: 

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk

The Murmur.

      As I have always said, nobody knows the spark that will ignite the fire. Police brutality goes on day and daily, in country after country, and there is an angry murmuring. George Floyd's public murder by the police, thanks to modern technology, circulated the world, that was the spark that ignited this fire. This was not a sudden and unexpected explosion, this is the release of decades of pent up discontent and anger, decades of having injustice heaped on you on a daily bases. George Floyd threw open a door through which our anger could run free and express itself and attack the causes of those decades of brutality and injustice. 

     Of course you'll get the so called voices of "reason" condemning the destruction and looting, but where were they when for centuries the wealth created by the many was continually being looted by the few, where were their voices when the few, through the state and corporate bodies heaped destruction on our home, the planet? In a society where the majority are continually being looted of the wealth they create, what the apologists for the state, the media, call "looting" is merely taking back some of what you created. The trillions paid to the corporate world as a "bailout", is nothing more than looting the public purse by the state to comfort the wealthy few. 

      Yes, this anger may subside, and authority take back control, if that happens, then the brutality, the plundering of public wealth, the gross inequality and injustice will return, and you will have to accept it, or ignite another fire. The state authority and its accompanying brutality will not melt away because you desire it to do so, it will require the full force of your anger to rid ourselves of that scourge. 

      This could be the birth pangs of a new world as it struggles to be born, trying to push its way from the darkness to a bright new future. The choice is ours.

The Murmer Of The Poor

Brokers, bankers, Earls, Dukes,
callous, mercenary, pirate crew
gasconading through the land
Bloated, pampered, privileged few.

Striding with selfish arrogance
plundering as you go
grasping at the fruits
the common people sow.

Take heed, you swaggering fat cats
in our world you don't belong,
that murmur you hear is the poor
rehearsing an angry song.

The day is fat approaching
when our chorus loud you'll hear,
then all your greed and treachery
will surely cost you dear.

A price you'll pay for being blind
to the hungry at your door,
oh, haste the day our angry chorus
becomes a mighty roar. 

Visit ann arky's home at https://radicalglasgow.me.uk