On May 25, George Floyd was murdered by Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department. Like so many times before, at least since the attack on Rodney King in 1992, the police were caught on camera. What’s different now is that George Floyd’s murder has sparked a rebellion larger, broader, and more profound than anything seen in the United States since the 1960s.
This rebellion was long overdue. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s fought for and won desegregation, voting rights, and the integration of Black leadership into the political system. With the demobilization of the movement beginning in the 1970s, a process was begun to chip away at those gains using countless legal and economic measures, suppressing voting rights, militarizing a police force that occupies and represses Black America, and expanding the prison system. Additionally, the system of white supremacy was reinvigorated in order to scapegoat Black people for all of society’s ills. Democrats and Republicans alike have used coded (or not so coded) racism to push the politics of individual responsibility and “tough on crime” legislation to, effectively, criminalize Blacks, especially men. No wonder one sign carried at George Floyd demonstrations says Being Black is not Probable Cause.
Meanwhile, social programs became targets for defunding and outright elimination, and funding for public schools and universities was drastically cut. So many social programs have been eliminated that, as others have written, most social services now fall to untrained police to resolve—or, as the case may be, exacerbate.[1] Added to this is the neoliberal project of deregulation and privatization, as well as the continual rewriting of the tax code to relieve the rich of almost any responsibility for social welfare—not to mention the additional spoils the rich are awarded as so-called stimulus plans every time there is a crisis like the 2009 stock market bubble crash or this year’s Covid-19 catastrophe, which spurred a huge government giveaway. The result has been a massive transfer of wealth upwards, with the top 10% controlling 70% of US wealth (MarketWatch-March 2019).[2] The Covid-19 crisis has laid bare these drastic inequalities and the brutality of a system that prioritizes profitability over life. Clearly, all lives do not matter.
The George Floyd protests are not the first we’ve seen against this system, of course. Police violence has ignited protests for decades. We’ve seen countless movements for immigrants’ rights in addition to the Occupy Wall Street movement (2011), the Ferguson Uprising (2014) sparking the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests, the teacher rebellion (2018), and more. But none compare with the current rebellion against police brutality. Just as, during the Vietnam war, we saw the daily body count on the nightly news, today we witness in person and on our screens the daily signs of rebellion and police repression in Minneapolis, New York, Washington, Atlanta, and Seattle, as well as in smaller cities and towns across the country, some of which have never seen a protest before. The scope of the protests is unprecedented, but equally important is their character: young, angry, multiracial, and dynamic, with rapidly escalating political demands that generalize the fight beyond just the police terror that sparked the rebellion.
What these protests have accomplished is also new. Cops who kill are almost never prosecuted in the US. Yet Derek Chauvin was charged within days, and his three accomplices not long after. Public opinion has swung in favor of Black Lives Matter for the first time, and there is broad support for defunding the police, a demand that would have been unimaginable just a few weeks ago. The police are being kicked out of schools, organized labor is fighting to rid the trade union movement of police organizations, long standing symbols of racism are being vandalized and torn down, and an international movement expressing solidarity with BLM and attacking racism and colonialism has exploded.
The strength of this rebellion has also revealed the need for rebuilding a left that is capable of intervening politically while helping to consolidate our victories. But even more importantly, we need to rebuild a left that is willing to fight for political leadership. In our original International Socialism Project statement, we speak of the collapse of the revolutionary left in the United States and internationally. We have seen what this meant for our former organizations, where the attraction of reformism and the Democratic party proved too strong to resist when the alternative, building independent and revolutionary organizations, seemed so remote from the reality of official US politics. We should be honest with ourselves: after decades of hoping for a radical upturn but never seeing it materialize in any sustained way, activists were understandably demoralized, and some chose to abandon the project of building a revolutionary organization.
But we should be clear. The problem wasn’t our revolutionary politics, or our small size, or our “inflexible” principles (because we should be inflexible on the nature of the Democratic Party just as we are on issues of racism, sexism, and homophobia). It was the lack of a conjuncture that would allow us to break beyond a small minority and build an organization large enough and with enough experience and presence in movements and unions to contribute to real change. In spite of important accomplishments, decades of organizational stagnation and the inability to break out of our isolation pushed many to settle for what seemed possible: modest electoral strategies that soft-pedaled real challenges in the hopes of appealing to a wider and growing layer of people interested in socialist politics.
Two Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns (2016, 2020) played an important role in attracting more people to socialism, but they also unfortunately pulled a layer of veteran revolutionaries into reformist social democracy and, ultimately, the Democratic Party. It is hard not to imagine that instead of these two groups converging in some reformist middle ground, their paths actually crossing from opposite directions, with new socialists rejecting Democrats and drawing revolutionary conclusions, and old revolutionaries accepting the Democrats less and less critically. However these trajectories play out, it cannot be denied that, for the moment, protesters are looking beyond the Democrats.
Obviously, we are painting with broad strokes here. No doubt many of our old comrades will still look to revolutionary politics. In fact, it is easy to see that some are bristling with the lack of an organized intervention in the current rebellion by the Democratic Socialists of America who some have joined. It is also easy to imagine that without a clear direction for the movement, inevitable ebbs and flows, the newly radicalized will be pulled in different directions, especially if revolutionaries aren’t actively and collectively pulling towards building organizations that see their role as building an independent left. And we know as well that in the short term, newly radicalizing activists will come under great pressure to settle for the “lesser evil,” even if just to get rid of Trump.
If we’ve learned anything at all in the last few weeks of open rebellion, or if any of our old politics have been confirmed, it is that decades of lesser-evil voting for this or that Democratic candidate has brought us less than nothing. Instead, it has contributed to the overall and continuous movement of official national politics to the right. Meanwhile, just a few short weeks of not waiting on the Democrats but instead relying on ourselves, our own activism, has brought us victories that seemed unimaginable yesterday, even at the most euphoric—though fleeting—height of the recent Sanders presidential campaign. Even more than that, our victories have come at the direct expense of the Democrats elected to run the cities and police forces of most major cities in the US, including Minneapolis, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles. And it should not go unnoticed that as the rebellion pressurizes official politics, Trump’s approval ratings are falling and key Republican-party players are wavering in their support of him. As the tightly wrapped system comes apart at the seams, the 1% apparently do not trust that Trump can hold things together.
What remains to be seen in this rebellion is whether we will remember that the Democrats are our enemy. Even progressive Democrats like Sanders do not support the most universally popular demand that has emerged over the last ten days of rebellion: Defund the Police! Absurdly, the Democrats are calling for an increase in police funding. But, cynically, the Democrats will adjust their rhetoric to accommodate the new political climate created by the rebellion in order to limit, stall, and weaken its power. If we think they are on our side, we will lose.
[1] For an especially revealing description of this, see one former policeman’s account: https://medium.com/@OfcrACab/confessions-of-a-former-bastard-cop-bb14d17bc759
[2] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-richest-10-of-households-now-represent-70-of-all-us-wealth-2019-05-24
Patrick L. Gallagher is an Associate Professor of Spanish at Kent State University. He teaches and writes about Spanish contemporary narrative fiction, Spanish culture and history. He has translated fiction and and non-fiction about the Spanish Civil War and Franco period. Gallagher has been an activist since 1989.
