{"id":3005,"date":"2020-07-01T16:48:52","date_gmt":"2020-07-01T21:48:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=3005"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:56:30","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:56:30","slug":"republicans-and-riots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=3005","title":{"rendered":"Republicans and riots"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Left in death, 1992 and 2020<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Chris Cutrone<\/a><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Platypus Review <\/a><\/em>128<\/a> | July 2020<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[PDF flyer]<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy for the working millions which this world had ever seen. It was a tragedy that beggared the Greek; it was an upheaval of humanity like the Reformation and the French Revolution. Yet we are blind and led by the blind. We discern in it no part of our labor movement; no part of our industrial triumph; no part of our religious experience. Before the dumb eyes of ten generations of ten million children, it is made mockery of and spit upon; a degradation of the eternal mother; a sneer at human effort; with aspiration and art deliberately and elaborately distorted. And why? Because in a day when the human mind aspired to a science of human action, a history and psychology of the mighty effort of the mightiest century, we fell under the leadership of those who would compromise with truth in the past in order to make peace in the present and guide policy in the future.\u201d
\u2014 W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America<\/em> (1935)[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/blockquote>
 \n\n\n\n
\u201cLife is tragic simply because the Earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death \u2014 ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.\u201d
\u2014 James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time<\/em> (1963)[2]<\/sup><\/a><\/blockquote>
 \n\n\n\n
\u201cThe people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. . . . And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.\u201d
\u2014 Thomas Jefferson, Paris, November 13, 1787[3]<\/sup><\/a><\/blockquote>
 \n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n

I QUIT THE \u201cLEFT\u201d in 1993, after the LA riots, the quint-centenary of Columbus\u2019s Discovery and Bill Clinton\u2019s election in 1992 \u2014 in that order. These events told me that there would be no struggle for proletarian socialism, no Marxism, but only Republicans, riots \u2014 and Democrats. In 2020, nothing seems to have changed since 1992 \u2014 or 1968. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Riots and republicans <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Riots are bad for black people, turning them into targets for police and civilian vigilantes. Racism is real, and in the U.S. it targets blacks. There are no \u201cpeople of color\u201d but only blacks and more-or-less \u201cwhite\u201d people (the latter including \u201cblack\u201d \u2014 African and Caribbean \u2014 immigrants, who do not readily identify with historically black Americans, and indeed actively do not). During the recent riots, in Chicago\u2019s Little Village, the Latin Kings harassed blacks, pulling them from their cars \u2014 they left the white hipsters, \u201cAntifa\u201d or not, alone. During the riots, mostly the police stood by; some people were arrested \u2014 and they were disproportionately black. The riots enacted the very anti-black racism against which they protested, ending up confirming it. Does it matter if there are black cops, black police chiefs, black mayors doing it? The glass is swept up (how many [black] workers\u2019 hands will be cut?), streets cleared (how many toxins inhaled by [black] clean-up crews?), and normal life, such as it is, returns. But the bitter after-effects remain (how many stores closed permanently and their [black] workers cast into unemployment?). What was it all for? If the police are defunded or even abolished, private security will not be \u2014 nor will the state; but it might be privatized (further), perhaps with black contractors \u2014 or not. Perhaps the riots will have in the end been in vain. \u2014 Children, be careful what you wish for! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Republicans point out that the U.S. is not\na democracy but a constitutional republic; that it is a nation not of people\nbut of laws \u2014 a nation based on an\nidea or ideas: that all are equal, with rights to life, liberty and the pursuit\nof happiness; and all are equal before the law \u2014 if not exactly with respect to each other. Republicans hold to the\nvalue of freedom over mere life; that law should prevail and provide the true\nmeaning of life, over mere living; and that, while generations pass, freedom\nendures. This is the \u2014 revolutionary \u2014 legacy of the American Revolution to which they adhere. And so\nshould we. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The law is not tyranny. Crime is not\nrevolutionary. Rioting is not the revolution. Trump is not the Tsar; Biden is\nnot Kerensky; the DSA are not the Bolsheviks (nor the Mensheviks); the anarchists\nare not the anarchists. The Third Precinct is not the Bastille; Jacobin<\/em> is not the Jacobins; CHAZ\/CHOP\nis not the Paris Commune. Raz Simone is not Huey Newton or Robert F. Williams; BLM\nis not the Jewish Bund; 2020 is not 1917 \u2014 or 1968. But it might be 1992. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

While 1992 led to the election of the Democrats, in 1968 and 2020 it led and will lead, now as before, to electing Republicans \u2014 let there be no doubt. The DNC riots (and George Wallace) led to Nixon\u2019s victory; the Days of Rage and Kent State led to his reelection. In 1992, George H.W. Bush sent in the U.S. military (active duty troops, not National Guard) to \u201cpacify\u201d Los Angeles; and there were dozens of bodies felled in the streets and hundreds more sent to hospitals \u2014 thousands to jail. But the riots did not harm Bush\u2019s reelection: Clinton would have lost if Ross Perot had not split the electorate, allowing Clinton to win with a minority of the vote. Donald Trump was a supporter of Perot\u2019s Reform Party (out of opposition to Bush and Clinton\u2019s NAFTA) \u2014 before he and Jesse Ventura left in protest later against its Right-wing takeover under Pat Buchanan, a true \u201cAmerica first\u201d nationalist and isolationist. As in 2016, the silent majority will speak again; again, it is only a question of how loudly they will do so. Perhaps more loudly than the vocal minority. Prepare to be gobsmacked \u2014 again. Even if it\u2019s Biden\/Harris in 2020, it could be Trump again in 2024 \u2014 do not expect him (of all people) to go gentle into that good night! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Columbus <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The other event in 1992 that convinced me\nof the impossibility of struggle for proletarian socialism was the observation\nof 500 years of the Columbian Discovery of the New World in 1492 \u2014 which the \u201cLeft\u201d protested as the beginning of \u201c500 years of\nracism, sexism and homophobia,\u201d neglecting that all human communities, in all\nplaces, ever, for thousands \u2014 tens of\nthousands \u2014 of years, have been\nracially chauvinistic and genocidal, enslaved those they conquered and did not simply\nkill, were patriarchal, and asserted murderous sexual morality over all their\nmembers; and that the transformation of the world and of humanity in our modern\nbourgeois emancipation, of which the Renaissance Italian Columbus\u2019s voyage was\npart, was the very first time that the potential for overcoming myriad\ngenerations of racism, sexism and homophobia had ever emerged in history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Genghis Khan was a protagonist of history\neven greater than Columbus, in both action and atrocity \u2014 should the people of Asia (and beyond) mourn who and what he made\nthem? But of course Khan was just a prominent and particularly dramatic example\nof what humanity has carved in its blood over the course of millennia \u2014 or eons. Only since Columbus has slavery been abolished, genocide\nmade a crime, and sexual freedom and gender equality been achieved. The epochal\nbourgeois revolution, of which Columbus\u2019s Journey of Discovery was part, is the\nfirst \u2014 and only \u2014 successful slave revolt in history. 1992 marked not 500 years of\noppression but five centuries of liberation, for the entire world. It put an\nend to ancestral guilt and began history anew. This change continues to this\nday. Its task is not over yet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Mexico, Columbus Day is celebrated as\nthe \u201cDay of the Race,\u201d celebrating the marvelous mixture of European and\nindigenous people, the new modern race of Americans. \u2014 Shall we regret them as \u201cillegitimate children\u201d instead? Republican\nU.S. Congressional Representative Steve King said that all existing human\npopulations are the products at some time or other of rape and incest, but that\nit is not the children\u2019s fault for the sins of their fathers and mothers. \u2014\nShall we prefer that they were aborted? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Slavery <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

We are told by those such as the Mayor of Minneapolis and the Governor of Minnesota \u2014 the Speaker of the House of Representatives and various Senators and other Governors and Mayors \u2014 Democrats, all \u2014 that today in the U.S. we are living in 400 years of slavery and its effects, of \u201cwhite supremacy\u201d \u2014 really! One wonders whether they are truly ashamed or rather proud to say so; anyway, various Hollywood actors, music and sports celebrities tweet their applause. It must be very kick-ass to be white nowadays. (Remember The New Jim Crow<\/em> and Orange is the New Black<\/em> that everybody was reading and watching: Poussey Washington\u2019s death was protested, however that did not end well.) But isn\u2019t present misery much more specific (and much less sexy): the deindustrialization of the past neoliberal capitalist generation; not 400 years of racism but 40 years of postindustrial poverty, in which not only the black underclass but also the black middle class has grown? The unexpected plot-twist after the achievement of Civil Rights reforms in the 1960s against racism was that the working class as a whole would be thrown onto the scrapheap of neoliberal capitalism. A century earlier, the Robber Baron Jay Gould had declared that he could hire one half of the working class to kill the other. Is this what we have been seeing for the last generation, the \u201cpoverty draft\u201d \u2014 not only to the military but the police (including prison guards)? Jean-Paul Sartre asked whether there was any sense to life in a world where there are people whose job is to break our bones. He was right 70 years ago \u2014 and is still. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The \u201cwhite\u201d underclass has also grown since\nthe 1970s \u2014 has been decimated (starved, sickened, bastardized,\ndrug-addicted, criminalized \u2014 lumpenized) \u2014 as well:\nhas this been the \u201cwhite genocide\u201d that the actual \u201cwhite-supremacists\u201d (or\n\u201c-nationalists\u201d) bemoan? Shall we look forward to a \u201crace war\u201d to settle the\nissue; shall we prove the old white racist fears of black revenge true; or are\nwe beckoned by another future? Frantz Fanon declared that slavery was long overcome,\nand said that there is no black mission and no white burden \u2014 that he had no desire to crystallize guilt in hearts, and wanted to\nmove into a future in which children would not scrutinize their color. Fanon\nsaid that excessive consciousness of the body is destructive of our humanity,\npsychologically and spiritually: it is not only mortifying but morbid, succumbing\nto morbidity. Fanon called on us to reject the destructive impulse of Thanatos,\nthe Death Drive, and instead to embrace Eros, \u201cto build the world of the You;\u201d\nand prayed, \u201cO my body, make of me always a man who questions!\u201d[4]<\/sup><\/a>\nHe was right 70 years ago \u2014 and is still.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Slavery is not the remarkable fact of\nAmerican history, but its abolition is. The abolition of slavery in the U.S.\nwas the attempt to prevent, for the whole world, it ever coming back. It is the\nextremely brief century and a half of the ban on slavery that is the exception\nto history, the difference from countless ages of slavery across the eternity\nof time \u2014 it is in fact what makes the U.S.\nexceptional and indeed the leader of the freedom of the entire world, to this\nday. The U.S. is the land of the free and home of the brave \u2014 the U.S. banishing slavery has been an act of unprecedented bravery\nand freedom, and still is. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the guilty liberals\u2019 1619 Project last\nyear, claiming indelible blackness and the permanent effects of the past visible\nin our bodies, will be taught in schools instead. Democrats don kente cloth this\nyear and take a knee for eight minutes and forty-six seconds. \u2014 \u201cThis is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of\nme.\u201d[5]<\/sup><\/a>\n\u2014 A true mortification of the flesh, but\nwithout any sort of spiritual redemption. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Thomas Jefferson said that the world belongs to the living and not the dead. But in tearing down a statue of Jefferson we might not claim the world that actually belongs to us, the world of not mere life but of living \u2014 in freedom \u2014 but only the world of the dead. Shall we let the dead\u2019s claims dominate us? Patrick Henry\u2019s \u201cGive me liberty or give me death!\u201d was not a mere phrase. \u201cLive free or die\u201d does not mean literally dying but not really living. Are we actually living, or is our life rather a living death? Are the living today only the evidence of past death; are we only living monuments to the dead? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Pathology of freedom, or death <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

When looking up at a statue of Columbus\ntoday, the rage we feel is the frustration and confusion of our liberation. We\nhate Columbus for his role in making our freedom inescapable. We blame the\nherald and harbinger and seek to kill the messenger for the bad news that, as\nRousseau said, society has forced us to be free. Christopher Columbus the man\nis long since dead; but his image haunts us with all the terror \u2014 what Fanon called the \u201cpathology\u201d \u2014 of freedom. This is the fear and hatred of the revolution \u2014\nour hatred and fear of freedom. We feel freedom itself as\nan oppression. Of course it has been and continues to be traumatic. But no\ndestruction of symbols, no matter how furious, can cure our ills. As Freud\nobserved, what is painful can nonetheless be true. The truth is that we are \u2014 painfully \u2014 free. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The painful truth is that we are not living\nthrough a revolution in the riots, or even a prelude to revolution; but the\nriots are only the expression of pain at the actual revolution in capitalism, a\n\u201ccry of protest before accommodation\u201d[6]<\/sup><\/a>\nto the new post-neoliberal reality, the change at the political Center that is being\nled by Trump. We look at Trump and see the effect of Columbus. We look at\nColumbus and see Trump. But while we decapitate Columbus, Trump keeps his head \u2014 and we brain ourselves. \u2014 Children,\ndon\u2019t let statues fall on your head! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like Sally\u2019s brother James Hemings, freed\nby Jefferson, we might become lost, and drink ourselves to death, after our\nmanumission. That is our liberty. But the world goes on \u2014 and we cannot, or at least ought not to, hate others for living. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They will live and they will die but they\nwill be free. Free to suffer and free to die, to find their own paths to death \u2014 which is the only possible meaning of life. Can our lives (our\ndeaths) find their true meaning in freedom? Or will we be freed only from \u201cthis\nmortal coil\u201d[7]<\/sup><\/a>\nand not from our mere mortality? The riots were provoked by the death of George\nFloyd and memorialized him: were they a true celebration of his life? Floyd\u2019s\nfamily says they were not. The protests called for convicting the police who\nkilled Floyd, to hold their lives responsible for his death. The righteous\npolice will hold the wrongful police to account, and they in life along with\nFloyd in death will be sacrificed to redeem our collective guilt, the living\ndeaths of our own lives, in memory of his dying. Keeanga-Yamahtta\nTaylor called the riots a \u201cfestival of the oppressed\u201d[8]<\/sup><\/a> \u2014 but can they be anything beyond what Rosa Luxemburg called the \u201cdance\nof bloody shadows without number\u201d?[9]<\/sup><\/a>\nCan they bring meaning to life, or only to death? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is the dying of the oppressed the only meaning of our life \u2014 is death the only meaning of black life? What will our meaning be \u2014 can there be any meaning to us \u2014 in history? Beyond riots and Republicans, law and order, and, for now \u2014 today and tomorrow \u2014 Trump? Will we look only at ourselves, with morbid fascination and rage, and not look beyond ourselves to \u201cthe open door of every consciousness\u201d?[10]<\/sup><\/a> \u2014 Children, I hope that you hope for more than death \u2014 for more than mere life! | P<\/strong>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

[1]<\/a> W.E.B. Dubois, Black\nReconstruction in America<\/em> (Rahway: Quinn & Boden Company, 1935), 727. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

[2]<\/a> James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time<\/em> (London: Michael Joseph LTD, 1963), 99.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[3]<\/a> Thomas Jefferson, \u201cCorrespondence of Thomas\nJefferson,\u201d in The Diplomatic\nCorrespondence of the United States of America<\/em>, ed. Edward Livingston (Washington:\nBlair & Rives, 1837), 2:116.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[4]<\/a> Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks<\/em>, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto\nPress, 1986), 232.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[5]<\/a> 1 Cor. 11:24 ESV<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[6]<\/a> The phrase \u201ca cry of protest before\naccommodation\u201d is a paraphrase of \u201cPassionate self-assertion can be a mask for\naccommodation\u201d from Bayard Rustin in \u201cThe Failure of Black Separatism,\u201d Harper\u2019s Magazine <\/em>(January 1970);\nSee also, Chris Cutrone, \u201cA cry of protest before accommodation? The dialectic\nof emancipation and domination\u201d in Platypus\nReview <\/em>42(December-January 2012)\navailable online at <https:\/\/platypus1917.org\/2011\/12\/01\/cry-of-protest-before-accommodation\/<\/a>>;\nAdolph Reed, \u201cBlack Particularity Reconsidered,\u201d Telos <\/em>39 (1979), later expanded as \u201cThe \u2018Black Revolution\u2019 and\nthe Reconstitution of Domination,\u201d in Stirrings\nin the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era<\/em>, ed. Adolph Reed\n(Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1999); and Adolph Reed, \u201cThe\nLimits of Anti-Racism: Vague Politics about a Nearly Indescribable\nThing,\u201d Left Business Observer <\/em>121\n(September 2009), available online at\n<http:\/\/www.leftbusinessobserver.com\/Antiracism.html>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[7]<\/a> William Shakespeare, \u201cHamlet, Prince of\nDenmark,\u201d in Shakespeare: Complete Works<\/em>,\ned. W.J. Craig (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 886.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[8]<\/a> Keeanga Yahmatta Taylor, \u201cHow Do We Change\nAmerica?,\u201d The New Yorker<\/em> (June\n2020), available online at <https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/news\/our-columnists\/how-do-we-change-america<\/a>>.\nThe phrase \u201cfestival of the oppressed\u201d originates from V.I. Lenin, \u201cTwo Tactics\nSocial-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,\u201d in Collected Works<\/em>, trans. Abraham Fineburg and Julius Katzer, ed.\nGeorge Hanna (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), 9:113. Available online at\n< https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/lenin\/works\/1905\/tactics\/index.htm<\/a>>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[9]<\/a> Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet: The Crisis of German Social-Democracy<\/em>, trans.\nDave Hollis. Luxemburg Internet Archive, <https:\/\/www.marxists.org\/archive\/luxemburg\/1915\/junius\/<\/a>>.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[10]<\/a> Frantz Fanon, op. cit., 232<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Left in death, 1992 and 2020 Chris Cutrone Platypus Review 128 | July 2020 [PDF flyer] \u201cThe most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West. They descended […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[45,24,43],"class_list":["post-3005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-45","tag-anti-black-racism","tag-trump-era"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3005"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3045,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3005\/revisions\/3045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}