Notes

4 Theses on Snapchat Stories:
1) People criticizing looters need to incorporate a more nuanced class perspective into their understanding of what's happening. Looters do not steal out of greed; looting is an action born out of necessity. Decades, nay centuries, of continued oppression, of segregation, structural violence, systemic racism, divested communities, the murder of black leaders, the war on drugs, white flight, gentrification, disenfranchisement, police brutality, food deserts, and a million other nuanced, systemic forms of oppression, have made people desperate. On top of this, we have a mismanaged pandemic which has disproportionately ravaged black communities, unemployment skyrocketing, a crisis of our medical infrastructure. Deindustrialization and chronic unemployment in black communities. While the looting of a small business is horrific and destructive, you must retain a nuanced understanding of the dynamics of capitalism, must contextualize these incidents as the inevitable result of a vicious and destructive white supremacist, capitalist economic system. And while yes, the looters are not the same as the protestors, it is unfair to depoliticize the actions of the looters by asserting that they are "using chaos as an opportunity to steal." Working-class people forcefully taking basic necessities, stealing commodities that they can later sell, or committing property damage against a big corporation is a political action. To say that the looters are merely "greedy people taking advantage of a desperate situation" ignores that, for many, there is literally nothing else they can do: a complete lack of a leftist alternative has weakened everyone's political imagination. Black folks have essentially tried every conceivable form of organizing and every theoretical approach to defend themselves and their communities from racism: anarchism, non-violence, militant self-defense, civil disobedience, electoralism, Marxism-Leninism, Focoismo, intercommunalism, Islam, and Christianity. Countless black leaders killed, imprisoned, exiled: Fred Hampton, MLK, Malcolm X, George Jackson, Assata Shakur, Huey Newton, and so many more. A young generation of black leadership killed, leaving behind a weakened community susceptible to the War on Drugs and mass incarceration. And while new movements begin to organize and expand, new movements like Black Lives Matter (that we should wholeheartedly embrace and support), the specter created by the US government's vicious extermination campaigns still haunts the reality and the memories of all those who are living; for many, an alternative is still not apparent. A new generation of leadership will arise, and we, as the members of the progressive youth, must work to rekindle the flames of revolutionary love, compassion, and ambitions.

2) It is distasteful to appropriate Martin Luther King against the protesters. MLK famously said that "riots are the voices of the unheard," and while it is true that when this quote is placed in its proper context, MLK is highlighting the flaws of rioting, we can still derive a meaningful truth from this line. Rioting is an expression of frustration, stagnation, and lost dreams, of social death, of alienation and "leftbehindedness." Remember too that MLK was literally the most hated person in America while he was alive, and your distaste for the protestors, your awkward fixation on these spontaneous outbreaks of violence, demonstrates that you have not learned a thing from the civil rights movement. Rather than laughing at the rioters, making totalizing condemnations of the protests, and refusing to place the looting in context, we must analyze them as the expression of an angry, frustrated people who have taken matters into their own hands, a people who have seized the moment and will not let it drop. (People who appropriate the civil rights movement are also ignoring the duality of that era: how MLK's nonviolence coexisted with the militant organizing of Malcolm X and others, as well as how the militant self-defense of the Black Panthers, dissatisfied with the civil rights movement, later comprised the main organizing front behind black power and rights).

3) Take this moment to calm down, take a few steps back, and engage yourself in history: analyze the concrete historical developments that led to these outbreaks of violence. All social minorities, whether black, latinX, LGBT+, or working-class, are united in their struggle against one system, a systemic totality whose various "disparate" appendages (anti-black racism, racism in general, class inequalities, imperialism abroad, etc.) constitute a singular unity (this in no way is meant to diminish or erase the ways that anti-black racism is unique). All of our struggles are interrelated and interconnected. I can assure you that the destruction of another black radical movement will trigger a wave of reactionary policies (including racist policies against other minority groups), just like how the systematic destruction of black communities via the War on Drugs and mass incarceration is fundamentally connected to the birth of Neoliberalism (see Ronald Reagan; although I single out Reagan, this effort was bipartisan). This would have disastrous effects for all working-class and minority communities. The ideology of "law and order" is critical for the continued reproduction of America's capitalist system, for it maintains the social stability that is needed for the continued looting and plundering of the working masses by the capitalist class. And while one might respond to this plea for an anti-capitalist orientation towards these events by advocating for a united front

4) We all need to take a moment to understand these protests with more nuance, to engage in an historical analysis of the concrete developments that led to these outbreaks of violence. The economic system that we current live in is a capitalist economic system: the system comprises a social totality, in which its various elements, which often appear as separate and independent, are actually all components of a singular unity. Anti-black racism, other forms of racism, the class structure, imperialism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of oppression and discrimination are all elements that compromise a singular unity: capitalism. Although all these forms of oppression are linked back to capitalism, that doesn't mean that they can take up unique forms and grow independently. Anti-black racism in the United States, for instance, stems from the hyper-exploitation of African slaves, which generated incomprehensibly vast wealth for the new nation. The creation of the modern family (and don't construe this as an attack on the nuclear family) is connected to the birth of capitalism and the degradation of women's social status, a familial structure that functions as a mechanism for the continued reproduction of capitalism and the workforce.