Archive for category: KITES JOURNAL

Issue #4 Editorial

By the kites Editorial Committee (April 2020)

Opportunities missed, claimed, and coming

Over the past year and change, a rapid succession of crises have gripped North America. The pandemic has brought premature death to over half a million people and the agonizing pain of losing loved ones to so many more. All the while, people have been forced to bear the additional hardships of social isolation, unemployment, evictions, and the despair of facing an uncertain future in which there may be no return to a state of “normal” for many. George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police was the spark that ignited protests and rebellions all across North America, as the righteous anger at a system whose police routinely murder Black proletarians and other oppressed people boiled over after nothing has changed despite so many killings caught on camera and so much talk of reform.

The Wet’suwet’en exercise self-determination on their unceded lands by blocking access roads required by Coastal GasLink to force through a pipeline project that was never consented to by the traditional political structures of the Wet’suwet’en people.

In Canada, prior to the arrival of COVID-19, yet another crisis unprecedented in scale gripped the country. On February 6, 2020, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police invaded the unceded territories of the Wet’suwet’en nation to enforce a court injunction on behalf of the Coastal GasLink natural gas pipeline, setting off a wave of rail, road, and port blockades by Indigenous peoples and supporters across Canada that numbered in the dozens, the most significant of which was the weeks-long blockade of Canadian National Railway—a major economic and transportation artery of northeastern North America—by a group of Kanyen’kehaka (Mohawks) of Tyendinega. This was Canada’s equivalent to the protest and rebellion in the US, in that it revealed that in Canada there also exists the explosive potential for a revolutionary united front driven by the struggles of oppressed peoples and pulling along a decisive chunk of the multinational popular classes. Concerning the multinational proletariat in particular within Canada, nowhere has the potential for resistance and struggle been more clear than in the wave of proletarian struggles that have unfolded and taken hold across the Greater Toronto Area since 2020, with rent strikes and subsequent tenant resistance to mass evictions taking place in and across proletarian neighborhoods like Parkdale, East York, East Scarborough, and many others. We can add to this the monumental resistance waged against police violence by victims and families of victims in Malton, where a people’s movement was sparked by the brazen police murder of 62-year-old Ejaz Choudry on June 20, 2020, who was experiencing a mental health crisis when police kicked in his balcony door and shot him to death. This movement gained ground across the Peel region, and together with other struggles playing out in places like Toronto, it has revealed the vast ground there is to be gained for proletarian organization and class militancy through the present crises.

On 6 July 2020, a couple hundred tenants overwhelmed Toronto police and crashed the condominium residence of Toronto Mayor John Tory demanding that he invoke the emergency powers at his disposal to halt the impending mass evictions that tenant organizations were predicting and were about to be made easier by the passage of pro-landlord legislation Bill 184 by the Ontario government. Photo by Neal Rockwell, The Leveller.

Meanwhile, back in the US, the transition of power from one section of the bourgeoisie to another was rocked by the challenge of fascists both inside and outside the halls of power, and the Biden administration now faces the task of sewing back some semblance of bourgeois order and normalcy (worst of luck to them).

The sum of these crises have presented a wide range of opportunities for communists and revolutionaries to build solid organization among the masses, sharpen up the class struggle, and politically intervene in a way that shakes all of society. However, with few exceptions, the organized revolutionary forces capable of doing so are tragically absent. Left to its own devices, the bourgeoisie’s regime of preventive counterrevolution has proven itself quite effective at diffusing crises, even if the bourgeoisie remains incapable of truly resolving them. The bourgeoisie has employed an impressive “diversity of tactics” in dissipating class struggle over the last year, from the numerous progressive candidates winning largely ineffectual local and legislative seats where they have universally failed to change much of anything, to the opportunist nonprofit sector activists who grabbed the media spotlight and garnered millions of dollars in funding over the summer speaking in the name of the protests and rebellions,¹ to allowing radicals in Portland, the whitest major city in the US, to smash windows, light fires, and declare autonomous zones. Meanwhile, the prevailing form of activity among activists and Leftists has been “mutual aid,” usually just charity work done with a radical veneer, which by and large has failed to build ties among the masses (it remains unclear what the “mutual” part of mutual aid is) and certainly failed to mount a serious challenge to bourgeois rule.

Seattle’s “Temporary Autonomous Zone” established with the tacit support of local politicians, and Portland’s nightly clashes between anarchists and the police with the regularity of a sports match, allowed the genuine mass outrage to blow off steam, much like letting a petulant toddler tire themselves out before bed.

In order to be in a position to seize on future crises, the time is overdue for those who claim or want to be communists to integrate with and sink roots among the masses, learn from their lives, experiences, and ideas, build organization among them, and, in the process, train themselves and others as communist revolutionaries.

This coming summer presents a great opportunity to begin this process through campaigns of social investigation, wherein communists and anyone with a toe in that direction go to proletarian neighborhoods in their cities or regions, talk to and interview people about their life conditions, sum up the experience, and use the knowledge gained and contacts made to develop plans for organizing people and struggle in those neighborhoods. As more people are vaccinated, it should become easier for the kind of face-to-face interaction that this entails to take place safely. (That said, nothing has stopped dedicated proletarian revolutionaries from doing this throughout the entire pandemic.)

The crises of the past year present ample opportunities to ask proletarian masses how their lives have changed and not changed and what they think of these crises. A simple starting point for conversations would be something like this (adjusting for your geographic particularity and embellishing as you see fit):

Over the past year, we’ve seen rebellions against police brutality all across North America, a pandemic that’s left hundreds of thousands dead and so many more unemployed and struggling, Indigenous peoples resisting all kinds of oppression, and that hot mess that was the US presidential election. We’re out here talking to people about all that’s gone on over the last year and how it’s affected our lives. We’re doing this because we’ve experienced or witnessed all this and because we’re revolutionaries. So we want to get to know what other people are dealing with through all this crisis, what are people struggling with, and how people are viewing all these big events, so we can figure out how, together, we can challenge and eventually overthrow the system that’s behind all these injustices. So what’s changed for you over the last year? And what hasn’t changed?

More direct questions can follow, depending on the specificity of the neighborhood where the investigation is being undertaken: “Have the police changed the way they interact with people in this neighborhood at all? Have you or your family lost their jobs? Are people around here facing eviction? Did you receive any healthcare or government assistance help during the pandemic? Did the last election change anything for you?”

Let’s get our crews together and start making plans for a summer of social investigation. Reach out to kites to let us know your plans or to work something out! We will be publishing reports of this summer of social investigation in our next issue (kites #5), and we’re happy to work with people on writing these reports for publication. What follows is a more practical guide for how to go about this social investigation.

How to do social investigation

Step 1: Unite a group of people to undertake a social investigation project. If you have an existing collectivity, you’ve got a good start, and you can consider uniting others outside your organization through this particular project. If you’re not part of a collectivity, you can easily start one by launching a kites study group, as a number of people across North America have already done (more on this below). You don’t need a permanent organization to do any of this—you can start things off by just gathering a few people around to talk about the crises of the last year alone, and you can introduce this social investigation project as a concrete example of something people can do. There doesn’t need to be a commitment from anyone yet to work together in the future, and frankly, a one-off social investigation project is a great way to test out how to work together and who should work together before considering a level of organization that requires more discipline and responsibility.

Step 2: Make a plan for what kind of social investigation makes the most sense in your area. If you already do political work in a proletarian neighborhood, that might be a good place to start. However, if “going to the masses” is new to you, think about which proletarian neighborhoods have been sites of struggle (such as where rebellion broke out last summer), where the “lower and deeper” sections of the masses are (those most dispossessed and facing the sharpest forms of oppression), and where it will be easiest to start conversations with masses (a park people hang out at, a transportation hub, a proletarian shopping district, a neighborhood or housing project where it’s easy to go door to door, etc.). Think about which sections of the masses you want to reach and what your crew is capable of. For example, if you live in the vicinity of a concentration of migrant farm workers and some of the people in your crew speak Spanish, organize a trip there. Avoid thinking like a dumb Leftist or a postmodernist identarian when considering potential sections of masses to reach—for example, skateboarders played a significant role in the rebellions last summer and increasing numbers of multinational proletarian youth are getting into skateboarding…but who’s thinking of skate parks as good places to go talk to and organize people?

Step 3 (can be concurrent with the other preparatory steps): Do some theoretical study to prepare your crew, but don’t feel like you need to study everything before going to talk to the masses. “The Mass Line” chapter in Mao’s Red Book is a helpful starting point. Many articles in previous issues of kites will also be helpful, such as the Specter series on who the proletariat is and the OCR manuals on agitation and summation. In this issue (#4) of kites, we are publishing a report on a communist-led social investigation trip to Baltimore that took place in 2018, three years after the 2015 rebellion. Before that trip, the participants did a study of the Specter series. It proved illuminating for comrades to have first had a general discussion about class and contemporary processes of proletarianization before trying to understand it up close and in person. Studying communist theory is always most fruitful when done in conjunction with practice. But again, studying theory shouldn’t be a barrier to going out and doing some practice.

Step 4: Come up with a basic script to explain to the masses what you’re doing and get them talking. You can use the one above, but you should try to focus on one crisis in particular based on the particular conditions in the neighborhood you’re going to (for example, in a place with a high rate of COVID deaths, that might be your principal focus). Make adjustments to that script through practice and summation to make it more effective as you’re conducting social investigation.

Step 5: Get your materials together. Something to give people with a way they can contact you is helpful. Some physical copies of kites would be good to have on hand to show people where you are sending a report to be published, and to sell to any advanced masses you talk to. Audio recording devices are of course essential, but you should introduce and explain yourself to people before you pull out an audio recorder. You should assure them you will not be using their name, and you should write down their name and other identifying information rather than recording it (no reason for the enemy to have easy access to that info). Finally, pens and notepads are essential for taking notes when people don’t want to be recorded, and for writing people’s contact info down (storing it in your phone makes it easy for the enemy to access).

Step 6: Organize your crew to be most effective on your social investigation trips. Having some designated leadership is important for making quick decisions and for checking in on how it’s going throughout the day and adjusting based on the experience. Keeping the crew in pairs is essential for collectivity and for safety, especially for comrades more vulnerable to attack from the police or from hostile or oppressor elements among the masses. Fielding your crew based on language abilities is especially important in immigrant neighborhoods. Have contingency plans for what to do if you’re approached by police, which can include a cover story (like someone with a student ID or journalistic credentials using those as part of a cover story of a student sociology project or journalistic research) and plans for how to deal with police harassment (including when it would be appropriate to make a stink and risk arrest versus when it wouldn’t be productive to do so). Summation meetings are always essential to any communist practice, so be sure to follow up any social investigation outings with debriefing and summation.

Step 7: During your outings, try and get a broad survey of the different masses in the neighborhood, both demographically and politically. As mentioned above, quickly sum up what you learn from the masses to better focus your investigation and to adjust how you’re presenting yourselves to people and what you’re asking them. Don’t waste too much time talking to backwards masses. Sometimes public debates with the backward can be fruitful in attracting the advanced, but more often such a spectacle won’t do us any good, especially if such and such a place isn’t our neighborhood. Focus on the people who seem more advanced. And don’t write people off because they’re religious (most masses are), they don’t use the correct woke terminology (most masses don’t), or they bring up contradictions among the people that don’t fit your idealized view of the masses (most masses will).

Step 8: Designate who will do what tasks after the social investigation is complete, and set deadlines. How are interviews getting transcribed? Who is taking your collective summation and the transcribed interviews and turning them into a written report that can be sent for publication to kites? Who is following up with the contacts you made and what are you intending to do with those contacts?

Social investigation as a starting point for communist organizing

Going out and talking to the masses about their lives is important in and of itself for communists. We’ve already talked a lot of shit in kites about the fact that most people in North America who call themselves communists don’t do this, so we won’t belabor that point here. What we will say is that conducting social investigation among the proletariat can be deeply transformative for communists and potential communists alike, and summing up the experience together will make it more so.

Writing a report which includes the words of the masses themselves as well as some of your analysis of what was learned and having several such reports published in kites will make this a collective experience that we can all learn from.

Beyond these immediate objectives, this summer of social investigation can be the basis for building communist-led mass organizations and class struggle among the proletariat. By summing up the experience, you should be able to identify some of the main concerns of the masses, the particular forms of oppression they face, and the best opportunities for organizing them in struggle. You should also get a sense of who the masses are, from the most rebellious teenagers to the grandma with mad wisdom to which neighborhood church is reactionary and which sides with the people. Getting contact info, especially from the most advanced masses, enables you to quickly follow up with deeper social investigation, political education, and plans for organization and struggle. If your crew is committed to it, you can scientifically analyze the possibilities for organization and struggle and diligently follow up with contacts, transforming this initial social investigation into the beginning of a more long-term effort and commitment to build political base areas for revolution in proletarian neighborhoods.

Some common objections to social investigation

Aside from flakiness and widespread (but often very selective) claims of social anxiety, a few common objections are likely to come up when uniting a crew to conduct social investigation. All of these objections are hinged on presumptions about of the backwardness of the masses. Uniting a crew for this effort will likely involve what we communists call “line struggle” over the following objections:

1) You have to do “mutual aid” (basically, give people free stuff) before they’ll talk to you. The grand irony of this objection is that probably no one who says it has ever actually tried talking to the masses in an explicitly political way before—it’s one of those dumb Leftist conventional wisdoms that has spread without any attempt to assess if it’s true. This objection presumes that the masses are only capable of responding to their immediate survival needs and incapable of conceiving of collective struggle or thinking about things that don’t directly affect their lives. It presumes that the best way to relate to the masses is by manipulating them—here’s some free food, now listen to our politics—in ways that churches have been doing for years (just substitute politics for Jesus). It’s been done to death. For a further elaboration of all that’s wrong this, read Kenny Lake’s “Malcolm X Didn’t Dish Out Free Bean Pies” in kites #3.

2) People won’t talk to you if you’re not part of their community. In this objection, “community” is always defined by what people learned in their postmodernist college classes. In all our experiences, we’ve found that most masses will talk to you if you have something compelling to say and don’t sound like some NGO worker rhyming off a scripted sales pitch. If you are genuine and can speak with conviction, people will listen to what you have to say, regardless of your nationality, social background, and identity markers. It’s true that often people will more readily talk to someone from the same background as them,¹ but this gets used as an excuse by people to not integrate with the masses. In our experience, a multinational crew is the most effective and makes a strong statement about who we are as communists. But you shouldn’t let nationality differences prevent you from going and talking with the masses. You should definitely not be arrogant or commandist, but that’s the purpose behind making social investigation a starting point.

3) People will only talk to you about their immediate concerns and not about any questions outside of those concerns. As with common objection #1, anyone who says this has probably never tried to talk to proletarian masses about Africom’s drone strikes, the people’s war in the Philippines, or the Palestinian liberation struggle. They’ve probably never talked to anyone who’s been to prison, since prisoners are often interested in reading about a lot things outside their life experiences. This objection concentrates both a typical Leftist “economism,” which consigns the masses to only care about their immediate interests, and the postmodernist conception of community, which confines people to narrow, isolated, self-contained communities. The world, and the masses, don’t work like that. No “community” is isolated from the larger workings of the capitalist-imperialist system, many people already have some sense of this, and it’s our duty as communists to move people along to a deeper understanding of all this. Many proletarians think, care, and have opinions about all sorts of things beyond their immediate neighborhoods and survival needs and can often relate to proletarians in other parts of the world quite easily (that’s a practical expression of what we call the material basis for proletarian internationalism). The most advanced (and, on that basis, the intermediate) among the masses can be won to take up struggles that have little or nothing to do with their own lives, such as opposing imperialist wars of aggression. While this social investigation call is focused on learning how the masses have been affected by the recent crises, we should not shy away from learning their thoughts on questions that don’t immediately affect them or from bringing these questions into the conversation.

Conclusion

To those who have tried the many well-worn ruts of activism and the Left, to those frustrated at seeing world-shaking crises pass us by without a revolutionary force to seize on them, and to those who want to go beyond theoretical discussions or Twitter proclamations: take up this call for a summer of social investigation. It can be the start of a more long-term effort by communists to sink roots among the masses and develop the organizational base that can seize on future crises. And the more this call is taken up, the more we will come out of the summer with a detailed picture of the lives of the proletariat in North America and a deeper understanding of how to organize them in struggle. The comrades in kites are ready to assist with these undertakings and, in fact, already have some plans of our own for social investigation this summer. Email us at kites-journal[at]protonmail[dot]com to start making a plan, and visit the Contact us section of our website to learn about the safest way to do this.

To reiterate, taking up this call for social investigation will be deeply transformative for anyone involved. For as Mao put it:

How should we judge whether a youth is a revolutionary? How can we tell? There can only be one criterion, namely, whether or not he is willing to integrate himself with the broad masses of workers and peasants and does so in practice. If he is willing to do so and actually does so, he is a revolutionary; otherwise he is a non-revolutionary or a counter-revolutionary. If today he integrates himself with the masses of workers and peasants, then today he is a revolutionary; if tomorrow he ceases to do so or turns round to oppress the common people, then he becomes a non-revolutionary or a counter-revolutionary.

At the height of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in Maoist China, the schools were closed, and tens of thousands of revolutionary youth fanned across the country to integrate with the workers and peasants and unite with their struggles.

1 It’s a positive development that the leadership of the Black Lives Matter Global Network and other like-minded grifters are finally getting called out publicly by some of the families of those murdered by the police. Our question for the postmodernist activist crowd is: Why wasn’t it obvious to you that these people were opportunists? Because they called themselves abolitionists?

2 It’s also true that a lot of proletarian masses can smell opportunism from a mile away—including coming from people of their own nationalities, that the petty-bourgeois postmodernist identarian activists have made little inroads among proletarian masses (and generally aren’t interested in doing so), and that ultimately most proletarian masses will judge you for your integrity, ideas, and actions, not on your identity.

By the kites editorial committee (US section)

Following the protests and rebellions ignited by the police murder of George Floyd, calls to “defund” and “abolish” the police have grown in popularity, mostly among the activist/Leftist crowd and the progressive petty-bourgeoisie. Some elected officials have given their endorsement to these calls, and the Minneapolis city council intends to make a considerable overhaul of its local repressive state apparatus. The exact meaning of “defund” and “abolish” the police varies considerably, but usually means shifting money away from the police and into social service and community programs.

To some degree, these calls represent a growing recognition of the depth of brutality at the hands of the police faced by Black proletarians and other oppressed people, with the words “structural” and “systematic” in increasing, if unclear, usage. This recognition tends to come through the prism of Foucauldian power relations rather than a communist understanding of the police. In the latter view, the police under capitalism-imperialism are a crucial part of the bourgeoisie’s repressive state apparatus. Under US capitalism-imperialism in particular, the police play the function of keeping oppressed people—especially Black proletarians and all those “surplus populations” cast off into the “reserve army of labor” (unemployment)—in a subordinate position and stamping out the threat of rebellion through harassment, brutality, and murder, as well as repressing protests that go beyond the acceptable limits of dissent. While the prism of Foucauldian power relations focuses instead on the daily interactions between different groups and individuals in society with differing amounts of power, it is nevertheless a good thing for growing numbers of people in the US, including substantial numbers of white people, to confront the scope of brutality the police inflict upon Black proletarians and other oppressed people, through whatever ideological prism they understand it.

On a more practical level, these calls to defund or abolish the police also highlight how neoliberal austerity over the last several decades has drastically cut social services, from mental health treatment and intervention to school councilors, while simultaneously dramatically increasing police budgets, arming the police with military weaponry, and siccing the police on everyone from school children to individuals undergoing a mental health crisis. So it’s understandable that people are seeking funding for the social services that have been cut under austerity by demanding funds be withdrawn from police budgets, as doing so might mean fewer individuals in mental health crises being killed by the police and fewer Black youth being thrown in prison for “misbehaving” at school. On the ground, it is inspiring and righteous to see high school students fighting to expel the police from their schools.

But there are two important contradictions with calls to defund or abolish the police. One, usually they are simply radical-sounding rhetoric masking making reforms to the system of capitalism-imperialism that oppresses and murders Black people. That’s not to say that such reforms wouldn’t make life a little better for some people—that’s what reforms do. But shifting some money to social services and nonprofit organizations, who preside over oppression with paternalistic rather than blatantly brutal methods, will not alter the fundamental nature of the system and the brutality it inflicts on the masses.

And by “taking action,” what Kijiji means is buying themselves some public relations wokeness by giving $100k to Black and Indigenous charities that encourage oppressed peoples to work harder at succeeding in a system that murders them at shocking rates.

Which brings us to contradiction number two: calls to defund or abolish the police pretend that you can somehow get rid of the police without overthrowing the system that the police are there to protect. In any society divided into classes, the ruling class maintains standing armed bodies to defend its rule and prevent rebellion among those it oppresses. In the US, where the oppression of Black people—from slavery to Jim Crow to Northern and urban ghettos to unemployment and mass incarceration—is central to the foundation and functioning of capitalism-imperialism, the police play a crucial role in defending the system exactly by the brutality they inflict on Black people. Consciously or unconsciously, calls to defund or abolish the police imagine that you can somehow get around these facts and trick the ruling class into relinquishing the repressive force that its rule rests on. It’s an odd rehash of the old Trotskyite “transitional demand,” where you seek to manipulate the masses by making a demand that the system cannot meet rather than telling the masses that the system must be overthrown. The masses cannot be manipulated into making revolution and the bourgeoisie cannot be tricked out of power.

Given the explosion of protest and rebellion that has rocked the US, there will likely be aspects of “defunding” the police implemented in the coming months and years. These measures will sew confusion and bourgeois-democratic illusions while keeping the system intact and gluing the smooth functioning of bourgeois law and order back together. Some nonprofit organization careerist activists will secure higher salaries for themselves and funding for community programs that make little difference in the lives of the proletariat. Some social services will be used for things like mental health crises, while the police will be focused on brutalizing specific sections of oppressed people with greater precision (for example, after “stop and frisk” was no longer official policy, the NYPD targeted youth in housing projects with a vengeance under the rubric of fighting gangs). In the most extreme scenario, especially if ecological catastrophes and economic collapse increase, we could imagine the bourgeoisie employing private security to protect their neighborhoods and wealth while the masses are left to fend for themselves.

Besides failing to make substantial change for the masses, reforms and performative wokeness can also be used to enlist people to assist the police. “Community control” of the police can easily facilitate the creation of snitch networks. And woke snitching is now a reality. After Rayshard Brooks was killed by Atlanta Police on 12 June 2020 outside a Wendy’s fast food restaurant, protesters burned down the Wendy’s. Activists acting under the rubric of postmodernist identity politics rushed to point out the white woman in a video supposedly torching the Wendy’s. Police then arrested the white woman, Natalie White, and charged her with first degree arson. A subsequently released police video showed Rayshard Brooks referring to Natalie White as his girlfriend.

A fast-food joint burned to the ground is immediately labelled terrorism and criminality by the dominant class forces. But another black man murdered by police – that’s just business-as-usual in America. Rayshard Brooks was killed by Atlanta police outside this Wendy’s on 12 June 2020.

The bourgeoisie also has the option of allowing and even encouraging the flow of drugs and guns, as well as contradictions among the people, to lead to an increase in gang violence, while the police take a more hands-off approach. In summer 2018, a communist-led multinational social investigation team visited Black proletarian neighborhoods in Baltimore and talked to residents about what their experiences with the police and with the system overall were after the 2015 rebellion ignited by the police murder of Freddie Gray. Many people pointed out that the police in fact backed off in the wake of the rebellion, allowing drugs to flow and murders to occur with little intervention. It’s not that the police became less brutal per se, but they allowed the effects of decades of unemployment, deteriorating neighborhoods, drug addiction, and the underground economy to run their course and do the work of brutalizing the people for them. Here’s what three Black proletarians in Baltimore told the communist-led social investigation team:

Let me tell you something, we don’t have cops no more. We got monitors. They monitor the crime. For instance, walk across the street, [you hear] “I got this, I got that, I got ‘bupes’, I got percs.” They be selling their wares, and the police be sitting right in front of them, and they don’t say nothing. [Pointing at a police car parked at one of the busiest drug-dealing corners in West Baltimore:] There you go, his lights are flashing, but he’s not going to get out the car.

[The police are] hanging around the corners where people are doing what they’re doing [dealing and using drugs] and they’re not doing nothing. They may have even be having a conversation with the criminals. In fact, I think they may even be involved with some of them; there’s some crooked cops out here.

People like you of different nationalities, before the Freddie Gray situation, the police would have stopped the car, got out, asked what was going on. But nowadays, I can be holding a gun to you, and holding you hostage, and the police would roll right by. …They just figure like “why should we put our hands on someone?” They just thinking “why should I jeopardize my career?” We video recording them now. So they just avoid it all.

To be clear, and before any idiot eager to prove their wokeness gets it twisted, the police would only respond to the rampant drug trade by brutalizing and murdering people, not by stopping the importation of drugs or providing treatment to addicts. The point here is that the system has no solution for the oppressed, whether that comes in the form of police brutality or unemployment and economic devastation leading to a booming drug trade and violence among the people. As one Baltimore resident told the social investigation team concerning the failures of existing social service programs:

Drug needles over here. Programs over there. All these programs doin’ nothing but helpin’ you a little. But it’s putting you back out in the system. Because once you finish the program you gon come back out in the streets. Right on the drugs again.

A similar scenario played out in Cincinnati after the 2001 rebellion set off by the police murder of Timothy Thomas. A large number of guns mysteriously appeared the summer after the rebellion, the flow of drugs seemed to increase, and murders among the people reached new heights. The bourgeoisie has learned many ways to respond to rebellion, including fomenting gang rivalries and contradictions among the people and then saying, when the murder rates increase, “see what happens when the police aren’t around?”¹ The increase in murders in a number of cities through the US since the 2020 rebellions could very well be in part fostered through conscious bourgeois policy. This is exactly why we need revolutionary organization with deep roots among the people that can act as a counter to this tactic. Here, we renew the call we have been making in kites: as Mao emphasized, at the core of being a communist is doing social investigation among and integrating with the masses, and those in North America who are serious about becoming communists should spend far less time on the internet and talking to Leftists and far more time in proletarian neighborhoods getting to know the masses and struggling side by side with them.

The bourgeoisie is quick to learn from history because, as the ruling class, it is a highly organized class. The proletariat cannot hope to begin doing the same without organization.

Some might read all this and say, “okay I agree with your theoretical arguments, but shouldn’t we unite with the defund/abolish the police position because it’s the best thing that’s out there now?” This line of reasoning confines potential within the narrow horizons of the existing activist/Leftist milieu and justifies a petty-bourgeois fear of challenging those who use postmodernist identity politics to appoint themselves leaders of the existing movement (and increase their nonprofit activist salaries with Ford Foundation funding). But it does point to a real problem: no revolutionary leadership—individual or collective—exists today in the US with the ability, experience, influence, and audacity to vie for leadership of the current movement against police brutality and the oppression of Black people, set correct dividing lines, unite all who can be united, and divert the spontaneous movement towards revolutionary objectives. This is what we must transform by training communist cadre capable of acting as such a leadership (including by training ourselves). Not taking on this responsibility means allowing class forces other than the proletariat and politics and programs short of communist revolution to lead and deflate the existing resistance movement into dead-ends and keep the system intact, even if some reforms come to pass.²

Finally, if the above arguments have not swayed you, here’s something to marinate on concerning the problem with today’s “abolitionist” politics: Angela Davis is now a celebrated author, academic, and hero for the activist crowd. Ruchell “Cinque” Magee is still in prison. How many “abolitionists” even know who he is?

1 One noteworthy strength of the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion was that a gang truce was reached shortly before the rebellion and subsequently strengthened in the course of and after it, making it much more difficult for the bourgeoisie to employ this tactic.

2 As a practical suggestion for training communist cadre in relation to the present movement against police brutality, we suggest reading the article “From the Masses, to the Masses: A Summation of the October 22^nd Coalition’s Resistance to Police Brutality in the Late 1990s” in kites #1.

ENDNOTES

One noteworthy strength of the 1992 Los Angeles rebellion was that a gang truce was reached shortly before the rebellion and subsequently strengthened in the course of and after it, making it much more difficult for the bourgeoisie to employ this tactic.
As a practical suggestion for training communist cadre in relation to the present movement against police brutality, we suggest reading the article “From the Masses, to the Masses: A Summation of the October 22^nd Coalition’s Resistance to Police Brutality in the Late 1990s” in kites #1.

By the kites Editorial Board

A series of outrages and the protests and rebellions that followed them have laid bare to a new generation, to white people willing to listen, and to the whole world a cold but potentially liberating truth: White supremacy and the oppression of Black people are fundamental to the foundations and functioning of the United States, and the rulers of the US, no matter what they as individuals think or feel, cannot go a day without inflicting brutality on Black people. These brutalities will only end when the system that needs and perpetuates them, together with the class that rules that system and those who enforce it, are forcibly overthrown and destroyed.

The 46-year-old George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer on May 25, 2020. The killer Derek Chauvin had his knee pressed into the throat of George Floyd for nine minutes, despite appeals from Floyd that “I can’t breath.”

The government response to Hurricane Katrina that resulted in the loss of countless Black lives and the destruction of Black neighborhoods in New Orleans. The Jena 6. The racist vigilante murder of Trayvon Martin. The epidemic of police murders of Black people whose victims include Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor, and now George Floyd. The youth at the forefront of the most powerful rebellion in 50 years in the US grew up watching the horrific images of these and many other outrages. Despite two terms of the first Black president, despite federal investigations into police practices, despite the implementation of body cameras, despite implicit bias training, and other bullshit police reforms that have changed nothing, and the election of numerous progressive politicians to city governments promising to remedy injustice who would then turn to implement draconian curfews and repression in response to a righteous rebellion. Add to all this the miserable failure of the bourgeois state to meet the health needs of the people during the COVID-19 pandemic and the many unnecessary deaths on the system’s hands as a result, and the tinder was laid out for an explosion of resistance.

What started in Minneapolis and included the beautiful sight of that city’s third police precinct burning to the ground quickly spread like wildfire to virtually every city, large and small, across the US, far exceeding the previous inspiring examples of Ferguson in 2014 and Baltimore in 2015. The defiance of these rebellions—especially of the proletarian youth at the forefront of them—in the face of vicious police repression is an exciting display of mass combativity rarely seen in the US. The rebellions have already achieved great results: criminal charges filed against murderous and brutal police; disrupting the smooth functioning of “law and order” that has repolarized society in a way that has forced everyone to reckon with the oppression of Black people; and exposing the way that every elected official in any position of actual power, whether blatant reactionaries like Trump or progressive mayors like de Blasio, Lightfoot , Garcetti, or Frey, supports and presides over the brutal police and repression that are used to stamp out rebellion. The question we always ask is: what will come out of this? How do we go from mass rebellion to a mass revolutionary movement? How can mass combativity now lay the ground for mass armed combat in the future?

“Progressive” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey took a walk of shame after being booed as a “traitor” and chanted out of a June 6 protest.

For days, the rebellions succeeded in getting beyond the control of city governments, police, and all those claiming the mantle of justice while instructing people not to go beyond the limits of the acceptable channels of dissent. These rebellions exposed the irrelevance of the multitude of same-old Leftist organizations, postmodernist activists, non profit organizations, and all manner of other opportunists. In the coming weeks and months, the ruling class and a variety of bootlickers, opportunists, and progressive politicians will be working to glue the social order back together with a variety of tactics, from “good protester, bad protester” narratives to promises of police reform to electoral schemes. And of course, they have and will continue to try to brutally repress rebellion out of existence, including with lengthy prison terms for the most audacious and defiant. Those of us who understand that no fundamental change can come about from this system have a responsibility to defend those facing prison time, to support and spread any new waves of rebellion, and to expose the bankruptcy of all the reforms being offered as solutions and all the attempts to suppress the rebel spirit with the “right ways” to protest.

Adding further insult to injury, police chiefs across North America are playing at being woke as they have begun “taking the knee” as they struggle to contain the continent-wide rebellion sparked by the killing of George Floyd — who, we cannot forget, died under the crushing weight of a pig’s knee.

On a deeper level, we have a responsibility to build the organized forces for revolution, seizing on the favorable conditions created through struggle to recruit revolutionary cadre and develop widespread consciousness of the need for revolution. For the rebellions have also exposed the fact that no serious and sizable revolutionary organization exists within the US capable of providing leadership during a nationwide rebellion and through the twists and turns of the struggle that will follow it, never mind exponentially expanding the organized forces for revolution during this moment. To give a concrete example: no revolutionary organization is in a position to send dozens of trained cadre to Minneapolis this summer and conduct widespread social investigation in the neighborhoods that went up in the flames of resistance, recruit rebel youth into communist youth organization, and leave behind powerful mass revolutionary organization in proletarian neighborhoods. In sum, the rebellions are great; the state of the subjective forces for revolution in the US is pathetic. It is this contradiction we need to work urgently to resolve. And the people and organizations behind kites do not think of ourselves as being outside of this problem.

Mao explained the process of rebellion and the development of revolutionary consciousness in this way: first people fight back, then they seek out philosophy. As the rebels who took history into their own hands seek out philosophy, what will they find? Radical-sounding but empty rhetoric, such as the fantasy of abolishing police and prisons without the revolutionary military defeat and destruction of the bourgeoisie’s state power. The pragmatic logic behind electoral schemes to get progressive district attorney and city council members elected who never wind up achieving anything more than the most paltry reforms. Post modernist identity politics that insist on viewing the world from your identity out and treat identities as commodities to be traded on nonprofit activist organization job market. (If they go to college) the endless perpetuation of ever more nonsensical postmodernist jargon that is completely out of touch with the material realities of oppression and oppressed people. The stale strategies of Leftist organizations who have been doing the same thing for decades. The posturing of dogmatic idiots calling themselves communists, Maoists, etc.

Revolutionary philosophy, strategy, and politics are difficult to come by in North America today. While the member organizations and individuals behind kites cultivate class struggle and mass combativity in their own regions, our collective contribution through kites will continue to address questions of revolutionary strategy, analyze the unfolding crises of capitalism-imperialism, and offer summations of resistance and revolutionary struggles that we must learn from. Deeply relevant to this moment are the articles in the series “The Specter that Still Haunts: Locating a Revolutionary Class within Contemporary Capitalism-Imperialism,” the article “From the Masses, To the Masses: A summation of the October 22 Coalition’s Resistance to Police Brutality in the Late 1990s,” and the more recently released “Manifesto of the Organization of Communist Revolutionaries,” all available at kites-journal.org. We look forward to being in dialogue with others attempting to dig into the challenges of building a revolutionary movement and communist organization and connecting revolutionary theory with all those hungry for it in the wake of the rebellions.

That last point about connecting revolutionary theory with rebel youth is especially important if we do not wish to see a repeat of what happened after the previous rebellions. Let’s briefly recap: Powerful rebellions by Black Proletarians in response to police killings, in Ferguson in 2014 and Baltimore in 2015, punctuated and inspired the exponential expansion of growing protests against police and vigilante killings of Black people, as well as forcing widespread debate on the systematic oppression of Black people. In the wake of these rebellions, the voices that got media attention, funding, and leadership claims were by and large careerist non-profit sector activists, while Black proletarian organizers with roots in the neighborhoods most under the gun of police violence were at best ignored and at worst assassinated, as in the case of Darren Seals in Ferguson. The bourgeois political establishment was somewhat successful at channeling the resistance into electoral schemes, faith in federal government intervention, and reforms that never got to the root of the problem. Performative wokeness on social media often overshadowed real resistance. Lots of mediocre PhD dissertations about the Black Lives Matter movement were written by grad students eager to show off their social justice credentials and ability to trade in postmodernist jargon. And for the most part, the many activists generated by the protests preferred the safety of their woke social cliques to the challenges of going to the people most affected by police brutality, learning from and integrating with them, and developing mass organizations and revolutionary consciousness among the people.

Darren Seals was a leader and organizer of the Ferguson protests in the summer of 2014 that were set off by the police murder of Michael Brown. Seals, who was an autoworker and a musician, was shot and his car set ablaze in what most assume was an assassination. At least a half dozen other prominent figures in the Ferguson uprising have been killed in murders if not by “suicide” or “overdose” which many deem suspicious.

The mass rebellions that began the summer of 2020 are an urgently needed rupture with this state of affairs. While powerful nationwide rebellions are not the same thing as the revolutionary overthrow of bourgeois rule, they do give more than a hint that revolution is possible in the heart of US imperialism. For they demonstrated that phalanxes of militarized police used to beating and murdering Black people with impunity could get knocked on their asses, literally and figuratively, when people stand up to them, and even the deployment of National Guard troops could not easily re-establish order. They showed that the audacity, audacity, and more audacity, of the youth refusing to back down and willing to fight the police can catch on like wildfire and inspire others all across the country to join in. They proved the existence of a social base for revolution, and that when people on the bottom of society move in powerful ways, all other classes are forced to respond and take a side. And they brought out cracks and fissures within the ruling class and revealed its inability to maintain social order when faced with a critical mass of people in open rebellion.

While the particular militancy of this moment will not maintain itself indefinitely, the spark for these rebellions—the oppression of Black people—is something the US ruling class cannot put out. This is because from slavery to Jim Crow in the South to ghettos up North to the “War on Drugs,” mass incarceration and the casting off of large numbers of Black people into unemployment as a permanent “surplus population,” the US ruling class has depended on the exploitation of Black People, or on discarding them when they can no longer be profitably exploited. And the social cohesion of the US has rested on keeping the masses of Black people in a subordinate position in all spheres of society, which can only be maintained with the utmost violence and brutality from police and prisons.

The rebellions have revealed this cold truth and created favorable new conditions for revolutionary organizing. But communist cadre will not emerge spontaneously from these flames, so it is incumbent on all of us to find ways to connect with the rebel youth casting off the well worn ruts of established ways of dissent. Our journal kites enters the fray with the weapon of communist theory. On the ground, we hope those who dream of going from rebellion to revolution will find ways to connect with the masses, learn from them and their inspiring example, build organization among them, and develop themselves and others as communist cadre figuring out how to rise to the challenges ahead.

To end with these relevant words from Mao: “How should we judge whether a youth is a revolutionary? How can we tell? There can only be one criterion, namely, whether or not he is willing to integrate himself with the broad masses of workers and peasants and does so in practice. If he is willing to do so and actually does so, he is a revolutionary; otherwise he is a non-revolutionary or a counter-revolutionary. If today he integrates himself with the masses of workers and peasants, then today he is a revolutionary; if tomorrow he ceases to do so or turns round to oppress the common people, then he becomes a non-revolutionary of counter-revolutionary.”