The reckless murder of yet another unarmed black American at the hand of the police has sparked days of furious protest, as the citizens of Minneapolis demonstrate their refusal to allow the life and memory of George Floyd to be discarded in the name of the perpetuation of an oppressive system that continues to suffocate and constrict without remorse.
The killing carried out on Monday by members of the Minneapolis P.D was as cruel as it was wasteful. After being arrested on suspicion of writing a bad cheque, Mr Floyd was handcuffed without restraint before being forced face down to the ground and pinned by the restraining officer’s knee on the back of his neck for over 9 minutes. This excruciatingly painful ordeal, in its essence a drawn out hanging, is symbolic in its barbarity and brazenness. For 9 minutes Mr Floyd pleaded for his life, for 9 minutes the officers casually disposed of the life of a citizen they are sworn to protect, on a busy pavement, surrounded by onlookers.
Are the people of Minneapolis to be blamed for the tide of anger that has been unleashed on the city and continues to spread across the United States? Mr Floyd’s killer currently sits at home, his safety secured by a massive police presence, a luxury millions of black Americans could never begin to claim they have experienced. Social media is flooded on a perpetual basis with videos of police officers across the United States behaving like an occupying army in relation to the nation’s black citizens. Just this month the murder of Ahmaud Arbey in broad daylight by racist vigilantes in Georgia saw national spotlight; despite the incident occurring in February his killers had been allowed to walk free for over two months, the case delayed due to complications arising from their professionally intimate relationships with many senior figures within the Georgia state prosecution service. We all know that Monday’s incident is not an isolated event, and those who attempt to paint the violent response it has incurred as such should be treated with a contempt reserved for blind idiots and malignant racists.
The reactions of both the police and holier than thou commentators to the handling of the recent anti-lockdown demonstrations in Minnesota’s mid-western neighbour Michigan, contrasts starkly with those displayed this week. When dozens of protestors stormed the Michigan State Capitol in late March and managed to avoid carrying out a coup only by the good graces of their own incompetence, many on the American Right, including President Donald Trump, encouraged state authorities to work cooperatively with their citizens to hammer out a compromise in the interests of fairness and democracy. In the case of Minneapolis, Mr Trump has jumped on the opportunity to further flex his authoritarian muscles by gleefully declaring his willingness to deploy armed soldiers in the city to quell the unrest. A cursory glance at images of both groups of protestors would be a more succinct explanation for the dissonance displayed in these responses than I am capable of providing.
The murder of George Floyd represents the limit to which the citizens of black America will be pushed. Mr Floyd’s death is not a cause of the unrest in and of itself, nor is the as-yet-unpunished status of the police officer who killed him. The cause of the destruction in Minneapolis is the white supremacy that is the essential component of the US economic model. American Capitalism was built on slavery and it now relies on the continued oppression of its black victims to maintain the economic harmony of those at the top it has always served, as well as the fruits of the culture that have emerged from African-American life for both export and maintenance; simultaneously reeling in the financial benefits of the commodification of black culture all over the world whilst de-fanging it of its true revolutionary essence at home, it has allowed it to become a tool deployed by the rich used to keep abreast of the popular mood and ensure their cash-flow remains constant. This economic model is responsible for the United States’ calamitous response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the 100,000 deaths and economic havoc it has caused. Deep-seated labour and mortgage market discrimination in the US has left black America disproportionately vulnerable in relation to the virus. The percentage of African Americans without any healthcare insurance of any kind is at almost double the rate of whites, whilst insurance premiums account for on average 20% of a black household’s yearly income, as opposed to 11% of a white household. The surge in unemployment and lack of a meaningful federal income safety net has also left black workers, occupying less advantageous jobs, acutely at risk to the economic upheaval of the prolonged lockdowns made necessary by the Trump administration’s refusal to treat the pandemic with any level of sincerity until the worst of the damage had been done. In short, the anger evoked by George Floyd’s murder will not be pacified by the successful prosecution of his killer, nor should it be. Everyone must demand more.
The scenes in the United States this week in combination with the surreal events that have taken place throughout 2020 all over the world bear a striking resemblance to the upheavals of 1968; a turning point of the 20th Century with ramifications that shaped the world we live in today. In Paris, a sudden outpouring of dissatisfaction and dissent over Capitalist excess and French consumerist culture led to a month of demonstration and revolt in the city that mutated into a series of nationwide general strikes that ground France to a halt and pushed the country to the brink of civil war, as the army, commanded by President De Gaulle from his brief exile in Germany, readied themselves to dislodge Leftist protestors from the city by force. A crisis only averted by De Gaulle’s reluctant and belated decision to dissolve parliament and hold elections at the behest of his Socialist Prime Minister Georges Pompidou. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, Czechoslovak reformers led by Alexander Dubcek had their Prague Spring crushed by the USSR and its Brezhnevite hardliners in an episode that eerily reflects the situation that has been rumbling on in Hong Kong over the course of the last year, seeming poised to take another step up in intensity as the Chinese Communist Party seeks to take over the security operation in the city itself. Further afield, the shock of the Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and the hammer-blow it dealt to American confidence in their own unassailability mirrors the reality check the United States has been dealt in relation to its gross mishandling of the Covid-19 situation, as its death toll resides firmly at the top of of the international standings, whilst its one-time Vietnamese adversaries have emerged from the crisis without a single fatality.
1968 was the year the lid was blown off the top of the post-war order by an energy created by the bubbling dissatisfaction towards imperialism, authoritarianism and consumerism and it brought about a paradigm shift to societies across the globe, although not a shift to the good. De Gaulle and his supporters stormed to a historically dominant performance in the June ’68 elections, the alliance between the Communists and Socialists subsequently fell apart and the French intellectual Left became fractured as the last remaining Stalinists within its ranks rushed to the defence of Soviet tank crews on the streets of Prague. The shattering of American confidence in Indochina did not lead to a reassessment of its imperial ambitions, instead the Fordist consensus of the New Deal gave way to the rise of Neoliberalism, the acceleration of wealth inequality and the slow liquidation of public life in the US and later Britain. The period also ushered in the vulgarity and corruption of the reactionary Nixon administration and its illegal escalation of the war in Vietnam to Cambodia and Laos. The point is that despite the best efforts of the Soixante-Huitards, the moment escaped them. It seems to me that we are in a uniquely important historical and cultural turning point of our own, and as Vingt-Vingtards we can’t afford to make the same mistakes.
To begin, we have to accept that racism is grounded in classism, especially in the United States. In doing so we have to accept that an anti-racist society is simply incompatible with a Capitalist one. Every anti-racist message should be accompanied with that sentiment. The movement that has been set in motion by the murder of Mr Floyd must not focus on his death alone, otherwise the system will reboot itself and the issues will continue to poison the fabric of American society and more black men will be summarily executed in the street. From here, solidarity can be established along class boundaries and the rejection of racism and its integral role in the upholding of the Capitalist order can proliferate and mutate into a collective demand for social, cultural and economic dignity across the world; be that in Britain, where Covid death rates for BAME patients in English hospitals are 2.5 times higher than those of whites, or DR Congo, where private corporations rape the country and its people in an almost Leopoldian fashion whilst mining for Coltan, or Hong Kong, where an imperial power is flagrantly flouting international commitments it itself has made in order to impose its will upon a tiny neighbour. All of these issues are connected, and the best way to preserve the memory of George Floyd is to turn his death into the beginning of a mass-movement that has the potential to change the way the world interacts with itself, not to make it the end of a municipal murder investigation.
We should also ensure that this is our movement and not one that we allow capital to neuter at birth. This has to be carried out by the citizens in their entirety, giant corporations have for too long sucked the revolutionary life out of driving forces for change. There should be no place for Nike in the new anti-racist movement or Barclays in the gay rights movement. We shouldn’t rely on celebrities without accreditation to mangle a powerful message from mansions in Calabasas or townhouses in Knightsbridge.
The alternative is more of the same; more George Floyds, Philando Castiles and Micheal Browns. More of the economic conditions that imbued within and nurtured the mentality of their murderers, and constructed the state apparatuses that protect them, and more of the same erosion of community and public life that funnels wealth and land and power into the hands of an increasingly small group of hoarders who will happily drive us all hard starboard into the rocks, be those rocks ecological disaster or civil war, if it means they can avoid surrendering some of what they have; leaving less for us and making the world a more cruel, more dangerous place.
Twitter- @SamuelBF3
