Onward to the Black Revolution!
By Lorenzo K. Ervin. Illustration by Sophie Bass.
In recent years, we have seen rebellions of poor people rise up against racist violence and police murder. But what is a rebellion and how does it differ from an insurrection? An insurrection is a general uprising against the power structure. It is usually a sustained rebellion over the course of days, weeks, months or even years, which has been organised by grassroots political forces.
It is a type of class war that involves a whole population in an act of armed or semi-armed resistance. Sometimes mistakenly just called a rebellion, its character is far more combative and revolutionary. Rebellions are almost totally spontaneous, short-term affairs. But even an insurrection is also not the final stage of social revolution, since revolution is a social process that transforms the whole of society, rather than a single event.
An insurrection is a planned violent protest campaign that takes the spontaneous revolt of the masses to a higher level. Revolutionaries intervene to push rebellions to the insurrectionary stage and the insurrection on to a social revolution. It is not small, isolated pockets of urban guerrillas taking actions, unless those guerrillas are part of a larger revolt. The importance of recognising the true differences of each level can define our strategy and tactics at that stage and not lead us prematurely into a full offensive, when the enemy is not yet weakened enough by mass street action or political attacks.
The importance of also recognising the true causes of the revolt cannot be understated. Anarchist revolutionaries intervene in such struggles to show people how to resist and the possibilities of winning freedom. We want to take the people’s rebellions against the state and use them to weaken the entire rule of Capital and its white power structure.
We want to create resistance on a longer term and to win liberated zones. To disconnect these communities from the state means that these rebellions will assume a conscious political character like the Palestinian Intifada in the occupied territories controlled by Israel in the Middle East.
Creating the possibility of a Black insurrection means popularising and spreading the various rebellions to other cities, towns and even countries and increasing them in number and frequency. It also means consciously nullifying the power of the state, instead of temporary revolts against it, which ultimately preserves its power. There must be a deliberate attempt to push the government out of existence and establish people’s power. This has not yet happened with the various Black revolts we have seen since 1964, when the first such modern revolt erupted in Harlem, NY.
In the 1960s, the Black communities all over the United States rose up angrily with massive rebellions against the state demanding racial justice. After the Harlem revolt, for the next four years major rebellions shook the United States in the Watts section of
Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago and hundreds of other North American cities. Isolated acts of police brutality, racial discrimination, substandard housing, economic exploitation, “the hoodlum element,” a breakdown in family values and a host of other “explanations” have been put forward by liberal and conservative sociologists and others commissioned by the state to whitewash the true causes. Yet none of these revealed this as a protest against the capitalist system and colonial rule, even though the social scientists “warned” of the possibility of a new outbreak of violence.
Once again in the spring of 1992, we saw a massive revolt in Los Angeles, whose immediate causes were related to the outrageous acquittal of four Los Angeles policemen who had brutally beaten Rodney King, a Black civilian. But there again, this was just an immediate cause acting as a trigger; this revolt was not a sympathy revolt for Rodney King personally. The cause of this rebellion was widespread social inequality in the capitalist system and years of police terrorism. This time the rebellion spread to 40 cities and four foreign countries. And it was not just a so called “race riot,” but rather a class revolt that included a large number of Latinos, whites and even Asians.
But it was undeniably a revolt against racial injustice first and foremost, even if it was not just directed against white people in general, but the capitalist system and the rich. It was not limited to just the inner city in the Los Angeles area but spread even to white upper crust areas in Hollywood, Ventura and beyond.
This was the beginning stage of class warfare, instead of just a “racial squabble.”
We saw yet another rebellion against racism and police terrorism in London, UK, in early summer 2011 after the police murder of yet another Black man by Metropolitan police. The Black community rose up in rebellion, destroyed capitalist property, and “looted” a store of consumer goods they could not afford. Like in most instances, the bourgeois media zeroed in on the “looting,” and labeled the whole thing as a “criminal orgy of violence.” Sadly, some white middle-class Anarchists repeated this propaganda in their own denunciation of the “rioters.” They had no understanding of what was happening, and why they should have been in the streets with these youth, giving them political and military direction.
If the so-called Anarchist “Black Bloc” of white youth had joined with inner city Black kids, we may have had a general insurrection of long-standing and major damage to the state and capital.
If an underground military force existed or a militia was assembled out of this united attack of Anarchists and Black youth, it could have entered the field of battle with more weaponry and advanced tactics.
As it was, the gangs played that role in Los Angeles in 1992 and London in 2011, and played it very well. Their participation is why it took so long to put the rebellions down, but even they could not prevent the re-establishment of white power in South Central Los Angeles or Black sections of London. Not just because of being militarily outgunned, but because they had no revolutionary political program despite all their rhetoric of having been radicalised. Also,
the state came down extremely hard on the rebels. Over 20,000 people in Los Angeles were jailed, 50 were killed and hundreds more badly wounded, and over 2,000 were arrested and jailed by the UK government and police.
Could a liberated zone have been won, so that dual power could have been established? That possibility existed and still does exist if the people are properly armed and educated, but it is not easy. Mass resistance with heavy military weaponry may have won serious concessions, one of which was to pull back the cops. We don’t know if that would have happened and those who said the Los Angeles Police Department did withdraw were engaging in pure speculation. We do know that this is not the last rebellion in Los Angeles and other cities. They may come much quicker now that the genie of urban revolution is out of the bag again. London provided another example of angry poor people rising over yet another atrocity by the police. There have been hundreds of such rebellions in the USA, UK, France and other countries against police terror and government repression. This is a form of class warfare. If white Anarchists can hail protests like Black bloc attacks on buildings, confrontation with cops at anti-globalization demos, and other acts of political violence, then they need to support these revolts by poor people, the truly oppressed, under the capitalist system, and not lecture them from the side-lines.
Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin is an American writer, activist and black anarchist. He is a former member of SNCC, the Black Panther Party and Concerned Citizens for Justice. Following an attempt to frame him on weapons charges and for threatening the life of a Ku Klux Klan leader, Ervin hijacked a plane to Cuba in February 1969. While in Cuba, and later Czechoslovakia, Ervin grew disillusioned with the authoritarianism of state socialism. Captured by the CIA in Eastern Europe, he was extradited to the US, put on trial and sentenced to life in prison in 1970. He was introduced to anarchism whilst in prison, inspiring him to write Anarchism and the Black Revolution in 1979. Released after 15 years, Ervin remains politically active.
ONWARD TO THE BLACK REVOLUTION, AS PART OF A SOCIAL REVOLUTION!
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