How We Must Respond to the Rittenhouse Verdict
A plea for militant organizing
How long will we allow liberals and the progressive center to assert pacifist organization and protesting as the only legitimate form of social resistance?
Ask any apparatchik of the American state about the necessity of its military bases, spending budget, and war-making capacity. They will tell you about the realities of power and change. They will insist that you are deeply unserious if you question the legitimate role that hard power plays in maintaining social structures.
The only way to be considered a serious person in U.S. politics is to pay lip service to the role of militant force in protecting the public interest. Militancy in this case is not just acceptable; it is celebrated in the mainstream with nationalist pride.
Of course, unless you’re currently deployed by the U.S. military to defend money invested in Middle Eastern extraction and resource exploration, then you should worry more as an American about being crushed by your couch or drowning in the bathtub.
But if you’re actively protesting extrajudicial police executions? Not only are the cops allowed to do whatever they want to you, but armed civilians are allowed to walk up to you with a gun and blow you away.
In fact, you were always the real danger.
As I wrote last week, there have never been political solutions in the U.S. The only significant social improvements in U.S. history have come from actual civil war, presidential assassinations, wartime service, and court order.
The forces in White America that have laundered the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. have obfuscated the frustrations and limits of the change wrought by peaceful protest. Many acknowledged the failures of the non-violent movement by the end of the 1960s.
You can argue that there have been other places and contexts where non-violent tactics have been successful. But it is nothing short of laughable to look at American history and say there are non-violent solutions. There aren’t even political solutions.
Non-violent organizing assumes that there is a meaningful apparatus for policy making. It assumes that policy makers are responsive, even cynically, to the inherent humanity of protestors brutalized by the forces of reaction. There is not even a correlation between public opinion and policy in the U.S.
You can see the deep sickness of this mentality on display when historians and journalists watch the images of children attacked by dogs and sprayed with fire hoses from Selma in 1963. They see the unimaginable brutality and declare that not only was it actually good for the movement, but by watching it and consuming the images we actually become better people.
And this is the personal ideology betrayed by the defenders of non-violent tactics. They believe the lives of activists are worth so little that they should just allow themselves to be attacked and brutalized. They believe that we should be run over in the street and shot by white nationalists. They believe policymakers will care.
Until there is a militant mutual aid organization in your locality, then the cops and the right’s civilian activists will continue to execute the underclass in the streets.
There is no political solution coming to fix our social problems. There never has been.
If there were meaningful militant mutual aid organizations in the Twin Cities, then Derek Chauvin can’t kneel on George Floyd’s neck until he dies.
If there were meaningful militant mutual aid organizations in Kenosha, then Kyle Rittenhouse can’t just walk up to a group of protestors with a firearm.
If there were meaningful militant mutual aid organizations in Charlottesville, then white nationalists can’t drive their cars through a crowd of protestors.
Protests and demonstrations are important, but they are not the totality of necessary action. Until there is the capacity to compete with law enforcement and white nationalists, then Kyle Rittenhouse and Derek Chauvin will continue to exercise their monopoly on force.
We must stop pretending that our political and legal systems can intervene on behalf of anyone but the wealthy and powerful. We must create for ourselves a social element that is as committed to our project as our opponents are to theirs.
