The 2020 Class War
What the 2020 George Floyd Riots Were Really About
Introduction
On May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed by Police Officer Derek Chauvin while being placed under arrest in Minneapolis, MI. The incident represented only one instance out of hundreds of fatal police encounters that occur annually in the United States.[1] However, both the content and context surrounding Floyd’s untimely death at the hands of a police officer using grossly excessive force triggered widespread protests and civil unrest that surpassed its predecessors in both scale and intensity. Political activism spread beyond American shores, as protests were carried out in countries like the United Kingdom. Additionally, the widespread destruction associated with related riots and looting resulted in a staggering $2 Billion in property damage.[2] At least twenty-five people were killed.[3]
News and media pundits promptly framed the unrest as a response against police brutality, and in many cases, protests were in fact, limited to this scope. Yet, the magnitude and scope of the destruction, the goals of affiliated political groups, and the responses of both politicians and the public suggest that the civil unrest in the U.S. over the summer of 2020 was a reaction to much deeper underlying causes.
The Real Causes
It Was Recorded
The death of George Floyd, in and of itself, was not an overt act of racism, nor was it any worse than the hundreds of other tragic police encounters that everyday citizens have with law enforcement officials. However, key factors led to the eruption of anger and unrest that followed the incident. First, bystanders filmed the entire event and posted it on the internet. The incident stood out as a clear, undeniable example of the callous brutality suffered by Black Americans at the hands of overaggressive police officers who are far too often shielded by police unions and qualified immunity. It also occurred around the same time that Breonna Taylor was unjustly killed by police during the execution of a no-knock warrant on her boyfriend’s house March 13, 2020, and the racially-motivated shooting death of Ahmaud Arbery at the hands of white vigilantes in Satilla Shores, near Brunswick, GA. The glaring exposure of George Floyd drew these events together, painting a blood-soaked picture of persistent violence toward African Americans, much of which was carried out under the cloak of police authority.
COVID Lockdowns and Intensity
Secondly, the timing of the death, as occurring during the COVID pandemic lockdowns, lent to the intensity of the unrest. As mentioned before, George Floyd’s death ignited civil unrest to a degree that the unjust passing of both Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery did not? Why? On its face, Floyd’s death, while reprehensible, was far less so than Taylor’s, or Arbery’s. Breonna Taylor was a bystander who was gunned down by police while they conducted no-knock raids, a practice begun in 1960s, that frequently lead to unnecessary fatalities, and for all reasons should be considered a tyrannical overreach of authority and be immediately illegalized. Arbery’s death was a clear-cut hate crime. He was shot by a group of white vigilantes for the apparent crime of jogging in the wrong neighborhood. George Floyd’s situation was less clean-cut. To be sure, George Floyd’s death was a result of a gratuitous abuse of police authority. However, Floyd’s status as a felon with a long list of past crimes, and the fact that he was being arrested again for trying to make purchases with counterfeit cash, doesn’t elicit the stark picture of the ugliness of race-driven violence like Arbery’s case, nor does it highlight the tragic consequences of authoritarian state-sanctioned practices and policies like no-knock raids and qualified immunity, as in Taylor’s incident. I’m not invalidating anger toward Floyd’s death, but why did his case cause uproar when these other two events made little more than headlines?
The answer is timing. Since March of that year, lockdown measures mandated by governments throughout the country applied a shocking level of pressure on American society, much of this being acutely felt by the nation’s most socio-economically disadvantaged. Many people already living paycheck to paycheck were laid off from their jobs. Countless small businesses went belly up, unable to withstand the abrupt economic shocks to their industry. As Americans were warned against venturing out into public for fear of contracting the novel virus, the ensuing policies exacerbated mental illness, substance abuse, violence, domestic abuse, and suicide. People were depressed, anxious, and angry. Deep down, most people knew that the government was to blame for their misery. Yet their contingent trust in public leaders and fear of COVID-19 blinded them to the real object of their hatred. So, when George Floyd died on the pavement under Derek Chauvin’s knee, everyone was finally given a socially acceptable reason to break out of lockdown and unleash all the hell that was welling up in their hearts for months.
This is why the 2020 unrest surpassed earlier civil uprisings, such as the L.A. riots in 1992, and the Black Lives Matter Movement in 2015 after Michael Brown’s death. It is also why the deaths of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery both received relatively mind responses. Those two crimes occurred before the pandemic lockdowns. People just didn’t have the same pent-up rage. It was not that George Floyd was a particularly outstanding individual, or that the act itself positively screamed racism, but because the public harbored a reservoir of negative energy that they were willing to expel at the early possible moment.
A Rally Cry for Class War
Now that we’ve covered how Floyd’s death made it to the front lines of social justice causes, and what provided the rage that fueled the level of action that followed, it follows to examine the underlying political motives of the 2020 unrest, and for that matter, all unrest in recent years. The official reason stated for the George Floyd unrest was police brutality, but events that followed don’t necessarily line up with that objective. Rather, the 2020 uprising was primarily fueled by a mix of aggravated, long-standing antagonism manifesting in an explosion of precariat and proletarian violence against others who benefitted from what they considered an unjust and racist system. Floyd’s death, therefore, was simply the opening shot that ignited a more general class revolt.
Consider what was actually destroyed during the unrest. If grievances were solely about police brutality and government abuse, the logical course of action would be to focus hostility on law enforcement. However, while several precincts and federal buildings were attacked, the majority of the violence was directed against homes and businesses without regard for the race or demographic identity of the proprietor.[4]
In this manner, the 2020 unrest – the riots, in particular – were less about police brutality itself and more about the large context of class inequality that resulted in the abuses of power most by LOEs most acutely felt by Black Americans. The establishment of Black Lives Matter adopts a Marxist political standpoint that highlights the real nature of unrest, which does not see police brutality as the root of inequality, but as only one symptom of it. In this respect, the entire American system is considered racist and unjust. The police are simply considered the enforcing arm of the larger systemically racist American sociopolitical structure. Supported policies, most notably the movement to defund the police, are an effort to weaken the power of the state’s preferred political weapon in maintaining the social inequity established by past actions and abuses committed under the premise of white supremacy.
Yet even this cannot account for the full breadth of unrest unleashed by the George Floyd incident. The United States is a country tenuously held together by several intertwining and intersecting ideologies. While the official binding philosophy is enshrined in the Constitution of the United States and the writings of the American founding fathers, nationalism (more commonly described as patriotism), Religion (Primarily Christianity), and capitalism have historically been accompanying, and most often, closely associated binding ideologies that help maintain the existing social order. Due to the various failures of the system, guided by these philosophies, to guarantee the conditions that produce an adequately just society, the aggrieved and their allies have adopted various leftist counter-ideologies that range from Marxist-Communism to Anarchism. These counter-ideologies have been instrumental in making moral sense out of rage produced by social asymmetry.
Thus, the social system is considered unfair, and ultimately illegitimate by many who align themselves with racial justice initiatives and BLM objectives. However, there are other factions within the social system that, while they bear some ideological differences, hold their contempt for the status quo in common. In fact, in the U.S. today, radical factions in opposition to facets of the system are numerous, and span the political spectrum, from leftist anarchist groups such as Antifa to the right-wing conspiracy cult, Q-Anon. Because of this, the U.S. social order is under constant threat of active hostility from one or more of these factions. And whenever one initiates a campaign against it, many of the others often follow suit.
Such is the cause of the establishment of the CHAZ – later known as the CHOP, is Seattle, WA. When compared to other historical examples of popular seizure of sovereign territory, such as France’s June Rebellion in 1832 and the Paris Commune of 1871, the CHOP seems like a farce. In a way, it was. The zone itself, while initially established as an autonomous police-free zone, was expected by its new residents to be a ground zero for a revolution on American soil, upending racial antagonisms, abolishing sexism, and reorganizing material assets in a socially just manner along egalitarian anarchist lines. However, the distaste for hierarchies led to a dearth of coordination, the establishment of clear goals, and the absence of clear leadership, that rendered this would-be Bethlehem of social revolution inviable.[5] Yet the overarching theme of the CHOP itself spoke volumes on far-leftist opposition to the nationalist, religious, and capitalist ideologies that structure American identity, along with calling the justice of the U.S. Constitution into question. While the CHOP failed miserably as a revolutionary front, it succeeded in articulating the basis for left-wing popular opposition to the American status quo. Again, in this case, the removal of police was not the end, but the anticipated beginning of further political change.
“Moderates” and Other Useful Idiots: Public and Political Reaction
While the facts and data regarding the civil unrest of the 2020 riots are plain and objective information, its nature and quality, just like all historical events, is a matter of interpretation. This interpretation is both a sign of our times and a guidepost for future thought and action.
In the political realm, power is centralized and explicitly and visibly exercised on the institutional level. Such institutions, primarily the government, are responsible for regulating and directing society. The government’s monopoly of violence is the backbone of government power, as its role is to regulate and direct society through the means of fear, force, and fraud, behaviors that are either frowned upon or expressly forbidden to the rest of the public. Thus, the limits of its ability to exercise that violence, or to halt its practice by others, is the limit of the government itself.
When unrest began, police initially utilized aggressive anti-riot tactics to disperse violent and peaceful demonstrations alike, drawing criticism from the general public and inciting further anger. As a result, Law Enforcement Agencies were compelled to revert to more passive tactics, often standing down in the face of hostility, or even “taking a knee” along with protesters – this author agrees that this ostensible gesture of solidarity was nothing more than “copaganda”. By the middle of the summer, when Jacob Blake was shot, police often stood out of the way of protesters, especially in the face of outright destruction and mayhem, exemplified by the Kenosha riots.[6] As mentioned before, the timidity of government and law enforcement agencies to crush this apparent uprising is most clearly marked by activists’ establishment of the CHOP in Seattle, WA, where authorities were cleared, and occupiers went so far as to extort tax businesses that continued to operate there.[7] As much of a joke as the CHOP was, its transient success was symbolic of the limited capabilities of the use of government force.
The impotence of government is further marked by the sheepish and hollow positions taken by politicians on the state and federal levels. The President is forbidden to deploy federal troops to any state without the express request of that state’s Governor or legislative body.[8] Constitutionally, therefore, the response from Washington amounted to nothing more than partisan pandering to their voter bases. While Republican officials rattled sabers and bemoaned the supposed unwillingness of states – primarily blue states – to quell unrest, Democratic politicians tended to legitimize protests against racial injustice, while tepidly criticizing destruction, often dismissing violence as marginal, isolated incidents within the scope of a mostly peaceful movement. New York representative, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez even once endorsed rioting, saying, some communities, “have no choice but to riot.”[9] Governors themselves varied in the extent of their response, with even the Mayor of Seattle marching with protesters, before those very activists increased their intensity, attacked federal buildings – again, not police – and seized control of several city blocks. The pitiful response displayed by the government reflects its ultimate dependency on public obedience. Government response was limited to damage control. For individual politicians, it meant exploiting it.
The weakness of political power to restore order, and let the fire burn out, so to speak, reflects its inferior position in relation to the decentralized power rooted throughout people and their culture, from which it draws its own strength and legitimacy. While manifestations of centralized power can gain the upper hand in the state without honest consent, this always relies on effective propaganda or the potential for ruthless and overwhelming force, i.e. Nazi Germany. Neither of these were at the disposal of the U.S. government, as made clear by the impunity enjoyed by even rioters, and the fact that legions of supporters of demonstrators and other activists at least sympathized with counter-ideological objectives. In any case, they were not beholden to the ideologies associated with the faith, flag, and free market ideologies associated with the American ideological structure rests.
Supporters of the unrest, like officials, dismissed the focus on the violence as an attempt to distract from the essentially peaceful nature of the protests. While this is probably true to some degree, rebukes of violent civil disorder were lukewarm, at best, where left-leaning advocates would grudgingly acknowledge destruction in one breath, before enthusiastically pointing out the majority of non-violent demonstrations. This is a strange matter, since one would think anyone invested in the integrity of any movement would try to ardently condemn and dissociate with destructive wing-nuts on the fringes, but they don’t. Instead, they downplay their actions, or even attempt to justify them by saying things like, “This is only way they can get your attention”.
This type of behavior, espoused by left-leaning America and parroted by opportunistic Democrat politicians desperately trying to navigate the political tightrope, reveals these apparently rational moderates as a vast army of useful idiots in service of the left-wing crusade to upend the prevailing social order. Sam Harris, on the subject of religion, aptly pointed out how religious moderates provide cover for religious fundamentalists.[10] This is just as true in this case, where the quiet dismissal of nationwide rioting, plunder, and murder was, more or less, excused by sympathetic bleeding hearts who implicitly invoked the soft racism of double standards when they justified the rioter’s moral grounds for their transgressions against life and property, while viciously condemning fairly limited and local actions of private citizens to defend it in the wake of Law Enforcement retreat, starkly exemplified by the Kyle Rittenhouse incident in Kenosha, WI.
The useful idiots fail to understand the contradiction between condemning violence and oppression on the one hand to their “vocal endorsement of actions that are manifestly aggressive toward other people” on the other. This latter part employs the practice of “repressive tolerance”, a revolutionary tactic coined by Herbert Marcuse.[11] This hypocritical standpoint is just a justification for the suppression of dissent, made palatable for self-identified progressives and leftist revolutionaries. The willful acceptance of this double-standard has proven very effective for social control. And, since there is plenty of reward for taking the bait, millions happily allow themselves to be duped, say 2+2=5, and avoid any of the pain associated with ever having to face their own hypocrisy.
It may be easy to see this as a terrible moment in history where the public is evidently succumbing to a cancerous ideology hellbent on rotting civilization from the inside out. But the truth is that people have always been irrational animals with a strong capacity for illusion. Ideologies, whether they unite people, or justify actions that would otherwise feel, or at least be seen by others as wrong, function as a sort of defense mechanism. Ideology, in this case, progressive, Marxist, or anarchist paradigms, serve the function of restructuring society along class lines (a common trait in late-stage organized societies), which subvert the older ideologies initially employed to bind the group together. It is no secret that the United States has its fair share of present and historical transgressions under its belt, and the present ideological counter-culture acts as the rally point for concerted effort to rectify material inequities. This is precisely what the 2020 unrest was about. Police brutality was only the pretext for the initiation of action for the realization of more overarching goals supported by a collage of leftist political positions, ranging from sheepish half-measures to the total restructuring of the exiting social order.
[1] https://policeepi.uic.edu/u-s-data-on-police-shootings-and-violence/#:~:text=250%2C000%20An%20estimated%20250%2C000%20civilian,in%20the%20U.S.%20each%20year.
[2] https://fee.org/articles/george-floyd-riots-caused-record-setting-2-billion-in-damage-new-report-says-here-s-why-the-true-cost-is-even-higher/
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/31/americans-killed-protests-political-unrest-acled
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jun/01/george-floyd-riots-violence-damage-property-police-brutality
[5] https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/black-rose-rosa-negra-seattle-chop-analysis
[7] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/city-and-spd-leadership-failures-amplified-chop-dangers-report-says/#:~:text=Police%20said%20during%20a%20June,after%20one%20attempt%20was%20thwarted.
[8] https://policy.defense.gov/portals/11/documents/hdasa/references/insurrection_act.pdf
[9] https://www.businessinsider.com/ocasio-cortez-says-some-communities-no-choice-riot-2019-7
[10] https://www.samharris.org/blog/the-virus-of-religious-moderation
[11] https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100414515#:~:text=Repressive%20tolerance%2C%20Marcuse%20argues%2C%20takes,might%20be%20seen%20as%20an