Black Proletarians Rioting in Florida

All the political commentators agreed in describing the riots that shocked the US last May as the most serious demonstration of proletarian wrath since the late ‘60s.

In Liberty City, a black ghetto in Miami, Florida, the escalating clashes between blacks and policemen caused 15 deaths and 400 injured as about 300 blacks were ultimately arrested.

Riots in Liberty City – a very fitting name for a ghetto! – are nothing but a link of the lengthy chain of racial violence that has periodically shocked the country this century. The most important were in St. Louis in 1919, Detroit in 1945 and, during the second half of the ‘60s, in most of American cities.

It was the ‘60s riots that had the pseudo‑left debating the African American question, as it was called at the time.

Floods of words were written as the publishing industry turned it into a big business. Multitudes of solutions resulted from the strenuous efforts of multitudes of debaters. The resolution of the issue came thanks to President Johnson, promoter extraordinaire of the Indochina’s bloodbaths. His laws ultimately appointed equal civil rights to black and white citizens as every sincere democratic in the world breathed a sigh of relief. A couple of slaps on America’s wrist, deemed a bit imperialist and racist but still sincerely democratic, were just enough as there was to be pleased with the ability peculiar to any democracy to improve the living condition of the communities momentarily excluded from benefiting from «national welfare».

Reforms, that is the true solution of the problem!

Today, ten years later, even the most eccentric sociologist can tell that the living and working conditions for most African Americans haven’t improved in the slightest and, in fact, we claim that they have gotten even worse.

A claim that is comforted by statistics that are shedding a light on the huge mass of unemployed workers in the US. And by the certainty that, whenever labour power is expelled from the production process, it is always the weakest part of the proletariat that gets the boot. In the US, it is certainly black people that are the least protected by the political and union apparatus.

We don’t need to remind the conditions of extreme poverty and brutalization ghetto inhabitants are subjected to as rats run around freely in their rundown accommodations and gangs of young unemployed and lumpen hunt each other.

Whether they are mystified by using appellatives such as “race wars” or not, the riots that took place in American ghettos are authentic outbreaks of class struggle.

In any case, American sociologists and Italian “marxologists” are masters at echoing those who trace every event that is unsettling the social order back to a clash between ethnicities or groups of people identified, for the lack of a better word, as “deviants” out of society’s control. Then, they proceed to demonstrate how the democratic game is ultimately able to correct said frictions. Howerer, it is always the National Guard that suppresses the riots by shooting blacks on sight.

Politicians, learning the lesson from sociologists and from the events, hastily push for law reforms as soon as waters calm down. It has to be kept in mind that these are surely not meant to improve the existing conditions of the black proletariat but only to appease the legal status of the petite and middle black bourgeoisie. At the same time, they are meant to reward the hard hat behaviour of black executives that did their best to cool the feistiest tempers down or, even better, that identified riots’ leaders to police.

By the old but effective “divide et impera” tactic the American bourgeoisie has and always will have a field day against the black proletariat as long as the metropolitan proletariat, without any race distinction, won’t be able to lead the way so that any proletarian riot can actually have productive results for the cause of the international proletariat.

Unfortunately, given the current state of affairs, the domination of bourgeois society is such and so that capital was not only able to make two workers of the same factory compete against each other but it also made the black proletarian compete against the white one by using wage differentials policies.

That is why American capitalism, with all of its economical problems such as the monetary (productive crisis and unemployment) and political crises (such as the Iranian and Afghan ones), has always been able at first to contain any riot that has broken out, proceeding then to extinguish the fire of class struggle. Therefore, its domination over the metropolitan proletariat remains intact.

The mistakes of the so called “black movement” ideologists originate from said disunity. These mistakes come from their inability to free themselves from the perspective of black nationalism which, in some cases, assumes the features of actual inverted racism.

There are mistakes tied to localism caused by the inability of the perspective of the movement to move past the walls of the ghetto. At the same time, there is the incapacity to go past the barrier of the concept of democracy and integration in the bourgeois society.

Are all of these mistakes attributable to the black proletariat or are they caused by the historical retardation of the western and generally light skinned proletariat?

Since the times of the Third International, has some other voice been raised outside of ours, unfortunately so distant and feeble, to show the right perspective to all the American proletariat?

It has been said a lot about a better collaboration between the white and black proletariat but ultimately blacks are generally even excluded from any union that is not “black”.

Revolutionaries know that only in the Communist Party it is possible to break the barriers of race, gender and social class that are at the same time products and manufacturers of the capitalist mode of production.

But this conclusion cannot be reached spontaneously by the class but only as the result of prolonged and often harsh class struggles as long as the Communist Party is able to employ its decisive influence on the process.

We are rejoiced by the bursting fury of the young and defenseless black proletariat but we need to work, even obscurely and from distance, so that the future riots that are to be expected can solder with the resurgence of the international proletarian movement. That is in the perspective, peculiar to all communists, of overthrowing the capitalist regime to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat whose regime is the only one able to correct any contradiction between nationality and race on a global scale.