Considering the torrent of words the ruling class has used to express its horror, shock, and utter disbelief over the insurrection in Los Angeles that shook its rule to the very foundations, it's amazing how pitifully little attention has been given to the insurrection's effect worldwide.It took Bush himself to slightly draw the curtain. "I was embarrassed," he said in his nationwide television speech after his visit to the devastated area. Embarrassed?! This is a masterful understatement. An unprecedented humiliation is what it was.
Just a few weeks ago, Bush was the leading representative of the master class, the architect of the "new world order." This is the new order for not just the "free world" but the entire world. But the masses in Los Angeles have made the word "order" an irony.
A few weeks ago Bush was the executive who had ordered Desert Storm and the destruction of Iraq. His name aroused fear and apprehension all around the earth. Now Bush, the modern ruler hiding behind the armor of predatory militarism, stands naked. Like the emperor in the old folk tale, Bush has no clothes.
Bush and the ruling class he represents saw themselves as rulers not only of the Atlantic and Pacific but the Seven Seas. To the amazement of the whole world, the masses of Los Angeles in one unprecedented, utterly incredible social convulsion turned the Neptune of the Seven Seas into a sawdust Caesar.
Who will angry soldiers fight?
Now more than ever the combined officer corps of the Air Force, the Army, the Marines and the Navy will have to think twice about a new Desert Storm. They will have to pay attention to what Sen. Sam Nunn, the long-time chairperson of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said when Congress debated having a volunteer military.
Nunn warned that the white personnel of the armed services are diminishing while the Black and other "minorities," as he put it, are growing numerically larger. It is a consequence, he said, of the volunteer system, which he deprecated. He favored conscription instead.
But the Congress, aware of the anti-war sentiment sweeping the country at that time, turned down conscription. If the naval command now dares to think in terms of a genocidal Desert Storm kind of attack, they can conjure up the ghost of the Potemkin mutiny in addition to the Los Angeles insurrection. It is not a happy thought for the militarists.
For so many years the empire of finance capital has seemed invincible and unconquerable. Can the Los Angeles events affect U.S. worldwide military supremacy? Does the insurrection fundamentally change all this? Does it bring up, as though from the rearguard, an utterly new phenomenon, a heretofore unexposed vulnerability?
Rome's dependence on slavery
The ancient empire of Rome, with its military prowess, also seemed everlasting--as long as chattel slavery remained stable and endurable. Rome's great military feats, its artistic monuments, its aqueducts, theater, literature--all were possible as long as slavery endured.
But when slavery began to crumble, when an ever larger section of the patricians, the nobility, and other free people all lived off the labor of the slaves, rebellions took hold. Rome's might was possible only as long as slave rebellions could be contained, only as long as the slave system did not disintegrate.
For the U.S. empire, the Los Angeles insurrection has sounded the alarm bell. Although repressed with unmitigated force, with daily scurrilous attacks by a kept press which is free only to lie and to slander, the insurrection nevertheless lives on.
While the ruling class maintains a serene public face, this uprising has changed the agenda of their inner councils. They are now far more preoccupied with domestic affairs. International questions have been shoved way into the background.
Rarely has there been such an illustrious example of the relation between foreign and domestic politics. For foreign policy has been ever more an extension of domestic policy. Except in the historiography of the bourgeoisie, domestic politics always seem to be merely a reflection of quarrels within the ruling class. They appear to be affairs exclusively in the domain of the exploiters, involving the share of booty each would derive from the sweat and blood of the exploited.
But the rebellion adds a new dimension to the statement that foreign policy is an extension of the domestic struggle between the oppressors and oppressed, not just the struggle among the oppressors.
The Iraqi government swiftly caught the significance of the rebellious masses and their merciless repression by the combined forces of city, state and federal government. Iraq introduced in the UN Security Council a complaint against the U.S. for violation of human rights.
In doing so, Iraq rose from the humbled to the humbler, to the delight of the vast majority of the human race and even to many on the council itself. The Security Council had to accept the complaint, and even the U.S. delegate could not oppose it.
`We have problems at home'
None of this is altogether new. In the post-World War II period Walter Lippman was regarded by many in the capitalist establishment as the foremost writer articulating U.S. foreign policy. He could thereby also act as occasional critic. Lippman understood the foreign policy implications of the Watts rebellion of 1965.
After writing for more than two decades in the New York Herald Tribune exclusively on foreign affairs, Lippman was forced to publicly proclaim, "We now have problems at home. Our attention has to be drawn in that direction."
During the Johnson administration, there is no question that they attempted, through the projects known as the Great Society, to alleviate some of the most onerous and grossly discriminatory practices in order to better prosecute the Vietnam war at a time when the capitalist economy was rising. But no fundamental alteration in the general conditions for Black people took hold.
Executive, police power strengthened
The insurrection demonstrates to the hilt where the development of the governmental apparatus of the city administration of Los Angeles is going. As in the state and federal governments, the tendency is toward increased centralization, moving power away from the legislative branch and into the executive. The mayor's office--the executive branch--grows stronger and power shifts in time of crisis to the police and military.
The city council of Los Angeles has 15 members. Three are Black, three Latino and one Asian. Thus city council members from oppressed peoples constitute a formidable minority. Yet in times of a real crisis, the city council, even with such a heavy minority bloc, turns out to be utterly impotent. Scarcely any members give voice to the oppression of the people. Should any do so, the capitalist media barely take notice.
In every major city in the United States there has been a slow but undeviating tendency for the police power to grow stronger as the legislative branch grows weaker. More power is arrogated to the executive branch, which in turn strengthens the police power. This tendency is also evidenced in most European capital cities, but it is especially accentuated in the principal cities of the United States.
It's no accident that in cities like New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Los Angeles and San Francisco, the police and military forces of the cities grow while the legislative branches become mere talking shops. In times of crisis they fall into a complete torpor. And the mayor handily invokes emergency powers that in turn authorize the police to virtually act as an army of occupation.
They should have seen it coming
If in the weeks and months before the insurrection there was anyone who had an inkling of what was coming, it was the Los Angeles Times. This paper is the principal mouthpiece of the big-business community in California and one with a sprinkling of liberalism.
It dispatched staff writers Charisse Jones and Hector Tobar to live next door to each other for a month on the 900 block of West 53rd Street of South Central Los Angeles. There, said the Times, great changes were in full swing.
Jones reported on the experiences of Black people, while Tobar explored life for the neighborhood's Latinos. Their findings were published in the Feb. 16 and 17 Los Angeles Times.
The article on Feb. 16 purports to analyze a massive shift in population that had altered what it calls the "area's urban landscape" with new residents, Latinos. There are vivid descriptions of individual Latino households explaining how and why they migrated in such huge numbers to this area.
In recent years, it says, thousands of Latino immigrants had moved to West 53rd Street and its surrounding blocks, profoundly transforming the area's character.
"In little more than a decade, what was once the largest Black community in the western U.S. has become one of the nation's fastest growing Latino communities. By the turn of the century, experts say, Latinos will outnumber African Americans in South Los Angeles," said the Times.
A certain Reina Maldonado, resident of 53rd Street, said, "When we first came here, it was almost all Black people. Pretty soon it will be all Latino. And then you wonder who will be next to replace us. The Asians?"
The Times continues, "As the area's Black population slowly disappears, there is a feeling among some of the newly arrived Latinos of being pioneers and of creating something new."
`Black community disappears'
In the Feb. 17 edition, written by Charisse Jones, is basically the sad story of the Black residents whose community is slowly disappearing. It is obvious the reporters made an intensive study which demonstrated the massive shift of Latinos and the declining Black population. Despite this intensive effort, the result is superficial if not hollow.
The articles might have rung an alarm bell of the deteriorating economic situation. They might have warned of the oppressive character of the city and state governments, and most of all the police.
But not a word of this appeared in this very elaborate study. All one sees is a massive shift of population. Is that in and of itself the fundamental cause of the insurrection? Or is it the frustration arising from the monstrous repression by the police, the city government, and the state? Not a word of this is in the study.
There is nothing in the Times' articles on the economic situation of the Black people. How many are employed, unemployed, partly employed? How many middle class Black people are there? What are they doing?
Only after the rebellion, on May 11, does the Los Angeles Times condescend to inform its readers that Census Bureau figures of 1990 show that the income, employment and education of South Los Angeles fell below the city and county averages. In some cases the area was even below its level in 1965.
At 30 percent, the 1990 poverty rate for households in South Los Angeles was twice the rate for the city overall. That figure was nearly three times the national rate of 11 percent. It was also higher than during the 1965 Watts rebellion, when 27 percent of the area's households lived in poverty.
All this information was available after the 1990 census to city, state and federal governments. But they paid no attention.
Who are the criminal few?
Equally guilty is the kind of reporting done in the May 18 Newsweek, where we find that a small group of the "underclass" rioted and devastated the area while 30 million African Americans stayed home as orderly, law-abiding citizens. What a shameful fraud. What a lie.
It was exactly in this language that the reactionary writers and publicists for the absolutist monarchy described those who attacked the Bastille in the French Revolution and contrasted them to "the vast majority of law-abiding citizens."
It counterpoises what it calls a small criminal group to the vast majority. But the real small criminal group is the millionaires and billionaires, who are not at all orderly and law abiding but who rob, cheat, deceive and will use any artifice to maintain their superabundance of wealth and power and pursue the extraction of superprofits.
Insurrections throughout history
It is impossible to understand the nature and impact of the Los Angeles insurrection unless one considers that it is one of more than 200 rebellions reaching back to the days of slavery. Reporters Jones and Tobar try to divorce this relatively small community from the chain of historical evolution in the Black liberation struggle. This is impossible.
Just alluding to the 1965 Watts insurrection or the ones in Detroit, Newark and elsewhere is still inadequate. For a full-rounded exposition of the nature of the struggle, one has to view it in terms of class and national oppression. It is both a national liberation movement--a national struggle, to use the Leninist term--and a struggle against capitalist exploitation and imperialist oppression.
Without seeing this dual character of the struggle, one inevitably falls into the trap of confining it to petty reforms and patchwork solutions. Moreover, the white workers must fully awaken to their responsibilities. Otherwise, they will sink ever lower and absorb more of the blows of capitalist oppression and exploitation, adding to the problems rather than becoming, together with the Black, Latino and other oppressed people, part of the solution.