The mayor of Los Angeles grasped for justification after imposing a curfew last weekend, declaring that “violence and vandalism hurts all.” Woven throughout his trite, state-sanctioned rhetoric is the basic assumption that force against property can be equated with state violence.
However, violence against property is a farcical construction. You cannot suffocate a Target, starve a Chase Bank, shoot a Walgreens in the back, or beat a Wells Fargo to death. But these institutions have enormous wealth that they can bring to bear against the communities they inhabit. Target can donate $300,000 to Minneapolis to further its surveillance state; Chase Bank can work to deny homes to people of color in Oakland. Walgreens can take away healthcare its retirees depend on; Wells Fargo can systematically bar Black and Brown people from houses. Those actions, driven by capital, harm human life, brutalize communities, and reinforce oppressive hierarchies — forms of violence that make property damage pale in comparison.
This weekend, I watched protestors in Oakland break the windows of a Chase Bank and set it on fire. But in 2008, I also watched Chase Bank receive billions in taxpayer money after helping cause one of the largest economic crashes in history. As a result of that economic crisis, thousands of lives splintered into pieces and 10,000 people killed themselves. Yet I watched the financial executives who caused the meltdown walk away with a single arrest among them. I personally was not harmed because I am a member of the bourgeoisie, and that insulates me from the vicissitudes of capitalism. But millions were harmed and continue to suffer. If you believe that poverty is not violence, then I urge you to ask yourself what violence is.
Violence is the force of capital visited upon the people to create conditions of precarity. Capital can so easily plunge people into poverty, breaking them with jobs that extract long hours in exchange for simple survival. And poverty in turn brutalizes its inhabitants, dehumanizing them as they sacrifice their individuality to a faceless system that demands more cheap labor.
Vandalism, in this accounting, is not violence. It is force directed against institutions that exploit and oppress their communities, institutions that dehumanize the poor and marginalized with callous efficiency. Those sitting at home watching the past week’s protests see banks and former slave markets on fire and proclaim that peaceful protests are the most effective form of resistance. But a protest that the state approves of is not resistance; to them it is a temper tantrum, a parade with pretensions. The state does not value human life; it values capital. The way to draw its attention and force a response is not by politely pointing out how many Black and Brown people are murdered every year by the police; it is to bring force to bear on the brick and mortar of capital.
When the Minnesota Department of Public Safety tweets that they are waging urban warfare against protestors, they are fulfilling the words of Zak Cope, who wrote in 2015 that “fascism is imperialist repression turned inward.” Capitalism requires violence to maintain itself, abroad and at home. The movements of police on U.S. soil hinge on this simple fact. They wield tear gas, banned in international warfare, against their subjects. They fight to maintain racist hierarchies, and in the process killed over 1,000 people just last year. This is violence in its purest form.
Why, you might ask, do Black and Brown communities destroy capital? Are they not destroying their own buildings and spaces? Often, the answer is no — buildings may be destroyed, but people of color are far less likely to own those buildings than their White counterparts. The same goes with homes: As of 2017, Black home ownership sat at 43% nationwide, roughly the same rate it was in 1968 when the Fair Housing Act was passed. White home ownership in 2017, meanwhile, rested at 72.9%. In terms of pure capital, the net worth of a typical White family is on average 10 times greater than the worth of a Black family — $171,000 compared with only $17,150. According to a study conducted by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, Black Americans consistently struggle to access resources to start businesses and aggregate money. Black people do not functionally own capital in the United States.
What they have is labor value — a commodity that is relentlessly exploited by the police state. For example, Black people are imprisoned at five times the rate of White people in the United States, and once in prison, the 13th Amendment allows them to be put to work as slaves. The Clintons used Black slave labor during their time in the Arkansas governor’s mansion. George W. Bush took advantage of slavery to fuel his war machine. Black and Brown people have been systematically denied access to capital for as long as they have been in this nation, while their labor has been exploited by capitalism. When protests destroy banks, chain markets, and police stations, they do not destroy the Black and Brown community. These institutions were never a part of their community to begin with.
An argument for these institutions does not defend the spaces people of color inhabit; it defends capital’s self-interest. In this moment where the brutality of the American system is on full display, one can choose the side of capital or the side of human life. The former reduces individuals to “human capital stock.” It is painful to have nuance boiled away and to be accused of not caring if people live or die. But neither capitalism — nor the poverty it causes — cares about good intentions. Capitalism does not care whether people live.
Martin Luther King Jr. argued for nonviolence. But he also told us that “riots are the language of the unheard.” He spent his final campaign fighting against poverty — a campaign for which he would finally be murdered. You cannot tell the police officer that you will vote him out as he beats you into the ground. You cannot ask the capitalist politely for the money which they have looted from you. They have visited the violence of the state upon the people for centuries. Now, as they claim that the force being turned back against their capital is violence, the question becomes simple: Which side are you on? The protestors are choosing between the risk of a quick death from a pandemic and a slow death from the police state. Those who believe their use of force against brick and mortar is commensurate to the violence of the capitalist state have chosen the side of power and oppression.
Image source: Courtesy of Ben Roberts