Friday, November 11, 2011

The Riots are Coming





In a set of comments to a text by Brian Holmes over at the occupyeverything.org site, a mysterious "Jane" lets us in on a secret that is now, following the recent streetfights in Oakland -- battles that will, for better or worse, be continuing, with an increasingly radicalized occupation that, hardened by the relentless barrage of flashbang grenades, teargas and rubber bullets, knows that it can stand in the streets and bang with the most naked exhibition of state violence -- now out of the bag: the riots are coming.


"Austerity isn’t temporary, and it isn’t new — the current model has simply been moving toward the OECD and the US from what we used to call peripheral economies since the Seventies if not before. Or to put this all anther way: *the riots are coming*. Only in the US and perhaps Germany is that not totally obvious. They will come fitfully, and will of course appear to be about local and/or incoherent causes without any historical continuity or purposes, as in the banlieues and Tottenham. They will nonetheless be part of a great historical continuity, just as we can place the real and regional specifics of Tahrir and Pakistan and etc also within a historical continuity: the inability of the US-led regime to magnetize the globe toward its own interests."


And:


"So, in closing, I guess I could offer the following prĂ©cis: the political-economic question is not 'how do we get a better distribution of social surplus?' The real political-economic question is, 'What is one’s orientation toward the riots?' Being for or against them, for or against militancy, is a non-question. It is *already* a militant situation."


If there was any question as to the nature of the situation, the actions of the OPD and the other 17 -- and no less -- agencies involved in the attack on Oscar Grant Plaza and its expansion into the build environment have surely answered it for you: it is indeed a militant situation, and whatever the response of those implicated in the situation, the only answer the cops will have be bullets, rubber or live.


http://occupyeverything.org/2011/eat-the-rich/#comment-201

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