The protests changed me in a lot of ways. One way was, I was by no means a class reductionist before. But the protests really woke me up to the real struggles of oppressed communities in the US and importantly, the revolutionary potential in those communities. I remember listening to Rev Left in my car and had to pull over for a minute to absorb it when Breht said something to the effect of “what did white socialists in America ever give us?! Bernie Sanders!? Fuck that! The real revolutionary potential is with oppressed communities.”
The thing that really made me a Leninist over less-centralised tendencies was Occupy. There was a revolutionary moment unlike anything for a generation. All the conditions were there and it came down to how capable the left was at organising around them. Instead of anything coming of that, it was a disorganised mess where the mass unrest was generic enough for liberals to hijack and recuperate. While I get the safety of anonymity and leaderless resistance, the lack of discipline and theoretical foundation to the kind of movement that creates is very self-sabotaging in that it limits the potential to capitalise on messaging or strategy in any kind of coherent way.
BLM immediately struck me as repeating the same problems. You could amass people in the streets but couldn’t direct them toward a singular goal or use the success of that goal to pursue a larger one. There were slogans but they were generic enough that they were recuperated into a culture war between black lives matter and all lives matter. Without some kind of proper vanguard, only one cause brought people out into the streets and only with inciting incidents. Because it wasn’t overtly socialist that cause didn’t seize on the moment to become a wider economic protest in response to COVID’s collapse. The reform-the-police wing turned it into a circus- at the Denver protest I remember a white furry setting up a booth right outside of the speaking area and they weren’t discussing race relations- which only served to empower the liberals now mirroring the MAGA line word-for-word. Even when real gains were achieved, a chunk of Seattle under people’s control, it became hippies planting community gardens instead of the militias calling for repeat seizures.
As it flares up again, it keeps the issue of civil rights in my mind but I have less faith now than I did in 2020 than I did after Ferguson. Some people will break windows, cops will attack them, liberals will defend and increase funding to the cops, the weakest reforms will be demanded by some people in response to them and then probably shot down by the democrats because they own the businesses with broken windows and prize those windows over black lives. That contradiction calls for something more that I don’t see BLM being able to pivot to in its current form.