Real Crimes and the Coming Violence

An alpine glacier as I flew towards Milan.

I just enjoyed a get-away to Europe for almost two weeks. I spent three days with Mona at her place in southern Switzerland where I hadn’t been for 20 years, and another three days in a small town in the Italian Alps with my old friend Giovanni, ending with a fun trip to the thermal baths and spa at San Pellegrino… Our politics have drifted far apart, but we still enjoy each other even when we argue for hours. The journey ended yesterday with Adriana and family in Lithuania for a celebration of her sister’s wedding and new baby. It was an odd trip to be sure!

Sunrise over Intragna, Switzerland.

I don’t go too long without the darkness of the Gaza genocide entering my mind. How is it that such a large majority of the world stands clearly against this horror and demands its immediate cessation, and yet the U.S. and Israel keep killing, keep doing what they are obviously doing—slaughtering, starving, and destroying the two million Palestinians in Gaza, and now beginning to expand that extermination campaign to the West Bank? How do most European powers and the propaganda organs masquerading as independent media keep supporting this? “Never again” is an insulting phrase now, when those who have shouted this the loudest and longest are now the ones carrying out precisely the ‘again’ that was never to be allowed by the world.

My words and thoughts on this are irrelevant, I know. I add my drop of water to the sea of opposition. I wish I had the power to affect the course of events. I wish I lived in a world where justice and fairness meant something. Of course in the U.S. it has always been proclaimed—and consistently violated in favor of power and money. The Trumpists have dropped any pretense about the rule of law, and are engaged in the fastest ever looting of the country in its long sordid history of plunder and rapacious exploitation. Not to mention their ramping up of organized thuggish violence in the streets combined with a rising number of disappearances. Are death squads about to start in the U.S.? Hard to believe it could get worse, but every day it does. It remains to be seen if there will still be elections, and if they will be free enough to take power away from these people.

We are well down the road to open, bald-faced fascism. The ICE troops being recruited and deployed, backed up by active military and National Guardsman, seem to be the kind of “good Germans” that made the Nazi death camps run. One protest sign I saw go by on social media asked simply “What Trump Order Will You Disobey?” That’s the question that hangs over us now as a Sword of Damocles. If the everyday soldiers being used as theatrical props right now don’t want to become actual murderers and pawns or even unwilling protagonists of this neo-fascist takeover, they’ll have to refuse to play along, and further, turn on their commanders who haven’t had the spine to stand up to these illegal orders. Mass protest will grow more difficult if and when they start savagely beating people for standing quietly with a sign, or chanting their opposition to this madness, or when they fill the expanding privately owned jails with people who turn their cameras on the illegal body snatchers… and so on.

And mass protest has felt so impotent for so long that it’s hard to muster the enthusiasm to turn out. At least since the Bush/Cheney crowd, and probably back to Reagan’s people, the strategy has been to simply ignore protest and pretend it doesn’t exist. The corporate media has generally gone along with this, reinforcing the power of the authorities to determine what is “news” and what isn’t. So marching around yelling at buildings has become a painfully empty ritual most of the time, at best amplified on social media reproducing its own bubble. There are occasional breakthroughs of course, and that’s why some people still turn out, in the hopes that it will have a wider impact. The Tesla Takedown protests did drive sales down worldwide and put a dent in Elon Musk’s aura, if not his wealth. Twenty-five years ago the WTO protest in Seattle did stop them from making many horrible trade deals that were on the table at the end of the 20th century. So what will we do now?

Had a nice yoga class along Lago Maggiore… what a view!

I had an idea to bring hundreds of rolls of toilet paper to an ICE protest and start tossing them over the troops to dramatize the point that “ICE is Shit!” And it may have the useful effect of embarrassing them, and even possibly slowing down their mobility as they have to move through endless streams of TP…. A modest and perhaps silly idea, but ridicule, disobedience, disrespect and anything that degrades their dignity and sense of self-righteousness is worth doing, chipping away at their morale bit by bit. Noncooperation, working to rule, slowdowns, feigned confusion, misplaced documents, typos, it’s all part of the process of grinding down the already inept and fragile system they’re trying to build.

A few recently read books speak to some of these issues. One by the recently deceased Joshua Clover I had on my shelf for several years and hadn’t yet read. When I heard he died a few months ago, I finally picked up Riot Strike Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (Verso: 2016) and I thought it quite interesting. Essentially he’s making a Marxist argument about how different kinds of social opposition corresponds to the stages of capitalist development. So riots, in his view, were prevalent in the period prior to industrialization, when the key issue that drove upheaval was prices in the market, especially for basic food items like bread.

The political practice in its fullest dimension is that of reproduction—of the household and the individual, of the local community. Around the turn from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, the matter of reproduction shifts its center of gravity from one location to another, one struggle to the next. (p. 15)

It shifts from the tussle over prices in the market to a struggle over the conditions and price of labor in factories. It doesn’t happen exactly at the beginning of the 1800s, but after the Luddites and other fights over the introduction of new labor-saving machinery and the rise of the factory, the strike emerges as the key form of fighting. This is not to say that riots disappear because they happen throughout history, but his point is that the two forms strike and riot each are grounded in different parts of the capitalist cycle:

Strike and riot are distinguished further as leading tactics within the generic categories of production and circulation struggles… a set of practices used by people when their reproduction is threatened. Strike and riot are practical struggles over reproduction within production and circulation respectively… The riot is a circulation struggle because both capital and its dispossessed have been driven to seek reproduction there. (p. 46) … It is precisely the transition from marketplace to workplace, from the price of goods to the price of labor power as the fulcrum of reproduction, that dictates the swing from riot to strike in the repertoire of collective action. (p. 69) … When the basis for capital’s survival shifts sufficiently to circulation, and the basis for the survival of the immiserated shifts much the same, there we shall find riot prime. It thus names … the leading form of collective action that corresponds to this situation. (p. 28)

Clover’s analysis dovetails with the work I cited in my last post from Nick Dyer-Witheford and his colleague on the “cybernetic circulation complex.” They argued that the burgeoning info-tech sector’s growth is predicated largely on an effort to radically increase the speed by which capital turns over in each cycle embodied in the production and consumption of commodities (M – C – M_1,Money-Commodity-More Money in Marxist terms). Countless analysts have argued for the past decades about the falling rate of profit and the resulting deindustrialization of the Global North, and how capital has retreated from productive investments into various speculative ventures to make money grow through asset appreciation (M – M₁). The enormous investments in infotech make little sense if seen only in terms of social media or advertising. The real role in capitalist terms of the information technology sector is to increase the speed by which capital invested in commodity production can return to its owner as increased value, a process that takes place primarily in the realm of circulation. Concurrently, working class people are thrown out of steady waged work into precarious dependency on an ever-shifting landscape of gig work, mostly in the service (or servile) economy. And this is where any collective effort to affect the price of goods turns to jello and slips away:

… the new riot discovers, as it goes to set the price of goods, that the economy as such has receded into planetary logistics and the global division of labor into the ether of finance. The police, however, are to be found on every corner. (p. 124)

And on that note we turn to the next book (though we’ll come back to Clover later). Alec Karakatsanis is a lawyer who has been fighting the “punishment bureaucracy” (as he calls what most people still insist is a “criminal justice system”) for many years now. He has won many cases, ended cash bail in some places, and is an astute observer of the propaganda systems that shape public opinion about policing. This is obviously important to understand in an era where everything from increasingly militarized local police to federal troops are being unleashed on cities across the country. All too many people staying home watching TV are spoonfed blatant propaganda about what cops do, what happens to people sucked into the so-called “criminal justice” system, and then once incarcerated, largely forgotten. Karakatsanis’s new book Copaganda: How Police and Media Manipulate Our News (New Press: 2025) is a fantastic tool to help combat the prevailing insanity.

… the volume of news stories on police-reported crime dwarfs their relative importance on any conceivable metric of objective global and domestic harm. Such a barrage of reporting affects which harmful things we feel emotionally terrified of and which harmful things we rarely think about. (p 39) … The content of daily news would be different if the bureaucrats who test lead levels in water or who inspect safety code violations or who teach children had the same PR budgets and connections to shape the conventional wisdom about a concept like “safety.” Shifting public resources from police PR to other government agencies that care for people would change whether and how the public thinks about the issues these other agencies address and could demonstrate the role that institutions other than the punishment bureaucracy play in improving community well-being. (p. 70)

In an era when masked goons, some employed by the federal government and unknown others freelancing as jackbooted thugs, are terrorizing our communities, and local police are either ignoring it or actively helping them, it seems inevitable that there will be major uprisings. It appears that the government wants a violent response to their aggressive lawlessness to justify it post-facto, and to give excuses for even greater levels of militarization. Somewhat less than half (at least) of the population apparently believes that having police and military in city streets is necessary for public safety (certainly that’s the line being hammered by the Trumpists). The longterm propaganda effect that leaves so many people believing that policing helps improve public safety is one of the the pillars of our new fascism. Karakatsanis reveals a simple fact that few people realize:

… when pushing the “police reduce crime” mantra, mainstream news outlets ignore the comprehensive 2017 meta-study—a study of all other studies—that … reviewed forty years of studies and concluded: “The effect on crime of adding or subtracting police is miniscule and not statistically significant.” (p. 116)

But so much of our current climate is driven by the unsupportable assertion that even if statistics show that crime is falling steadily in most categories and most cities, people don’t feel safe. No one is arguing that crime is nonexistent, but the reality is that walking around in most neighborhoods of most cities is remarkably safe, and safer now than it has been for years. Still, in San Francisco we had a campaign to recall progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin led by the demonstrably corrupt Brooke Jenkins, who was appointed by the corrupt Mayor to replace him after the recall was successful. (Read about this in depth in the excerpt from Copaganda we published on Foundsf.org at the link just above.) In a look at the election-night coverage in various media outlets, Karakatsanis explains the way the propaganda works:

… setting the tone for its two election-night articles, the pre-election article claimed that the district attorney’s “policies have taken much of the blame for what critics say is San Francisco’s passive response to rising crime.” This sentence belongs on the marble facade of the National Copaganda Museum and Gift Shop. It foists one false premise (crime is rising) on top of another false and incoherent premise (there has been a “passive response”). It does this not by asserting facts, but by quoting “critics” who are “saying” something. The article then declares, obliquely, that progressive policies “have taken the blame.” What a house of cards. Crime was not rising under the progressive district attorney, the policies he implemented have been shown in rigorous studies to reduce crime elsewhere, a response to something that was not happening cannot be called “passive,” and unnamed policies cannot be anonymously blamed for an occurrence that never occurs. (p. 196-197)

Yikes! Since I read this and long after he wrote it, Trump took over Washington D.C. on trumped-up claims of widespread crime and mayhem, but of course the cops and DEA and FBI and other federal agents mostly just mill around at heavily touristed sites. If they do go into the neighborhoods, they are met with angry neighbors who recognize what is going on and reject it, scolding the soldiers to leave (Dave Zirin had a good viral video of this on Instagram). In that Instagram clip the DEA agent half-heartedly tries to claim that he and his fellow gangsters are engaged in “community policing.” This is often introduced as a solution to police violence by the more progressive politicians in city government. But Karakatsanis knows this comes from decades of counterinsurgency theory and practice in various countries subjected to U.S., British, and French colonialism (the U.S. proving ground starting in 1898 was the Philippines for most of the 20th century).

Its goal is essentially to build allies among a targeted population to make at least some repressed people trust and support the colonial oppressor so that the oppressor can continue its profitable policies while minimizing unrest by recruiting ambassadors within the repressed community. (p. 256)

A very violent period is coming. Like it or not, it’s going to get ugly, whether by the fascist terror wreaking havoc or a series of urban riots that push those terrorists back into their holes. Joshua Clover smartly insists at the beginning of his book that an obsession with the “violence of the riot effectively obscures the daily, systematic, and ambient violence that stalks daily life for much of the world. The vision of a generally pacific sociality that only breaks into violence is an imaginary accessible only to some. For other—most—social violence is the norm.” (p. 12) But when we give our attention to spectacular violence of the form that happens in urban uprisings, provoked by police violence, Trumpist terror, or sheer desperation, we easily overlook the profound violence of the punishment bureaucracy that has already been terrorizing large swaths of our society for more than a century. Karakatsanis nails it:

This everyday violence is not as visible as the image of George Floyd being suffocated under the knee of a police officer. And although every major police department that I have researched has in recent years had systemic scandals of abuse, lying under oath, and coordinated coverups, all of that misconduct pales in comparison to the scope of the daily violence of standard lawful policing: one that subjects poor people to mass surveillance and harassment, takes billions of dollars in personal property through civil forfeiture, traps people in abusive jails, coerces plea deals, imposes harsh sentences with no connection to empirical evidence, separates individuals from friends and family, leaves pets to starve alone, and marks tens of millions with a criminal record that closes off opportunities for employment, health care, and housing. Police leaders do not want to talk about the everyday brutality of the punishment bureaucracy. (p. 259)

In The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, we learn about the burgeoning war and policing industries that have honed their chops by experimenting in the West Bank and Gaza, but this was written before the genocide began. The tight connection between U.S. and Israeli policies and interests, culminating now in one of the worst crimes ever committed in history, is a lot clearer when seen through the lens of this book’s brilliant analysis. Israeli secret agents and its military have long supported fascist militaries in Central and South America, and of course they had a long profitable relationship with apartheid South Africa. In each of these cases, the U.S. was the power behind the scenes pulling the Israeli strings. At this point, real events have rushed beyond Lowenstein’s book, but that doesn’t make it any less relevant to our theme in this blog post. In fact, towards the end of his pretty short volume, Lowenstein quotes a Canadian professor Ron Deibert, who stresses that what makes it especially difficult to resist the cyber surveillance industry and the terror campaigns it makes possible is the fact that “the world today is run by a transnational class of gangsters. That’s the way I think about it, like kleptocracy globally.” (p. 168)

It’s hardly a revelation at this point to recognize that we are living in a kleptocracy. Trump gleefully blackmails friends and foes just like a mafia don, shaking down governments, corporations, and even his supposed supporters. He and his offspring have raked in hundreds of millions on cryptocurrency tokens which are simply a modern ponzi scheme. And of course the Russian oligarchs were doing all this long before Trump gained political power. Now a substacker has published an account of how a former head of Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee Alnur Mussayev has just made a public declaration about how Putin controls Trump through having all sorts of documentary evidence of his many crimes, both financial crimes when he worked with Russian mafia to save his real estate deals, and video evidence of his pedophilia and sex crimes. I don’t know if it’s true and even if it is, we all wonder what the hell it will take to puncture the bizarre hold he has on his followers. Meanwhile the assembled cast of sadists and xenophobes, Xtian nationalists and gold-plated asskissers, continue to carry out the bidding of this semi-senile, addle-brained malignant narcissist who is only concerned with adding to his pile of gold while destroying anyone who has ever tried to bring him to a justice that will never be had…

The view back as we ascended the San Marco Pass.

On the plane during the long ride home, I watched an astonishing film made in Scotland called “On Falling.” It is a very slow film, showing in detail the life of an Amazon warehouse picker (without ever mentioning the company’s name, but it’s quite obvious), in this case a Portuguese immigrant, Aurora, in Scotland. The scene switches back and forth between her tedious barcode scanning hours at work and the lonely, empty life she’s leading at a shared apartment nearby. Scene after scene shows her eating a reheated meal during lunch breaks, doing her laundry, eating a white bread and cheese sandwich for dinner, speaking briefly with her Spanish housemate who while friendly enough, never has a moment to spare. Aurora eats alone, chewing slowly, occasionally sneaking potato chips or a treat from one of her flatmates as she struggles to pay for her electricity, the gasoline in the car her Portuguese friend drives her to work in, to fix her broken phone screen, etc. She is painfully lonely, and whenever she finally gets to converse with someone (her new Polish housemate, the woman who interviews her for a different job) she freezes up. Simple interactions with questions like “what are you doing tonight?” or “what do you enjoy doing when you’re not at work?” leave her muted and blank. She struggles with normal human interaction because she’s been so lonely and spends most of her “free” time in her isolation, staring at her phone, but without apparently ever talking to anyone, texting anyone, or having any past or present relationships that amount to anything. It is hard to watch at times, but finally I was mesmerized by the portrayal of the condition of a slice of today’s working class. The climax of the movie (spoiler alert) is a scene when the computers are out at work. Half the workers are boisterously playing cards in the breakroom, but Aurora walks into the warehouse to find a bunch of pickers playing together in a circle, batting a ball in the air and laughing. She joins in and has a light moment with coworkers she’s never spoken with, and the camera pans the dozen and a half workers, every race and gender, size and shape, stuck in the same dead-end world as our heroine.

I’ve been reading Bifo’s substack column for the last year, and this movie seemed to capture better than any other effort I’ve seen one of his recurrent themes: we have already begun to lose our humanity and our subjective sense of self to the electronic webs in which we’re stuck. Disconnected isolation that makes physical contact difficult and uncomfortable, the slow demise of sexual life, the narrow channels of “communication” that have replaced the rich open-ended possibilities that saturated earlier ways of living… I can’t say that I think we’ve entered this lonely panopticon entirely, but clearly it is pulling more and more people into its maw. This movie was the first honest portrayal I’ve seen in cinematic form.

In conclusion, more vacation photos!