The vice mayor of a tiny Southern California city is under fire after appearing to call on street gangs to organize in the face of immigration sweeps by federal agents in Los Angeles.
damn, she sounds cool as hell lmao. pretty hardcore to call out the local gangs for cowardice at not standing up to the federal thugs.
I seem to recall a lot of “gangs” in the US originate from minority ethnic community defence organizations, to push back against particularly egregious mistreatment by the hegemonic political project, right? I mean, they thrive because our security apparatus serves capital, not communities.
not saying that gang leaders are heroes of the working class and champions of the oppressed, but the distinction between them and the thugs with badges can get blurry here.
God I will butcher it, but I remember someone asking about the revolutionary potential of gangs in the US. They asked it as politely as can be and got a pessimistic response. Why did they think the revolutionary potential low? I don’t have a clue. I didn’t think it would come up again
I still remember a thread where someone was talking about the revolutionary potential of modern lumpen making “lumpenproletariat” not a great class distinction, and one of the top comments was some snide “Lumpen drug runners aren’t gunna’ help us do communism, dude.” Oh really? Why not? Seems like the people forced out of any “legal” means of selling their labor to survive would be primed for revolution. To me a lot of that thread read like hexbears with unexamined classism and even unintentional and unexamined racism. So-called “gang-affiliated” “criminals” are more often just members of ad-hoc organizations within marginalized communities struggling to survive within a system that wants to see them be literal slaves or cease to exist. Liberals spit on these “gang members” meanwhile white supremacist gangs are called “cops” and liberals honor them at every opportunity and expect complete deference to them. Most “gangs” may not be at all Marxist yet, but they have extremely high revolutionary potential.
The line I hear is that organized crime is likely to follow the money, and since the capitalists have more money, they could be too easily bought off and used as a contra-like force against a revolutionary movement.
I’ve wondered if something like that might be done to Mexico at some point with their cartels.
Mexico’s cartels are basically CIA proxies and have been for a long time. They coordinated very closely with the DFS and their various rebrands which were in turn a way for the CIA to operate without having to use their own agents. They did the shady shit they didn’t even want Mexican feds to do, and that’s a scary fucking bar.
The cartels have a lot of money and a lot of power on the ground, but it’s suspicious as hell that they keep on the cutting edge of CIA insurgency tactics, supply chains, drone warfare, hacking and even psyops to this day. They also conveniently strike exactly where and when the US government would like, as in the case of the new Culiacanazo around the national elections.
In Latin America, these organizations are very, very reactionary, and the US continually plays a role in keeping them that way. Within the US, I really don’t know, but it’s very telling that there’s rarely any prosecution of traffickers in the way Latin America continually has to do. Yet the flow of drugs remains the same, and they keep getting sold in US streets and the money laundered in US banks.
Are we really supposed to believe that US corporations are in control of every market in the world but the richest and most powerful criminal organizations and their leadership are all abroad? CIA most likely advises against disruption because the biggest US gangs are in their pocket too.
I think that is a valid concern and analysis, but I also think it has a lot to do with where in the hierarchy of the organization an individual is. As with labor aristocracy in the proletariat, there are those whose class interests will still align with the capitalists, but the low-level street gangs don’t really fall into that kind of category and the majority of the people comprising the larger organizations are still working class grunts, doing what they can to eke out a living. Part of the problem is the broad meaning of “gang,” and the use of “criminal” as a catch-all for anyone who is operating outside bourgeois law. If we’re talking about the giant cartels and the people who run them, they are just another part of the capitalist machine, filling a particular niche in the corporate ecosystem and even serving a particular political purpose for the capitalist class as a whole. Of course they will follow the money. Even though smaller local gangs may end up ultimately working for the cartels out of necessity, just as regular workers need to sell their labor to “legitimate” capital, they can’t be lumped in as part of the same class as the cartel management. Like came_apart_at_Kmart was saying (or asking)
a lot of “gangs” in the US originate from minority ethnic community defence organizations, to push back against particularly egregious mistreatment by the hegemonic political project
That’s close to being the definition of the kind of people who are ripe for radicalization. So when we hear the line “organized crime is likely to follow the money” we still have to ask “who exactly are we talking about within ‘organized crime’?”
Most of the gangs in and around LA are remnants of the Black Panther Party. After the BPP was undermined and killed off, splintered factions broke off trying to rebuild, but ended up descending more and more into crime. The original Crips were formed to protect themselves from cops and eventually these offshoots of the BPP, who (by the 1970s) had become little more than bandits.
Most of the gangs in and around LA are remnants of the Black Panther Party
Source? the crips formed during the decline of the BPP but not directly from remnants, bloods/piru formed in reaction to crips, surenos, nortenos, Asian boys, tiny rascals didn’t
Nazi lowriders, PEN1 really didn’t
A lot of these groups were effectively deputised into the local distribution arm of the CIA through people like Freeway Rick Ross
damn, she sounds cool as hell lmao. pretty hardcore to call out the local gangs for cowardice at not standing up to the federal thugs.
I seem to recall a lot of “gangs” in the US originate from minority ethnic community defence organizations, to push back against particularly egregious mistreatment by the hegemonic political project, right? I mean, they thrive because our security apparatus serves capital, not communities.
not saying that gang leaders are heroes of the working class and champions of the oppressed, but the distinction between them and the thugs with badges can get blurry here.
God I will butcher it, but I remember someone asking about the revolutionary potential of gangs in the US. They asked it as politely as can be and got a pessimistic response. Why did they think the revolutionary potential low? I don’t have a clue. I didn’t think it would come up again
I still remember a thread where someone was talking about the revolutionary potential of modern lumpen making “lumpenproletariat” not a great class distinction, and one of the top comments was some snide “Lumpen drug runners aren’t gunna’ help us do communism, dude.” Oh really? Why not? Seems like the people forced out of any “legal” means of selling their labor to survive would be primed for revolution. To me a lot of that thread read like hexbears with unexamined classism and even unintentional and unexamined racism. So-called “gang-affiliated” “criminals” are more often just members of ad-hoc organizations within marginalized communities struggling to survive within a system that wants to see them be literal slaves or cease to exist. Liberals spit on these “gang members” meanwhile white supremacist gangs are called “cops” and liberals honor them at every opportunity and expect complete deference to them. Most “gangs” may not be at all Marxist yet, but they have extremely high revolutionary potential.
The line I hear is that organized crime is likely to follow the money, and since the capitalists have more money, they could be too easily bought off and used as a contra-like force against a revolutionary movement.
I’ve wondered if something like that might be done to Mexico at some point with their cartels.
Mexico’s cartels are basically CIA proxies and have been for a long time. They coordinated very closely with the DFS and their various rebrands which were in turn a way for the CIA to operate without having to use their own agents. They did the shady shit they didn’t even want Mexican feds to do, and that’s a scary fucking bar.
The cartels have a lot of money and a lot of power on the ground, but it’s suspicious as hell that they keep on the cutting edge of CIA insurgency tactics, supply chains, drone warfare, hacking and even psyops to this day. They also conveniently strike exactly where and when the US government would like, as in the case of the new Culiacanazo around the national elections.
In Latin America, these organizations are very, very reactionary, and the US continually plays a role in keeping them that way. Within the US, I really don’t know, but it’s very telling that there’s rarely any prosecution of traffickers in the way Latin America continually has to do. Yet the flow of drugs remains the same, and they keep getting sold in US streets and the money laundered in US banks.
Are we really supposed to believe that US corporations are in control of every market in the world but the richest and most powerful criminal organizations and their leadership are all abroad? CIA most likely advises against disruption because the biggest US gangs are in their pocket too.
I think that is a valid concern and analysis, but I also think it has a lot to do with where in the hierarchy of the organization an individual is. As with labor aristocracy in the proletariat, there are those whose class interests will still align with the capitalists, but the low-level street gangs don’t really fall into that kind of category and the majority of the people comprising the larger organizations are still working class grunts, doing what they can to eke out a living. Part of the problem is the broad meaning of “gang,” and the use of “criminal” as a catch-all for anyone who is operating outside bourgeois law. If we’re talking about the giant cartels and the people who run them, they are just another part of the capitalist machine, filling a particular niche in the corporate ecosystem and even serving a particular political purpose for the capitalist class as a whole. Of course they will follow the money. Even though smaller local gangs may end up ultimately working for the cartels out of necessity, just as regular workers need to sell their labor to “legitimate” capital, they can’t be lumped in as part of the same class as the cartel management. Like came_apart_at_Kmart was saying (or asking)
That’s close to being the definition of the kind of people who are ripe for radicalization. So when we hear the line “organized crime is likely to follow the money” we still have to ask “who exactly are we talking about within ‘organized crime’?”
Most of the gangs in and around LA are remnants of the Black Panther Party. After the BPP was undermined and killed off, splintered factions broke off trying to rebuild, but ended up descending more and more into crime. The original Crips were formed to protect themselves from cops and eventually these offshoots of the BPP, who (by the 1970s) had become little more than bandits.
Source? the crips formed during the decline of the BPP but not directly from remnants, bloods/piru formed in reaction to crips, surenos, nortenos, Asian boys, tiny rascals didn’t
Nazi lowriders, PEN1 really didn’t
A lot of these groups were effectively deputised into the local distribution arm of the CIA through people like Freeway Rick Ross