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.
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’?”
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’?”