Virginia Worker Editorial Board Member Sal Rojo reflects four years on from the massive George Floyd Uprising in 2020 and how quickly it was contained by the state, capitalist parties and their networks of nonprofit organizations
“workers were losing their age-long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed them and began… I shall not say to understand, but to sense the necessity for collective resistance, definitely abandoning their slavish submission to the authorities. But this was, nevertheless, more in the nature of outbursts of desperation and vengeance than of struggle“
What is to be Done? V.I. Lenin
Only a few years ago the US was rocked by massive protests and rioting triggered by Minneapolis police killing a Black worker named George Floyd. For many this was seen as the beginning of the revolution. The demand for abolishing the police was initially accepted by Minneapolis city politicians, police precincts were burned to the ground, in cities like Portland protestors had taken over entire sections of the city in their “autonomous zones”. The mass sentiment was in favor of rebellion over racial injustice and Black Lives Matter was the slogan which they rallied around. So how did we move so quickly from this militancy to the tepid consumption of Black History Month displays at local Target stores selling Black business trinkets manufactured by Chinese workers?
As Lenin correctly analyzed in “What is to be Done?” spontaneous mass rioting and protesting always leads back to the normalization and cooptation by liberal society and governance if such movements are left to their own devices. What is now substantially different from Lenin’s Tsarist Russia and in the US in 2024 is the vast network of nonprofit organizations funded by and channeled through liberal bourgeois philanthropists and their Democratic Party with The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation being the pinnacle example.
These organizations and their ideology were already in place prior to the George Floyd uprising. The uprising gave them the advantage to assume leadership over it and steer it back ultimately to the election of Joe Biden. It’s where all militancy was killed and a new generation of grifters were propped up to sell vacuous books, programs, and lectures on how we all can engage, as individuals, in practices of not being “oppressive” while nothing materially changed with the socio-economic system of capitalism (which caused Floyd’s death in the first place).
Now workers are faced with employer-mandated DEI trainings which pin the problems of oppression on the individual thoughts and behaviors of those with no political power in a system which perpetuates the very things these indoctrination sessions claim they are addressing. A sleight of hand by the ruling class to present themselves as if doing anything substantial to address the issue. Instead they’re recruiting a few more people out of the masses into these supervisory roles to manage such hollow campaigns while being paid off for it as hype men to keep up the charade.
January 6th was a blessing for the big bourgeoisie which had come to see Trump and his middle class malcontents as a threat to the stability of their machinations. His supporters had rejected from the right the NGOs, the Democrat Party and their sugar coated bullets promising racial justice. It was the ideal boogeyman for the leftwing of capital to fearmonger to the masses that Trumpists would institute a fascist regime. It easily subsumed the antifascist trend which cropped up under Trump as president, just as the antiwar movement under Bush II was destroyed with the election of Obama. It should be painfully obvious that any mass protesting triggered by the actions of either the state or capital will inevitably be driven back into the fold of the bourgeoisie. So what must be done to break this boom-bust cycle?
Again, as Lenin argued in “What is to be Done?” it is the job of marxists to inject class consciousness and organization into these mass movements and contend for leadership against the liberal networks which have vastly more resources and infrastructure to outmaneuver and isolate us. Their weaponization of identity has become normalized to achieve their ends so much so that the slogan of “listen to X identity” has become a catechism among many, resulting in a thought terminating cliche. A commonality we share from Lenin’s time is the persistent problem of those within our tendency who constantly seek to either consciously or unconsciously tail and liquidate into those forces which work to destroy any basis for a revolutionary politics.
The primary tasks for us remains 1) to rebuild mass worker organizations and 2) to rebuild independent working class politics and a party in order to effectively break the organizational and ideological stranglehold liberalism has over the working class and masses. Only on such a footing can the material issues of Black workers and all workers be fundamentally resolved.
The Virginia Worker 
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