Ruling Class Mafias Divided On How to Repress LA Uprising

Opinion | Thomas G.

Nearly 5,000 national guards and Marines have so far been deployed to Los Angeles, adding to the hordes of local and state police forces unable to contain the uprisings sparked Friday in response to terror raids against migrant workers by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal officers.

“It doesn’t feel like the LA we all know and are familiar with, this feels like some sort of third world conflict zone,” a reporter with a local outlet of media monopoly NBC said, as protesters behind him shot fireworks at police from behind a flaming barricade.

The uprising has caused greater contention among the ruling class, which both sides hope to exploit for electoral gains. The Democrats claim that the Trump administration intentionally caused the uprising in order to increase his control, with Democrat California Governor Gavin Newsom saying “Donald Trump has created the conditions you see on your TV tonight.” LA Mayor Karen Bass argued that protesters are colluding with Trump to justify implementing a curfew “to stop bad actors who are taking advantage of the President’s chaotic escalation.”

The Republicans have in turn blamed the Democrats for letting the situation get out of hand, with Trump threatening to “have troops everywhere” and his defense secretary Pete Hegseth stating, “The governor of California has failed to protect his people, along with the mayor of Los Angeles” in justification for sending in the Marines to LA. They imply the Democrats are encouraging “lawlessness”, playing up the Democrat’s trafficking with mass movements and their token arrests at demonstrations.

The ruling class is responsible for provoking the masses, but the masses are responsible for their rebellions, and this is a good thing. The age-old tactic of the ruling class is to portray the justified rebellions of the masses as being caused by an alien force in an effort to divide them, and it is a symptom of the deepening political crisis that the two ruling mafias should blame each other for causing it.

Blaming each others’ parties plays into the hysteria of the electoral farce while at the same time diverting attention from the general crisis of imperialism, the basis of the underlying process of increased repression from the executive branch. This trend of reactionization is the political manifestation of the worsening economic crisis of overproduction, which it seeks to overcome by destroying its own productive forces. As the economic crisis intensifies, the ruling class has to resort to more vicious attacks against the working class in order to offset the effects of the crisis, with the terrorizing immigration raids directed at workplaces being a manifestation of this.

While the uprising has increased divisions among the ruling class in how to handle the rebellion, fundamentally they are united in their aim to crush it. The Democrats prefer to maintain their rule through a thousand counterinsurgency programs, policies, and NGOs combined with more selective state violence. The Republicans rely on “shock and awe” and what the Trump administration calls “peace through strength”, flaunting open terror in the hopes of submission. Their aims are the same—to disarm the masses and smash their rebellion.

Such contention has manifested even more clumsily in the state’s repressive forces. While LA Mayor Karen Bass has put on a show of opposing Trump’s deployment of armed forces, she actively utilizes them to repress the masses—not only in their coordination with local police forces, but also as a scapegoat to implement and indefinitely continue a curfew: “If there are raids that continue, if there are soldiers marching up and down our street, I would imagine that the curfew will continue.”

The LAPD chief stated in a press conference that LAPD “does not participate in or coordinate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement on civil immigration enforcement”, which he followed up by saying, “We want everyone to believe and be able to call the LAPD in time of need if they’ve been the victim of a crime or a witness to a crime. We need that, otherwise the system does not work.”

Clearly the rebelling masses do not believe the LAPD, evidenced in the fact that their system is not working. Regardless of LA’s “sanctuary city” status, LAPD is actively assisting and defending ICE; they are the ones standing between the masses and ICE and they are the ones allowing the ICE raids to continue. As the state increases its repression against the people, such counterinsurgency programs fall apart and the enemy becomes increasingly isolated. Repression breeds resistance, exposing the enemy. However, it must be capitalized by revolutionaries or else the energy is squandered and turned by revisionism and opportunism—the agents of the ruling class among the mass movements—into electoralism to prop up one faction of monopoly capital against another.

The Democrats and their assortment of opportunists and revisionists want the people to believe that things will only get worse if they rebel, but as things continue to get worse anyway, the masses inevitably reject such blackmail with explosive fury. They offer more comfortable shackles in exchange for compliance with their conditions of rule, an offer they do not extend to all, necessitating and justifying the violent rebellion of the deepest and most profound masses that aims not only for better conditions, but doing away with the oppressive and intolerable conditions to begin with. The most intense rebellions happen at the start of uprisings, when the masses take matters directly into their own hands, and before revisionism and opportunism have had the chance to capture the energy and set in motion their peace police.

The working class and the capitalist class are locked in an incessant battle that can only be overcome through revolutionary organization. The tactics of both mafias can temporarily succeed insofar as the masses are disorganized and under opportunist leadership. The programs of the Democrats aim to prevent the masses from uprising in the first place and disarming them from within while the Republicans aim to outlast and overpower the spontaneous uprising.

There is always a contradiction between spontaneous action and organization present in uprisings and mass movements in general. Organization is the key to outlasting and outmaneuvering the enemy, because through unified action a smaller force can overcome a bigger power. There is also a contradiction between revolutionary and opportunist leadership. Revolutionary leadership acts as a lever among the masses, organizing them to go as far as possible, increasingly outside the bounds of what is permitted by the ruling class in order to conquer their demands. Opportunist leadership hinders this, seeks to bring it back into the bounds of ruling class permissibility through pessimism, disorganization, electoralism, and reformism. Revolutionaries must aim to overcome disorganization and revisionism bite by bite, small victory by small victory in class combat, learning from the concrete experiences of the masses and educating them in it.

Rebelling does not always secure immediate demands, but demands can only be conquered through rebellion, and organization allows mass rebellion to last long enough to secure its aims.

Photo: Alleged ICE vehicle on fire in the beginning of the LA uprisings.

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