Notes from a Conversation Among Comrades on the George Floyd Protests: Lessons for Ourselves and Beyond

Two years have passed since the George Floyd protests were set off by the police murder of George Floyd, choked to death by police officer Derek Chauvin after being stopped for using counterfeit money at a convenience store. The murder of Floyd, recorded by witnesses, sparked mass anger about racially targeted brutality by the police, igniting protests in Minneapolis and soon after in many cities across America and the wider world. Quotes from the transcript below illustrate the difficult reality faced by those attempting to intervene in the situation; similar difficulties will likely continue to exist in engaging with similar protests in the future and in other locations. During the protests and in their aftermath, there was a significant hope internationally that the protests represented a political breakthrough. While there certainly were positive aspects to the large scale out-pouring during the protests, understanding the difficulties MLM organizers faced in engaging with the mobilizations may contribute to a more objective understanding of the situation. As in all matters we must “Cast Aside Illusions and Prepare to Struggle.”

In particular, organizers dealt with both significant challenges among the broader public involved in the struggles, as well as confusion among their own ranks. Protests overall were rapidly co-opted with the messaging of the U.S. ruling elite. Overall, the protests resulted in few sustained gains. However, through positive collective functioning, comrades were able to bring new activists into ongoing political work, and sharpen their own political understanding. Relatedly, in addition to the larger difficulties presented by the objective situation, comrades identified a lack of internal clarity about the wider situation among a few comrades as a key internal barrier, including a bias towards tailing spontaneity or harboring the illusion that the protests signified that the U.S. was fast approaching a revolutionary situation.

Certainly, the reflections in the transcript that follows these background remarks present a limited window into the upheavals that swelled throughout almost every American city and town during this period. However, they do represent something of a valuable perspective from organizers located in several major cities, several of whom traveled between sites during this time, including to cities of various sizes. In addition to the large protests and occupations covered in these accounts, there were myriad other mobilizations during this time, including more overtly Democratic Party run vigils and forums, although these are not delved into in this report. The barriers faced across locations were of a similar enough nature throughout as to indicate that there was a degree of political consistency at these protests across the country despite the particular variations in places and locales.

Background on the Outrage

While many in the U.S. and abroad were encouraged by the massive display of outrage, including by the fact that this was, numerically speaking, the largest protest movement in U.S. history, the movement had deep limitations which resulted in a major impasse for the movement, followed by a series of severe setbacks.

Causes

There have been ongoing protests for decades opposing the racist police brutality directed against African Americans and Latinos. Overall, the rate of fatalities from police violence among Blacks was 3.5 times higher than non-Latino whites from 1980-2009.¹ Since the late 1990s, the rate of police fatalities has generally increased across the board for all racial groups. The rate of police fatalities among Blacks declined from 1980-1990 before starting to rise again, while that among whites has increased steadily since 1980, though it remains less than 50% of the rate among African Americans.

Overall, a legacy of racism dating back to the period of slavery in America remains part of the system of class rule in the United States and plays out in many interactions with the police, both those that result in fatal violence and those that do not. In addition, the underlying economy has had a steadily increasing percentage of the population excluded from the workforce (not counted in official unemployment statistics which only count those who are actively filing for unemployment benefits from the government). Combined with the rising narcotization of the society, both through medically prescribed opioids and anti-depressants as well as the tolerance, tacit or explicit, by the state of non-regulated “illegal” drugs, a growing section of the population has been rendered essentially “non-persons” in the eyes of the state, and is treated by the police with contempt and as essentially expendable. This section of the population includes large numbers of African Americans, but it has also expanded to all sectors of the population.

While the number of fatalities from the police have not increased dramatically since the 1980s, the increased availability of recording devices on cell phones have made police crimes against the people more visible and contributed to the rise of mass protests against such incidents.

The same factors that led to the rapid increase in the movement—including spontaneous tailing of social media trends—contributed to its rapid collapse, as focus coalesced around a few social media accounts which promoted the idea that political change will fundamentally stem from spontaneously occurring mass events, a sentiment expressed by the phrase/website “it’s going down”. This [wrongly] implies that there is no need to organize among the masses, one should just show up when people turn out, and “it” will happen “organically.”

The Floyd protests spread to many American cities and small towns where there had been little to no mobilization in many years. On one hand, the right wing spread conspiracies that “antifa” organizers were being paid by George Soros and fellow “globalists.” On the other hand, the Democratic party initially blamed the protests on Russian intervention or on “white anarchist outsiders,” before deciding to co-opt the movement with “left” (liberal) notions of “proper allyship” i.e. the concept that only the most oppressed identities should speak or act. This quickly resulted in the most backwards forms of “leadership” taking command, i.e. the agenda of the powers that be represented by a token representative of an oppressed group.

Beyond such dynamics were larger trends—a population overall frustrated with the continuing downward trends in the U.S. economy, exacerbated by the massive unemployment that occurred in the first year of the COVID pandemic, though also buffered from severe economic hardships by the small but not insignificant government handouts during this period. This included a few direct cash payments, but also policies like cities waving parking ticket practices, the government suspending student debt payments, etc. Initially Americans were split on support for the protests, but within a few weeks, a solid majority of Americans began to support the protests² including a fair number of those on the right as well the larger majority on the left.

Politicians on both sides of the aisle maneuvered to voice support for the aims to “reform” the police. Behind the scenes, their basic concern was to quell and subvert the mass outrage of the protests. One way to do this was to articulate support for “defunding the police.” In an occupation in one area, certain individuals promoted legislation to defund the police. From the start the “defund” measures were revealed to be largely a smoke and mirrors tactic, making use of existing COVID related budget cuts and reallocating funds without actually decreasing the police budget, and claiming that this amounted to “defunding.” Within a year, it was revealed funding for the police only increased during this time.

Overall in the country, the protests shifted the situation in a matter of days from little to no public acceptance of public organizing or demonstrations (as a result of COVID lockdowns) to participation in numbers exceeding anything in recent history. As a result, it was clear there was a need to get involved, but activists in different locations had different assessments about how to effectively do so. In particular, in locations where there was a degree of ongoing mass work, the thought was to engage in protests enough to clarify basic politics and get others involved in collective organizing among the masses, rather than to try to play too much of a leading role in the protests given the scale of the outpouring of people. In contrast, in locations without more developed work, comrades in several instances tried to more directly organize the outpourings, with mixed results.

Interview

Based on the trajectory of comrades’ previous politicization in past upheavals, there was enthusiasm to engage, despite the barriers in scale and dominant liberal politics:

Rhea: In the build up to the protests with all the COVID restrictions and extreme articulations from the [liberals] that if you go outside you’re gonna kill someone, it was difficult to have events. We had a few zoom calls, so it was a difficult environment. There were some events, but a lot of the established left was not doing much. We were trying some independent initiatives. But outdoor events were considered too risky [by many in the public]. So when the protests started there was a quick shift, with people having outside meetings. And in our view that seemed quite promising. In our area we overestimated the significance and strength of the protests, thinking that overall there was sharper political consciousness there.

I kind of got politicized by the 2013/14 mobilizations against police brutality around Eric Garner and Michael Brown. I wasn’t aware of broader lessons of revolutionary history then; I just went out and participated in them. So while [the Floyd protests] were militant, there was a lot of liberal stuff coming out, so we didn’t want to totally get swept up in them, but find some things to interact with them. It was a tight situation with the COVID stuff before that, and then all of a sudden it seemed people were pretty open to organizing. And then of course the reality was a bit different. When you talked to people about politics they often were pretty closed off, but it seemed like a pretty big opening in some sense to seize on so we [thought we] should do that.

Initially, the protests were disparate, but offered numerous places to intervene. Despite an overall endorsement of a form of militancy among the public engaged in the protests, the same individuals’ overall political consciousness and framework often was very low:

Antoine: The first few protests in our area were largely directionless. People were wandering, and there were a lot of standoffs with the police, [and] people taking down the American flag by the police station. The established leftist groups, and non-profits/Democratic Party affiliates weren’t there. Now, there were a lot of problems with the protests, [such as] weakness, identity politics as others [in this conversation] alluded to, but there was a certain openness to try to identify stuff and not just follow the leader in the first week or so.

Lily: They [the protests] were pretty massive…[but we had problems thinking through] how to talk with people. We produced a banner, a flier, brought speakers. We formed a contingent within these marches, but they were very massive, and were awash with these different trends, the NGO trends, left adventurist trends. The basic trend was the unwillingness of people to have basic conversations, which I think was caused by the basic situation of people largely following [social media] hash-tags.

Antoine: There were some debates going on though, in particular one comrade who thought we should go “whole hog” into this because he saw it as representing [that] we were fast approaching a revolutionary situation. But, there were other shades of opinion. Generally the [dominant] view was that [this] was not the case, and we should engage with the protests, but we should work on and develop our existing work in relationship with the protests but not drop the ball on what we were [already] doing.

A number of comrades didn’t have experience in those bigger protests. Not that we had had resounding success [in prior efforts to engage with large-scale protests]. But we had some success before working together in bigger protests; last time there were successes in big protests against police brutality, fliering, and getting people’s contact info in a coordinated fashion…but some people who had not been to such protests felt overwhelmed, despite the plans, to go in with a pamphlet, and to invite people to follow up things if we had good conversations. In the actual dynamics of the protests, especially with the police firing tear gas, people got tense or nervous, which makes some sense given the circumstances. But [some comrades] had difficulty following through, even when not facing tear gas, [resulting in] not following through, in not being coordinated, in [not] working together well in trying to talk with people and finding people to work with. So even when having something of a plan, our difficulties and shortcomings stood out a good deal in carrying that through.

Then there was also the challenges just of the conversations we were having with people, given the extreme identity politics. People didn’t want to talk often or they were emphasizing hashtags in conversations. It was difficult going from hashtags to substantive conversations to follow up and working together. And just to emphasize, that was tied up with not just the disorganized character of the protest but also a much deeper-seated trend we’re coming up against in the U.S. left, of really American pragmatism and tailing spontaneity, of “hey it’s working now we’ve got a big protest [what else is there to talk about].”

I think we had a few efforts to get beyond that, but we didn’t see that squarely as a group: what those things were about, and the obstacles in working with people in the protests.

At first, things were generally disorganized, with inspiring mobilizations followed up quickly by political missteps and fumbles. But the positive side was that, despite the confusion, the protests gathered so quickly that it was too fast for the established Democratic Party network and related NGO apparatuses [to strangle] what was there [initially]. In fact, in the initial weeks, the Democratic Party opposed the protests publicly. But even before they switched to support the protests, there was a deep reception of ideas that echoed that of the ruling class among protesters.

Logan: One of the demands was the defund the police campaign, which looked very uncritically at the nature of the police; slash the budget a bit and we’d supposedly resolve the whole issue of Black people being shot. But people really bought into that from the start and that was a challenge.

Antoine: We faced a fairly different situation in in our area where some of our initial hesitancy, given the dynamics in in our area, things fairly quickly became Democratic Party dominant with people who were running for office and related non profits leading the major protests by about a week in, which meant that the room in which to maneuver, to try to work with others, to get something basic moving, was pretty limited. Sometimes we could talk and have basic conversations with others and other groups about how backwards some of the articulations around just “get out the vote”³ were, but beyond that, we weren’t so successful in working with other trends even around getting something like a general assembly going. Now, in part that relates to [the fact that] other than ourselves there were only a couple groups intervening and organizing in an organized fashion, and we had past experience with them, and were not able to cooperate on a basic level.

Rhea: There were a lot of NGO groups. I think this happened in other areas too where a lot of them were undercover a bit. They came up with a new name, and they got a few high schoolers from some of their youth programs and press-ganged them together, and said ok…that seemed to happen pretty quickly in in our area, maybe two weeks.

Antoine: A week and a half into the protests, a prominent politician tweeted out, “this is the revolution and it is being televised,” which if she is saying that, shows how confident the Democrats were that they largely had the situation under control in our area, which was not the case in every other city. Despite all the shortcomings, there was generally a longer period before things were co-opted and turned into NGO soup.

In some areas though, there was more of a mass presence that defied rapid corralling by the powers that be.

Mel: The situation by us was you had all these marches going in circles; what made the occupation somewhat different was you had people [initially] sitting down having some time to talk with one another—allowing, in theory, for […] some exchange of ideas, beyond just marching before their feet began to bleed. [This led to some larger organizing, including a brief General Assembly, and various organizing efforts.]

Logan: The limited amount of headway that you were able to make in that occupation with some people, was far more than what was achieved in the one we were involved in. I don’t think people were thinking much about what should happen with this occupation beyond what was already going on, other than we should sustain the mutual aid efforts, sustain the food that was being supplied, keep things very horizontal, no leadership at all. There were some power squabbles that happened, but they were not so overt. One group came to the mic that said “we were at the front lines of the struggles, so you all should bow down, but we are all anonymous so we’re not going to tell you our names.” But it was a “people’s mic” so they got on and said these things, so it rotated to the next person, and was kind of forgotten.

But there was a bit of power that did exist, that did exist in different hands. Not among those people talking on the mic, but among people who were in contact with the police chief, [they] got on the mic at one point to say “the police chief doesn’t want us to go into the precinct and they don’t want us to fuck anything up, so guys don’t go in, if we want to keep this occupation, don’t touch it,” (laughing) exposing very clearly the fact that the police were working with people in the occupation in order to quell anymore attempts to gain any more footage of the area, to expand this occupation, or to do anything more than what was being done—which was already pretty limited mutual aid efforts and the police precinct being attacked.

Lily: The situation in our area was similar to yours. There was an effort to co-opt the demonstration through these different NGO efforts. More often than not it was an effort to co-opt this ultra-left language that some of the anarchists would make around horizontalism, so a group of kids would show up behind a giant Penske rental truck, loaded with speakers, and say “we are not from an organization, we are just people form the community, we don’t trust leaders.” And we’d see time and time again that who’s on [their] program as speakers would be the heads of prominent NGOs. And the crowd was just expected to believe that a bunch of 14 year-olds just managed to gather enough money to rent Penske trucks. So this happened a lot quicker than we realized. I think we expected things would be co-opted, but it was quickly co-opted, and so it tightened itself, and so the demonstrations tended to slow off in a lot of ways, and became smaller. And so our position was we should use our contacts with people we were working with to create our own demonstrations, but I think we weren’t able to work so much in that environment. We didn’t clarify how we would put forward a protest that was different…that was going to be clarifying. We put forward a protest that didn’t break away from a lot of the more vague aspects of the George Floyd protest lingo, demonstrations that were critical of the government’s handling of the pandemic, and statements condemning the violence of the police, statements with revolutionary remarks. [Still], we were able to do one protest on our own; [it] was a high point at that time.

Interviewer: What were the negative and positive aspects of dealing with the more spontaneous elements of the struggle?

Antoine: People were mobilized, talking about political questions, both people at the protest and beyond, I got in touch with people I knew from middle school and high school [who were all of a sudden very interested in politics], so these were mixed in with political notions…but the spontaneity of it all really limited things. I think there was a shift within a few weeks from the Democrats saying “this is [the doing] of Russian agents or white anarchists from other states” to saying that “we support these protests.”

And I think around that shift… A) people were more comfortable going to these protests, butB) were ever more quick to parrot the official state narrative. And that was an incredible weakness, […] even some of the people who were at the protests saw their messages change, even the protests not so led by the Dems or affiliated organizations. But people tailed the larger dynamics of what the bourgeoisie was putting forward [in terms of ideas, acceptable messages, slogans, etc].

Mel: This relates to the struggle with comrades, another person thought it’s really happening! Basically the idea was people were up [for] talking, in theory […] let’s work together let’s get organized. We had a group interested in that, but one of the self-appointed leaders of the group shut it down by saying “if it’s not just saying ‘BLM’ there’s no point in talking about anything.” He became a key contact with the police, there was a lot of social media of him hugging the police, he was trying to create a fashion brand around himself, which is pathetic, but not so pathetic that he was about to short-circuit something else.

There was overall this idea [that] we’re here because everyone else is here, [and] not too much interest in breaking from that.

Antoine: We also had the other pamphlet against the idea that defunding would end police brutality. Often there was not just opposition but real hostility to talking about these questions. Which was quite striking because people didn’t want to talk about larger issues but [just] repeat slogans, and if you wanted to talk about wider issues there were often ways, particularly revolving around identity politics, to silence that. Some of the people doing that were probably really into bourgeois politics, say of working with an NGO. But it was broader than just those people, it was a real disinterest in theory, in analysis, in understanding.

Rhea: The idea of [the] “listen to Black leadership” line, that was put out to say “the people on the car right now that are saying ‘go here, vote for these people just do whatever they say,’ listen to them.” I do recall we had our speaker, not even leading new chants, but just raising chants in a section that was under-resourced in terms of speakers. People were like “what are you doing?” People wanted to take the mic away from us because we weren’t Black, so we wouldn’t lead any chants.

So if the ideology that’s going around is [that] basic participation in the protest in the normal terms of what it means to do so is very questionable, so you have to be very careful [that] you don’t become a racist, [then] making a pamphlet and even discussing it is even more [questionable].

At several of the protests we gave out a lot of those fliers without much to show for it, without most people coming out to anything or wanting to talk about anything, which is sad.

Logan: Along with the uncritical thinking around the protests, there also was uncritical thinking around racism, and so that led to thinking racism only exists in our heads. And because it only exists in our heads, we could read these “anti-racist” books that came out in the literal dozens or hundreds and resolve these things in our heads and, you know, the good apple cops could stay and the bad apple cops could go, and if then some of the bad apple cops could turn into good apple cops and if we could shift these things that are going on in our heads about our racist ideas then we could resolve this thing about racism entirely. So I think this was a major conception among people or at least was taken up, like buying the merch [merchandise] was a signal to people that you were an anti-racist. If you had a sign on your lawn, if you had it on your shirt, on your instagram bio, on your mask, on your face literally, “you were an anti-racist, you were solving the problem, were part of the solution.” This was a negative trend that was going on and stifled people’s ability to think critically […] about why Black people were being shot, what was the result of racism in the society, etc.

Rafi: I think that was a trend, though I think perhaps stronger than “we could all be anti-racist if we read the right thing and wear the right signals,” stronger than that, was that some people could not be anti-racist if they were white, that identity politics kind of stuff. These two things in some sense contradict each other, [and yet the idea] that the white people’s role is to be the supporters that are never perfect, that will always be kind of racist, and to have different kinds of [ritualistic] hand gestures, some of them were kind of like the Nazi salute, the white people were supposed to put their hands on the arms of people of color, but to do so symbolically so their hands were supposed to be turned down [resembling a Nazi salute] (laughing).

Logan: Or “buy Black” [buy goods from Black-owned businesses].

Mel: On the subject of spontaneity, one of thing we were trying to do was to have people we met at the protests come to [a notable politician’s office to join the protests] which we were protesting before, but the people who were doing that before liquidated that. They said “we can’t do anything that doesn’t say Black Lives Matter front and center [now].” And our thinking was if we could have some sort of outlet for all these tens of thousands of people to say not only down with [the politician] who was front and center not only in terms of police brutality, but also corrupt about COVID, resulting in ICE detentions…that could be a positive way forward. But unfortunately, without [large crowds of people], people’s idea was “I’m gonna go to whatever random march passes by me, until it stops, and until then there’s nothing to be done.” So that was a low blow actually for us trying to keep it going. We struggled to keep it going for 5 or 6 weeks and managed to have some of the smallest turn outs in all the George Floyd Protests. We did get it on social media, there were these few instagram accounts that we had postings on even after the George Floyd protests, but a few people would show up and seeing that there was not a thousand people there would just go away. Some people were more interested but conflicted and did stay around, but it was difficult given the climate.

Antoine: Just one thing to emphasize about the spontaneity and the dynamics more broadly about the movement, around this time we had some success in making some basic inroads in working with a few tenants in the housing developments in the surrounding areas where the protests were called in our area. And the mass base of the protests were all petty bourgeois college educated people. None of the people who we had talked to in the projects had gone out to the protests period, to any of the protests. A few of the people we talked to in the projects or related housing development went out with us, but they said this was the first time they had gone to any of them. I think it speaks to some of these issues that most of the people at these protests were used to campus politics, NGO politics, social media activism, and had no connection with the larger working class, and especially with the Black working class which was the base of the tenants we were working with at the time.

Rhea: Well a good deal of high schoolers too, and a few in our area, but then, at least in our area, the kind of after school program NGO set up thing was about to really corral them into stuff that wasn’t gonna do anything.

I remember that one time in a transit hub by us, there were six or something—fully decked [out] like in football gear with helmets—riot police guys up against a wall, and then there were 50-60 mostly high school kids who had put them there by making a human chain. And [the students were] saying “you’re not going to knock us so we’re gonna hold you against the wall and make some demands.” Then they made speeches about how we need to get out the vote, or local politics is where it’s at, whatever their really reactionary civics teacher had said (i.e. from their charter school).

Mel: When we started to do the housing organizing [in largely Black communities] one person said at a mass meeting, “hey, you know the BLM people, right (because we looked comparatively petty-bourgeois, and were white)? Well get them [the BLM protesters] out over here!” There was such a distinction from Black residents in the housing struggle [and the protests].

Antoine: I was in some conversations with some of the somewhat better people from the protests where you [Mel] were about going to organize in public housing, and some of them were vehemently opposed to going and tabling and talking to people—that “wasn’t our place,” it would be racist to do so. It was the most thinly veiled justification for staying with the most narrow circle of petty-bourgeois so-called activists who were mostly on social media. But it was really striking those views were somewhat prominent. And it was not just these protests. I remember coming out of earlier ones too a number of years ago, with Eric Garner and Michael Brown. There was this constant articulation that “white people or non-Black people, your job is to talk with your racist family members, you should not go out of your economic zone or even outside of your familial relations really”, and those ideas were quite prominent in the George Floyd protests too, the idea of going among the people was strongly opposed in most of the protests.

Logan: On the other hand it was pretty [strongly] promoted to have white people be the ones to explain what’s going on with racism, and don’t ask a [Black] person, because that’s labor [to explain]…“figure it out yourselves white people.”

Lily: Also on the other side there was ultra-left orientation in different cities around property destruction and rioting, the idea that voting is not gonna work, going among the people is not gonna work, destroying things is gonna work, we’re not gonna participate in local politics, but instead in mutual aid, and maybe working with this staffer from local politics, “that could be kind of cool.” Really revealing that that ultra-left stuff was not far removed from the right opportunism. Also this phenomenon of the nine hour public comment over zoom [on local governmental sessions about the police] which was a very interesting tool that local communities deployed in mass all over the country, and people lined up in mass for 9 hour public comment. All over the country people were going to these demonstrations and then pretending they were gonna do something by being on zoom.

Antoine: Something that came up in the housing projects when talking with people was some opposition to the protests by saying “why are they smashing windows and what not?” And people I think rightfully saw “what does that have to do with anything?” Something we did was saying, partly correctly, that it was in part the police doing it [doing the property destruction]. There were some prominent videos of police doing this. On the other hand, there was a significant section of the protests, maybe more where Lily was than in in our area, but it was still there, who saw this was “our chance to smash a Starbucks window, this is our chance to throw a Molotov cocktail,” though I don’t think any of those got thrown in our area—people did talk about wanting to do it, and talked about “fucking shit up” in a vague sense, which did nothing to help anything, [followed by] the other side of it, them doing basic liberal reformist organizing.

Rafi: And in addition to smash Starbucks there was some sort of Lumpen stuff, of people smashing a jewelry store to get jewelry, and people saying “if this is about fighting for justice, why do that? [They’re] just taking a fancy watch.”

Antoine: I think we sometimes weren’t so clear on that stuff in that moment. I think it was important to expose some of the police’s role in that stuff, but sometimes we overemphasized that, and didn’t admit that the criticism was correct. And sometimes we were wrong. For instance, if you see the full video, some people smashed a police windshield, and the police came and smashed what was left to see through the windshield. [It would have been good not to be] caught up in this on Twitter and in the frenzy, [we were not] not pausing to analyze things so clearly or carefully.

Mel: There was a question of how to break through the parochialism and localism and get more of a national (and international) perspective. One of things we tried to do was publish fliers about an online event about the history of the Naxalbari struggle, in India, and some people took the flier. One of the people that saw it was one of the most opportunist people who had an NGO there just to get money, and had a tent for his group to get money; I think they got a lot of money. He said, “you’re Maoists, those are my people.” He had nothing to do with Maoism, he just saw it as another label he could use when going around. He was not trying to win anyone over to [MLM] politics, he was trying to get people to spend money on his little tent. Not so different, I think, from people who saw the protest as an excuse to get some jewelry. What you could get from a jewelry store, why not get from some liberal activists? The same mentality, essentially.

Antoine: There was an over-focus on the narrative emerging on social media at times. We tried to put a few things out, but we didn’t try to put much out on social media. We put out a few statements that we worked on together with something of a national analysis, but there were a few people that wanted to go all out on social media and spend all our time on that. [But the people who were most enthusiastic about social media were the least organized about following up on it]…It’s possible with a better and more coordinated network we could have made a better impact.

Mel: On the subject of an international perspective, you had so many people coming together, albeit as was said, a lot of them with a petty bourgeois background, but so when we had the GA [general assembly] come together we were able to put forward, “what is our stand on U.S. imperialism, what is our stand on U.S. bases abroad, should we incorporate related demands, should we discuss this?” And initially there was a lot of enthusiasm in this, it was something of a breaking point. But the individual I mentioned, who called himself a Maoist, and us as his people, at a certain point maneuvered to shut the whole thing down, by saying before we make any demand, “I want us to talk about every single thing, what’s my place, etc.” And immediately, rather than staying to “talk about everything” he created a whole lot of confusion and immediately proceeded to walk away. At that point any opportunists who were waiting were able to shut things down by using that moment to say “who are so and so [to help coordinate this at all]” and it collapsed pretty early.

But the positive thing to me was there was general interest in talking about such things, but the dominant signal was “don’t.” And when it came to a person of authority saying “this isn’t your place” people pretty much gave it up. Very much in the occupation there was the idea in the encampment where we were that “if we lose this, we’ll lose everything.” And then “if we’re gonna lose this thing, we just should find the next ‘squat.’” And my friend has this space, etc. And it became literally like Abbie Hoffman’s favorite movie Wild in the Streets, like, the younger you were, the cooler you were. If you were trying to talk about planning it was like “ughhh” if you were older you were not to be trusted. I was in my 30s, people who were 15 were like “my friend has a cool basement, let’s go there,” and at that point, there literally were 2 people about who were [cool enough] able to have a discussion, so there was not much hope there. There were some younger people, well not literally young, but who were new to stuff, and interested in stuff, but once things fell apart they went right for the Dems or for official NGO organizations that were waiting to scoop things up. There was the line too that if you were trying to say anything at a rally “you were an informant” because “it’s only informants that try to say anything at a rally, they are called swoopers, they ‘swoop in’ and have people follow their mics,” so “don’t say anything” that’s our answer, which of course is not so good from a political perspective. So that’s pretty bad.

Antoine: There was also the line [when visiting the occupation] that anyone taking photographs should be attacked physically, so a few reporters who showed up were attacked, because supposedly any photograph would just be used by the cops, which was surreal because the cops were all around [the occupation], there’s cameras everywhere, they could record. Getting some basic positive journalist coverage is essential, and if you really needed to be secretive about your identity, why are you playing candy crush on your phone in the middle of this protest? Give me a break.

But on the point about the international [military] bases, I remember we had a study on the Panthers then. This was something of a breakthrough then. 30 people or so came around, and then by using the Panthers’ […] sharp analysis of things, we were able to put larger things on the table, and avoid the whole of “who are you to say this” sort of thing, because it was the Panthers. I remember the question of the revisionist Soviet Union came up and the restoration of capitalism, and I said, “well look, the Panthers made this argument, I agree with it, but they were one of the groups putting this forward at the time.” And that disarmed people who would say “who are you to say this,” because “I’m just someone who is quoting the Panthers.” It’s something of a concession to liberalism to not put it directly on the table to say “this is what I think,” but it was helpful to get a few more points out there without the discussion just being shut down on the basis of identity as so many conversations were during this period.

Interviewer: It may be good to circle back to the lasting effects on other comrades.

Lily: Well, in our area there are very few comrades from before the George Floyd protests who are still around.

Mel: I know a few got involved through the George Floyd protests. It’s interesting that so many who were involved before stopped being involved after. People who were confused politically before seemed to get more confused.

Antoine: The protests really shook people in different ways. They thought they had to put everything on the line all of a sudden. Everything we’ve been talking about that “was just talk” is now actually real. Kind of silly. But I think also there is still, among some people, the idea that that was the high point, that it is not until we have these giant street protests—and of course we want big protests—that we’ll be in a good spot again. And that idea lingers in a few people at least. And what should be clear in talking though this today is we weren’t in a good spot with these protests. The protests themselves were not good despite some positive aspects. And if you’re talking about what’s needed for a revolution, there needs to be a lot better than what we saw there, and that can’t happen magically. That foundation has to be built through a lot of struggles, through a lot of efforts, because the protests were quite easy to dissipate both through repression and direct co-optation, and those go hand and hand for the ruling class.

Lily: We didn’t understand how we needed to speak clearly and articulate our differences from the major trends in these protests, but it would have really clarified with new people coming to the fore. I don’t think we would have been able to radically change the situation differently.

Antoine: I think in our area pretty quickly after the first protest or so [it would have been good to try] to get together a big meeting or a big discussion or even a potential protest speak-out followed by a kind of larger GA type-forum, to have some way to try to engage. We didn’t try to lead any protests during this period, and we didn’t generally mass flier, at least in the initial period, to try to invite people out. But [it would have been good] to do something to get people involved in our efforts, to deal with all the nonsense and backlash we’d face from that, but I think we shied away from that mistakenly. It probably would have blown up, but so what, we’ve been yelled at before.

Mel: There was a few months where it seemed we achieved a lot in our area with getting a few people involved in the politics, but it eventually blew up. But it didn’t have to blow up, so I think there was some success despite the situation being quite difficult, but it does take a toll. But there is a lesson: there are people who think there needs to be a high point to come forward. At the same time there were people who, when things got more involved, they got freaked out, it’s two sides of the same coin. People always have to be ready to adjust to the situation, and not have a preset idea, “only now does it make sense to do something.” I still think we’re dealing with a general yielding to spontaneity in different forms; when the moment is right you do something, when not you go to sleep. That’s a larger challenge in the culture we’re dealing with, and internationally, you saw internationally, there was interest in George Floyd protests as representing a pole of revolution, which I think was incorrect.