BAGR1: The Ferguson Insurrection

From Black and Green Review no 1.

The Ferguson Insurrection

The execution of Michael Brown, an unarmed black 18 year old, by a white police officer on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, MO, was sadly not an anomaly. The response, however, has been.

         Within hours, the streets had filled up and shortly after, businesses were in flames. And every night for weeks, it happened again. Each night spreading wider and farther.

         The confluence of systemic racism and the feeble-minded, infantile bullying mentality of those drawn into the police force unsurprisingly creates volatile and deadly situations. Time after time, police murders occur with regularity and largely without consequence. The explosiveness of the murder of Michael Brown doesn’t arise from the particulars, but from the sheer crushing weight of this reality. That fragile boundary between the threat of state power and coercion burst and the rage flooded.

         And while that rage has waned, it hasn’t died. Coiled and ready to strike, the rage boils just beneath the surface.

         While this unrest has been called many things, it should be referred to by what it has proven itself to be: the Ferguson Insurrection.

The Promise of the Insurrection

The promise of this insurrection lies in the fact that while many groups have tried to own or direct that rage, none has succeeded. Solidarity demonstrations have shut down mass transit in major cities, but attempts to curb property destruction have faltered. Riots have broken out with regularity and fervor in an ephemeral response.

         What we have been seeing is pure rage.

         We are seeing a crack in the veneer of a proscribed social contract that we were born into. We are seeing mythos that goes back to the origins of property and the external boundaries inherent to sedentary societies amplified as domestication intensifies. States are built on the lie that we cannot exist without their structures and defense. From the armies of Mesopotamia to the police of Ferguson, MO, this is the tie that binds.

         The rallying cry throughout this insurrection remains simple: no more. No more will these communities sit idly by as the pigs target, harass and kill. Some seek reform, some seek justice, but the overarching theme is that the attempts to suppress rage will no longer work. Complicity is no longer an option.

         It would be an absolute stretch to pretend that there was widespread thinking about the relationship between this insurrection and the nature of domestication. It is not my place nor any one else’s to attempt to own this insurrection through critique and reporting. Nevertheless, the base complicity with the law is an essential part of the domestication process. Conscious or not, the refusal to accept the legitimacy of state power nor to succumb to the mounting threats of an increasingly militarized police force is, on some level, a breakdown in that process.

         This insurrection, like all insurrections, doesn’t hold answers. Even if it does not seek them, there can be no divorce from the reality that people need to eat. Societies must not only attack the state, but move beyond it. Until that step is taken, the fate of those attacking is fully interwoven with the very society under fire.

         Yet the rage still pours out.
         And that’s where the beauty of this insurrection lies: it exemplifies the limits at which the domesticated begin to bite back. Context always matters, but it is the erosion of social control that exposes the possibilities that the infallibility and inevitability of power is a lie. Plain and simple, this is what it looks like when people hit their limits.

         It is this rage that has been the final blow to civilizations past, present and future. Anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter famously observed that the apex of collapse is the point of diminishing returns. That’s an economic positioning, but it holds true for all social, ecological and psychological aspects of life. If giving your life to serving civilization has only ever been met with systemic poverty, being antagonized by police and being a talking point for religious and political figure heads, then where is that return? Why take it?

         In this case, as in many others, this isn’t a proverbial or rhetorical question. If you’re penned up, bullied, and killed by a state that is doing you no favors, how much worse can it be once they are destroyed? The immediacy is telling. This is the response of the human spirit, the human animal. This is the fox chewing at its leg after being snared in a steel trap.

         There’s a part of the mind saying over and over again: we don’t need this. And the façade, fortunately, is flammable.

The Limits of the Insurrection

The problem with this insurrection, as with any really, is that it becomes a reified. Community leaders, that is say the would-be politicians (even the anarchist ones), eagerly champion the perceived cause, often in defiance of the words and anger coming from the streets. Rage is rarely owned by any one position, but that won’t stop the professionals from navigating it.

         We see this over and over again.

         Liberals want to right the wrongs through reform. Conservatives want to demonize and ghettoize populations. Both will do so while bolstering the overall power of their militarized arm: resulting in military grade weaponry (tanks were a common sight in Ferguson), seeking body cameras (rarely if ever helping victims, but often used to identify and prosecute “suspects”), and allowing space to deflect the “trauma of the job” onto management rather than focusing on the pig mentality and logic itself.

         That last point can’t be overstated. Being over 13 years deep into oil wars, we’re talking about a high number of PTSD-fueled jarheads flooding the police and private security sectors (the private security world, by the way, is the refuge of the discharged police). So while it’s easy to look at the increase in police violence simply as documented by an increase in cameras and social networks to share videos, that’s missing the point that this increased hostility can only be a fraction of the interactions and incidences that these former-soldiers were displaying overseas. This is a context that has not only been ignored completely, but one where grievances have been hastily suppressed.

         The insurrection at home is a part of the global response to the globalized reign of techno-industrial civilization. It’s just the part that we’re seeing. But to separate this reality from the Arab Spring or uprisings throughout the world is to buy this same lie.

         So as the well intentioned try to bring both sides to the table, they’re really only ever-taking one: the furthering of state power and, at best, a relaxation of the barbed-wire fences.

         The lack of a cohesive narrative apparent in what is an outpouring of rage lends itself to outside narration. This is especially true as our “user-generated content” society wants a Spectacle. We’re programmed to want a smooth story arch. If anger in the streets is simply saying, “we have had enough”, the sidelines are booming with a way to finish that sentence. The vacuum of power is an implicit presumption that we create to remove that rage and contextualize our external discussions.
         The limitation of insurrection is the potential that it will die out through mediation. That is the goal of so many groups, religions, and states. That is the goal of domestication: to control the human being through diversion and redirection of impulses.

         This insurrection continues to show its promise in its persistence and instinctuality. We can only hope that the narratives of ownership and compromise fail to take root. So that they won’t die off in textbooks, prison cells, and Twitter feeds. This may not bring the end of civilization in and of itself, but it is a testament to the refusal of complicity necessary to continue its existence.

         This may not be the final blow, but it is certainly a death rattle.

         Alas, as the ability of civilization to carry on requires complete subservience, may the insurrection never die.