A-Infos (en) Italy, FAI, Umanita Nova #20-25 - Will Fire Melt the Ice? Racial Oppression and Riots in the USA (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Racial oppression and the maintenance of a minority status of part of 
the workforce through the denial of documents are two characteristics of 
the contemporary economic and political system. ---- The alternation of 
progressive and conservative governments, in Europe as in the USA, leads 
to the widening and narrowing of the windows within which the 
undocumented component of the proletariat can aspire to obtain the same 
documents or, at least, to be a little less harassed by the police forces.

There are several reasons why no government has ever questioned this 
system at its roots: the need to maintain a fundamental, but potentially 
unruly, component of the workforce in a state of blackmail; the desire 
to divide the class along lines of demarcation imposed by the state; the 
ability to wave the security scarecrow of the "crime brought by 
immigrants" and the flags of identity.

Having made this general premise, let's move on to the specifics of the 
US case. Over the past 40 years, since Reagan's presidency, the number 
of deportations has increased, peaking during the Clinton presidency, 
dropping during Obama's second term, then increasing during Trump's 
first presidency, and continuing its rise during Biden's term. We can 
say that we are faced with a bipartisan policy. And we say this both in 
the face of Trumpian propaganda, according to which Biden was allowing 
immigrants who were dedicated to eating domestic animals, and the 
Democratic propaganda of recent days, which paints the deportations as 
the work of an openly racist administration. It is worth noting that the 
increase in violence against the migrant component of the working class 
occurred with the definitive affirmation of neoliberal policies, from 
the Reagan administration onwards.

There are differences between progressive and conservative governments: 
the former try as much as possible to make violence invisible, and 
therefore acceptable to their electorate; the latter glorify it.

With both sides in command, we have seen an increase in the 
militarization of the border, the construction of administrative 
detention centers, the practice of dividing family units (with the 
corollary of missing minors), and an increase in the budget available to 
ICE. The increase in funding for campaigns to repress and control 
migrant workers has allowed the introduction of increasingly 
sophisticated control technologies, designed and managed directly by 
that military-digital complex that has joined the traditional 
military-industrial complex. Palantir has sold its digital analysis and 
surveillance systems, the ones that allow the integration between 
government and private databases to identify the people that ICE will 
have to arrest. But not only Palantir: Microsoft and Google have also 
enriched themselves by providing IT services to the federal agency 
dedicated to the persecution of the undocumented. And even outside of 
the large companies in the sector, there is a myriad of companies that 
provide technological support to the work of ICE, such as those that 
provide the electronic bracelets that some immigrants are forced to wear 
while waiting for their visa application to be validated or not. In some 
cases, those who provide these services not only provide the 
technological platform but also have the power to directly manage the 
relationship with people waiting for documents.

Here we are witnessing a paradigm shift: in the "classic" golden age of 
the military-industrial complex, that of the McNamaras, police functions 
or military functions had never been directly delegated to large 
companies in the sector, but they limited themselves to providing 
material, design and maintenance capabilities. Now we see the digital 
sector increasingly entrenched in the state machine. The embrace between 
capital and state structure is becoming increasingly ironclad.

Some peculiarities of the US situation should be highlighted. Sanctuary 
cities, or cities where federal regulations that limit immigration are 
not applied, or rather, are

applied in a weakened form, are the cities in which the undocumented 
component provides important parts of the workforce in sectors such as 
manufacturing, agriculture, personal services and cleaning and 
maintenance services. These cities are democratically led cities, in 
democratically led states. Yet the federal government even when it was 
led by Democrats has, except in the second Obama term, continued the 
policy of criminalizing the undocumented. The contradiction is only 
apparent: the federal laws that regulate residence visas and citizenship 
allow the migrant workforce to be kept in a position of strong 
blackmail. From the moment this were to raise its head or become 
redundant it could be persecuted in sanctuary cities as well as in the 
deep South firmly Republican.

There are also other considerations to make, especially on the southern 
border of the USA. New Mexico, California and Texas were conquered after 
the US-Mexican War in the mid-19th century and a good part of the 
Mexican-speaking and cultural population that lived in those territories 
remained there, acquiring US citizenship over the following years but 
also maintaining ties with Mexico.

This immediately gave a characteristic of "porosity" to the southern 
border, with constant trade exchanges and flows of Mexican migrants 
attracted by the requests for workers in the agricultural sector, as 
regards California, and for livestock (the same livestock that then 
headed towards the slaughterhouses of Chicago that fed the growing 
population) as regards Texas and New Mexico, but also cultural exchanges 
that still define that part of the USA today. Even the Spanish-speaking 
elites of those territories have integrated over the years into the US 
ruling class.

This also means that migration, even if only on a seasonal basis, has 
been a constant feature of those areas; the situation has changed in 
recent decades when, alongside the traditional Mexican flows, flows from 
Central American, South American and Caribbean countries have been 
added. The Chicano component of the population is native to those parts 
of the USA and not a foreign body as is represented by propaganda, 
whether aimed at assimilation or segregation.

The Spanish-speaking component of Cuban origin present above all in the 
state of Florida is still different. Although this, like the others, 
falls within the broad category of Latinos, in this case it is about 
people who fled the Cuban government, some immediately after the 
revolution that deposed Batista, others in more recent years. In many 
cases, these are people who have received slightly favorable treatment 
in the name of the fight against communism and who have acquired 
citizenship. In many cases, they vote for the GOP and some exponents, 
such as Rubio, have reached high state offices and have been eligible 
candidates in the primaries of the elephant party.

The Chicano component of the population of Southern California, despite 
having always been present in the territory, in fact they are the first 
to settle after the native tribes, has been kept in a subordinate 
position with respect to WASP-style immigration, as per practice in the 
racialized hierarchy typical of American society. Over the years there 
have been periods of rather intense struggles, such as the Chicano 
Moratorium, an intense and extensive anti-militarist and pacifist 
protest movement during the Vietnam War. As well described by Davis and 
Wiener in "Set the Night on fire - L.A. in the sixties" (Verso Books, 
London - New York 2020), a fundamental book that reconstructs the 
history of social movements in the metropolis of the 1960s and early 
1970s, the Chicano community of Los Angeles during the twentieth century 
joined with a certain patriotic push the American wars, the First and 
Second World Wars, but also the conflict in Korea. This patriotic drive, 
however, ran out of steam and changed direction during the years of the 
Vietnam War, giving rise to a large antimilitarist protest movement that 
emphasized how the community paid a significant price in blood in a war 
that it did not feel was its own and that it saw as being in the 
exclusive interest of the ruling class. A similar thesis can be found in 
the militant African-American groups of the time as well as in the 
politicized sectors, at the time however extremely marginal, of the 
white working class. The presence of community structures that have 
persisted over the decades has allowed the preservation of forms of 
memory of those struggles even in the years that followed.

The explosion of protests in June of this year is the emergence of that 
karst river of radical contestation of the US social structure whose 
existence we have already underlined in other articles ("Betraying the 
white race means being loyal to humanity", Umanità Nova number 21 year 
100, and the pamphlet "The age of quarrel - the US crisis seen through 
the lens of social anarchism" published in November 2020).

Social movements have already shown that they are capable of undermining 
the supremacist policies of the ruling class. The movement against 
police brutality showed its strength during the Ferguson era and 
re-emerged powerfully, and with even more radical demands, during the 
first Trump presidency; from a predominantly African-American movement, 
it became a movement that broke the banks of class division by involving 
sectors of the white working class, especially its youth components.

During the Floyd Rebellion, during the Ferguson uprising and during the 
uprisings of early June 2025, it was possible to see how the 
counter-insurgency devices were not only the police ones, now 
increasingly militarized, but also those deployed by that myriad of 
organizations and NGOs of professional activism, dedicated to mediating 
and recovering the most radical demands, which are the left branch of 
capital.

In the USA, much more than in Europe and other parts of the world, the 
undergrowth of these organizations is extensive and has broad economic 
and organizational capabilities, being linked to the Democratic Party. 
If they still had some legitimacy during the Floyd Rebellion at the time 
of Ferguson, they have been much more marginalized and neutralized not 
only by the radical ways in which those who took to the streets 
appropriated public space, but also by the fact that the nefarious 
nature of their work is now recognized as such not only by the militant 
agent minority but also by increasingly large sectors of the racialized 
sectors of the working class. In both Los Angeles and Minneapolis, but 
also in the small but radical demonstration that took place in Austin at 
the same time, these professional reclaimers were ignored and, in fact, 
isolated.

In the last decade, we have seen a certain reemergence of the demands of 
class-based unionism in the USA, with important struggles both in the 
public sector (teachers), in manufacturing (automotive sector) and above 
all in the service economy (logistics and catering) as well as among 
workers in prison (see "Questione carceraria e lotta di classe" 
published in Umanità Nova 21 year 98 and "La lotta degli maestri del 
West Virginia" in number 19 year 98). Over the years, in many states, 
minimum wages of 15 USD per hour have been imposed by struggles, a 
conquest now eaten away by inflation. It is precisely at the 
intersection of the economic level with that of racial oppression, on 
which the 2020 movement had also grown, that an internal crisis could 
open up that would be difficult for the Trump administration to manage. 
It remains to be seen whether the riots in Los Angeles and Minneapolis, 
which directly put ICE, the military guarantor of the principles of 
white supremacy, into crisis, are a model that will extend to the 
federal level.

Lorcon

https://umanitanova.org/il-fuoco-sciogliera-il-ghiaccio-oppressione-razziale-e-rivolte-in-usa/
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