The following article was written by the Basic Needs Electoral Committee of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America.
Thirty years after the Rodney King rebellion, the June 7 primary elections in Los Angeles signified the emergence of a new level of organization and political awareness for the millions of workers that are rejected by today’s corporate capitalist economy. The 1992 rebellion marked the first expression of mass resistance by “de-industrialized” American workers and it shook the country. The electoral rebellion of 2022 demonstrated an even more significant mass politicization.
Voters in Los Angeles city and county elected progressive anti-corporate and even abolitionist “defund the police” candidates or sent them into the November 8 runoffs with commanding leads. It was a reminder that the American ruling class is on the defensive. Democratic Socialist community organizer Eunisses Hernández won in an East Los Angeles city council district with more than 60 percent of the vote, defeating incumbent Gil Cedillo. Hernández ran as an abolitionist candidate, advocating dismantling the prison system and funneling funds into mental health care and housing the unhoused.
Los Angeles Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) leader Hugo Soto-Martínez has a 9-point lead over the pro-real estate, anti-homeless incumbent council member Mitch Farrell as they head into the November runoff. City Controller candidate Kenneth Mejía has a 20-point lead over 13-year City Councilman Paul Koretz.
As the race for mayor heads into November, longtime community leader Rep. Karen Bass has a 7-point lead over anti-homeless, law-and-order candidate Rick Caruso in October. Bass’s results reflected the progressive surge, but they also benefitted from popular disdain and rejection of the billionaire Caruso’s creepy attempt to buy the election with $40 million from his fortune.
REVOLUTION RISING
All these victories were made possible by a coalition of hundreds of grassroots organizations: DSA, Progressive Democrats of America, California Progressive Alliance, Working Families Party, Los Angeles Tenants Union (LATU), SEIU, and more. Although the mobilization for progressive candidates was intentional, well planned and coordinated, what made it possible was a massive upsurge of primarily young workers with no ties and no loyalty to the system. Artificial intelligence, automation, and financialization have created a society where workers are no longer needed and are being abandoned by the ruling class.These workers were the driving force behind the victories in Los Angeles. They have no use for a system based on private profit instead of common good. A revolution is rising and nothing can stop it.
This upsurge broke out into the open after the primary, when unhoused people and their supporters shut down the Los Angeles City Council three times in July and August. Before newly elected council members could be seated, it was trying to pass the extension of Municipal Ordinance 41.18 to outlaw homelessness in almost 25 percent of the city.
Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN) organizer Pete White explained what was causing the rebellion. “Los Angeles does not have currently, or never has had, a real housing plan to address the needs of poor Angelenos,” he told Democracy Now!. “What we continue to see in Los Angeles is the march towards criminalization. That is the strategy. And Los Angeles, it’s an anywhere-but-here strategy. It’s an out-of-sight, out-of-mind strategy. It’s a funding of the police department to solve a social crisis. What we saw in City Hall … was the voices of houseless people, the voices of civil rights organizations and tenants’ organizations saying, “Enough is enough.”
The key issues in Los Angeles are the demand to house the people, especially the unhoused, and the post-George Floyd demand to defund and abolish the police. These are what inspired so many new leaders to run for office. Contrary to the national media narrative, these demands won decisive victories over candidates who doubled down on historic policies of criminalization and incarceration.
Vilification of the unhoused and glorification of everything about the police caused City Council member Joe Buscaino’s mayoral campaign to finish last. Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, a frequent tough-on-crime guest of Fox News, was forced into a runoff. Community anger was further fueled by new revelations in the Torrance Police racist texting scandal. Not one but two attempts to recall progressive District Attorney George Gascón failed to collect enough signatures to even qualify for the ballot.
As Homeless Capital of the country, Los Angeles’s failure to deal with its housing crisis has become a key issue. Mejía won based on his record of serving the unhoused and fighting for tenant rights. A recent UCLA report on housing documented how politics in Los Angeles has been dominated by developers and speculators. Their policy has been to build luxury apartments, redevelop the areas around Skid Row and do nothing to house the masses in the streets.
POLITICIZATION
The revolution proceeds in zigzags and bursts and includes compromises and/or direct actions wherever needed to move it forward. In earlier, non-revolutionary periods, compromises were generally practiced by opportunist leaders to secure advantages for themselves or some limited constituency. Today, now that the opportunity to win real victories exists, compromises can be and are being made when necessary to move forward the movement as a whole. This is shown by the remarkable leap in political sophistication among the workers involved in the various campaigns.
In the first place, millions of people have begun to understand the importance of running candidates and voting in elections, in a way that just did not happen before 2016 and 2020. They learned to rally around corporate-free, basic needs candidates who come from and represent their struggles to survive. On the other hand, they are wise enough to avoid a purist approach and also sometimes vote for centrists like Bass, who may not really speak for them, but who are in a position to block fascistic, corporate politicians like Caruso. They have learned to work within the Democratic Party, not as a strategy for ultimate social change, but as a tactic to drive forward its accelerating polarization from the inside. They separate out the fighters for a new society from the corporate agents and apologists that are trying to block and suppress the movement.
They are learning how to overcome their various ideological differences in pursuit of common basic needs demands. Many are learning to think strategically, and understand our immediate struggles as stepping stones toward a new society based on human rights instead of corporate cash.
As Richard Moya of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) explained, “For me, the key is to remember that policy reforms are meant as a way for us to also focus and grow the movement. That is something we sometimes get backwards. Sometimes, we think the policy is the thing we are trying to achieve, when really we are using this as an organizing component to win bigger things.”
The Democratic Party in California holds the office of governor and the legislature. A viable challenge to the party leadership is emerging statewide and it is coming largely from within the party itself. The increasingly unified working class demands for housing, education, healthcare and defunding the police have intensified in the course of the 2022 elections. Established Democrats are losing to a wave of challengers.
Karen Bass’s endorsers, donors, and the entire Democratic Party machine – all the way up to Biden – supported her, not because they are afraid of Caruso, but because they are afraid of the progressive wave that is challenging incumbents. They see Bass’s credibility in the community as the best way to neutralize its demands – but workers can use the Bass campaign to elevate their demands instead, every bit as much if not more than the ruling class does.
REAL SOLUTIONS
While the reproductive freedom movement may not seem as important in blue-state California, the relationship is vital because a national victory by anti-abortion politicians may lead to a national ban on abortions, and because the national reproductive freedom movement, in order to win, must unite with the larger movement for basic needs like the one driving the electoral revolution in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles and the nation does not have a housing insecurity problem, but a billionaires problem. The survival of our people requires us to abolish billionaires and construct a cooperative society to meet all the people’s physical, emotional, spiritual and ecological needs.
As Pete White expressed it, “Instead of the criminalization of the houseless community, we are calling for housing preservation. … We are calling for city-owned and government-owned properties to be turned back over to community trusts, and for those buildings and that land to be converted into housing for houseless people. We are calling for leadership that recognizes houselessness is a byproduct of a failed housing system, or a lack of a housing policy, and poverty. … We’re calling for housing for all, housing that’s affordable at the lowest levels of affordability.”
November/December 2022 vol.32. Ed6
Published: October 18, 2022
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
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