Facing Inter-Imperialist Crimes : The Los Angeles Riots...

The newspaper "Los Angeles Magazine" headlined : "Power of the people, not the crown" as millions of protesters chanted "No king !" across the United States.

In the face of inter-imperialist crimes (Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, Yemen, Iran, etc.) : the Los Angeles riots... a prelude to those around the world

The timeline of the June riots in Los Angeles (USA)

The Los Angeles riots, which began on June 6, are the most combative episode of the working class in the world recently, at a time of massacres in the Gaza Strip :

A wave of violent arrests of undocumented immigrants by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) has sparked outrage in the Californian metropolis in recent days. Protests against these crackdowns have degenerated into violence and vandalism in some areas. The US president then accused the Democratic local authorities of having lost control of the city and sent in 4,000 California National Guard troops and 700 Marines.

The decision was widely denounced by local officials, who accused him of exploiting the situation. Despite dramatic images of burning robotaxis, looting, and clashes with police, the incidents were concentrated on a few downtown blocks. Mayor Karen Bass imposed a curfew on June 10 in the area, covering 13 square kilometers of the sprawling city. The measure "has gone a long way toward protecting stores, restaurants, businesses, and residential communities from criminals who mock the plight of the immigrant community," the Democrat said Tuesday (June 17), announcing its lifting.

Since this weekend, when the "No Kings" march saw thousands of people peacefully protest against Donald Trump, tensions have largely eased in Los Angeles. On Tuesday, the city center was crowded with passersby walking among many businesses that were still boarded up and sometimes covered in graffiti, according to an AFP photographer. But the mayor said she was ready "to reinstate" a curfew if necessary.

Le Figaro

Fake revolutionaries face the riots

The fact that these riots are disturbing to the mainstream media and "experts in movement" is well expressed firstly by the Nouvel Obs, which seeks to diminish their historical character :

Some Republicans are comparing the protests that have erupted in Los Angeles since June 6 against arrests by the federal immigration police (ICE) to the riots of 1992. The comparison is essentially political.

"Los Angeles is riots again..." wrote Republican Party member Chuck Devore in a column on Fox News, the conservative-leaning news channel, on Sunday, June 8. Then it was Donald Trump Junior’s turn to make the comparison in a post on X, "Make Rooftop Koreans Great Again !", a reference to the violent clashes between the Korean and African-American communities that took place in 1992.

For the past six days, Los Angeles has been the scene of numerous demonstrations, sometimes violent, to protest raids by the federal immigration police (ICE). Some Republican elected officials have drawn parallels with the 1992 riots, which resulted in the deaths of some sixty people in the City of Angels. For Valérie Beaudoin, a specialist in American politics and associate researcher at the Raoul-Dandurand Chair, "the only comparison we can make between the two events is in terms of location."

Los Angeles protests : "The comparison with the 1992 riots is tactical"

The New Obs.

But, secondly, "revolutionaries," who falsely label themselves in elections and in trade unions, also expressed, surprisingly, the same embarrassment at the revolt :

The arrests of undocumented workers in Los Angeles have sparked protests in several other cities. It is hoped that they will be a step in raising awareness of the true content of Trump’s policies.

Workers’ Struggle : United States : Protests against the hunt for migrants

Is that all ? In the language of union bureaucracies, LO’s formula : "a step in the awareness of the true content of Trump’s policy" means : move along, there’s nothing to see ! Because the CGT, the bureaucratized French union to which LO remains attached, is not calling for any action in solidarity with these riots in Los Angeles, where workers’ defenders have nevertheless brandished weapons against the police : the CGT’s mission is to stifle any similar movement in France, so it would be wrong for the beginnings of international solidarity to emerge.

Gone are the days when Griffuelhes, in solidarity with the Chicago rioters, made May 1st a day of insurrectionary struggle in 1906 !

Lutte Ouvrière, on the other hand, uncritically follows the CGT, which called for anti-war demonstrations. The CGT, which in 1914, through its entry into the Sacred Union, was one of the organizers of the imperialist slaughter, now claims to be fighting against wars. Trotsky denounced Jouhaux, the leader of the CGT, in 1914. N. Arthaud calls for following the CGT in 2025, while calling himself a Trotskyist :

To protest against the spiral of war into which the imperialist leaders are plunging us, to express solidarity with the affected populations, various rallies are being organized, including :

Tuesday, June 24 at 7 p.m., Place Saint-Augustin, Paris 8th arrondissement

Thursday, June 26 at 6 p.m., Fontaine des Innocents, Paris 1st arrondissement

Lutte Ouvrière supports these gatherings and calls on its activists and supporters to join them.

Let’s demonstrate against the war

Yes, these gatherings are undoubtedly very "diverse" in their labels, given all the organizations competing in "l’Assiette au beurre", but any conscious worker, who has often broken definitively with reformism by having studied the betrayal of 1914 by the unions and social-democratic parties, after having experienced the betrayal of a strike, knows that all these gatherings are not at all "diverse" in their political line : they are in the line of social-patriotism. This is one of the simplest principles of the ABC of communism : any gathering against the war, which does not denounce social-patriotism is itself social-patriotic ! LO, calling for anti-war gatherings without citing any appeal, is of the hypocritical kind, the worst, which supports without saying so. The Permanent Revolution party has the merit of citing one of these appeals :

NO TO ISRAELI-US AGGRESSION AGAINST IRAN !

STOP THE GENOCIDE IN GAZA !

NO TO FALSE PROPAGANDA ! IT IS NOT IRAN, BUT ISRAEL AND THE UNITED STATES ARE THE AGGRESSIONISTS !

DISARMAMENT OF ALL TYRANTS ! (Israel, it should be remembered, never wanted to sign the nuclear non-proliferation treaty)

MONEY FOR EDUCATION, HOUSING, JOBS, PENSION. CERTAINLY NOT FOR WAR !

LET’S PROTEST TOGETHER TO SAY IT LOUD AND CLEAR !

Social Gaullists, right-wing bourgeois patriots like D. de Villepin can sign this kind of declaration, because the term imperialism has disappeared : it is nations, homelands, the nations competing with "our nation" which are cited, stigmatized.

In 1914, social patriots like Léon Blum and L. Jouhaux shouted in the same way : it is not Serbia that is guilty, it is Austria-Hungary, war on the German race !

The specialty of social patriots is to denounce foreign imperialisms : the "Germans" in 1914, the Israelis and the Americans in 2025.

"The main enemy of the German people is in our country," wrote the proletarian revolutionary Liebknecht in a 1916 tract. "The main enemy of the French people is in our country" : it is French imperialism and its socio-patriotic minions, from the Socialist Party to Solidaires and the CGT, that the Liebknechts of France would write in 2025.

A. Kazibe and JP Mercier, the spokespeople for LO and RP, are union delegates from Solidaires, a split that emerged in the 1980s from the CFDT, itself a 1964 split from the CFTC, an anti-communist religious union organization created in 1919. However, it was in 1919 that the creation of the British mandate by the League of Nations (the UN at the time) dates back to this territory, including the future State of Israel. The majority of the CGT (Jouhaux), like the CFTC, supported this neo-colonialism carried by the French (Syria, Lebanon, Cameroon) and British "mandates."

The creators of the future pro-Western imperialist Israel, this governmental left represented by Millerand in 1919, supported by the CGT and the CFTC, are today denouncing in 2025 these horrors that they themselves created ! All the demands of the CGT and other "progressive forces" concerning a Palestinian state today are placed within the framework of the Sykes-Picot agreements, formalized by the Treaty of Sèvres, and the "mandates". The CGT advocates in 2025 for Palestine a "progressive" neo-colonialism, that of the "mandates" of the League of Nations, with the support of its far-left cadres (LO, NPA, RP), as did the right wing of the Second International from 1907.

Down with the Sykes-Picot Agreement ! Down with the artificial borders created by the French and British mandates of 1919, which created this rump "Palestinian people" reduced to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. By defending this "Palestinian people" created by the mandates in 1919, the pseudo-revolutionary far-left is only defending a colonial creation !

Yes, but, as these revolutionaries will say, "much water has flowed under the bridge." This "Palestinian people" does exist now. If so, it’s a dead end. The inability of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip to defend themselves against Israel shows that this "people," reduced to this ghetto, does not have a viable territory in the Gaza Strip. Instead of shouting "solidarity with the Palestinian people," let’s shout "long live the class struggle among the Palestinians." Because many Palestinians have actually emigrated to the Gulf States. In particular, an educated Palestinian petty bourgeoisie thrives in the Gulf States, while its cousins ​​in Gaza are massacred. Today, it shows no solidarity with Gaza. For example, in the magnificent university of one of the most backward Emirates, such as Sharjah, in the United Arab Emirates, certain scientific departments are the monopoly of Palestinian academics. The dollars they are certainly sending to their proletarian cousins ​​in Gaza have not protected Gaza.

Palestinian patriotism, like all patriotisms that ignore the class struggle, is sterile, as we have proof of today. Yes, the time has come to fight it, not to glorify it as LFI and the CGT do. This Palestinian petty bourgeoisie, generally Arab, often left-wing secular republican, did not manifest itself during the Arab Spring or today in the Arabian Peninsula. It is with the construction workers of India and Pakistan, with the Filipino women exiled for life in the Arabian Peninsula for the benefit of the "locals," that the proletarians of Gaza will have to show solidarity, more so with their engineer cousins, teachers who have become millionaires corrupted by the Gulf monarchies.

The defensive riots of immigrant workers, the seeds of revolution

The anarchist political group Tridni Valka has the merit of analyzing the Los Angeles riots in the light of the revolution :

The spirit of the Los Angeles riots of 1965 and 1992, as well as Ferguson in 2014 and Baltimore in 2015, is once again present in the city of Los Angeles, California. Street fires, clashes with the National Guard, looting, torched Tesla vehicles, vandalized police cars, mass unrest, and the spread of protests to other American cities all testify to the resurgence of class struggle at the heart of the beast. This is no small feat, as the state has increased the deployment of its law enforcement agencies, also resorting to martial law, imposing a curfew, and intensifying the witch hunt against protesters.

This group rightly denounces the Mexican left in the same way as Trump :

The official left of the Mexican government, as the good, domesticated left that it is, calls for not provoking disturbances against social peace, for protest and indignation to be kept within the bounds of citizenship and submission to the power of the Yankee state. It is therefore not surprising that its most orthodox supporters find it implausible that a savage proletariat would resort to self-defense and street fighting against the security forces (mongrel dogs of capital). This lukewarm attitude and calls for calm only condemn us to wander through the dead ends of bourgeois democratic institutions, thus reducing our struggle to nothing and returning us to the same miserable normality.

These riots have the character of those which precede them, the initial stage of any revolution :

Historically, our class’s outbursts of anger occur in a context of disorder, chaos, and spontaneity. It is therefore absurd to determine a correct way to struggle for the class. The class launches into struggle out of necessity and because of its condition as an exploited and wage-earning class [without waiting for the call of a warlord or any petty leader]. It is its natural reaction to resist the attacks orchestrated against it by the bourgeoisie : be it repression, budget cuts, layoffs, or the rising cost of living.

The only alternative is the autonomous struggle for the destruction of Capital.

If we refer to the need for the exploited and oppressed to struggle in the streets and not under the passive norms of hashtags, support for the political parties in power, as well as respect for law and order, it is not because of a simplistic and crude fetishism towards violence and social revolt, but because we recognize that the struggle in the streets serves to make the class aware of its own strength and subversive potential, because it is in these situations that its recognition as a community of struggle emerges, in the exercise of collective mutual aid and class solidarity above all the false categories of nationality and race with which capital seeks to keep us divided.

And precisely, these riots come at a time when the "false categories of nationality and race with which capital seeks to keep us divided," such as "Iran’s war against the USA," are being put forward not only by capital, but also by pseudo-revolutionaries.

First of all, it is not the question of defending Iran against the USA that revolutionaries must put forward, but the objective of the proletarian revolution leading to the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, in Iran, the USA and France.

But the link between Iran and the immigrant worker riots in Los Angeles is much closer than it seems. For artificial Emirates like Dubai have been created in opposition to Iran. Dubai was created thanks to the influx of Iranian traders fleeing their country, which was suffocating them. Then Dubai imported workers from Pakistan and elsewhere to build towers. The latter, deprived of any rights, regularly organize riots of the Los Angeles type. But while major French industrial groups, as well as the University through the Sorbonne and the Louvre, are very present in the Emirates, the CGT (Construction and Higher Education Union) of construction and higher education (including its federation, the Ferc, held by the far left), completely stifle these revolts by not giving them any internationalist union echo. It is the political destabilization of these Emirates by the uprisings of its immigrant workers (90% of the population !) that will be the political bomb that will liberate the Peninsula, shake the power of the mullahs, not at all the missiles that will destroy neighborhoods of Tel Aviv.

The "revolutionaries" who claim to oppose imperialism’s armed operations against Iran are not even calling for the closure of the French base in Abu Dhabi, which was precisely set up against Iran !

Conclusion

Yes, the riots of the youth of working-class neighborhoods, of migrant workers, "hinder" the "established" revolutionaries : why don’t the workers convert to socialism by reading our writings "in peacetime," they think ? Because the emancipation of the workers can only be the work of the workers themselves. Socialist propaganda will not find a conquered public, but it is such riots that are the seeds of future revolutionary uprisings. If the revolutionaries, in France as in the USA, renounce conducting systematic propaganda for socialism and the soviets, "in peacetime," this propaganda will have difficulty taking hold when the workers go to war.

The Los Angeles riots are a sign of the revolutionary character of the working class, not just the undocumented, to be popularized as an example throughout the world ; and a sign of the increasingly blatant rallying of pseudo-revolutionaries to social patriotism. This is propaganda for the world socialist revolution, which will unify and inspire the riots of immigrant workers from Los Angeles to Dubai !