A week or so ago, a friend and I attended the Indivisible “Hands Off!” protest in Chicago. Here is a brief description of what I experienced and some brief takeaways.
We got there around noon, but about two hours beforehand, I had seen a crowd of marshals and planners in the square setting up. Even then, there was a professionally hung banner hanging from the Daley Center; from what we understood, the banner belonged to the Chicago Teacher Union. When we arrived, we found ourselves in a sea of people, almost all of whom were older white women; there were few young men and even fewer black people. The majority of the people around us were waving American flags and holding signs reading things like “DEPORT ELON,” “FELON MUSK,” “ELON MU卐K,” photoshopped images of Trump as Hitler, et cetera. There was a stage by the Daley Center, surrounded by CPD officers, one of which I saw photographing the crowd with his phone—at the DNC they had used a periscope-looking device to get photographs of faces, I assume this was not what he was doing; he probably just liked seeing so many flags and swastikas.
As we loitered, the speeches commenced. They were short and sweet, a nice reprieve from the usual park-and-bark Chicago protest order. However, I felt a gulf between the organizers speaking and the crowd they had pulled almost immediately. Although most of the speakers, drawn from progressive churches, unions, and nonprofits, had much to say about Trump and Musk’s smash and grab of the state, and “stealing from your wallets,” they were also full of vitriol about Trump’s attacks on trans people, and the continued genocide in Gaza; but did the attendees care as much about those things as the speakers? It seemed to get far less applause than the moments when the speakers addressed the audience’s bank accounts. In one particularly evocative example, some speaker from a progressive nonprofit said something along the lines of, “For the past three months, things have been dramatically worse than ever before,” before quietly saying, “The problems have been going on for a lot longer than that though for lots of reasons,” muttering as if the crowd could turn on him should he suggest circumstances were dire before the small-handed Cheeto-in-Chief took office.
We left before the march began, though we returned later for a short glimpse of the moving crowd. As we walked out from the core of the crowd, participants got younger, less white—but NOT more black—and perhaps more radical. Against the backdrop of American flags, I was relieved to see keffiyehs, even if in practice their wearers may have agreed with the people closer to the stage.
From all I can tell, Indivisible, the group that called for the mobilizations, is a shell for local progressive organizations to work under; in Chicago, this seemed to me like basically the Mayor’s office and the CTU, plus the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and other progressive nonprofits. If you look at Indivisible’s website, you can learn how they say they function: https://indivisible.org/resource/guide. Those who want to read it will probably get a kick out of the language; when you read that, according to Indivisible, “constituent power” is synonymous with representative liberal governance, you must be impressed at the recuperation. One can imagine Negri rolling in his grave.
Anyway, it all but says on the tin that they are a faction of the Democrats and that there is some degree of sublimated resentment about the failure of Kamala’s campaign. “We simply were not able to convince enough people that the threat posed by Trump to democracy, to abortion, and to all our rights and freedoms outweighed their frustration with the status quo.” To most of the organizers and attendees, Hillary’s riposte to Trump in 2016 remains correct: America Is—Was—Already Great.
I later learned about 30,000 people were in attendance; I don’t know how that compares to the height of the Palestinian protests in the Loop here. There is a question here of what communists should do when an ongoing social movement is married to the status quo’s institutions and their most capable managers: is it worthwhile to be present and honest, to be there when they hit the limits of that arrangement? Are there good historical examples of movements that were not immediately communistic but became so upon impact with their limits? Or is it worth staying home? I wish we had current criteria to evaluate which things we should participate in. I would love to read something critical about the Yellow Vest movement in France or communist participation—or lack thereof—in Eastern European color revolutions.
“In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.” I wonder and shudder to consider what the 29,998 other people at this protest would think about the property question.
