Los Angeles, CA: Anti-Repression Workshop at La Conxa Space Attacked

From It's Going Down

Statement of solidarity from the bay area with anarchists and autonomists in Los Angeles, who speak on a recent attack against an organizing space by authoritarians.

On July 31st, the self-proclaimed “revolutionaries” of Defend Boyle Heights (DBH) mimicked the fascist state by rehearsing their own Maoist brand of authoritarian repression at the jail solidarity and courtwatch workshop, “What To Do In Case Of Arrest.” Masked members of DBH attempted to charge their way through the doors at La Conxa, and in the process pepper-sprayed those who tried to prevent the masked attackers from entering the space.

The “What To Do In Case Of Arrest” workshop was intended to help protect workers from state violence and provide tools for navigating the carceral state in the event of arrest. As an attempt to justify their attack, DBH retroactively attempted to label the workshop as “counter-revolutionary” and “reactionary.” By simply placing the words “so-called” in front of the word “autonomous,” they tried to totally discredit the nature of the community workshop and its facilitators. DBH then doubled down by claiming that the autonomous event organizers were training attendees on how to repress radical work and cited “hypocrisy” as a justified reason for mobilizing a masked attack.

Like bullies on an adrenaline rush, DBH gleefully announced their imaginary victory over autonomous organizers who they have presumptuously labeled as “the idealist petite-bourgeoisie.” This unfortunate fantasy is a desperate attempt to justify their newly acquired taste for repressing any group of people that may attract praise from someone other than themselves.

The authoritarian nature of DBH has left them unable to conceive of a leaderless group, with autonomous collaborators. As a result, they framed a member of the OVAs as a “leader” (but in other articles an “anti-leader”) and used their contention with this individual to justify the DBH attack against an open workshop with unaffiliated members of community present. To this day they maintain that the two OVAs were pepper sprayed “deservedly so” on the official DBH Facebook page.

Defend Boyle Heights is a group that proudly asserts that “identity does not matter,” and yet does not hesitate to weaponize and tokenize femmes of color who are willing to be mouthpieces for their patriarchal and class-reductionist organizing. As a result, DBH did not have an interest in any PRIOR accountability or transformative justice processes – and instead jumped at the opportunity to lump everyone together with one individual and their contention with them. DBH struck first and asked questions later, offering underwhelming and largely irrelevant “evidence” to justify their night of violent role-playing. In fact, the full video was not released until days after the attack, which serves to show that this “evidence” was weaponized in order to justify an attack on the workshop, not offered for consideration to the community at large that DBH seeks to bully into complying with their edicts.

As Defend Boyle Heights faced the consequences of their indiscriminate attack on working class people, they mocked those who pointed out that DBH’s misdirection of tactics had the same impact as fascist state repression and infiltration. Ironically, DBH could not identify the troublesome parallels between their own actions and state repression tactics, and they bragged about autonomists’ attempts to identify the masked group who ambushed the abolitionist workshop. DBH declared themselves the mouthpiece of the proletariat as they shut down a workshop that could only further benefit, well…the proletariat. They even made sure to specify that “there was only one child” present in the space – as if this excuses or lessens the seriousness or recklessness of their actions.

Defend Boyle Heights offers to the working class a messy explanation for why they “had” to shut down a valuable community resource in the struggle against state repression. Invigorated by their newfound bloodthirstiness, DBH is now inciting the proletariat to attack anyone who wishes to use alternative community spaces to build with Boyle Heights and the larger L.A. community. Defend Boyle Heights hopes that those around them will fear being on the wrong side, and choose indiscriminate violence over transformative justice whenever misunderstandings arise in their community. This inclination of DBH is widening and deepening already existing tensions to a point of disrepair that the state can ultimately capitalize on – if they haven’t begun to already.

Defend Boyle Heights is calling for the active repression of autonomists rather than building resistance against the state, or creating supportive resources for the same working class for whom they claim to speak. DBH does not have the authority to call for a community-wide ban without a community-informed process. DBH makes the promise of continued violence and escalation, because they know that a community process for their grievances would deny them the ability to satisfy their desire to continue wielding repressive violence. DBH intends to rehearse the repression of autonomists today, before they even have their mythical “workers’ state” (which is sure to be without workers and full of bureaucratic parasites who “represent” the proletariat).

Defend Boyle Heights offers instead this sad excuse for attacks on autonomists, anarchists, and anti-authoritarians alike because DBH knows they cannot protect the working class from state repression or fascist terror, and they hope you won’t notice. And for those of you who do notice and challenge them, DBH has made it clear that they will not hesitate to gaslight you with self-righteous propaganda, or outright violent harassment.

-Anonymous Affinity Group

There are 24 Comments

What does "class reductionist" mean here? Not being into identity politics?

it's not just not being into identity politics. class reductionism is the idea that all forms of oppression that exist under capitalism are merely variations on the primary contraction between capital and labor (bosses versus workers). every other contradiction, tension, and form of oppression is secondary or tertiary -- i.e. a distraction -- and will eventually fade into irrelevance after the primary contradiction between bosses and workers is resolved through the expropriation of the means of production by the self-conscious proletariat organized in the revolutionary party. this is the typical line of right-wing leninists, stalinists, and maoists. they are happy enough to pay lip service to being against patriarchy and racism, but only insofar as it serves to organize proles as proles.

This reads like a bad parody.
Unbelievable people still have to suffer these groups.

Against 20:48.

People who use the term class reductionists get their conceptually harmless and moralistic ideas from social workers, liberals and other wannabe capitalist state functionaries. Notice that this social work influenced perspective talks about "oppression" -- and not about exploitation. People whose conceptual framework is hobbled like this haven't got anything useful to contribute to the rise of a class against class mass social movement against capitalist social relations and the bourgeois state in a soon to collapse United States.

I’m sure glad old kev is still lurking here to lecture anarchists on the ways of authentic proletarian class-for-itself non-reductionist politics. What a relief from anarchist dogmatic slumber!

Thanks, Gifford. How's sexual harassment of women going these days?

don't know who this Gifford is (or is supposed to be), but you have to be aware enough to know that there are way more people who can't stand you than one imaginary enemy. and are you just trying to ride the MeToo wave with the empty allegation of sexual harassment? why not accuse your imaginary enemy of rape or child murder?

To the anonymous comrade who posted this statement at Its Going Down:

The capitalist mode of production is the most significant underlying basis of all the other horrors the human species is plagued with and threatened by -- it is not just one more wholly equal item on a long left-liberal laundry list of "oppressions." The capitalist system has outlived its historical usefulness. And it has fortunately also created the material preconditions for an immediate leap to a free, egalitarian, ecologically sane, post-market society on a global scale.

From the point of view of the vast majority of the world's population, capitalism is all about wage labor. Wage labor is the most fundamental way that we encounter the capitalist world; wage labor is how this world is produced. A fight against this social order means a fight among wage laborers and against wage labor. The United States is the main problem country of the world, the United States is sailing into a converging series of insurmountable existential crises and the U.S. domestic social order is growing more fragile by the day. The problems of this society cannot be solved on this societies' terms. This social order is more vulnerable to mass revolutionary subversion than it has ever been. Mass revolutionary subversion doesn't mean a little harmless sporadic, short-lived steam valve rioting that provides entertainment for the youth contingent and leaves nothing to build on, and it does not mean any kind of ethnic-based/skin color based explanations for how the capitalist world works. A real world liberatory opposition can only take off from a public combative politics geared exclusively towards the vast majority of people who have to sell their labor power for wages or a salary, and the only way forward for this is an extremely visible, class against class, collective direct action politics that does not exist right now and that roots itself in mundane everyday life concerns of mainstream wage earners and enlisted people in the armed forces.

Your use of the word "oppression" as well as "class reductionist" indicates that you do not fully understand this. Your underlying understanding of how the world functions appears to be largely borrowed from left-wing tendencies of capitalist politics, left-overs from the worst aspects of the failed, guilt-ridden, Stalinoid and often deeply repugnant U.S. New Left of the early 1970's, politics that failed to go anywhere and were not worth a shit to begin with; for example, the Black Panthers. You appear to do this as a form of left-wing conformist groupthink. To repudiate identity politics as the objectively pro-capitalist politics that it is might make you unpopular with the vast majority of politically inert passive opinion holders, wearing adult-diaper-sized baggy pants because capital tells them to dress this way, umbilically tethered to the global machine as they stare slack-jawed into their Iphones, in the hapless, tiny, left-liberal plus anarchist camp followers protester crowd, and at this point it appears that being liked is more important to you than being effective, in the long term, against the underlying historical problem, at a point when this problem is more open to a liberatory solution than it has ever been before, and when it is clearly time to retool.

At this point in the 21st century you aren't going to lose points with anybody by not being nostalgic about the Black Panthers or George Jackson, let alone Huey Newton. What do you know about Huey Newton?

We need a direct action politics that focuses on the wage earning class, and if you don't get this, then whatever good intention you might have you are not going to be of any use.

Also, what's the difference -- in patterns of real world action, not just verbal postures -- between the two groups in conflict in Los Angeles?

Keep it short please please please, for the attention spans of consumer society products.

How does one separate those who don't understand from those with whom they fundamentally disagree?

A distinction worth making IRL, perhaps impossible online.

When it does go it will go over a prolonged period of time(see John Michael Greer).

The issue is neither oppression or exploitation(both countersensical concepts) but compulsion. Compulsion at its base is something that everyone does to everyone. It's not a system problem but a society problem. The answer lies in detachment an departure not attacking some system with an essential character.

Class is a functional consequence of status and other factors such as fuel based mediation and complicated structures of debt. There is not agency in class or any kind of declarative binary position. Class follows a function not an intent. War Marxism(as I call it) simply doesn't get this. The more Camattean types do who focus more on capital and relations and less on class an binary war of positions(such as comrade kev here).

It isn't just class reductionism that is wrong but class determinism of any kind. Class analysis is only useful in describing a particular function of power and status.

On a related matter.

What does the La Conxa Space do?

What does Defend Boyle Heights do?

In communicating this, try to imagine that you are communicating with people far, far outside of your immediate social circle.

From the outside, this looks like an unintelligible conflict between two leftist groups. The author of the original posts needs to explain the basis of the underlying conflict.

Did everyone already see the cringey bad video that Defend Boyle Heights made? I'm trying to find it.

Where they have a spokesperson reading and then the camera zooms out as all the other members come in to frame, wearing hammer/sickle masks? It's … amazeballs. FIND AND POST PLS

Yeah, the real difficult to find video is on YouTube.

From their own statement they are clearly Maoists.

So, why is it that people who generate more pleasant noises are always less capable in practical terms than people with DBH's -- GBH? -- crap politics?

where you see "less capable in practical terms", read "unwilling to pepperspray random children"

kind of social darwin sounding language ya got there! careful on that road COMRADE, goes to such dark places

From what's posted here, this space seems defined in terms of identity politics:


Which doesn't mean that if they are attacked in a thuggish manner that their attackers shouldn't be publicly exposed and held accountable.

Weirdly enough, there was a situation akin to this at the stinky anarchist bookfare in SF some years ago, where a scenester, apparently out to accrue subculture cred with other scenesters, trashed a table where Mao-iods were distributing their propaganda. Far from being a mighty blow against Stalinism, this was a cowardly act of bullying against people who have terrible politics, but who also have the guts and backbone to militate for them outside of their comfort zone, in a context where they know they might encounter a lot of hostility.

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