6. SPURNING THE PEACEMAKERS
Homicide is still the largest single cause of death for children under eighteen in Los Angeles County. Years ago, I used the Sheriff Department’s ‘gang-related homicide’ data to estimate that some 10,000 young people had been killed in the L.A. area’s street wars, from the formation of the first Crips sets in 1973—4 until 1992. This, of course, is a fantastic, horrifying figure, almost three times the death toll of the so-called ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland over a roughly similar time span. It is even more harrowing when we consider that most of the homicides have been concentrated in a handful of police divisions. Add to the number of dead the injured and permanently disabled, as well as those incarcerated or on parole for gang-related violations, and you have a measure of how completely Los Angeles – its adult leaderships and elites – has betrayed several generations of its children.
Soon after I published City of Quartz, I wrote and narrated an hour-long film for Channel 4 in the UK. In the documentary, I interviewed dozens of gang members, as well as community activists, on both the South and Eastside; none expressed even a grain of optimism about reducing gang violence. All the more extraordinary, then, when on the eve of the Rodney King riot, the leaderships of the major Black gangs in Watts announced a truce: a truce that endured for more than a decade and was replicated by local truces in other war-torn parts of the city. The initial response of the LAPD and Sheriff’s – especially the corrupt and tainted anti-gang unit, CRASH – was to do everything possible to sabotage and undermine the truce. To the credit of Chief Willie Williams, he pulled the dogs off; to the discredit of Mayor Riordan and his business backers, they refused any dialogue with the truce organizers.
It had been obvious for most of a generation that the only people who can end the street wars are the warriors themselves. Mindless punishment and super-incarceration have been societal disasters: locking away tens of thousands of young people in hyper-violent prisons, dominated by institutionalized race wars, without any semblance of education, rehabilitation or hope. The real function of the prison system, indeed, is not to safeguard communities, but to warehouse hatred for the day when it returns to the street. In contrast, the organizers of the gang truce movement offered an unprecedented framework for dialogue with the youth of the city: a chance to turn street warriors into community organizers and peacemakers. But with the heroic exceptions of Congress-woman Maxine Waters and State Senator Tom Hayden, no elected politician even bothered to listen. Funds from Rebuild L.A. went to the usual suspects – politically connected developers and ministers – while almost nothing trickled down to the housing projects or mean streets. Unlike 1965, there was no social postmortem on the causes of the riot, nor any serious new investment in youth employment and recreation, despite the proven track record of programs like the California Conservation Corps.
The failure to acknowledge the gang truce or build on its early successes was a first-rate tragedy, whose price we are now paying in an inexorable, deadly resumption of gang warfare. The gravest danger, as always, is inter-ethnic violence, spreading from the chronic warfare between Blacks and Latinos that is tolerated in the county jails and state prisons. Our overcrowded penal institutions, governed by a cynical calculus of social incapacitation, are expressive of the mean Victorian ethos that currently commands California politics.
7. CITY OF ORGANIZERS?
Finally, a cautious note of optimism. The local labor movement is largely missing from City of Quartz, yet – as I argued later in a little book called Magical Urbanism – Los Angeles over the last fifteen years became the principal R&D center for the future of the American labor movement. The militant, creative organizing campaigns of the janitors, hotel workers and drywall workers kept hope alive in L.A. during the tough years of the 1990s and helped train a new generation of activists. As elite power become more politically diffuse and uncertain, the renovated L.A. County Federation of Labor emerged as the single most important electoral and social force in the city. The successful Living Wage campaign demonstrated that local government could play a proactive role in restructuring labor markets and preventing the race to the bottom in wages and benefits. The long, bitter but ultimately successful campaign to defend the rights of catering and cleaning workers at USC – culminating in hunger strikes and mass arrests – took the battle into an inner sanctum of elite privilege and self-righteousness. Los Angeles in the 1990s became a city of organizers.
But Los Angeles’ new progressive politics, buoyed by the dynamism of the new unionism, has arrived at a watershed. Clearly, the labor movement needs to stay on the political offensive, expanding its clout into additional areas of vital interest to local working people, especially the politics of land-use, transportation, healthcare and housing. It requires an expansive vision and comprehensive program, yet the labor movement has mortgaged its future to a Democratic Party, large elements of which are in full retreat from traditional New Deal commitments. In striving to remake it, labor runs the risks of having its own new unity and militancy unmade instead. Indeed, some would argue that the Democratic Party is the inevitable graveyard of political principle.
Labor’s forward march in Los Angeles, and with it the future of the urban region, depends, in my opinion, upon further consolidation of a programmatic vision, built around a human needs agenda, that is not hostage to any individual campaign or political personality. Los Angeles needs, in short, a more, not less, ideological politics. I find nothing praiseworthy in current calls for more ‘centrism’ or ‘pragmatism’: euphemisms for the continual process of incremental adjustment to the rightward drift of the Democratic Party. In contrast, conservative Christian groups have built impressive political bases in local suburban politics largely through unyielding, programmatic tenacity. Odd to say, but many conservatives seem to have a better grasp of Gramsci than many on the Left. Above all, they understand the principle that a hegemonic politics must represent a consistent continuum of values: it must embody a morally coherent way of life.
Upton Sinclair – the most famous Socialist in Southern California in the 1920s and 1930s – understood this instinctively and completely. His EPIC movement of 1934 brilliantly used the ethic of the New Testament to argue the compelling case for production for use and full employment. He campaigned on the straightforward principle that the right to earn a living for one’s family transcends the right to own idle property. His campaign was a crusade that lit fires in the hearts of millions of ordinary Californians, most of whom had never previously paid any attention to ideas from the Left.
But what is the equivalent crusade today? What moral imperative should organize and give passion to a progressive politics for Los Angeles and California? The answer, I think, has been provided by the extraordinary, if underpublicised hearings that Los Angeles state senators Gloria Romero and Richard Alarcon conducted several years ago, which focused on the scandal of poverty, particularly child poverty in California. They argued with real eloquence that California – one of the richest societies in world history – needs to declare war on the poverty and youth violence in its inner cities and farm communities. This is the great issue – not tax relief for corporations and SUV owners, or persecution of undocumented immigrants – that should be the moral center of local and state politics.
The gigantic demonstrations of Latino immigrants and their allies in the spring of 2006, which reclaimed downtown Los Angeles in the name of El Pueblo, revealed the social power of the city’s blue-collar neighborhoods and suburbs. The challenge to labor activists and community organizers is to harness this emergent power to a consistent progressive program, and the centerpiece of that program, in my opinion, should be a social and economic bill of rights for the city’s children. At the end of the day, the best measure of the humanity of any society is the life and happiness of its children. We live in a rich society with poor children, and that should be intolerable.
San Diego, April 2006
PROLOGUE
THE VIEW FROM FUTURES PAST
The best place to view Los Angeles of the next millennium is from the ruins of its alternative future.