The Kenosha Shootings and Their Historical Significance
Written By: Giacomo Bianchino
It seems absurd that we in 2020 can, without a hint of irony, say “white teen militias are shooting protesters dead in the street” but the events in Kenosha have, and not for the first time this year, broadcast the harrowing truth of the world we live in.
Last Sunday, the 23rd of August, a 17 year old white man, Kyle Rittenhouse, took the lives of two protesters and injured another. He walked away from the scene without police intervention and tried to return home to get some sleep. Three days later he was arrested in his home town of Antioch, Illinois, and now faces charges of reckless homicide, intentional homicide and reckless endangerment.
No-one is able to dispute these facts. There are multiple videos showing the events occurring in clear sequence. In the first video [content warning: murder], he is seen pursued by a man with a plastic bag, now identified as Jacob Rosenbaum, who seems to hurl projectiles at him. He runs, before turning and firing on the man. After killing him, he was reported to have exclaimed “I killed someone”. In the second video [content warning: murder and assault], protesters who had seen Rosenbaum’s murder pursue him. He falls and turns around, aiming from a seated position as a man with a skateboard and another with a pistol approach him. When the skateboarder, later identified as Anthony Huber, tries to take his gun, he is shot in the chest. He died nearly instantaneously. The other man, who has a pistol but does not shoot, is shot in the arm. Rittenhouse then stands up, fires several more rounds in the direction of the protesters, and walks with his arms raised past police officers and vehicles, none of whom choose to stop or even question him.
“If we are to avoid the mistakes made by communists in the past however, we cannot simply view this as an extension of business as usual”
But in the furore that has followed, the significance of this narrative has become a site for intense dispute. The debate, at least as it has been dictated by the right, has centred on the question of Ritten house’s responsibility and specifically on whether or not he was acting in self-defence. This focus, however, removes the context of the event and fails to recognise its importance in historical terms. The fact is that dwelling on the legality of his behaviour or even his personal responsibility distracts from the forces and circumstances that made this tragedy possible in the first place.
In order to give these events the larger context they need, let’s step back for a moment and look at a similar series of events in history. In 1919, the Italian Communist movement was at its height; boasting the largest proletarian movement in Europe concentrated in the largest and most mobilised party - the Socialist Party of Italy. They struck regularly and in great numbers, and orchestrated walk-offs for day labourers and farmhands across the Northern Italian countryside. The class power of the workers became so threatening that groups of boys from the towns and cities made trips to the countryside with the explicit intention of “defending property” and bludgeoning communists. These black shirted thugs became the cornerstone of the squadristi; the early fascist militants.
At the time they were welcomed by the owners of the larger estates and smallholding peasants alike. Anyone with property saw them as allies against the power of the “reds”. While urban liberals were less enthusiastic about the use of this force, those with property raised little objection. In the cities, the large bourgeoisie class also started to exercise concerted violence against striking workers; not only with the use of police but the mounting of machine guns to intimidate the protesters. Eventually the workers gave out, partly due to the misdirection of the PSI (this led to the formation of the Italian Communist Party in 1921). The fascists, who had become more organised in the intervening period, became the cornerstone of “order” that forced workers back to their posts. They used their leverage to wrest power and become the dominant political force by 1923.
This is a long digression in order to explain contemporary events. But the comparison of the Italian and American conditions is striking. A period of working-class empowerment characterised by threats to the property of the bourgeoisie is met with harsh state repression. It is supplemented by the popular violence of self-proclaimed militias, who intimidate protesters out of action.
The turning point America stands at now is the tilt towards the kind of political compromise which would make vigilantism and violence the condition of order. In periods like this, the violence of both sides is equalised. Extra-judicial killings are put on par with the destruction of objects by protesters. One can be guaranteed that the sections of the liberal bourgeoisie who stand to lose the value or integrity of their property will not prove difficult for the proponents of order to win over.
The Rittenhouse murders are concerning because they show the propensity of bourgeois liberalism to collude with and slide into fascism in times of crisis. If we are to avoid the mistakes made by communists in the past however, we cannot simply view this as an extension of business as usual. The return to understandings of violence as the foundation of social order is more dangerous for marginalised groups and the political left than it is for even critical liberals. We must rally around even the liberal-democratic rights, explain some of these rights that we have gained, like the freedom of association, protest and gathering, as well as our freedom to promote the worker’s interests through the existing channels of media. On the other hand, we must start preparing ourselves for more concrete methods of resistance as the prow of the West keels into fascism.