Two rallies
Thinking about the word 'rally' this week.
On the one hand, there have been historic marches and rallies (and successful direct actions) on police brutality in response to George Floyd's murder. Hundreds of thousands of people are rallying to demand defunding police and generally weaken repressive force in the US and elsewhere.
At the same time, there's a stock market 'rally'. I don't want to be glib, but it's true: ruling class investors are flocking to equities and 2020 losses in the DOW jones have been erased in the last few weeks. There's been a huge increase.
I only mention the pun because the two rallies, while diametrically opposed (one is leftwing and the other rightwing), are connected.
First, the inequality rampant in our society--and the ways that the masses of people are subject to that inequality--is causally connected to the rampant success of the ruling class. The forces at work in stock market rallies, among other things, lead to rallies in the streets over time, particularly against the police who enforce ruling class interests like white supremacy.
But second, both rallies are large-scale social phenomena where there is an elephant in the room: the pandemic crisis and all its attendant force is kind of lurking in the background, both in the form of the increasing number of cases and, for instance, massive unemployment.
Calls to defund police are necessary. They are not (yet) calls for further support in a time massive unemployment, eg. They are not (yet) calls for healthcare or a better public health response to the pandemic. I’m not sure they should be, either.
None of this is a critique or suggestion that the movement’s demands should be otherwise (doing so is a terrible move). I just note it just out of interest. Police brutality must change right now, and these demands to defund the police are happening in the context of a pandemic.
I can’t help noticing that the demand to defund the police doesn’t incorporate elements of the tectonic tensions in our social formation right now, from impending evictions to eldercare death tolls, etc. I think the protest and rallies themselves incorporate those elements: would the marches, looting, and actions be so widespread and intense if there weren’t a pandemic?
Similarly, the stock market rally doesn't appear to take into account massive unemployment, huge shocks in demand and supply, and mind-boggling fluctuations in every standard measure of a healthy economy. Would the rally happening now in stocks be happening without the surrounding pandemic crisis?
Meanwhile, infection curves are going up pretty dramatically in Arkansas, Florida, and New Mexico and elsewhere. Curves are flat most other places, but they’re not exactly going down.
I feel like there's a lot of room for possibility in both rally situations. For the movements, there is a lot of possibility to keep pushing. Given the response we’ve seen from the state when it comes to demands for police reform, I bet we could keep pushing. For the investors, there is a lot of possibility that there isn’t a there there in the economy, an 'everything bubble' about to burst beneath their optimism.