Fire On
Main Street

Small Cities In The George Floyd Uprising

By Shemon, Arturo and Atticus

 
First edition, format & printed by NightOwl Zine Collective

Cover image from Lansing, MI courtesy of The Detroit News

(6/1/21)

Anticopyright, free for prisoners
Fire On Main Street

Small Cities In The George Floyd Uprising

by
Shemon, Arturo, & Atticus
The small city still does not exist on the map of the left as far as
revolutionary struggle is concerned. Instead, the revolutionary
left in the United States is mostly focused on big cities, resulting
in a kind of parochialism where most revolutionaries live in big
cities and are more likely to know comrades in other big cities,
even overseas in cities like Berlin, Paris or London, but have no
relationships with revolutionaries in the small cities and suburbs
a few miles outside their city.

In geographic terms, the historical and cultural poles of the
far left milieu in the US are Oakland and New York City. Most
movement texts and organizational strategy come from these
two cities. On one level, this limited geography is a reflection of
the class background, cultural status, university education, and
coastal biases which map onto the liberalism of left-wing activists
since the 2008 crisis. For example, Occupy was also a national
movement with camps scattered throughout the country, but the
focus still tended to be on New York and Oakland. No matter
what the rest of the country did, it was as if those two cities were
the only ones that mattered in the imagination of activists.

With the 2014 riots in Ferguson we can now look back and
say that this rebellion foreshadowed a wider geography of strug-
gle, although that was not clear at the time. No one had heard of
Ferguson before the police murder of Mike Brown and the riots
that followed. Suddenly a small St. Louis suburb was the center
of national attention. While NYC and Oakland were not neces-
sarily displaced as the extreme poles of the revolutionary left,
they were no longer in a dance only with each other, but were

4
circling around a new center of gravity—the small suburban city.
But as the fires of Ferguson disappeared, the binary emerged
once again between NYC and Oakland.

When the George Floyd uprising erupted throughout the
US this summer, dozens of riots happened in small cities like Spo-
kane WA, Eugene OR, Fargo ND, Salt Lake City UT, Atlantic
City NJ, Lynchburg VA, Columbia SC, Fort Lauderdale FL, ete.
The large and midsize cities certainly showed up, with explosive
riots in places like Minneapolis, Oakland, Los Angeles, Portland,
Chicago, Louisville, New York City, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Mi-
ami, etc. While much attention has been given to these larger
cities, the riots in the small cities and suburbs have been largely
overlooked. The only exception here is Kenosha, which couldn’t
be ignored after an armed white counter-protester fired his auto-
matic rifle at BLM protesters and killed two of them.

Riots have been growing in small cities and suburbs
throughout the country, but this isn’t an entirely new phenome-
non. The riots of the 1960s had already exposed a wider geogra-
phy of struggle, although most people do not remember this era
this way. Alongside big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit
and Philadelphia, small cities also exploded in places like Roch-
ester NY, York PA, Omaha NE, and even in small towns and
suburbs like Wadesboro NC, Saginaw MI, Plainfield NJ, and
Cairo IL. In fact, nearly half of the riots during the “long hot
summer” of 1967 happened in small cities and towns.

Clearly, it is not urban centers alone that set the stage for
riots and uprisings. Given the shifting geography of where pro-
letarians live and work in the US, our wager is that small cities

a
and suburbs will increasingly play a role in the battles and rup-
tures that are coming. Therefore, it’s crucial that we analyze the
particular dynamics of these places and the strategic implications
that they pose.

Class Conflict In The Peripheries

The George Floyd uprising, like the Ferguson riots before it, re-
vealed a growing proletarian strata which increasingly lives out-
side of big cities. As small cities and suburbs continue to grow in
population, they have also become home to a more diverse cross
section of the proletariat, which is increasingly Latinx and Black.
This strata broke through in small cities like San Bernardino CA,
De Moines IA, Champaign IL, Lansing MI, Albany NY, Brock-
ton MA, Providence RI, Richmond VA, Birmingham AL, etc.

While poor people are still over-represented in the largest
cities, their numbers have been growing in small cities and sub-
urbs for decades now. As the biggest cities get more gentrified
and become more expensive to live in, a growing number of pro-
letarians are leaving and finding more affordable housing in the
suburbs and small cities that surround the big cities. This trend
is also reinforced by the fact that working class jobs continue to
shift away from the urban core and into the suburbs and small
cities on the peripheries. At the same time, those who already
lived in the peripheries have become poorer, especially since the
2008 crisis, which increased the rate of foreclosures in these ar-
eas.

Of course, small cities are not homogeneous, and in fact ex-
hibit sharp differences. The small metropolis is very different
from the suburb or satellite city, not just in terms of size and
population but more importantly in terms of political-economy.
Whereas small cities like Kenosha or Wauwatosa are suburbs of
larger cities like Milwaukee, a small metropolis like Birmingham,
Durham, or Albany forms its own economic core and has its own
suburbs.

We can further divide the political-economy of small cities
into two types. The first type are the left-behinds: these are the
small cities which have received little to no capital investment,
more commonly known as gentrification. These include small
cities like Rockford IL, Chester PA, Forest Park GA, or Kenosha
WIL. Most of the small rust-belt cities in the Northeast and Mid-
west fall into this first category, although these small immiser-
ated cities can be found throughout the US.

The second type are those small cities which have seen a sig-
nificant influx of capital investment, such as Durham NC, Pitts-
burgh PA, Lancaster PA, or Rochester NY. Here investment is
about revitalizing the small city as a tourist destination, and as a
hub for white collar jobs in healthcare, technology and education.
Of course, this kind of investment does not mean less racism or
less poverty for the proletariat, which still finds itself relegated
to low-wage jobs with no benefits and no job security.

As some small cities make their downtown areas more at-
tractive to suburbanites and yuppies, the same pattern plays out
as in the big cities—proletarians get priced out of the commer-
cialized urban core and pushed into the peripheries of the city
where rent is more affordable. Despite the existence of small
shopping districts, art, cultural and entertainment centers,

 
highly concentrated pockets of racialized poverty continue to
grow on the edges of these types of small cities, reinforcing the
social inequality and racial boundaries that eventually explode
into open revolt, as was seen in the Daniel Prude riots in Roch-
ester and in the Ricardo Munoz riot in Lancaster, both in early
September.

The Limits Of Big Cities

If we take a city like New York City and broaden its geography
to the overall NYC metro area, we will quickly see that the city
is completely dependent on its surrounding region for survival.
Looking at things from this vantage point means we need to ask
the following questions: from where and whom do we get our
food? Our electricity? Our water? Fuel and replacement parts for
subways and buses? And other essential goods we need to sur-
vive?

For example, where does NYC get its power from? 31%
comes from nuclear power, 44% from natural gas, and 19% from
hydro power. None of this is produced in New York City itself.
Each of these power sources are located somewhere else, and
electrical transmission lines have to deliver the power to the city.
From the standpoint of power infrastructure, the NYC region
stretches hundreds if not thousands of miles. To think of NYC in
an isolated manner when it comes to power is to fall miserably
short in understanding the territory, infrastructure, and rela-
tions with small cities, suburbs and towns that make a place like
NYC possible.
Our point is not to argue that struggles in big cities are use-
less or anything like that. The radical histories and milieus that
exist in larger cities can have a big impact on the political devel-
opment of revolutionaries in smaller cities, and that cross-polli-
nation is important. However, our argument is that if we are se-
rious about revolution, big cities alone are not enough. Just like
socialism in one country was impossible, so is revolution in one
big city. This is because big cities are not isolated islands, but
exist in tight relations with their surrounding regions and geog-
raphy, which includes small cities, suburbs, towns and rural ar-
eas. Accepting rigid boundaries between these geographies falls
into a type of ignorance that cannot recognize the inputs that go
into big cities, that make them what they are.

It is worth remembering the experience of the Paris Com-
mune. Here geography was inseparable from the defeat of the
revolution. One of the reasons for its defeat was its isolation from
the rest of France. Paris went hungry because the siege of the
bourgeoisie effectively blockaded the city from the food produc-
ing regions of France. Paris is not exceptional, but a pattern that
has kept repeating itself in revolutionary movements throughout
the decades, in Barcelona, Shanghai, Athens, and Aleppo. Major
cities are not self-sufficient. Even with a narrow focus on food in
mind, it should be clear that there is no serious possibility of rev-
olution if we cannot find solidarity outside of big cities. Any road
to revolution will have to tackle this problem politically and lo-
gistically. Otherwise our fate will be that of the communards:
hunger and isolation.
Invoking the Paris commune sets our analysis within the
framework of insurrection, even though this would emerge out
of capitalist geographies. This tension is inescapable, but one we
must grapple with in light of the George Floyd uprising. It is
obvious that the uprising did not generalize. The riots did not
leap into an insurrection and ultimately a new form of life. How-
ever, the riots have opened up new pragmatic questions that were
mere fantasy only a year ago.

In an era where cities produced massive amounts of indus-
trial goods, James Boggs wrote The City is the Black Man’s
Land, pointing to the unique position of Black proletarians in
core industrial cities in the North. Capturing cities like Balti-
more, Newark, or Detroit in the 1960s was not only symbolic,
but a real node of material power that could be connected to the
Black Revolution. The Republic of New Afrika pointed out a flaw
in Bogg’s thinking, arguing that Northern cities were sur-
rounded by a sea of white racists. In contrast, it was Southern
Black cities, nestled in an ecology of Black rural areas, which
could provide the dynamic exchange of resources we have dis-
cussed. However, a revolutionary commune of the sorts that
Paris had in 1871 was not built in the 20th century in the US.
Perhaps the closest analogy could be the rise of Black political
elites in many major cities, but this is a crass analogy. None of
these mayors did anything radical, but they quickly ran into the
same geographic limits of being surrounded by hostile metro and
regional areas. They were starved of capital investment and a tax
base and these cities became highly immiserated. If this is what
capital can do in these reformist circumstances, imagine what
capital will do if cities go all out in an anti-capitalist insurrection!

Our focus on small cities, therefore, is not moralistic, but
strategic. Small cities are often important nodes which bridge
into rural areas. Unlike midsize and large cities, small cities tend
to be surrounded not only by suburbs, but also by exurbs and the
countryside, places where agriculture, energy production, and
extractive industries are more concentrated. We have not talked
about urban economies in terms of metropolitan regions, but
small cities and suburbs also increasingly constitute a growing
portion of the metropolitan economy. While manufacturing has
largely left the big cities, it has often migrated to suburbs a few
miles away. Small cities and suburbs are also a crucial part of the
logistical backbone of the US, playing an essential function in the
production, distribution, transportation, and storage of commod-
ities. Amazon and Walmart distribution centers are often found
in these places.

For some the lesson of the riots this summer is that we must
fight the police. While this is certainly true, this lesson only
makes sense as part of a larger plan that develops forms of coor-
dination between small cities and big cities. Fighting the police
is not an end, but a means to an end, and if we are not careful, it
can be a dead end. For us, the crucial lesson of the 2020 uprising
concerns the questions of infrastructure, territory, power, and
revolution. How does the riot generalize into an insurrection and
from there a revolution? We believe that small cities and suburbs
are an essential part of how this happens.
Strategic Particularities

The riots in small cities exhibited some of the same characteris-
tics as those in the big cities. Police departments were quickly
overwhelmed by multi-racial crowds that came together to at-
tack the police and sabotage property. While counterinsurgency
has a smaller base in smaller cities—because of the lack of NGOs,
lack of Democratic Party infrastructure, and the lack of a Black
middle class—counterinsurgency still happened in these places,
as a small layer of activists and local politicians intervened and
tried to stop people from rioting and looting.

At the same time, it’s important to distinguish what is dif-
ferent about the riots in small cities. The specific environment of
these places gives rise to particular forms of struggle: the decen-
tralization of the physical terrain and the centrality of cars allows
for greater mobility. In this sense, small cities are fundamentally
different from big cities in that they were not designed for the
prevention and suppression of riots.

Unlike the rigid grid structure of large cities, there is a
unique, highly diffuse spatial organization in small cities and
towns in which townhouses, apartment buildings, housing com-
plexes and trailer parks are situated in between roads and high-
ways, lawns and estate grounds, patches of woods and parking
lots, golf courses and baseball fields, strip malls and shopping
centers, all of which make it much more difficult for police to cre-
ate choke points to corral people and make mass arrests. Thus,
there’s much more strategic depth available to the movement of
the crowd in small cities.
Furthermore, unlike the police in NYC, LA, or other large

cities which regularly train in riot tactics, police departments in
small cities are generally inept and ill-trained when it comes to
lealing with large hostile crowds. When reacting to riot situa-
tions, they are quickly overwhelmed and outmaneuvered in the
streets. Rioters and experienced militants can take advantage of
this.
Of course, there are also clear disadvantages to insurrection
in small cities. Often there are no downtown shopping distinct to
mobilize around, and when there are, they are very small and eas-
ly surrounded. Because there is less concentration of capital in
small cities, power is more dispersed and harder to find. Another
main disadvantage posed by the small size of these places is that
the security state might be more likely to know who key militants
are.

Something else that stands out in small cities is the absence
of a far left milieu. This was not always the case, but it has been
this way for some time now. This is not meant to insult or look

 

lown upon revolutionaries in small cities. In fact, the lack of a
leftist milieu might be a blessing in disguise, since there are less
activists, NGO professionals, and academics to mediate, co-opt,
or stop the riot.

Because of their unique conditions, what militant organizing
looks like in these places will be different from big cities. Some
radical projects have already been taking place in places like Mis-
sissippi, Indiana, and upstate New York, where revolutionaries
are not necessarily protesting all the time or writing articles for
a chic radical publication. Instead, they are building spaces,
providing resources, and using these activities as a basis to start
new conversations about revolt and insurrection.

At the same time, critiques of mutual aid apply in small cities
as well. We do not want to be a radical version of the Salvation
Army. Nor do we want to reproduce the same narrow political
milieus that exist in big cities but in smaller forms. Our spaces
should be places for proletarians to gather, learn, and strategize,
and should provide infrastructure which aids in class combat.
This requires following and participating in the struggles of the
proletariat, which can manifest themselves as workplace mili-
tancy, tenant strikes, eviction defense, insurgent fighting for-
mations, etc. There is no recipe for this. It has to be carefully
developed from the tactical and strategic needs that are organic
to each specific struggle.

Building A Bridge Between Small Cities And Big Cities

Revolutionaries in small cities often travel to big cities to take
part in demonstrations and support radical organizing, but we
are much less likely to see the reverse happen. Rockford, for ex-
ample, is 90 minutes away from Chicago, but few Chicago based
radicals have ever stepped foot in Rockford. Yet proletarians in
this small rust-belt city rioted and looted for two nights during
the George Floyd uprising this summer. While the revolutionary
left from big cities might participate in a rebellion in Kenosha,
will their support ever extend beyond that?

This is not a moral argument about breaking out of our bub-
ble, but a direct and immediate problem about how we will sur-
vive the capitalist crisis and reproduce our ability to live and

14
fight. From the standpoint of revolutionary strategy, making
connections to small cities is a key part of preventing the isola-
tion of big cities, which are entirely dependent on the ecology of
their surrounding regions. If the goal is revolution, it is impera-
tive that militants in big cities begin to build trusting relation-
ships with militants in these smaller peripheral cities. Instead of
taking a dozen flights to Oakland or NYC, Berlin or Paris, a se-
rious orientation towards revolution in the United States will in-
volve driving hours outside of Oakland or NYC and building po-
litical relationships with people in small cities like Vallejo, Man-
teca, Modesto and Merced, or Allentown, Scranton and Utica.
This will be very difficult to do. For starters, while jobs are
increasingly shifting to smaller cities and suburbs, it is still true
that the majority of jobs are concentrated in large urban cores,
and even revolutionaries need to hold down jobs under capital-
ism. But there are other intangible limitations that will also make
it hard. Small cities are places of isolation, devoid of big muse-
ums, famous music venues, and other interesting cultural forms
which we enjoy in big cities. And to the extent that we travel to
try to meet comrades who are similar to ourselves, we might find
no one on the other side of this trip. This creates many problems
with no easy solutions. The current demarcations and constitu-
tion of the ultra-left makes meeting our other half very difficult.
Niche texts and authors only become common knowledge
amongst the dense ecology of revolutionaries that live in big cit-
ies. In small cities this is much less likely. Instead of beginning
from a textual starting point, it makes more sense to start from
the tasks, tactics, strategy, and political horizons which have
emerged out of the George Floyd uprising. The basis for these
possibilities is the generalized crisis which the pandemic, capital-
ism, and the uprising have generated.

So much of the left gravitates around dense publications, or-
ganizational and social networks built in large cities, but as the
George Floyd uprising unfolded, these formations revealed
themselves to be largely useless. They have been built not for the
purposes of engaging in class combat, but for enriching the social
capital of middle class people who want to appear radical, who
want the cultural trinkets of radicalism, but who have done very
little in light of the most intense and massive social unrest in re-
cent US history.

It is the logistics of revolution that should set the basis for
how we organize, where we organize, and who we organize with.
Only by basing our strategies and horizons in that vantage point
does our argument make sense. While big cities will play an im-
portant role in this process, accomplishing this goal will require
a real presence in the small cities and suburbs which surround
the big cities.

Conclusions

There are several interrelated conclusions. First, we believe that
some revolutionaries should move to these smaller peripheral cit-
ies and connect with proletarian militants in these places, as they
are closer to food, manufacturing, logistical, and power infra-
structures. Second, even if we do not move to these smaller cities,
we still need to develop real political relationships with the mili-
tants in these places. Third, we need to learn as much from

16
revolutionaries in small cities as we do from revolutionaries in
big cities. Fourth, we need to abandon our big city-centric
worldview and develop a new praxis that wrestles with the shift-
ing geography of class conflict.

We look to new geographies which do not center finance or
real estate capital, the university, or the tiny milieu of the radical
left, but instead search for what is required to make revolution a
real possibility, and that means seeing the world differently. It
has not been any text that has made this perspective possible, but
the revolts of the George Floyd uprising. We are merely scribes
of the uprising, trying to connect the riots and street fighting to
the actual possibility of insurrection and revolution. We do not
see the riots as simply riots, but as a process of struggle that
opens up the possibility for the overthrow of racial capitalism.
This path closes along the current trajectory of the big city-cen-
tric left, which is literally the left-wing of capital in its material
position. Instead of a left that converges in big cities, we need a
left that is rooted in the expansive geography of critical infra-
structure and proletarian life.

Our argument is not so far fetched in light of the history of
this country. The dynamic relationship between the urban center
and the periphery has been a feature of many radical struggles
here: the Maroon communities, the Underground Railroad,
IWW, CIO, and SNCC. Even today the proletariat has connected
some of the dots. It is us, in the far left who are trailing behind
them, trying to catch up, and often in the way of their advance.
While the proletariat has not completed the map, it has shown us
some important paths and directions we must take.

   
We know that infrastructure is key in sustaining capitalist
flows, but what does this infrastructure mean in the context of
an insurrection? Blockading infrastructure like airports or high-
ways makes sense at times. But how long can you hold a blockade
if your city runs out of food? What happens when you need clean,
running water? What happens when you need electricity? Is the
goal to blockade power facili
we prevent the political and ultimately military isolation of large
cities?

This summer’s riots have yet to propose an alternative. In
this sense they are critiques of racial capitalism and the police,
but as soon as the riots become conscious of themselves, they will

 

es or to take them over? How do

have to propose an alternative to capitalism. We must do every-
thing in our power so that the coming riots transform into insur-
rections, so that the flag of the commune-maroon community is
raised once again, and where all the questions of geography, of
who, where, and what, will be front and center. It is these ques-
tions which revolutionaries should be thinking about and trying
to answer, not only theoretically, but in terms of praxis. This
means expanding our geographic horizon and spending some se-
rious time and energy rooting ourselves in small cities.
This essay was first published 1/3/21
on the website It’s Going Down

hitps://itsgoingdown.org/fire-on-main-street-small-cities-in-the-
george-floyd-uprising/