We might say the proletariat only sets itself the problems it can solve. It was a class riot." Class Composition and Capitalist Restructuring, 4. But it's also the single most significant modern event for Korean-Americans, says Edward Taehan Chang, professor of ethnic studies and founding director of the Young Oak Kim Center for Korean American Studies at the University of California, Riverside. Latinos, African-Americans and Korean-Americans have "a lot more in common than differences," Ahn said. Click here for the guide. ▶ Start forum discussions, submit articles, and more... about | donate | help out | submitting content | other languages | a-z | contact us | site notes, 3. Years of advancement by a section of blacks, their intersection of themselves as mediators between "their" community and US capital and state, was shown as irrelevant. But though we should understand the resentment towards the Koreans as class-based, it is necessary to put this in the context of the overall situation.

Yoo's mother told him to get back inside. Where are the police?" But though this event had a strong effect on the blacks of South Central, their attack on Korean property cannot be reduced to vengeance for one incident - it was directed against the whole system of exchange.

They see people with big old houses, nice cars, all the stereo equipment they want, and now that it's free, they're gonna get it." The systematic nature of the rioting is directly linked to their participation and most importantly to the truce on internal fighting they called before the uprising. However the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is predominantly white and its victims massively black and Hispanic (or as P.C. In L.A. specifically, the inhabitants of South Central constitute some of the most excluded sectors of the working class. The Koreans are on the front-line of the confrontation between capital and the residents of central L.A. - they are the face of capital for these communities. Will M., former gang member, on the destruction of businesses. In the primary with a field of more than 20 candidates, a strong Korean-American vote buoyed Ahn into the runoff where he'll face state Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez, a fellow Democrat. The rebellion in Los Angeles marked a leap forward in the global class struggle. If you have an ebook reader or a Kindle, check out our guide to using ebook readers with libcom.org. Ahn saw his father on the second or third night, he recalled. These gangs, as an expression of the proletariat, are not in the grips of a false consciousness that makes them think all there is to life is gold chains and violence. For a member of South Central's youth proletariat, the only rational economic choice is to sell drugs.

The proletariat can thus only recompose itself, within this level, through a material will to reappropriate to itself in real terms the relation to social wealth that capital has formally redimensioned". In South Central, reporters are now being called "image looters". The rebellion in Los Angeles was an explosion of anger against capitalism but also an eruption of what could take its place: creativity, initiative, joy. As Mike Davis put it in 1988, "the contemporary Gang scare has become an imaginary class relationship, a terrain of pseudo-knowledge and fantasy projection, a talisman." The public spaces that remain are militarized, from "bum-proof" bus shelter benches to automatic sprinklers in the parks to stop people sleeping there. It moved production to other parts of the world (only, as in Korea, to export class struggle as well); it tried to break the strength of the "mass worker" by breaking up the labor force within factories into teams and by spreading the factory to lots of small enterprises; it has also turned many wage-laborers into self-employed to make people internalise capital's dictates. As the country's fastest-growing immigrant group, the trends don't bode well for the GOP, who lagged behind the Democrats in Asian-American engagement in 2016. "Despite the fact that Korean-American merchants were victimized, no one in the mainstream cared because of our lack of visibility and political power," Chang said. Distorted by the bourgeois press, reduced to a mere 'race riot' by many on the left, the L.A. rebellion was the most serious urban uprising this century.