JOIN US and Combative Uprising in Miami, FL on March 14 at 3 PM to show out against this oppressive bill! We will have literature, music and speakers talking about the importance of protest for all social progress. Location soon to be announced. Register at https://bit.ly/3c3AzZr

Right out the gate 2021 has a challenge for Floridians who are invested in transforming society for the better. Governor Ron DeSantis, with the help of FL House Rep. Juan Alfonso Fernandez-Barquin of Miami-Dade, is swiftly pushing through a bill that would criminalize protests and potentially penalize participants as if they’re agents of organized crime. The RICO bill has been criticized by various citizens, NGOs and legal groups for its vague wording, wide reach and general reactionary approach to recent popular criticisms of law enforcement and calls to defund the police. Those in favor say that it will not pose a threat to peaceful protest, but rather protect citizens from “bad actors,” “outsider agitators,” and those who seek to harm law enforcement.

It passed through its first subcommittee at the end of January and is likely to move to the house floor. A vote in favor will see the bill made into law by July of this year. So what exactly is Florida looking at?

The Bill:

• Defines a riot: “A person who participates in a public disturbance involving an assembly of three or more persons acting with a common intent to mutually assist each other in disorderly and violent conduct…commits a riot”
• Becomes an “aggravated” riot if ten people are in participation, or if other conditions are met like bodily harm, $5K or more in damages, etc
• People arrested for participating in a riot will be held in custody until their court hearing, no option to pay bail
• People arrested for engaging in, inciting, participating in, obstructing traffic, etc in a riot face higher penalties across the board (mostly third degree felonies). In the case of assault or battery on an officer, a mandatory 6 month sentence
• Reinforces and affirms laws to favor people acting “in defense” against rioters. For example: if a protestor is suing someone for assaulting them/hitting them with a car while they were participating in a “riot,” the driver can bring up an “affirmative defense” supported by this bill, and they will face no civil consequences
• Makes mob intimidation a first degree misdemeanor, with Mob Intimidation defined as: “a person, assembled with two or more other persons and acting with a common intent, to compel or induce, or attempt to compel or induce, another person by force, or threat of force, to do any act or to assume or abandon a particular viewpoint”

These and other aspects of the bill may be interpreted in ways that obscure its intended use, but in their application will serve to weaken our power and grow the power of repressive forces. The classification of doxing as a first degree misdemeanor might be useful in regards to protecting people from harassment and intimidation, but its reasonable to assume that this will not be employed in the defense of all victims of doxing equally. More likely, it will serve to discourage people from having mobilizations that call out specific politicians in front of their homes or offices, or protests of certain establishments or businesses/business owners. In a section regarding municipal budgets, the sponsors propose that any person can file an appeal to a budget that decreases resources to law enforcement. The budget will then go to DeSantis and his cabinet for review where it can be modified or rejected as they see fit. Similarly, if a civil lawsuit is brought against a municipal government because of damages that occurred during a “riot,” sovereign immunity (which bars the government from being responsible for paying out damages exceeding $200K to any individual) will be suspended IF it is determined that the municipal body did not provide enough law enforcement, or interfered with law enforcement’s ability to do their job. These proposals will not only prevent the scaling back of police presence or defunding of police but will motivate local governments to have more police and more powerful police departments to protect their own interests. Here we can see a glimpse of the economic interest driving DeSantis’ continued attempts to pass this bill: he wants to centralize political power in Florida to continue his goals of privatization and deregulation.

This is what fascism can look like.  Fascists will use reactionary ideology to justify or obscure privatization in order to force open markets and expand the economy to their benefit. This bill comes as FL representatives are also orchestrating a coordinated attack on voting rights and natural resources like wetlands and Big Cypress. They are suppressing COVID data and forcing schools to open while giving them no resources to keep students and teachers safe.

DeSantis may present clear features of fascism that must be resisted, but just voting him out and replacing him with a Democrat won’t resolve the economic crisis that proposes this rotten ideology as a solution. For evidence of this we can look to our new president Joe Biden. His support of the police state has been exemplified in his 1994 crime bill, fervent support of the Patriot Act, and most recently his approach to deterring “domestic terrorism.” But even his seemingly progressive stances do little to stave off the advancement of fascist power. His opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline is a gesture towards progressives and his “dedication” to mitigate climate change, but it does not stop the destructive extraction from Canadian tar sands and does nothing to protect the thousands of workers that will be laid off as the result of the termination of the project. Generally, his environmental policies may address lifestyle and infrastructure related issues, but they pose no threat to the capitalist interest that is driving climate destruction. In fact in creating “stricter regulation” and “aggressive standards” he’s further consolidating the power within those industries who create the problem, as the most powerful companies are the only ones with the capital to meet these standards.

This is why we can’t let liberal representatives of capital dictate what progress is. Liberalism passively paves the way for fascism, and then uses its political power to stamp out our resistance to it. Halting the Keystone XL pipeline is not progress when there is no challenge to the extraction and financial accumulation that motivated it. A diverse cabinet is not progress when it guides a state that imprisons its citizens in insane numbers for private profit and orchestrates ruthless imperialist exploitation of the planet. Progress can only come from us, organized as a social force, standing up against imperialism and capitalism. The social base that Trump tapped into and emboldened have not ceased to exist because there is a Democrat in the White House. Political representatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene are making sure that fascist ideology and politics are being continuously reproduced in the masses and going strong, while fractions of finance and industrial capital go neck to neck over who will have dominance over the global economic arrangement. We will never beat the fascists using the capitalist electoral system, because it is a system that knows nothing but the drive for our continued repression and exploitation, and the reproduction of capitalist economic, political, and ideological dominance.  We beat fascism by building combative independent organizations that can expose the capitalist interest that poisons nearly every aspect of our lives, and that then construct the mass movement to eradicate it.

We do not need to honor and support the militarized thugs who brutally police us, we do not need to thwart the genuine outrage of the people, and we MUST not standby while our rights are eroded. Similar bills have been proposed in 11 other states. No matter what comes of this bill in Florida and those all over the country, the path to true progress is in what we can build together. We must resist this and all attempts to interfere with the bourgeois democratic rights that those before us have fought and died for. We can then use that resistance to fortify our relationships with each other, and together build the politics and ideology to guide us in our continued struggle.

A movement is building, and it needs you. If you agree that capitalism is the problem, get involved, get in touch.

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