Everybody's been dragging Vicky Osterweil's new book because of its cringy writing style, but we're missing the bigger point that her message is less about rehabilitating looting, and principally appears to be concerned with disparaging unions and organization in general. (thread

At her best, Osterweil admits the interplay (dialectic?) between spontaneous rebellion and organization: 
"If we tell the story of the unruly, riotous masses, and their often overlapping, sometimes conflictual and contradictory relationship to “the labor movement” proper...

...we get a clearer picture of how we might act in the present to honor and recapture that power without falling into the same traps that doomed US American working-class movements to liberal accommodation and repression" (p. 126)

However, these moments of lucidity are few and far between; for the most part, unions (and organization in general) are condemned throughout the book as inherently and inveterately racist, xenophobic, sexist, etc.

Osterweil acknowledges that, yes, riots can be and often have been racist in nature, and that the tactic has to be situated in a broader political context.

However, unions, from her perspective, aren't worthy of being treated with the same nuance; they are "predominantly reactionary organizations" (p. 160). Over and over, she argues that workers' organizations are incapable of doing anything besides stabbing workers in the back.

The underlying animosity toward working class organization creates an interesting contradiction, given that Osterweil has to make perfunctory criticisms of the epoch-defining union-busting policies of Reagan and Thatcher (p. 220).

Because in her view, unions are intrinsically evil institutions, it places her in an awkward political position at points when she has to pay lip service to them — acknowledging the vicious attacks on their existence by the ruling class and its agents before quickly moving on.

Fortunately, just as Osterweil cherry-picks her examples for the book, we too can look back and find inspiring instances from our own history in which the working class was able to build strong interracial bonds, when it didn't shrink from violence for the purpose of self-defense

I'll highlight one example from labor history from right here in Philadelphia: the Garbage Riots of 1938

"Flying squadrons of cars, sometimes numbering as many as forty at a time, sped from union headquarters on Arch Street to intercept collections across the city. Roving bands of strikers issued severe retribution on anyone who dared to replace them on the routes....

The very public way in which these dramatic actions were carried out made the interracial solidarity of this strike undeniable and did much to transform the popular conception of the black worker as a strikebreaker in some of the city's most staunchly pro-union sections...

One black sanitation worker, Ellis "Big Boy" Shaw repeatedly made the news because of his actions during the melees, leading squadrons of strikers in using bottles to attack replacement workers who were exiting trolleys at Twentieth and Spring Garden Streets.

Shaw was out the following day, again leading spontaneous assaults against city vehicles and scab workers, eventually arrested a second time after being picked up for beating a replacement worker...

Other moments of interracial militancy played out in these years against the police, with protesters arming themselves with pointed sticks, hammers, and bricks." (Francis Ryan, AFSCME's Philadelphia Story, p. 57-58)

Osterweil claims that: "The logic of formal organizational power, no matter how noble or radical the organizations’ goals, will in crisis lead it to preserve itself for “the next fight” rather than abandon it all for this one...

...But the organization that is preserved is one that, at the height of the people’s power, turned its back on them" (p. 138)

However, the lived experience of workers' organization in the context of the Garbage Riots provide a credible rebuttal to this charge:

"While [Municipal Workers Union] President William J. Donohue tried to maintain a favorable position in the press by rejecting all forms of violence...

...the union backed any measures its members took to ensure that trash collection was stopped, realizing that its survival as an institution depended on the outcome of this strike." (Ryan, p. 57)

TL;DR tactics are important, but politics matters a lot more