Struggles with insurrectionary content in the United States have progressed from demanding something (1880s-1940s), through demanding everything (1960’s-1970’s) to demanding nothing (1992-present). Each new phase is marked by the lasting contradictions of the previous one, insofar as no period is completely “new,” rather it only makes separate and dominant a certain tendency hitherto indistinct in the previous mode of struggle. When uprisings in Philadelphia ’64, Rochester ’64, Watts ’65, Newark ’67, Detroit ’67, Buffalo ’67, everywhere ’68, Berkeley ’69, Chicago ’69 and hundreds of others cities demand a change in the totality of existing conditions, they are only theorizing the implications of the generalized strikes and riots of proletarians in the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th. When rioters in LA ’92, St. Petersburg ’96, Seattle ’99, Cincinnati ’01, Toledo ’03, Benton Harbor ’05, New Orleans ’05, St. Paul ’08 or Oakland ’09 during the last two decades act with the intensity and coordination of ‘60s rioters, but without the general national atmosphere of rebellion, and without wanting anything at all from their targets and enemies, then they are only conceptualizing in deed the concrete failure of every institutional attempt to “change everything.” Against abstract demand, even the demand to end all demands, they are acting on the basis of a concrete rejection of demands as such. This practical shift relocates the power to make history from those who reconcile conflicts to those who make them irreconcilable.
— Johann Kaspar, “We Demand Nothing” in Fire to the Prisons #7 (2009)
