The Three Revolutions that wernt

Maybe it started when Dick Cheney won the presidency in 2008, or maybe when Al Gore led the country to war against Saudi Arabia six years earlier, or maybe the beginning of it all went unnoticed by the general public when a Cuban boy drowned en route to Florida in 1999, his death not more than a footnote in the local news. It is impossible to say for sure. But what is certain is that, at some point, a clock began ticking in America, counting down unstoppably, inevitably, to the day when revolution would come to the republic once thought indivisible.

Between the time the clock began ticking and the time its alarm bells rang, there were numerous false alarms, smaller tremors that shook American society before the earthquake that finally split it in two. Here are the three largest of those tremors, the ones which very nearly brought that earthquake on the country prematurely. Here are the three revolutions that weren’t.

2011: The Great Transport Strike

The Great Transport Strike of 2011 was the single largest mobilization of labor in US history.

The roots of the strike go back to the financial crash of 2008, though of course it would not have been possible without the smaller-scale labor unrest that dotted the 2000s. In response to the crash, the newly elected Cheney spent his first year in office slashing regulations and welfare programs. With pressure from his administration, Congress lowered the top marginal tax rate and very nearly defunded social security (the bill failed to pass the House or Representatives), and with lobbyists from the finance sector commanding the Labor and Commerce departments, his cabinet reduced employer-provided healthcare standards. Most relevant to the Great Transport Strike was Cheney’s assault on the minimum wage. One of his first acts as president was to sign a bill into law which halted the third stage of a procedural minimum wage adjustment put into motion near the end of the Gore administration. Had it gone into effect, the third stage would have raised the minimum wage to $7.50, but the new legislation stalled it at $6.71. Another bill he signed in November of 2009 took things a step further by undoing the other two stages, cutting the minimum wage back down to $5.15 even as millions of Americans faced financial ruin or worse. There was much uproar over the second bill in particular, but it went unchallenged at the state level.

What began the chain of events that led to the Great Transport Strike was actually a relatively small affair. In June, UPS drivers in New Mexico went on strike to protest the lack of air conditioning in their vans when a driver in Albuquerque died of heat exhaustion on the 5th. The strike spread to southern California and then Mississippi the following week, involving around 20,000 people altogether—a large strike, but by no means a record-breaking one. At this stage, the Teamsters union leadership was on board with the demonstrations.

Around the same time, FedEx drivers in Michigan went on a single-day strike to drum up public support for a lawsuit they intended to levy against their employers for deducting the cost of replacing damaged goods from their wages, which they claimed constituted wage theft to the point that many of them were making well below minimum wage. The strike, which involved only a handful of small local unions, came and went with little attention from the major media outlets, and had things ended there, the Great Transport Strike likely never would have happened. But of course, they didn’t, and it did. Cheney directed his Department of Labor to refuse to prosecute the wage theft case, which immediately drew national attention to the conflict. Thousands of unorganized workers in Michigan went out on strike on the 12th of June, just as the UPS strike was taking off in California and Missouri. Forming a coordinating committee to organize the actions of roughly three thousand nonunion FedEx workers, which included warehouse staff as well as drivers, the strikers in Michigan set up lines of communication with the striking UPS drivers in the south despite discouragement from the Teamsters leadership.

Alarmed at the apparent cooperation between the two strikes, president Cheney issued an injunction against both strikes, arguing that by showing intent to coordinate their actions they were violating the solidarity strike clause of the Taft-Hartley Act. The Teamsters ordered the striking UPS workers to withdraw from communication with the FedEx strikers, but they ignored both this and the injunction, planning instead to sue to overturn the injunction order. With the strike now out of their hands, the Teamsters leadership withdrew and ordered its members to return to work. Many remained on the picket line, engaging in the first major wildcat strike since the 1940s.

Naturally, the IWW pounced on the opportunity to agitate. As soon as the second FedEx strike began, IWW organizers began firing on all cylinders trying to get workers in other states to go on strike. It worked—by the last week of June, more than 30,000 additional FedEx and UPS workers were on strike across the nation.

On June 28th, the 10th circuit court struck down Cheney’s first injunction order, but he immediately (less than an hour after the ruling was publicized) issued another, this time on the grounds that the UPS strike had become a wildcat strike, and the FedEx one had been one from the beginning. This one would be impossible to overturn, being essentially correct in its assertion and its interpretation of Taft-Hartley. Ignoring the injunction yet again, the strikers persisted, their ranks continuing to swell in the first week of July. With unemployment at an outrageous 12% at this point in time, there was no shortage of labor for FedEx and UPS to bring in as strikebreakers once they were certain they would face no backlash now that the strike was illegal. Violent clashes erupted between strikers and police as the latter attempted to disperse picket lines; occasionally the violence spilled over to the scabs when striking workers tried to block them from entering truck yards and warehouses.

It was only a matter of time before the kindling that was being heaped up encountered a spark. On July 16th, it happened. Police trying to clear out a mass of strikers in St. Louis so a procession of strikebreakers could get to work fired indiscriminately into the crowd, killing seven people, two of whom were scabs. The picket line erupted into a riot which was forcibly dispersed in a flurry of tear gas and rubber bullets. More than fifty people were arrested. In the aftermath of the shooting, tens of thousands of workers, many of whom had been brought in as strikebreakers, joined the strike to protest the brutal attempts to suppress it, bringing their total manpower up from about 80,000 to about 200,000 by the end of July. It was already one of the largest strikes in American history, and it was far from over.

On August 1st, usually considered the date the Great Transport Strike began, 70,000 or more workers in the railroad industry went on strike all at once. After a failed month-long struggle to get their respective unions to call one through official channels, this was yet another wildcat strike. With the railway companies unable to replace many of the workers on short notice due to the training their jobs required, the entire American rail system shut down almost overnight. The remaining workers had little work left to do with rail lines inoperable across the country, so before long the number of railroad workers alone who were participating in the strike neared 100,000.

By this point, the character of the strike had radically changed, and its demands changed with it. What began as a strike with narrow purposes--to recover stolen wages, to get AC units put in delivery trucks--morphed into a general uprising against the conditions imposed on the working class in the wake of the recession. Among the new list of demands were calls for higher wages, welfare reform, an end to right to work laws, and better unemployment benefits at the national level. The specifics varied from one picket line to the next, but the nominally powerful organizing committee kept it simple: a fifteen-dollar federal minimum wage, $400 federal unemployment stipends, and the repeal of Taft-Hartley, along with terms specific to the strike like a general amnesty for those involved and the original demands of the striking UPS and FedEx workers. Some of the more radical participants went further. The IWW pushed for a twenty-dollar minimum wage; CPUSA and the Workers World Party wanted the housing industry to be nationalized to put an end to the burgeoning homelessness crisis. Many local cadres of striking workers wished to see Cheney’s Secretary of Labor resign.

Violence continued to break out on an increasingly large scale. In Detroit, two to three hundred strikers stormed a FedEx warehouse, ransacked it, and burned it to the ground. Intense street fighting with the police persisted for the next three days as local authorities cracked down. In San Diego, The police fatally shot a speaker at an otherwise peaceful rally. An epidemic of attacks on police erupted throughout the city in retaliation, culminating in the siege, abandonment, and destruction of a local precinct. In Atlanta, rail workers occupied a train station for eight days, rendering the locomotives inoperable through sabotage and trading gunfire with the state troopers sent to clear them out. By August 14th, the national guard was mobilized in eleven states.

The strike reached its zenith near the end of August. From the fifth to the eighth, representatives from the strike’s central committee and the IWW met with the leadership of the nation’s biggest unions—the AFL-CIO and its constituent unions, the Teamsters, the USW, the UAW, and the UFCW chief among them—with the goal of convincing the most influential unions in the country to call a general strike. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka offered a sympathetic ear, but when all was said and done the executive councils of every union present rejected the proposal out of hand. Upset by the outcome, Trumka resigned from his post the following day. With Trumka’s endorsement and the involvement of the IWW, a coalition of AFL-CIO and Teamsters locals split off from the herd to begin organizing a single-day general strike scheduled for the 26th.

When the 26th came, an estimated three million laborers across all sectors stopped working. Roughly 1.3 million people converged on Washington, DC for a march intended to be the centerpiece of the strike, making it by far the largest protest event in American history. Descending on the Lincoln memorial, the marchers heard speeches from a roster of radical voices including people like former vice-presidential candidate Cornel West, IWW organizer Salvador Gutierrez, and renegade AFL-CIO officer Jorge Carreón. That evening, as the behemoth of a match dissipated, impromptu rallies materialized in front of the White House, the Capitol building and the offices of the Department of Labor. These were considerably smaller than the daytime protest, but more frenzied. Bouts of arson elicited brutal crackdowns from the police and the national guard, who were already on edge from the near impossibility of containing a mass of more than a million people in a city of barely half that. Just after midnight, around 80,000 protestors marched west across the Potomac, overwhelming a mass of riot police gathered on the Arlington Memorial Bridge and pushing their way to the Pentagon, which they encircled. For about an hour they chanted “jobs not bombs!”, echoing the slogan of an earlier protest movement, and, more ominously, “burn it down!” At around two in the morning, the DC national guard cleared the area with extreme prejudice. Nine protestors were killed, an unknown number badly wounded.

The theatrics of the 26th kicked off a weekend of protest in DC. Several large demonstrations were held in solidarity with the strikers, accompanied by anti-war and anti-austerity rallies. The first major explicitly communist event was held on the afternoon of Saturday the 27th, when around three thousand members of the Workers World Party and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization marched from the headquarters of the World Bank to join a larger gathering in front of the White House, red banners in hand.

Despite some speculation that the general strike would carry over unprompted into the next work week, most of the three million who had left their jobs on Friday were back at them on Monday—except for the truckers. Nearly 600,000 truckers who hadn’t taken part in the original strike either remained off the job after Friday’s general strike or joined the picket line anew. Several thousand went on strike mid-haul, stopping their trucks in traffic and using them to block off highways. Inspired by this display, thousands of other drivers broke into company lots and commandeered their trucks, driving them to strategic locations on interstates and state highways to clog up the nation’s roadways like clots cutting off an organ’s bloodflow. Several of these mass truck robberies turned into chaotic melees, with workers plowing through police lines in stolen semis as they attempted to flee the scene. Most of this was loosely organized, coordinated over the radio among groups of several dozen drivers apiece making decisions on the fly.

This was the final straw. Within hours of the first mass truck robbery, Cheney declared a state of national emergency. The Department of Justice deployed federal law enforcement officers to assist state forces, with orders to have every picket line shut down and every street cleared before the end of the week, by any means necessary. The army and the marine corps were sent into the hardest-hit cities à la the Los Angeles riots of 1992. On the 31st, Cheney signed an executive order authorizing employers to fire any worker refusing to return to work by noon on September 2nd without regard for existing union contracts and labor regulations. He then signed a second one temporarily permitting the termination of workers for “workplace disobedience,” which the order broadly defined as including any attempt to organize outside of recognized union contracts, encouraging strikes, sit-downs, slow-downs, or boycotts through speech or action, or “defying workplace protocol with the intention of diminishing productivity or causing a work stoppage of any kind.” This second order was set to expire at the end of September, but Cheney remarked to the White House press corps that nothing was off the table when it came to restoring order.

The strike was already faltering by the time Cheney delivered a one-two punch with his executive orders. Just before the general strike on the 26th, UPS had agreed to install air conditioners in its delivery vans and incorporate hazard pay into its drivers’ wages in the meantime. The following day, FedEx, having already agreed to stop docking pay for damaged packages in mid-August, offered substantial raises in a final attempt to lure the Michigan strikers back to work. With funds running low, many of the workers taking part in the original two strikes (which, together, were the core of the entire movement) returned to work after the 26th, deciding they could only hold out for so long and it was better to go home with their original demands met than to stick it out in the face of starvation, eviction, and escalating state violence for a more abstract goal. Demoralized, battered, and hungry, many other workers followed suit. While the weekend of protest raged in DC, the strike was withering away elsewhere in the country. When Cheney made his ultimatum, the strike crumbled.

A few stubborn holdouts remained on strike well into September, including enough of the insurgent truck thieves to keep the interstate system completely shut down in some areas for more than a week. In this period alone, twenty-plus people were killed in armed standoffs between state troopers and truckers. By mid-September, however, the movement was dead.

The Great Transport Strike of 2011 left tremors in its wake which were felt long after the last striker abandoned the picket line. In late September, freshman senator Bernie Sanders wrote a bill to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, citing Cheney’s use of the act to try to suppress a strike with legitimate grievances during his oral arguments. In the House of Representatives, Barbara Lee motioned to begin impeachment procedures against Cheney’s Secretary of Labor. Sanders’ bill was voted down by a bipartisan supermajority; Lee’s never made it to the floor. The strike was a huge talking point in the 2012 election, but the DNC’s refusal to muster any real resistance to Cheney’s crackdown neutered nominee Hillary Clinton’s ability to go on the offensive in that department. Still, the popular vote swung hard against Cheney, even though he managed to hold on to the electoral college by the skin of his teeth.

The big unions that refused to join in on the strike suffered internal crises in the months that followed. The renegades in the AFL-CIO who helped organize the general strike on the 26th struggled for power with the liberal leadership, which was more concerned with securing and protecting contracts than the kind of fluid militancy the IWW was preaching. Facing pressure from below, the new president resigned in November, triggering new leadership elections which the renegades promptly swept, re-installing Trumka as president in the process. In the years between the strike and the start of the war, the AFL-CIO would grow increasingly radical, and Trumka with it. The Teamsters were not so lucky. Their leadership refused to budge, and rather than waiting around for the next round of elections, their militant faction began defecting to the IWW en masse, causing the latter’s membership to skyrocket during the 2010s.

In the longer term, the events of the strike set in motion a trend of large-scale cooperation between different currents of the American left. The temporary alliance between the WWP and the FRSO during their August 27th march foreshadowed their role as founding members of the United American Reds three years later, and the demonstration of solidarity between militant unions and socialist parties throughout the strike was a precursor to the formation of the Fifth International in 2013.

2015: The Rent Riots

In the three years between the Great Transport Strike and the autumn of 2014, class tensions deteriorated even further. Unemployment never fell below eight percent, the minimum wage was stagnant at just over five dollars, and the homeless population remained at a fairly constant 700,000. Following the 2012 election, Congress was deadlocked between the two major parties, unable to agree on anything except the military budget. Polling showed that confidence in the American political system, already at record lows, plummeted during this period. But while the country was breaking down, the left was bulking up—the Fifth International was founded in early 2013, bringing together some of the most prominent radicals in the nation, and indeed the world, and its member organizations began experimenting with Liam Sutton’s concept of “preventative weaponization” later that year, putting up huge communal stockpiles of arms and ammunition in the hands of the most militant unions and parties in America. It was only a matter of time before this confluence of events proved disastrous for the establishment.

Political turmoil was at an all-time high in mid-to-late 2014. Responding to the Fifth International’s entrance to the scene, a microcosm of the Red Scare sprang up, and at the same time a partisan realignment was underway as many Republicans and the leftmost Democrats reversed their respective positions on gun control. Of course, all of this was happening during the midterm elections, which were turning out to be the most chaotic in recent memory.

As the deadline for the annual appropriations drew nearer, the left wing of the Democratic Party threatened to stage a coup within the party if their policy demands, among them a reduced military budget and expanded Medicare access, were not addressed in the new budget. The progressives had grown into a formidable force since the Blue Movement in 2010, so the prospect of them withholding their votes from Nancy Pelosi in the next Speaker election, or worse yet, breaking off from the Democratic caucus to vote as an autonomous faction of the party, was concerning enough to the party’s higher-ups to give them real leverage. The party yielded and let the progressives include provisions in the proposed bill which would reduce the $750 billion military budget by 20% and expand Medicare to cover those aged 50 and up.

Of course, these provisions were unacceptable to the Republicans, who immediately voted the bill down in the Senate. The one they sent back made no revisions to Cheney’s agenda. The Democrats attempted to get the progressives to work with the Republican bill as a starting point to introduce more limited versions of their demands—a 10% budget cut for the military, for example, or lowering the Medicare age to 55 instead of 50—but they wouldn’t have it. They argued that people were suffering at home and abroad, and the least they could do was put up a decent fight. So the House Democrats sent over another bill, essentially the same one but with minor changes to the infrastructure and education budgets, and it too was voted down by the Senate. With time running out, the conservative wing of the DNC abandoned the military cuts over the outcry of the most staunch progressives, sending over a weaker version of the bill without them. Miraculously, the bill made it through the Senate, but instead of accepting the compromise, Cheney vetoed it. He didn’t just want the military budget to remain high, he wanted it to be higher. The parties remained at an impasse, and on December 22nd, the government shut down. It would turn out to be the longest government shutdown in history, clocking in at seventy-nine days.

The new Congress took office on January 6th, handing a few House seats to the Democrats and a Senate seat to the Republicans. Neither party gained a substantial advantage, and the freshman congresspeople were no more willing to compromise than their veteran colleagues. When another token attempt to pass a bill failed, the two sides finally settled in for the longest game of political chicken ever played.

With funds frozen, the Department of Housing and Urban Development stopped renewing contracts with public housing landlords. Most had advance payments for January, but as the shutdown stretched into February, contracts started expiring, landlords were left with a choice: start charging their tenants full rent, or go broke. Naturally, most chose the former. Near the end of February, more than two thousand landlords had stopped receiving payments, and a large majority of them intended to charge rent at the beginning of March.

This presented a problem. The tenants in these public housing complexes were there because they couldn’t afford to pay full rent elsewhere. For obvious reasons, few, if any, would be able to cover rent when it came due.

Word of the looming wave of evictions spread around the country in the waning days of February. Mass protests were held in DC demanding an end to the government shutdown, none quite as large as the central march on the day of the August 2011 general strike, but several pulling in crowds of over ten thousand. Tenant unions organized rent strikes. Socialists stirred anti-landlord sentiments with rallies in and around public housing complexes, leading to the first arrests of the riots as organizers were jailed on trespassing charges.

The backlash on March 1st was visceral. Angry crowds gathered in front of the nation’s courthouses blocked the handful of landlords who had begun charging rent in February from filing eviction paperwork until the authorities forced them to retreat with salvos of tear gas. In Boston, the crowd at one courthouse returned with a vengeance after sundown and burned it to the ground. Dozens of instances of tenants occupying their buildings, refusing to pay rent or comply with evictions, popped up.

On the third day of unrest, police began violently enforcing evictions. With nothing to lose, some of the more dedicated tenants fought tooth and nail to keep control of their buildings, turning the occupations into sieges and then the sieges into bloodbaths when the police abandoned the last of their restraint. Horror stories of police brutality filled the nightly news. The Marcy Houses in Brooklyn, New York became the site of particularly vicious fighting as the tenants engaged in what amounted to building-to-building guerrilla warfare with the officers sent to evict them. The following night, thousands of evictees swarmed housing projects in a dozen major cities, overwhelmed law enforcement, and seized the properties from their landlords, forcing them to flee (or worse, in a few cases). The chaos spread from the housing complexes to the perceived root causes of the tenants’ housing insecurity. Looting sprees broke out in gentrified neighborhoods. An unfinished high-income apartment building was razed to the ground in Philadelphia, another in Seattle. Banks were up next: two dozen were ransacked on the fourth and fifth nights of March, three of them completely destroyed by arson. An improvised explosive device was detonated in the lobby of a bank on Wall Street, killing none but injuring fifteen. The degree of violence in the tenant occupations rose. In some clashes, deadly firefights broke out when the tenants got ahold of smuggled-in firearms.

In one of the few displays of political self-preservation instincts of his career, Cheney ordered a thirty-day moratorium on evictions on the sixth to stop the flames from being fanned any further. Three days later, the desperate House Democrats caved and passed the Republican bill unaltered. The Senate hurriedly passed it on to Cheney, who signed it that afternoon. HUD money was flowing again shortly, and the riots subsisted in the days that followed.

Like the Great Transport Strike, the Rent Riots of 2015 had far-reaching implications for the left and the country as a whole. Conservative media was ablaze with conspiracy theories that the Fifth International had provoked the riots, or that progressives in Congress had purposely caused the government shutdown knowing it would lead to unrest. In May, senators Mike Pompeo and Ted Cruz co-sponsored a bill which would make it illegal for American labor unions to join the Fifth International or engage in mass buyouts of firearms. In what is often described as the low point for Cheney’s reputation, Bernie Sanders was arrested on the steps of the capitol building after an impassioned six-hour filibuster of the deal, allegedly for advocating violence against the government when he said that “the poor must remain armed at all costs in today’s society” in the face of police brutality. Though he was released shortly thereafter, the incident turned him into a national icon, which put powerful momentum behind his presidential campaign when he declared his intent to run immediately after his release.

The rampant fearmongering about the Fifth International (some of which, to be fair, turned out to be quite accurate) contributed to the rancor of the 2016 election, and is partly responsible for the Secession Crisis of 2017 and the resulting civil war.

2016: The Bezos Riots

That the February Revolt happened so quick on the heels of the Bezos riots makes it debatable whether the latter even qualify as a “revolution that wasn’t” or if they were just the beginning of a revolution that *was*. Nevertheless, they had a distinct beginning and end, so it’s worth examining them separately.

The 2016 election, of course, was a disaster. More information about it can be found elsewhere, but what is of particular importance here is Jeff Bezos and his independent campaign. Bezos announced the start of his campaign in January of 2016, immediately creating a media sensation as people speculated what the richest man on Earth wanted the office of the presidency for. There was outrage on the left, of course. Many accused him of trying to buy the election, or of running with the intent of spoiling it for Democratic front runner Bernie Sanders if he clinched the nomination, as was projected at the time.

Sanders ran a successful insurgent campaign, heading into the convention in July with an outright majority of pledged delegates. But his popularity was not enough to ward off the machinations of an anxious establishment. All 716 of the party’s superdelegates cast their votes for the conservative Eric Holder, handing him the nomination despite the disapproval of the majority of the party’s base. Like the convention of 1968, rioting quickly broke out. This was but a preview of what was yet to come.

On October 6th, a lone gunman fatally shot Bezos at a rally in New York.

For some, it was a day to mourn, but for many others, it was one to celebrate. That night, throngs of people unashamedly took to the streets to cheer on Bezos’ death. Naturally, the police tried to disperse these impromptu street parties, but as the night wore on they grew more crazed and slipped out of the realm of what the authorities could contain. The biggest conflagration sprouted up in Times Square, where the ground floor of the NASDAQ building was vandalized, its windows bashed in and its lobby scorched by Molotov cocktails. A small group of the most frenzied revelers scaled the Times Tower and toppled several of its billboards, sending them crashing into the street below where the mob, moving as one, dragged them into a massive bonfire in the center of the square. The party-turned-riot finally petered out around four in the morning.

The upwellings of the sixth were the beginning of a longer period of unrest, most of it concentrated in the two weeks following the assassination. Though most of the unrest occurred in New York, there were flashpoints all across the country. An Amazon warehouse in Alabama reported that more than half of the staff failed to show up to work on the seventh, provoking rumors that a strike was underway, but no large-scale revolt of labor ever materialized. A mob in Los Angeles had to be kept at bay with rubber bullets when they marched on Beverly Hills chanting “kill the rich.” In the Bay Area, multiple reports alleged that roving bands of youths dressed in black bloc gear had begun terrorizing rich Silicon Valley neighborhoods, burglarizing their homes, setting fire to their cars, and tearing down the walls of their gated communities. In Chicago, police severely overreacted to a block party coincidentally being held on the night Bezos was shot, teargassing the partygoers in response to a mundane noise complaint. Over the following week, anti-police protests shook the city in tandem with the chaos happening around the country.

The unrest, quickly christened the “Bezos riots,” reached its peak on the night of the tenth, when another mob that had gathered in Times Square was forced to retreat under heavy fire from the NYPD. At loose ends, the mob turned its attention south and marched towards the financial district. It grew in size and fury as it moved south, lashing out against office buildings along the way until it reached Wall Street, where the police were kept on the outer edges of the crowd, giving the rioters near the center free reign over the financial capital of the world. Financiers working late that night were left at the mercy of the masses. The one building with any police protection when the rioters descended on it was the New York Stock Exchange, though the officers were quickly beaten back into the lobby. A number of unguarded buildings, including the Trump building at 40 Wall Street and the American headquarters of Deutsche Bank, saw their lower floors occupied for several hours. Some of the defining photographs of the prewar years were taken that night—a mob parading a prop guillotine down Wall Street, the south end of Manhattan aglow with fires as seen from the Statue of Liberty, and the graffiti-covered NYSE building the morning after, still sporting a banner hung across its facade by vandals the night before reading “PANDEMONIUM - PLACE OF ALL DEMONS”.

These images and others like them dominated the news cycle that week. The whole nation descended into a state of madness for a time. On the twelfth, the Fifth International called an emergency congress, which remains the only one of its kind to this day. Unlike the previous four congresses, this one was conducted entirely out of the public eye, something the press was keen to take note of. Some of the delegates present at the congress wanted International’s member organizations to seize the riots as an opportunity to begin an armed insurrection, holding up the highly spontaneous nature of the unrest as proof that the American people were ready for a revolution. Others feared that any attempt at a revolution would be far more likely to fail and result in a withering reactionary backlash than to actually overthrow the government. Then there were some, though they were an increasingly small minority in the International, who were against the idea of an armed revolution on principle. Ultimately, these latter factions won out, and the fifth congress resolved to merely issue a vague statement in support of the working class. Behind the scenes, however, Liam Sutton led a clandestine effort to organize the Fifth International’s many disparate gun clubs and munitions stockpiles into the skeleton of a revolutionary force. Between the end of the Bezos riots and the beginning of the February Revolt, he and his comrades would craft what would come to be known as the American Worker’s Army.

While Sutton set to work laying the groundwork for the revolution yet to come, the fetal revolution underway was coming to an end before it had a chance to truly begin. Curfews and national guard deployments in a handful of cities put an end to the nightly mayhem not long after the Fifth International held its secret congress, but the working class, still delirious with anger, was not ready to go quiet into that good night. On the 19th, a waiter serving Mark Zuckerberg at a restaurant in Palo Alto pulled out a handgun and shot him twice in the chest at point blank range. He miraculously survived, but the message to the wealthy was clear: there are people in this country who hate you enough to kill you, even at the expense of their own lives. Already uneasy from the killing of Bezos and the gleeful rampage against capitalism that had occurred in its wake, the attempted murder of Zuckerberg was the last straw for many of America’s wealthy elite. From late October through to the end of the year, twenty-seven of the top 100 richest people in the US moved abroad permanently, along with dozens of people lower on the list. This mass exodus of capitalists has since come to be known as the “Great Cash Migration.”

Four months after the Bezos riots, the specter of class conflict would return to haunt America one final time. And the rest is history.