Rioting for a Reason: Civil Unrest and Political Opportunity
"We have nothing to lose but our chains! We have nothing to lose but our chains!”
The chant erupted across the nation and around the world at demonstrations (and riots) in response to a St. Louis County grand jury’s decision not to indict white police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown, a black man, in Ferguson, Missouri. It was heard again following the vote of a New York grand jury not to indict a police officer in the death of Eric Garner, and again when Attorney General Eric Holder addressed a crowd in Atlanta, Georgia.
Is it merely a coincidence, a fluke, that this slogan echoes the most famous lines of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto? “Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things,” Marx declared, in the concluding lines of his revolutionary tract. “The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims,” he continued. “They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains…. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!”
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