The “Lumpenproletariat’s Redemption”: Black Radical Potentiality and LA Gang Tours

From Hollywood celebrity bus tours to Universal Studios walking tours, Los Angeles (LA) “is a city that has been built on tourism and self-promotion for more than 150 years.”[1] Yet, in many of these tours, LA is a city “out of context.”[2] For Laura Pulido, Laura Barraclough, and Wendy Cheng, this means that much of the city’s tourism creates a very “white” LA, in which the areas toured highlight the city’s white population and history, ignoring the large population of color that resides in the city. Thus, the spaces highlighted on these popular tours ignore issues of race, class, and colonization necessary to make LA a possibility today because it is assumed that this history is not sellable to a largely white tourist population. One component of LA that is ignored in most of its tourism culture is the fact that the city is considered the “gang capital” of the nation.[3] According to the Los Angeles Police Department’s (LAPD) website, there are more than “450 active gangs in the City,” and they boast a “combined membership of over 45,000 individuals.”[4] Many of LA’s gangs are composed of black, Latinx, and Asian people.

In an effort to bring together tourism and gangs, a group of black and brown former gang members from South LA started a non-profit organization called LA Gang Tours. These former gang members are also the tour guides. On the three-hour-long bus tour, tour guides provide personal oral histories of gang life in their community, paying particular attention to gangs like the Bloods and Crips. While describing their lives as gang members, tour guides also drive the tourists through multiple areas of the city, always ending in South LA, the tour’s geographic focus.

LA Gang Tours have received criticism from reporters, bloggers, politicians, and local activists.[5] This group of critics uses terms like “ghettotainment,” “poverty/slum tourism,” and, most consistently, “exploitation” to describe the tours.[6] The overwhelming assumption in these descriptions is that the tours financially “exploit” South LA because tour guides profit off of negative images of violence. For example, one reporter calls the tour a business endeavor that “is clearly exploitation at the lowest form”[7] because of the financial profits made by tour guides. Similarly, Nathan,[8] one of my interviewees who is a local Protestant minister and former deputy of gang reduction for LA, notes that the gang tour is a “legal hustle,” but:

At least it’s legal. It may be exploitive. But the other hustle [i.e., gang life] was exploitive, too, but in a different way. So there’s part of me on that front, I say, “Well, you know, you gotta make it somehow. At least they’re [tour guides] not slinging anymore,” you know.

Nathan’s “legal hustle” speaks to another iteration of exploitation because his critique ultimately concerns profits tour guides potentially make. Therefore, before the city would ever accept the tour, Nathan tells me, it needs to “see [the gang tour’s] financial books.” Again, the assumption is that tour guides exploit South LA and its gang history because of their sought-after profits. This is not to say that making profit off South LA is always viewed as exploitative,[9] but profit in the hands of the community’s black and brown residents is deemed as exploitative by some people in the city.

I have elsewhere criticized LA Gang Tours,[10] but I want to complicate the narrative of exploitation here. Through a mix of ethnographic interviews, participant observation as a tourist, and textual analysis of popular press articles written about the tours, I argue the gang tour functions as a complex critique of institutional racism by the population that Karl Marx once said was largely antithetical to social transformation: the lumpenproletariat.[11] The lumpenproletariat, for Marx, are those deemed criminals and they are thus unproductive toward his communist revolution. Using the work of Frantz Fanon who theorized the lumpenproletariat as productive, I show that the tours provide one avenue where the lumpenproletariat are not unproductive, but can publicly challenge systematic racism in Los Angeles. In addition, I argue that LA Gang Tours provides a challenge to the “objecthood,” or assumed inhumanity, associated with nonwhite racialized bodies in South LA. For this project, racialized objecthood speaks to the historical relationship of blackness to commodification.[12] Marx has argued that the commodity has little resistant quality, meaning they are incapable of speaking out against their own commodification.[13] But this, Fred Moten argues, assumes that black people were not commodities, bought and sold on the market.[14] For Moten, to critique racism is to critique capitalism because blackness assumes resistance to commodification. Therefore, I argue, it is not shocking that different forms of objecthood are always up for critique on LA Gang Tours. Gang violence, police brutality, mass incarceration, white and business flight, and racial segregation are just a few examples from the tour.

This article proceeds by providing a tour description to show how I came to complicate the exploitation narrative. I then move to compare the exploitation critique with tour guides’ self-description of their acts as “revolutionary.” Using Sylvia Wynter, I argue that exploitation does not work as a critique of the tour because tour guides refuse to separate racism from classism; instead, racism impacts South LA’s class relations. Next, using the work of Marx, Moten, and Fanon, I provide a theoretical overview of the lumpenproletariat and objecthood, as they relate to LA Gang Tours. Doing so shows that tour guides use the tour to both benefit from capitalism and challenge it in ways that are not typically allowed for people of color with criminal records. Then, I show that the tours allow for what I call a “lumpenproletariat’s redemption,” in which a criminalized group, viewed as largely idle, becomes productive in ways that include and exceed capitalist production. I conclude by rethinking the conception of revolution.

Standing on the corner of Waterloo Street and Kent Street in Echo Park, Los Angeles, I waited alone for about 15 minutes in the designated meeting spot to be picked up for my first LA Gang Tour. I was excited, but also skeptical. Much of the articles I read about the tour beforehand referred to it as “ghettotainment.” These materials tainted what I expected to find, making me doubt the potential benefits of the tours.

All the articles I read about LA Gang Tours also stated that they averaged about thirty people per tour. Still, I stood by myself on the corner, feeling nervous that I was in the wrong place. Behind me stood the Dream Center, a large church and the gang tour’s starting place. The Dream Center has a reputation in LA for helping people to leave their criminal past by providing spiritual guidance and job opportunities. Although the tour guides are all from South LA, most of them transitioned out of gang life in Echo Park with the help of the Dream Center that I stood in front of. “Yo, Armond!” I suddenly heard from behind me. I turn to see Alfred, smiling and walking toward me from the Dream Center. I dapped him up. “What up, homie,” I said. Alfred started the gang tours in 2010 to, as he says, “show tourists what LA gang life is really about.” In his mid-40 s, Alfred is a heavily tattooed former member of the Latinx gang Florencia 13. He and I met a few months before this day, and we talked on the phone a few times since, but I still had not taken the tour. “We’ve gotta do a private tour today,” he said, “because this group from Sweden couldn’t make their flight.” Unlike the larger gang tours of roughly 30 tourists and multiple black and brown tour guides on an air-conditioned tour bus, the private tour consists of three or fewer tourists and only Alfred taking people around in a car, sometimes his own.

“Anyone else coming?” I asked. “Married couple. Should be on their way,” Alfred said, before pausing at the sight of a white sport utility vehicle (SUV) slowly pulling up alongside of us. We glared at the SUV, unsure who sat behind the dark tints. The windows slowly rolled down, and a white couple sat inside smiling. “Yo!” Alfred yelled with a smile. This was Eric and Carol, the couple we waited for. They flew in from Norway to take the tour.

After our introductions, Alfred hopped in the driver’s seat, Eric in the passenger seat, and Carol and I in the back. Driving around the Dream Center, Alfred began with a personal biography of himself. He told us that the Dream Center is an important starting spot because it is where he began to make what he calls the “spiritual change” necessary to stop gang banging. In addition, driving food trucks for the Dream Center inspired him to come up with the gang tour. He noted that driving through rival gang neighborhoods to provide help rather than violence was necessary for his “redemption.” From these initial food drives, he came up with the idea for the tour, specifically the ceasefire. According to the tour’s website,[15] the “Safe Passage” ceasefire occurs during the tour’s hours (usually Saturdays from 10:00 am to 1:00 pm), and involves an agreement between four South LA gangs to engage in no illegal activities as the tour bus drives through the community.[16] For Alfred, the ceasefire is one of the things that he is proudest of, not because it protects the tourists, but because it shows that rival gangs are capable of redemption. This is part of what Alfred refers to as “revolutionary” change for South LA because the ceasefire destroys the narrative of his community as uncontrollably violent.

From Echo Park, our SUV turned south toward Downtown. Passing massive graffiti murals, Alfred explained the significance of graffiti for gangs throughout LA. In particular, he argued that graffiti is a language unto itself, as it allows residents to know which gangs are at war and which are at peace. We also drove by the Financial District, where Alfred argues that the disparity between wealth and poverty is so drastic it drove him and other gang members into bank robbery. While driving by the tall high-rise banks, he says with a smile: “LA is the bank robbing capital of the world. Although that number went down when I retired.” An example of the disparity between rich and poor, according to Alfred, is the fact that Skid Row, where the largest homeless population in the country resides, is just a few blocks away from these banks. Multimillion-dollar banks sit next to people sleeping on the street. Two more Downtown stops included the LA County Jail and the now-defunct Rampart police station, represented in movies like Training Day.

After Downtown LA, we finally made our way toward South LA. The Watts Towers were one of the first stops, and one of the few where we got out of the SUV.[17] These famous towers were constructed by Simon Rodia in the mid-1950s. Right next to the Towers there is the Watts Towers Arts Center, a local center established in the 1960s. The center provides a space of expression for the black and brown residents of South LA, particularly after events like the 1965 Watts Rebellion and the 1992 LA Rebellion.[18] The Watts Towers and the Watts Towers Arts Center, along with Downtown graffiti murals, force one to acknowledge the importance of art on tour. Alfred wants tourists to know about the productivity of his community, not just the violence.

Driving down infamous streets like Slauson—one of the areas in South LA well known for gang violence—Alfred provided us with oral histories of gangs like the Bloods and the Crips. Rather than situating the history of gang violence as solely self-destructive, Alfred notes that these gangs owe their legacy to police brutality and segregation in LA. The Crips, for example, began after the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s attack on the Black Panther Party left the Party’s LA chapter dismantled. A group of teenagers from the South LA area who sought to emulate the style and bravado of the Panthers began wearing the organization’s colors (blue) and patrolling their own streets. They called themselves Crips. Later, another group, calling themselves Bloods, formed to combat the aggression of the Crips.[19]

Next we drove through the Pueblo del Rio housing projects, largely Blood territory. Here, we made a quick stop in front of a playground, and women and children ran up to the SUV at the sight of Alfred’s face sticking out of it. He is well liked here, as women reach through the window to hug him. They tell us that the tour’s ceasefire allows them and their children to come outside in ways that they normally would not.

Our final stop for this tour was on Rosecrans Avenue in Compton,[20] but by this time I was admittedly overwhelmed with the amount of information we received in just three hours. I thought about the majority of the articles I had read about LA Gang Tours, which noted that they were “exploitative.” But after experiencing it myself, I was not so sure. In particular, the tours made complex connections between the city and its gangs, particularly how the city played a significant role in the creation of gangs. Whether it is police corruption and brutality, excessive wealth, segregation, or mass incarceration, the tour suggests that the “exploitation” critiques are not complex enough because they ignore the role of the city and systematic racism in making gangs.

What’s in a “Revolution”? Linking Racism and Classism in South LA

Whether it was expressed to me during the tour or in interviews with tour guides, the most important and consistently stated goal of tour guides is to create “revolutionary change” for South LA. By revolutionary change tour guides mean that they seek to end the racialized violence associated with their neighborhood, which takes the form of self-destructive rival gang violence, but also the city’s disproportionate political, social, and economic oppression of South LA residents. Tour guides blame themselves for violence, but they also implicate the city within a history of systematic violence: police brutality, privatized prisons, mass incarceration, racial segregation, lack of employment, and white and business flight. This is why Alfred stated in our first interview: “Gang problems are always economic problems.” Tour guides situate the racism associated with their community as always-already classed.

In light of a complex understanding of the overlapping nature of racism and classism, tour guides have what they call three “revolutionary” objectives for LA Gang Tours: (1) they seek to create economic avenues for an impoverished community in which many residents are deemed “unemployable” due to their criminal records; (2) they seek to create awareness around South LA’s poverty, crime, and violence; and (3) they seek to create safety, if only for the three-hour ceasefire. In one interview, Alfred told me these three goals can be summed up as illustrative of “our [South LA’s] humanity,” meaning the entire neighborhood, not just tour guides. This makes the tour revolutionary, for Alfred, because the city has historically denied such black and brown humanity.

Because tour guides seek profit for their labor, the reporters, politicians, and activists[21] who critique tour guides view their actions as financially exploitative and, thus, standing in contrast to revolution. Yet, despite their overwhelming focus on exploitation, the tour’s critics do not desire a Marxist, capitalist form of revolution. More accurately, I argue, the critics focus solely on financial profits of tour guides because they do not view tour guides’ critique of racial violence as central to social transformation. For the critics, resisting profits is viewed as proper resistance. However, it is inaccurate to view resisting profits as the sole mode of resistance that tour guides should engage in. That argument assumes that capitalism impacts people of all classes and races equally. While politicians, reporters, and activists who critique the tour assume that capitalism does not include the racism most important to tour guides, scholars like Melvin Oliver, James Johnson, Jr., and Walter Farrell, Jr. argue that South LA residents are impoverished because they are people of color.[22] “Financial exploitation” as a critique misses the fact that the city has provided few economic avenues for a large portion of its residents based on their race.

The assumption of Western society has been that capitalism is an “unbiased” system that likewise works from an untainted, neutral conception of the “human.” But Sylvia Wynter observes that focusing on capital as the sole determinant of all “human” experiences ignores the importance of systematic racism to civil society.[23] Thus, what is missing is the notion that the conception of what it means to be human, in the first place, is inherently racially exclusive and should not be taken for granted. Likewise, I argue that critics of LA Gang Tours do not consider tour guides’ challenge to racial violence as revolutionary because they assume that all actors in economics are “human,” in the taken-for-granted Western sense.

Katherine McKittrick, following Wynter, cautions against treating capitalism as the sole determinant of all human experience. McKittrick argues that the “human” has in contemporary times taken a largely economic framework that Wynter calls “Man2” (who emerges out of “Man1”).[24] Man2, McKittrick argues, is a figure “based on the Western bourgeoisie’s model of being human that has been articulated as, since the latter half of the nineteenth century, liberal monohumanism’s homo oeconomicus.”[25] In this critique, what constitutes the human is Western, upper/middle class men, whose calculus is largely economic. For Wynter, the sole focus on the conception of Man2, particularly in Marxist theorizations, has limited application to antiracist politics because Man2 assumes that we “all” engage in politics on a neutral, non-raced frame. However, while some humans can resist their exploitation, the Other seeks to challenge the Western conception of humanity to begin with. Exploitation begins with the assumption that tour guides have been viewed as “human” and, thus, willingly consent to capitalism, for better or worse. Yet the city, as one manifestation of white supremacy, has largely denied the potential for the residents of South LA to consent at all. Here, the ability to even be exploited is a “human” privilege for Wynter. Alternatively, tour guides just want not to be killed.

Even though the tours’ critics may disagree with the tenets of Marxism, and especially the concept of revolution, they continue to associate conceptions of social transformation in a purely economic domain, as if that is the only determinant of human experience. But while the politicians, activists, and reporters talk about one conception of revolutionary change (economic), tour guides consider a different, yet overlapping, conception of change (antiracism). LA Gang Tours begin with the assumption that racism is a more significant determinant of human experience than capitalism. More accurately, racism, as critiqued by tour guides, is inseparable from capitalism.

Theorizing the Lumpenproletariat and the Resistance of the Object

The articulation of racism and classism by tour guides aligns LA Gang Tours within and oftentimes against a history of black radical activism and scholarship. Tour guides’ critiques of Los Angeles mirror two areas of black radical scholarship that will be addressed below: (1) the redefinition of the lumpenproletariat provided by Fanon;[26] and (2) the critique of black commodification as outlined in Moten’s work.[27] Note that, of course, tour guides do not refer to themselves as the “lumpenproletariat.” Yet, I argue that their work constitutes a challenge to discussions of Marx’s lumpenproletariat because the tours are not “unproductive” which, in Marx’s terms, meant having no potential for revolution. Rather, tour guides provide a unique challenge to systematic racism in the city, sharing similarities to Fanon’s discussion of the lumpenproletariat in Algeria. In addition to their productivity, tour guides attempt to redeem themselves for their past transgressions as gang members. Specifically, in my usage of Moten, tour guides’ attempts to overcome past transgressions challenge their own historical reduction to commodified objects.

Whether it is because of their criminal records, or forced labor in private prisons, or their lack of employment opportunities (aside from low-wage service sector positions), South LA residents have historically been prevented from full participation in dominant modes of capitalist production. But via LA Gang Tours, tour guides dismiss these limited options in favor of creating their own means of production, by which I mean tour guides’ gang experiences, stories, and territories literally become productive. Thus, tour guides’ attempts to financially profit mock dominant understandings of who should and should not profit from capitalist endeavors. Because legal money now enters the pockets of a group (lumpenproletariat) who are not supposed to legally profit from their labor, tour guides challenge the maintenance of systematic racism in LA in terms of profit but also, and inseparably, the normalcy of South LA’s racial oppression. Tour guides’ creation of the gang tour is essentially a proverbial slap in the face of the prison industrial complex and the limited low- wage service sector jobs. It is a denial of these sectors as the sole form of productivity for black and brown life. LA Gang Tours and its call for an end to racialized objecthood assumes a critique of capitalism, while simultaneously embracing profit. None of this is to argue that LA Gang Tours officially constitute “revolution,” but to say that tour guides’ work often mirrors Fanon’s lumpenproletariat and Moten’s objecthood more so than the popular critiques of exploitation.

Reworking Marx’s Lumpenproletariat

While Marx and Fanon provide two different descriptions of the lumpenproletariat, there is one consistent commonality between each’s understanding: the lumpenproletariat is a criminal/ized group in a capitalist society. It is a group whose alternative modes of moneymaking do not very explicitly make wealthy the upper class because the lumpenproletariat refuses to engage in the modes of production set up by the wealthy class. Today, there are alternative ways to reintroduce the lumpenproletariat back into dominant modes of production that benefit the wealthy class, such as the private prison industry and low-wage service sector jobs.

According to Marx, despite the lumpenproletariat’s alternative modes of moneymaking, the group remains in league with the upper classes. In the “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” Marx argued that the lumpenproletariat is the enemy of the proletariat (working class), thus contending that against the proletariat stands “the aristocracy of finance, the industrial bourgeoisie, the middle class, the petty bourgeois, the army, the lumpen proletariat organized as the Mobile Guard, the intellectual lights, the clergy, and the rural population.”[28] For Marx, the lumpenproletariat is one group, among others, that is a “pawn” of the republic, used to temper revolution rather than enact it. This leads to his famous denouncement of the lumpenproletariat:

Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème.[29]

Similarly, in Policing the Crisis, scholars Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, and Brian Robert note that, for Marx, the lumpenproletariat feeds off of the proletariat “through theft, extortion, begging, prostitution and gambling.”[30] As such, it is a hindrance, rather than support, to class revolution. For Marx, the lumpenproletariat is unproductive, and it impedes the progress of “real”/class revolution.

While Marx viewed the lumpenproletariat as unproductive, this same population was seen as wholly necessary for Fanon’s revolution. Fanon saw the lumpenproletariat as potentially one of the more revolutionary forces in racist, capitalist, nationalist societies. Specifically, Fanon noted that the lumpenproletariat, which is already prepared to break the laws set up by the upper class, is willing to revolt against other restrictions. Fanon argued that when the lumpenproletariat fights a rival this is not too much different than attacking the structures that made one group a rival of another in the first place. Thus, Fanon argues, not only capital, but colonization, nation, and race are central to understanding the lumpenproletariat’s revolutionary potential:

The lumpenproletariat constitutes a serious threat to the “security” of the town and signifies the irreversible rot and the gangrene eating into the heart of colonial domination. So the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed, and the petty criminals, when approached, give the liberation struggle all they have got, devoting themselves to the cause like valiant workers. These vagrants, these second-class citizens, find their way back to the nation thanks to their decisive militant action.[31]

The lumpenproletariat is not a useless population for Fanon. Instead, this group has the potential to play a key role in liberation struggles.

While Fanon wrote of Algeria, I argue that South LA can be situated within his discussion of the lumpenproletariat’s radical potentiality. Tour guides constantly refer to their actions as antithetical to the relations of systematic racism in their homes, which includes rival gang violence, but also white flight, police brutality, mass incarceration, and segregation. Each of these relations critiqued by tour guides assumes both race and class relations, as South LA lost significant economic opportunities via racist policies and classed practices like white flight and deindustrialization.

Objecthood and/as Political Power

Moten’s theorization of objecthood is based on the idea that black people’s entrance into Western societies begins not within Western conceptions of “humanity” but as a commodity relation (the Middle Passage, the auction block, the plantation). The history of black radicalism is a resistance against this originary objecthood. This, Moten posits, is in direct contrast to Marx’s theorization of commodities because Marx argues commodities have no resistant qualities:

It is plain that commodities cannot go to market and make exchanges of their own account. We must, therefore, have recourse to their guardians, who are also their owners. Commodities are things, and therefore without power of resistance against man. If they are wanting in docility he can use force; in other words, he can take possession of them.[32]

The commodity, for Marx, is a passive object, acted on by subjects. Moten fires back against this position, arguing that he is “interested in the convergence of blackness and the irreducible sound of necessarily visual performance at the scene of objection.”[33] For Moten, from the initial scene of commodification, particularly of the black body, there is an always-already, immediate resistant performativity.

Black performance, for Moten, is most potent not where black people are reduced solely to objects by racial violence (subjection), but in the aural/oral and visual moments, where black people challenge the classification of themselves as commodities to begin with. This is a theory of resistance that rethinks Marx’s commodity because, for Moten, commodities (or objects) indeed speak. Objecthood is not passive, but full of life.

I apply Moten (and Wynter and Fanon) to LA Gang Tours to show that the tours have a different concern that always exceeds economic exploitation. Tour guides seek to challenge the racial violence that structures their homes and normalizes the residents of South LA as objects. From slavery, to colonization, to immigration laws, to Jim Crow, to white flight, to deindustrialization, to mass incarceration, and to police brutality, these are relations to objecthood that situate residents of South LA as open for destruction.

The gang tours call for an end to black and brown objecthood in LA, which assumes a critique of capitalism. Tour guides want to live, which is not a very complex theoretical position. And yet, the reality is that, at any moment, a black or brown gang member and/or a white, racist police officer may kill them. At any moment, they could be removed from their homes, placed into a privatized prison. At any moment, they could be stopped and frisked for being in the “wrong” section of LA. These are object relations, connected to a history of producing South LA’s residents as nonhuman.

The “Lumpenproletariat’s Redemption”

Rather than an exploitation narrative, tour guides constantly characterize their labor through the framework of “redemption.” Bringing together the work of tour guides and the work of social theorists, I further term tour guides’ labor, in direct opposition to the exploitation narrative, as the “lumpenproletariat’s redemption.” This is a relationship that both uses and despises capitalism, which means tour guides argue that their ability to make money is itself a critique of racism. Tour guides’ reference to themselves as former gang members resonates with Marx’s definition of the lumpenproletariat. Yet their labor most often falls between Marx’s and Fanon’s definition because they challenge racism via a bifurcated relationship to capitalism. Tour guides use their capability to make money legally to critique the history of systematic racism/objecthood in South LA.

Relatedly, redemption is a term with purposeful Christian implications (saving souls), but it has a physical component, too (saving people from violence). In tour guide conceptions of redemption there is also a necessary transformation of what it means to be a “gang member.” Like a slave speaking against her own commodification, tour guides use the tours to redeem themselves and speak against their reduction to objecthood.

As will be shown, the lumpenproletariat’s redemption is a better description of LA Gang Tours than the exploitation critique because the lumpenproletariat’s redemption assumes a necessary articulation of racism and capitalism. Even as tour guides celebrate capitalism, their critique of racism assumes a critique of capitalism because they toy with the idea of who is a subject and who/what is an object. Marx assumes a baseline Western subjectivity, but blackness assumes objecthood (Moten calls this the “unthought position” of classic Marxism). Not being historically considered a “subject” and making money is a challenge of LA Gang Tours, not in a classic Marxist sense but in a way that shuns the illegalities by which the lumpenproletariat has been forced to make money.

The Potential of the Redeemed Lumpenproletariat: Challenging Racism on Tour

The tour guides of LA Gang Tours share much with Fanon’s lumpenproletariat. For example, Fanon notes a definite connection between police and colonial violence and the production of the lumpenproletariat. Likewise, it is not a coincidence that two major stops on tour are police related: the LA County Jail and the now-defunct Rampart police station. In fact, tour guides view the police and the prison systems as central to making them gang members. In our first interview, Alfred told me “prison only made me a better gangster.” Similarly, in a television interview, when talking about the other tour guides he has hired, Alfred stated: “Between the four people that are working right now, they probably have about 120 years in jail.”[34] Later, during the same broadcast, while standing at the front of the tour bus, one tour guide, Melvin Johnson, tells the bus of white tourists: “Every jail we went by today, I, uh [laughs], I was there.”[35] In multiple instances, tour guides’ unapologetic acknowledgment of their former criminal behaviors and their ability to connect this to policing reflects Fanon’s lumpenproletariat.

However, it would be misleading to blanketly read tour guides as Fanon’s lumpenproletariat because they celebrate a legal engagement in captialism that has largely been denied to them. Alternatively for Fanon, the lumpenproletariat would not so much celebrate capitalism, but eventually come to a complex critique of capitalism by identifying it as inseparable from racial and colonial violence. This critique is missing from tour guides’ analysis. Instead, they consider the ability to make money in a legal fashion as itself a challenge to the dominant structure of Los Angeles.

Tour guides see their ability to finally make money in a legal fashion via LA Gang Tours not as proof of capitalism’s neutrality, but as a reminder that the city has actively prevented them from financially profiting in legal ways because of its history of racism. While the city has been historically more helpful to its white residents politically, economically, and socially, it has for just as long often wiped its hands of responsibility for South LA’s problems, making a gang tour one way former gang members produce, contra Marx’s lumpenproletariat. Instead of the city’s failed promise to provide social, political, and economic change for South LA (such as with programs like “Rebuild LA” in the aftermath of the 1992 LA Rebellion),[36] it takes a program like LA Gang Tours for residents to create their own means of production. That is, gang members’ experiences and their war-torn homes finally become financially and socially productive for them.

As noted in a 2010 newspaper article, the tour is “not just about gangs, it’s about the economic problems in the city,”[37] problems that, since the white flight of the 1960s, have disproportionately limited opportunities for South LA.[38] As such, Alfred makes sure to stay involved in many business ventures, including a nonprofit that he started known as Inner City Visions. The goal of the organization is to provide violence intervention in the South LA community or, more specifically, to mediate gang conflicts before they escalate to gang violence. The mission of Inner City Visions is “[t]o strategically break the inter- generational cycles of poverty, addiction and gang violence by using a holistic approach that meets the unique needs of vulnerable families and children.”[39] Relatedly, during his own home video recording after one gang tour, tour guide Melvin Johnson promoted his hip-hop company, West Coast Getcha Gotcha Entertainment.[40] In his video, Johnson states, “My idea synchronizes with the tours, that’s why I’m here to support them.”[41] Johnson’s rappers also created the gang tour’s official music video, “LA Gang Tours.”[42] In addition to tour guides’ own business ventures, there are also the rarely addressed prices of the rented American Transportation Systems buses that the tours use. Whether to the direct financial benefit of themselves or largely white-owned businesses, tour guides have created alternative economic relations despite the city’s historic dismissal of their neighborhood.

Thus, a focus on financial profits and “exploitation” misses a more pressing critique of tour guides. Black and brown residents of South LA have historically been used to increase profits for private corporations and their owners (who are usually white people) through their labor in privatized prisons, low-wage, service-sector jobs, or illegal behaviors that can lead to incarceration. However, while these limited options maintain the treatment of South LA’s residents as nonhuman, the gang tour functions to explicitly stunt the financial gains of these largely white-owned entities. The gang tours present a challenge to systematic racism and capitalism by refusing the limited options of those who continue to profit off the historic objecthood of nonwhite bodies. This is less a contradiction of tour guides and more a contradiction of capitalism and racism. Tour guides’ ability to make money challenges dominant, white modes of production.

Therefore, there is still something importantly similar between Fanon’s lumpenproletariat and tour guides’ actions that should not be ignored, especially in critiques of exploitation. Both Fanon’s lumpenproletariat and tour guides are concerned with ending racialized violence. Despite 120 years of jail time among tour guides, they challenge Marx’s argument that the lumpenproletariat are unproductive. In addition to being laborers who promote their own product as part of a global market (evidenced by tourists who travel from as far away as Australia and Norway to take the tours), tour guides also create their own means of production in a community with few alternatives. Although tour guides have yet to explicitly critique capitalism, the necessity of their labor on tour does reveal the falsehoods of capitalism as a neutral, merit-based system in which “everyone” engages equally. Tour guides understand that their (legal) participation in capitalism is unlikely not only because they have criminal records, but relatedly because they live in a country structured by systematic racism. South LA, like many other largley nonwhite neighborhoods in the country, is criminalized because of the racial makeup of its residents. There is no neat separation between racism and capitalism here.

In addition to challenging their presumed lack of productivity, tour guides also define their actions as “redemptive.” Tour guides are heavily influenced by Christianity, and this influence is one of the more prominent elements promoted on tour. The tours begin at the Dream Center, a Christian organization in Echo Park that provides political as well as financial assistance to gang-involved individuals who want to transform their lives.[43] The Dream Center is where Alfred got his start after serving a prison sentence in the 1990s. In addition, under Alfred’s biography on the tour’s website, it is acknowledged that Christianity is central to his moral and spiritual transformation: “After a radical and life changing experience, receiving the Lord as his personal Savior, he has dedicated his life to serving the Los Angeles community through humanitarian aid and violence reduction/prevention.”[44] The Christian influence is so prominent for one tourist who I interviewed, named Sam, that it reaches uncomfortable levels during his first tour:

In terms of some of the negative stuff, I felt a little bit like there was some selling of Christianity, not to say that because you know I’m Catholic, I just felt there was some, I mean, it felt like some of the gang members when they even introduced themselves kind of pointed to being saved, which I think could kind of be a little bit, it seemed to be very shaped and tainted by it. … I mean I have no problems with that. I just don’t think that is something that you should publically be giving on the tours.

Despite the fact that Sam took the tour a year before me, we both noticed the prevalence of redemption and its relation to spirituality on the tour. Tour guides see the tour as a way to spread peace in South LA, but also to atone for their previous transgressions. Likewise, Alfred notes, unlike the trauma he used to inflict on his community, now “[his] heart and prayer is that this organization will provide rays of hope in dark corridors of drugs and gang violence.”[45] Elsewhere, Alfred speaks to this redemptive goal again when he notes, “There’s a perception out there that people can’t change”; thus, the gang tour “is really a story of redemption, that change is possible.”[46] This expression of redemptions allows for tour guides to, as one tourist, Carol, tells me, “promote their spiritual change.”

For tour guides, their quest for redemption seems to manifest itself in two ways. First, they highlight their previous engagement with gang-related activities. Second, they seek to redefine what a gang member can be. Tour guides focus on their criminal pasts in hopes of “saving” people or showing others what not to do. Of course, this association of crime with South LA is also why the mostly white tourists are there in the first place, as rap music, television, and films that focus on gang violence are often quoted by tourists as sparking their interest to take the tour. For example, I interviewed a Norwegian tourist couple named Eric and Carol, and, as Eric told me, Carol and he took the tour expecting to see “where [rappers] Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre grew up.”[47] Thus, the association of the South LA area with gangster rap is of central importance to some tourists’ desires.

Tour guides engage in the marketization of criminality by performing what tourists imagine gang life to be like on the tour. They lift their shirts to show tattoos and old bullet wounds as cautionary examples. One NBC television report revealed that tour guide Melvin Johnson states, “Everything bad that could happen to you involving gangs happened to me. I’ve been shot, stabbed, incarcerated.”[48] And, in a different television interview, tour guide Clarence Stewart, in conversation with a reporter, Michael Moore, details his war scars:

Clarence Stewart: I’ve been shot four times, close range. Michael Moore: Where about?
Clarence Stewart: Um, twice in the leg [pointing at his left leg], hit that main artery, almost bled to death. And twice underneath [pointing to his left underarm and lower left shoulder blade].[49]

During my first tour, Alfred similarly lifted his shirt to reveal his bullet wounds and gang tattoos. Referring to these types of performances and testimonies, Carol stated this was proof of tour guides’ “bad-ass experiences.”

While these flashes of war scars and tattoos can be viewed as attempts to show how “bad-ass” tour guides are or as playing to the largely white tourists’ desires to see what they imagine to be the “real” South LA, these performances also reveal the violence that structures South LA. This is not violence recorded in songs or on film, but on the black and brown bodies on the tour. It is a violence inseparable from a history of antiblackness, antibrownness, and capitalism in LA that normalizes, and articulates, white and business flight and deindustrialization to racial segregation and brutality against people of color. Part of tour guides’ redemptive goal is to discuss this violence and critique it. In short, LA Gang Tours is a space where Moten’s commodity speaks, it serves as a way to prevent the reoccurrence of this racialized violence, through both its three-hour-long ceasefire and the fact that many tour guides were once rivals and are now trying to build peace with each other and their respective gangs that extends beyond the ceasefire.

The conception of redemption, according to tour guides, relatedly calls for a redefinition of what it means to be a gang member. On LA Gang Tours, the gangster is no longer reducible to one or two races of people, but a product of the city’s institutional structure, especially as these institutions relate to policing. For the gang members, police are an occupying force (much like a gang) that protects the city by preventing South LA’s black and brown residents from moving beyond South LA, unless they are being moved into prisons. Police not only prevent black and brown people from leaving communities with few employment opportunities because of white flight and deindustrialization. They also reintroduce this population into capitalist relations via prison labor. Again, privatized prisons, police, and the city blur the lines between racism and capitalism.

Police violence in South LA is a constant theme on tour. During my first tour, Alfred stated that police consistently abuse and harass South LA residents, often for little to no reason. When tour guides point out that officers of the LAPD receive raises and new equipment for “gang task forces” throughout the city, they simultaneously redefine the gang member to include the officers of the city’s law enforcement.[50] During my first tour, Carol and Eric said that thinking of the police as gangsters was a novel position for them. They even expressed doubt about Alfred’s discussion of police abuse, with Eric saying: “in Norway police don’t even carry firearms.” Trying to envision a police force without guns was laughable to Alfred and me in ways that Eric and Carol could not fully understand. Further, Alfred’s consistent expression of displeasure with the police in LA prompted Carol to claim that Alfred “was like bashing on the cops like every second minute,” with Eric later commenting that the police should play a larger role on tour:

Maybe even the police officer [should be included on tour] to say, “you know this is the story from sort of Alfred’s point of view, this is how we [the police] see it.” To say, what are the problems? What are the root causes from a police officer’s point of view? What is it like for a police officer working in these areas? Why do they behave like they do? [emphasis added]

I asked Eric who he was referring to in his last question and his response was that he meant the South LA gang members.

What accounts for Norwegian tourists privileging the point of view of the LAPD (when they do not even have direct experience with LA) over their tour guide’s? Why do they give the LAPD the benefit of the doubt and not Alfred? As white, European tourists, Carol’s and Eric’s answers point to different relationships to and understandings of the police from tour guides who reside in South LA. Whereas police protect Carol and Eric, police threaten Alfred and his tour guide associates. The LAPD has not only violently policed and occupied South LA; it is a key feature in the structures of racism that created the neighborhood. This history of violent policing is long in South LA, despite the city’s denial of any relationship between policing and South LA’s problems. For example, in the 1960s, LAPD chief William Parker was notorious for denying any responsibility for the problems of South LA, particularly in relation to the Watts Rebellion of 1965:

Because of Parker’s insensitivity toward minority groups and his attitude toward blacks during the 1950s and early 1960s, his actions alienated the community and contributed to tensions that led up to the Watts uprisings. … Parker assumed no responsibility for the events that led to the outbreak of the civil unrest in 1965, and was unapologetic at the McCone Commission hearings, placing blame on the CHP’s [California Highway Patrol’s] handing of the arrest for sparking the revolt. Coming to Parker’s defense, Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty stated that he believed the revolt was the work of “subversive forces,” which actually planned incidents to spark a riot, and that he was not aware of any case where a police officer was dismissed for brutality.[51]

For tour guides and residents, police violence, capitalism, and South LA have always been interconnected. Still, for Eric and Carol, the police are not violent but South LA is. This is a well-entrenched narrative (not unique to Carol and Eric) that tour guides attempt to challenge by reclassifying police violence as a form of gangsterism. The gang tour is the first place many white tourists even consider such a reclassification. The tour remaps gangsterism, making this a concept that stretches beyond the black and brown residents of South LA to the badges and patrol cars of those purported to “protect and serve.”

Another redefinition of the gang member occurs via the promotion of art. On LA Gang Tours, the gang member is one who creates and not solely destroys. The emphasis on art is a central narrative of the tours that challenges the stereotypical domains of what a gang member is. Three of the twelve tour stops are art related: the Downtown graffiti murals, the Watts Arts Center and Watts Towers, and the Pico Union Graffiti (Graff) Lab. Lisa Sprinkles, co-manager of the Graff Lab, stated in an interview that the tour is important because tour guides “don’t, like, look at gangs like it’s inherently negative. They’re like seeking support and family and all of that, and some of them you know do things that are violent, but it’s a small percentage.”[52] Also the tours extend the efforts of the lab, set out by its founder, Rick Guerrero, who states that the Graff Lab is “for everyone,” as long as they are interested in art, not violence: “If you’re a gangster, that’s fine. Just leave it at the door. Everybody here, it’s all about peace, love, and love for the arts.”[53] And like the tour, the Graff Lab is a space where gang members are given alternative financial opportunities, such as the opportunity to sell art and attend art school, both options Guerrero provides.

On tour, the “gang member” becomes multifaceted and “criminality” more complex. Gangsterism is no longer racialized as one type of person, but includes the police and the prisons. It is no longer limited to individuals but also to the city’s structure, ranging from the tour to the businesses that profit off of South LA. But the gang member also includes artists and peacemakers. This population is no longer unproductive. The gang member/tour guide articulates the issues of the South LA community to the relationship between racism and capitalism.

Conclusion: LA Gang Tours and Radical Potentiality

Despite its largely white tourist base, LA Gang Tours is not really for white tourists at all. The satisfaction of the mostly white tourists is secondary to tour guides’ goal of transforming South LA’s history of racial violence, a transformation tour guides classify as revolutionary. Whether one agrees with tour guides’ conception of revolution or not is not really the point for them. The point is that tour guides continue to show the limitations of the narrative of financial exploitation for people of color because racism is a more pressing concern as it structures the domains of Western humanity. At times, tour guides’ goals for LA Gang Tours resonate with the ideas of Wynter, Fanon, and Moten; at other times their goals do not. Still, exploitation is shown to be far too simplistic of a critique of tour guide labor because it assumes a separation between capitalism and racism, a distinction constantly blurred through tour guide labor.

Ultimately, tour guides’ perceived focus on illegality should not be read as if they are committing illegal acts by simply providing a tour (“legal hustles”), but as reminders of why they organize the gang tours in the first place. They do so to “redeem” themselves by changing the narratives that are capable of being told by and about their home. Tour guides purposefully toy with illegality; they use their former relations to criminality and violence to promote peace and creativity in communities that they used to destroy. In the process, LA Gang Tours puts forth a highly complex critique of racism and capitalism.