BALTIMORE, OCTOBER 15 — Antiracist struggle continues to heat up in Baltimore, from weekly West Wednesday rallies against the police murder of Tyrone West, to the powerful Freddie Gray rebellion, to this week’s occupation of City Hall!
Antiracists stunned the center of political power here by disrupting a City Council hearing on Oct. 14 over whether to make Kevin Davis Baltimore’s a permanent police commissioner. After listening to politicians supporting Davis, and testimonies from people, young people began the protest. They decided to occupy City Hall until Davis and Mayor Rawlings-Blake came to meet with them and hear their demands. Cops flooded the building. Council President Jack Young removed a majority of the public seating in the council chamber, saying it was “unsafe.” Nevertheless, these fighters staged a second protest. This persistence made it possible for the sit-in to then take place, a tense face-off that lasted almost ten hours. Davis finally answered the antiracists’ request to meet him at 4 AM, not by meeting with the group, but by ordering their arrest!
The previous police chief, Anthony Batts, had been fired by Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake for not attacking the April rebellion rapidly or decisively enough. A new, more aggressive police strategy has already become apparent at recent rallies against police terror. It’s more like Ferguson, with rapid, aggressive arrests of antiracist leaders, and then further arrests based on identification from helicopter video footage.
The protest and sit-in at City Hall was organized because, although “proper” channels had been used, young people’s voices had been ignored. On the previous Monday, October 12, the members of a local antiracist group called City Bloc, released three demands and a statement with nineteen rules of engagement for the police to follow during protests. The three demands are:
Davis agree to the Bloc’s proposed guidelines for police at demonstrations.
Fire Housing Commissioner Paul Graziano. In Gilmore Homes, where Freddie Gray lived before the police killed him, and in other public housing, some maintenance officials demand sexual favors before making needed repairs. At Lakeview Towers, there has been a lack of water and heat. On top of that there has been an expansion of gentrification, instead of safe and healthy low-income housing.
Twenty million dollars invested in grassroots organizations that work with educating youth, like Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, Baltimore Bloc, City Bloc, and the Baltimore Algebra Project.
This fight is important in flexing our working-class muscles, and exposing the limits of a capitalist government. However, no amount of guidelines, firings or funding can weaken or halt this system built on exploitation.
The Cops, Politicians
And The State
Governments under capitalism are not neutral, but liberal politicians mislead the working class with the illusion that the government can be pushed to serve our class. In reality, the entire capitalist state always serves the capitalists. “The state” refers not to Maryland, or Oaxaca, or Gujarat, but to the main elements of power: the government, police, military and jails.
Until it is smashed with communist revolution, and until we then build a new state that will serve the working class — the capitalist state will uphold whatever businesses it wants, including police terror, and wars to secure blood-soaked profits for U.S. bosses worldwide.
This doesn’t mean fighting for the three demands isn’t a priority in this struggle! Communists in the Progressive Labor Party stand shoulder to shoulder with these fellow antiracists in fighting back. Note the bosses take back whatever demands or reforms the working class wins, when it’s convenient or necessary.
In the 1890s, a Black person was lynched in the U.S. approximately once every 40 hours. Struggles by the civil rights movement put a stop to most lynchings, but the rope and the open gutter racism has been replaced by police bullets, with Black cops, politicians, and even president. One hundred and twenty years later, nonwhites are killed once every 28 hours or less. This is because under capitalism, racism is a tool for:
1) making large profits from low-paid labor, and
2) oppressing the whole working class of all “races” by dividing and conquering us. That’s why white workers make less money in the U.S. South than they do in the rest of the country. A history of the most intense racism has made it especially hard to unite workers, organize unions, and fight for better pay in the South.
The State and Revolution
The capitalists have developed many tools to maintain their bloodthirsty racist rule. One of their divisive tactics is to promote Black nationalism, including encouraging Black workers to buy only at Black-owned businesses.
One of the main supporters of this is Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. In his book, Torchlight for America, he argues that members and supporters of the Nation of Islam can live on lower wages than other workers because they are taught to reject smoking, drinking and drugs. Based on those low wages, Farrakhan argues that large Black-owned businesses in U.S. cities can compete internationally, and profit. That’s no solution. The only difference between that plan, and life today, is that a few faces at the top would be of a different complexion. For the masses of people, poverty and racism would remain just as bad as they are now!
Communism, on the other hand, includes the whole working class. It will mean the death of racism and all forms of exploitation. Courage like the antiracists at City Hall opens the door for revolution. However, in order to make significant gains in the class struggle against racism, and for communism, a bigger multiracial communist party is needed.
PLP calls upon today’s fighters to stay on the road to revolution by forming communist study groups, joining the PLP, and continuing — for the long haul — to engage in sharp struggle, finally toppling capitalism and replacing it with an antiracist, communist world.