“There are decades where nothing
happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
—Vladimir Lenin
Millions of workers in more than 50 countries have taken the streets with bold and inspiring rebellions against the racist police lynchings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, and too many others. The uprisings expose a system that has failed on every level. From Nigeria to Pakistan, from Mexico and Brazil to Germany and France, this antiracist movement has electrified the workers of the world to fight back against the capitalist bosses’ terror.
Mass multiracial struggle is unstoppable when it’s led by politically advanced Black workers and communist ideas. Many workers have embraced communist leadership in this moment. Many more are looking for something better than the rulers’ sell-out liberal politicians, their merry-go-round of empty reforms, and their brutal path toward fascism and inter-imperialist war. It is the historic task of Progressive Labor Party (PLP) to lead the international working class to seize state power, smash the capitalists’ dictatorship, and end for all time the profit system’s deadly racism and sexism. The only solution to murders-by-cop is communist revolution!
Capitalist bosses: the most violent criminals
When huge protests broke out after George Floyd’s execution by four killer cops in Minneapolis, the rulers’ media and politicians first focused on a handful of looters and a few firebombed police cars. They condemned what they called “riots” and demanded that all protests be “peaceful.”
Meanwhile, anyone on the streets—or with a working television—was witnessing the systematic violence of the baton-swinging Klan-in-blue. As thousands of workers risked their health and lives in a pandemic to protest racist police murder, the bosses doubled down with more fascist terror. In Brooklyn, a police van drove into a crowd of demonstrators. In Buffalo, the kkkops knocked down a 75-year-old man and left him bleeding on the concrete with a critical head injury. The bosses’ mad dogs indiscriminately shot people in the head with rubber bullets, leaving some permanently blinded. Reporters were clearly targeted. (When U.S. capitalism is in crisis, “constitutional rights” don’t apply.) In Louisville, Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old EMT, was riddled with eight bullets after narcotics detectives invaded her home, and a “community pillar” named David McAtee was shot and killed outside his barbecue restaurant (abcnews.com, 6/2).
When the bosses’ bought-and-paid-for mayors imposed curfews, a historic tool “to restrict the movement and liberties of free and enslaved” Black workers (Washington Post, 6/3), the cops had a green light for chemical warfare with tear gas and pepper spray. As he made the marchers even more vulnerable to Covid-19, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio praised the cops for their “restraint.” Governor Andrew Cuomo, the mayor’s fellow liberal fascist, denied that cops had bludgeoned protesters “for no reason,” a bald-faced lie he was forced to walk back (slate.com, 6/4). In Washington, DC, as Terrorist-in-Chief Donald Trump cowered in his White House bunker, top Pentagon officials ordered National Guard helicopters to buzz low over nearby demonstrators, a “display of force usually reserved for combat zones” (New York Times, 6/6).
The truth is that the biggest instrument of violence, worldwide, is the bosses’ state: their government, military forces, cops, courts, schools, and media. The capitalists murder millions every year through imperialist war, mass unemployment, deplorable health care, unaffordable housing, and the profit-driven poisoning of our air, water, and food. During the pandemic, uncounted tens of thousands of workers around the world have died in their homes for lack of access to health care. Many were turned away by overwhelmed local hospitals after decades of budget cuts and closings. As always, Black, Latin, and indigenous workers have been ravaged out of proportion to their population. More than 1,200 U.S. health and medical workers published an open letter hailing the protests, calling anti-racism “vital to the public health” (CNN, 6/5).
Police murder: as American as apple pie
Despite plummeting U.S. crime rates over the last 30 years, police department budgets have kept steadily going up. Each year, the cops kill about 1,000 workers, a high percentage of them Black or Latin. Every so often, a new police reform is adopted: civilian review boards, or body cameras, or “racial sensitivity” training. Or the next wave of Black mayors and police chiefs. None of them make any difference. Democratic politicians are just as complicit in these lynchings as Republicans. During his eight years as president, Barack Obama and his Black attorney general, Eric Holder, refused to bring charges against the police who slaughtered Michael Brown in Ferguson, or Eric Garner on Staten Island, or Freddie Gray in Baltimore. They sat on their hands after Trayvon Martin was killed by a civilian wannabe cop in Florida. When protesters lit up Baltimore after Gray’s murder, Obama blasted them as criminals and “thugs,” the classic racist code for Black rebels (Reuters, 6/1).
Since the onset of the Covid-19 outbreak, in a period of extreme racist inequality and the breakdown of basic infrastructure to keep workers alive and healthy, U.S. billionaires have looted an additional $434 billion (Common Dreams, 5/28). With rising instability both within the U.S. and internationally, the bosses need social control more than ever. Though they may try to quell the protests by restructuring the police, the bosses cannot outsource the class war against furious workers. They need their kkkops for that. As the Washington Post noted, “Even amid the coronavirus pandemic and orders that kept millions at home for weeks, police shot and killed 463 people through the first week of June — 49 more than the same period in 2019. In May, police shot and killed 110 people, the most in any one month since The Post began tracking such incidents” (6/8).
The new abolitionism
Joe Biden, the racist nitwit the Democrats are running against Trump, has his own shameful history as a police shill. In a speech on the Senate floor in 1994, the year he authored the legislation that ushered in mass incarceration in the U.S., Biden said, “Anybody who does not want cops, then do not ask for them; send them my way. Send them to Philadelphia, Wilmington, Trenton, the area I live in. And my daughter will be safer, my wife will be safer, my mother will be safer, and I will be safer. And I will be happy” (NYT, 6/1). More recently, as workers rebelled, Biden offered a suggestion to improve police training: [Y]ou shoot ‘em in the leg instead of in the heart” (foxnews.com, 6/1).
More sophisticated reformers, like Black Lives Matter, have proposed a package of eight measures they claim would reduce police violence by 72 percent. Others, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are leading calls to “defund” the cops and limit their scope of operations. The Minneapolis City Council went so far as to declare its intent to “dismantle” and “abolish” its rabid police force (The Guardian, 6/7). Mainstream Democrats like Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are pushing back against these initiatives. The finance capitalists, the bosses’ main wing, have a problem they cannot solve. On the one hand, they need to keep the loyalty of Black workers, both to get Trump out of office and, down the road, to fight in World War III. On the other hand, they need the cops to defend the bosses’ interests by terrorizing workers—and specifically Black workers. Black women and men, the most exploited and oppressed, have the greatest potential to give our class revolutionary leadership.
While Black Lives Matter’s reformism and identity politics are dangerous and divisive to our class, it’s a positive sign that more workers are aspiring to live in “a police-free society,” as the Minneapolis Council president called it. But we won’t be able to get there until we destroy capitalism, the source of all racism and inequality.
Communism is the only alternative—join PLP!
As the revolutionary communist leader Mao Zedong once said, “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” The ruling class will not peacefully hand over their state power or give up their trillions of dollars of profits. If only it were so easy! Historically, big changes—even within the limits of a reform struggle—come about only after workers resort to violence. Consider John Brown and the other armed abolitionists who helped to end slavery, or the gunfighting union coal miners of the 1920s. The gains of the U.S. civil rights movement wouldn’t have happened without armed self-defense groups like the Deacons for Defense and Justice—or the bosses’ fear that urban uprisings would destroy their assets and undermine their Cold War competition with the Soviet Union.
But real and lasting change requires something more: organized mass violence to seize state power and make a new society run by and for the working class. Though their communist revolutions were later reversed, that’s what happened in Russia and China. That’s what Progressive Labor Party believes in. Individualistic looting or spontaneous violence won’t get workers what we need. Working class anger is a good and powerful thing, but it must be directed in a strategic way against the bosses. We need millions of workers internationally to join us to smash the bosses’ state with violent communist revolution.
Over the last two weeks, a multiracial, multigenerational, international fightback has given us a glimpse of workers’ potential and power. In New York and Minneapolis, bus drivers refused to take detained protestors off to jail. In Washington, a man sheltered 70 young rebels in his home overnight to help them avoid arrest. Medical workers are heading straight from their long hospital shifts to the latest rally. We don’t need the bosses’ politicians to pacify our anger. We don’t need the bosses’ cops to keep “order” by choking the life out of our brothers and sisters. We are who we have been waiting for!
At some point, the street protests will die down. That’s when we’ll need to carry the same fighting spirit back to our jobs and schools and churches. End the capitalist police state nightmare! Fight for communism! Join PLP!