The proletariat seeks to transform the world according to its own world outlook, and so does the bourgeoisie…What is correct develops in the course of struggle with what is wrong.
– Mao Zedong
The mass antiracist rebellion sparked by the murder of George Floyd has brought to the light what Black and Latin workers have always known, the role of the police is to terrorize the working class, particularly Black workers. The police cannot be reformed because in killing Black workers they are doing their job to maintain capitalism.
“Defund the Police” has become a mass slogan of the rebellion. Millions of young people around the world are demanding a world with no cops. The capitalists will never do this. Capitalism is based on the bosses exploiting the working class for profit. The bosses use both racism and the police to maintain this system. Racism is used to justify low wages and keep the working class divided. The police enforce racism and the laws that protect exploitation. People are not equal before the eyes of the law because the law is there to maintain inequality. The bosses steal billions every day, it’s called business. The laws are there to protect them. Capitalism and equality are incompatible.
The whole history of the police is one of defending the bosses’ interests by attacking the working class. Capturing escaped slaves, terrorizing Black neighborhoods, portraying Black and Latin workers as dangerous, breaking strikes of all workers and protecting what the bosses have stolen from us are why the police exist. The bosses need the cops to protect them and their racist system like fish need water.
The bosses build racism, mistrust and fear among our class to divide us and turn us towards the police. The bosses' racism and anti-working-class ideology help keep us oppressed. But our class does have experience liberating ourselves. The struggle of the working class in China shows we can build a society based on trusting the working class. The working class in China under the leadership of the communist party built a society without cops. This was not some small experiment, but a massive transformation of a society that involved 600 million people.
No exploitation – No need for cops
From the 1940’s to 60’s the world was inspired by the working class in China fighting for communism, even as the capitalists re-established themselves in the Soviet Union. The Progressive Labor Party came out of this struggle and today we fight for communism even as capitalism has returned to China. The revolutionary war against the Chinese capitalists lasted from 1946 to 1949. During this period the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) established liberated zones of workers’ power under the leadership of the CCP. The zones were bases for the working class led by the CCP to both build a workers state and direct the ongoing war against the capitalists for state power across the whole of China. In these zones the capitalist legal structure was eliminated and replaced with a political system that relied on the working class. This system of collective working-class society carried over into the period after the revolution and was maintained at some level until the return of capitalism in the 1970’s.
The CCP replaced the complex system of laws that protected exploitation with a straightforward code of comradely behavior based on serving the people. The police and courts were replaced by workers’ meetings led by the CCP where problems between ordinary people were worked out. Guidelines, such as put the needs of the people before your own, treat people in a comradely way, be honest with your comrades and work to build a socialist society, could be applied by groups of workers to look at any situation that arose.
The CCP “system relied heavily on education and persuasion rather than force and upon the use of social pressure rather than governmental power. [It] stressed the importance of internalizing how to be part of society and pointed out the ineffectiveness of using fear of punishment.” Each individual was deeply involved in dealing with problems and enforcing the solutions. There were no police or formal courts. (China Quarterly, a British journal of research on China, Oct – Dec 1970)
On resolving contradictions among the people: "unity-criticism-unity" CCP slogan
The revolution in China did not eliminate selfish thinking and other problems between people. Undoing exploitation and building a collective society allowed problems like stealing, fights and disputes to be handled constructively.
Daily life was organized into collectives and people dealt with problems. Communist “cadre [or leaders] organized the meetings. These cadre were instructed to rely on the masses. Any individual could air grievances and have the group take up the problem by appealing directly to the [Party] collectives.” (China Quarterly Oct – Dec 1970) The ideology was based on confidence in workers to build and strengthen society through collective struggle based on criticism and self-criticism. The goal in resolving the dispute was to strengthen the comrades and strengthen society.
In the book Fanshen, about the building of socialism in China, a man attacked someone in his town after a heated argument. The man was tackled and held by people in the town until a meeting was organized. At the meeting the man was confronted by his comrades who criticized him. In the meeting it came out that he had been encouraged in the attack by the leaders of the local Catholic Church whose land had been distributed to the workers in the town. The meeting decided that the bigger problem was the church and the attacker could be a productive member of the town and assigned him to work for 15 days on the land of a soldier who was on the front lines.
Under capitalism people try to create alternatives to the police. These efforts help combat the racist lies pushed by the bosses and build unity and confidence in our class. In Minneapolis a Native American group, AIM started neighborhood patrols to document police violence against indigenous workers. It grew into looking out for people in the neighborhood in a broader way. The group started by “walking the streets deterring both police and intra-community violence by intervening or simply bearing witness…[the organization] has expanded the definition of patrol duties to include cooking hot breakfasts for the unhoused and checking on overlooked neighbors” (Mother Jones, 6/13/20)
The limits of these situations is that capitalism requires cops. Until we unite under a revolutionary communist strategy, the bosses will succeed in finding ways to undermine people’s confidence in each other through the elevation of racism and real or instigated disputes. This is why the CHOP (Capitol Hill Organized Protest) in Seattle, another example of the working-class rejecting police oppression, can only be temporary. The working class needs to be organized as a communist party. To end police attacks requires ending exploitation.
Make revolution and keep working on it
The bad ideas of capitalism, racism, sexism, selfishness, individualism etc. are deeply ingrained in all of us. Even under a working-class communist society undoing 500 years of capitalism will take a long time and a lot of struggle. The reason communism can tackle these problems is because it is a society based on the needs of the working class. Our class has a profound interest in unity and ending exploitation. Racist terror is essential to capitalism. The police are the front-line forces of the bosses in carrying out that terror.J