LOS ANGELES, October 19— A recent organizing retreat with a mass group against police brutality we’re in created an opportunity to struggle and unite with our friends to move the fight against police brutality forward by leading with communist ideas.
"I honestly have learned a lot from PLP and agree with PLP that no matter what bill, president, defunding etc you have, as long as capitalism exists there will always be racism, poverty etc. PLP is definitely going deep to the root of the cause…CAPITALISM!” This response exemplified the sentiments of our base among families impacted by police brutality in the Los Angeles area when asked what they thought about the retreat. For all the strengths of the group, those families closest to the Party immediately recognized the limitations of the reform movement.
Within the struggle against police brutality we are having some success in having communist ideas lead the struggle. At the same time, as communist ideas are becoming more accepted the bigger movement led by reformist forces aligned with the Big Fascist liberal wing of the ruling class are shifting their rhetoric to sound more militant. It becomes clear why the liberals are the main danger for our class as they spend billions of dollars more each year on the police to attack workers while funding movements to sound revolutionary that are working to keep people tied to the bosses’ system. This left sounding reformism is part of what we have to struggle against within our anti-police brutality group.
This is a long-term struggle
We have reached this point after almost 2 years of organizing with families - study groups, club meetings, base building, and fighting in the reform movement alongside families to expose the limitations of reforms. We are in a position now where families want to struggle with other families around PLP’s ideas. Now that the mass organization’s leadership body includes both organizers and impacted family members (something we struggled for), this makes room for us to continue to sharpen the contradiction of reform vs. revolution among families.
The retreat focused on evaluating the last year of work the group has done and planning the next year. It included 6 people from 5 different impacted families and 8 people from the core organizing team. We wanted to struggle for a shift from individual family actions (which has engulfed the last year of work) to collective political campaigns. Since this was the beginning of a new leadership structure to include families, one Party member planned a session that discussed what family leadership looks like and how we build collective power. This session brought forward important lessons such as the criticality of organizing among the working class to grow our movement as well as getting to the root of a problem. This opened the door for us to raise where and how we organize. Families liked the idea of fighting back collectively. Mental health will be the focus of our first campaign. Families also agreed with meeting once a month and opening each meeting with a reading and political discussion so we can all search for the root causes together.
Continual fight against bosses reformism
Ten years ago, one of the main calls of the national movement against police brutality was for body cameras and more training for police. Since the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, the sharpening of political consciousness of workers all over the world, the mass movement has been forced to move their rhetoric to the left. If someone was to talk about body cams today, they would be shouted out of the room. Defunding and even abolition of the police are the new catch phrases.
While this creates definite opportunities for us, there are also dangers. As in every other aspect of our work, liberals are the main danger. The police brutality movement is no different. For example, the politics of the mass movement in Los Angeles including the mass organization we belong to openly call for abolition and have some understanding of the root causes of capitalist exploitation. Having said that, in spite of their correct criticisms of the "reform movement," they fall into the same trap as they ultimately contain their fightback within the bosses state apparatus advocating for so-called "non-reformist reforms" and policy changes that would shift funding away from police and prisons towards expanding social services. Not only do they incorrectly believe the ruling class would allow this, they think that their position is fundamentally different from other reforms, and more critically do not see the need for a Party such as PLP, or the need for an armed working class to lead a communist revolution that smashes the bosses state and establish a dictatorship of the working class!
We will be exploring this with the families in our upcoming book club and will continue to raise our communist analysis in study (including in our PL study groups) and in practice. We hope to recruit those families closest to us and support them in leading the struggle around the Party's ideas with other families.