Liberal bosses’ police reform movement builds fascism

LOS ANGELES, September 7—The worldwide multiracial, antiracist upsurge in the wake of the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many others was a positive development for the international working class. The mass rebellions and flurry of protests activated countless previously-passive antiracists, and became possibly the largest worldwide movement against racism in recent history. These mass actions gave revolutionary communists an enormous opportunity to expose how racism is endemic to the capitalist system, and that it can never be eliminated without the violent overthrow of the ruling class that profits from it (see front page).   
But, we must also be clear about who leads this movement—the main wing of the U.S. ruling class. The actions of the masses were quickly misled into electoral politics by groups loyal to the Big Fascists (see glossary, page 6).These Big Fascists are the dominant finance capitalist faction of the U.S. ruling class. They are also the imperialists who are trying to defend their worldwide empire against competition from Chinese and Russian imperialists.
We must attack the capitalist leadership, expose the limits of reform, and show the need for a communist revolution. In the mass movement against police violence, that means pointing out the fundamental role of the police under capitalism: to preserve the private property of the capitalist class, protect the profits they reap from the exploitation of the labor power of the working class, and terrorize workers from fighting back.
Liberal racist push pro-cop bills
In the aftermath of the rebellions, calls for “defunding (or dismantling) the police”, “reimagining policing”, and “investing in the community” emanated from the mouths of Democratic Party politicians, including some prominent leaders of liberal-faced fascism, congressperson Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Vice-President Kamala Harris, among others. These public statements were meant to quell the militancy of the movement and mislead honest antiracists into supporting now-President Joe Biden and the Democrats in the 2020 elections.
With the help of the capitalist media, an organ of class rule, the Democrats were largely successful in getting many people off the streets, and into the voting booths. CNN, MSNBC, and other liberal media had attacked the Small Fascist (see glossary, page 6) President Donald Trump and promoted Biden’s candidacy, and a few highly-publicized prosecutions of particularly grisly murders by cop terrorists.
Now, there is a competition between Republicans and Democrats over who is more pro-cop. This battle has included attacks on Republican Senators and Congresspeople for opposing president Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan (ARP), which restored funding that had been cut during the pandemic to hundreds of police departments all over the U.S., and brazen support for pro-cop Republican amendments to Biden’s $3.5 trillion federal budget plan.
When openly racist Senator Tommy Tuberville from Alabama proposed an amendment to the budget resolution requiring the “defunding” of any local government entity that has the audacity to vote to shift money from police budgets to social services, New Jersey Democratic Senator Cory Booker got up on the Senate floor to hug Tuberville.
A “reach across the aisle” that boldly communicated Black and Latin working-class lives will never matter to ruling-class leadership. Booker thanked Tuberville for his “gift”, which he said would allow the Democratic Party to “put to bed this scurrilous accusation that” anybody in the Senate “would want to defund the police.” The Senate then voted 99-0 to adopt Tuberville’s amendment (Forbes, 8/11).   
When right-wing Missouri Senator Josh Hawley proposed a budget amendment to fund the hiring of 100,000 more cops by cities and counties, the Dems voted overwhelmingly (95-3) to adopt that one, too (Intelligencer at nymag.com, August 13). Not wanting there to be any confusion about the liberal bosses’ history of abject pro-cop advocacy, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin pointed out during debate that Hawley’s funding plan was merely an extension of a program established through 1994 legislation spearheaded by then-Senator Biden and signed into law under former President Bill Clinton (Forbes, 8/11).
Old ‘Jim Crow’ Biden
The Republican-Democratic unanimity in these votes harkened back to Biden’s love affair with two powerful segregationist Senators, Democrat James O. Eastland, and Republican Strom Thurmond. Biden’s sordid history of support for racist cop terror and mass incarceration goes back decades (NY Times, 6/5/19).
Starting in 1984, Biden, in concert with his two openly racist pals, engineered three major federal crime bills that both led to large increases in a disproportionately Black and Latin federal jail population, and encouraged states to tighten the police state in their own jurisdictions. These laws included the infamous “100 to one” disparity in the amount of powder compared to crack cocaine sufficient to trigger mandatory minimum sentences, which led to much longer federal jail sentences for predominately Black defendants. Other bills legalized “civil asset forfeiture,” allowing cop and prosecutor seizures of cash, cars, etc. before a criminal conviction, and increased federal penalties for drug possession (Vox, 6/20/19).
The liberal bosses’ disgusting racism on a national level has been mirrored in state and local legislative bodies. For example, in California, Democrats hold a supermajority of seats in both the State Senate and Assembly, allowing them to pass legislation without any Republican support, and have held the governorship for a decade. To buy off the hundreds of thousands in California who hit the streets after the murder of George Floyd, some “progressive” Democrats introduced “police reform” bills.
If they had passed, they would have at best played a minor role in reining in cop terror. Examples of changes: the bills would have authorized cutting back on tear gas and rubber bullets, allowing more access to police records, and “decertification” of brutal cops fired from one department who try to get hired as cops elsewhere. But, “under the pressure of intense lobbying by” police unions, Democratic legislators “publically sympathetic to the cause but privately circumspect” blocked any of the bills from being voted on (LA Times, 9/2/20). These changes do not change the fundamental oppressive relationship of the police to the working class.
In 2020, amid mass demonstrations against police murders in Los Angeles and a great deal of hoopla about “reimagining policing” by some Democratic council people here, the Council voted to transfer some funds from the LAPD to social services and mental health “initiatives.”
All that changed this year.
The Council ratified Mayor Eric Garcetti’s proposed three percent increase in LAPD funding, voting 15-0 to give part of LA’s pandemic-rescue-plan funds to the cops. (LA Times, 5/21) The unanimous vote included Councilperson Nithya Raman, a self-proclaimed “Democratic Socialist” (read: Fascist).
The liberal bosses are attempting to build back some legitimacy in their racist institutions. Posturing as friends of antiracists is part of their move as warmakers. The bosses are in desperate need of a population willing to fight in the coming war against their rivals China and Russia (see editorial, page 2).   
The capitalist class will never allow its front-line defenders to be defunded or abolished. A communist revolution will abolish the theft of wage slavery, a crime for which the capitalists will be found guilty as charged.