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Vol. 82/No. 16 April 23, 2018
(editorial)
Cop brutality is a blow to all workers!
The refusal to accept cop brutality and killings has grown among
working people in recent years. These murderous assaults are aimed at
the working class as a whole and disproportionately hit workers who are
African-American. Outrage against this violence builds on the gains of
the powerful working-class-led Black rights movement that overthrew Jim
Crow segregation in the 1950s and ’60s and the recent round of actions
against cop assaults since the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Missouri. Millions around the country were outraged at the police
killing of Stephon Clark in Sacramento, California, and Saheed Vassell
in Brooklyn, New York.
Cop brutality is endemic to capitalist exploitation. Its role — part of
the rulers’ criminal “justice” system — is to intimidate and punish
workers.
The number of cops arrested and indicted for murder or manslaughter has
risen a bit as protests have taken place in recent years. But Democratic
and Republican politicians and the court system work together to ensure
that very few police officers are ever convicted.
It will take a more powerful, disciplined working-class-led social
movement to win victories in the fight against the brutal and arbitrary
violence the cops inflict on our class.
Today’s labor struggles by teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky
and other places are setting an example of how workers can unify and win
allies, steeled with a healthy distrust in the capitalist two-party
swamp. Workers like these, gaining confidence and increasing class
consciousness, set an example and form a pool to win to the fight
against police brutality.
As working-class struggles deepen in the years ahead, millions will
learn from direct experience with cops and company goons on picket lines
and in broad social struggles that the police exist to “serve and
protect” the bosses’ class interests. The capitalist rulers seek to
defend their profit rates by pushing the crisis of their system onto the
backs of working people. They will need their police to keep us in check
and cop killings will not end.
When Cuban workers and farmers, led by Fidel Castro and the July 26
Movement, rose up in a mighty revolution to overthrow the U.S.-backed
Fulgencio Batista dictatorship and take power, one of the first things
they did was to dissolve the government’s cop apparatus and replace it
with revolutionary worker combatants. Emulating their example is the
road to ridding society of the scourge of police violence.
Related articles:
Hundreds protest New York cop killing of Saheed Vassell
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