Fourth International Statement of Solidarity with Anti-Racism Protests
https://socialistaction.org/2020/06/20/fourth-international-statement-of-solidarity-with-anti-racism-protests/
June 20, 2020
Our Solidarity with the Worldwide Anti-Racist Revolt
By the Executive Bureau of the Fourth International
The scope and magnitude of what have become worldwide protests and an
emerging mass upsurge against racism and police brutality following the
murder of Black worker George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota
in the US, are unprecedented. These mobilizations are marked by the
massive multiracial participation of young people in a
cross-generational movement. They have also been in many cases the first
mobilizations in countries emerging from lockdown and have succeeded in
imposing their presence on the streets.
Daily protests throughout the US have continued for more than two weeks
in cities big and small. The multiracial, Black-led, largely
decentralized, spontaneous nature of most of the protests, some of which
take place in multiple parts of cities at the same time, are the
unmistakable signs of an authentic mass social movement. Many of the
protestors are unemployed. Many will be drawn into protests for
unemployment insurance and other social struggles in the coming period.
There has been widespread police repression of anti-racist protests
including the use of dangerous chemicals in gas and peppers spray,
unprovoked assaults against peaceful protestors, curfews, and mass arrests.
The protests that are taking place outside the US from Europe to
Australia, from Japan to Africa, from Mexico to Brazil have combined
protests against the killing of Floyd, solidarity with the antiracist
protests in the US, and protests against local police brutality against
Black majority populations as in Brazil, indigenous peoples as in
Australia, ethnic and religious minorities and migrants. Protestors
around the world have shouted and carried signs proclaiming “Black Lives
Matter” alongside the names of people of color killed by police locally
– Adama Traoré, in France in 2016 and several cases in Britain – in ways
similar to George Floyd. Demands to remove symbols of racist and
imperialist oppression such as statues of Belgian King Leopold II who
murderously exploited the Congo as a private capitalist space, or
statues of slave traders in Britain, center of the transatlantic slave
trade, echo demands to remove Confederate statues and Southern
(pro-slavery) flags.
Crisis of Capitalist Legitimacy
The failure of capitalist governments – most notably in Britain, Brazil,
and the US – to adequately respond to the Covid-19 crisis, the waves of
mass lay-offs that have thrown millions out of work and which affect
racialized and immigrant populations much more violently, coupled with
mass protests that after two weeks of daily mobilizations are gaining
momentum, have put capitalist governments momentarily on the defensive
as they strive to reimpose normal capitalist functioning.
In the US, the rebellion has already caused division in the big
bourgeoisie and its political representatives. There are signs of crisis
of the regime and of the Trump government itself, as top military
officers and Trump’s own secretary of the Defense – and all four living
former presidents including George W. Bush – have openly disavowed
Trump’s threat to use military force against the largely youthful,
multiracial demonstrators he labels “thugs” and “terrorists.”
The fact that this division has prevented on occasion brutal repression
and that the slogan of defund/demilitarize the police is growing among
the demonstrators with some success, represent initial partial victories
in the struggle.
The moment has its dangers as well. Trump’s law and order tweets have
encouraged white nationalist groups some of whom have attempted to join
the anti-racist protests while displaying coded racist symbols and long
guns. Far-right and authoritarian governments in Brazil, the
Philippines, India and elsewhere are using the situation to strengthen
anti-terrorist and repressive measures which will have a
disproportionate impact on Black, migrant and indigenous communities.
Migrant communities in Europe have long been terrorized by far-right
groups such as Golden Dawn in Greece, and the economic crisis will
exacerbate racist and anti-migrant attacks.
A Mass Upsurge
The enormous explosion of antiracist mobilization following Floyd’s
murder has been seen as the result of the “straw that broke the camel’s
back.” This includes not only a series of police murders against Black
people, but the effects of a pandemic that has resulted in mortalities
in the Black community at two to three times greater than the population
as a whole, and an economic crisis that has also disproportionally
harmed Black and ethnic minority workers.
Mass protesting in the streets and the ongoing need for physical
distancing at a time when non-white, migrant and marginalized
communities are particularly vulnerable to the pandemic is one of this
period’s great contradictions. Black communities, supported by young
people and white workers, are taking to the streets because they
consider it is more urgent to stop racism, repressive violence and
neo-fascist governments than to respect measures that are impossible to
implement in their homes and under conditions of lack of income and
employment.
The accumulated tension of racist violence including police murders of
Blacks and murderous antisemitic attacks and anti-Muslim terror, and the
genocide of indigenous peoples combine with massive unemployment caused
by the depression and pandemic that has hit working class communities of
color far harder than the population as a whole to explain the
willingness to fight and courage in the face of the oppressors.
The links made by protestors between Floyd’s killing and local racist
police violence throughout the world run deep. The treatment of
internally colonized, indigenous people of color in the US, Canada,
Australia, South Africa, and Latin America, and migrant communities of
color in the imperialist metropoles of Europe reflect centuries of
colonial and imperialist domination of the global north over the global
south that have been central to capitalism. From the looting of the
silver mines of Potosí by Spanish colonists in the 16th century that
became part of the capital accumulation that underpinned European
capitalist development, the European enslavement of millions of
Africans, to the colonization of Africa in the 19th century and today’s
neo-imperialist domination of the global south people of color have
borne the brunt of capitalist development and expansion.
Some of the worst atrocities against human beings in recent decades have
been perpetrated against ethnic and religious minorities. Ethnic
minorities and socially constructed racial groups have faced repression
around the world, from ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and
Rwanda in the 1990s to the current repression of Muslim minorities in
China and India and the treatment of Palestinians in Israel and the
occupied territories.
Their Anti-Racism and Ours
Reformist capitalist politicians are scrambling to remain relevant and
channel the movement’s energy into the safe channels of government
hearings, commissions, and cosmetic reforms, limited to removing symbols
of the slave trade and superficial changes in police practices.
A rush of multinational corporations – including many that are part of
the Fortune 500 in the US – are now loudly proclaiming anti-racism,
running expensive media ads, pledging donations, revising company
handbooks. These are the same companies who practiced racist and sexist
hiring practices, and resisted reforms for years. Many have made huge
profits on the backs of working people of color.
There is no leadership or voice from the traditional political parties.
The lack of political leadership in the US is particularly acute. The
domination of the capitalist duopoly of Democrats and Republicans over
US politics has meant that the energy in the streets is not finding a
nation-wide political expression. During the US Democratic primary
campaign, US Senator Bernie Sanders generated enormous enthusiasm and
widespread support particularly among young people for his program of
social democratic, New Deal style reforms. But the Sanders campaign was
ended by the corporate interests that control the Democratic Party
before the pandemic, mass layoffs, and now antiracist protests in the
street began, creating a gap on the left.
The transformation of European social democracy into neo-liberal tools
of capital and the electoral collapse of the Communist Parties has left
a gap on the European left that presents both challenges and
opportunities to connect anti-racist and anti-capitalist demands.
A Time of Opportunity
The global uprising against racism and police repression has enormous
potential for the future of the new generations, who are starting
workplace and trade union struggles, who are rising up in the struggles
against climate change, in feminist resistance, and who are proving
themselves in the direct struggle against the police as the armed force
of bourgeois democracy, underlining the necessity of organizing
self-defense by the movement during demonstrations and other public
events as well as the need to build an ongoing movement based on
democratic self-organization.
For the moment, the protest movement expresses anger and often radical
but unfocused demands for change. This reflects the newness of the
movement, the inexperience of the protestors, but also the bankruptcy of
many established reformist political leaderships. In the US context the
demand to “Defund/demilitarize the police” and even “disband the police”
has found a broad popular echo and has considerable potential as an
anti-capitalist transitory demand. There is widespread repudiation of
the AFL-CIO for still including racist and ultra-right police unions.
Other demands are being formulated as the movement develops and arising
from the different national situations: against police violence notably
against Black, indigenous and ethnic minority populations, against the
criminalization of protest, against institutional racism and the
perpetuation of colonial and pro-slavery symbols, and for positive
action for social and economic justice to right historic inequality.
It is possible today to raise the banner of working-class international
solidarity in a way and with an audience that we have not seen for
decades and explain, as Malcolm X said, “You can’t have capitalism
without racism,” and the fight against racism is intrinsic to the fight
against capitalism, and that this movement has considerable potential to
swell and converge with labor, women’s and anti-capitalist movements
throughout the world to impose the path to a new, just society.
For all these reasons, the Fourth International commits itself to
fighting alongside the women and men who are today insurgent in this
anti-racist and anti-neofascist uprising. The battles against state
violence and institutional racism under capitalism can only have
coherent consequences if we face the implications. We are all at war
against the system that destroys the planet, discriminates against human
beings by gender, race, sexual orientation and identity, which
superexploits us in the name of the survival of corporations, whose sole
objective is the permanent increase of profit, to the detriment of our
lives and bodies.
Socialist Action News
Sign up for our weekly newsletter:
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Related Articles
Demonstrators demand removal of racist monuments and Confederate flags
June 19, 2020
By MALIK MIAH
The rebellion against police violence and murder continues to expand.
New demands arise against institutional racism and its symbols of
oppression and genocide by Black and Brown people and Native American
nations.
U.S. Fight Against Racism and Repression Reaches New Heights
June 14, 2020
By JEFF MACKLER
Today’s unprecedented mobilizations began with the police murder of
George Floyd. But their depth and staying power is equally a reflection
of the mass anger and frustration stemming from all the insults to one’s
being that capitalism has inflicted on working class America, and
especially the nation’s Black, Brown and Native American communities.
Mumia: World On Fire
June 11, 2020
By MUMIA ABU-JAMAL
Protests against police brutality and racism in America have spread
around the world.
--
___
Carl Sagan
“Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of
wonder and awe. Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who
pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human
beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid
rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore
the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly
from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries.”
― Carl Sagan, CosmosFourth International Statement of Solidarity with
Anti-Racism Protests
https://socialistaction.org/2020/06/20/fourth-international-statement-of-solidarity-with-anti-racism-protests/
June 20, 2020
Our Solidarity with the Worldwide Anti-Racist Revolt
By the Executive Bureau of the Fourth International
The scope and magnitude of what have become worldwide protests and an
emerging mass upsurge against racism and police brutality following the
murder of Black worker George Floyd by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota
in the US, are unprecedented. These mobilizations are marked by the
massive multiracial participation of young people in a
cross-generational movement. They have also been in many cases the first
mobilizations in countries emerging from lockdown and have succeeded in
imposing their presence on the streets.
Daily protests throughout the US have continued for more than two weeks
in cities big and small. The multiracial, Black-led, largely
decentralized, spontaneous nature of most of the protests, some of which
take place in multiple parts of cities at the same time, are the
unmistakable signs of an authentic mass social movement. Many of the
protestors are unemployed. Many will be drawn into protests for
unemployment insurance and other social struggles in the coming period.
There has been widespread police repression of anti-racist protests
including the use of dangerous chemicals in gas and peppers spray,
unprovoked assaults against peaceful protestors, curfews, and mass arrests.
The protests that are taking place outside the US from Europe to
Australia, from Japan to Africa, from Mexico to Brazil have combined
protests against the killing of Floyd, solidarity with the antiracist
protests in the US, and protests against local police brutality against
Black majority populations as in Brazil, indigenous peoples as in
Australia, ethnic and religious minorities and migrants. Protestors
around the world have shouted and carried signs proclaiming “Black Lives
Matter” alongside the names of people of color killed by police locally
– Adama Traoré, in France in 2016 and several cases in Britain – in ways
similar to George Floyd. Demands to remove symbols of racist and
imperialist oppression such as statues of Belgian King Leopold II who
murderously exploited the Congo as a private capitalist space, or
statues of slave traders in Britain, center of the transatlantic slave
trade, echo demands to remove Confederate statues and Southern
(pro-slavery) flags.
Crisis of Capitalist Legitimacy
The failure of capitalist governments – most notably in Britain, Brazil,
and the US – to adequately respond to the Covid-19 crisis, the waves of
mass lay-offs that have thrown millions out of work and which affect
racialized and immigrant populations much more violently, coupled with
mass protests that after two weeks of daily mobilizations are gaining
momentum, have put capitalist governments momentarily on the defensive
as they strive to reimpose normal capitalist functioning.
In the US, the rebellion has already caused division in the big
bourgeoisie and its political representatives. There are signs of crisis
of the regime and of the Trump government itself, as top military
officers and Trump’s own secretary of the Defense – and all four living
former presidents including George W. Bush – have openly disavowed
Trump’s threat to use military force against the largely youthful,
multiracial demonstrators he labels “thugs” and “terrorists.”
The fact that this division has prevented on occasion brutal repression
and that the slogan of defund/demilitarize the police is growing among
the demonstrators with some success, represent initial partial victories
in the struggle.
The moment has its dangers as well. Trump’s law and order tweets have
encouraged white nationalist groups some of whom have attempted to join
the anti-racist protests while displaying coded racist symbols and long
guns. Far-right and authoritarian governments in Brazil, the
Philippines, India and elsewhere are using the situation to strengthen
anti-terrorist and repressive measures which will have a
disproportionate impact on Black, migrant and indigenous communities.
Migrant communities in Europe have long been terrorized by far-right
groups such as Golden Dawn in Greece, and the economic crisis will
exacerbate racist and anti-migrant attacks.
A Mass Upsurge
The enormous explosion of antiracist mobilization following Floyd’s
murder has been seen as the result of the “straw that broke the camel’s
back.” This includes not only a series of police murders against Black
people, but the effects of a pandemic that has resulted in mortalities
in the Black community at two to three times greater than the population
as a whole, and an economic crisis that has also disproportionally
harmed Black and ethnic minority workers.
Mass protesting in the streets and the ongoing need for physical
distancing at a time when non-white, migrant and marginalized
communities are particularly vulnerable to the pandemic is one of this
period’s great contradictions. Black communities, supported by young
people and white workers, are taking to the streets because they
consider it is more urgent to stop racism, repressive violence and
neo-fascist governments than to respect measures that are impossible to
implement in their homes and under conditions of lack of income and
employment.
The accumulated tension of racist violence including police murders of
Blacks and murderous antisemitic attacks and anti-Muslim terror, and the
genocide of indigenous peoples combine with massive unemployment caused
by the depression and pandemic that has hit working class communities of
color far harder than the population as a whole to explain the
willingness to fight and courage in the face of the oppressors.
The links made by protestors between Floyd’s killing and local racist
police violence throughout the world run deep. The treatment of
internally colonized, indigenous people of color in the US, Canada,
Australia, South Africa, and Latin America, and migrant communities of
color in the imperialist metropoles of Europe reflect centuries of
colonial and imperialist domination of the global north over the global
south that have been central to capitalism. From the looting of the
silver mines of Potosí by Spanish colonists in the 16th century that
became part of the capital accumulation that underpinned European
capitalist development, the European enslavement of millions of
Africans, to the colonization of Africa in the 19th century and today’s
neo-imperialist domination of the global south people of color have
borne the brunt of capitalist development and expansion.
Some of the worst atrocities against human beings in recent decades have
been perpetrated against ethnic and religious minorities. Ethnic
minorities and socially constructed racial groups have faced repression
around the world, from ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and
Rwanda in the 1990s to the current repression of Muslim minorities in
China and India and the treatment of Palestinians in Israel and the
occupied territories.
Their Anti-Racism and Ours
Reformist capitalist politicians are scrambling to remain relevant and
channel the movement’s energy into the safe channels of government
hearings, commissions, and cosmetic reforms, limited to removing symbols
of the slave trade and superficial changes in police practices.
A rush of multinational corporations – including many that are part of
the Fortune 500 in the US – are now loudly proclaiming anti-racism,
running expensive media ads, pledging donations, revising company
handbooks. These are the same companies who practiced racist and sexist
hiring practices, and resisted reforms for years. Many have made huge
profits on the backs of working people of color.
There is no leadership or voice from the traditional political parties.
The lack of political leadership in the US is particularly acute. The
domination of the capitalist duopoly of Democrats and Republicans over
US politics has meant that the energy in the streets is not finding a
nation-wide political expression. During the US Democratic primary
campaign, US Senator Bernie Sanders generated enormous enthusiasm and
widespread support particularly among young people for his program of
social democratic, New Deal style reforms. But the Sanders campaign was
ended by the corporate interests that control the Democratic Party
before the pandemic, mass layoffs, and now antiracist protests in the
street began, creating a gap on the left.
The transformation of European social democracy into neo-liberal tools
of capital and the electoral collapse of the Communist Parties has left
a gap on the European left that presents both challenges and
opportunities to connect anti-racist and anti-capitalist demands.
A Time of Opportunity
The global uprising against racism and police repression has enormous
potential for the future of the new generations, who are starting
workplace and trade union struggles, who are rising up in the struggles
against climate change, in feminist resistance, and who are proving
themselves in the direct struggle against the police as the armed force
of bourgeois democracy, underlining the necessity of organizing
self-defense by the movement during demonstrations and other public
events as well as the need to build an ongoing movement based on
democratic self-organization.
For the moment, the protest movement expresses anger and often radical
but unfocused demands for change. This reflects the newness of the
movement, the inexperience of the protestors, but also the bankruptcy of
many established reformist political leaderships. In the US context the
demand to “Defund/demilitarize the police” and even “disband the police”
has found a broad popular echo and has considerable potential as an
anti-capitalist transitory demand. There is widespread repudiation of
the AFL-CIO for still including racist and ultra-right police unions.
Other demands are being formulated as the movement develops and arising
from the different national situations: against police violence notably
against Black, indigenous and ethnic minority populations, against the
criminalization of protest, against institutional racism and the
perpetuation of colonial and pro-slavery symbols, and for positive
action for social and economic justice to right historic inequality.
It is possible today to raise the banner of working-class international
solidarity in a way and with an audience that we have not seen for
decades and explain, as Malcolm X said, “You can’t have capitalism
without racism,” and the fight against racism is intrinsic to the fight
against capitalism, and that this movement has considerable potential to
swell and converge with labor, women’s and anti-capitalist movements
throughout the world to impose the path to a new, just society.
For all these reasons, the Fourth International commits itself to
fighting alongside the women and men who are today insurgent in this
anti-racist and anti-neofascist uprising. The battles against state
violence and institutional racism under capitalism can only have
coherent consequences if we face the implications. We are all at war
against the system that destroys the planet, discriminates against human
beings by gender, race, sexual orientation and identity, which
superexploits us in the name of the survival of corporations, whose sole
objective is the permanent increase of profit, to the detriment of our
lives and bodies.
Socialist Action News
Sign up for our weekly newsletter:
Your email address
Related Articles
Demonstrators demand removal of racist monuments and Confederate flags
June 19, 2020
By MALIK MIAH
The rebellion against police violence and murder continues to expand.
New demands arise against institutional racism and its symbols of
oppression and genocide by Black and Brown people and Native American
nations.
U.S. Fight Against Racism and Repression Reaches New Heights
June 14, 2020
By JEFF MACKLER
Today’s unprecedented mobilizations began with the police murder of
George Floyd. But their depth and staying power is equally a reflection
of the mass anger and frustration stemming from all the insults to one’s
being that capitalism has inflicted on working class America, and
especially the nation’s Black, Brown and Native American communities.
Mumia: World On Fire
June 11, 2020
By MUMIA ABU-JAMAL
Protests against police brutality and racism in America have spread
around the world.