[cs_edworkers] IG: Mobilize across U.S. against racist police terror in Missouri
- From: S_ AN <s_an@xxxxxxx>
- To: undisclosed-recipients:;
- Date: Thu, 21 Aug 2014 21:45:45 -0400
Statement from the Internationalist Group. Please post widely.
Outrage
Over Cop Murder of Michael Brown Throws Capitalist Rulers Into National Crisis
Mobilize
Across U.S. Against Racist
Police Terror in Missouri
Stand with Protests Against Military / Police Occupation
Drop Charges Against All Arrested Protesters
All Cops and Troops Out of Ferguson,
Mo.!
Capitalism Is Racist to the
Core –
Black Liberation Through Socialist
Revolution
AUGUST 19
– When a police officer in the St. Louis suburb
of Ferguson, Missouri shot down an unarmed black
teenager, Michael Brown, and cops left his body lying in the street for hours,
it set off an explosion of mass anger that hasn’t stopped. Young and old, the
population of this more than two-thirds black town had had it with the almost
entirely white cops and their racist bosses who lord it over the place like it
was a plantation. No matter what the rulers tried, they couldn’t squelch the
protests. Right from the start St. Louis
County police deployed the military arsenal they had been building up to put
down black unrest: armored cars, snipers with high-powered rifles, tear gas,
stun grenades, rubber bullets, the works. Didn’t work.
In fact,
it backfired. There was nationwide shock as the images resembled upheavals
against bloody dictators in the Middle East, Palestinians rising up against
Israeli occupation or mass protests in the black Soweto
township in apartheid South
Africa. The snarling dogs recalled Birmingham, Alabama
in the most violent phase of repression against the civil rights struggle.
Militarized policing drew particular attention, with liberal Democrats and even
right-wing Republicans lamenting it (after lavishly funding it). All the
firepower didn’t stop nightly protests by angry youth fed up with police
harassment, and now murder of a young black man as he held up his hands saying,
“Don’t shoot!” So under pressure from Washington,
Democratic governor Jay Nixon brought in a black state highway patrol official
to take command.
Captain
Ronald Johnson did the Officer Friendly routine, walking with protesters,
promising to pull heavy armor off the streets, speaking to church congregations
about his own teenage black son (“who wears his pants saggy”). Simultaneously,
black Democrats Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson came to town to cool things out.
Thinking that those in power were finally listening, the mood shifted, people
celebrated. The euphoria lasted barely a day. When local police finally
released the name of the killer cop, Darren Wilson, after days of stonewalling,
they also tried to smear Michael Brown as a “suspect” of shoplifting. First
they murder him, then they assassinate the victim’s character. Furious protests
broke out again, and the armored cars were back.
Next came
the curfew. While Democratic president Barack Obama made hypocritical speeches
about protecting the right to protest, Democratic governor Nixon ordered
protesters off the streets at midnight Saturday, supposedly to stop looting.
The protesters defiantly stood their ground for an hour in the rain until the
barrages of gas and gunfire finally drove them away. Then on Sunday the results
of the independent autopsy by Dr. Michael Baden came out: Michael Brown was
shot six times, all from the front, twice in the head. Militant protests broke
out again. This time the cops didn’t wait and attacked demonstrators hours
before the curfew went into effect. On Monday morning the governor ordered in
the National Guard.
Now mass
arrests have begun, with 78 protesters booked in the last two days. In line
with local politicians’ denunciation of “outside agitators,” a number of people
from New York and California have been yanked out of crowds by
the cops. Among them was Carl Dix, a leader of the Revolutionary Communist
Party (RCP), who said, rightly, “There are no ‘outsiders’ in the struggle for
justice and liberation.” Meanwhile, President Obama piously appealed for
“justice,” “healing” and “coming together going forward” – along with calls to
maintain “public safety.” The first thing to be done for the safety of the
public in Ferguson is to get the cops and military out of town, and drop all
charges against everyone arrested since August 9.
The
Internationalist Group stands with the embattled people of Ferguson, Mo.
We hail the courageous youth who have refused to be intimidated by everything
the racist rulers have thrown at them. The fact that they have fought back
against the police has thrown the ruling class into crisis nationally. The
police murder of Michael Brown reverberated around the country because this is
no local issue. It came only a few weeks after Eric Garner was chokeholded to
death on Staten Island by New York
City police. Across the U.S., cops kill well over 400
people a year, and they won’t be stopped by calls to limit their hardware.
The
military/police occupation in Missouri
must be fought by mobilizing labor/black/immigrant power and youth opposed to
racist repression nationwide.
Because
racist police brutality and cop terror is endemic in American capitalism, it
can’t be stopped by a few modest reforms. Killer cop Darren Wilson definitely
belongs behind bars for a long time. Many are calling for him to be arrested,
indicted and tried, and vow to keep up the pressure, chanting “No justice, no
peace.” But as Marxists we know that there is no justice for the oppressed
in the capitalist courts. The ruling class stands by its guard dogs – the
police “serve and protect” the interests of capital. The cops’ job is to keep
the poor and working people down, which is exactly what they are doing in
Ferguson.
In this
fight to rip racist oppression out by its roots – in this country born from
chattel slavery – the struggle for black liberation is and has always been
central. To put a stop to racist police brutality and murder, we must fight
for revolution, a socialist revolution to overthrow capitalism.
Nationwide Militarization
of the Police
What has
happened in this white-ruled black Missouri
suburb is not just the result of local racism (see box), it is a direct
reflection of the rampant militarization of police forces throughout the U.S.
Those Bearcat and MRAP (mine-resistant ambush-protected) armored vehicles, the
LRAD (long-range acoustic device) sound cannons and heavy-duty weaponry that
suddenly showed up on West Florissant Avenue in Ferguson, along with the police
helicopters circling overhead, are part of a national program in which the U.S.
Departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security are pumping billions of
dollars of equipment into beefing up local police forces in the name of
fighting “terrorism.”
Some of
this is disposing of surplus war materiel: the Pentagon’s “1033” program has
provided over $4 billion in left-over armor, ammo and weapons from Iraq and
Afghanistan to domestic police
agencies. The Homeland Security Department supplied $34 billion in “terrorism
grants.” So now police in Fargo, North Dakota (average homicide rate, 2 per
year) have assault rifles in every squad car, Kevlar helmets to withstand
battlefield-grade ammunition, and a $250,000 armored truck (with rotating
turret) “just in case.” St. Louis
County got a $360,000
Bearcat, night vision goggles, body armor and three helicopters (New York
Times, 15 August). And of course, if they have it, they’re going to use it,
as they are now doing in Ferguson.
Residents
of Ferguson are
well aware that their city has been turned into a war zone. A Los Angeles
Times reporter recorded a protester shouting at a line of police in
fatigues, “You gonna shoot us? Is this the Gaza Strip?” In fact, high-level
police
officials from the area have traveled to Israel to receive how-to lessons on
occupation. This included St. Louis County police chief Timothy Fitch, who
attended
an Anti-Defamation League-sponsored “National Counter-Terrorism Seminar” in
2011 to “study first hand Israel’s tactics and strategies” (Rania Khalek,
“Israel-trained police ‘occupy’ Missouri after killing of black youth,”
Electronic Intifada, 15 August). The NYPD is so tight with Israel that it has
an office in Tel
Aviv.
The result
of these programs is that run-of-the-mill police actions across the country
increasingly resemble military operations, with the general population as the
“enemy.” While this has been intensified by the “war on terror” since 2001, it
dates back to the “war on drugs” starting in the 1980s, and to the original
creation of SWAT teams in the late 1960s. And from the beginning, it has been a
bipartisan effort.
A recent
study by the American Civil Liberties Union (“War Comes Home: The Excessive
Militarization of American Policing” [June 2014]) reports that 90 percent of
all large U.S. cities have SWAT (special weapons and tactics) assault teams, as
do 80 percent of small towns. Moreover, 80% of the hundreds of SWAT raids it
investigated in 2011-12 were in order to serve search warrants: terrorizing
people on the basis of mere suspicion. A New York Times (9 June) article
by Matt Apuzzo reported:
“Police SWAT teams are now
deployed tens of thousands of times each year, increasingly for routine jobs.
Masked, heavily armed police officers in Louisiana
raided a nightclub in 2006 as part of a liquor inspection. In Florida in 2010,
officers in SWAT gear and
with guns drawn carried out raids on barbershops that mostly led only to
charges of ‘barbering without a license’.”
In the
shock wave set off by events in Ferguson,
liberals have criticized militarized policing focusing on the absurdity of
supplying armored cars to townships in rural Maine. Ruling-class critics were
mainly
concerned that the heavy-handed paramilitary tactics weren’t working. Note that
the ACLU study only objects to “excessive” militarization, i.e., “overkill.” If
protesters had been shocked-and-awed into submission, there wouldn’t have been
a peep from Washington.
As soon as the National Guard was brought in, the complaints stopped.
However,
the greatest threat is not that this is a boondoggle but that the authorities
are gearing up for internal war. They publish studies on it, formed a
military North American Command to prepare for it, and used the 2013 Boston
Marathon attack as a practice run for locking down an entire metropolitan area.
Internal war against whom? Forget about Al Qaeda, the target is us, the
poor, black, Latino, immigrant and working people who dare to resist.
The
military equipment was always intended to be used to quell “domestic
disturbances” (by which they don’t mean family quarrels) and “racial unrest”
(what they used to call “race riots,” meaning when black people fight back
against racial oppression and racist attacks). And in fact the police
recipients of the Pentagon largesse are contractually required to use all that
stuff within a year of receiving it. So what’s happening in Ferguson,
Mo. is no one-shot
deal, we’ll see those images again, most likely soon.
Build a Multi-Racial,
Revolutionary Workers Party
With the
election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the United States
there was a lot of happy talk
about a “post-racial America.”
The reality is very different. In fact, in recent years there has been a rise
in racist reaction. This is the core of the rabid rightist opposition to Obama,
despite his capitulation to right-wing pressure at every step. And it is
accompanied by mounting racist attacks by police, security guards and
vigilantes against blacks and immigrants. Last year there was the NYPD murder
of Kimani Gray in East Flatbush, Brooklyn and the racist verdict freeing the
killer of black teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida. This year it is the NYPD
murder of
Eric Garner, the Missouri
cop killing of black teenager Michael Brown, and an ever-growing list across
the country.
What we’re
facing is not some cracker cops run amok, “a few bad apples,” an out-of-step
police chief – it’s a whole apparatus of racist repression in the service of
imperialist capitalism. The increasing virulence of the attacks is a
reflects entrenched local racism, certainly, but also the worldwide economic
depression since the 2007-08 financial crash, and endless U.S. wars of terror
in the Middle East and around the world. Today, as clouds of tear gas and
volleys of flash-bang grenades engulf Ferguson,
many young people have marched in protest, as they did in 2013 for Trayvon.
Whole sectors of the population may be beginning to see, as the
Internationalist Group has declared on our placards, that “Imperialist War
Abroad Means Racist Repression in the U.S.”
The key
question is how to fight this escalating racist-capitalist assault. What’s
needed above all is revolutionary leadership. Black Democrats like Jesse
Jackson Sr. and Al Sharpton are only trying to divert and defuse struggle in
order to aid the government. In New York, Sharpton called a mass march over the
Verrazano Bridge to protest the police killing of Eric Garner, but then backed
down under pressure from fellow Democrat, mayor liberal Bill de Blasio, and his
police commissioner Bill Bratton. Instead he is now holding an August 23 march
on Staten Island calling on Democratic
president Obama and his corporate lawyer attorney general Eric Holder to launch
a federal civil rights investigation – in order to keep protest under control.
Nevertheless,
the August 23 march has become a referendum on racism, as reactionaries attack
the United Federation of Teachers for participating in what they call an
“anti-police” march. Thus class-conscious teachers, students, immigrants and
workers will join in marching while fighting for a program of militant class
struggle against cop terror.
On the
social-democratic left, the International Socialist Organization (ISO) has
mainly done reporting, denouncing racism but raising no demands at all. Its
main competitor, Socialist Alternative (SAlt), demands that “the whole Ferguson
police system be
put under scrutiny” – meaning nothing – and calls for “community controlled
policing,” supposedly overseen by union and community representatives. This is
a sinister call for collaboration with the cops. SAlt would have you believe
that
cops are workers, a deadly illusion as cops are the armed fist of capital. It
is ABC for Marxists that the police are the core of the state, and no matter
who supposedly “controls” them, they will uphold racist capitalist “law and
order.”
A smaller
social-democratic outfit with a local in St.
Louis is the Workers International League (WIL),
affiliated with Alan Woods’ International Marxist Tendency. Unlike SAlt, WIL
warns against illusions in “community control of the police,” but a statement
on the murder of Michael Brown echoes the capitalist media in denouncing
“riots,” “looting” and “vandalism”:
“while we can sympathize with the
reasons for the riots … riots can never bring about fundamental change….
Furthermore, the looting and vandalism will only damage our own neighborhoods
and give the powers that be a convenient excuse to dismiss the legitimate
issues facing the youth. Riots provide a convenient distraction for the
media.”–Socialist Appeal, August 12
Revolutionary
Trotskyists urge protesters to direct their anger effectively at the capitalist
state, but in contrast to these reformists we defend the youths who raged
against the racist cop murder and demand that charges be dropped against all
those arrested. The real looters are the giant corporations (including
QuikTrip, whose gas station was torched and whose $11 billion a year in revenue
comes from soaking communities like Ferguson).
The most
prominent left group that has been active in Ferguson is the Maoist
Revolutionary
Communist Party, which mainly promotes the thought of its cult leader Bob
Avakian. The RCP also works with liberals like Cornel West in the Stop Mass
Incarceration Network, and with the National Lawyers Guild on the Stolen Lives
Project, whose banner listing hundreds of names of the more than 2,000 killed
by police since 1990 has been prominent in the Ferguson protests. Despite its
name, the RCP
these days is putting forward a program that doesn’t go beyond
liberal/reformist demands – such as calling to “fire the police chief” and for
“a full accounting of what happened” – with a little rhetoric about revolution
tacked on to spice it up.
The RCP
chants “The Whole Damn System Is Guilty as Hell!” but doesn’t say that system
is capitalism. Nothing about communism either. Strikingly, in several articles
on Ferguson the
RCP never once mentions racism, which isn’t easy given the blatantly racist
repression. Yet the key point for genuine revolutionary communists to stress is
that the struggle against racism and for black liberation requires a program
for workers revolution against capitalism. We defend the RCP against the
red-baiting authorities, and demand charges be dropped against Dix and all
those arrested. But in Ferguson
as elsewhere what these Maoists put forward is the politics of reformism, as
they pitch their message to liberals rather than pointing a road to revolution.
The hard
truth that revolutionary Marxists must state plainly to the masses is that all
these supposed “reforms” will do nothing to change an unreformable capitalist
system that was founded on slavery, and which in one form or another has
continued black oppression ever since.
A new
police chief will do nothing more than placing state highway patrol official
Johnson “in charge” did: put a black face on racist repression. Limiting the
flood of heavy weaponry from the Pentagon and Homeland Security won’t stop the
killer cops. In New York City
under liberal mayor de Blasio, who campaigned to “reform” the racist
stop-and-frisk tactics, cops murdered Eric Garner with their bare hands.
The fight
to put a stop to racist cop terror must mobilize the force that has the power
to bring the capitalist system to a grinding halt: the millions-strong
multiracial working class. St. Louis labor has a
special responsibility to oppose the police/military occupation of Ferguson,
but as
elsewhere the political program of union officialdom is to elect Democrats. And
while the mayor of Ferguson is a Republican, the
St. Louis County
executive and Missouri
governor who control the cops carrying out the repression are Democrats. The
key to mobilizing workers power is to oust the bureaucrats and break with the
Democrats.
What’s
urgently needed is to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party.
Not some insipid “mass party of labor” (WIL) or “independent left-wing,
anticorporate candidates and coalitions” (SAlt), but a party that can lead all
the oppressed in sharp class struggle to bring down capitalism and install a
workers government. It would call on workers, blacks and all defenders of
democratic rights to mobilize massively in the streets against cop terror,
demanding that all police and military get out of Ferguson, now, and initiate
integrated
labor/black defense guards against racist attacks. It would also call for a
massive program of public works under union control, and for a shorter
workweek with no loss in pay to provide jobs for all.
The
militarized police and National Guard invasion and occupation of black
Ferguson, Mo. is the face
of racist repression in the U.S.
today, as endless imperialist wars abroad “come home.” An effective fight
against cop terror here is inseparably connected to the struggle to mobilize
workers power to drive the U.S.
out of Afghanistan and Iraq and to
defend those fighting against imperialism. It is necessary as well to join with
immigrants who face arbitrary seizure by the police and hundreds of thousands
of deportations a year. As an Internationalist Group sign noted at an August 18
protest in New York, “Immigrant Workers in NYC
Say: Stand With Besieged African Americans in Ferguson.” We demand full
citizenship
rights for all immigrants.
The way to
put an end to the terror of the ruling class against the exploited and
oppressed was shown almost a century ago in the revolutionary program of Lenin
and Trotsky, who together led the 1917 Russian October Revolution. This means
combating all illusions in capitalist “justice,” or appeals to Obama and his
top cop Eric Holder, who terrorize the world, from drones in Yemen to
prisons in Guantánamo. We emphasize that racist repression is a bedrock of
American capitalism, as it has been since slave patrols in South
Carolina in the 1830s became the first professional police force
in the U.S.
To put an end to it, we must replace the dictatorship of capital with the rule
of the working class.
From New York to Ferguson:
Mobilize workers’ power to smash racist terror! Black liberation through
socialist revolution!
Box
Ferguson, Mo.: A History of Entrenched Racism
It’s no
secret that the police and military assault on Ferguson, Missouri
is shot through with racism. Police chief Jackson
and his police force act, as does the nearly all-white city council, like
they’re in a Southern town back in the days of Jim Crow segregation. It’s no
accident. Under the “Missouri compromise,” Missouri entered the
union as a slave state. Missouri slave owners
formed militias to stage bloody incursions into free Kansas,
such as Quantrill’s Raiders who burned Lawrence
to the ground and provoked guerrilla war with abolitionist John Brown. Dred
Scott, then living in St. Louis, sued to win his
freedom, but was told by U.S.
supreme court chief justice Roger Taney that black men “had no rights which the
white man was bound to respect,” a decision which set the stage for the Civil
War that finally abolished slavery.
St. Louis County broke off from the city in the late 1800s as
a refuge from the “urban ills” of the growing railroad, river shipping and
manufacturing hub. As blacks moved north during World War I, St. Louis County
towns
kept them out by enacting restrictive covenants which banned home sales to
non-whites and were only outlawed by a 1948 Supreme Court decision. These were
then replaced by zoning laws designed to achieve the same purpose by requiring
large lots and prohibiting apartment buildings. As the black population of St.
Louis grew and the civil rights movement led to the
end of formal segregation, the 1950s and ’60s saw a massive exodus of whites
from the city to the suburbs in St.
Louis County.
By the
1970s and ’80s, between “white flight” and the collapse of industry, St. Louis
suffered massive
depopulation, and is now down by almost two-thirds since 1950. The city gained
notoriety then as the “used brick capital” of the world. As poverty spread in
the inner city, many black middle- and working-class families migrated to North
County
towns. More recently, whites have been moving back to the city, which as a
result of gentrification went from 28% white in 2000 to almost 50% white a
decade later. Since 1990 Ferguson
has gone from being 74% white to 70% black. But political power remained in the
hands of white politicians who held all but one seat in the city council and
school board, while a 96% white police force held blacks in check.
Although
over one-fifth of the population in Ferguson
lives below the official poverty line, what’s notable about Ferguson is that
this is not a ghetto
rebellion of the jobless but a revolt of a working-class and middle-class
African American community against an entrenched white capitalist power
structure. There are major profitable companies in the area: the corporate HQ
of Emerson Electric ($24 billion a year in sales) is in Ferguson; another major
area employer is
Express Scripts ($105 billion a year), the mail-order prescription supplier.
But very little of this revenue finds its way into municipal coffers. Instead,
the second largest source of the town’s revenue ($2.6 million last year) is
from … traffic tickets, fines and court fees.
Moreover,
five out of six tickets issued in Ferguson
are to blacks, who are twice as likely as white drivers to be pulled over. As
one resident put it, “Everybody in this city has been a victim of DWB [driving
while black]” (Washington Post,13 August). Or as another said, quoted in
a recent report by the Arch City Defenders, “in North County,
if you’re black, they’re going to stop you” (Newsweek, 14 August).
According to the public defenders’ report, last year the Ferguson municipal
court issued 24,532 arrest warrants, more than one for every man, woman and
child in this town of 21,000 people. So the racist police are not only brutal
repressors, they are parasites feeding off the black population.
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