FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
International Communist Workers Party
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FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! |
International Communist Workers Party | |
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RICHMOND--Can a gentler, kinder capitalism work? Do we need activists who fight for reforms or communists organizing for revolution? Of late, Richmond, California, a city of about 100,000 has become a poster city for the gentler-kinder-capitalism argument. Apart from winning Richmond City Council (RCC) elections by way of defeating multi-million dollar-backed Chevron candidates, the RCC reformists have made Richmond the first California city in decades to institute rent control.
Their greatest achievement, however, is the decrease in street murders. From a high of 47 in 2008 to as low as 4 so far this year, the murder rate has dropped dramatically. How? It took a monumental change. They rejected the ‘stop-and-frisk’ racism that sees inner city youth as thugs and criminals. Instead, they saw them as young shell-shocked victims who needed help.
A City Hall that’s Anti-Racist?
They worked out that most of the shootings in the Iron Triangle neighborhood involved just 17 individuals between the ages of 16 and 25. They offered these 17 a deal: respond to the city’s mentoring, stay out of trouble, don’t pull the trigger and they could earn up to $1,000 a month for nine months!
This has made a huge difference. One neighbor told the local radio station “I haven’t sat on my front porch in 30 years. I do now” And the City Council no longer discusses asking the National Guard to come and occupy the city! Have anti-racist attitudes triumphed at City Hall?
Unfortunately when humane policies win out, they become arguments that bolster the idea of reform and dismiss the need for revolution. If we the people organize, the reformists argue, we can make the government, or state, work for us.
What Are the Racist Bosses Getting out of This?
Red Flag disagrees. Nothing significant happens (and the reduction in the murder rate is significant) unless it primarily serves the needs of capitalism. The only time the government appears to work for us is when our needs temporarily coincide with those of some capitalist. Communists bring a key analytical tool to the movement: historical materialism. Its basic tenet is that the way a society reproduces itself (works) determines its form of governance. Imagine the politics of government in a society where people produce for social needs, not private profits.
In three years during World War II, Richmond’s population exploded from 24,000 to 94,000. That wasn’t to meet the needs of black families to escape the racist South, but to meet the needs of Kaiser shipyards for labor. After the war when the shipyards closed, Chevron Oil Refinery became Richmond’s dominant political player. It is still the biggest employer, but tomorrow it won’t be.
A City Hall that Serves Capital!
The University of California at Berkeley is building a new 10,000 graduate student body Berkeley Global Campus in Richmond. Its Chancellor, Nicolas Dirk, is jetting the world over (including the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland) attracting major corporate and academic partners. The campus is a component of US imperialism’s plan to maintain its world dominance.
Trying to entice academics, bio-tech firms and international postgraduate students to study next to a neighborhood that vies with Compton for the title of “murder capital of California” is not a winning proposition. Richmond has to be cleaned up!
There is nothing anti-racist about capitalism. Everything it does is for profit or investment (future profits). Everything it does that even looks humane is hypocritical.
Pacify a violent neighborhood so that UCB, the institution that built the bombs that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, can continue its work on weapons of mass destruction in peace!
Nothing in the RCC reforms will stop the ongoing ‘ethnic cleansing’ that has affected communities from Palo Alto through San Francisco, Oakland and Richmond for years. One way or another, black families find themselves relocated to the ‘exurbs.’ In the years to come, RCC rent control and the safer streets it has created will benefit the international grad students instead of the present residents of the Iron Triangle.
Far from becoming an argument rejecting communism, the story of the Richmond reform movement shows the need for a revolutionary movement. When we raise our ideas from within this movement, we help to change the people in it. We have a role to play in discussing, reading, writing for and distributing our paper--Red Flag. While the capitalists have their ‘global university,’ we are building a revolutionary movement of the international working class.
Below is an extract from a response to our final draft of the article above that an activist who reads Red Flag offered after having been part of the original discussions about the
article.
I agree with your argument that the reforms will not bring fundamental change to the political economy. They reproduce capitalism ultimately, as your article said.
My reply is broad. When I got involved in the Richmond reform movement, I didn’t think it could create fundamental political economic change. I got involved because I didn’t want 400 acres of open space to become a casino resort. In the process, I saw people change in remarkable ways, and I started to wonder if engagement by people in Richmond’s reform movement reproduces capitalism while it contributes to the possibility of resolution by people changing in the process of engagement.
The reform movement has engaged otherwise completely disengaged citizens. People who even thought the status quo was great and people who have known for a long time it’s not working (and didn’t act because they didn’t think anything could change) are, themselves, changed by engagement. It’s not a revolution, but I’m not sure I want to be part of a revolution with most of the people I live with. The problem is a national one. The people who I have worked with and been changed in the process are another story, and they are thinking about what could be possible outside the capitalist economy. While most are not always thinking outside the system, thinking outside the system is a possibility for many in ways that it was not before engagement in reform.
There’s a split in the Richmond movement. A smaller part of the leadership wants revolution and sees reform as a road to that, and a larger part sees reform as the answer, or a kinder gentler capitalism. But at least everyone is engaged in the debates, and that’s more than much of the American public. I have worked on social issues with like-minded people in the past. Working in Richmond politics was the first time I worked with the public, and, frankly, I’m shocked at how far the small public I engaged with is from seeing the need for fundamental political economic change.
While revolution is the answer, how we get there, and, moreover, what we do when we get there is the challenge. Marx underestimated ideology, and ideology can only be overcome through practice, or engagement. Your paper is praxis, and in some respects the reform movement may be, too, for some. While the reform movement does bolster the idea of reform, it may not, at least for everyone, dismiss the need for revolution.
However, I think the Global Campus will destroy any revolutionary potential, no matter how small, of the progressive movement. The ideology around Education is so strong, it’s very hard for people to see that the university and Silicon Valley culture are one and the same, and neither one is a good thing in itself, though there are contradictions.
It’s an interesting article about which more needs to be written.
--Red Flag reader in Richmond, CA
