FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM!
International Communist Workers Party
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FIGHT FOR COMMUNISM! |
International Communist Workers Party | |
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RICHMOND, CA, Nov. 30—”The Berkeley High School incident is over,” a black UC Berkeley student told me, a member of ICWP, at Thanksgiving. They caught the guy and nothing will happen on December 9th.” We were talking about the 2000-strong multi-racial walkout led by Black students on November 5th after threats of a lynching on December 9th had appeared on the library computer.
Blacks make up just 2% of UC Berkeley’s student body. That shows how “cherished and welcomed” black students are by the education system. Clearly this student had experienced the ways of racism. She didn’t agree, however, that capitalism was the root of it and that a communist revolution would be needed to defeat it.
Capitalism, I argued, where a tiny minority (less than 1%) exploit the overwhelming majority, requires both violence and the ability to divide the vast majority. Capitalism breeds racism because racism has proven the best way to divide that majority. She disagreed. “Democracy,” she countered, “is imperfect but it’s advancing the cause.” Democracy has always been, in fact, the lie that covers up class rule.
What worried me, though, was her willingness to accept the Berkeley High School incident as an isolated episode. The way she saw it, there was a problem and there was a solution - end of story.
I realized the urgent need to popularize the communist way of understanding the events around us. The dialectical approach starts with the idea that there is a story to everything and everything is connected. It trains us to look not just at what is happening but, more importantly, on what is developing. Then it helps us see the direction of development by looking for the main conflict in the story.
November 2015 may well have been a pivotal month. On the 5th, 2000 black, Latino, Asian and white students poured out in protest at Berkeley High (much bigger than the last walkout). Then, in Minneapolis on the 15th, cops shot and killed Jamar Clark, a young Black man. This set off a week of protest in which rocks were hurled at the cops, cop cars were damaged and police headquarters surrounded. On the 16th, Oakland cops killed another young Black man as they were making arrests at an illegal sideshow. The following day students at nearby Castlemont High stormed out in protest. This killing was special in only one way: it represented the thousandth killing by US police this year. In 2015, cops have killed 3 people a day - doesn’t that outstrip the operational capabilities of any other terrorist group? On the 26th, Chicago finally indicted one cop for the murder of Laquan McDonald…13 months after the fact. So far, that’s produced four days of protests targeting downtown merchants.
Although the protests haven’t stopped the cops from killing people, they have forced the ruling class to expand its tactics. On November 22, a Black Lives Matter activist was roughed up at a Donald Trump rally, with Trump’s approval. The following day a UC Berkeley “White Student Union” Facebook page was taken down, but not before receiving 900 likes. On the 25th, Alameda County Sheriffs (Oakland and Berkeley are in Alameda) echoed other police departments and complained “about an unprecedented wave of violence against police officers.” The next day, four racists (three white and one Asian) shot five demonstrators protesting Jamar Clark’s murder in Minneapolis.
Together, these stories show development. The multi-racial movement that surged in Ferguson has spread. Because of its impact, the legal system can’t continue terrorizing the working class in the old way. As a result, capitalists need to develop an ‘extra-legal’ terror movement like the Ku Klux Klan. They have no choice. Capitalist exploitation requires violence and a divided working class!
This dialectical way of thinking helps us realize what must be done. Racism shows up in all our democratic institutions, from UC Berkeley admission policies to the Oakland Police Department. Making the connection between these different areas leads us to the crucial insight that racism itself is rooted in the capitalist system. It will only be defeated with communist revolution and we must make sure each protest raises that awareness. The recent growth of our Party from South Africa to Bangladesh to the garment shops in Los Angeles and El Salvador gives us the confidence that we can win the masses in motion to fight for Communism