USA, October 2— Fascist immigration officers (ICE) shot Wilber Rafael Garces Perez, 28, in the back while kidnapping him in Austin (Texas) twelve days ago. Wilber suffered terribly from the bullet lodged near his spine, which was only removed today. Now he is charged with “assaulting” an ICE agent with his car’s sideview mirror.
ICE has killed at least thirty-one people so far this year. Four were shot. Twenty-five died in detention. At least two died while fleeing kidnappers. Arrests are at a record high since a summer enforcement surge across the USA.
Most of those arrested have no criminal history. Some are people going in to fill out required paperwork. Some are small children forced to appear alone before immigration judges. Some are US citizens. A few US citizens and many others have been deported. Some to countries they never knew and that the US State Department says are too dangerous to visit.
But protests are surging, too. Seventy people in the small mainly-white town of Oswego (NY) quickly rallied to defend two immigrant workers sheltering on a roof. They confronted local police and firefighters who were helping ICE try to kidnap the workers. After six hours, the crowd was able to help the workers escape. Now they are angry with the city, not just with ICE.
“Too much of the ICE patrolling is legalistic. It betrays fatal illusions in capitalist democracy,” said a comrade involved in this work.
Resistance is good but it’s not enough. We need revolution. Many are ready to hear that.
“Give me the new Red Flag,” said a dedicated anti-ICE patroller in Pasadena (CA). “It always upsets me. In a good way.”
“If they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night,” James Baldwin wrote in 1970 to the imprisoned Angela Davis. Fascist ICE is turning into a Gestapo coming for us all.
Since February, federal officials have demanded that tech companies send them identifying data behind anti-ICE social media accounts. Anti-ICE protesters are tracked and identified with facial-recognition technology, FLOCK cameras, and national databases. Much of this technology comes from Israeli companies and was first deployed against Palestinians.
FLOCK is an automated license plate reader (ALPR) system with 100,000 devices. They conduct over 20 billion scans per month for over 5,000 cop agencies. ALPRs have sparked protests across the USA, most recently in Dallas (Texas). Many cameras have been vandalized.
But attacking the symptoms of growing fascism does not address its root cause. That is capitalism itself. It’s imperialism.
The class of capitalist exploiters has always maintained its power to exploit the masses through state violence. And through lies spread to divide us. Racist lies. Lies about “democracy.” To make some of us think the system serves us and exempts us from that violence.
Global capitalism is in a crisis caused by its own internal contradictions. Increasing mechanization (and now AI) lower profit rates since profit comes only from exploiting workers’ labor. Competition sharpens into trade wars. Then into shooting wars.
Class lines harden. Class inequality soars. Racism intensifies. Nationalism becomes more virulent. Corruption festers and grows. Climate disasters and genocides multiply. The violently repressive nature of the capitalist state is exposed. Masses recognize it as fascist.
We’re seeing all that today.
To destroy fascism at its capitalist-imperialist roots, masses must embrace communist revolution.
Revolution, because reform is at most a band-aid. At worst, a blindfold keeping us from seeing the truth. Only armed revolution – led by communist workers, soldiers, and sailors – can defeat the capitalists and their fascist tools.
Communism, because only communism can replace capitalism’s “cash nexus” with a society based on cooperation and sharing. A global communist classless society will have no nations and no borders. It will need no repressive state or wars.
In communist liberated zones, wherever established, the working masses will plan and produce only to meet our needs. We will organize and defend ourselves through a mass international communist workers’ party. As now, our party will extend an invitation to membership to all willing to struggle collectively to realize communism everywhere.
This is the message we must take to our family, friends, co-workers, and classmates. And to the anti-fascist masses who are rising up in small ways and large. Let’s build communist collectives now.
Read Fight for the Day When No Worker Will Be Called Foreigner here