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Only Communist Revolution Will End Racist Police Terror ♦ U.S. Capitalism and Racist, Xenophobic Policing ♦ George Floyd Rebellion Spreads to France ♦
Only Communist Revolution Will End Racist Police Terror
SEATTLE (US)—“You see, we are perfectly able to take care of ourselves,” said a Boeing comrade as she scanned the five thousand demonstrators. This anti-racist, multi-racial rally and march went off without a hitch in the Rainier Valley, a neighborhood the bosses’ press calls the city’s most crime-ridden. Everything from traffic control to hydration to the mass distribution of masks was guaranteed by the masses. Not a racist cop in sight!
Our Boeing comrade spoke a simple truth that could only become an everyday social reality in communism. The need for a police force will vanish in communism. The Party will lead mobilized masses, including a Red Army when needed, to guarantee what’s best for all society,
Sparked by the racist murder of George Floyd, millions have taken to the streets. Demands to defund the police, abolish ICE and abolish the police reverberate around the world. Various unions and global NGOs have taken up the call. Some demonstrators even blame capitalism and call for some vague kind of “collective care for ordinary people.”
Unfortunately, these reform demands allow or even extend the life of capitalism. They have been tried before and have failed. The grim proof lies in the escalating murders of Black and Latinx workers.
Racist policing is not solely a U.S. phenomenon, although the US ruling class has done its best to export this particular horror around the world. Every capitalist nation creates it.
Capitalism requires cops. Capitalists invented policing, indeed the whole of jurisprudence, to ensure their continued ability to exploit workers. Racism plays a key political and economic part in guaranteeing this exploitation. Racism divides the working class and provides trillions in profit through super-exploitation. Police provide the armed might to terrorize workers. Racist police brutality must continue for the bosses’ system to survive.
Every year, capitalist police forces grow more racist, militarized, brutal and deadly. In the U.S., they emerged out of slave patrols, the bourgeois necessity to control “dangerous classes”, and imperialist military slaughter. “Dangerous class” is code for the working class, especially those subject to racist super-exploitation. Racist cops are coded into the DNA of capitalism.
Camden, New Jersey is often mentioned as a model for abolishing the police. Seven years ago, this once-industrial city of 90 percent Black and Latinx residents disbanded its police force. What was advertised as a new, “gentler and kinder” police force sprang up in its place.
It turned out to be a mirage. Many residents are not impressed by this police rebranding. For example, the police force “hasn’t changed much” Sharim Anaya, a long-term resident, told reporters. Edwin and Katrina Ramos stated that cops treat Camden “as a war zone.”
“But will communism actually get rid of racism?” asked a skeptical young Boeing worker.
Yes! In sharp contrast to capitalism, communism relies on collective production to provide for our collective needs. The capitalist motive to divide the working class and extract super-profits from racist super-exploitation will end. And along with it the need for racist policing.
Ending the need for this atrocity is the first step. Unburdened by capitalism’s need to exploit, terrorize and divide us, the International Communist Workers’ Party will organize mass campaigns that will eliminate racism. This huge task will require the leadership of a mass international party. We invite you to join now!
Communist revolution will destroy all aspects of capitalist state power, including the police. No more vague calls for a more just future under capitalism. Help us to make the simple truth that we can take care of ourselves a reality.
As U. S. Capitalism Developed, So Did Racist, Xenophobic Policing
The needs of U.S. capitalists dictated how the country’s police forces developed. Modern policing grew out of slave patrols, the suppression of the working class and imperialist military slaughter. Each corresponded to capitalism’s requirements during a specific historical period.
Early U.S. capitalism relied on the exploitation of enslaved Black workers to amass huge amounts of capital. Slave codes were instituted throughout the U.S. to intimidate any who dared rebel. Slave patrols enforced these laws.
These codes were not limited to the South. New York state slave codes forbade enslaved people from being out an hour after sunset without a lantern or gathering in groups of more than three.
When chattel slavery was abolished after the US Civil War, and Reconstruction was defeated in 1877, police enforced Jim Crow laws. These laws mandated racial segregation. They filled the prisons with Black workers serving long terms of convict slave labor.
Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, state police forces were established to protect the bosses’ industrial profits. State police forces in Nevada, Colorado and Oregon began as industrialists’ private paramilitaries. They targeted new immigrant workers such as Hungarians, Italians and Jews. Pennsylvania bosses established the Iron and Coal Police to crush strikes.
Latinx workers made up a large section of the U.S. agricultural labor force. Between 1840 and the 1920’s, vigilantes and law officers lynched over five hundred Mexicans and Mexican-Americans and killed thousands more by other means. The notorious Texas Rangers led the charge.
In 1909, Berkeley, California police chief August Vollmer brought professionalism and science to racist U.S. policing. “For years, ever since [my] Spanish-American war days, I’ve [used] military tactics to good effect,” he explained. “We’re conducting a war…against the enemies of society.” He included socialist agitators, strikers, union organizers, immigrants and Black people among these enemies.
In 1965, President Johnson (a Democrat) first declared a “war on crime.” He proposed legislation to provide local police with military-grade weapons like those used in the imperialist war on Vietnam. After the Watts rebellion in Los Angeles that summer, the LA Police Chief said that fighting the anti-racist masses was “very much like fighting the Viet Cong.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. armed police forces in at least 52 countries. It trained cops from at least 80. The notorious School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, did much of this training. No wonder it’s called the School of the Assassins. It was key to the U.S. anti-communist campaign to suppress revolutions.
In 1982, Joe Biden, the present Democratic Party presidential nominee, echoed this sentiment. “You’re in as much jeopardy in the streets as you are from a Soviet missile,” he told the Senate. For a decade, he introduced laws that protected racist killer cops.
Today, the New Jim Crow and the criminalization of immigration have made the situation even worse. U.S capitalism and racist, xenophobic cops are connected at the hip. The legacy of slave patrols, the suppression of the working class, and imperialist military tactics are imbedded in US policing. Reforming or defunding police is destined to fail as it has for centuries. Communist revolution is the only development that will allow us to rid ourselves of racist killer cops.
The Floyd rebellion spread quickly to France
Death by asphyxiation at the hands of racist police
In July 2016 Paris Adama Traoré, of African descent, was chased by police and arrested. Three cops threw him in their van and piled on to him. According to the independent autopsy commissioned by his family, he suffocated.
The three cops got off Scott free. The official autopsy blamed heart failure – another, on his smoking weed. Or whatever. Not only did they get off, they got commendations for later helping to suppress protests against his (almost certain) murder.
Adama was hardly the first to be suffocated by racist cops. In 2007, Lamine Dieng died of asphyxiation in a police van. In 2008, Hakim Ajimi lost his life after two police officers throttled him and compressed his chest. In 2015, Amadou Koume died of asphyxiation after being arrested in a bar. As is clear by their names, these were all of African (Black or Arab) descent, like Adama.
When word of George Floyd’s murder reached France the Traoré family and supporters called for a rally to protest his and Adama’s deaths. As many as 60,000 people showed up.
This shouldn’t be surprising, given the history of police racism in France. This racism began with the colonial empire which France began assembling in the 1600s. These colonies included Haiti, Algeria, West Africa, and Indochina (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos). Like colonial police everywhere, they used informers, torture and murder to preserve these lucrative regimes.
When the colonized (and the local capitalists) rebelled, the French imperialists resorted to unrestricted slaughter. During the war in Algeria alone, they killed about a million people, mainly by the army, but the police were enthusiastic as well. In one incident famous (in the Middle East) they tied a young Algerian woman (Zuleikha Al-Shayeb) to a jeep and dragged her through the streets of Algiers, while through a loudspeaker they warned that this was what was waiting anyone who rebelled against France. Then they tortured her for ten days and threw her from a helicopter.
Back in WWII the Germans defeated France and the collaborators set up a pro-German government in Vichy in the south of France. An ambitious collaborator named Maurice Papon helped René Bousquet, top Vichy cop, to arrange for the Vichy police to round up French Jews and send them to the death camps. The Germans didn’t even have to ask the Vichy police for the roundup, and the anti-Semitic cops even took 4,000 children.
Flash forward 20 years and Papon is a buddy of De Gaulle, becomes a cabinet minister and, during the Algerian war, chief of the Paris police. On October 17, 1961 some 30,000 Franco-Algerians demonstrate peacefully for Algerian independence. Papon orders his racist cops to attack. More than 11,000 are arrested and literally hundreds are beaten, tortured, and even thrown in the Seine River. Maybe 200 (two hundred!) are drowned. Bodies show up for weeks afterwards.
As in the US, well meaning (and not so well meaning) people are calling for police reform. Castener, the justice minister, announced a ban on chokeholds. But the cops objected and, a few days later, he rescinded it. So much for reform.
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