Communist Revolution Will Impose Death Penalty on Racist Capitalism
LOS ANGELES (USA), April 20— “Guilty on all counts!” trumpeted the headlines as the verdict was announced in the trial of Derek Chauvin, murderer of George Floyd. We are neither surprised nor satisfied. Many saw during the trial that police officials were distancing themselves from Chauvin. Police and politicians hope to convince the angry masses that he was just a bad apple—to cover up the reality that the system is rotten to the core.
But starting with the murder of 13-year-old Adam Toledo in Chicago, on every single day of testimony, the “KKK in blue” killed somebody. Sixty-four or more, mostly Black and Latinx. Including—a few minutes before the verdict was announced—16-year-old black honor student Ma’Khia Bryant in Columbus, Ohio.
“We’re sick of being peaceful,” a man told police in Columbus. “No more being peaceful.” Masses are rightly outraged. This verdict—and the racist capitalism that it seeks to whitewash—gives us no justice and no peace. Only communist revolution can achieve the popular demand, “Abolish the Police.” Only the abolition of wage-slavery can end the material basis of racism worldwide.
Angry masses poured into the streets again, after Daunte Wright’s assassination during yet another bogus traffic stop in suburban Minneapolis. The killer cop supposedly fired her gun “accidentally.” But there is nothing accidental about racist police terror. Its roots are deep in US capitalism.
US policing grew out of the laws and patrols that enslaved Black workers to produce profits for capitalist plantation owners, merchants, and bankers. It absorbed the legacy of Pinkerton strike-breakers.
Later, cops, courts and laws reorganized racist super-exploitation as sharecropping, chain-gangs, and “Jim Crow” segregation. When capitalists needed Black labor in Northern factories, they segregated Black workers into the worst jobs and neighborhoods.
Little has changed. Capitalist professors and producers still churn out disgusting racist scientific “theories” and popular “culture.” Capitalist politicians and pro-capitalist union leaders still use racism to divide and exploit the whole working class.
And when that doesn’t work – when multi-racial strikes and Black-led rebellions rock the cities—there are always the cops.
Racist police terror cannot be reformed away. The tiny, inconceivably wealthy US ruling class needs racism – anti-Black, anti-Asian, anti-immigrant – to divide and distract the masses who have everything to gain by overthrowing them. We can’t allow calls for “police reform” to deter or divert the revolutionary communist movement we need.
Mobilizing for a Communist May Day
The masses need communism to end this capitalist dictatorship and every trace of its wage system. Real communism, not like the state capitalism in China or Cuba or anywhere else today.
Real communism means organizing ourselves as one International Communist Workers’ Party worldwide to produce and distribute what the masses need, sustainably and without exploitation.
Communism thrives on the unity of the masses, on the destruction of racism, nations, borders, and every other “ism” that capitalism uses to divide us.
Communist revolution will destroy the police and all other elements of capitalist state power. The masses, led by communist ideas, will solve any problems of anti-social behavior or counter-revolution that arise.
The Los Angeles young workers’ club handed out leaflets in South LA, saying all this, inviting people to May Day. There were many good conversations. Four workers asked to be contacted for May Day.
Comrade V told a Black social worker that in communism “we would protect ourselves without cops, collectively.” This woman has a relative who is a cop and she was arguing that we couldn’t survive without the police, especially in South LA.
Just then a male comrade came up behind V to get leaflets out of her bag. The woman thought he was a thief and immediately moved to defend V. V told her that the fact that she, a complete stranger, was ready to defend her proves how the working class in a communist society will work collectively to defend ourselves—without police.
“Comrade V’s optimism and enthusiasm, asking folks unapologetically for their phone numbers, really inspired me,” said an older comrade.
The communist relationships and collectives we build today are the nucleus of the communist world we so desperately need.
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