George Floyd, one year later here ♦ Tulsa massacre here ♦
Minneapolis, (USA), May 28, 2020—Protesting the racist murder of George Floyd, angry masses burned Minneapolis Police Station #3
George Floyd One Year Later: Why We Need Communism Now
One year ago, on May 25, 2020, racist Minneapolis cops killed George Floyd. The protests that erupted across the US and around the world transformed mass consciousness. They raised demands – like “abolish the police!”—that capitalism cannot satisfy. Comrades of ICWP continue our work to mobilize the angry anti-racist masses for communism and to recruit them as members and leaders of our party.
Derek Chauvin, who led the cop death squad, has been convicted of murder but will he even do significant jail time? When masses burned a Minneapolis police station, and rebellions spread, the ruling class got scared and threw Chauvin under the bus.
In the past year, US cops have killed another thousand people, disproportionately Black and Latinx.
As the Chauvin jury was deliberating, cops killed Adam Toledo, 13, in Chicago and Ma’Khia Bryant, 16, in Columbus, Ohio. Days later, on April 21, cops murdered Andrew Brown Jr., 42, with a “kill shot” to the back of his head in Elizabeth City, North Carolina.
The capitalist response should convince us that only communist revolution, not reform, can abolish the police. Democratic Party forces are promoting a “George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021” that would not even have saved George Floyd’s life. Federal “civil rights” charges against the Chauvin gang are but a slap on the wrist. Widespread “diversity and equity trainings” hide the true root of racism: capitalist wage slavery.
Communism won’t need police. Police exist to protect capitalist private property. They function as an occupying army to terrorize working-class neighborhoods (in the US, especially Black and Latinx) and suppress strikes and rebellions.
Communism will abolish private property in land and production. The masses, led by the party, will make policies to serve our collective needs. Workers won’t have to strike or rebel to get their views heard or their needs met. In communism, communities will resolve conflicts amongst the people through mediation and comradely struggle.
Many contradictions have sharpened in the US over the last year. The Trump faction has ramped up openly racist, fascist agitation to mobilize its core base. This base consists largely of white small-business people, not white workers. The “populists” who lead it – like Josh Hawley and Tucker Carlson – mostly come from wealthy families and prestigious US colleges. Their failed coup of January 6 was a start, not an end.
In response, Democrats are trying to channel anti-racist masses into a fight to stop racist voting reform laws in Texas, Florida and elsewhere. A big contradiction: these capitalists, loyal to Wall Street and US imperialism, can’t really be anti-racist because their own system needs racism to survive. They are even more dangerous.
Mass protests against racist police murders continue and will escalate. Wherever possible, we must organize communist actions against racism and bring communist ideas to rallies and marches organized by others. The contradictions in the capitalist system and among the capitalists create opportunities for our Party to grow significantly in the US, as elsewhere, in the year ahead.
The Tulsa Massacre of 1921: To End Racism, End Capitalism
“It didn’t end when the flames died down on Greenwood Avenue,” said a Black woman raised in Oklahoma. “It’s still going on.”
And it will continue to go on until communist revolution ends capitalist wage slavery, the foundation of racism.
Greenwood was a flourishing Black area in harshly-segregated Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921. It was called the “Black Wall Street” for having the largest concentration of Black wealth in the US. Several residents owned the equivalent of over $1 million today.
But 23 Wall Street in New York City, headquarters of J.P Morgan & Co., was the financial center of the United States. This Wall Street, in the 1600s, had been a marketplace for selling enslaved people. In 1919, National City Bank of New York (now Citibank) became the first bank with $1 billion in assets.
Oklahoma had received statehood in 1907 amidst a population boom, an oil rush, and rapid industrial growth. By the 1920s, white oil wildcatter Tom Slick had a net worth close to the equivalent of half a $billion today.
Industrialization and petroleum markets made life more precarious for many Oklahomans. Many small farmers went bankrupt. The capitalists and their new state government quickly passed “Jim Crow” segregation laws harsher than those in the former Oklahoma and Indian Territories.
During the recessions after the world war, these rulers struggled to keep the masses from blaming capitalism and seeing the promise of workers’ power in the Soviet Union. They found their scapegoat in relatively affluent Black Greenwood.
On May 31, 1921, Sarah Page, a white woman, falsely claimed that Dick Rowland, a Black man, had attacked her in a downtown Tulsa elevator (he probably stepped on her foot accidentally). White newspapers elaborated on her lie. They inflamed a racist white lynch mob, deputized and armed by the police.
Black veterans marched to the downtown jail where Rowland was imprisoned. But the racist mob drove them across the tracks to Greenwood. It burned down 40 commercial and residential blocks including 1000 homes. It killed hundreds of Black people, dumping many in secret mass graves or the river. Thousands were left homeless and traumatized.
“My father got so angry whenever it came up later,” said our friend. “He would get real hard and want to go out and hurt somebody. And he was not like that.”
A direct line connects the Tulsa Massacre to the frame-up of the Scottsboro Nine ten years later. To the murder of Emmet Till in 1955 and to Amy Cooper who called the cops on a Black bird-watcher in New York last year.
A direct line connects the Tulsa Massacre to the dispossession of 98% of all Black farm owners in the US, mostly since 1950. To the foreclosure crisis in 2008-2010, which hit Black homeowners twice as hard. To the eviction crisis that is exploding as the federal Covid-19 eviction moratorium ends.
It’s still going on.
It’s still going on because capitalism needs racism, entwined with sexism, to divide the working-class. To super-exploit Black, Latinx and immigrant workers while driving down wages for all. To terrorize the masses, especially those who are most oppressed. To keep others from following their lead in militant fight-back.
But that line can be broken.
Not by reforms to “reduce inequities in generational wealth.” The reparations promised to Black Tulsans twenty years ago came to nothing.
But by revolution to build a communist society that abolishes personal “wealth” along with poverty. Where everyone is housed comfortably without owning property. Where social problems are handled by community intervention, not by police. Where we view differences among us as a source of collective strength, not of competition or hostility.
Communist cooperative production for the masses’ needs will destroy the foundation of capitalism’s racism and sexism. Communist comradely struggle, work and education will break the line and end racism, sexism and all other divisive “isms” for good.
The capitalists’ Wall Street and their racist system will end up in ashes.
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