Cops Exist to Oppress Our Class here ♦ Community policing group in Guerrero, Mexico here ♦ Defeat Imperialist-Inspired Violence with Communist Revolution here ♦ Black Panther Party for Self Defense here ♦
May 15, 2022—Protest in Buffalo, NY, USA, following racist murder of ten mostly-elderly Black shoppers in a super market by a young white supremacist.
Cops Exist to Oppress Our Class: Build ICWP Collectives to Defend Our Communities and Fight for Communist Workers’ Power
LOS ANGELES (USA), May 30— “If the cops have no duty to protect you, then the only point of their existence is to be used against you,” reads a meme that Mabel reposted on Facebook.
“Finally,” wrote Mabel, “somebody gets what I’m putting down.”
On May 11, a white supremacist teenager drove two hundred miles to murder ten majority-elderly Black shoppers in a Buffalo, NY, grocery store. On May 15, a gunman killed one and injured four other Taiwanese-American churchgoers in Laguna Woods, CA. And on May 24, a teenaged gunman murdered nineteen mostly Latinx children and two teachers in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
As news came in about Uvalde, shock and horror turned to fury. The police had spent more than an hour outside the school and cowering in the hallways as children frantically called 911. Police handcuffed parents and threatened them with tasers to keep them from rescuing their children. It appears that finally a parent with a shotgun went in and ended the siege.
“We should learn from the self-defense groups in Guerrero, Mexico,” said Yaxkin. “The community could defend itself. I’m thinking that my aunt and I, for example, could go to the local elementary school. It would be the beginning of organizing the community for self-defense. It’s an indigenous social practice to rely on ourselves and our neighbors. We have never been able to rely on the oppressor to protect us.”
When the masses lose confidence that the government will protect them, and begin to take matters into their own hands, we’re on the verge of a revolutionary situation. As this becomes widespread, the next step is a plan and a vision. This is when the working class needs a party to organize the struggle, and to plan for the new society—a communist world without oppressors, where we will be able to protect each other.
Mabel continued, “Communities do a much better job at keeping themselves safe than the people who are PAID to ‘protect and serve.’ Especially if they only run into the building to save their own children.
“I have been numb and sad ever since Buffalo,” she added. All this “has just made me unbelievably angry and reinforces my belief that we need ‘alternatives to policing’.”
School Cops Attack Students Instead of Protecting Them
In 1999, two teenaged gunmen killed thirteen students and wounded twenty others at Columbine High School in Colorado. Now, children as young as five participate in active-shooter drills while schools lay off social workers and psychologists and hire school cops.
Over 10,000 school cops hired since Columbine have not stopped a single school shooting. Instead, they’ve arrested over a million kids, mostly Black and Latinx, for routine behavior issues.
This is what capitalism in decline looks like today for working-class families in the US, especially Black and Latinx families. Elders shot down in the grocery store. Baby formula unavailable at any price. School cops arrest kids for wearing a hoodie, but can’t protect them from a school shooter. And if you decide for whatever reason that this is not the time to bring a baby to term, in many states, you can be arrested.
Build Communist Collectives to Survive, Defend, and Fight for Communist Workers’ Power
Masses have responded with courage and collectivity. In Laguna Woods, an unarmed guest charged the gunman. He took him down at the cost of his life and the congregation subdued and hog-tied the killer.
After the massacre in Buffalo, the only grocery store in the community shut down. Neighbors organized community food distribution.
In Uvalde, parents fought the cops. One woman jumped the school fence to rescue her and her neighbors’ children.
Like the self-defense organizations in Guerrero, Mexico, groups of armed Black workers like the Deacons for Defense during the US Civil Rights Movement and others, these examples show that the masses can and will organize to support and defend their communities.
Organizing for communism means building collectives that fight for survival now and for power in the future. Depending on the circumstances, we must organize collectives that support and defend the communities in which we live. The rulers won’t do it. Their police forces protect the power and property of the capitalists, while they launch genocidal attacks on Black and Latinx workers. It is up to us to protect our class.
The collectives we build now will one day be positioned to fight for power. To fight the battles that will lead to the building of a communist society.
Community policing group in Guerrero, Mexico. Read more here
Let’s Organize Ourselves to Defeat Imperialist-Inspired Violence with Communist Revolution
The Uvalde elementary school student lay next to her dying 4th grade classmate who was covered in blood. Carefully wiping that blood over herself, she pretended to be dead. That is how she survived.
“Capitalism comes into the world dripping from head to foot in blood and dirt,” Marx wrote over 150 years ago. It is still as violent as ever, worldwide. Yet the USA has a unique bloody epidemic of mass shootings.
Why do the shooters seek to sow terror at sites of community interaction: supermarkets, places of worship, schools?
Author Priya Satia pointed to the industrial revolution in Britain and the development of imperialism. In the 1700s, its wars entailed unprecedented mass violence. They reshaped gun use in civilian life, too. For the first time, Satia writes, “we find a discharged teenaged soldier walking on Bristol Bridge waving his musket around until without notice, he ‘wantonly drew the trigger’ and killed a young man.”
The US Pentagon recently admitted that it has dropped 337,000 bombs and missiles overseas in the last twenty years – an average of 46 strikes per day.
This violent assertion of US power has wrecked wedding parties, homes, markets, hospitals, and schools. It has maimed and killed shoppers, babies, school children, charity workers and anyone else unfortunate enough to be caught in the cross hairs.
The domestic cost of this carnage can be seen in the relentless attacks on the standard of living of the US working class. Wages stagnate; people are forced to work longer hours; they have fewer vacation days per year and are easier to fire than their west European counterparts. The bottom 50% of wage earners now claim only 1% of the nation’s wealth.
The social costs include the opioid crisis, rising suicide and homicide rates, increasingly open racism, and sexism, more car accidents, and a falling life expectancy. And in the highest rates of police shootings and incarceration in the world.
This impoverishment of the working class is fertile ground for conservative and liberal media and politicians to build a fascist movement.
Shooters like the 18-year-old in Buffalo emerge from this climate of imperial violence abroad and relentless decay at home. He belonged to an organized Discord group some 15 strong, 6 of whom were actual accomplices to the massacre who knew details of his plans some 30 minutes beforehand and failed to sound the alarm.
The young Uvalde shooter also emerged from this same climate of violence and decay. Republican politicians try to deflect the outcry about easily available assault rifles with talk about mental health. But they do nothing to create the conditions necessary for mental health or services to treat those who are struggling.
Uvalde had few resources of positive interventions but plenty of funds for a “school security” police force that hid in a corridor for an hour while brave 4th graders strategized how to save themselves and their classmates!
And the self-organization of the Uvalde 4th graders brings us to the final point: the growing anti-fascist, anti-capitalist reaction. Massive demonstrations against the racist murder of George Floyd swept the globe two years ago. More recently, a post-pandemic strike wave has broken out across the US. Walkouts at some two hundred schools protested the assault rifle violence in Uvalde.
The masses are in motion. Capitalism, born in brutality, has nothing to offer except more brutality. Constructing a world with caring community interaction at its core is the task of the communist revolution ICWP has started to organize.
In the late 1960s, the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, openly carrying legal .357 Magnums, 12-gauge shotguns and .45-caliber pistols, followed the Oakland police and documented their racist misconduct and brutality. In 1967, they entered the California statehouse to read a statement saying, “The time has come for Black people to arm themselves.” This so frightened politicians that they passed the Mulford Act, supported by the National Rifle Association, that prohibited the open carry of loaded firearms. This was the beginning of modern gun control laws in the US.