“Stop Cop City” Protests Call on us to Fight for Communism here ♦ Learning from the Past to Fight for Communist Future here ♦
“Stop Cop City” Protests Call on Us to Fight for Communism
USA, June 17— “I am pleading with you not to spend the tax dollars of a Black city, to tear down a forest in a Black neighborhood, to increase the policing and caging of more Black people,” Atlanta resident Robell Awake begged the Atlanta City Council. But despite fourteen hours of testimony, the Council voted to fund “Cop City.”
In May 2020, mass worldwide protests were ignited by the racist police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Atlanta restaurant worker Rayshard Brooks. Defund—and abolish—the police became mass slogans. Many saw this as a moment when the cops would finally be forced to stop their violent assaults on poor and Black workers.
But the rulers had other plans. These included a massive police training facility in Atlanta known as Cop City. This is no ordinary set-up. It includes a mock city for cops around the US to train in urban warfare—to put down the protests and uprisings of the masses against this murderous system.
Capitalism Needs Racist Cops
Capitalism is a violent system where the very few get very rich off the work of the rest of us. It needs racism to divide us and cops to keep us in line. As things get worse, the rulers need more racism, and more vicious cops.
Cop City is being built to “improve police morale” and to train them for the battles ahead. The masses hate the cops as the racist murderers they are. The corporate elite – Coca Cola, Delta, and Home Depot have headquarters in Atlanta—love them and rely on them to maintain their power.
This attack on our class is also an attack on the environment. In Atlanta, Black and working-class communities have the highest levels of childhood asthma and other diseases caused by pollution. And the Atlanta ruling class has chosen to build Cop City by destroying half of Weelaunee Forest, one of Atlanta’s four lungs, which serves as a defense against environmental racism.
Beginning in 2021, protestors organized by Black-led community organizations denounced the plans for Cop City. They have been pepper-sprayed, attacked, and violently arrested.
Forest defenders have organized civil disobedience by living in the forest to stop its destruction.
In January 2023, a police task force made up of city, county, state, and federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, was formed. These fascists began arresting the forest defenders for camping in the forest and charging them with domestic terrorism. On January 18th, they murdered indigenous Venezuelan environmental activist Tortuguita Terán, shooting them 57 times while their hands were up.
As the struggle heated up, three activists were charged with felony “intimidation” for passing out leaflets exposing the cops who murdered Tortuguita. Another three activists were arrested by the SWAT team and charged with money-laundering for organizing a bail fund.
Capitalism is unsustainable. By converting the planet into commodities, it is destroying it. As the masses organize resistance, it becomes more fascist and murderous.
If we, the masses, focus only on one aspect of the struggle—defending the forest or reining in the police because “Black Lives Matter”—we will be fighting isolated and defensive battles. The movement to Stop Cop City must become a movement to do away with capitalism itself.
It won’t be easy. The capitalists are willing to kill as many of us as they need to keep their wealth, power, and privilege. But there are always far more workers than capitalists. We produce everything. They produce nothing. And they need our working-class siblings to fight their wars.
When we unite to fight for the world that we need, we can win. We need you, who are reading this, to join the International Communist Workers’ Party to win the fight for a communist world!
Learning from the Past to Fight for a Communist Future
LOS ANGELES (USA), June 16— Cop City is going up in the middle of the Weelaunee forest, land stolen from the Muskogee (Creek) people for the expansion of cotton slavery two hundred years ago.
Our book club is discussing Changes in the Land by William Cronon. It deals with the invasion and environmental destruction of what became New England. A four-hundred-year-old crime.
Our readings underline how capitalism turned the land and its fruits into commodities. This was the beginning of both class society and environmental destruction there.
This is one of many distinct histories and cultures in the Americas. The Native people of southern New England lived in groups of a few hundred people. They had developed a culture of agriculture as well as hunting. They modified the forests in a sustainable way, cultivated the land and migrated after the harvest, hunting for use and limited trade with neighboring groups.
Their societies were based on kinship and tradition. They lived without rich and poor. Land was not private property, but a resource to be cared for and shared to sustain the group.
In the late 1500s, European fishermen and fur traders began to arrive on their shores. They brought diseases which were not fatal to them, but to which Native people had no immunity. In a couple of decades these diseases killed 70% of the Native people.
When the first English settlers arrived in 1620 to establish a religious settlement, they found deserted villages and a society in disruption. In 1630 the Massachusetts Bay Colony was established by an English corporation which hoped to relieve unrest in England and to make a profit. The settlers were mostly poor or middling farmers. They expected to set up a class society like England, but with themselves in a better position.
The settlers had guns. Native people were weakened by the social chaos of mass death. In a relatively short time, the settlers began to turn everything into commodities. Instead of maize and deer and the land being resources to be used and cared for, they became objects to be sold for a profit. Instead of living sustainably, English settlers began destroying the environment.
The English cemented their conquest of New England with the 1637 Pequot Massacre. All men were murdered. Women and children were enslaved.
With the destruction of the land and its conversion into private property came the capitalist state, with laws that protected the interest of the colonists. Cop City represents the legacy of illegitimate laws designed to protect the land brutally stolen from Native people and the riches produced by the slave labor of African-descended people.
Capitalism has destroyed the traditional society that existed before European conquest as well as destroying the environment. We can’t go back.
We must go forward to a communist society which sustains the earth, produces for use, and in which there are no rich and poor. Where we all form a global family without borders. This is our task.
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