Internationalism
is the watchword of the day;
from Gaza to Ukraine to Ferguson, Missouri
from Gaza to Ukraine to Ferguson, Missouri
LCFI
statement on the police murder of Michael Brown
19/8/2014
Michael
Brown was shot and killed by a cop on Saturday, sparking protests and riots in
Ferguson, Mo.
Michael
Brown brutally slain by police Officer Darren Wilson on 9 August
“The
Social-Democrat’s (i.e. Revolutionary Socialists before 1914 – LCFI) ideal should
not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to
react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it
appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able
to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police
violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every
event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist
convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and
everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation
of the proletariat.” Lenin. [i]
Eighteen
year old Black man, Michael Brown, was murdered on August 9, 2014 by Officer
Darren Wilson, in Ferguson, Missouri. He was unarmed and shot multiple times by
Wilson. The details are given by his friend, Dorian Johnson, 22 as related by
Trymaine Lee:
“…Brown and
Johnson took off running together. There were three cars lined up along the
side of the street. Johnson says he ducked behind the first car, whose two
passengers were screaming. Crouching down a bit, he watched Brown run past.
“Keep
running, bro!,” he said Brown yelled. Then Brown yelled it a second time. Those
would be the last words Johnson’s friend, “Big Mike,” would ever say to him.
Brown made it past the third car. Then, “blam!” the officer took his second
shot, striking Brown in the back. At that point, Johnson says Brown stopped,
turned with his hands up and said “I don’t have a gun, stop shooting!” By that
point, Johnson says the officer and Brown were face-to-face. The officer then
fired several more shots. Johnson described watching Brown go from standing
with his hands up to crumbling to the ground and curling into a foetal
position. [ii]
Brutal police
slayings of Black men in the US are frequent but only some provoke the reaction
that this one did. The severe beating of Rodney King in 1992 provoked far wider
and more violent protests, as Steve Argue relates:
“In the
case of Rodney King, despite videotape showing the cops using enough force to
kill a man, the police were acquitted in their first trial. In that case it
took a mass six day uprising in 1992 that destroyed over a billion dollars in
property to win a new trial for the criminal cops. In the subsequent trial, two
cops, Koon and Powell, were found guilty. For a change, two brutal cops went to
prison for their crimes. In addition, the 1992 uprising forced the resignation
of LA’s Chief of Police. On a small scale, property was also redistributed
through “looting”. Yet, the people paid a heavy price for this action with all
kinds of repressive government forces mobilized in the streets including the
Marines, 53 people were killed, around 2,000 people were injured, and nearly
20,000 people arrested.” [iii]
The Los
Angeles riots of 1992 were the worst in the USA terms of death toll after the
New York City draft riots in 1863. They were an incoherent outburst of rage at
the terrible oppression of the Black and Latino communities. The majority of the
dead were Black, but it included some 15 Latinos and 10 whites + a few Asians.
They came in the wake of world historical events globally, the dissolution of
the Warsaw Pact, the break-up of the USSR and the obscene crowing of the
neo-liberal establishment about the “end of history”. Wiki elaborates:
“The End of
History and the Last Man is a 1992 book by Francis Fukuyama, expanding on his
1989 essay “The End of History?” published in the international affairs journal
The National Interest. In the book, Fukuyama argues that the advent of Western
liberal democracy may signal the endpoint of humanity’s sociocultural evolution
and the final form of human government. “What we may be witnessing is not just
the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war
history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s
ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as
the final form of human government.” Fukuyama’s position contradicts that of Karl
Marx, who imagined that antagonistic history would end with communism
displacing capitalism.” [iv]
We may be
sure that the 1992 uprising was not a conscious response to these international
events but we are equally certain that that was the material basis and
objective driving force which was reflected in at least a very deep sense of
foreboding unease in the consciousness of the masses who saw what was
happening. The ruling class of America were predicting oppression and
exploitation without end or opposition of every nation on the planet and the
working class in the US and everywhere else. Whilst the USSR stood there was a
hope that what was a distorted and bureaucratic opposition, but was
nevertheless an opposition, might hold back and even defeat their oppressors.
It was gone now but nevertheless the Los Angles oppressed gave them their
answer to the question “will they fight?” George Bush’s New World Order was
going to be challenged not only politically and in foreign wars but on the
streets of the cities of the USA itself.
Appeal,
successful, for race and class unity in the Lost Angeles uprising in 1992
Therefore,
since humanity can only liberate itself from global capitalism and its modern
expression, Imperialism, by slaying the beast in its lair, how the US working
class goes about their historical task and if they succeed is of vital
importance. Los Angles did succeed in driving back the offensive for a period
but the altogether different political circumstances and response to the
killing of Michael Brown has shown that that offensive has now taken a new and
more deadly and threatening aspect than even 1992. To understand this we must
take the global circumstances into account, we must take the US political
circumstance into account and, most importantly, we must get the relationship
between racial oppression and working class oppression right by understanding
how this has evolved in the USA.
Today the
global economic and political crisis leaves no room for illusions about the
“end of history”. Wars are raging in Libya, Syria, Iraq and the Ukraine, chaos,
broken states and plans for war against Iran, Russia and China are afoot to
hold together US hegemony of global Imperialism. US ‘recovery’, far better than
Europe or Japan, is essentially at the expense of their rival Imperialist
powers and the semi-colonial world. Falling global profit rates is driving
WWIII as the objective laws of capital impinge on the consciousness of the
Republican Neo-Cons and Democrats alike. It impinges on the consciousness of
the far left too but many are taking the side of Imperialism over its wars,
Ukraine being the latest example. Our faith is in the working class and the new
forces that are emerging to represent them in a revolutionary way.
WHY THE
REACTION TO THE KILLING OF MICHAEL BROWN WAS SO VIOLENT
The riots
in Ferguson were initially about the killing of Michael Brown and probably
would have only lasted one night or might not have turned violent at all but
for the extreme and violent reaction of the police. It is reported that people
from Gaza were tweeting people from Ferguson on how to protect themselves from
tear gas. Press photographers were instructed to stop taking pictures and leave
the scene and two reporters were arrested. But it was the military riot gear
deployed at what were initially peaceful protesters against what all knew to be
a brutal police murder that amazed everyone. Jelani Cobb, a writer for the New
Yorker, noted: “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If
you have a tank every protest looks like an insurgency”. As Press TV reports:
“Slowly,
every police department in the United States, at the behest of the Department
of Homeland Security, is being trained by Israeli groups. As part of this
training, there is an increased move to use of military uniforms, armoured
vehicles, heavy weapons, illegal surveillance, lying to the people, press and
courts and systematic interference in the electoral system. They are becoming
“Israeli.”” [v]
Lest it be
thought that Press TV are alarmists who only report in a sensationalist way we
have the objections of a Republican Senator:
“The images
and scenes we continue to see in Ferguson resemble war more than traditional
police action,” Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky wrote today in a
column for Time, calling for police agencies to be demilitarized. Another U.S.
Senator, Missouri Democrat Claire McCaskill, has said local law enforcement
officials need to “demilitarize” the situation in Ferguson…Given the images
from Missouri, some veterans have observed that they patrolled foreign combat
zones equipped with less armour than the police in Ferguson, which is northwest
of St. Louis. [vi]
For those
leftists who think in their backward and syndicalist what that what happens in
Gaza, Ukraine and Iraq is nothing to do with the working class in the US or UK
and we can fight austerity through our trade union structures and “force the
left bureaucrats to fight” by enough grass roots pressure here is the answer.
The ruling class have prepared their answer; they have psyched up their police
forces and given them enough military hardware to silence every protest. And
they are again playing the race card in the USA, as ever.
Police
stand watch as demonstrators protest the death of unarmed teenager Michael
Brown.
“The images
and scenes we continue to see in Ferguson resemble war more than traditional
police action,” Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky
WAS THE
SLAYING OF MICHAEL BROWN RACE OR CLASS?
Both, of
course, and it’s how the dialectical interrelationship of the two plays out in
the USA that makes the difference between commentating and leading politically.
Unlike the 1930s today the vast majority of industrial workers in the USA are
black. They make up a disproportionate section of the prison population, of the
unemployed and ghetto poor. But an even more oppressed section are the
“illegals” the 12 million + Latino workers who do all the menial tasks for dirt
wages and who cannot complain or properly unionise because of their immigrant
status. But their cause can only really be defended by the organised working
class and the state’s prime object is to keep the class divided on race, sex,
immigration and any other issue it can dredge up. The War on Terror never
replaced race, it was rather a refinement of it as is the current
anti-Immigrant children brouhaha on the Mexican border.
Let us
affirm now that this was a racist murder, it was also an attack on the entire
working class and oppressed so it is a class issue too. Only those lost in
hopeless syndicalist dogmatism would make a rigid counterposition between the
two in the USA in particular with all its history of Black slavery and Jim Crow
lynchings and the Ku Klux Klan. Socialist Fight polemicised against David North
WSWS/SEP on the killing of Trayvon Martin on just this point:
“This
brings us to the posting on the WSWS site on 5 April by Joseph Kishore
entitled, The killing of Trayvon Martin and racial politics in America. The
piece seeks to prove that it was class and not race that motivated the murder
and those who were trying to impute racial motives to George Zimmerman were
defending the capitalist system and trying to divert the anger of the masses
away from its real cause and into the blind alley of ‘identity politics’.
Zimmerman, the killer, was not motivated ostensibly by a white racist agenda
and the fact that Martin was black – this very likely had nothing to do with
the case. We must be sure of this – because Kishore informs us:
“Racial
prejudice may have played a role in the killing of Martin, who was
African-American. The initial public reaction, however, did not focus on race,
but rather on the gross injustice involved. As Martin’s mother, Sabrina Fulton,
put it, “It’s not about black and white, it’s about right and wrong.”
As if the
two were counterposed. Again the gross reductionalism: all black people must
forget about the history of Imperialist barbarism and slavery and get on with
uniting with whites against capitalism.
Kishore, in
directing his anger against the ‘ex-lefts’ makes the following outrageous
counterposition,
“Toward
this end, these forces have put forward a grossly distorted picture of American
society, politics and history—one in which race, and not class, is the central
issue.”
The history
of the USA is about class and NOT race is it? Of course behind the Civil War
and the Jim Crow laws is class, the divide and rule, the poor whites and the Ku
Klux Klan but given this history then we absolutely cannot ignore, downplay or
even dispute the racial content of this history or the racial motivation of the
Zimmerman murder or we can justly be called racist ourselves.
…Every
black workers is both black and a worker, they have a history of both race and
class oppression and are experiencing it right now. To tell them to ignore the
race and concentrate on the class, is itself lecturing, bordering on racism. To
assert is is race and not class is equally wrong. [vii]
BLACK LIFE
MATTERS.JPG
To
counterpose race and class is very wrong “Every black workers is both black and
a worker, they have a history of both race and class oppression and are
experiencing it right now. To tell them to ignore the race and concentrate on
the class, is itself lecturing, bordering on racism”. To assert it is race only
and not class is equally wrong.
Conclusion
We have
sought to prove that the slaying of Michael Brown and the reaction to it by
both the police and protestors is an integral part of the global class struggle
now being waged from Gaza to Syria to Libya to Iraq and the Ukraine to mention
but the hot spots. These are the global class struggle just as much as a strike
or a general strike itself. We opened with a quote from Lenin to show how
backward and syndicalist the model of the English trade union branch secretary
was, “the ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the
people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression,
no matter where it appears”. From the combination of Lenin’s insistence of the
essence of Imperialism the rule being global finance capital and the division
of the world into oppressed and oppressor nations there arises not only the
duty of Ferguson to rally to the cause of Gaza and Iraq and the Ukraine and
also to their own ‘illegal’ migrant workers. And, as the opposite side of that
the duty of all those to rally to the cause of Ferguson. We think we have seen
enough of that internationalism in the global and US wide demonstrations for
Gaza and Ferguson to be confident that the great heart of the global working
class is still beating strongly and Internationalism is becoming ever more
their watchword. In this we place out trust and from these we seek to reforge
the Forth International, the World Party of Socialist Revolution.
Justice for
Michael Brown!
Fight
Police-State Terrorism!
For Armed
Workers’ Self-Defense to Protect Ourselves, Our Families and Our Homes!
Towards a
Revolutionary Party of the Multiracial Working Class
Notes
[i]
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of our Movement,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm
[ii]
Eyewitness to Michael Brown shooting recounts his friend’s death 08/12/14 By
Trymaine Lee, http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/eyewitness-michael-brown-fatal-shooting-missouri
[iii]
Underground America, Missouri: Direct Actions Challenge the Epidemic of Police
Murders in the United States, August 14, 2014,By Steven Argue
http://copsrcorrupt.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/missouri-direct-actions-challenge.html
[iv] The
End of History and the Last Man, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man
[v] Press
TV, American police now “Israeli-DHS trained,” precursor to dictatorship,
http://www.presstv.com/detail/2012/08/10/255432/us-police-now-israelidhs-trained/
[vi]
Bloomberg Business Week; A Federal Effort to Reuse Military Gear Turned Cops
Into Commandos, By Justin Bachman August 14, 2014, http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-08-14/ferguson-shooting-how-military-gear-ended-up-with-local-police
[vii] The
killing of Trayvon Martin and David North’s SEP, By Tony Fox July 2012,
http://socialistfight.com/2014/08/16/the-killing-of-trayvon-martin-and-david-norths-sep-a-backward-workeristreductionalist-political-current-by-tony-fox-july-2012/