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	Workers Vanguard No. 1175	15 May 2020

From Indianapolis to NYC

Racist Cop Terror in Capitalist America

Break with the Democrats!

For a Multiracial Revolutionary Workers Party!

Captured on video, the racist killings of two young black men, Ahmaud Arbery, 25, and Dreasjon “Sean” Reed, 21, have sparked anger nationwide and protests in the streets. Vigilantes (a white ex-cop and his son) chased and gunned down Arbery in broad daylight while he was jogging in white suburban Glynn County, Georgia, on February 23. An official cover-up fell apart only after the video went public last week. The next day, Reed, while live streaming, was hunted down and blown away by Indianapolis cops, one of whom gloated over his dead body: “It’s going to be a closed casket, homie.” Over the next few hours, the thugs in blue killed two more people, another black man, McHale Rose, and a pregnant white woman, Ashlynn Lisby.

Upon release of the video of Arbery’s racist murder, capitalist politicians of all stripes, from Republican Donald Trump to Democrats Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders, feigned outrage. The social order that these twin parties of capital administer is rooted in the forcible segregation of black people as an oppressed race-color caste at the bottom of society. American capitalism was founded on chattel slavery and is maintained on the bedrock of black oppression. Like countless black people before him whose lives were snuffed out, Arbery was the victim of a lynching born of the depraved American capitalist system, which breeds racist violence.

Cop terror is integral to that system. The cops, along with the courts, prisons and military, are the core of the capitalist state, a machinery of organized violence to defend the class rule and profits of the bourgeoisie against the working class and oppressed. Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray—these and many others were killed by the cops while Democrat Obama ran the U.S. imperialist plantation. The structural oppression of black people, woven into the fabric of American capitalism and enforced by the Democrats and Republicans alike, serves to divide the working class and further the exploitation of all workers.

In Indianapolis, protests initiated by Black Lives Matter have been met by police violence, including the firing of pepper balls into one demonstration on May 9. The leaders of the protests have set as their goal the establishment of “police accountability.” But the police are “accountable” only to the capitalist ruling class that they serve. In Georgia, the NAACP and other civil rights organizations issued a May 6 statement calling for federal intervention and an “independent investigation” after local D.A.s had initially refused to charge Arbery’s racist killers. The truth is that the capitalist state is the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. No federal investigations, no “progressive” D.A.s, nothing can make it act in the interests of working people and the black masses. The capitalist state must be uprooted through proletarian socialist revolution and replaced by a workers state where those who labor rule.

In response to Arbery’s murder, black Democratic lawmakers in Georgia have also been pushing a state hate crimes bill. Such legislation enhances the powers of the capitalist state in the name of prosecuting racist violence. Inevitably, those powers are used against the left and labor as well as black militants who defend themselves against race terror.

Today, with the COVID-19 pandemic ravaging the black, Latino and immigrant populations in New York and other cities across the country, police have mobilized under a new pretext for their racist rampages: enforcing “social distancing” and other such measures. According to the NYPD’s own statistics, black people and Latinos account for over 80 percent of all COVID-19 tickets and over 90 percent of arrests. In a recent assault recorded on video, an NYPD officer hurled a black bystander who was protesting a “social distancing” arrest to the sidewalk and beat him senseless. Police have also been swarming the subways to remove homeless people seeking refuge from the pandemic.

It doesn’t matter which capitalist party, Democrat or Republican, runs the machinery of state violence. In many of America’s urban centers, including NYC and Indianapolis, Democratic mayors command the repressive forces. In unleashing them against the besieged black and Latino population, these local executives of the capitalist state are simply doing their job. As NYC mayor Bill de Blasio proclaimed in response to the high rate of COVID-related arrests of minorities: “We’re not going to sideline the NYPD.” And on April 1, Governor Andrew Cuomo instructed: “The NYPD has to get more aggressive, period.” Cuomo was also one of the first governors to call out the National Guard, which would be used to augment the cops in suppressing social unrest. We demand: National Guard out!

It is a criminal betrayal of the working class that the pro-capitalist labor bureaucracy has organized cops into the unions and heralded them as “essential workers” during the lockdowns. Cops are not workers, but rather the guard dogs of capital and mortal enemies of labor. As Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin put it: “The police everywhere, in every republic, however democratic, where the bourgeoisie is in power, always remains the unfailing weapon, the chief support and protection of the bourgeoisie.” Cops out of the unions!

Black people are not simply victims of the American social order. Black workers have enormous social power as a strategic component of the multiracial working class, including in the unions and among those today providing necessary services and keeping society afloat. For that power to be brought to bear, it must be mobilized in implacable opposition to the capitalists, their state and political parties. We fight to build a multiracial revolutionary workers party that inculcates in the whole of the working class, including white workers, the consciousness that its emancipation from wage slavery will only be achieved with the liberation of the black masses through proletarian revolution.

Fighting to build such a Leninist vanguard party, the Spartacist League, U.S. section of the International Communist League, stands on the program of revolutionary integrationism: a proletarian-centered struggle against every manifestation of racial oppression, based on the understanding that the complete integration and equality of black people can be realized only in an egalitarian socialist society. For black liberation through socialist revolution!